(July 21, 2013 at 6:25 pm)apophenia Wrote: People in Asia often grow up with meditation as an automatic habit they acquire early on; same principle: inducing a powerful and significantly altered state of consciousness. (I have a book on Zen and the brain which I'm episodically dipping into, and one theme that is emerging is that deep states of meditation parallel properties of various stages of sleep, inhibiting some functions, disinhibiting others, and so on, while retaining consciousness and lucidity. It's a thought provoking idea.)
That never worked for me. I was familiar with the concept since childhood - having seen my grandmothers meditate every day - so when one of our teachers told us that we should all meditate atleast 15-30 minutes every day, I was on board. I would tell my family not to disturb me, lock myself in my room and spend some 20 minutes sitting in lotus position, trying to focus my mind. And all I ever got was extremely bored and pins and needles in my legs.
So, eventually, I gave up on meditation and instead started spending that time masturbating. And I can tell you, it was a much more reliable way of inducing a powerful and significantly altered state of consciousness and the results were much more satisfactory.
