Mysteriously missing meditation method. I suspect many of us improvise something here, in the absence of official instructions. meaningness.com/wonder
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Thanks for many replies to this! The brief extract I quoted here was an inadequate specification
The hypothetical method would be about agendaless involvement in sensory fascination—
not about thinking or non-thinking, not about non-involvement, not about doing anything
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I don't know if it has a name but I've definitely tried this, I remember for example trying to turn off my visual edge detection to maybe find new patterns (I failed but it was instructive, plus I'd be very surprised if anybody got that to work given how our eyes work)
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Yeah, edge detection is bottom-up. Fwiw I seem to be able to turn off the top-down stuff, which for a former machine vision researcher is exciting; plausibly the experience is of the raw output of early/bottom-up vision.
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In kasina meditation, though concentrative and agentic, I've found I need to intentionally let go of visual preconception, in order to let the strange afterimage do its own phase-shifting dance in front of me—this is what lets my mind settle down into absorption
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I've done this w/ practice. I observe a static point in a forest and let focusing relax. It ends up modulating sort of randomly, and after a minute or two the center of vision seems to be tiled outwards. Looking slightly around immediately reveals convolutions, which is wacky.
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