Neuroscience & the Meditation Path sponsored by FitMind App

Hi everyone, my name is Liam from FitMind, and I'm here with Delson Armstrong today. Delson's a very advanced meditator, and we're going to be talking about the neuroscience of some of these different meditation traditions and techniques, specifically yoga and Buddhist meditation. There have been some exciting neuroscience studies on Delson's brain while he's entering some of these rare altered states of consciousness, so we're also going to discuss those neuroscience studies that are just being conducted. The results, as I understand it, just came out recently, or these are the initial findings. So to start, Delson, if you could just walk us through, beginning with yoga, because I know that was one of your earliest practices: what does that entail, what's the science behind it, and what is your experience of that intensive practice?

Sure. Well, let me start by saying that I started out with Hatha Yoga in the beginning, and Hatha Yoga was an interesting thing, because it was a lot of different kinds of maneuvers, physical maneuvers, physical postures, that created a very interesting euphoric feeling in the body and in the brain. So coming out of that session the first time was like I was floating in the air. That was the subjective feeling that really interested me in this whole idea of, what can yoga do, and is there more beyond it? So I was introduced to different techniques of yoga, different kinds of yoga, and I had a chance to study with some teachers, with the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali as the resource.

What I noticed was that with yoga, it's really all about centering the mind around one particular object, and then making it a singular focus so that nothing else is in the mind. There are different ways of doing that. For example, you could use a syllable, like a mantra, like Aum, or you can focus your attention on what they say is the third eye in the middle of the forehead. And then there are other kinds of things like that. These are all centering techniques. There are different steps in this process of yoga, and it starts off with what's known as pratyahara, goes into dharana, then dhyana, and samadhi. Pratyahara is all about withdrawing the senses and centering the mind around an object.

Dharana is the beginning of really starting to put the mind focused around that object. And then the result of that is what's known as dhyana, or a concentration. And then from there is samadhi. In this case, samadhi has a different connotation within yoga as compared to, let's say, Buddhism, because in this practice, samadhi is the fruition or fruit of the path of yoga in the Yoga Sutras. There are all kinds of different techniques given where you can use something known as samyama, which is using the dharana, the initial focusing, the dhyana, where the mind becomes concentrated, and the samadhi. These three make up the samyama, and you can focus on different things to create different kinds of experiences in the body and in the mind. There are different kinds of what they call samadhi, different levels of meditation in yoga. We have what's known as ananda samadhi, bhava samadhi, and these are all different ways of experiencing happiness and bliss, as they say.

Come from a very focused mind, and basically what happens is, as you focus your mind around it, it does become calm, and it becomes very quiet, and from there you experience the sense of self, or a sense of some kind of separate identity beyond your body and your mind.

And that, in the Yoga Sutras, for example, the first line is basically, now yoga, meaning introducing the practice of yoga. The second one is yoga as chitta vritti nirodha, which means the cessation of mental activities is yoga. The cessation of mental fluctuations, so the mind's not going every which way, or even a cessation of any kind of mental activity. Well, yeah, that's what I was going to get at, because the third sutra in that says,

which means then you see a true self. So there's an idea that you come to a point, after having ceased all of these mental activities in the background, where there is a sense of self that the mind, or you, experience, so to speak. And that is known in yoga as the purusha, the soul or the spirit or the consciousness, which then joins with what's known as prakriti, which is the super consciousness or the cosmic force. And that's the union which yoga really means, to yoke. So to unite the small soul with, let's say, the super soul. And the subjective experience of that is where you suddenly have almost a depersonalization of the mind and the body.

Where you kind of have an experience that your body and your mind are within this container of consciousness, and you are the universe experiencing this mind and body and so on. So it's like you've become your witnessing metacognition, in a sense. Your mind is now identified with that as a new sense of self. And my understanding is you've practiced this very intensively since you were young. You talked about, for example, going into a cave and even a dark retreat experience, and experiencing some of these things in the Himalayas, and really manipulating your nervous system. Could you explain a bit about your practice as you went through it? Yeah, sure. Well, while I was in the Himalayas, like you said, the dark retreat, there's a process known as Kayakalpa, and it's actually a de-aging process.

It's based in Indian science, ancient Indian science known as Siddha Yoga. In Siddha Yoga, the idea is that you go through this process of about 40 to 90 days where you're in a dark retreat, so there's no light at all, and you're taking certain kinds of medicinal herbs which come only from the Himalayas. They cleanse the body, they purge the body, and they have some kind of an effect on the nervous system.

They have an effect on your gut bacteria, and they have an effect on the cells themselves. So it increases, for example, mitochondrial activity, so it energizes the body. But beyond that, in terms of the actual dark retreat, what's happening is you are becoming very sensitive to light. So when I had this dark retreat, there were all kinds of visions in front of you that happened.

And the way that the understanding was back then is you focus your attention all the way at the middle of the head which is really where you could say the pineal gland is and so this goes into the territory of what we could call the mystical aspects of things where there's a release of what they say is DMT and you experience all kinds of very strange visions but you kind of make contact in this subjective experience with different entities and have some kind of communication with them yeah it's it's really cool and i think in psychology that's called prisoner's cinema but you're really taking that to an extreme level by doing 40 days in darkness yeah and um all right so you've done a lot of really intensive yoga practice and basically taken that path all the way through to find out all right what what are they talking about in these ancient texts that seem really esoteric i mean you can read about some of those things and think it's pure nonsense but the fact that you've actually experienced it and then more recently

you've developed an interest in buddhist meditation so could you explain some of the basic psychology or science behind what's happening there with the mind when you're training and it's a slightly different mental training process yeah before that i just want to also uh talk about kriya yoga because that was a main part of my practice for a few years and there because you mentioned the manipulation of the nervous system that's really what's happening what happens is you do certain kinds of postures and you do certain kinds of breathing techniques and certain kinds of movements both mentally like you are basically circulating what they call the kundalini in different parts of the body and the spine.

And then along with that is the breath, and certain kinds of mantras that you chant mentally. And that's supposed to create some kind of an experience, which I did experience. And it's almost mathematical in terms of the calculations that they do. There are about six degrees of Kriya Yoga, and I went through all of them. And as you get through each of the degrees of Kriya Yoga, it multiplies the effect of the previous degree by a factor of 12. So you're going through different exercises, and as you become more advanced it's having even more of an effect, almost an exponential effect on your nervous system. Is that the idea? Yeah, yeah, and it was quite intense.

You know, I'm surprised I survived it, because I went through a process where I was very intense. I was meditating six to eight hours a day just doing this whole process, and in doing so I came to a point where you feel this mystical unity with consciousness and the universe and so on. When I experienced that, for a long time the mind was perceiving it, as you said, as the metacognition, where it was like the universe experiencing itself through this body and mind. But then it faded away, and what you realize is that you have to keep doing these practices in order to get to that point. But there's another process in yoga known as sahaja samadhi, and that's very much what's known in the Yoga Sutras as kaivalya, or dharmamegha samadhi. What that's talking about is you come to a point where you're always in that witness consciousness state, that metacognitive state, which is just mind watching mind, but then you need to be unified in your attention to be able to do that all the time.

What I noticed was it was still very subjective, and it didn't really create too much of a process of insights. Yes, there were these really interesting experiences, but my realization, in my experience, was that there was no real change in personal development, so to speak. I was still experiencing the same things subjectively, from an egoic standpoint. I was still experiencing things in the sense of liking things and craving for things, and so there was still some tension in the mind that was causing some suffering, right? Even if not on as much of a scale, there was still some kind of, yeah, clinging. Yeah. And so that kind of brought me towards Buddhism, and an early Buddhist practice rooted in what they call the Pali Canon.

and I was actually first interested in Tibetan Buddhism, so I went through that whole process of Mahamudra and Dzogchen, got to that experience of Rigpa, which is really qualitatively similar to the experience of Sahaja Samadhi. What is Rigpa, for those who aren't familiar? So Rigpa is really just that experience of mind, or that experience of consciousness, without any self-referential thinking going on.

So it's just basically seeing things, or as it's understood, seeing things as they really are. But there's an understanding that it's like consciousness, or there's an awareness, there's a knowing, there's a cognition there, that is void of any personalizing going on. But what I realized is the experience is similar to that Sahaja Samadhi. And so it's a process of continually resting in that. But it's a conditioned state, as we call it. And what that means is, if it's dependent upon conditions, then when those conditions are gone, it fades away. So even that consciousness, that Rigpa, has a prior condition for it to arise. In other words, it's still impermanent and still liable to cause mental suffering.

Yes. Yes. Because the whole point there is there's still some kind of identity view there. There's still some kind of a sense of personal self. It's almost like you transcend this egoic self to a super self, but there's still a sense of ego there. It's just a spiritual ego, if you will. So you go, just in case folks aren't familiar with what you're talking about with that jump, you go from being this kind of mini-me in the head somewhere, you know, it feels like I'm behind the eyes somewhere, I'm just this bundle of thoughts, and then. And you're, I guess, for Rigpa, and it sounds like also the end of the yoga path, you're kind of all of a sudden just this field of consciousness that's experiencing everything.

Yes. Yes, that's exactly it. But, like I said, that was the experience. So I went to the end of that, and I decided to go back to the early Buddhist texts, or the understanding of what it's like in the Theravada texts, as they say. And I got introduced to it by searching for, well, primarily I was interested in loving kindness meditation first, so I searched for metta on YouTube and I got introduced to Bhante Vimalaramsi and I started watching his videos. I couldn't really make sense of a lot of things he was talking about from the suttas. But then I decided to take an online retreat, and that was in 2016.

And while I was doing it, I was following the instructions. I was looking at it from the attitude of a beginner, like completely new and fresh to this whole process, and I got introduced to what were known as the jhanas. And so these are very much similar in the sense of, you have the dhyana or the samadhis in Yoga Sutras, but they have a different way of looking at it or perceiving it, because the jhanas are levels of ceasing activity, and then they're also levels of understanding or insight into this process of the mind. So one of the things that really struck me was the mindfulness aspect of it. What is the mindfulness that we talk about, because mindfulness has been described in so many different ways? But this particular definition from Bhante Vimalaramsi really makes a lot of sense to my mind, which is it's observing how mind's attention moves

from one thing to another. And so here the meditation is very much an open awareness. You're not trying to focus your attention on something. You're allowing the mind to collect its attention around a particular object. In this case, that's loving kindness. But in doing so, the mind doesn't become completely quiet, and what I realized from this practice is that when I was doing the practices before, it wasn't actually quietude, it was just suppression of mental activity, which then felt like it was quiet too. So you were trying to control the mind.

and direct attention in a certain way, but as a result there's still a bunch of what are called hindrances in Buddhism, but basically, mental afflictions and all these issues with the mind that are still there. They're not being dealt with, but the mind's becoming very focused, creating an experience, and then if you come out of that experience the mind still has all this baggage. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, for about a couple of hours to maybe even the whole day you'll feel really good. You'll feel very relaxed and calm and collected when you do that kind of practice, but then you realize that your reactions to situations are the same.

Whereas with this practice, with regards to the TWIM method, as we call it, that's the Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation method. Here, what it means is your mind is tranquil. There's wisdom and insight, which means your mind is tranquil enough and open enough that you can notice when mind's attention moves. And when it does that, you're actually in that moment dealing with, as you said, the hindrances.

And the way you deal with it is a process of relaxation. It's what's known as the 6R's. And what I see from that is it's an exercise of right effort. That's known as right effort in Buddhism, where you notice that your mind is distracted. So that's the first step: to recognize. And then you bring your attention back by taking it away from the distraction and then relaxing the mind and body. When you relax it, what you're doing is you're relaxing the tension, which is understood as craving, as a manifestation of craving.

And whenever you do that, your mind becomes very open and very calm and collected. You then smile, and smiling is an important part of this, because when you're smiling, your mindfulness is actually pretty strong. And then you collect your mind again back to its object in meditation, and then you repeat. So this process of the 6R's and the TWIM method is all about dealing with the mental afflictions as and when they arise, and then letting them go. And then when you're doing that, the mind does transform.

For a couple of reasons. Number one, it's actually seeing how it works itself. And two, it's actually, let's say, purifying the mind right there and then through an active process of letting go. Yeah, that's a key point you made a couple of times, that you're observing how the mind works. So the mind is seeing how it works without trying to control its activity. You're just observing, and then it's just this slight intervention to relax any craving that you notice, until it naturally collects into what you mentioned are called the jhanas. So could you walk us briefly through this path, through the jhanas, and then this will take us to the neuroscience study I mentioned at the beginning, where they've actually put your brain in a scanner while you're going through this process all the way to the end.

Yeah. As we understand in the early texts, there are these things known as jhanas, and there are four jhanas, and in the fourth jhana, there are these four levels of perception. So they are known as the arupa jhanas, or actually, they're really better known as, or better understood as, ayatanas. And that's, I mean, that's a lot of Pali words, but I'll just simplify it by saying that jhana is basically meditation.

That's really what it is. It comes from that same root in Sanskrit, which is dhyana. So it's a collectedness of mind. And arupa and rupa, rupa means just a form. You're still aware of the body. And in arupas, you're basically just in the mind and you lose feeling in the body. You lose a perception of the body. And ayatana means the base of, and I'll contextualize all of that. So we'll start with the first jhana. The first level here is where you first have the intention of loving kindness as an object, for example. And this is the process which is known as thinking and examining thought, when you can verbalize or visualize the loving kindness in your heart.

And you verbalize with certain statements, like, may I be happy, may I be well, and so on. And for the first 10 minutes, you're feeling this experience of warmth in the chest. Subjectively, it just feels really good. It just feels very light and calm and happy and collected. And then after that, you send it out to what we call a spiritual friend. And it could be anybody who's of the same sex, who is alive, and who you think of, who immediately puts a smile on your face.

So smiling is an important component of this particular practice, and the reason is because, as we understand, when you smile it lightens the mind subjectively. So your experience is that your mind becomes more collected, more mindful, and it's like that idea of fake it till you make it, right? You don't even have to have a sincere smile necessarily. One interesting study I'll point out was on people with Botox. So they physically couldn't stop smiling, and the impact on their psychological state just from that was substantial. Yeah, so there's something to be said about that, and you know, the understanding is you see, like, an image of a Buddha or a statue of the Buddha, and you'll see a little smile on his face, and that's actually a teaching to remind you to smile.

So this is what we call a feeling meditation, a smiling meditation, and so when you become more collected in your mind, which is you're still open in your awareness but it's sort of circulating around this object of loving kindness, the attention you start to feel what we call is joy and happiness and unification of mind. So this joy can be experienced in the body in a very vibrant way. Some people experience a sort of heat in their body, some people experience some kind of vibration in their body, and some people just feel very happy. It's just a very uplifted state.

And what's known as happiness, which is the comfort of the body, the tranquility of the body. So the piti, as we call it, is that vibratory happiness or joy. And the sukha is that comfort in the body, and then the unification of the mind. Now what happens is, at a certain point, if you're still progressing on this practice, you get into what's known as the second jhana.

And in the second jhana, the mental humdrum drops away. And what I mean by the mental humdrum is, you started this process with verbalizing or visualizing, and there was an intention to be in the loving-kindness. But that drops away, and all you're experiencing now is the feeling and quality of that feeling of loving-kindness. So this is what's known as confidence in the practice. Now it's almost like autopilot. Now the mind is just flowing with this loving-kindness.

And there's still that piti, there's still that vibratory happiness, there's still the sukha or comfort in the body, and there's still the unification of mind. But what has ceased, and as I said, these are levels of cessation. In the first case, in the first jhana, what ceases is all of the sensory activity, the mind being pulled in different directions by the senses.

Because you close your eyes and you collect the mind around the mental object of loving-kindness. So you're no longer paying attention to what's happening with the ears or any kind of smells that are happening or the sensations in the body. It's not collecting on the mental plane. So that's what ceases in the first. In the second, what ceases is that verbalizing, as I spoke about, which comes in the form of not only the initial verbalizing in mind but also that mental humdrum in the background. So it becomes much inner chatter. And so that goes away, and then that's the cessation of that. Now, in the third jhana, what ceases really is the vibratory joy.

That feeling of excited joy goes away and it's much more tranquil, and here you're also trying to lose awareness of the feeling in the body. So if you're sitting down, for example, it kind of feels like you can't feel your hands or different parts of your body feel like they're not there, or you might even just feel like you're floating. And some people actually feel the reverse of that, which is you feel like you're sinking into the ground, you're becoming heavier, but there's no more sensation of where the body starts and ends. It's just very, very subtle. It's somewhat equivalent to Pratyahara in yoga, right? Because your senses are now completely turned inward to the point where, if someone touched you, you would feel it, but you're no longer paying any attention to your body.

Correct, that's right. And the way to understand it is, as far as I'm aware of it, there are certain parts of the brain that are starting to become less active. Right, like somatosensory areas. Yeah, and I believe it's probably also the temporal parietal lobe, which has to do with the sense of space and the body and so on. So that starts to become less and less active.

And then eventually, when you get into the fourth jhana, this whole experience of the body from the head down, or from the neck down rather, is gone, and you kind of just feel it in the head. That loving-kindness feels like it's moved up to the head. And what also ceases is that sense of that tranquility, that tranquil happiness is gone, and what's remaining is just this blank mind which is equanimous. So it's very deep equanimity. And what happens here is that you also kind of lose awareness of the breath. Not that you were so aware in the first, second, and third jhana. It just seems more imperceptible.

You're not paying attention to whether you're breathing or not as such. And then we come to what are known, as I said, the arupa jhanas, or also the ayatanas. And so ayatana here means realm or base. And why I say that is because the fifth level is known as the base of infinite space, so that sense of infinitude of space happens where now you lose awareness of even the head and you're in just the mind and there's no sense of where your body is. There's just this feeling of infinite space and expansion, and it just continues on and on and on. And here the practice changes, where you're radiating, as we say, the loving-kindness, which can change to compassion.

And the loving-kindness here is a little more energetic, while the compassion is a little fuzzy and softer and much calmer. And then there is an experience of infinite consciousness, the sphere of infinite consciousness. So that level of expansion that we talk about in this infinite space starts to break down. And what's happening is you're starting to see the awareness, and the awarenesses start to break down.

And what I mean by that is the consciousness that you experience starts to go into micro fragments of individual consciousnesses. And what we are experiencing here is, for example, in the internal contact of the eye. So in the mind's eye, so to speak, you might see flickering, or you might actually hear flickering in the ear, or feel certain kinds of electrical sensations on the tongue, or even smell phantom smells.

And what we are experiencing here, according to the text, is infinite consciousness. So it's not infinite consciousness that would be understood as being this eternal, all-abiding, like field of pure awareness, field of awareness. It's just that it's breaking down to infinite consciousnesses, individual awarenesses that arise and pass away in every moment, conditioned by prior conditions like contact with that sense base. So you see the impermanence on a really deep level. Once you start to see that impermanence, then your mind kind of gets tired of it after a while. And this tiredness is what is known as dukkha. That's the suffering aspect of it. And then you realize that there's no controller here. It's an impersonal process.

And eventually it dies down. It stops, and you get into what's known as the base of nothingness. And some people have an experience of, like, sinking down a level and then entering into the space of nothingness. Or some people have an experience of that flickering starting to slow down, and there are gaps. And those gaps then become larger and larger until they become the viewpoint of the mind and the object of the mind, which is the nothingness.

Now, in infinite consciousness, what happens is you experience a level of joy, but this joy is not vibratory. It's not energetic. It's a more content joy. And then that also changes into a much, much deeper equanimity at the base of nothingness. Then we get to a very interesting stage known as the base of neither perception nor non-perception. It's a very interesting state. The way people describe it is it's like you're asleep but you're awake at the same time. What we understand from here is there are these proto-thoughts that arise.

I call them proto-thoughts, but they're basically what are known as formations, and they create sort of like a bubbling up of a thought before it becomes a fully formed thought. Right? And so these bubbles you start to see, and they create these disconnected images and colors and patterns and things like that, and you're not fully able to recognize them, because the idea of perception in the Buddhist context means to recognize something. So we have contact, we have feeling, and we have perception.

and the contact as you said was the actual impact of the sensory information with the particular sense the feeling is the experience of that so you see a color and you know it's to be a color and that's the cognition of it but the perception of something that I'm seeing as a color red then knowing it of a labeling it of as red is the perception of it so there's not a lot of things you can fully recognize so to speak and what happens is when you come out of this state there's an instruction for a couple of minutes to kind of reflect on what happened and you might start to see things and you six are as we say which is to recognize it release it relax and then come back and just be in a mind that is neutral yeah so neither perception or non-perception is that state where I would, in my understanding, I would equate it to basically like an REM sleep, a REM sleep, where there's kind of fuzzy dreams here and there.

Yeah. Or even, subjectively, from my experience, also maybe being aware in deep dreamless sleep to some extent, too. Yes. Although there are the start of formations, so it wouldn't be exactly equivalent. Yeah. But I also just want to point out that these states you're describing might sound kind of kooky to someone who hasn't been there themselves, but this is a map that's not only incredibly laid out in the suttas, which were written or which were verbally transmitted roughly 2500 years ago and then subsequently written down, but it's also something that is replicable in the sense that

every meditator might experience. It's slightly different, but if they follow the steps that you're describing, they will go through these jhanas. Yeah, just as they're being described. And it's kind of incredible when you see, oh, this is what that's talking about. I have the same experience. Yeah. Because our minds are all pretty similar, nervous systems are all pretty similar. Absolutely. I mean, it is funny that you mentioned it, because I think you were commenting before in a previous discussion you had where you said it's kind of strange when you talk about it, like, yeah, I'm now perceiving nothingness. Yeah. How do you do it? Makes no sense to, and because words can't even really describe these states, these states are really subtle, and our vocabulary is kind of clunky when it comes to describing these things too. Yeah, but I'll tell you what, there comes a point where you have what is known as the experience of cessation of perception, feeling and consciousness.

And that's a very interesting state beyond just neither perception or non-perception. So this happens from that point, you kind of drop off. Yeah. And when we talk about the drop-off, what happens in the experience is, well, as you start to get more mindful, you kind of have an understanding of what it feels like, because it's like all of the dials of the senses start to go to zero. Or some people have a sinking feeling where they're just dropping into this void, and then it just switches off. And so you don't know you were in that state until after you come out of it. And for a moment or however long it was, the mind was shut off.

The feeling, the sensory experiences, the perception, the recognition aspect of it, and the cognition, the consciousness, all cease for some time. And then when you come back up, your mindfulness is so sharp, your awareness is so sharp that you're able to see certain things that give you clarity into how this whole process of the building blocks of reality your subjective reality are created so you're okay so you're going along you go through the jhanas one through eight as you like one through four and then there's the arupa jhanas up through eight neither perception or non-perception at some point the mind seems to almost like run out of fuel yeah and just kind of and then subjectively it's like there's this blackout experience and as the mind boots back up almost like a computer coming back online your mindfulness is really sharp and you start to see how this pro how the mind works at the deepest level and what results is you know all this joy and this this insight can create lasting cognitive changes yes yes because at that point in time you no longer take things personally

Well, we have to understand that there are levels of awakening within the Buddhist context, but in the beginning you realize that this is all an impersonal process. So you no longer are looking or have a belief in some kind of a personal internal consciousness that you take to be self. Now you see everything as a process, through what's known as dependent origination: from this arises this, from this arises that. And really there are these 12 links, as we talk about, but just to simplify it, it just gives you an understanding of how the world is created through your experience of contact, feeling, and perception, and then how you choose to react to it. You get better clarity on realizing, in that moment, if you choose to react in a certain way, it causes tension and tightness, which is the craving, the clinging, and the being, and that causes further aggravation, further agitation of the mind and body.

But if you are mindful in that moment, and you choose to let go of it, then you don't experience further agitation. I've been teasing, I guess, the audience with this study they've done on your brain, where you actually went into a cessation event that we just talked about, where the mind seems to almost shut off, and they put your brain under ... And this was a research lab in the Netherlands that is ... It's a world-renowned research center.

It's top-notch, very expensive equipment, and I think it was an electroencephalograph, where they studied your brain waves as you went through this. That's correct, that's correct. It was split over two days. It took two different days, and it was through two different labs. So the first lab was looking at how the mind starts to build what they know, and they call it predictive modeling. What they're trying to figure out is: does the brain recognize things in the way of sounds, or does it recognize things in the way of speech? Does it recognize words, or does it recognize that this is a made-up word, and things like that? So that was the first experiment, and what they did was, yes, they hooked me up to 64 electrodes. They also were testing my temperature, my heart rate, respiratory rate, and any kind of subtle movements and things like that.

And what they found was very interesting, which is they did different kinds of measurements for different levels of the state. So one was a waking state, just neutral, nothing going on. One was focused attention, and then one was just that state of cessation. And what they saw was the brain actually had more delta activity while it was in this state of awakeness, and then as well as in the same as nirodha, or cessation, as we say. And what they saw was the delta waves were so deep, deeper than deep sleep. In cessation, you're going along, and then this cessation happens, and then there's these long delta waves, very long. Yeah, very long amplitude delta waves, which are even deeper than deep sleep as we understand it from your science, right? It might have, let's say, I mean, delta is roughly 0.5 to, I think, four hertz, and this might have been closer to the 0.5 range of that.

Right, or even lower. Well, the initial findings from the scientists were that they were kind of surprised to see that, because first they thought maybe the brain was just basically asleep. But they saw that the other mental, or rather the other physical or physiological components of the body were like as if it was still awake.

So the heart rate and the respiratory rate and things like that were like as if they were still awake, but then the mind was completely shut off. It's comforting to know that your brainstem is still keeping your body alive. Yes, and that's what we would call in Buddhism as vital formations, or the ayu-sankharas, which keep the metabolism going, which keep the cellular activity in a healthy way.

The other thing that they said was, so that was the first study. And then the second study was in a sleep lab. So they had me go into a 90-minute cycle of sleep. And what they were kind of confounded by was that it looked like the mind was still awake. And so they asked me, were you actually asleep or not? But then they saw that the physiological aspects of the body were like it was in a state of sleep, a state of deep sleep. But the mind looked like it was awake.

And that's your subjective experience? You were aware while the body was going through a sleep stage? Yes. So the mind was aware of the different stages of sleep, and there was this very sharp mindfulness, as we'll say. And because of that, they were kind of confused by that, because there was more delta activity while the mind was doing its own thing.

Practically no delta activity while it was asleep, and then very deep delta activity while it was in cessation. It's fascinating, because there's so many things that we could extrapolate or try to guess at. But one of the things that we've talked about is this idea that the normal waking state for someone is characterized by constant craving, in the sense of approach-and-avoidance software that's very old, from when we were just very small organisms. Move away from the thing that's going to cause us harm, and move towards the thing that will help us survive and reproduce. And this is just built, there are layers on top of it, but it's the most primal part of our brain.

But we're doing that all day long. We hear something, we either like it or don't like it. And that kind of tension is pulling us. And then we finally get to relax and sleep and kind of recover from that day of trauma. And it seems like something different is going on in your brain. You're not undergoing that waking trauma the same way your normal brain might. Yeah, I think that's a good interpretation of that. And that kind of explains a lot of the stuff that we talk about when we do the relax step in this particular practice.

Because what we're saying is when there's a craving, there's a tightness and tension in the body, and we're letting that go. We're relaxing it. And you brought up that primal activity of the avoidance measure or trying to grab something, whether it's food or meat, and that comes from this sense of this identity with the body and the mind. And even that also has a very subtle agitation, subtle tension. And so the way sometimes I explain it, it's like, for example, a piece of chocolate cake. You see a piece of chocolate cake, you get hungry, and the mind is agitated by it, and it craves it. And then when you have that piece of chocolate cake, you kind of relax.

You're satisfied. You've satisfied that craving. But this whole process is about: what about if you could relax without having to satisfy that craving? And so you're reconditioning the body-mind mechanism to say that you can still be relaxed and you don't need to satisfy your cravings. And so then eventually it comes to a point where craving is ceased altogether.

It's amazing. And it reminds me, from a neuroscience perspective, basically the dopamine reward system. They used to think really that the pleasure molecule was dopamine, but it turns out it's more of a motivation chemical, and it creates this agitated 'I gotta have it' state. So you just think about the chocolate cake, you get this hit of dopamine, your mind starts to really latch on to that, and it's not the dope, the agitated feeling doesn't go away until you get the cake. Yeah. And as you've just said, instead of giving it the cake and strengthening that circuit that says, 'All right, I'm gonna have another thought about cake, and then they'll feed me,' kind of the mind getting you to be its slave almost, instead you're relaxing that feeling and not keeping your attention on it, and bringing up a wholesome content state. So the mind learns to just stay, be content with, and gets a reward in that sense from relaxation.

Instead of learning that it needs to get the cake before it can finally relax and stop being agitated. Exactly, so exactly so. And I also wanted to point out a very interesting part of that finding in the research, which has to do with intention and determinations. Oh yeah. So basically when we talk about determinations, we go through a process of determining how long the mind will be in a certain jhana. So that's the initial exercise, and then finally you move your way up to, you, the cessation, perception, feeling, and consciousness. And what I told the researchers was that about 10 minutes in, the mind is going to go into cessation.

And at the 90-minute mark, it will come out. And what they found from the reading was that at the exact 10-minute mark, everything stopped, everything slowed down, and it went into cessation, and then at the 90-minute mark everything started coming back up again, and they were kind of spooked by that, because understandably. So there's an interesting thing about intention that's happening in the mind, where somehow probably the vital formations that are dependent upon that intention continue to keep the body alive, and then there's some kind of an internal biological timer that knows that at some point, at the 90-minute mark, it's time to get back up. But the question there is, because the time is subjective, but somehow the body or the brain or the mind is able to be in sync with what we could call probably absolute time, or however we want to call it.

Yeah, to me this makes no sense on a biological level, because even though we have a circadian clock, it's not set perfectly to our conventional time that's kept on clocks. And it's also not, the circadian rhythm is baked into our biology but not this time, not clocks. So one theory I thought of is just that we look at clocks enough throughout our lives that you might have, on this very deep subconscious level, a perfect timer almost by now. But it's hard not to. It's hard to explain in our current understanding of science. To me it's just really incredible. Yeah, yeah. And you can do this for up to seven days, right? You can stay in cessation for up to seven days. That's right. After seven days, that's when the body starts to wind down in terms of its metabolism and energy, and it can be dangerous. So the recommended, and I mean it is really up to seven days, that's really all it is. And the other thing to understand is

this whole process of staying in cessation, why would you want to do it? What is the whole point of doing it? And really, it's basically switching off the mind. Can you imagine what it would be like? It's not even a nap. It's deeper than a nap, or deeper than any kind of sleep and rest. And that probably gives an extra jolt of energy to the nervous system. What you will notice if somebody goes through this process of

cessation and comes out of it, they notice that their senses are much sharper as well. So somehow the sense of color is more vibrant. It's almost like they're hyper aware, and there's like a hyper realism to everything that you're experiencing in that. So you feel really energized after you come out of the cessation? Yes. It's incredible stuff, Delson, and thanks for walking us through, you know, your full practice history and some of the science. And it's just my hope that as researchers gain more of an interest in this stuff and take it seriously as replicable experiences that people have, that you can train, that there's more research and understanding that comes out of it. And I guess for folks who are interested in starting the practice, we'll put some links to the TWIM practice and the TWIM retreats below.

Also, shameless plug, you can check out the FitMind app if you want some mobile guided meditation. And Delson, you've got a book that's just come out, right? Yes. So I think you'll probably just put links in there if you want, but there's two books I want to shamelessly plug. Great. One is David Johnson's The Path to Nibbana, which he actually takes you through this whole process of jhanas. So it will tell you everything that we've been talking about in a very detailed way. Yeah. And the second book is called A Mind Without Craving. It just released, so it's available on Amazon and a couple of other websites. Great. Well, thanks, Delson. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you.