Stream Entry/Cessation/Fruition Awareness Program

There is the possibility that there are a number of meditators out there who have attained stream entry but don't know it (here I refer to so called 1st path as described in the Burmese Theravada tradition).  It can be easy to miss, and in reality most people have probably never heard of a path anyway.

Most commonly it is not a very big moment.  The first one is important as a major milepost, though, because for many people this will mark the beginning of an acceleration of their spiritual/meditative progress.  It might be important because if you are constantly working up to a high equanimity and not getting a fruition, ever, after years, who knows, maybe it might be a signal to change something, increase the dose, work with a teacher, whatever.

I think the word cessation is probably the best English word to use for this neurological phenomenon.  This is one meaning of the word nirvana, an extinguishing.  Also known as a fruition, being the so-called fruit of the path.

When the mind is in high equanimity (11th nana according to the Progress of Insight) and one truly lets go and is okay with everything, there can be a little discontinuity, a "blip" where one loses time, perhaps a fraction of a second.  A common response is "what was that?"  It is as if the mind lets go of the "self" for a moment, or "reboots".  In that moment there is nothing - no seeing, no hearing, no taste, no smell, no physical sensation, no thought, no sense of time or space.  If eyes are open, it's kind of like a blink.

But it is very brief, and it seems the mind has this strong bias to assume everything is "normal", that things are continuing as before, and so you have to really be aware and see things as they are in order to notice this.  But it's not like you really see it, it's more like you pick up the edges of the event horizon on either side of the black hole, you perceive the glitch, and some describe picking up on some clues as to the lost time - i.e. "wait, my breath was at the bottom, now it is at the top".  This blip moment is often immediately followed by a flash of light (technically, one is sent "back" to the 4th nana), often followed by a somewhat blissful wave of sensation through the body.

This phenomenon will eventually repeat, and can come in a variety of slightly different forms.

Some of these seem to be "deeper" than others.  For stream entry, it apparently has to be deep enough to do the damage, as it were.  It is as if something is seen through or perhaps the mind, constantly trying to understand and deal with it's surroundings, is confronted with the possibility that instead of being something, perhaps it is nothing and must take that information into it's calculations.  That seems to change something.  Stream entry is generally followed by a "honeymoon" period where one's mood is very good and concentration is excellent.  Jhanas may become more obvious.
 
Some people can bring these on at will, and I have heard that Judson Brewer at Yale has recorded some of these with fMRI, but I suspect he will need a much larger sample before we begin to get a clue as to what is going on with this.

From the Heart of Wisdom Sutra:

So, in emptiness, there is no body,
no feeling, no thought,
no will, no consciousness.
There are no eyes, no ears,
no nose, no tongue,
no body, no mind.
There is no seeing, no hearing,
no smelling, no tasting,
no touching, no imagining.
There is nothing seen, nor heard,
nor smelled, nor tasted,
nor touched, nor imagined.

 ADDENDUM:

I guess this post was for people that are experiencing relatively straightforward cessations.  I should mention that also people might notice nothing more than a shift in awareness, a possibly sudden but certainly significant increase in their mindfulness ability.  And technically, it could plausibly happen so slowly that you would never notice anything.

But yeah, if you're noticing these blip-flash-bliss wave moments repeatedly, and particularly if you are experiencing the shift in mindfulness, maybe noticing jhanas for the first time, yeah, that's stream entry.

Legalize Research Already!

"First magic mushroom depression trial hits stumbling block"

"LONDON (Reuters) - The world's first clinical trial designed to explore using a hallucinogen from magic mushrooms to treat people with depression has stalled because of British and European rules on the use of illegal drugs in research."

Sigh.  Can't we just all get along and do a little clinical research on promising substances?

LSD helps to treat alcoholism

The Nature article, "LSD helps to treat alcoholism" reports on the 

"first-ever quantitative meta-analysis of LSD–alcoholism clinical trials. The researchers sifted through thousands of records to collect data from randomized, double-blind trials that compared one dose of LSD to a placebo. Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38% of people who received a placebo. “We were surprised that the effect was so clear and consistent,” says Krebs.

That's ONE dose.  Wow.  I suspect these are old trials from the 50's or so, the days of Grof and others.

I would guess that few alcoholics are familiar with the fact that Bill W, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was greatly changed by an LSD experience.

My take is that psychedelics can help one gain insight and let go of troublesome ego based patterns.

Psychedelics and Plasticity: Doors of Reception

The  fascinating thesis "Doors of Reception" provides an interesting view of psychedelic research.  I found the information about gene expression, plasticity, and attention to be particularly compelling.  A slight bit on the technical side, but readable. Some quotes:

Even more notably, they found that there were certain gene expressions that were induced by the hallucinogenic agonists but not by the non-hallucinogenic ones (Gonzalez-Maeso et al. 2003). These particular genes mainly belong to the family of early growth response (EGR) elements which are primarily known to be involved with neural growth and plasticity (Leah & Wilce 2002).

The hallucinogen-specific transcript for the protein Egr-2 showed particularly robust expression.

Gene expression of neural growth and plasticity helps explain the long term benefits that have been seen with psychedelics.

The level of Egr-2 expression was proportional to the magnitude of attentional demand.

Meditation has a great deal to do with attentional demand.

As neuroplasticity-based therapies emerge and begin their refinement, the two novel and central attributes they entail, that of qualitative activity-dependence and potentially permanent curative capability, parallel precisely the two key aspects of psychedelic therapy that have, over the past six decades, been a conceptual and ideological challenge for conventional medical science to address and antithetical to its economic landscape.

Skepticism about fMRI analysis

As reported in "Stanford psychologists uncover brain-imaging inaccuracies," apparently the smoothing techniques used to make sense of fMRI data may cause researchers to miss activity from smaller scale structures and thus possibly assign that activity to larger structures nearby.

Skepticism about Meditation Research

The article "Research on TM and Other Forms of Meditation Stinks" highlights some of the flaws in meditation research.  An important point to be made is the difficulty of precisely defining meditation itself.

Even more difficult would be capturing details of brief, spontaneous peak experiences.

My sense is that we are slowly getting better at this, with some of the older research being more of a stone knives and bearskins kind of thing.  Many people are aware that private research funded by a group with an agenda (such as Transcendental Meditation) may not constitute the highest expression of reasonable investigation.

Skepticism about EEG biofeedback

In the article "Read this before paying $100s for neurofeedback therapy" the author points out a number of reasons to be skeptical about alpha biofeedback.

Certainly one should be skeptical when paying thousands for neurofeedback, as in the case of Biocybernaut.

I do think there are a surprising number of not so well informed practitioners out there providing neurofeedback with little knowledge or sense of scientific discipline, and in some cases bordering on outright charlatanism.  So there is definitely a case for skepticism.

But I would add a couple of points.  The initial research cited, from the 80s and 90s, is quite a long ways from modern biofeedback.  Personal computers with the necessary speed and processing ability, software, equipment, and protocols had not been developed at that time.  It was after that time period that EEG biofeedback exploded.

The article seems to focus a bit more on alpha biofeedback than biofeedback targeted to specific anomalies (although ADHD is mentioned).  In some ways it is easy to slough off the alpha training of the sixties as hippie nonsense.  My take would be that alpha training, in general, is akin to meditation.  And if you don't go about meditation in the right way *, for example, you could spend decades and not attain stream entry, i.e. in some way be wasting your time.  Off the top of my head I can point to the addiction rehab studies of Peniston and later Scott as examples of successful alpha-theta training.

However, overall the article does have a balance to it, and I would agree generally with the skeptical attitude.  The problem is when skepticism becomes knee jerk.  I am reminded of an old researcher who commented on Tibetan monks meditating, and expressed the opinion that they were simply wasting their time.

I can say that EEG biofeedback definitely helped me, but for my particular set of conditions I suspect proper meditation would have done about the same thing.  For certain disorders, I think EEG biofeedback does have the ability to produce miraculous results.  Hopefully more and better research will point the way.

* One proven way, The practical meditation instructions of Mahasi Sayadaw (~40 minutes mp3).