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The first paragraph isn't about vibrations. That's just visual junk. Looking at it closely will make vibrations apparent.
The second paragraph sounds like it's about vibrations. The rapidly-changing graininess is overlaid by another pulse, yes? How do you know that it's a pulse, unless you can almost-sort of see the fluctuation from "nothing" to "something" to "nothing"? (In stage 2 the "something" is clearest, so don't expect the "nothing" to be overwhelming.)
If you can't label "pulse" or "seeing" fast enough, try "that." If you still can't do it fast enough, simply see the vibrations without being distracted, or count them. Balance just seeing with labeling if distraction is a problem. Re-read my stage 2 advice in the post.
I'll be away for a few days, starting now, so you're on your own for awhile. Sounds like you'll be fine.
The twitching is typical, like I said. Not in the sense that every time you meditate, from now till forever, you're going to have it. But it's common enough in stage 1. There are also related things that can happen in stage 2, but they're not quite the same. So I'd say that they might be gone by stage 2 and probably will be by stage 3. Your body will get over it eventually. Think of it as your body trying to adapt to doing this new thing; it takes some time to iron the kinks out.
Good luck with your practice! Let us know if anything interesting happens.
The factory & lenses metaphor seems like a good argument for why meditation should work in the sense of allowing a flawed process to discover and improve itself despite its own flaws. But: the key part of that metaphor is that using a flawed lens one can discover the flaws of the lens, by confronting contradictory evidence caused by flaw; and people are notoriously prone to not reaching the correct conclusion when presented with contradictory evidence.
Well, the metaphor only goes so far. This process does not ask a person to explicitly apply what they learn in meditation. (If it did, the possibility for bias and error would be quite large, as with most things.) Rather, cultivating attention and perception allows the defects to be seen clearly, and one's brain somehow manages to correct them "under the table," leaving it somewhat mysterious how that happens.
This is something I planned to write about in Part 3. To be honest, I find it surprising and somewhat bizarre that this can happen, and that it can happen in such a regular way, in discrete steps. If anything strains my own credulity about the whole process, it's this. (In my experience and the experiences of others it has worked this way, which makes it merely surprising to me. That information probably doesn't help you, though.)
The problem I see with your request is not that you want something that meditation causes which is observable by a third party (there are lots of potential ideas in the comments), but you want something that meditation causes which is observable by a third party which your goal structure approves of. Which, in principle, is fine, but I can't say I know what your goal structure is. I have continually emphasized that the value of enlightenment for a person depends on their particular goals. (There are things about it that I think would benefit most people or everyone, but it doesn't help much to say that when people can't conceptualize those things and so can't judge now whether they actually would want them.)
Adelene, who counts as partially enlightened according to my model, describes being able to see multiple senses clearly enough and close enough to simultaneously to be able to transcribe her synaesthetic experiences on paper. Would that be a benefit for you? Perhaps it depends on whether you have visual synaesthesia or a fertile imagination.
I suggest that "wide perceptual width" (a side effect of enlightenment) may lead to strong improvements in the ability to observe and describe parts of one's visual field that are not actively being focused on. Would this be a benefit for you? In principle many people might be indifferent to it...apart from visual artists, for whom it might be anything from really important to life-changing. Or police offers, for whom it might one day spell the difference between getting killed or not.
I spelled out some other possiblities in Part 1, and I think there are even more in the comments. And there are others which I haven't mentioned yet, but am working on. And there are even others which I haven't thought of in the first place.
So, I can't help with your question unless I know your goals.
I understand where the desire for third-party verification comes from. But you wrote
your procedure seems like something I’d like to try, but only if I can ask someone else to judge the results.
which makes it sound as if you think this is just a cute way to improve some mental abilities and want to be sure that you can tell whether it worked. I hope my posts so far didn't give you the impression that I think this is a good idea. I would strongly suggest not meditating unless you're prepared for potentially large changes in the way you see yourself and the world. If that's something you're interested in, the side effects can be really awesome. And if you want the side effects badly enough, perhaps that's a good reason, too. But your attitude seems very casual, which in my opinion is likely to lead either to you getting more than you bargained for, or to you quitting at stage 3 because you don't have enough commitment to the end result and thereby causing yourself a lot of pointless, avoidable suffering. (But if I'm misreading you, just say so.)
So, think about it.
And, the clarification that you asked for:
you seem to claim that after achieving enlightenment the changes become permanent, but it’s not clear if that means “as long as you keep meditating an hour a day” or not; people into meditation seem to do it more-or-less until they stop being interested in meditation, but it’s not obvious if they stop because it didn’t work or because they’re done—and, as I said, I pay attention to statements from people like you but not to most practitioners of such methods.)
Let me start off by saying that I don't speak for anyone else, so I can't comment on why specific people stop. If you look at the population of people who have stopped, probably the whole range of reasons that people stop doing any kind of self-cultivation will be represented (e.g. same as for practicing a musical instrument, writing fiction or poetry, drawing, etc.).
Once you reach any stage of enlightenment, it's permanent; no more meditation (and no more anything, except maybe food and air) is required to maintain and upkeep that attainment. In principle a person could completely forget about meditation and everything related to it and go on their way, and still retain all the benefits. (Most likely their attention and perception have been cultivated so much that they can't help but do meditation-like things when going through daily life, so they might continue to make some progress anyway.)
The cognitive side effects of enlightenment, i.e. the benefits that aren't enlightenment but are related to it such as e.g. perceptual improvements, can wax and wane like anything else related to mental functioning, but seem to be pretty stable in the long run without appearing to require maintenance or upkeep either.
Once you reach full enlightenment, there is no more need to meditate in this style ever again. There is nothing left to get out of it, and the only reason I can think of to do it would be to review what it's like so as to explain it to others.
Even fully enlightened people may continue to meditate in other styles for unrelated reasons. Full enlightenment produces a surprising amount of mental pliability, and one can pursue meditation aiming at altered states of consciousness, relaxation, bliss, etc. surprisingly easily and effectively at this point. But that isn't the same process, even though we have the same word ("meditation") for it.
By the way, the previous paragraph is rather easy to test if meditating for pleasure is approved by your goal structure. Even the first stage of enlightenment makes that sort of thing a lot easier. (The process of doing that will probably push you towards further stages of enlightenment, so testing it happens to also be a commitment to working towards full enlightenment.)
The model for higher stages of enlightenment is not one that I can fit into a blog post.
One reason is that I agree with what muflax said: the most-correct model I know of will have a fractal element, which will be hard to represent in a simple way. In my opinion, for the first four stages, this fractal element is less important. Afterwards, it's more important.
I don't think a model with a fractal element is necessarily the most useful one, though. I think a linear model (like the one I gave for the first four stages) can go pretty far. Problem is, I don't think the really important stuff that happens after stage 4 is anything that I can describe in a way that makes much sense until you get past stage 4, fractal or not. For example, in this model, I describe lots of stuff that is easy to understand: mood changes, attention changes, etc. Most of what's interesting about post-stage 4 is not really like that. Post-stage 4 stages involve repetitions of the qualities of earlier stages, but that's not what's interesting about them.
If you want a flowchart, it will be pretty unremarkable:
stage 1 --> stage 2 --> stage 3 --> stage 4 --> first stage of enlightenment --> (some stuff) --> second stage of enlightenment --> (some stuff) --> third stage of enlightenment --> (some stuff) --> full enlightenment
"Some stuff" is not me being evasive, I just see no useful way to write about it here. Nothing under "some stuff" is scarier than what I wrote about stages 2 and 3, so I'm not declining to share anything that can ruin your life.
Keep in mind that this model, including only the first four stages, is itself simplified in relation to the more precise models that it is derived from.
I think the four stage model of enlightenment is insufficient (needs more stages), but I can't easily explain what's wrong with it, and the model I prefer is not very precise in the places that it differs from the four stage model.
EDIT: Just for clarity, "stage 1" through "stage 4" are not related to the four stages of enlightenment in any straightforward way. Not related at all unless you use a model with a fractal element. "Stages 1...4" are one thing, and the four stages of enlightenment are another.
Should be noted that I take Zoloft and Lamictal in case those are influencing any of this.
Before you continue with this, I'm formally recommending that you run what you're doing by your doctor and get your doctor's permission before you do it.
Not because I think this practice is (or isn't) going to be problematic for you, but because I don't know what your mental health situation is, and your well-being is important enough not to put solely in the hands of someone on the internet.
Also, I strongly suggest explaining what you're doing to a close friend, and having them check in with you every so often to make sure you're OK.
The rest of what I write is predicated on your having checked with your doctor and gotten his or her approval to continue.
(If you don't mind saying, what is the exact diagnosis that you're prescribed those medications for? Feel free not to say if you don't want to share publicly.)
So, taking Zoloft and Lamictal probably is influencing this. My guess is that Lamictal will alter or suppress the mood / emotional stuff that can happen in stage 2. Zoloft probably has some effect, too, but I have no idea what.
Let's talk about your visual field. I don't know the cause of what you're describing, and I think it's common enough, but what you mention about it pulsing is probably different. It might be vibrations. Here's how to find out.
Look closely at any part of your visual field with eyes open, when you can see the graininess. (Make sure you're looking at a static scene.) I'll suppose you're looking at a quarter. It should appear to you that the graininess is commingled with the image of the quarter, or that the image of the quarter is "arising out of" or "formed by" the grain. If the pulses you're describing are vibrations, then the grain / quarter is the "something." Label every pulse that you see, and label very quickly. If you label fast enough (or can see enough pulses) it should become obvious to you that there is also a moment where the grain and the quarter simply aren't there; this is the "nothing" (lack of visual field where your attention was).
(Looking at my own visual field, it sometimes appears that the grain is there, and then the quarter is there. Both of those are "something." "Nothing" is when it appears there are blank frames, without visual qualities, that surround instances of grain or quarter or the grain / quarter complex.)
If you can see the "something" and the "nothing," these are vibrations. If visual vibrations are clearer to you than tactile vibrations (e.g. in the movement of your abdomen), then your new object of meditation should be any part of your visual field (attentional width as wide or narrow as is comfortable for you, eyes closed or open as you prefer), and you should label the pulses with the label "pulse" or "seeing" (making sure to see both the "something" and "nothing"), and label any distractions as well. When the tingling thing happens, you can move to that while it's there if you like.
As I said, I think Lamictal may suppress the mood stuff associated with meditation. So, to recap...bizarre visualizations, probably seeing vibrations in multiple sensory modalities, body tingling during meditation, other physical sensations continue after meditation ("buzzing" in your head), expected energy and mood changes potentially dampened or altered: stage 2.
The interesting part is if you've always sort of noticed the "pulsing" of your visual field but never paid attention to it. Then your situation is more complicated and "stage 2" may not be a perfect representation of it. However, the advice for your situation would be the same either way, so it doesn't matter much.
After concentrating a while on my abdomen a painful wave grips my attention and physically throws me off my meditation posture.
Try to observe that carefully every time it happens. You said that you can sometimes see negative feelings as mental objects and not "yours," so you're definitely on the right track. Consider ways that you may not be fully seeing them as mental objects. For example, are the negative feelings afflictions for you? How do you know? If you know because they feel as if they are, make sure you recognize the feeling "being afflicted by negative feelings" or the impression "having negative feelings present in my experiential field" as a mental object too. (This "affliction" is part of the non-standard meaning of "aversion" or "hatred" which is shared with Buddhism.) It's a little hard to get across what I mean here, but if you see it, you'll probably recognize what I'm trying to say.
The vibrations I've picked up so far have been physical twitching of the abdomen, an in and out fading of the sensation of the abdomen, the abdomen themselves phasing in and out of existence and finally my attention itself setting and resetting itself. None of these experiences are very clear so I might be making them up.
Apart from the twitching, it sounds like you can perceive vibrations pretty well.
If you're in stage three, the "lack of clarity" is related to the fact that the "fading out" is is the clearest part. (Imagine a video of the moon waxing and waning using time-lapse photography, and imagine that the waning is extremely clear and the waxing is hard to discern.) That's simply how they present, and you may not actually be missing anything, which would mean you're doing a good job.
If you additionally feel that the vibrations aren't clear, that feeling is a different mental object; label it. Feeling that they aren't clear, and simple fact of their being unclear (or reporting on their unclarity using the word 'feel'), are different.
My concentration is still a mess but I'll try to find out the exact qualities of these experiences.
If you additionally feel that your concentration is a mess, that's a mental object too.
It is very hard to improve concentration in stage three, so if that's where you are, for now I wouldn't focus too much on trying to get a lot better at it than you already are.
Well, not having conscious experience isn't like anything. It just seems to me that being asleep is like something.
Not along the lines of having a sense that time is passing (one only seems to have that sense after waking up, so it's really "having a sense that time passed," as if the brain has some kind of built-in chronometer), but in having some kind of experience that can't be described normally.
Please let us know how meditation is going for you once your retreat is over.
It sounds like you may be describing vibrations, in one sensory modality only. What do you mean by "nothing"? Absense of a tingle? Absense of all physical sensation?
Physical sensations are a good place to look for vibrations because there are a lot of physical sensations that everyone seems to recognize are made up of fluctuating stuff. Most people are more attuned to this kind of fluctuation than to fluctuations in other modalities. Vibrations in other modalities are actually kind of similar, except that they don't "tingle", they just...fluctuate. Maybe tingling is a good metaphor for that.
Two main possibilities that I see:
1) Your concentration is relatively good, and when it gets to a certain point, it produces this effect, but the effect distracts you, your concentration falls apart, and the effect disappears. ("Concentration" here means something like "ability to keep your attention on one object," which is different from the typical meaning, and isn't the same process as concentrating during everyday tasks.) If your concentration was better, the tingling would become stronger, and very pleasant. Concentration simultaneously brings on this particular sensation and breaks it up into easy-to-discern vibrations.
2) You are somewhere in stage 2 (probably the beginning, but who knows), which has random pleasant (or simultaneously pleasant / weird or pleasant / unpleasant) tingly sensations as a characteristic of it.
So, you can distinguish between these possibilities as follows. Next time you get this tingling, don't label it 'that', but label it 'that-that-that-that-that-that...', one label for each fluctuation you can discern. Try to see each fluctuation clearly, from the "something" to the "nothing". Even if you can't see all 10 or 20 per second, do your best. If the tingling is caused by good concentration, this will likely make it go away quickly. If the tingling is caused by being in stage 2, this is more likely to extend it or intensify it or bring on another round of it, and your concentration may increase.
If rapid labeling intensifies it, that's good, you should focus on doing that, and try to label faster in general. If you can sort of notice 10-20 tingles per second, you should set a goal of generating at least four labels per second when there isn't any tingling around.
I assume that if you're in stage 2, you're in the beginning, because you didn't report any mood or emotional effects. You did report some bizarre visualizations, which is definitely stage 2-esque (especially because of their bizarreness), but for now I'm attributing that to being sleepy. But it could just be the way that stage 2 manifests for you, especially if you don't typically have imagery like that.
If I'm wrong about where in stage 2 you are, you might get a BIG rush or a series of rushes of tingly sensations from labeling rapidly. And if this happens, at one point, at the end of the rushes, you may feel like your attention is much less precise than before, which would be a decent indication that you may have entered stage 3, so hold on. (But in that case I would say you have an aptitude for this style of meditation, and think that you'll probably get through it quickly if you keep going. Also, if you haven't reported many emotional side effects, you may not be susceptible to them.)
Do you feel any different when you're not meditating? Tingles? Weird visualizations? How's your mood and energy level?
The world does, subjectively, appear to be enormously fresh and interesting to me (compared to before I went down this particular path), which may be related to what you read.
OK, but, how sure are you that you have no conscious experience while asleep?
No problem. Send me a message and let me know what's on your mind.
The imagery you're describing is really interesting. :) Could be a lot of things. If you're feeling dreamy while it's happening then it's probably because you're getting tired. Try standing up, siting in an uncomfortable position, drinking coffee, or something like that.
Forgetting what label to use or forgetting to label sounds like sleepiness.
You said the shivers are "not unpleasant," does that mean "slightly pleasant" or absolutely neutral? How would you say your focus is during the moments leading up to it, compared to when you start meditating or get weird imagery?
Body sensations like tingling, shivering, pins-and-needles, etc. are really good places to search for vibrations. It's probably obvious to you that sensations like this aren't static, but are comprised of rapidly fluctuating sub-sensations. (Imagine what it would mean if "tingling" was a static sensation. Would you even call it "tingling"?) So, how rapidly do they fluctuate? How quickly can you observe the sensations that comprise them?
I may have more to say if you can tell me more.
I wonder if this is a common denominator among people who have meditated or otherwise gotten beyond stage four. Would be interesting to hear what regular folks think about consciousness during sleep.
Looking forward to hearing how it's going.
If you really are in stage 3, I would suggest not trying to shut out or ignore your negative feelings, whether or not you're focusing on your breath. Where are they, subjectively? What is negative about experiencing them? What are their exact qualities? Entertaining that sort of stuff can sometimes be helpful.
EDIT: My working theory right now is that the perception of "vibrations" is somehow related to the particular technique I describe, whereas the stages are more general in relevance.
Am I missing something? Why don't the practical instructions lead up to the final stage of "enlightenment" and instead stop at "partial enlightenment"? Is there a further stage after #4 that might be even more dangerous than #3 and that you don't think is safe to describe to anyone who isn't already at #4?
The practical instructions don't go further because the issue of going further is complicated, and trying to describe it in a reasonable and useful way would have made this post much too long.
If you can handle stage three, I would have no worries about your ability to handle anything afterwards.
I've never read Gurdjieff, so I don't really know. Terminology is tricky and I wouldn't venture to guess unless I was more familiar with what "many I's" means.
Fair enough. These issues can definitely be confusing.
If you'd like to pick up on this conversation in the future (or restart it), feel free.
Hmm, updating on this I'd guess I a very wide Range of Phenomena, but maybe normal or possibly even worse worse speed.
What you'd need to know is what counts as normal for the population you think you're part of, and not for people in general. I'm not sure I have that information, apart from this broad generalization:
-In stage 2, range is not very wide, speed is very high
-in stage three, range is pretty wide, speed is much less than stage 2
-in stage 4, range is extremely wide, speed is variable but not as high as stage 2
People who don't meditate seem to have range being narrow and speed being lower than any of the stages, but I'm not completely sure.
Also I never said I were alone in this. In fact we already know of two individuals that show these symptoms just in the pool of people who have read this thread.
Adelene did not assert that she was outside the model (like you did), but only that she thought she was partially enlightened without ever having formally meditated. That is completely consistent with the model. Her results on the cessation-of-consciousness test agree with what the model would predict for such a person. She claims that her everyday experience is similar to stage four (or mode four perception), which agrees with what I asserted about partial enlightenment (in Part 2).
Let me know if you try the cessation-of-consciousness test and are interested in sharing what happened.
About your experience, I'm not sure I'm following. Let me take a step back. You say that "location" means x,y,z coordinates. Before, you wrote
"I know that some kind of events take place inside my brain...and some happen outside of my brain, but other than location they don't seem any different and I get information about them through the same channel not sorted into two different piles like most people do.
If you visualize purple monkeys, what is the location of that and how do you know? Given how you know it, why does that method of knowing result in it seeming different than e.g. the way your feet look, on the basis of location, but not on any other basis?
Location doesn't sort into two piles, it sorts into an infinite amount of piles arranged in a hierarchy.
It seems that you're not talking about your actual experience (unless you assert that there is an actual infinity somewhere in your experience)?
I'm not sure what would be an "appropriate" response, visualizing is an action, output not input, and also "how do you feel" tends to be after longer term trends rather than the exact moment,
People can visualize spontaneously. (cf. e.g. hypnagogic imagery, daydreaming, other stuff).
Someone can say "I was happy for hours but all of a sudden I felt sad" and that makes sense.
Could "I feel purple monkeys" be an accurate response to "how do you feel this very second?" in the way that "I feel sad" could be, if you hadn't been visualizing purple monkeys for a long stretch leading up to the question? If so, it might be interesting to you to investigate how your experience differs from most people's, just for the sake of self-understanding.
I'd also guess the incidental skills and effects are probably involved in the stages phenomena.
My guess is that most of how the stages present is downstream from second-order recognizing and unmodeled personal factors, though 'concentration' can make a big difference here when formally meditating.
My working definition is somehting like "an agent that a correct and fully informed implementation of CEV would assign subjective experience and care about for it's own sake.".
According to your working definition, you don't know whether you count as a person, and are very far from knowing.
But this doesn't help, since you previously asserted that you are not one, and seemed to indicate that it has something to do with your ongoing "lack of self" experience.
Assuming what you meant was that you assume or believe with high probability that a good implementation of CEV would not count you as a person, why do you think so?
Just have to interject here that there is no particular relationship between "vibrations" (my definition) and orgasm.
On the basis of Kevin's description, caffeine is probably more useful for meditation, since it doesn't produce a "multi-hour psychedelic odyssey into [one's] own psyche." Caffeine's effects on attention and wakefulness can be helpful, especially in light of the fact that it produces no overt kind of experience. Meditation cultivates attention and perception. What Kevin is describing sounds like it would get in the way!
"Vibrations" are not a particular kind of experience. "Vibrations" are the manner in which experience presents, independent of content, when attention and perception are cultivated in specific ways. Everything from orgasms to blank walls vibrate.
In terms of this discussion, the most obvious differences are that this cessation of consciousness is momentary, produced by mental exertion, able to be produced rapidly and repeatedly, and without the typical sequelae of waking up from sleep.
How sure are you that you have no conscious experience while asleep (in contrast to merely having no recollection of conscious experience)?
Cool. You probably are partially enlightened. I take the cessation-of-consciousness test pretty seriously. But, two follow-up questions:
1) How do you know that consciousness ceases? What is it like?
2) Do you notice any difference in your attention / perception in the second before, and the second after, consciousness ceases?
Anyhow...
The degree to which you're partially enlightened (or fully enlightened) will be hard for me to say much about, because most of the information I have about this relates to what people say about their current experience compared to their pre-enlightened experience (and you claim not to remember ever being un-enlightened), or relates to guessing on the basis of their meditation experience over time (which you obviously have none of apart from what I asked you to do just before). Even so, here are a few thoughts.
Moments where consciousness ceases tend to fall into three basic categories:
1) Consciousness ceases, and there is a big change in the way things appear to be afterwards. The basic model of enlightenment involves four stages of enlightenment (not directly related to the four stages of meditation experience I've described previously), and this category of consciousness-cessation occurs after advancing to the next stage. However, it can also occur when advancing towards enlightenment in a way that the four-stages model doesn't cover, which is surprisingly common. (The four-stage model of enlightenment is somewhat primitive and doesn't cover enough.) Some of your experiences seem to have been along these lines.
2) Consciousness ceases, and there is some small change in the way things appear to be afterwards. These tend to indicate advancing towards enlightenment in a way that isn't covered by the model. Some of your experiences also seem to fit in here.
3) Consciousness ceases, and there are no changes afterwards apart from attention / mood / mindstate. These tend not to indicate anything except that that one has cycled through the perceptual modes (and is a test for partial enlightenment). You had five instances of this after running my test.
You claim always to have experienced things approximately the way you do now, except you have noted a number of moments where consciousness has ceased, and various large or moderate changes afterwards. So you were not born fully enlightened, and I would guess (on other theoretical grounds) are still probably not, but are probably beyond the first stage of enlightenment.
If you're interested in this subject and want to pursue it further (publicly or through PM), let me know, I'd be glad to talk with you about it.
Other than that, I'd like to ask you some questions about your experience of the world. I'd like to hear how someone outside the culture of communities interested in enlightenment would describe her experience, and am interested in doing this publicly in order to provide evidence for or against the claims I've made in this series of posts. I'm also interested in how someone without any experience of being un-enlightened would describe things. (The descriptions may be radically different, for all I know, because so many of the typical descriptions are built around the contrast between before and after enlightenment, so I'm curious for all kinds of reasons how that turns out.) I can also try to give you some insight into how enlightened you are on the basis of your answers, if you're interested. Also wanted to ask you about your synaesthesia, for reasons that may or may not turn out to be related to meditation / enlightenment. So let me know if all this is OK with you.
About your pronoun thing, not sure what to think, except that maybe this is a "meditation hangover," which I assume has gone away since then.
My guess is that meditation trains a lot of different skills, that whatever my brain does trains an overlapping but slightly different set of skills and at different proportional effectiveness, and that the end result is me being all over the place and not really possible to place on the scale.
From my experience, it seems that the core skill related to enlightenment is "second-order recognizing" (with two aspects: speed, and range of phenomena that it has access to), and everything else is downstream from it. Other skills built in meditation seem to be either to be incidental or merely helpful in developing second-order recognizing.
In light of that, I would not be so quick to assume some kind of personal uniqueness in terms of the model I laid out, especially given that that kind of thinking does seem to be a common human bias.
Hmm, some of my many of my psychological problems that's been ruining my life for more than a year or so actually sounds a lot like how you describe stage 3... Than again half f every psychological effect or condition I've ever heard of does, so it's not very string evidence.
Right, I wouldn't take psychological problems as evidence for being in stage three, unless there was additional evidence for that. Psychological problems are common enough.
more something like "I know that some kind of events take place inside my brain (I call all of these "thoughts" and am confused abaut how people seem to classify some as "imagery" some as "thought" some as "feeling" etc. Those words are complete synonyms to me.) and some happen outside of my brain, but other than location they don't seem any different and I get information about them through the same channel not sorted into two different piles like most people do.
If you intuitively and self-evidently see some phenomena as happening outside and some phenomena happening inside, which is what "[...]other than location they don't seem any different[...]" means to me, that seems precisely to be sorting phenomena into two different piles. As if they come pre-tagged with "location" data.
As a long-time meditator, I don't recognize phenomena as intuitively or self-evidently "inside" or "outside" or "neither inside nor outside" or "both inside and outside." That entire classificatory scheme has ceased to exist for me. (In some ways I lack the ability to conceptualize what it would mean, although I remember that it used to mean something to me.) There is no location tag, and there is no empty field where the location tag would be. Of course, my model of the world tells me that some phenomena (sensory experience) represent stuff in the external world (albeit produced produced "inside," through brain activity), while other phenomena (cognition) merely represent the activity of my brain, but that is just a model, something which can be altered for all sorts of reasons, and not the default way that my experience is parsed.
How would you really know what's inside your brain and what's outside your brain, except by applying an explicit detailed model of how the world works? Is that what you're doing when sorting phenomena? Or are you using some more primitive way to sort (e.g. "sort by location tag")? Because sorting by the application of a model is not a low-level cognitive process, and has all the implications for what that sorting is like which follow from not being a low-level cognitive process.
Apart from this, I'm not sure why you think thoughts and imagery and feelings are synonymous. If someone asked you how you felt, do you think "visualizing purple monkeys" could be an appropriate response? (Are you a synaesthete?)
I can sort events by where they happen and put aside those who have the location 'armoks brain' but it's not somehting by brain does all the time if I don't tell it to. "
My guess is that this refers to the explicit sorting by the application of a model; for you, things come tagged by location, and you can choose to use the location tag to sort phenomena, or you can simply not sort.
So, unless I'm wildly misunderstanding you, my guess is that you aren't partially enlightened. But, who knows. Have you tried the cessation-of-consciousness test I described to Adelene?
When I said I had no self I meant it more literally than you describe the meditation- attained one. "my mind is comprised of various automatic processes, there is nothing that 'subjectively experience' them, and words like ''me and 'I' are just pragmatically useful labels the usage of which varies with context and which obviously don't correspond to anything in the real world. ".
As far as I can tell, "me" and "I" correspond to things in the world, or at least, there is a way to interpret them so that they do. They may not correspond to anything ontologically unique, but they definitely do describe features of the functioning of a physical system (your brain / body complex in relation to its environment) as precisely as might be expected from natural language terms.
What you're describing sounds to me like some kind of dissociative state.
(Speaking of which, if you ever need an expendable human to be tortured for 3^^^3 years or somehting I'll volunteer so that an actual person wont have to do it.)
In your opinion, what are you missing that would make you an actual person? The feeling of being an actual person formed of processes that cohere? (regarding my "dissociative state" guess.)
I can assure you (with high probability) that most people you run into would consider you an actual person rather than a sequence of unrelated processes, regardless of whether or not you feel like an actual person. I'm sure (with high probability) that you recognize that all the processes in your experience function together in a precise, finely-tuned way, which is how you're managing to have this conversation with me, and handle the rest of your life. So what's missing?
It actually sounds like doing this with just concepts (probably mostly 'that/thing /I-see-it/object-of-focus', which is a single rather simple one in practice) will work fine, and that's much easier and faster than any of the other suggested methods.
I'm not sure I recognize what you're describing. Labeling, at least when you get the hang of it, appears to be somewhat nonconceptual. (The method I described to you isn't "categorizing," even though it may sound like it, and even though the basic method of meditation I've described in the post has a lot in common with categorizing.) When I label rapidly to cycle through perceptual modes, I don't conceive very much at all about the object except that it's there (plus whatever concepts my mind generates by default upon getting certain stimuli, independent of trying to label). The label becomes something that gets generated in response to an experience, not so much of a linguistic / semantic thing as you might expect.
To give you another idea of why I'm not sure that what you're thinking of doing is sufficient, at my default waking level of concentration, I can accurately label "seeing" about 4-5 times per second. (I can second-order recognize that visual experience is happening much more frequently. Labeling is a crutch.) What you're describing sounds like it would happen more slowly than labeling. If that's true, and if your knowledge of cognitive psychology suggests that labeling should be the slower process, I'd say you may have that belief because you don't understand what I mean by labeling. (On the other hand, if you can do this with concepts faster than 4-5 times per second, I probably don't understand what you mean.)
I guess ultimately I'm not sure that I understand you and whether what you're suggesting is the same as / different from / similar to what I'm suggesting, and don't want to vouch for a method that may not work, even though you have a theoretical reason to think it will.
So, mess with the instructions if you must, but I can't really tell you what the result would be.
These will be my beliefs, conditional on the results of your experiment:
-You use one of my methods, and notice an apparent cessation of consciousness. Then I would be convinced that you're beyond stage four.
-You use your own method, and notice the same. Same conclusion.
-You use one of my methods, and don't notice anything. I would still hold out some possibility that you're beyond stage four, on the basis of your description of your experience, and consider that you're not implementing the method correctly (more likely to me), or that the method only works for people who meditate their way to partial enlightenment (less likely to me). I'd ask you some other things about your experience.
-You use your method, and don't notice anything. Reduces my confidence that you're beyond stage four somewhat, increases my confidence that your method doesn't work.
Thanks for being willing to take the time. I'm extremely interested in hearing how it turns out.
Using labels is actually a crutch. You could just as easily pick an object of meditation and have a nonverbal, second-order recognition that you're experiencing it. But you have to be sure that you're doing that correctly, and be sure that you're not having attentional lapses, otherwise it's likely to be much less effective. Labeling tends to force people to do this correctly. (About "doing it correctly": It's difficult to explain in words what the "second-order recognition" process is, so a person looking to cultivate it on the basis of an explanation only may have a hard time figuring out whether they're cultivating it or not. But people seem to get it when they label.)
An equivalent method which is not suitable for beginners but may be suitable for you would be to imagine a glyph every time you recognize an instance of seeing (or whatever your object is). The glyph would then be similar in meaning to the word "that." You only need a single glyph. (Multiple labels are useful for passing through the four stages or moving closer to full enlightenment, but don't add anything besides complication if the goal is just to cycle through perceptual modes.) But, make sure you can imagine glyphs fast enough. Testing this out on myself, I can produce labels at least twice as fast as glyphs. (This may be because I've had a lot of practice with the label method.)
You don't need to retain awareness of the labels after you produce them. The goal isn't to produce a list, just to rev up the second-order recognition process. Similarly, there's no need to produce a map or representation of your mental states over time. Just recognize them, moment by moment.
Not sure what to make of your situation. Specifically, I don't know what this means:
Stuff like observations of stuff inside my brain and outside my brain being the same kind of thing,
If you mean something like "it intuitively and self-evidently appears to me that some things are 'inside' me (e.g. feelings) and some things are 'outside' me (e.g. physical objects or their sensory representations) but they all seem quite the same on some level," I would specifically say that you are probably not partially enlightened.
About the sense of self, there are various ways it changes through meditation, even before partial enlightenment. A simple, intuitive notion of self is something like "I am the entity that thinks, intends and acts." One that is often attained through meditation and which replaces it is "my mind is comprised of various impersonal processes, and I am the subjectivity that experiences them / there is some kind of subjectivity that experiences them." If I had to suggest what an enlightened person might say along these lines, it might be something like "every mind process is impersonal, and recognizing that means that mind processes no longer appear to be personal or impersonal."
It's definitely possible that some kind of progress through the stages has been going on for you, which could be the cause of some of what you're reporting, even if it hasn't gotten you partial enlightenment yet. It can also just be, as you said, something associated with learning about the mind in an everyday sort of way. (Or both.)
If you think you can 'almost' see vibrations, then you can try to look for them for awhile and see if they make themselves clear. They do become clearer and more obvious when you have more concentration, so you can try to develop that skill and see what happens. However, keep in mind that this is a form of meditation, and if you're wary of stage 3, and haven't been there yet, doing this is a great way to push yourself there. You might as well just do the technique I describe in Part 2.
(In some ways, as a rationalist, you should be more wary of stage 2. Stage 3 sucks, but in stage 2, people are likely to form all sorts of false beliefs because the mind generates some weird thoughts and the pleasurableness / enjoyableness of stage 2 entices many people to give those thoughts way more credence than they deserve. Though it can be interesting retroactively to observe how easy it is to be misled by one's feelings.)
You could also try what I described here as a test, but the same caveat applies.
FYI, if you can manage to see vibrations after putting in only a little bit of effort, but can't pass the cessation-of-consciousness test, I think it's more likely that you're in the beginning or near the beginning of stage two (which does give some insight into the workings of one's mind), and more importantly, that whatever your mind did to get you there without any formal meditation will be something that it will continue to do, which will eventually plop you down in stage three. Whether or not you choose to formally meditate now, I would ask that you keep this in mind, and if one day you realize that your life has been sucking for absolutely no reason, re-read what I wrote about stage three (in Part 2) and see what you think then. If everything I said about meditation is wrong, it's no skin off your back, but if what I've said is true AND there is evidence that you've found your way to stage three by accident, you are likely to be able to save yourself a lot of suffering if you take up meditation then compared to just trying to coast through.. Forewarned is forearmed.
Based on your description, I see some chance that you may be right. Lots of things to ask. But let's stick with something simple to begin with.
Meditators who are [partially] enlightened can cycle between the various modes of perception, at first by meditating, and sometimes (with practice) at will, and at the end of mode four will experience an apparent momentary cessation of consciousness. So, if you'd like to see whether this is true for you, I'd ask you to do the following exercise and see what happens:
Even if you don't perceive vibrations, and so sensory experience of an unchanging subject appears static, it should be clear to you that the mental process of observing the quality of one's experience is "pulsatory," in the sense that observation happens as a string of individual observation-moments. So pick an object to meditate on (I find an unchanging visual field is good for this; doesn't matter much what's in the field), focus your attention on it, and every time you recognize that you are having an experience of that object, label that experience. (If you pick an unchanging visual field, your labeling will be "seeing, seeing, seeing, seeing, seeing, seeing..."). Don't worry about labeling anything else. Make sure your label corresponds to recognizing the experience (it shouldn't be a mantra, you should only label "seeing" when you have a clear second-order recognition of your first-order experience). Label quickly, multiple times per second if possible. If your attention gets wider or narrower during this, let it be wider or narrower, and just keep on recognizing and labeling your experience moment-to-moment. If your attention gets so wide that labeling only one sense seems ludicrous, feel free to use "experience, experience, experience...." instead.
If you are beyond stage four, then then exercise is likely to produce a variety of attentional and perceptual changes, but not really any of the physical / emotional / cognitive weirdness from the various stages (since by hypothesis you're not in any of those stages, according to the simple model I described; so you won't cycle through the stages, just the bare perceptual modes associated with them.)
If you are beyond stage four, you should expect that after your attention gets quite wide, there will be a momentary apparent cessation of consciousness, and immediately after, your attention will be narrower. Most people can keep on going through the cycle narrower-->wide--->cessation of consciousness-->narrower--->wide--->cessation of consciousness over and over, so if you think you've missed seeing it the first time, you can try again.
Don't expect the cessation of consciousness attained through this method to produce any sort of mental change, apart from possibly causing feelings of relaxation and happiness for a short time afterwards.
I don't know how long it will take to do this experiment. The speed at which a meditator can cycle like this may depend on individual factors, how far along they are towards full enlightenment, and practice. I would estimate 30 minutes to an hour as an upper bound. But the process can also be extremely fast (I can do it in less than 10 seconds). The faster you can do it, the harder it is to observe the attentional changes, but the easier it is to examine whether consciousness appears to cease or not, and vice versa.
If you can cycle through the modes of perception up to the apparent cessation of consciousness by using this method (and are accurately describing your experience), I would be convinced that your brain is quirky enough to have gotten you beyond stage four (to partial enlightenment) without any formal meditation.
(Note: I know my 'tone of voice' is odd above. This is a thing that happens when I'm talking directly to someone I don't know well. I haven't yet found a good workaround that doesn't involve getting to know the person. I can only directly tweak some things about how my automatic systems work. ;P )
Mine isn't anything to write home about either, so no worries. :)
Actually, re-reading this, I have two questions.
What experiences have you had that you think correspond with enlightenment? Do you mean the apparent momentary cessation of consciousness?
In what way do you think your normal experience is like my description of stage four (or mode four perception)?
I may have more things I'd like to ask you after you respond, if you don't mind.
Curious about your experience and why you think that, perhaps, you have achieved enlightenment or partial enlightenment already. What specifically causes you to think so?
There was a brief discussion of the possibility of enlightenment without meditation in the comments section of Part 2.
Another possibility, which I consider more likely without knowing anything more about your situation, is that you're simply in one of the later stages. As I said, stage two does specifically tend to lead to some sort of overall cognitive change that's for the better. If people don't begin in stage one, the most likely place for them to be is actually stage three (more about this in Part 3).
And there's always simply the possibility for error, which is quite common.
Read Part 2, see what you think, and let us know.
Well, I'd bet that a battery of cognitive tests related to attention and perception would find a cluster of really obvious differences between me and the relevant control population.
But I am not a cognitive psychologist. Maybe someone who is or who knows about the subject has some input on what to test.
EEG might be the simplest measure, but does it give any really specific information?
In my post I described mode one perception as having "various cognitive and emotional content but nothing very extreme aside from physical unpleasantness." Why do you expect some kind of overt mental alteration?
I already said that twitching is typical.
Edit: Lots of respect for doing a weeklong retreat.
Some very general comments.
Yvain may or may not be right about the etiology of your buzzing sensations (people get these sensations from many causes), but clearly what you're doing is affecting your breathing, which is the interesting part (you mention having meditated before but never had this experience until using my technique), and typical.
Twitching, inability to hold a posture, feeling like your face or body is contorting is also typical.
It occurs to you that twitching is related to the specific process of noting your breath, which is good. Also typical. Keep observing that. (Cf. my piece of advice in this post about paying attention to new things that seem strange or interesting.)
I'd say you're in middle or late stage one.
Keep noticing your breath, the interaction between your noting and your weird experiences, and your weird body sensations. Your experience will eventually change as you continue to meditate.
Also, go back to being on retreat, away from the internet.
Thanks for doing the experiment and letting us know about it.
If you're attempting to use the technique I'm describing, remember to actively label all the mental activity that occurs to you. If the majority of the mental activity you can see is repetitive thoughts and reactions to them, the majority of your meditation experience should be the generation of a stream of labels related to them: "thinking, remembering, aggravated, in-breath, thinking, annoyance, hearing, thinking, shocked, out-breath, thinking, frustrated...". In some ways this is much more important than just trying to follow your breath.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I don't know whether 'vibrations' are necessarily observable by anyone who has passed through any of these stages, or are just a side effect of the specific exercises I prescribe to cultivate attention, which would not occur if someone has passed through the stages by another method.
Thanks for giving the experiment a try and reporting about your results so far. Please keep us updated.
I have some comments about your reported experience, but since you do seem to be intending this as an experiment, I would rather not say much and let you see for yourself how things turn out.
Despite that, if you feel the pressing need for some kind of feedback, feel free to send me a private message.
By the way, my name is David, not Daniel!
I would also note that enough English-speaking people have tried an intensive course of meditation such as that described by the OP that even if intensive meditation had zero effect on a person, I would have expected (based on just 'raw numbers') to hear of at least one meditator who is notorious for inventing a new kind of machine, discovering a new scientific law or for some other improvement to our civilization
This is an interesting point.
I notice no change in myself as a result of meditation that I would think is likely to have decreased my lifetime potential for scientific or cultural output, but this kind of "noticing" is obviously not especially reliable.
My inclination is to think that the culture of meditation typically draws in a certain type of person, but I'm not sure that's sufficient to explain your observation (assuming your observation is true).
Talking about the mind level is another way of talking about the brain level, though figuring out the relationship requires scientific knowledge.
I don't know enough neuroscience to translate the two contrasting assertions on the mind level into assertions on the brain level. I don't know enough about neuroscience (and perhaps today, no one does). But they are obviously translatable in principle. They are bona fide, explicit predictions about what future research in neuroscience will find. This seems to me to be a really good example of an explicit testable claim about the world that would follow from enlightenment. Do you see something wrong with it?
I imagine some people's minds may be quirky enough that they might eventually achieve enlightenment without ever meditating. So I would guess that it's not necessary. However, I don't know of any such cases, so I see this as speculative.
In the paragraph immediately after what you're quoting, I wrote
Partial enlightenment is preceded by the apparent momentary cessation of consciousness, which will happen at the very end of this stage.
which implies that 1) stage four ends, and 2) when partial enlightenment has occurred, stage four has ended. Given that, I would think that caveats concerning what may happen if you stop meditating in stage four would no longer be taken to apply.
I'm still curious where your mischaracterizations have come from. Perhaps something about my writing style leads to them. I didn't ask just as a way to point out that your assertions about my claims are wrong. I would genuinely like to know the answer.
I used the word "attachment" without explaining it. "Attachment to the world" I've never written, though phrases like that appear constantly in Buddhist literature and are often taught as central to it (as you seem well aware of, given your use of the phrase "Buddhist heritage" in relation to this discussion).
About these terms, I seem to be having enough trouble getting across the basics, so I think triage is in order.
If your experience includes something which you would call 'self' (whatever that means to you), some aspect of your brain's functioning is responsible for that. In various altered states of consciousness, the experience of what you would call 'self' is typically altered in various ways, which can point you in the direction of whatever you would call 'self' in normal experience if you aren't sure what I'm talking about.
So, what does it seem to you that 'self' in your experience is doing? Is it structuring your experience in some way? Is it not? Whatever you claim about its relationship and role in the operation of your mind can be translated into claims about the functioning of your brain. Enlightenment leads to different claims about the way that whatever you would call 'self' operates (or operated) in your mind, which can similarly be translated. A comparison of the translated claims will show that they are different. The different claims lead to different expectations about what tests will find.
There is no claim here that there is a "self" part of the brain.
I suggested 3 months to a year for achieving partial enlightenment.
If you consider seeing progress according to the four stage model that I gave (or another more detailed model) to be something that reduces the uncertainty of the value of the pursuit, then obviously you will be in a position to better evaluate whether it is a worthwhile pursuit much sooner than that.
If you meditate frequently, you might (should?) reach a state of enlightenment. This will take probably at least a year to reach.
I wrote that a year is a good upper bound.
After you have reached 'enlightenment', you likely still have to keep investing significant hours into meditation to prevent sliding back into the period of mental degradation.
I explicitly stated that enlightenment is permanent. I should also have explicitly stated that partial enlightenment is permanent (in the sense of not regressing to non-enlightenment or a lesser category of enlightenment).
You can't describe to us what enlightenment is, how it works, or what benefits it brings.
I have provided a metaphor about how it works and described numerous potential benefits.
You have no empirically tested benefits of enlightenment to share with us.
My claims about the benefits of enlightenment are on the basis of empirical observation; you simply don't have access to the evidence on which those benefits are claimed. I explicitly stated that too.
What do you think the causes of your mischaracterization of what I've written are?
"Attachment" has a specific nonstandard meaning in Buddhist-associated thinking, and I realized after writing Part 1 that it would have been better to omit the word altogether rather than try to explain it. So I would prefer to discuss the testable aspects of enlightenment without talking about attachment.
Erm, it's not that I just read the sentence "feel X" and feel it. It's that I looked away from >the computer and spent half a minute putting myself into a quite contrived situation. The best category would probably be self-hypnosis - and most people are hypnotizable. I have an advantage of having this skill in a sort of rudimentary way because my dad did stuff like this for a while (he was a social worker). I'm not sure how effectively I could communicate it to other people, but looking at self-hypnosis literature would probably give a good idea of the upper bound.
OK. I think I misunderstood you here and also at some points in the past (including your original response).
However, in relation to my claims about enlightenment and bias, you said:
Because peer pressure, the urge to conform, seems like a direct product of unnecessary attachment to the world, which seems like something meditation with a Buddhist heritage is focused on reducing.
I described what this style of meditation is focused on achieving rather explicitly. "Attachment to the world" is not anything I wrote, but is something you are imputing to me because it's associated with Buddhism. I don't think you've read what I've written very thoroughly, and for some reason are trying to respond to it anyway. If you want to continue this discussion, I request that you re-read my post first, and then re-state any comments or criticism.
I will have to look into this orgasm-on-command stuff before I respond. (I originally used that as an example because I thought it was something that would be especially unlikely to be achieved just by imagining / intending. Ha!)
Perhaps I misunderstood that metaphor you used in post #1, where the mind is like a distorted lens and if you get the right self-awareness you can infer the distortion and compensate. Bias is a distortion, right?
The metaphor only goes so far. Bias is a different type of distortion. If I had to characterize the distortion that meditation addresses, I would characterize it as a distortion in the perception of or in the representation of the components of the mind. The ability to correct that is clearly (to me) not the same as the ability to correct bias. However, correcting it provides some powerful new capacities which can be applied to dealing with biases if one is so inclined.
I see at least two basic ways that one could approach the issue.
The first is to treat it like a mindhack, and evaluate it by its apparent results in people who have applied it. Ask them what good it's done them, and observe their lives and behavior to confirm. Perhaps tell them what your idea of "useful" is and ask them to constrain their explanation of what it's done to those things.
The second is to examine whether it leads to testable beliefs that turn out to be accurate (cf. this comment). See if there is a topic which enlightenment is claimed to be relevant to which you consider useful, state some beliefs, see if the enlightened person says otherwise, and go from there. (This requires that the enlightened person also be rational and well-informed. An enlightened person who doesn't know anything about the subject you want to talk about, who is uneducated, mentally ill, brain-damaged, or whatever, is probably not going to state accurate beliefs, for reasons unrelated to enlightenment.)
The right control is to spend an hour every day for a year imagining the orgasm, >since that's the approximate duration of the proposed experiment with pursuing >enlightenment.
I see your point.
What is your probability estimate that a person who imagines having a full-body orgasm for one hour a day over ten years will develop the ability to have one just by imagining it (or something like that)?
For what it's worth, I tried Manfred's experiment and nothing interesting happened. (I understand "imagining a toothache" to mean imagining a visual or abstract image that I associate with toothaches, and allowing my attention to shift very quickly between the imagined object and the non-imagined location of the teeth where the toothache is supposed to be.)
Enlightenment gives the meditator enough self awareness to see their biases, and >they don't care enough to reduce them. I can't imagine this alternative, are you >really proposing it?
I can't imagine why you can't imagine that this alternative might be true.
Biases don't come with tags that say "bias" on them. "Biases" is a term that people have created to refer to cognitive tendencies which they judge not to reliably lead to accurate beliefs. To effectively determine whether something is a bias you have to at least have an understanding of what it means for a belief to be accurate and have a means by which you could determine whether a belief is likely to be accurate. Obtaining these depends at least on intelligence, cultural background, education, and personality / cognitive style. An interest in spending a large amount of time working out whether something is a bias or not, or searching for things that are biases, depends at least on personality / cognitive style and goal structure.
If these factors don't align before enlightenment, why would you expect that the mere ability to see many cognitive processes clearly ("seeing one's biases", i.e. seeing some of the processes that are biases, not necessarily seeing that those processes are biases) would make them align afterwards? Do you think I'm claiming that enlightenment magically tags all biases with the tag "bias"?
Sorry, I read the first sentence first, and so experienced a minor full-body orgasm. It >didn't particularly vibrate, though - I don't have a clear enough picture of what that's >even supposed to mean, possibly.
Today may be the day that you learn that your mind works in a very uncommon way.
What is your probability estimate that a LW reader would have a similar experience to yours, just from reading what I wrote or something like it, in a non-contrived situation?
On the other hand, if enlightenment doesn't fix the really obvious flaws in our >brains, it would make it more unlikely that it fixes the less obvious ones. I mean, >come on, it should at least stop Asch's conformity experiment from working, right?
Before I agree or disagree, why do you think so? Biases have different origins, and something that may improve some may not improve others.
(Parenthetically, the relationship between rationality and Asch's experiment is not as straightforward as you seem to think.)
The orthodox Buddhist position seems to be that 'impermanence' is both gross (the breakdown of macro-level objects) and subtle (fluctuations in all the objects of one's experience).
FYI, "Sayadaw" is a title / honorific, so googling just that won't help much.
The point at issue was communicating about higher mathematics with people who have no mathematical training, rather than people who have some mathematical training.
Remember, the original point concerned communicating about enlightenment. "Some mathematical training" may be analogous to "partially but not fully enlightened." "No mathematical training" is analogous to "never effectively practiced meditation."
I still believe with high probability that you think "higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training" is true. A good place to find someone without mathematical training would be a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe.