Rose Eveleth - The Ancient, Peaceful Art of Self-Generated Hallucination (Nautilus)

This is an interesting article to me because I have experienced chemically induced hallucinations, sensory deprivation induced hallucinations, and the much more subtle distraction of lights and images during meditation. They are all three qualitatively different in my experience.

In the Zen tradition, this "self-generated hallucination" is called makyo. Here is a definition from Wikipedia:

The term makyo (魔境 makyō^?) is a Zen term that means “ghost cave” or “devil’s cave.” It is a figurative reference to the kind of self-delusion that results from clinging to an experience and making a conceptual “nest” out of it for oneself. Makyo is essentially synonymous with illusion, but especially in reference to experiences that can occur within meditation practice.

I have always understood these as experiences to be ignored, as mere distractions along the path. The warning is that it can be very enticing to get caught up in visual pyrotechnics in meditation, but that is simply another form of attachment.

The Ancient, Peaceful Art of Self-Generated Hallucination

Posted By Rose Eveleth on Mar 19, 2014


Cornelia Kopp via Flickr
After five years of practicing meditation, subject number 99003 began to see the lights. “My eyes were closed,” he reported, “[and] there would be what appeared to be a moon-shaped object in my consciousness directly above me, about the same size as the moon if you lay down on the ground and look into the night sky. It was white. When I let go I was totally enveloped inside this light… I was seeing colors and lights and all kinds of things going on… Blue, purple, red. They were globes; they were kind of like Christmas-tree lights hanging out in space, except they were round.”

Subject 99003 described these experiences to Jared Lindahl, a researcher from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, who has spent years scientifically studying meditation. He and his team are the midst of a large study on meditators and their experiences, and in a recent paper they homed in on a peculiar experience many of them share: mysterious lights that appear in their mind’s eyes as they practice.

To figure out just where these lights might be coming from, Lindahl and his team talked to 28 meditators for an average of 77 minutes each. Nine of them reported “light experiences,” with descriptions much like subject 99003’s. “Sometimes there were, oftentimes, just a white spot, sometimes multiple white spots,” one said. “Sometimes the spots, or ‘little stars’ as I called them, would float together in a wave, like a group of birds migrating, but I would just let those things come and go.”

Another said: “In concentration I’ve had rays of white light that go through everything. They’re either coming from behind me somewhere or coming out of the object that I was concentrating on… I saw it with my eyes open and it wasn’t really seeing it was something else, even though I still was perceiving that I was there.”

Buddhist literature refers to lights and visions in myriad ways. The Theravada tradition refers to nimitta, an vision of a series of lights seen during meditation that can be taken to represent everything from the meditator’s pure mind to a visual symbol of a real object. In one Buddhist text, called The Path of Purification, the nimitta is described this way:

It appears to some as a star or cluster of gems or a cluster of pearls, […] to others like a long braid string or a wreath of flowers or a puff of smoke, to others like a stretched-out cobweb or a film of cloud or a lotus flower or a chariot wheel or the moon’s disk or the sun’s disk.

Other Buddhist traditions also refer to lights during meditation, but Lindahl points out in the paper that “there is no single, consistent interpretation of meditation-induced light experiences in Buddhist traditions.” And yet the appearance of lights isn’t a fluke occurrence—it’s something that many meditators experience, and that many traditions have tried to incorporate and explain.

“Sometimes the spots, or ‘little stars’ as I called them, would float together in a wave, like a group of birds migrating, but I would just let those things come and go.”

So where are these lights coming from? They’re clearly not real, physical lights dancing in front of the meditator’s face, but rather a construction of the idle, meditating brain. What is it about meditation that opens the brain up to these kinds of hallucinations?

To answer that question, Lindahl and his team looked for occasions where the descriptions he gathered from meditators intersected with descriptions of neurophysiological disorders. They found that both the first-person accounts and the Buddhist literary descriptions of these lights intersected pretty well with the experiences of people undergoing the intentional practice of sensory deprivation.

Hallucinations are relatively well-documented in the world of sensory deprivation, and they dovetail with the lights seen by meditators. Where meditators describe jewel lights, white spots and little stars, those under sensory deprivation sometimes describe dots and points of light. Where meditators see shimmering ropes, electrical sparks, and rays of light that go through everything, the sensory deprived might see visual snow, bright sunsets, and shimmering, luminous fog. Neuroscientists think that when the eyes and ears are deprived of input, the brain becomes hypersensitive and neurons may fire with little provocation, creating these kinds of light shows. Lindahl suspects that the lights that meditators see are the result of the same phenomenon—that meditating is itself a mild form of sensory deprivation.

In some ways, this is not surprising. Meditation often involves being alone, in a quiet, dimly lit room. Some Tibetan Buddhists practice what’s called “mun mtshams,” or “dark retreat,” in which they close themselves off in the dark. And it’s not just about the physical spaces where meditation happens—many forms of meditation are focused on isolating a single stimulus and shutting out everything else, a kind of mental sensory deprivation. By focusing on breath, a specific vision, a single object, or something else as they get into the zone, meditators are “guarding the sense doors” from the rest of the world. This may be an ancient trick for creating a space of intentional sensory deprivation and opening oneself up to the dazzling light show that often follows.


~ Rose Eveleth is Nautilus’ special media manager.

David DeSteno - The Morality of Meditation

This weekend's New York Times Magazine had a brief but interesting article on the "morality of meditation," a look at how the technology of meditation - originally intended to help free the mind from attachments and suffering - is being commoditized for mass consumption, completely void of its original purpose and intent.

However, what these researchers found was that meditation practice, even when not intended to promote freedom from suffering or increased compassion, still resulted in increased compassion among those practicing meditation compared to those who were not meditating.

So the use of meditation for performance enhancement (how truly American!) still has very positive behavioral effects on those who adopt the practice.

The Morality of Meditation

Olimpia Zagnoli

By DAVID DeSTENO
Published: July 5, 2013

MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended. Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to Buddha and other early meditation teachers. As Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For Buddha, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended effect — the reduction of suffering — empirically demonstrable?

To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by the psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaëlle Desbordes and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an experiment whose publication is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. We recruited 39 people from the Boston area who were willing to take part in an eight-week course on meditation (and who had never taken any such course before). We then randomly assigned 20 of them to take part in weekly meditation classes, which also required them to practice at home using guided recordings. The remaining 19 were told that they had been placed on a waiting list for a future course.

After the eight-week period of instruction, we invited the participants to the lab for an experiment that purported to examine their memory, attention and related cognitive abilities. But as you might anticipate, what actually interested us was whether those who had been meditating would exhibit greater compassion in the face of suffering. To find out, we staged a situation designed to test the participants’ behavior before they were aware that the experiment had begun.

WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or she) found three chairs, two of which were already occupied. Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair. As he waited, a fourth person, using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot, entered the room and audibly sighed in pain as she leaned uncomfortably against a wall. The other two people in the room — who, like the woman on crutches, secretly worked for us — ignored the woman, thus confronting the participant with a moral quandary. Would he act compassionately, giving up his chair for her, or selfishly ignore her plight?

The results were striking. Although only 16 percent of the non-meditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had meditated. This increase is impressive not solely because it occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in distress — what psychologists call the bystander effect — reduces the odds that any single individual will help. Nonetheless, the meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

Although we don’t yet know why meditation has this effect, one of two explanations seems likely. The first rests on meditation’s documented ability to enhance attention, which might in turn increase the odds of noticing someone in pain (as opposed to being lost in one’s own thoughts). My favored explanation, though, derives from a different aspect of meditation: its ability to foster a view that all beings are interconnected. The psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I have found that any marker of affiliation between two people, even something as subtle as tapping their hands together in synchrony, causes them to feel more compassion for each other when distressed. The increased compassion of meditators, then, might stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions — ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like — that divide us.

Supporting this view, recent findings by the neuroscientists Helen Weng, Richard Davidson and colleagues confirm that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others.

So take heart. The next time you meditate, know that you’re not just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors, community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well.


David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More.”