Reclusland

Just finished reading a great post over at “Imagining the 10th Dimension”: Consciousness in Frames per Second.

In it, Rob Bryanton discusses the “frame rate” of human consciousness.  He explains that it likely varies person-to-person but is “in that magic range somewhere between 20 and 40 cycles per second, (where) we do indeed seem to have just such an experience, where things start to blend together into a seamless stream.”

Go and read the article.  In fact, subscribe to the blog and check out the animation as well.  Rob’s work has done a lot to help create my current conceptual framework.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Where this leads me though, is back towards meditation and enlightenment, perennial topics at Reclusland.  Here’s a recent post over at dharmaoverground that gives a good explanation of where I’m coming from.

Jarrod posts:
“The guided portion (of the meditation) ended and I felt compelled to continue my sit, but started to just note sensations (rising, falling, sitting, etc.) Pretty quickly the noting went into auto-pilot and picked up pace significantly. I just let it go and tried not to get in the way. At the same time a distinct pulsing sound/sensation began that was acting like a metronome to the noting. The whole process fell into a nice rhythm with probably 2-3 pulses per second and 3-4 notes per pulse. Each breath was noted by “rise, rise, rise, rise” “fall, fall, fall, fall” in this distinct rhythm plus additional notes between the breaths.”

Then Jackson ellucidates:
It sounds as though your shift in to “auto-pilot” noting was a shift from 1st ñana (Mind & Body) to 2nd ñana (Cause & Effect). First, one comes to know directly that both physical and mental phenomena are “objects”. Then, one notices not only that intention precedes action (and that both arise on their own), but also that noticing occurs automatically as well, and only when there’s an object to notice. Things start to speed up, just as you described.

A more in depth analysis of the 1st and 2nd ñanas can, I’m sure, be found in Daniel Ingram’s book.  I haven’t had a chance to start it yet, but it is online here for those who don’t mind reading the entire thing off a screen.

Anyway, the point being that somewhere along the meditative path, assuming that you are working with a practice of “noting” (that is, watching the rising and falling the breath in the abdomen, or naming/labeling  all sensations as they arise, or any other practice where the focus in on change, I believe), the process apparently speeds up, and the practitioner must let go and simply allow the rising and passing away of sensations as they occur on their own.  This seems to happen as we try to bring our focus onto more and more distinct “things”, deliberately creating “frames” within our experience, while at the same time, pulling our awareness back from the thing thus framed.  As Rene Daumal says in Le Contre-Ciel: “I am that which thinks, not that which is thought.”

And now back to the 10th Dimension post, where Rob says: “some humans operate at a more accelerated “frame rate” than others, and that our frames per second experience of time is directly related to our state of mind and our health.” This, to me, points to a connection between the Buddhist conception of equanimity and our ability to actively notice smaller and smaller “frames” of consciousness.  That what truly makes us unhappy are the things which we miss happening, things that fall between the cracks of our awareness.  Places where the radio station fuzzes out, and we miss a few bars of that song that’s always playing, regardless of whether we listen to it or not.

Neuroscientifically speaking, this is likely related to what is know as our “working memory”.  This is the sort term memory that we use while performing tasks such as remembering a telephone number or a series of words in a sentence, similar to the RAM memory of your computer:

“working memory is a chalkboard on which we rapidly scrawl and erase information…..When we hear the phrase “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” a cluster of neurons fires during each word. When one cluster fires, it suppresses the others momentarily, preventing the sentence from coming out scrambled….As the neurons for “It,” “was,” “the,” and “best” fire in sequence, the brain creates pathways from one point, or brain state, to the next. The more powerfully each excited cluster can inhibit or suppress all others in the sequence from firing, the more solid these pathways….As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That is normally not biologically feasible. “Synapses can’t be stronger than that, the brain is a very complex biochemical machine.”…Mathematical models like these may seem removed from the gritty reality of gray matter and neural chemistry, but they provide a critical connection between what people actually experience and the hidden mechanisms inside the brain.”

Working memory is crucial for cognitive control of emotions: It allows us to consider information we have and reason quickly when deciding what to do as opposed to reacting automatically, without thinking, to something…mothers whose negativity was most strongly linked with their child’s challenging behaviors were those with the poorest working memory skills. The authors surmise that “for mothers with poorer working memory, their negativity is more reactive because they are less able to cognitively control their emotions and behaviors during their interactions with their children.”

Try not to get too caught up in the number 7 mentioned in that first link.  Instead, just keep in mind that the more things you hold in your working memory, the more those things must suppress the rest your mind in order to continue existing.  And the more suppression going on, the worse we are at controlling our emotions (and the further we drift from equanimity).

The practice of noting then, can be seen as a purposeful digitalization of something that is, at heart, an analogue process: the experience of being an awareness-within-reality.  The practitioner is attempting to break through the digitizing process, to fall-between-the-frames so to speak, and realize that, as Buddha said, “All component things in the world are changeable. They are not lasting.” thus coming into the direct experience of that which is non-digital, non-component.

Am I saying that we should all go watch high-frame-rate movies, and try to catch the individual frames?  Stare into the flickering light of the projector until we can catch the black space between the still images? No, not really.  That’s the wrong direction, entirely too mediated.  The point is not to train your mind with a movie camera and then to bring that trained mind back into real life with your newly developed “super powers”.  The point is that real life is already the ultimate tool for training your mind in this way.  You just have to pay close attention: closer, closer, fall between the cracks, identify as the space between the cracks, and bam! there it-you is-are.

But if you do want to watch a movie, here’s a good one. (I very much want to embed this, but it’s been disabled…)