'Technodelic Meditation Experiences' are Here (and They Changed my Life)

SoundSelf opens with a set of calming instructions to the meditative process.

If you've ever tried meditation, you'll have a rough idea what it is. Find a relaxing place. Lay back. Take a deep breath. Feel your body.

If you're like me, you'll also have a rough idea of how utterly pointless the actions seem.

I've never been able to 'get into' meditation - and it's not for a lack of trying, either.

There's an allure, some sort of spectacle, to the ancient practices of meditation. That may have been the barrier that prevented me from understanding why the experience was significant.

I went into meditation expecting it to do something to me.

My mind could never be cleared, my thoughts never truly silenced, and that elusive energy never felt.

That's okay, because meditation isn't for everyone, right?

Well, maybe. I don't know the answer to that question. All I do know is, meditation was definitely for me. I just needed it to be filtered through something a bit more 'contemporary.'

The Technodelic Experience

'Technodelic' is the leading word used to describe SoundSelf, and it's so obscure that Google mostly yields information about a Yellow Magic Ochestra album.

It's an...interesting, but self-explanatory portmanteau.

Techno from technology and delic from the Greek word -delia. Or, more likely, from psychedelic.

Maybe techno is from techno music, who knows.

It's marketing jargon that could only come from the man who initially advertised his experience via a ceremony where the cautioned use of 'just a little bit of weed' was advised.

So let's tear away the fluff and actually discuss what SoundSelf is.

It is, practically, a meditation app. Aesthetically, it's a mindfulness experience. In terms of 'gameplay', it's a nightmarish trance beamed directly into your eyeballs via the power of Virtual Reality.

Yes, SoundSelf is a VR experience, where you're expected to meditate.

You know, the action of clearing your mind, feeling your body, and alleviating to the next level?

Yeah, do that with a hunk of plastic on your face.

When I first loaded up SoundSelf, got comfortable on a beanbag, and put on my headset, I was going into the experience with some level of skepticism.

The store page boasts how SoundSelf utilizes 'centuries-old mindfulness techniques' and methods 'measured by neuro-scientists to produce transcendent states of consciousness.'

Based off what I had read, I was going into it with the same mindset teenage-me went into trying binaural beats. 'This should be a trippy experience.'

As I lay back, and indulged the eerily reassuring meditative guide, following her instructions step-by-step, I begun it feel it -

- really stupid.

I'm glib on purpose - a SoundSelf session goes for, at minimum, fifteen minutes. For the first five minutes of my experience, all I was doing was following the instructions, and being treated to a very unpleasant visual and auditory experience.

See, in SoundSelf, you're laying back, facing upwards. You've established a pace of breathing before you even begin and then you're told to 'tone' - use your voice. You're ooooo'ing and aaaaah'ing like a stereotype of a monk. While you do this, your gaze - your virtual gaze - is being lifted upward, through an honestly mesmerizing tunnel of vibrant lights and impossible patterns. You spend a few minutes breathing and toning and for a while all you feel is the cold plastic against your face, and then -

- well, it just sort of happens. Around seven minutes into my first session I started to notice my legs and arms felt a strange numbness. In that same thought, I got rid of that thought. I kept looking upwards, into the strange patterns that changed and morphed to my voice.

Then you realize that, if you cared to focus on it, your body feels entirely numb. Almost like it's not yours. Like you're reaching an understanding of who you are, who you actually are.

You don't care to focus on it though, and you let yourself go more. There's nothing running through your mind now, you're simply feeling the energy that is within your body and the energy of the lights before you - energy that you manipulate and change with your voice and then -

- it's over.

The lights fade away and you're back on the ground, where you started.

That polite voice from earlier suggests you relax a little bit, and you realize that you just, for the first time in your life, understood what meditating actually is.

A Higher Level of Understanding

That was my experience with SoundSelf. Yours might be different. The same is said for meditation itself.

I've shown countless people SoundSelf, and I've gotten a range of reactions. All of them have been positive - or at the very least, impressed with how good such a zany idea is. Many of them have compared the experience to a drug, citing a brief high felt when they took the headset off.

Fewer had the experience that I had, although when they did, it was obvious.

They would come out of their separate room - isolated, and in a cool darkness - in a sort of haze. They would appear tired, as if collecting their thoughts, but they were fully present.

They were just reeling from what had been shown to them.

SoundSelf became a regular routine for me. For a time, I would try to use the program each morning, before I did anything else. Fifteen minutes in the morning to clear my head did amazing things for my mental health.

Then I started to push the sessions longer. Thirty minutes was previously too long for me. Too boring, too much potential to be trapped with my own thoughts. After trying it, fifteen minutes seemed too short of an escape.

It was when I was sitting through forty-five minutes of the experience that I started desiring more - or, funnily enough, less.

My body would ache after being seated near my computer desk for that long, and my face would bear the telltale reddish imprint of a VR player.

I tried my daily SoundSelf routine, just, without SoundSelf.

I tried meditating.

That's when I realized I had gained some small, but higher understanding of the spiritual self. When I sat in a peaceful spot, and let my thoughts melt away, my body vanish into nothing.

When I could feel my energy when I wanted to, without any material aides.

Spirituality is Hard, but Worth it.

Writing about these sorts of spiritual experience goes beyond being hard. For many, it's outright pointless. For me, it had been pointless. Trying to understand the spiritual self is such a profoundly personal undertaking that no one can truly put it into words.

Yet I had to. The experience of finding your inner self through the pursuit of increasingly-expensive consumer technology is about the most bizarre tale I could imagine, yet it happened.

Since I've taken off the headset and found moments for myself through the day, I've felt whole. I've felt secure in who I am. At the same time, I feel profoundly small, insignificant, and entirely okay with that.

I feel - I feel there's a long way for me to go to truly unravel what I feel, and the same could be said for anyone.

What is so vitally important to me, is that you try. You try SoundSelf, or you try meditating under a tree. Do research into methods that you feel might work for you, and if you don't figure it out - that's okay.

Keep your mind open, and wait for it to come to you.

You never know what form this understanding might appear in.

For me, the answer lay in a 'technodelic' experience.

I guess spirituality is weird.