Maximum Meditation

The world that we live in is a stream of projected five sense information that is observed by consciousness. We call it a world of sense-perception, but only intellectual perception, nonetheless. In maximum meditation, the goal is to get consciousness off the current information stream while still remaining conscious of your present personage. You want to abandon the information stream and be in personage as you explore other options. The information stream that is used to produce the illusion of a material self and world is a hard read. What I mean by “hard read” is that it is chock-full of information and streaming at an incredible speed. The analysis, combination, and projection of the information are so demanding that the observer (you) is practically locked into place like an astronaut under G-forces in a rocket to the Moon. Sleep is necessary to get consciousness offline for a break from the hard read. In maximum meditation, we want to get offline but we don’t want to lose self-consciousness. In order to kick start the process, we reduce as much of the information we’re processing as possible. This reduction starts to eliminate the projection of the illusion and frees up the consciousness to observe other things that the mind is doing, call up things from memory to relive, or to just be in the solitude of being without any mind play being observed at all.

As a beginning meditator, you’ll want to be comfortable and secure. Find a safe and comfortable place to meditate, like at home perhaps. Relieve yourself before attempting to meditate. You don’t want to be hungry, as that information will call for your attention. You want to cut as many sensory information distractions as possible while still being comfortable. Try and find some private time to meditate as the activity of others will be a distraction. See to it that the temperature of the room is comfortable as you don’t want to feel too warm or too cool. Find a comfortable chair, a Lazy Boy, or even your bed will do. Optimally, it would be great if you could be naked when Maximum-Meditating, but it’s not necessary. Just make sure you don’t have anything uncomfortably tight on like shoes, a belt, a ring, a watch or the waistband on your pants. You want everything to be loose and comfortable, not pushing a lot of touch sensory information at you. Make sure you turn off the television and the radio in order to make it as quiet as possible, as the sound waves are distracting. Earplugs would be nice if the feeling isn’t too distracting for you. I prefer quiet, but some people actually use music as a meditative relaxer. Whatever works, they’re only listening for so long before consciousness is offline anyway. As for me, I prefer darkness for Maximum-Meditation. Others may want a little light, maybe some ultraviolet blacklight (poster type).

When I first started Maximum-Meditating, I lived in a house on a cul-de-sac with an attached two-car garage having a single door. Whenever the garage door was rolled down shut, after the light timed out, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. To top it off, I would get in the comfortable leather seats of my car and close the door. It was black as the night and practically soundproof once inside the car. I was good to go as long as the temperature in the garage was comfortable.

If you try the garage idea, don’t run the car engine while you’re in the garage, as that’ll shut down your link completely. I prefer a scent neutral atmosphere whereas others like to burn a little incense or a scented candle for a pleasant and comforting aroma. You’re really going to have to do a little trial and error to tweak the meditative atmosphere to where it’s most comfortable for your present sensibilities. I can tell you the atmosphere that I prefer to have is pitch black, but that may raise fear at another point of consciousness. I mean, some people may choose to sleep with the light on.

I prefer a tasteless atmosphere with no mints or gum and such in the mouth. Once you’ve set the most comfortable atmosphere that you can for your meditation, just sit or lay back and let it all go. Simply let your body go relaxed—absolutely relaxed. Inhale some deep breaths and just relax.

Once you feel completely relaxed, relax again. Yes, relax again. You’ll notice that you’re still holding on to stress tensions in the neck and shoulder area as well as your facial muscles. Your legs may also not be relaxed still, so this time, let it all go and just relax—give it to the chair. Now close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and then resume normal breathing. Just lay there relaxed in peace and be with yourself for a while. You’ll be tempted to fall asleep, but the point of this exercise is to remain conscious, so resist going to sleep. Be sure to remain conscious and take note of the thoughts that enter the mind as you remain conscious in the darkness of it all.

Since consciousness is no longer into a hard read and observation of the information stream, thoughts will start to invade your mind. The thoughts will be coming from everywhere—left, the right, up and down. They won’t have any order or any sense to them. It’s your undisciplined mind that’s unhappy with the fact that you’re making it do something other than project information or sleep.

Your mind is bored just being conscious with nothing on the screen to interact with. It’ll throw thoughts at you and/or continue to try dragging you into la-la land for a dream. Resist it and remain conscious for a half-hour to an hour or so. That’s the exercise; the beginning of Maximum-Meditation. You’re starting to gain control of your real self. Do this exercise daily if you can.

Let me tell you: For the first one or two weeks, nothing is going to happen other than what I described above. You will receive the traditional benefits of meditating but you will not have gone maximum yet. Just hang in there and don’t give up. The best is yet to come. After two or so weeks of meditating with the mind in conscious contemplation of thoughts that arise, the mind will be starving for the information feed that it’s used to having. Like a junkie feening for a hit, your mind is going to start to make up places and scenes for you to engage with. You may see people from your past or people you’re not familiar with. The places and scenes will just materialize out of the darkness like a mist filling into a blank screen.

What you’ll notice about these scenes that materialize is that the colors are more vibrant than those that come from the five sense information streamed illusion. A sunny day will be brighter—almost magical. The air will be so clear that it glistens and visibility will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced in the illusion. Go ahead and remain in conscious meditation and enjoy those scenes. You can just hover over and glide above those places, observing what you can. Attempt to touch some things if you feel that you can. If a magnificent scene presents itself, try to hold it for a while because it’ll come in and fade out as you’re attempting to get a good look around. This is where you practice a little will power and hold the scene from fading out. If ever things are not looking right and you don’t feel comfortable, just turn your attention to home and awakening from your meditative state and you’ll find yourself back on observation of the five sense information streamed illusion.

Let this go on for about a month or so, paying attention to exactly when you find yourself offline of the information stream. You’ll find that there’s a narrow exit from observation of the five sense information stream between being absolutely relaxed and conscious and being asleep. You’ll know when you’re offline too—it’s a whole different feeling from being saddled with a body along with rules that set "physical" boundaries. In the beginning, you’ll short yourself because of your acclimation to the observation of the five sense information stream, applying those rules to the offline situations. Take a while and get familiar with getting offline and getting out. As you become more familiar with your own being behind all appearances, you’ll be able to get offline and out faster. You’ll realize the only rules and limits offline are the ones you mentally set.

I remember seeing television tape/video of a Buddhist monk that set himself on fire in Vietnam as a protest against the persecution of Buddhists. At the time I first viewed the footage, it was long before I started meditating. I thought at the time that the monk must have incredible strength to be able to sit there in a double lotus under that kind of heat. He had to be supernatural. Well, I know now that the monk’s consciousness was no longer there. He had gone offline of the five sense information stream.

Others who were still feeding on the stream could see what it presented and feel the heat, but the burning monk's consciousness was okay, only the illusion of burning matter was there for a consciousness that continued to observe the five sense information stream. The only thing here is consciousness in observation of its illusion. That monk’s consciousness just stayed offline. It found something better to observe for the sake of hammering home a serious message to other consciousnesses gone into a mad delusion of personage in observation of this illusion.

Now, that is a perfect example that it’s not necessary to sit on a mountain humming “namaste” in a double lotus with a waterfall nearby in order to meditate. Those are the kinds of places that the mind can create from within a prison cell inside the five sense information stream. It really doesn’t make sense to go out and find a scene like that in the five sense information stream to meditate yourself offline into other situations or similar scenes. Setting that scene is more of a show put on by deluded consciousness. When you find consciousness in the five sense information stream that can meditate, you’ll find it going offline from caves, closets, and candlelit temple floors—wherever.

Some spots of consciousness (people) find it difficult to pull back from the five sense information streamed illusion and thus resort to drugs, mushrooms, and hallucinatory frequency jammers in order to go offline. These things don’t really get them offline with the control that meditation lends to the process. They jumble the processing and analysis of the information stream at the particular point of consciousness that ingested that drug information. They get a read that’s not totally in line with clear processing of the five sense frequency information and it could be a bad read with the mind throwing in unpleasant things. The unpleasant things are the likes of spinning rooms, snakes and demons, lion bites, a lot of screaming, those types of things. They’re all basically just hallucinations. Consciousness will have to experience that until the effects of the drug information run through the information stream at their particular point of observation. I don’t recommend drugs as a means to get offline. Drugs are not meditation. If you’re a person that finds it practically impossible to get relaxed enough to meditate yourself offline without falling asleep, I do suggest giving isolation tanks a try for the experience.

The tanks do a pretty good job of shutting down five sense information from the consciousness quickly, allowing you some time with yourself free of the illusion of body and world that the information stream provides. Once you have the basics of meditation down, it’s time to build on that and move into Maximum-Meditation. I’ll talk about some exercises that strengthen the mind and lead to Maximum-Meditation in the next chapter.