Luke Carbis

Further reflections on Chapter 4 of Jewish Meditation by Aryeh Kaplan.

Begin practicing visualisation meditation

Learn to focus on the patterns behind your eyes. Practice holding images there for longer periods. Meditations should last 20—30 minutes.

Introduce mantra meditation to enhance the clarity of the images. Ribbono shel olam is a Jewish mantra suggested by Rabbi Nachman. Practice until images become spectacular and vivid.

Begin conjuring images to hold in the mind’s eye. Practice holding images for longer periods, and controlling what the mind sees.

Advanced visualisation experiences

Visualising images which aren’t possible to see with physical eyes, such as the “lamp of darkness” which the Zohar speaks of, or intensified beauty of mental imagery beyond our physical perception.

Panoscopic vision, where one can visualise an object from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Ezekiel’s vision of four-faced angels who do not rotate as they move may be an example of a panoscopic experience.

Synesthesia may be induced in a higher state of consciousness. This is a mixing of the senses, where one sees sounds, hears colours, or feels scents. This may have been the experience of the people’s experience when the Ten Commandments were given. The Torah describes “All the people saw the sounds”.

Visualising nothingness. This is a phenomena less associated with transcendental meditation, and more with mindfulness meditation. It is the absence of everything, including self, and including blackness or space.

Reflections on Chapter 4 of Jewish Meditation by Aryeh Kaplan.

Meditative states are usually hard, often impossible, to describe. Language is created through shared experiences, and meditation is a purely internal experience, so it makes sense that we lack the vocabulary.

Even so, it is possible to understand varying degrees of consciousness by starting with two very familiar states: Sleep and Awake.

We can expand this further – sometimes we feel drowsy, sometimes we feel alert. So we can see that there are at least two wakeful states of being. Also, we know that there are two states of sleep: NREM (quiet sleep) and REM (active sleep). So, based on this, it’s possible to understand:

• Active sleep state
• Quiet sleep state
• Awake state
• Alert state

Now that at least 4 states of consciousness are obvious to us, it’s not impossible to imagine additional states.

I don’t think of these as a ladder, gaining higher and higher states of being. Rather, think of consciousness as a tree – we can tune in (or branch out) to being more perceptive, more focused, more creative, calmer.

It appears to me as though there are two main boughs to this tree, which I refer to as hot and cold meditative states. Being hot allows you to give your full attention to a single task, laser-focused to the exclusion of all else. Being cold allows you to clear and calm your mind, allowing positive emotions and creative solutions to surface.

I have experienced a hot meditative state many times while programming. Being “in the zone”, also referred to as achieving “flow”, is a common experience for software developers, who become hyper-focused – locked-on with the whole body and mind (often ignoring hunger, thirst, and even the need to use the bathroom).

There’s a whole subreddit (unknowingly) dedicated to being in a cold meditative state: r/showerthoughts. Often our best ideas come to us we’re relaxed, with a quiet mind, such as in the shower or drifting off to sleep.