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[Ari]

There are many cultural traditions the world over geared toward what is called inner development, be it called occult, magical, shamanic or otherwise. In these traditions meditation in one form or another has always had a primary position. It has always been considered indispensable for inducing changes in the human body/mind that result in what are today called psionic or psychic abilities. Westerners or other scientifically minded individuals of the post modern era, however, usually relegate meditation practices to a secondary position at best. The value of the altered state seems highly underestimated today outside of traditions, and is more considered in terms of psychological well-being or a help rather than a foundation pillar of psionic cultivation.

Indeed, it seems one can form and sense a psi ball or practice empathic and telepathic communication, even move a little paper wheel on a pin all by simply willing it in a “ normal” wakeful state. This is actually an illusion. To sense energy you need an altered state, or it would always be sensed. The focus and concentration that is taken for granted is that altered state in this case. For simple effects, it suffices. Because it suffices, the post-modern student of psionics assumes all it takes is more practice in the same state, or more focus to accomplish more elaborate effects.

All I have to say to that is: good luck. States of awareness are like gears in a car. If you want the car to handle a certain road at a certain speed, you need to consider shifting to the proper gear. Otherwise you get nowhere and can end up damaging the car. Trying to accomplish advanced psionic feats through will and high focus and only is like stepping on the gas on a flat road in first gear. It is not good for your vehicle, and you won't get very far at that.

This does not mean you need to be spaced out in a trance state in order for your psionic attempts to work well. In fact, this is where meditation also enters the picture. With meditation you can reach a trance state where that state can be subjectively experienced in an alert wakeful manner. You don't have to be “out of it” to be in a different gear. This is similar to someone who drinks or ingests some mind altering chemical for the first time as opposed to someone who is used to it.    

The first timer will not be able to accommodate the altered state and will be disoriented. Their brain chemistry is different that their consciousness cannot conform to it so they become disoriented. More experienced drinkers, users etc. can pretty much orient normally depending on the degree of brain chemistry alteration. With natural altered states, however, you don't have foreign bodies in your organism so adaptation can always be complete.

One of the things meditation does is lead you to altered states, teaching you about your own awareness gear box. It can also help you acclimate to these states so that even the deepest ones manifest with you awake and alert, but feeling different than in the default waking state. A third result is that meditation teaches you to remove mental clutter at increasingly deep levels, and this opens space for more of your awareness to be available for psionic applications.

This latter result ends up making even the highest levels of focus and concentration stress free and effortless. If you find yourself tensing or pushing when attempting some psionic application, it just means your meditation is not deep enough or has not cleared your mind and energy system of noise enough. In this way, if you place meditation first, psionic expression can come more easily and naturally, and the more advanced forms far more swiftly than through going through motions again and again and hoping that this alone will stimulate successful applications. Successful meditation development leads to greater ease in expressing psionic abilities. Many traditions even ignore psionic development altogether because it is a natural result of meditation experience anyway, and trying to focus on psionic applications on their own tends to bog down overall progress, at least according to these traditions.

In other words, meditation doesn't simply result in optimal conditions of awareness for psionic development, but represents the necessary conditions for such beyond a certain point. Thing is, most people today don't realize how elaborate and involved meditation can be. It includes energy cultivation at many levels, for example, a cultivation which also demands to ability to shift awareness gears at will and remain conscious and alert in the process. There is certainly more than meets the eye here, and the methods usually marketed for the general public are but introductory samples.

Even so, consciously developing substantial psionic control, which is natural and more or less effortless is not easy and requires a lot of dedicated commitment, combined with facing more than a little resistance, no matter how enthusiastic you are. There are no shortcuts, but relatively speaking cultivating lucid meditative awareness is the safest and swiftest path to establishing psionic expressions that can test the limits of an uncultivated body/mind.

The post modern methods of psionic development have not been around long, and most are actually watered down and oversimplified versions of traditional approaches. Long term effects on people have not really been established, but then again there are not really many who have managed to develop abilities beyond what is promoted on forums such as this. Traditional methods, and even modern adaptations that do not cut necessary corners have been proven to work, on the other hand, although the scientific community rarely gives credence to such claims. If you, therefore, find yourself wanting more out of your psionic work, consider meditation. Even the methods available to the general public are a start and can give you a greater intuitive sense of how you can better your psionic work, as well as a greater sense of your own awareness potential.    

[stolide]

A very good article. I think you will find that many people do not progress due to a lack of mental control. Another way to think of meditation is exercising mental control over one's self to induce states of mind or ways of thinking conducive to the task at hand.

[wirath]

don't think it is a good article, it so very suggestive.
Will state later this evening why, since I have to go.

[psiworldadmin]

I found some really great and true points made, but I will explain them when I have time.

[wirath]

sorry for the bad tone earlier, made my post and the computer crashed. So had to repost and did not had any time. But here are some point I do not agree on.

the post-modern student of psionics

Are we already a post modern psionic society??? or do we call psionics post modern???

 To sense energy you need an altered state, or it would always be sensed

You don't always need an altered state to feel something. Same with your body, you can feel every part of it, but don't feel them always. Mostly because you're focused on something else.

 Their brain chemistry is different that their consciousness cannot conform to it so they become disoriented

This suggest that chemistry is at work here. No supporting arguments are made to proof that. I agree with the adapting progress though.

A third result is that meditation teaches you to remove mental clutter at increasingly deep levels, and this opens space for more of your awareness to be available for psionic applications.

Meditation doesn't teach in it self. However it does create opportunities to teach you new things. Just like going to school, you still have to sit in class and focus on the subjects at hand.But I agree, it could provide you with an increased awareness for psionic abilities

In other words, meditation doesn't simply result in optimal conditions of awareness for psionic development, but represents the necessary conditions for such beyond a certain point. Thing is, most people today don't realize how elaborate and involved meditation can be.

Agree with this part, but is contradicting with earlier text.

For the rest I think it has strong points. Just the case effect relationship is in my opinion to suggestive. What could be a nice add-on is to give more examples of for what specific skills you could use meditation. This might give a better understanding for beginners.

[psiworldadmin]

Ok reading it over and other comments, I have to agree some places need to be explained a bit more.  Some newbies to meditation don't have a clue what you are talking about.  But I am not one who likes to tear up an article in public, so you'll have to pm me for more comments.

[Albalida]

 To sense energy you need an altered state, or it would always be sensed

You don't always need an altered state to feel something. Same with your body, you can feel every part of it, but don't feel them always. Mostly because you're focused on something else.

Ah, but when your focus changes so that you feel some parts of your body, or all parts, that you usually ignore... that's an altered state.

With this article, my only critique is the same one as with your mysticism article... It isn't so much "dumbing it down" as it is about "being clear" adding more structure and groundedness. I think a newbie would understand every word in this article, but not really at what you're getting at, because of lack of definition.

You didn't define meditation, for example-- it can be inferred what you mean, but just by saying meditation and "space out" a lot... well, it could mean physical relaxation, emotional equilibrium, concentration, de-concentration, or even philosophical insight from solving a koan. Which of these meditations, necessarily connects to psionic activity? Same with tradition-- some ascetic traditions use starvation and pain to get to that altered state, others use movement like spinning around. Which tradition do you mean? By post-modern, what do you mean?

[David]

Nearly same as the 'meditation-consciousness' article by Nico Milligan, aka LD from the PW.
Still worth reading though

~namaste

[Ari]

JK, you know the long drawn out stuff I usually write. This article represents a deep and involved topic that would require volumes to properly be explained. There is just so much in meditation most westerners do not know, and which are explained either as psychology or in cultural and religious terms. If I clarified each point the article would be running twenty pages at least, and the points would still not be clear. The only compromise I can think of is to write touch upon points, and elaborate them as answers to questions about them. Let me take wirath's points for now.

*The term "post modern" is my own adaptation. Technically the modern era ends with the information age, and the latter is considered post modern, for lack of a better term. Human society has undergone so many changes since the Industrial Revolution that it's inaccurate to put the last two hundred years or even the last century under a single label. I use the term to distinguish current information based society from post WWII society, for example, both of which may be considered "modern".

*Superficially you can feel in an allegedly normal state, but if you really examine it, to first establish such feeling you focus, breath a certain way, relax and undergo subtle changes of awareness, all of which amount to an altered state. If you stop someone on the street at random and tell them to sense energy, how successful will they be. My point is that when you make subtle shifts into altered states, these eventually become incorporated in your sense of "normality". Most take this for granted because the shifts are indeed subtle and made stronger through practice. Their awareness adapts so that the sense of normality is not lost. Yet awareness does shift to a slightly different gear. For greater effects you need greater shifts in awareness. Meditation helps you identify these and get used to them so they too can become normal. You don't need to be "obvious" about having an altered state, but if you lead a life in society you will notice that your awareness is usually somewhat different when you sense and manipulate energy than when you are dealing with other tasks, even though you can smoothly shift so as to take it for granted.

*There are several supporting arguments about brain chemistry, including medical experiments scanning the brains of meditating tibetan monks. You cannot separate brain activity from brain chemistry. Moods and chemicals are two sides of the same coin, and chemicals represent energetic processes at the quantum level, and are linked to more subtle effects in cellular molecular/atomic dynamics. There have even been theories of a certiain mutation of adrenaline called pink adrenaline. You can google this, but here is one link and quote: http://www.ambient.ca/cpunk/realdrugs.html

Adrenochrome: One of the components of "pink adrenaline," a derivative of the epinephrine produced in the body. It has an indole nucleus, identical to that in the hallucinogens, and for this reason was thought to be a chemical cause of schizophrenia, since some of the effect of that disease are similar to those produced by the hallucinogens. When injected, adrenochrome will cause immediate physical pain unless it is mixed with the subject's own blood. Mixed or not, it produces certain abnormal and unpredicatble effects in the subject, including changes in color and texture of the environment, distorted visual patterns, vague paranoia and irritability.

Internal feedback loops do affect brain chemistry, because awareness, and energy affects not only metabolism, but also latent gene activation (which in turn alters body chemistry).

*Meditation, and I am speaking of long-term practice here, represents a state of awareness. It is not something you do as much as the state you reach. What you do are the various methods to gain the meditative state. It is this state that awakens an intuition and creative thought process beyond normal cognition that acts as a teaching dynamic on many levels. This alone is a topic unto itself, and I can elaborate more in a new thread.

*Given the explanations I provided above, (perhaps not clear enough) I don't see how the last phrase contradicts the previous. I would be glad examine it, however, if anyone thinks its worth it.

The point of the article is that there is more to meditation than meets the eye, beyond the immediate psychological effects. Perhaps I did not emphasize that this "more" usually takes years of practice to become obvious, and most of the time the changes are so gradual you only notice them with hindsight or through singular peak experiences during the meditative state (which is technically a spectrum of states, but I think we can discuss it as one here). The article was suggestive because it amounts to an abstract. In addition there are a wide variety of responses to attaining meditating states in the long term. Different methods give different results. You can generalize to an extent, but unless you get into specifics, it will unavoidably sound suggestive in such a short article.

[Seikilos]

And now I understand why I should meditate, but I do not yet know how. How do you meditate Ari?

[Albalida]

This article represents a deep and involved topic that would require volumes to properly be explained.

Not necessarily, not if you keep to salient points --and believe me, I have the same problem, so I think... I hope... I know how to help.

To sense energy you need an altered state, or it would always be sensed. The focus and concentration that is taken for granted is that altered state in [example] but more advanced forms of psionics require a change in gear, so to speak

I think that should be your thesis statement. You can proceed to concretize the abstractions by taking the example of a psionic practitioner, taking us through the necessary levels of trance and their corresponding activities. Like...

"Gear" - Brain Activity/How to - Psionic Activity
Light Meditation - Concentration - psi ball
Light Meditation - Emotional equilibrium - aura scanning
Light Meditation - mental clarity - telepathic suggestion
Intermediate Meditation - focus - simple programming
Intermediate Meditation - Heavy Concentration - 1-5 revolutions of a psi wheel
Intermediate Meditation - Void - wake initiated lucid dreaming
Advanced Meditation - spatial location - etheric projection
Advanced Meditation - information - complex programming
Advanced Meditation - focus - 50-200 revolutions of a psi wheel

Something like that. It won't be a step-by-step How To of each of these skills, but rather more substantial as to the state of mind required. Say, in one meditation the frontal cortex is active, in the other that activity recedes to some place in the right hemisphere or the amygdala. You can have your pretty MRI scans to illustrate, and name what the frontal cortex is for, what the right hemisphere is in charge of, etc. No need to mention adrenochrome unless you're talking about whether psionic facilities are genetic. See how simple this When and Hows of Meditation article was? The author gave examples of how different each meditation will be: 30 minutes in the morning to maintain the psi body. 5 minutes before bedtime for a peaceful sleep. Astral travel. Prayer. All meditation, all different. Short, simple, but by no means vague. This one got mention of tradition in, in about as many words, followed by void and focus meditations in a separate article.

Topics that I see as worming their way into this article, but would be better as separate articles-- Meditation Past and Present (these being the specific traditional meditation methods, versus the modern use, that you seem to keep mentioning so mournfully  :'( ) ; The Value of the Physical Body in Psionic Development (here we can talk practical biochemistry, diet, exercise, genetics, etc. Things we need to know about this because we do something that affects it or can be affected by it-- not a detailed biochemistry lecture.) ; Neurology in Psionics (This would be the detailed biochemistry lecture.) Break it down.

Once you can condense your content to the point that you're trying to make, the rest is just style. You might feel you need "post-modern" to clarify that psionics is not traditional... but, we already know that psionics is already a very modern metaphysical craft, so that invented term would sort of just really be a lot of hot air, yes? What I learned in creative writing, is that concretization and economy of words is the in thing now. This is actually a full sentence: Rocks fall. Subject, verb. Whenever sentence construction gets complicated, it's usually because of a passive voice that can be expressed in fewer words is making it so. A good way to make things stylistically concise, is to do away with as many adjective, adverbs, and verb forms of 'to be' as possible. I was still insufferably verbose for a long while, still am when I'm casual, but I really believed that this tip especially helped me think more concisely. Hope it helps you as much!

[Ari]

Your proposal Albalida and how you think things can be organized is logical but simplistic. In practice if you want to get beyond throwing psi balls and memorizing endless layers of programming patterns for a better and stronger shield or spinning the wheel a few time, there is much more involved and it is advanced, not easy to understand and needs a lot of work. Wanting things simple and easy does not make them so. I wrote this longer post trying to support my points, but I see that the only way is to present practices.

The problem with practices is the same with working out. They take time and dedication to really work. It doesn't matter what the physics or neurobiology is. A bit of conceptual symbolism suffices. But, a background is always helpful because this is a forum and not a bulletin board for raw methods. To make things work, you have to think beyond the box, beyond lists, popularized givens and simplified concepts and assumptions. Maybe for most the box is enough. I apologize for wasting their time.

When you deal, however, with appraoches that really change you from the inside (over time) in order to move toward experiences beyond former limitations, you cannot use the same linear formulas. All I can add to that is that after near 30 years of practice, if things were so easy, I would have been on the bestseller list by this point, just like many others who wrote to satisfy the demands of people who want things as they think they should be.

From now on, I'll forgo the philosophy, and maybe even the physics. I do have a list of practices, but the applications start after the list is completed, which doesn't mean people can't still do their own thing. I believe before you start playing the game, you need to get in shape, or you can pull a muscle or two. The list itself is not geared toward results until a certain conditioning of body/mind has at least been initiated. I used to teach a course in energy development and meditation on another site, but I'm revising it. What I'm going to give here are cliff-notes. I will keep theory at a minimum, but will answer questions. Apparently understanding meditation is best a topic dropped until actually experiencing it, although I think the original article in this thread served its purpose and then some.   

[Oreus]

I quite liked the article, Ari. Good job. It's made me reconsider meditation.

[Caliph]

a good discussion of the value of meditation, and I'd be interested to know about the techniques you have found to be useful and or new ways to meditate since I'm always trying out new stuff and it keeps it from getting boring.

[Notagh]

Adrenochrome: One of the components of "pink adrenaline," a derivative of the epinephrine produced in the body. It has an indole nucleus, identical to that in the hallucinogens, and for this reason was thought to be a chemical cause of schizophrenia, since some of the effect of that disease are similar to those produced by the hallucinogens. When injected, adrenochrome will cause immediate physical pain unless it is mixed with the subject's own blood. Mixed or not, it produces certain abnormal and unpredicatble effects in the subject, including changes in color and texture of the environment, distorted visual patterns, vague paranoia and irritability.

That'd be useful for interrogations..

Great article, obviously. Although, it did read like an introduction to something more.
I'm hoping that something more will be the actual how-to of the subject you clarify the usefulness of.

Once you can condense your content to the point that you're trying to make, the rest is just style. You might feel you need "post-modern" to clarify that psionics is not traditional... but, we already know that psionics is already a very modern metaphysical craft, so that invented term would sort of just really be a lot of hot air, yes? What I learned in creative writing, is that concretization and economy of words is the in thing now. This is actually a full sentence: Rocks fall. Subject, verb. Whenever sentence construction gets complicated, it's usually because of a passive voice that can be expressed in fewer words is making it so. A good way to make things stylistically concise, is to do away with as many adjective, adverbs, and verb forms of 'to be' as possible. I was still insufferably verbose for a long while, still am when I'm casual, but I really believed that this tip especially helped me think more concisely. Hope it helps you as much!

I tried to make this post a little concise but I think I'll stick to verbose. You may just miss the point, or at least cause some confusion, if you're overly concerned about how long something is. (Unless of course, it's it or you're writing something with a word limit.)

[Albalida]

I tried to make this post a little concise but I think I'll stick to verbose. You may just miss the point, or at least cause some confusion, if you're overly concerned about how long something is. (Unless of course, it's it or you're writing something with a word limit.)

Not word-limit long, but winding in voice and style.

[Notagh]

I tried to make this post a little concise but I think I'll stick to verbose. You may just miss the point, or at least cause some confusion, if you're overly concerned about how long something is. (Unless of course, it's it or you're writing something with a word limit.)

Not word-limit long, but winding in voice and style.

Nom says it all.

[Tetsuya]

Blah at all this. Its a good article, mental control is too important in this field and it should be on the top of practice.

[Albalida]

Its a good article, mental control is too important in this field and it should be on the top of practice.

I agree. I have no criticism of the concept of the article, I only made suggestion of how to more engagingly present said concept.

...didn't need to Blah at the suggestion... :'(

[Tetsuya]

Its a good article, mental control is too important in this field and it should be on the top of practice.

I agree. I have no criticism of the concept of the article, I only made suggestion of how to more engagingly present said concept.

...didn't need to Blah at the suggestion... :'(

Hehe sorry i just read all the comments im like its a good article lol.