The Transcendent Brain

As someone who stumbled upon states of samadhi when I began meditating at 17 (without knowing what meditation is, much less what samadhi is), I’ve come to feel that illumination is an irrevocable change in the brain, such that the brain’s default state is effortless attention and stillness.

After having been immersed in the childish rituals of the Catholic Church growing up, I became averse to rituals and belief systems by my middle teens. Therefore I had no interest in methods, systems and traditions of meditation, which are fabrications of thought that preclude genuine meditative states.

So what is samadhi, and how does methodless meditation open the door to it?

Experience is one thing, and experiencing is another. Experience is of the past, whereas experiencing is of the present. Samadhi is not an experience, but a state of being, a phenomenon.

Though samadhi is defined as “a state of intense concentration achieved through meditation,” concentration has nothing to do with it. Samadhi comes about through passive, self-knowing watchfulness, an all-inclusive choiceless awareness that grows unseen into self-sustaining attention and stillness of mind.

Concentration requires effort and focus. Though it has its place in achieving one’s goals, goals and concentration have to be completely set aside for true meditative states and samadhi to occur.

If one is at all self-aware, one sees that the self stores experiences in memory. Accumulative memory then becomes the background through which we view and act, in relationship and in the world. That is an inherently false, “through a glass darkly” way of living, but most people don’t realize that there is another way altogether.

Because it entails union with the wholeness of nature and the universe, and communion with the immanent inviolability of life, states of samadhi are accompanied by causeless joy, bliss and ecstasy.

However, stillness and emptiness are unsettling at first, because there’s literally nothing to hang onto, and no center as ‘me’ that gives false orientation and direction. But one soon sees that living in terms of self and psychological memory is stultifying, and that joy, insight and love flow from silence and emptiness of mind.

Again however, when a state of samadhi is made into a memory, it delimits, if not denies experiencing it anew. And an experiencing of samadhi is always new.

If one doesn’t try to repeat the experience, and gives no importance to the memory of it, can recalling and recounting temporary states of samadhi be helpful to oneself and others in our journeys of liberation? Let’s see.

Having been raised in the Great Lakes State, I need to live around water. A few decades ago, I moved to California, most of which doesn’t see rain for about five months of the year. And since the town I resided in had no river, I would drive 20 minutes beyond the city limits to the Merced River, which meanders through the Central Valley and runs (often roars) through Yosemite.

Without a goal, just the intent to listen and observe the movement of nature and thought/emotion in a riverine environment, meditative states would often ensue there.

One day a meditative state became so intense, and one grew so completely infused with the beauty of nature and the immensity of the highest reality, that not only was the “I” utterly obliterated, but there was a temporary loss of functional memory. I literally didn’t know where I was or how I got there.

The first time this happened, along the Willamette River in Oregon, there was fear of losing my mind. But by remaining with the fear, and asking, “am I losing my mind?” the fear dissolved and a state of samadhi arose.

That morning along the Merced River produced some amusing effects. After recovering the necessary memories of where I was and how to get back to town, I recalled that I was meeting some friends for lunch in the cafeteria of the college. (I remember having to think about each step while driving, like you do when you first learn to drive.)

When I walked into the cafeteria, there was just a sea of unfamiliar faces. The recognition faculty hadn’t fully returned, so everything and everyone was completely new. For the first time I understood what Jesus meant when he said, “Unless you return and become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”

After standing there agape for a minute, a voice shouted up from the table next to me: “Martin, what the hell are you doing?” It snapped me back to “reality.” I laughed and said to my friend, “John, it would take the rest of the day to explain it to you, and I’m not sure that would do any good.”

Now, many years later, flashes and states of immensity and immanence occur daily. However, unlike a surprising number of people I’ve talked with recently, I don’t think I’m illumined. (A famous physicist once quipped, “The first rule is: Don’t fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool.”) Except during meditation, psychological memory still dominates the brain, and I still dream.

For tens of thousands of years, our ‘default’ state as humans has been symbolic activity and memory. And symbolic activity and psychological memory is thought-based consciousness. It begins the first reinforced images of ‘me’ as a young child, and continues with an endlessly busy mind until we kick off. What a waste of life and neuronal potential.

Throughout human history, there have been a few, a very few, that have “attained enlightenment,” which is to say made a complete transition from symbol-based consciousness to true consciousness of attention and stillness.

I conclude with two questions. First, does the memory of such incidents as described above impede complete liberation? Second, can people live and function well in such a dystopian society like this when states of samadhi are the rule within them?

Martin LeFevre

lefevremartin77@gmail

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