With the Help of
Electroencephalography
INTRODUCTION:
“Our house was a meeting place for Yaquis in Hermosillo [Mexico], just as it had been in Colorada and as it was in later years in Arizona. Almost every day Yaqui men and Yaqui families came to talk. Mama Grande served coffee to the guests and tomales when there was money enough to buy them.
“Some Saturday nights a great sabio came to our house. He lived in Ranchito at that time [1902], although he belonged to the pueblo of Vicam. His name was José María Nóteme, and he was very, very old. No one slept when he talked, and he would talk all night long. When he arrived, he stood as he smoked a cigarette held cupped in his right hand. First he blew smoke to the east, then to the north, west, and south. José María Nóteme told us of many things that would happen in the future; nearly all the things he said have come true and all of his predictions will come to pass in due time. He said that the men who killed the Yaquis would soon fight each other like dogs, and they did in the Mexican revolutionary wars beginning in 1910. He said the Yaquis would someday return to their rightful land, and they have. He said the Yaqui River would dry up, and it has due to a big dam that took all the water out of our river and gave it to the Mexicans south of the river. He said there would be carriages that ran without mules, and soon we saw automobiles. He told of big things that would fly like birds, carrying people all over the world. I saw my first airplane in Tucson in 1908. Everyone was terrified of the plane, but I knew what it was because José María Nóteme had said that it would come. He spoke of big iron balls that would fall from the sky and kill people, and there are bombs. He also foresaw a time when all the big nations of the world would fight each other, and only a few people would be left in the world. This is the part that has not happened yet.
“Many people say that all these same things were said long ago, before there was a Yaqui tribe, by the palo seco. The older people said that there used to be a great many sabios among the Yaquis; José María Nóteme was the only one I ever knew and he must have been one of the last.” (Rosalio Moisés, Jane Holden Kelly, William Holden Curry; The Tall Candle: The Personal Chronicle of a Yaqui Indian, University of Nebraska Press [1971], p. 24.)
“One day [Gordon] Wasson arrived with a group of people. With them came some fellow Mazatecs who brought a sick person wrapped up in a mat. They told me he was an orphan, Perfecto by name, and that he had been raised by Aurelio-Path. This Aurelio was a Wise One as well, and he had tried to cure the sick boy.
“But there was no remedy for the sick one. His death was near. After I saw Perfecto’s appearance, I said to Aurelio: ‘This child is in a very grave condition. He requires a lot of care.‛
“I took the children [sacred mushrooms: Psilocybe mexicana] and began to work. That is how I learned that Perfecto had a frightened spirit. His spirit had been caught by a malevolent being.
“I let myself be carried away by the Language that sprang from me, and though Perfecto didn’t take the little mushrooms, my words made him rise and get to his feet and he spoke. He related, then, that while resting in the shade of some coffee trees in Cañada de Mamey he felt something in back of him.
“ ‘I had the feeling that there was something behind me,‛ he said, ‘like an animal, like a donkey. I heard him lick his chops very clearly. I turned around rapidly, but I didn’t see anything. That frightened me a lot and since then I have felt sick. It’s true, Papa Aurelio, if you take care of me, I’ll get well. Maria Sabina says so.‛
“In the course of the vigil, the sick one got to his feet because the Language gave him strength. I rubbed some San Pedro [tobacco] on his arms.
“Weeks went by and somebody informed me that Perfecto had died. They didn’t take care of him as they should have. If they had done several vigils he would certainly have gotten well. They didn’t do it!” (Álvaro Estrada, María Sabina: Her Life and Chants, English language translation: Henry Munn, Santa Barbara Ca. 1981, pp. 72-73.)
On page 117 of the book Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda, a purportedly accurate account of Castaneda’s field work with his anthropological informant, don Juan “Matus,” don Juan tells Carlos that the deity that is inherent in the peyote cactus, Mescalito, has pointed Carlos out as “the chosen man,” and that, although he is baffled by this omen because Carlos is not an Indian, he nevertheless intends to pass on to Carlos some secret knowledge. He explains that he himself had a benefactor who had taught him how to become a “man of knowledge.” This part of Castaneda’s account of his fieldwork in Journey to Ixtlan is almost certainly accurate. The surviving pages of Castaneda’s field notes indicate that don Juan did indeed claim to have had a teacher—identified by Castaneda in his 1968 letter to R. Gordon Wasson as a Mazatec sorcerer who lived in the Valle Nacional in the Mexican state of Oaxaca—and that the teachings conveyed to him by his “benefactor” had concerned the manner in which the chosen man might strive to become “a man of knowledge,” or in Spanish: un hombre de conocimiento, uno que sabe, quien que sabe, or, as Rosalio Moisés apparently called such a person, un sabio (fem. una sabia) (See the excerpt from The Tall Candle quoted above. The Franciscan priest Alonso de Molina translated the Nahualtl word ixtlamati into Spanish as un sabio, that is to say, a wise person, one who uses reason and has experience. [Vocabulario en lengua castillana y Mexicana, 1572.] In present-day Nahuatl dialects, the word ixtlamati can apparently refer to either a healer or a sorcerer.)
Have sabios (wise ones) actually existed in Mexico? Do such people still exist? If they have existed, have they really been members of some pan-Indian secret society as Carlos Castaneda claimed in his later works? Have the presumably secret teachings of the wise ones been passed down from generation to generation, from master to disciple, in the same manner brujos (sorcerers and witches) and curanderos (healers) have trained their disciples? Disappointingly, when I searched through the anthropological literature looking for some mention of la sabiduría indígena (cf. brujería and curanderismo) as a sociocultural phenomenon in Mexico, I found very little to go on. Sorcerers, witches, and healers abound in the academic literature, whereas people who might have been called “wise ones” are just as conspicuous by the rare mention of them in the literature. Was don Juan talking through his straw hat when he told Carlos that the path to knowledge begins at the point when one is chosen as a disciple by a man (or woman) of knowledge? At this late stage in the game of ethnology, I am afraid that we shall never know for sure. I am supposing that practically everyone who might have had some first-hand knowledge of people called wise ones is now dead and buried. It is probably too late for an anthropologist in Mexico to just start asking around. It appears to me that the Spanish expressions uno que sabe, hombre de conocimiento, sabio/sabia, and so on, have simply been in fairly widespread use among various indigenous groups in Mexico for denoting a healer or a sorcerer. There has probably never been any secret society specifically for wise ones. For example, in Mazatec tradition, of which both Maria Sabina and Castaneda’s informant, don Juan, were apparently followers, a healer or a sorcerer/witch is called co-ta-ci-na in the Mazatec language, which translates as uno que sabe in Spanish, or “one who knows” in English.
Judging from the twelve surviving pages of Castaneda’s field diary, we may assume that don Juan considered himself what Rosalio Moisés and Maria Sabina would have called a sabio, a wise one, a man of knowledge. Unfortunately, there is nothing in these pages which implies that gaining the ability to achieve a mental state of trance—according to don Juan, the ability to stop one’s internal dialogue and thereby to stop the world—had been instrumental during don Juan’s own quest for knowledge as a young man. It would appear that Castaneda did not realise the great importance that don Juan had accorded this concept until long after his work with don Juan was concluded. According to his second book, A Separate Reality, this realisation came to him during a (purported) session with don Juan on 28 September 1969. While I have no difficulty in believing that a session during which Carlos was shown how to “stop his internal dialogue” by “using his ears to take some of the burden from his eyes” did actually take place, I am convinced that this session, should it indeed have taken place, would have done so in 1962 or 1963, and not in 1969. (On 15 December 1969 in this same book, don Juan explains to Carlos about the three different kinds of spirits that inhabit the Sonoran Desert: “. . . those that cannot give anything because they have nothing to give, those that can only cause fright, and those that have gifts.” Curiously, don Juan offers Carlos what appears to be the same categorisation of spirits on 8 April 1962 in the 12 surviving pages of field notes: “los spiritus que no dan nada, porque no tienen nada que dar, los spiritus que cuentan, porque esos si . . .” It seems quite obvious to me that Castaneda used some of the “leftovers” in his field notes from 1961 and 1962 while writing his entirely fictional second book, A Separate Reality, which he claimed covers the time period 1968 to 1970.)
On 28 December 1960 in Castaneda’s third book, Journey to Ixtlan, don Juan teaches Carlos “an appropriate form of walking,” which consists of gently curling the fingers of both hands while walking in order that one might maintain one’s attention on the trail and the surroundings. On 24 June 1961, don Juan teaches Carlos to cross his eyes while walking (in the appropriate manner) to prevent him from focusing his eyes on anything in particular. In Tales of Power, Castaneda’s (in my assessment, fictional) fourth book, he writes: “At the beginning of our association don Juan had delineated another procedure: walking for long stretches without focusing the eyes on anything. His recommendation had been to not look at anything directly but, by slightly crossing the eyes, to keep a peripheral view of everything that presented itself to the eyes. He had insisted, although I had not understood at the time, that if one kept one’s unfocused eyes at a point just above the horizon, it was possible to notice, at once, everything in almost the total 180-degree range in front of one’s eyes. He had assured me that that exercise was the only way of shutting off the internal dialogue. He used to ask me for reports on my progress, and then he stopped inquiring about it.” (Again, in this instance, Castaneda was probably using leftovers from his early field notes.)
Did Carlos Castaneda ever succeed in shutting off his internal dialogue by means of don Juan’s appropriate form of walking? I imagine that he did—at least a time or two. I know from my own experience that walking in the manner don Juan prescribed can put a person into a trance state; however, the greatest problem with the technique is that one must walk for a very long stretch, time and time again, before a shift in consciousness is likely to occur. Moreover, the resulting mental state is very difficult to sustain for any longer period of time once a shift has occurred. I imagine, however, that if you were to induce a trance in this manner enough times, you would eventually be able to induce the trance even without all the walking. Castaneda claimed that he practiced the technique for years before he had any success. Of course, he being the incomparable Carlos Castaneda, that intrepid explorer of the unknown, once he was successful, he was supernaturally successful. In his fourth book, entitled Tales of Power—a book that might better have been entitled Tall Tales of Power—he stops his internal dialogue at the drop of a hat and has incredible experiences during his purported sessions in the Sonoran Desert with don Juan, sessions that any reader with just an ounce of personal experience with the trance state will understand are fabrications from beginning to end.
From the time I first read the books by Carlos Castaneda—by that time he had published the first four books—I have been convinced that learning to stop the internal dialogue, that is to say, learning to induce the trance state, is the key to gaining any substantial and lasting personal benefits from the teachings of don Juan. Surely, it is all good and well to sincerely aspire to realise in your own life the premises of his teachings, the most basic of which I believe was the following: In order to become impeccably aware of yourself you must, little by little, relinquish all your feelings of self-importance. However, if you are ill-equipped for this endeavour—according to don Juan, if you have not acquired the ability to shut off your internal dialogue and thereby begun to fulfil your resolutions in this mental state of extreme suggestibility—then all the preoccupation and effort you might have expended in the attempt to change will probably have been in vain. Attempting to do away with self-importance without simultaneously effecting a permanent shift away from your ordinary state of consciousness easily becomes just another exercise for reinforcing your feelings of self-importance.
A Neurofeedback Protocol for the Muse Headband
In the first book I wrote about the author Carlos Castaneda and his “teachings of don Juan” (Making Sense of the Life and Works of Carlos Castaneda, F. Lawrence Fleming, published in October 2018) I suggested the use of a personal EEG device as an alternative to don Juan’s almost hopelessly inconvenient and tedious mental training exercise, “the appropriate way of walking.” In April of 2018 I had purchased an InteraXon Muse headband, which had seemed to me the best such device on the market at the time, but when I subsequently published my book in October, truth to tell, I had not, by that time, found the time to fully explore the device’s true potential as an aid to meditation.
Having clocked hundreds of hours on the Muse device since October 2018, I feel assured that it is not only an excellent aid to meditation; it is the best aid to meditation that is presently available. I have described my adventures with the Muse device in my second book about Carlos Castaneda (The Curious Case of Dr. Castaneda’s Twelve Pages of Field Notes, published in January 2023). I call the neurofeedback protocol that I have developed “the Florence mindfulness protocol,” named, obviously, after Yours Truly. For this blogpost, I should like to delineate this protocol in a much more straightforward manner than I did in my book. I’ll show you how to follow the protocol, but without attempting to explain how I came up with it, or how and why it works—to be truthful, I don’t presently know for sure how it does work; I only know that it has worked for me and that it appears to work for others as well. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you would like to try neurofeedback as an aid to meditation. Just hear me out before you decide.
The first step in following the Florence protocol is, of course, to procure the necessary hardware. The InteraXon Muse headband is, at the present time, available in two versions: the Muse 2 and the Muse S. Both versions have the same EEG function and should work equally well for this protocol. I recommend the Muse 2, which is about $100 cheaper than the Muse S. Go to https://choosemuse.com to make your purchase. Before buying the headband, however, be sure to check out the tabs under the heading “Resources” on the site, especially “Press & Reviews” and “EEG & Biofeedback research from Muse.” Unsurprisingly, all of the reviews listed on the Muse website are very positive. Reviews posted elsewhere on the Internet are not always entirely positive, although the lowest ratings for the device usually appear to have been posted by disgruntled buyers/users who have experienced either difficulties in getting the device to work properly or disappointment upon realising that a neurofeedback device cannot immediately transform an everyday sort of person into a yogi or a lama.
The free mobile application software for the Muse headband can be downloaded from the App Store, for iOS, or Google Play, for Android. Once you have both the hardware and the software, all you have to do in order to connect the device to your smart phone is to follow the instructions. If you have any difficulties with this, contact the support team at Muse; with a little help you will resolve whatever technical problems you may run into.
The next step in the protocol is just as important as the first, but all the more difficult to take: You must pledge to this project an hour of your time every day for at least the next two or three months. What you will be attempting to accomplish is nothing less than a major rewiring of your brain, and brains are not readily rewired. For most people, the best way to access an extra hour in the day for meditation is simply to get out of bed an hour or so earlier in the morning. In this way, you are not losing an hour of your day; you are gaining an hour that you would otherwise have spent sleeping.
Your initial sessions on the Muse headband will probably have to be dedicated to the task of making you feel comfortable spending an entire hour doing nothing but relaxing with your eyes closed. This task can be much more difficult than at first it may appear, which is why the first session should have a duration of only 15 minutes. Connect the headband to the mobile app (via Bluetooth), and then clasp the Muse to your forehead. If you are using the Muse 2, you can stretch an athletic headband over the device to ensure good connectivity. Choose the “Just Birds” soundscape. (Soundscapes on the app that have a built-in continuous feedback function do not work well for this protocol unless you turn the volume all the way down for the continuous feedback via the soundscape settings screen, which effectively leaves you with “Just Birds.”) For the calibration, relax, keep your eyes open, and engage your mind with some simple mental activity—I am in the habit of translating English sentences into Pig Latin, but you could do your nine-times table or some other arithmetic exercise. Recording a baseline according to the resting-state eyes-open paradigm will enable you to elicit the feedback signals (digital bird chirps) from the app with much less mental effort than a baseline according to the resting-state eyes-closed paradigm would. (For this protocol, it is important that your eyes are open before the calibration begins, and that you intentionally avoid any sudden muscular activity during calibration that will introduce unwanted artifacts into your EEG baseline recording. Just relax, and try to remain perfectly still.)
Once the calibration is complete, close your eyes, and continue to relax. Check every now and then that both your intraocular and extraocular muscles are relaxed. You can do this by deliberately allowing your eyes to lose focus behind your closed eyelids. (This is a very important manoeuvre to be able to perform. As a preliminary exercise before you attempt your first Muse session, you can focus your open eyes on some specific small object hanging on a wall, such as a small, framed picture. Allow your eyes to lose focus by relaxing your eye muscles until the object becomes slightly blurry and you find yourself observing the entire wall without focusing on anything in particular. Now perform the same exercise with your eyes shut. Repeat this exercise until you feel comfortable with it.)
It is important that you remember to save every session to your account. Being able to refer back to your earlier sessions will help you understand any subsequent progress you may appear to be making. If you did not find this initial fifteen-minute session too excruciating, add ten more minutes to your next session. Proceed in this manner until you feel comfortable performing a whole one-hour session. Do not be surprised or discouraged if this procedure takes fifteen or twenty sessions before you are ready for your first real neurofeedback session. At least you do not have to perform any tedious mental exercises during these sessions; all you have to do is close your eyes and relax until the app signals the end of session. The graph that is presented on the results screen following each session will probably be plotted almost entirely in the neutral to active zone with only a few dips of the Y-axis into the calm zone. Only a few “birds,” that is, the neurofeedback signals that you hear if you spend more than 5 consecutive seconds in a “calm” state of mind, will be marked along the bottom of the graph. Your “calm” score, expressed as the percentage of your time that has been spent in a calm state of mind, will vary considerably from session to session due to inevitable variations in your baseline recordings. In other words, the score you achieve along with the configuration of the graph on the results screen is to a certain extent dependent on the general state of mind that you were in immediately before you began the session.
Once you feel comfortable doing one-hour sessions, you should be ready for your first proper Muse session. For this coming stage in your neurofeedback training program, you will need to choose the mental exercise with which you will attempt to change the eyes-closed, relaxed, and mentally unfocused state of consciousness that you have been practicing thus far, to a mental state of focused attention. Just about any of the classic Buddhist or Hindu meditations should work as the mental exercise for your coming sessions. I, and others with whom I have worked, have had considerable success using the following exercise: Keeping your head aligned perfectly straight ahead, close your eyes and try to focus them on some imagined (or real) small object that is placed about two feet in front of you on a table top, the surface of which is about one and a half feet below the level of your eyes. While you focus your closed eyes thus, attempt also to stay aware of your breathing in the manner of any one of the classic breath-awareness meditations.
Begin your first focused attention session in the same manner as for the one-hour sessions you have done hitherto. (In the settings, ensure that the audio for the feedback signals is turned up high enough to be engaging, but without being uncomfortably loud.) Continue this present session as usual for about five minutes, after which you should begin whatever mental exercise you have chosen. It should not take long before you begin to hear the feedback signals indicating that you are (more or less) maintaining a state of focused attention. Continue your mental exercise without interruption to the best of your ability. If at any point your mind begins to wander—and wander it will, for one reason or another—the signals will cease, indicating that you must refocus your attention on the exercise. The objective of your sessions is now to achieve as high a score as you can by means of the diligence in which you perform your exercise. As in your earliest sessions, your score will vary considerably from session to session. Your mind-wandering excursions should be visible on the results screen in the form of clearly distinguishable spikes in the graphic display.
How many sessions will it take until the relevant neural pathways in your brain have been sufficiently rerouted through mental training to enable you to conduct a successful one-hour Muse session without at all employing your personal mental training technique? I can only tell you that it took me about seventy sessions before I was able to achieve a calm score of 80% or better without using any mental training technique other than relaxation. For you, it could take fewer sessions than it took me—or quite a few more. It is impossible to predict any one person’s predisposition for this sort of thing. Just be patient. The number of months you spend trying to reroute your neural pathways with the help of neurofeedback technique are possibly equivalent to about the same number of years you might have to spend learning to meditate in a more traditional manner. Another advantage of using neurofeedback technique is that it is relatively unencumbered by any formal system of beliefs. You do not have to put your faith in any particular world view, or your trust in any past or present-day master of meditation; all you have to realise is that human beings have been practicing meditation for thousands of years—not very many of them at any given time, I grant you—and that if you would like to know what all the fuss has been about, you simply have to try it yourself, but without expecting any rewards other than the enhancement of your personal understanding concerning what these people have experienced, experience that you personally have been missing out on.
However long this first stage of your neurofeedback training does take, you will know when you are ready for an attempt at entirely dispensing with your mental exercise when the section of the results graph that depicts the first five minutes of any session is entirely contained in the calm zone. You will have undoubtedly noticed in your sessions that the number of feedback signals (bird chirps) during those initial five minutes in which you are just relaxing has been slowly increasing. Once you begin to hear a steady stream of signals from the very beginning of most of your sessions, you can decide to perform your next session without the mental exercise if that session does begin with an uninterrupted stream of signals. You will soon realise that you are running on fumes, so to speak. The feedback on its own is maintaining your present state of consciousness. I think that the results of such a session will surprise you. You will become aware of the fact that it is possible to keep yourself in a fairly steady mental state of focused attention, but without actually focusing your attention on anything in particular. I believe that this is a particularly significant milestone on the road to experiencing the meditative trance state.
I would like to suggest that the mindscape that is the desired end result of the Florence neurofeedback protocol is what could properly be called “mindfulness” (i.e., sati in Pali and smrti in Sanskrit). In my personal estimation, however, mindfulness is not in itself a trance state, that is, the true meditative state of consciousness (i.e., samādhi in both Pali and Sanskrit), although, from my own experience, I do believe that a spontaneous transition to the meditative state is most likely to occur when one is being “mindful.” The most important difference between focused attention and mindfulness appears to be the manner in which your intrapersonal communication functions during these two intrinsically separate states of consciousness.
Up to this point in your neurofeedback training, a cessation of feedback signals during your sessions has been a clear indication that your mind is wandering, and that you need to refocus on your mental exercise if you are to return to a state of focused attention. Once you have reached the stage in which you no longer need a specific exercise to achieve and maintain a state of focused attention, you should also notice that you have, albeit inadvertently, allowed your inner dialogue to become active again. You get the same steady stream of signals that you achieved earlier when you were effectively trying to banish the normal thought processes from your mind. This is a very useful state of mind because, instead of relaxing entirely, you can choose to focus your attention on just about anything. (Becoming focused on one thing in particular while in a “mindful” state is something that often happens spontaneously, for example, when your mind, in its ordinary state of consciousness, has recently been occupied by a particular train of thought. You may find that a certain bugbear has become the centre of attention for your inner dialogue during your Muse session. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it just greatly lessens the likelihood of any transition to a meditative state of consciousness during your session. You may very well find that in a mindful state you are capable of clearer and more structured thinking than you are in your normal state of consciousness. Incidentally, your calm score on the Muse app will usually be close to 100% during a session in which you are mostly focused on one thing in particular. You can, for example, turn the feedback audio down to the minimum, and instead listen to music of your choice for one hour—it is actually quite pleasant to get rid of the digital bird chirping. The difference between listening to music in a mindful state of consciousness and listening to the same music in your normal state of consciousness is very striking.)
Once you have passed the mindfulness milestone, continue to do your Muse sessions as if nothing important had occurred. By this time, your morning meditation session has probably become an integral part of your daily routine, and with luck and perseverance, it will remain part of your daily routine until the end of your days. Begin these mindful Muse sessions in the same manner you began your first sessions; that is, just close your eyes and relax. In order to avoid becoming involved in some persistent inner dialogue that can seriously lessen the chance of achieving the true meditative state of consciousness during your session, you should constantly ensure that your intraocular and extraocular muscles are relaxed by means of the eye-focus exercise you performed during your initial Muse sessions. (This exercise may or may not help, all depending upon your general state of mind when you start your session. If you should find yourself hopelessly hooked on some particular train of thought, do not fight it, but just allow it to happen. This is the mindful thing to do.)
You will know that you are in a mindful state of consciousness when your inner dialogue unpredictably jumps from one train of thought to another all the while you continue to hear a steady stream of signals from the Muse app. You will, however, soon realise, probably from your first properly mindful session, that you cannot maintain a mindful state without certain interruptions occurring in your stream of consciousness. During a Muse session, these interruptions are indicated by sudden and absolute cessations of the feedback signals. The birds stop their (infernal) chirping, and the first few times this happens, you will probably want to open your eyes in order to see if the app has shut down. Such interruptions often last only about ten or fifteen seconds, but the utter silence during these few seconds is deafening.
You have, of course, experienced interruptions in the flow of feedback signals many times during your focused attention sessions. The birds stopped chirping, and you probably consciously realised that you had begun talking to yourself in the same manner you do in your ordinary state of consciousness. The app recorded these instances as lapses in concentration (mind wandering). Once you had refocused on your exercise, and brought your mind back to a “calm state,” you were rewarded with a “recovery,” which in the app is considered an important experience. According to the theory, you are subliminally learning to bring your active mind to a calmer state of awareness with the help of neurofeedback, and thus, the more recoveries you make, the better this learning process will proceed.
During a mindful session, the interruptions that you experience differ from those you experience in a state of focused attention in one very important respect. When the birds stop chirping, you may become aware of the fact that your inner dialogue has also been silenced, or, perhaps, that you have unconsciously shut off your inner dialogue while you prick up your ears in anticipation of the continuation of bird chirping. Sometimes the interruption has been heralded by some absurd thought that suddenly popped into your consciousness. Let us imagine that you suddenly asked yourself if penguins have the ability to swim tail-first. Upon this thought, the birds in the app instantly stopped chirping; and you found yourself suspended in a strange state of fully conscious thoughtlessness. After ten or fifteen seconds the birds began to chirp once again, and you began to talk to yourself again. At other times the interruption follows some other phenomenon of the hypnagogic state of consciousness, for example: a sudden and very appreciable muscle contraction, or some momentary visual or auditory hallucination. (The most common visual hallucination appears to be the experience of closed-eye visualizations, usually ever-changing clouds of saturated colours that appear and disappear or move into and out of one’s “field of vision”) I believe that an interruption of this kind is symptomatic of a spontaneous transition from the mindful state to a brief and usually shallow state of meditative consciousness. The mindful thing to do when these interruptions occur—and you should not be surprised if you experience as many as seven or eight during a one-hour session—is just to passively acknowledge that your inner dialogue has stopped. It would seem, however, that this acknowledgement usually creates enough mental impetus to jump start your inner dialogue; that is, you find yourself talking to yourself once again, and you are probably talking to yourself about what it was like not talking to yourself.
It may also happen, especially during your first few properly mindful sessions, that one of these interruptions in your stream of consciousness, instead of reverting to the mindful state after a very short time, has propelled you into a state of semi-consciousness in which your self-awareness is considerably diminished. Having suddenly become less self-aware than usual, you will probably not realise that anything important has occurred until the feedback signals become audible again after a much longer time than usual, or until the digital gong indicating the end of session has sounded. Once your normal self-awareness has fully returned, however, you will undoubtedly realise that what you just experienced was a meditative trance, the Holy Grail for any practitioner of meditative techniques. A time gap has occurred during your session for which you cannot account in any meaningful way. If you had ever wondered what it is that Buddhist monks experience while they sit motionless for hours in the meditation hall, be assured that this is it. (It is easy to forget, however, that even for a very experienced practitioner, a considerable amount of time in most sessions must be spent inducing, or rather, enticing the trance state.)
Continue to do your one-hour morning Muse sessions as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. It’s true; you no longer need the audio feedback to help you achieve and maintain a mindful state of consciousness. Having arrived at this stage in your training, all you have to do is to close your eyes and relax, with or without the use of the Muse headband and app. Nevertheless, any shorter or longer period in a Muse session in which the bird chirping ceases entirely is also a kind of neurofeedback, “signalling” that your inner dialogue has probably also been silenced. In this sense, your subliminal learning process may possibly continue.
At some point in this second phase of your training, you should compare your daily one-hour recordings to the one-hour recordings that you made before you started using a mental exercise to achieve higher Muse scores on the app. The difference will probably be quite significant.
In addition to your one-hour morning sessions, you should even get into the habit of holding one or two 15-minute device-free sessions a day at whatever time of the day that is convenient; for example, if you take the bus to work or school, that would be an excellent opportunity for a short session. Just close your eyes, relax, and imagine that you are beginning an ordinary mindful Muse session. (It is doubtful that any other passenger will intuit that you are doing anything out of the ordinary.) The only thing that will be missing during your session is the feedback, but you will discover after a few of these sessions that you can sense any interruptions in your stream of consciousness even without the help of the feedback signals. Your inner dialogue stops suddenly and quite conspicuously, only to resume a few moments later. For the unlikely case in which your inner dialogue does not resume right away, it is probably a good idea to set your phone alarm before you begin your session so that you do not miss your bus stop.
Achieving the mindful state of consciousness would appear to be much the same sort of experience for most people. (Sadly, there are undoubtedly some people who for various reasons will never achieve the mindful state, no matter how much they might try or how much they might benefit from it. For the practice of mindfulness, one needs a reasonably healthy brain, and not everyone is blessed with such a brain.) Electroencephalographically, mindfulness is characterized by the same dominant EEG power in the alpha to theta frequency range that also characterizes the mental state of focused awareness. In the Muse app, both these states of consciousness are recorded graphically in the same manner, that is, predominantly in the “calm” section on the y-axis. The actual calm score and the number of “birds” and recoveries will vary considerably from session to session. For a mindful session, the seemingly unavoidable interruptions that occur in the steady flow of feedback signals are usually recorded as if they were a result of mind-wandering events, and yet, your mind can hardly be described as wandering if you are not experiencing any inner dialogue. (Electroencephalographically, such an interruption in your stream of consciousness is normally characterized as a so-called “theta over alpha amplitude crossover,” which is very conspicuous in a clinically recorded electroencephalogram. The algorithm that is employed in the Muse app, however, can obviously not cope in a consistent manner with such changes in consciousness, which is why you should take the session-results graph that is made accessible following your mindful sessions with a good pinch of salt. The graph shows a spike into the neutral zone at the time in which the interruption in your stream of consciousness occurred. Something out of the ordinary appears to have happened; it’s just difficult to say what it might have been without having access to a multichannel, research-grade instrument that can accurately measure and plot the actual brainwave frequencies that occur during the session.)
The trance state, on the other hand, is a horse of a different colour. The trance state appears to be something that either happens during a mindful session, or it does not; it can be shallow, or it can be unfathomably deep; it can last for a few minutes, or it can take up most of your session. You may very well experience the trance state during your first proper mindful sessions on the Muse headband; it is as if the novelty of the experience makes it more likely to happen. During your trance, the bird chirps cease almost entirely, and the graphic record of this part of your session is contained almost entirely in the neutral zone of the x-axis. This experience will probably occur, if it does occur, towards the end of a session. The mindful thing to do is to just allow it to occur. (The Muse app allows you to continue a session past the end-of-session gong. You will not get any more audible feedback, although the birds and recoveries will nonetheless be recorded on the session-results screen. Thus, it is a good idea to begin to intentionally extend your sessions beyond the sound of the gong by simply ignoring the gong. If you need to get up earlier in order to do this, it will be worth your while to get up earlier.)
How will you know that you have “achieved” the trance state of consciousness during a mindful Muse session? Be assured; you will know. First of all, the birds will have suddenly stopped chirping, often when some odd and apparently disconnected thought has come to mind, but sometimes without any noticeable hypnagogic phenomenon of any kind. Usually, a palpable physical sensation—difficult to define, a sort of momentary dizziness, or a feeling of floating freely or of being suspended in some medium—will signal the beginning of the trance state. You will probably feel as if you are “zooming in” on something. You will probably also notice that your eyes are in focus, even though you have deliberately attempted to keep your eye muscles relaxed during your session. Unfortunately, the trance state will probably occur much less frequently following these first few occurrences. This is extremely frustrating, but nonetheless not something you should worry about. You have years ahead of you, or, at least, you hope this is the case. Just keep doing your sessions, and eventually the tide will turn in your favour. You do have something to look forward to every morning. For the total price of a few hundred dollars and three or four months of your time and patience, you have achieved something quite extraordinary. In terms of the teachings of don Juan, you have not only learned to stop your internal dialogue, you have also managed to stop the world, albeit only now and again, and usually for only brief periods of time. You have, nevertheless, become a warrior. The old Indian would have been proud of you. You are on the road to knowledge, whatever that might be.