Part of the article “Daily Activities which Naturally Induce Meditative States”
Advanced Meditation
If we want to advance beyond our natural daily meditations then focused meditation skills us to process our daily experience consciously. Essentially, we can direct our emotions and memories into their appropriate place.
It’s also when we experience the iconic contents of meditative states, such as visualizations, which most vividly occur in the theta and delta states. This imagery, or illustrations of ideas and concepts, occurs in a way which requires our interpretative skill to understand how it fits into the context of our lives.
Common deep meditation experiences can include visuals, vortexes, wormholes, people, energies, sounds, colors and cosmic representations. Sometimes they are simply conceptual constructions that we understand through a rough drawing of shapes and at other times they can be as real and vivid as a wakeful experience. In addition, some meditative experiences are ambiguous and others strike us with clarity and wisdom.
Meditation also produces other peculiar experiences. For example, when we reach a theta state we start to lose all of our sensory input; this is when we escape the sense of actually having a body. The best analogy to describe this is quicksand.
Some meditators in a theta brainwave state feel like they’re sinking into quicksand. The hardest parts of the body to submerge are obviously the lungs, because of breathe, and the head (or minds and brains) because of consciousness. Once we get completely submerged in the quicksand it feels like we’re wildly spinning in a weightlessness world of no gravity. One way to speed this up is to lie on our back under a blanket because the extra weight changes the way we feel our body leading up to the conscious loss of sensory processing.
In addition, a delta state is where our consciousness can experience a complete detachment from ego and start experiencing something more universal or greater than our illusory individual self. This lack of identity is sometimes called universal consciousness or connecting with divinity, although it’s a personal experience and many people have their own terms to describe this.
Final Thoughts
Regardless if we routinely do focused meditation or not, the reality is we all meditate every day. We can’t escape it; our brainwave state changes according to the activities we’re doing at the time, as well as when we sleep.
So if we’ve never tried meditation, or even given up on it, being mindful of naturally induced meditative states can skill ourselves in our meditative capacity. Moreover, incorporating focused meditation into our lives is arguably a necessity due to the health and wellbeing benefits it brings.
By Phil Watt
http://themindunleashed.org/2015/02/daily-activities-naturally-induce-meditative-states.html