Participants explained that as their attention became more stable on the breath or nimitta, they experienced a diminishing awareness of everyday sensory experiences and thoughts, leading to a profound sense of stillness and steadiness. One participant described this stillness as the disappearance of subtle mental movements, replaced by a deep inner calm.
Crucially, practitioners of jhāna meditation also described a process of “release” that was integral to deepening their meditative state. This release involved multiple aspects, including letting go of distracting thoughts, habitual patterns, and the sense of being in control. They emphasized that intentionally surrendering control of their mental and bodily processes seemed to facilitate relaxation and trust, allowing them to move deeper into the meditative experience. This act of release was not seen as passive but rather as an active yielding, demonstrating faith in the practice and leading to a sense of spacious clarity. Metaphors of “slipping upward” or “sliding into a jacuzzi” were used to describe the experience of entering jhāna, highlighting the effortless and yielding nature of this transition after initial focused effort.
This blew my mind when I read it because it sounds remarkably close to “my experience” from many years ago.
My intuition is telling me that there is something else that’s important about this though. In reading the full paper on this, it almost seems like this experience can be seen as a microcosm for how life should be lived and experienced as a whole (perhaps what a Self-Transforming Mind experiences). And as the paper highlights, using metaphors to put one’s self into this state of experience seems to be a critically important aspect of it.
Phenomenology of this sort relies on the idea that first person accounts not only provide meaningful descriptions of inner experience, but also that the words and concepts we use shape those experiences. In essence, the spiral between attention, arousal and release is mediated by both language and practice. Lakoff, Johnson and colleagues provide insight into this relationship by contending that metaphor is not merely a linguistic construct but an integral facet of human thought intricately linked to embodied experiences. They suggest that metaphorical mappings can influence not only language, but also perception, action, and even physiological responses. Our project advances upon these findings to explore the neurophenomenology of what appears to be a relationship between attention, arousal and release that is mediated by metaphor and practice.
Coleen expands on this connection between concentration and release when she suggests that she begins in the forest, by a tree. “I had a lot going on, and I was just struggling, and I was trying to sit to meditate and I just couldn’t. So, I laid down and looked up at this tree, and I was imagining ‘oh, to be a tree and to let go and to be able to just blow with the wind’, and I lay with that sense of asking, ‘what would it be like to just let go?’ And then boom, that’s when it happened.” She felt an expansion, loss of self, and utter quietude. Release, in this situation, bred stillness and insight.
For some reason, this also brings to mind Albert Einstein’s famous thought experiments.