Metta Meditation - Cultivating Phantasia / Hyperphantasia

Next steps in the cultivation of abilities.

At this point I had been practicing Kasina meditation for three weeks for long periods during the day and made progress while discovering the various aspects and side-effects. I gave up this practice after this time in favor of another technique that may have played a role in strengthening the abilities for the various phantasias. This was "metta meditiation". I will describe my experience and the justification for why I think this potentially played a role. For those who may be interested in repeating similar steps I will certainly say that this is not my attempt at prescribing some particular way of achieving these things but, in my view, is just an outcrop of any practice that serves to continuously push yourself to build up the capabilities of your imagination. To this end I will also be adding my own thoughts on why these exercises may be useful so the reader can take these ponderings in the abstract and form their own methodology as appropriate.

 

Metta Meditation.

I will describe, from my own efforts and memory, the process of metta meditation. Metta is a sanscrit word that translates to "loving-kindness". How is it accomplished? I will describe my steps:

 

1. The meditator prepares a quiet space for meditation. This follows the usual technique of stilling the mind so as to be absent of any intrusive thoughts pulling attention to them in some way or another so that the mind remains in a calm state of relaxed and quiet focus.
2. After a period. The meditator then takes an object of focus to concentrate on that inspires well-meaning, beneficent associations. It could be noted here that this is an aspect of "imagining" this object. Typically the object here is a person whom one thinks of fondly.
3. The practice then is to extend these thoughts to others in a similar capacity. From my understanding the goal here is to try to make it easier to generate the capacity of such thoughts and associations for others in a greater capacity.
4. The next part is interesting because the practice describes using the imagination to further extend this imagery. Holding these benevolent notions in mind... they are then extended outwards to imagine the places around oneself and people within it and to pervade these scenes with that cultivated well-wishing.
   

In the Buddhist literature they categorise this kind of activity as apramana which means "immeasurable" according to the prospect that it can continually and increasingly performed without limit. It's a great notion and in my experience can be a very powerful way to help get over and see through typical barriers that we would put up between ourselves and our fellow humans and all their failings in order to inspire us to move towards compassion for their various struggles and troubles. While as nice as it is, it's a bit beside the point of the blog so I'll try avoid yammering on about metta too much it lest I be accused of proselytizing.

Effectively what this practice entails is an exercising of the imagination and I would dare to conjecture that expanding on a quality that is considered "immeasurable" might play a role in helping to build it further. The reason I would put this idea to you is that it seems to be an expression of some quality that will apply at every conceptual stage and contemplation of it helps to expand out your own categories of understanding about people and such by helping to build an alternate mental model of potential issues you might have with their actions in another light. 

 

Whether you should act on this idea or simply remain mindful of the possibility is entirely your own choice but in the case of this practice it creates a sort of common conceptual sieve of understandings that you can put something into and eke out a reflection of your own perspective on matters. The Buddhists might say that in doing so you dissolve your own deluded perspectives that are rooted in what they call "The Three Poisons" (triviṣa) but I will take a neutral stance in saying that it simply offers another means of perspective by which you are free to make your own best judgement. Generating metta for someone like Hitler is best left as an exercise for the reader if one were so inclined. So, I will leave it here (honestly this is just getting my thoughts down on the matter - not an attempt to convert people).

I consider that any practice can be used with the point that I would likely say that some degree of meditative stabilisation of the mind would likely help. From my point of view the quietened, focused mind is a mind that is ready for learning and paying attention to things in an undistracted way. Essentially - being undistracted and focused helps you learn better so finding and cultivating this state is beneficial in both providing a receptacle for, and indeed for studying, the processes of the mind.

Finding such categories for expanding upon mentally that you can potentially keep adding to would be an interesting topic to explore. To illustrate the need for an appropriate focus in this regard one could take an example of choosing such a category like "things that are red" or "things that have wheels" or "food". In such cases we tend to bring to mind instances of objects that fit the category we are considering rather than bringing objects externally to fit within a category. So in choosing something potentially inappropriate we just end up making lists of things rather than helping to project our understanding of a quality onto things we know that perhaps should have those qualities.

 

If you start just simply making lists of things then you are missing out on training that aspect of building things into categories. A list of things you did in your day might include remembering a detailed photo of someone in a newspaper while riding the subway... but you might miss drawing some things together under a more universal categorisation such as considering the work of the people that created that photo and their motivations, or considering how far we've come in technology through the product of bright and motivated people so that we can even have such a vivid photograph in the first place instead of low-quality greyscale renditions of the past.

So the for the purposes to summarise what is happening here I will treat it such that a few key things are happening. 

 

1. That you are building up your ability to conjure up mental images of people, places, etc.
2. You are at the same time building deep associations with those things that your mind will become familiar with and better equipped to perform those associations with continued practice.
3. The result is that it actually becomes easier to imagine things which should be in the selected categories because you are teaching yourself to recall and integrate things in such a way.

So then to turn this to the phantasia aspect of things. The process is to actually try to imagine these people and the things they would be doing, putting them into some mental scene to which they inhabit, to imagine the people around them and such which will strengthen in your mind the ability to cast your various imaginings within fundamental categories... A person existing in a space, items/things/doings around them and so on. These things in your imagination may be very simple like just a vague notion shapes or a vague impression of a street around some landmarks like a familiar tree or house or such. 

 

Building on this you try to imagine a person, say, coming home from a hard day's work along this street and thinking about the relief they will feel to be home. You can imagine this person at home instead the next day getting up at 6am to go to work and peeking in at his young child which inspires him to go to do a long day's toil.

Just keep building up these notions in whatever level of fidelity that you can bring to bear. No need to force it. Practice should bring this naturally. If you go into the practice overly concerned with the notion that picturesque and exquisite visual-like details are the main goal then it is a distraction that hinders you from learning from what you should be just naturally building up by experiencing what you are doing anyway. Within some dedicated sessions of practice you will find that this activity becomes more natural and fluid with a good chance of greater detail in the imagination than when you first started. Thus your imagination becomes stronger as you practice in a natural, biological way.

For those of you who expected more about the phenomenology of various aspects of phantasia / hyperphantasia / prophantasia. I promise to get to that in the next post. I wanted to put pen to paper in this post on the matter beforehand to denote the temporal ordering of my practice as I feel it may be relevant to later more exciting breakthroughs. This post represents more or less my attempt to tie the bow on this aspect and I likely won't refer to it in subsequent posts. Though I would be happy to answer any comments from people on the subject.