Gone Fishin': A Transcendental Meditation Experience

I do not regularly do transcendental meditation, but my love for David Lynch has me giving it a try from time to time. I ended up triggering a trance-like state while doing so and had a pretty interesting experience. I like to project a view of myself as Mr. Future Analytic Philosopher, so I get a bit nervous sharing the woo, but that nervousness is a great signal that I need to step out of my comfort zone.

The Session

As I began my meditation session I broke from my usual pattern of emptying my mind, outside of my mantra, and instead looked inward while I still repeated my mantra constantly. I saw myself on a sailboat. I was wearing scuba gear. It was clear that I was preparing for a dive to go catch some fish in the wide, open, waters below. I continued running my mantra through my mind as I dove.

At first, as I tried to get deeper into the water, I found myself sinking as I breathed out but floating up as I breathed in. This is to say: my real life breathing pattern was influencing my imaginative space. My Ni space was not being consciously controlled at a full level, but instead at least in part being witnessed and interacted with. My breathing was synced with my mantra. I applied some mental exertion, it felt like I was doing mental "work," and pushed past the upward force by swimming down with all my might. I continued downward.

However, once I got down lower I found myself blocked by some sort of invisible field; I couldn't swim down any further.

I pushed down against it with all my strength. No give. I sat upon the force field in a meditative position to see if I could sink past it. I went no lower. I swam around the area and looked for an edge or hole to this strange obstacle. It seemed to go forever. I applied as much mental exertion as I could muster.

I found myself confused. I was totally awake, totally conscious, maintaining my mantra, and having an Ni experience. I have normally conceptualized introspection as being something that I have control over, at least when I choose to take control, but why was this not the case? What was blocking me?

I thought of giving up. Blanking out my mind like I normally would do in a meditation. However, my curiosity pulled at me. What was down there and why couldn't I get there?

I decided to do the only logical thing: I swam up. When I got to the surface I kept going up, in flight. Would there be a ceiling of force like the floor below?

I enjoyed the open sky and got up to the clouds. At this point I was seeing myself in scuba gear from the side, in a frame, from third person. I felt, physically in my actual body, the texture and feeling of the clouds around me. I flew up above the stratosphere to the highest layer of cloud cover, but when I tried to reach beyond and above I felt as if something was pushing me down.

I experienced some frustration as I applied mental exertion, unable to force my introspective self to make me rise up higher. How was this even possible?

I decided to try a different tactic. Since I was seeing myself in frame instead of in first person, what if I tried to move the frame instead of moving my body? I repeated my mantra and shifted my vision upwards, and with much more ease I was able to fly up. Soon, I lifted up past the atmosphere.

I found myself in space, in orbit, around the Earth. I flew past a satellite. I noticed that my scuba gear had, at some point, transitioned into a space suit. In my actual physical body, not my "Ni self" I felt a feeling of total weightlessness and a strange physical sensation that went from head to toe, as if electricity were running through my body. I realized something slightly terrifying: I suddenly had no control over my body. I was stuck in orbit until it expired, at which time I would either fall to the planet below or be shot into space.

I continued my mantra and took on a Stoic acceptance of my fate.

I floated for a while until I realized my orbit was spiraling inward. I would eventually fall out of orbit. I realized, as I was getting closer and close to the atmosphere, that I could manipulate my body so that I could reach downward towards the air, put my arm into the atmosphere, and use it as a rudder to manipulate my fall so that I could aim myself to where I needed to go. I trusted fate, and knew that sometimes Logos gives you an opportunity.

I repeated my mantra and enacted my plan; I quickly arced towards the Earth. I had aimed myself towards the ocean, where my boat had been. My curiosity still pushed me: could I dive deeper now?

Still in my space suit and accelerated towards the water face first as I took on a diving position; the position, alongside some conscious pushing, aided my increase of speed. My body, of which I was still fully conscious, still lied on my bed, though I noticed that both my breathing and my mantra were going faster as I cascaded towards the surface.

I hit the water, right near my boat. I dove down towards the invisible below, allowing my momentum to carry me, until I hit the level where I had been previously stopped. I felt like I was rapidly slowing down, both from the water itself and from the barrier. I exerted mentally both to swim down faster and to move my frame of vision. The shifting in frame was similar in terms of mental process as it had been before, in the sky, but this time I was experiencing things from first person. This meant that "shifting my frame" felt like pulling my sight downwards, as if I was shifting my entire consciousness.

I broke the barrier and continued downward.

I hit the sea floor gently, continued my mantra, and looked around me. I saw all sorts of fantastic creatures. There was a giant blue frog which had itself puffed up and rocking back and forth through the water, it was lit up bioluminescently. There was a pink coral-animal hybrid with eyes and a subtle smile. There was a shark, but instead of a head it had a gaping hole from which a dozen tendrils reached out to grab food. There was a school of fish that could fused themselves into one larger fish. There was a little fish with a flower for a head and with the psychic energy of a dog. I held it for a moment, pet it, and connected with it (her?) through my mantra, realizing my mantra helped me connect both to my unconscious mind and to life itself.

I pulled out the only piece of bait I had brought and held it out in my left hand. The shark latched onto my entire arm as I raised my right hand. A lifeline from my boat had been dropped. I took hold of it and tugged; the shark, it (him?) trying to wrestle the bait from me, and myself were raised up through the water, easily past the barrier, and back to the surface.

I lifted the shark onto the deck and climbed aboard. I knew what I had to do: I had brought inadequate bait with me. If I could use the shark's flesh as bait, I would be able to catch many more fish that were even more wondrous. I held an instinctive sense that other fish would be especially attracted to the nutritious meat of this powerful predator.

I connected to the shark with my mantra, knowing that he and I were tied through the experience of life. It was still latched onto my arm and my hand was pretty far inside of its body. I honored the shark emotionally and then seized his heart, squeezed, and ended his life.

I took him deeper into the ship and placed him on a large table in the kitchen. I pulled out a fillet knife and prepared his body by cutting him into small pieces for bait. I now had an abundance that I could use to catch many more fish.

I stepped onto the deck, satisfied with my work. I, still in the space suit, took off my helmet, felt the cool ocean breeze, stood grateful for my fate, and my alarm went off. The meditation session was over.

Analysis

1) As I pointed out in my description of my experience: I was not in full conscious control over what was happening to me. I could influence what was happening, but it felt like a negotiation. A negotiation with what? The more I've explored my spiritual side the more I've been impressed with the power of my unconscious mind.

Similarly, those fish were not created by my active consciousness. It felt like the simply swam up to me. Where, then, in my brain did they come from? A more spiritual person might associate it with something coming from the "outside" of my psyche, something supernatural, but my framework says that they came from the unconscious mind, a part of my mind that my consciousness inherently doesn't have access to in the day-to-day.

2) The imagery and theme of the experience strongly reflected David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish. I recently read it and highly recommend it, especially if you're a follower of his work. The question becomes: did my experience reflect his book or did his book unlock some sort of aspect of the collective unconscious for me? 

The collective unconscious is a Jungian concept which holds that humanity shares a genetic brain structure and therefor share a similar set of experiences. Something like thirst is a near universal, is derived from our brain structure, and is therefor connected to the collective unconscious. Jungians believe that there are aspects of the CU which are best understood metaphorically or symbolically and most Jungians would interpret my experience as being an experience of one of those aspects.

This, then, holds the possibility that Lynch's book did not give me visual language, but instead gave me access to a method with which to gather Ni experiences around the topic of "fish" being a CU symbol for creativity. Is this possibility the case?

3) It's cool that all this fit into fifteen minutes. One of the important aspects of introspection, though, is that even more fit into those fifteen minutes. There are aspects of my conscious experience which I did not share because no matter how many details I express I could never fully communicate my entire subjective mental experience. However, I did my best to capture the experience with the words so others could understand it and maybe catch a glimpse of it.

4) The experience held significance to me and was interestingly meta. While I've had and have been recovering from Coronavirus over the last two and a half weeks I've fallen from my meditation habit. This session was one of the first I've done since I came down with symptoms.

The message, to me, was deeply affirming of my meditative practice. This is both because of the experience itself being a deeply interesting thing to have, because that experience could only have been had through meditation, and because I took the experience itself as being symbolically an affirmation that meditation is intrinsically and extrinsically valuable. This reading is easily understood if you read Lynch's book but here's a quick interpretation:

The barriers in the water and in the sky spoke to the smallness and weakness of consciousness, and how consciousness can be expanded and strengthened (as I broke past both barriers) through willpower (somewhat, such as when I used my will to drive myself downward when my breathing had me floating), meditation, and shifts in perspective (my shift in perspective as in the shift in frame in the sky and the shift in consciousness when I dove the second time). This expansion process leads to the gathering of fish (creative and insightful ideas). These fish are caught through bait (which Lynch characterizes as attention and desire) and having this enriching experience led me to get more bait (I'm going to pay more attention to my edge-of-consciousness-experiences and my desire for more insight has increased).

I am, metaphorically, standing on deck right now and feeling that ocean breeze. Having this experience was cool as hell and even if there was no meaning or value I'm so glad I had it. At worst, if every point of significance I'm drawing is false, it was like a dope ass movie got created by my mind and that's worth it on its own.

While most of my meditation experiences are a normal, generally nice and relaxing, experience from time to time I get gold like this fish experience. I feel encouraged to continue meditating regularly and I hope to report more interesting experiences in the future. I'm also hopeful that the insights here are real and that through attention and desire my creativity and insight will increase. 

At some point I'm going to write a post about the practice of transcendental meditation. I've got a method to provide mantras for people who are interested. If I know there's a demand I'll write the instructions up straight away so folks can take this journey with me. Message me on this blog, on Twitter, or wherever else and let me know.

Orphan Black and Folding In Themes In RPGs

The following contains spoilers for the Canadian television series, Orphan Black.

Sometimes ideas, like men, jump and say "hello"

There is a special moment in the antepenultimate episode of Orphan Black where, in the middle of striking a killing blow to their enemies, the protagonists celebrate their many victories at an art show organized by Felix, the main character's foster brother. If you watch the clip out of context, without having seen the entire show, it might seem like a slightly sweet, slightly trite, character moment.

However, if you have seen the entire show, as the commenter Naomi Lamont puts it, "After five seasons of seeing all the impacts of nature and nurture, the line 'Thank you for the nurture' is incredibly moving." This scene is not simply a character moment, but instead a thesis statement for five seasons of television. Orphan Black is a work about the concepts of nature and nurture. Why create art around those concepts instead of just talking about them?

The ideas, the theme, of a piece of art are the reason why the art exists. Art is a medium in which we, as humans, can communicate ideas. In other parts of this blog I have used the term "Introverted Intuition" (Ni) to talk about the subjective experience of our mental world. Ni is something that is inherently incommunicable. If I imagine a dragon in my Ni and then ask you to do the same in your Ni the pictures would not be the match. However, I can do my best to translate my Ni into a piece of art so that you can experience it for yourself. I might describe it in a book or make a painting. The painting might express the literal dragon as I try and make the canvas as close to the picture in my mind as possible or the painting might express my emotional experience of the dragon and communicate that abstractly. I'll do everything I can to get the Ni ideas into the work and you will get to experience some percentage of my experience through my creation. My Ni speaks one language, your Ni speaks another language, and art is a shared language we can use to translate our ideas. Without this communication of Ni, most art is rather meaningless.

If you have not watched Orphan Black and have not had the ideas translated for you "Nature and Nurture" is going to feel hollow. Chances are your main touchstone for the concept is the lame false dichotomy brought up by first year psych students. If you have watched the show and had the ideas translated for you "Nature and Nurture" might make you tear up a bit as you think about how Sarah learned to nurture her daughter, her new extended family, and in the end, herself. You might think about Helena and how she was poorly nurtured in her childhood and how much pain and damage that caused. You might relate it to P.T. Westmoreland and his inability to nurture people for the sake of nurturing them, but instead only to build himself.

Nature and nurture, and the concepts tied around them, was an Ni experience held by some portion of the creative team on Orphan Black. This Ni was then used to unify the cast and crew around a set of ideas that were put to language in the show. Once Felix's speech makes the theme of the show explicit, all moments in the show make sense retrospectively. Every protagonist, villain, and major plot point were all expressions and explorations of the central idea. After all those years of effort and creative decision making, nature and nurture have been given language.

The process of giving language to Ni experiences via art is done by "folding in" your themes into the work. "Folding in" is a cooking technique that is some combination of both easier and harder than it sounds.

Essentially what you'll be doing, in creating fiction rather than in cooking, is integrating your thematic ideas into aspects of the art you're making. In this context, the art you're making is a narrative while participating in a tabletop RPG (as a player or a GM). We'll use this lens because it is my specialty, though the techniques we'll be discussing are adaptable to most art forms.

There's a fish in the percolator 

The origin of any tabletop RPG campaign has to be an Ni experience. An idea that demands creation. This idea might be what David Lynch calls a "small fish" or a "big fish." Small fish are simple ideas that are easily expressed. If you're just starting on your creative path you'll probably start with smaller fish. I've had the central idea of my campaigns be "man it would be cool for them to play in a My Chemical Romance apocalypse." Big fish are more complicated, are deeply tied to your personal experiences or the collective experiences of mankind, and are more likely to come up after you've got some medium ideas under your belt. I've had the central idea be "the desire for immortality is the eternal drive of colonialism." In both cases the entirety of the campaign was centered around the first fish. 

It should be known that the central idea is usually not something that can easily be put into a single sentence. Especially in the case of big fish, "the desire for immortality is the eternal drive of colonialism" is only an abstraction for the central idea. The only way I could actually communicate the theme to you is if you had participated in my Blades in the Dark campaign in which we explored the ideas. Similarly, the initial idea for Orphan Black was actually the opening scene in which Sarah Manning, the main character, witnesses a woman who looks exactly like her walk in front of a train. This central idea is highly connected to the concepts of nature and nurture, but if you've not seen the show and you're not connected to the artists' Ni you'll have no idea why.

Lynch says the first idea acts as a "Rosetta Stone" for your creative work. It is the common touchstone that shows what all of the ideas in your game have in common. The first fish is the beginning of the causal chain which will create your fiction, everything can be traced back to it. This will be especially true if you share this idea explicitly with your play group, explain why it feels significant to you, and encourage them to explore the concept alongside you.

Words, calling out for understanding

Once you have your abstract, hard to grasp at, central idea it is time to explore it. Exploration of an idea, through art, is done through a process of resonant action and reaction. Based on your first idea you might take some sort of action, such as brainstorm for different reasons why there might be two women on a train platform who look exactly the same. Once this action is taken it is time for a reaction, building on whatever idea came to you which feels like it best embodies your initial idea. You intuition, which Lynch defines as the crossover between intellect and emotion, will guide you in that feeling if you dwell on the topic long enough. This will trigger your next action, perhaps writing a backstory for one of the women, who you have decided are clones, which triggers the next reaction and so on.

In tabletop RPGs, at some point, you're going to have to bring other people in on this idea and into the process of action and reaction. Only you will know when that right moment is, based on your intuition, but I'd recommend the earlier the better. If you're planning on, let's say, GMing a game about immortality and colonialism you're going to want to get player input as soon as you can.

This means having a conversation at the table about the theme of the game. Players should know, from the very beginning, know what the central idea was. They should be encouraged to, by using the narrative authority of action and reaction which they get in the game, explore the ideas alongside you during play. Perhaps their main character can explore an aspect of the theme. Maybe they choose missions based on what areas of the theme they're interested in most. The might have their character deliver a monologue about the theme at some sort of dramatic moment. The cool thing is, you won't know how they are going to explore the theme, but once you see what they're doing you get to react to their artistic choices and you'll create something you never could have created on your own.

Once you sit down and tell your fellow participants what the central ideas are, the ideas are no longer yours. You now bring in every single person at the table into the process of action and reaction. It is important to hold on lightly, stay feral, in this process. While you are certainly invested in your ideas, possibly more so than the other participants, you lost the right to control your ideas in full when you decided to play a tabletop RPG instead of writing a novel. Don't restrict other people playing with the ideas for the sake of your own personal vision. The ideas, when opened up to others, become their own living thing which you cannot control.

If you're struggling to communicate your ideas to the group that's okay. They're an inherently abstract thing and it isn't always easy to put the idea to words. Do your best to trust your gut in terms of the best way to bring other people in on the concepts. If you cannot come up with any other way, take a look at the Made to Stick success model and look at ways the creators suggest you express ideas or try to boil down your fish into a set of questions.

I never heard of a man who murdered by the rules

Which game will best help you explore your idea with your friends? Well, it depends on the fish you've got.

When I wanted to run the My Chemical Romance apocalypse game I did a bunch of research on games with post-apocalypse vibes. I looked probably a dozen or so games with the setting. I settled on Other Dust because as I was fleshing out the core idea in my own head I realized that I wanted the players to be able to explore all sorts of different aspects of the setting, so a sandbox game made sense.

Sometimes the right game is going to choose you by inspiring an idea that must be expressed through play. This happened to me when I first read the Blades in the Dark rulebook, with it's Immortal Emperor ruling the city of Doskvol from across the island. I pictured what it would mean to be an "Immortal Emperor" and how bored he might get, sitting on the throne for 1,000 years. I felt his need for control. Controlling death is the ultimate expression of control. How much must he also want to control the lives of others? What else is there left to control? These ideas spun in me and guided the campaign of Blades, which I ran soon after.

Sometimes your fish is going to be so unique or huge that you're going to need to design your own game in order to explore it. If you can lightly hack an existing game I recommend doing it that way. If you have to build something from the ground up, good luck and I hope you publish it. In the past I've done this to various levels of success. I got a few good sessions out of my desire to run a game about the collective experience of society-level events and how our shared stories create that experience. The setting was Persona 5-esque and we used a Forged in the Dark framework. This was, however, pretty difficult work and it ended up falling by the wayside. It failed because each session was pitched as an individual "playtest session." Next time I feel the need to build a system for my idea I will just start a campaign and tell my players that I'll be doing design work as we go.

Make sure the themes of the RPG in question do not go against what you're trying to discuss in your campaign. If you wanted to do a critical reading of colonialism, be careful about running an inherently colonial game such as Dungeons and Dragons. Any RPG you play will have some central ideas of its own and it is important to make sure those ideas match up with your own.

I'm like the blue rose

Once you've picked a game and shared your ideas with your players, it is time to start playing. Your goal, other than the goals established by the game itself, is to communicate the theme from different angles as you contribute to the fiction of the game.

You don't have to do this perfectly. Not every NPC, location, and plot point need to be some sort of Grand Symbol of The Grand Idea. However, when you can, fold the ideas into your play. This includes major things, like making sure that the leader of a city's faction has a conceptual tie to the theme of the campaign, and minor things, like naming a side character "Chris" in your colonialism game after Christopher Columbus.

The major things are what let you explore ideas in your campaign. See if you can see how each character below, a handful of major antagonists and anti-heroes in Orphan Black, tie back to the theme of the show:

Rachel Duncan. The only clone purposefully raised to know she is a part of an experiment. She was raised by the scientists who ran the original cloning project, until she was separated from them, told they were dead, and sent off to boarding school to be raised to work for the corporate powers which funded the experiment.

Tomas. A priest from a Christian extremist group. He searched the world for Helena, a clone who was smuggled out of the experiment as a child and was therefore not monitored by the corporation, and raised her to belief that was chosen by God to kill the other clones (because she was actually the original genetic base, Tomas lied). During this process he abused her physically and emotionally.

P.T. Westmoreland. The founder of the corporation which created the clones. He has an obsession with extending his life, and the cloning experiment was meant to be the first part of a long study on how to give himself immortality. He takes on a patriarchal role to those around him, he has created a cult following that believes him to be 170-years-old (a lie), and uses his power over the believers to manipulate and control them.

Each of these characters were used to explore the themes of the show. Any time you get the chance to create a character, it is important to integrate the theme of the game in some way into their being. This goes for settings, major plot events, or whatever other aspects of the fiction you're creating.

RPG is about the process of resonant action and reaction. Follow your intuition, from the framework of the central ideas of the game. When you get the chance to take action, fold in an idea. When you react to something another player, or the ruleset of the game, does consider your reaction from the perspective of the theme. Build on it, follow your impulse, and say the most interesting thing you can think of in the moment (but seriously no pressure, sometimes the most interesting thing you can say in the moment is "I swing my sword" and that's totally cool).

You'd be surprised at the connection between the two

The minor things add what I call "psychic energy" to your campaign. Tossing in little references and concepts about your theme into the moment-to-moment of the fiction gives it a charge of interest. I think a lot about the film Gattaca, another work of art that explores human genetics, and how the stairway in the center of the main character's apartment complex is shaped like a DNA strand. This doesn't add anything significant to the fiction and doesn't make some "grand" statement about the themes of the film, but it does add a little extra oomph which makes the scene involving the stairway more memorable.

In Orphan Black we get lots of little chunks of psychic energy baked in here and there. Characters have names that reference concepts important to the idea. "Felix" rhymes with "Helix." Beth "Childs" in a show where parenthood is centrally themed. "Aldous" Leekie references the sci-fi writer Aldous Huxley who asked important questions about human nature. Each episode quotes a work connected to the theme as "Natural Selection" (each season 1 episode title quotes Charles Darwin) or "The Few Who Dare" (each season 5 episode title quotes Ella Wheeler Wilcox). A plot MacGuffin gets placed in a copy of The Island of Doctor Moreau, an H.G. Wells story about a scientist whose experiments created human-like monstrous beings. These little bits of energy give the show life and style that inform the work as a whole.

Sometimes your friends will notice these little things you're doing and they'll either cringe because it was corny, and that's fun, or they'll be impressed at how clever you are. Either way, you win.

He spoke softly, distinctly

The process of discovery, developing, and sharing ideas is going to be different every single time. Orphan Black, as a TV show, was inspired by a moment that could never be recreated. The steps the artists took to expand on their original moment of creation could have, with one slight alteration, completely changed the end result and would have given us a completely different show. The people the artists brought in, artists themselves, each touched the ideas of the show in different ways. Set designers, actors, writers, directors, etc. If you've seen the show you'll understand: thank God for Tatiana Maslany. 

There is only so much work that can be done to codify this process of shared creation. No tabletop RPG session looks exactly like another tabletop RPG session. However, going in with the intention of exploring an idea and gathering the tools available to you will give your RPG sessions so much more meaning and help you connect much better to your fellow players.

I once played in a game of Microscope in which the central idea being explored was the inevitability of death, as viewed on a macro-level through the end of humanity aboard a doomed generation ship. During this game, one single session, we talked about the following ideas:

-The absurdity of existence putting the value of existence into question

-Assisted suicide, legal suicide, respect or lack thereof for those who decide to kill themselves

-Dualism, are the mind and body inherently separate things?

-Does consciousness end at the moment of death? As explored through an android which sat conscious, but stuck and unmoving, for hundreds of years

-The government making questionable choices to prevent death

This process accomplished two things. First, I better learned how my fellow players think and feel which created a stronger bond. Second, my conceptualizations around death were expanded through the dynamic process of action and reaction with the game.

The Microscope game became a touchstone for the absurdity of human history and how so much of human choice is based on misunderstanding. It made me think about assisted suicide and the questions around that topic more than I had done so previously (very little). It led me to develop a fictional philosophy for our later sessions, Trialism, which put into question the way our current culture conceptualizes identity. The imagery of the still android still chills me to this day, many years later, as I think about being stuck in unchanging observation for so long. To me, the government stuff was fun, but a bit stereotypical, but it is absolutely possible that another player was touched more significantly by how we covered the topic in play.

All of this through a game? A better understanding of motherhood and humanity's inherent connection through some Canadian TV show? Yes.

I have experienced, and seen expressed, a fear or dread around the concept that we are inherently alone. That our Ni experiences can never be shared, that nobody will ever "truly" understand us. Art exists to overcome that fear and tabletop RPGs accomplish this in such a special manner, friends at a table. By diving into your consciousness, gathering ideas, and sharing them through art you are participating in a grand human project to connect. Every time you fold an idea into your play you are offering a glimpse of your being to your friends. Through those glimpses of Ni we all come to understand each other, build empathy and love for those around us, and offer our friends pieces of truth that were derived from our specific individual experience of human life. All this, through a game.