Meditative state

Meditative state appears in the account both as a discipline in its own right and as a way of returning, intermittently, to a mode of consciousness first encountered through psychedelic experiences. At the Center for Mindfulness in Worcester, a real-time feedback experiment makes the practice’s effects visible in activity associated with the Default mode network. Elsewhere, meditation offers the narrator a route back to a spacious, unresolved flow of thought: not a lasting transformation, but a newly available possibility within ordinary life.

Practice, Preparation, and Context

The account situates meditation within a broader inquiry into altered consciousness. Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies the brains of meditators, invited the narrator to his lab at the University of Massachusetts medical school in Worcester. Brewer’s research linked two apparently different routes into unusual states: the brains of experienced meditators, like those of people on Psilocybin, showed a marked reduction in activity in the Default mode network. Meditation therefore enters the narrative not simply as relaxation, but as a practice with a possible neural relation to the changes associated with psychedelics.

A different context appears in the underground guides’ draft charter, which describes profound experiences such as unitive and non-dual consciousness and identifies meditation, breathwork, and fasting as non-pharmacological ways of approaching them. This places meditation among practices that can serve as alternatives to psychoactive substances, while the associated guide documents frame intense experiences as requiring preparation, informed consent, safety, and post-session integration. The account does not equate meditation with a drug session; it shows instead that both sit within a wider culture concerned with how powerful experiences are approached and carried into life.

That distinction is clear in the clinical trial described elsewhere. Patrick’s sessions involved preparatory talking therapy, a capsule of Psilocybin or an active placebo, eyeshades, music, and two sitters present through the day. Meditation is not described as the method used in those sessions. Its importance to the subject lies in a different possibility: it can become a daily practice through which the narrator revisits, without another dosing, some of the mental territory that psychedelic experiences had made familiar.

The Feedback Experiment

To establish a baseline, Brewer showed the narrator adjectives such as courageous, cheap, and patriotic, then asked him to consider whether each applied to him. Merely reading the words would not activate the process under study; relating them to a personal sense of identity would. Brewer explained the posterior cingulate cortex as a central node in the Default mode network, involved in self-referential thought and in the narratives that connect events to an enduring sense of who a person is. Its activity, in Brewer’s account, reflects not just thoughts and feelings but how a person relates to them, including the way someone can become caught up in a craving.

The feedback apparatus translated that activity into a graph. Brewer guided the narrator through short runs from another room, and after each one displayed bars showing whether activity had risen above or fallen below baseline in ten-second increments. A monitor also rendered the changes as rising and falling tones, but the narrator found those sounds distracting. The procedure turned an internal process into something observable without making it simple: the graph registered fluctuations, while the exercise asked the participant to notice what kinds of attention accompanied them.

During the first run, the narrator closed his eyes and followed his breath. Meditation had already become a brief daily habit, partly because the psychedelic experiences had made it easier for him to enter a mentally quiet place that had previously eluded him. The lab result was modest rather than dramatic: most bars dipped below baseline, but several jumped above it. Brewer interpreted the jagged pattern as a sign of trying too hard and becoming conscious of the effort. In the display, quieting the mind did not mean eliminating activity; the very attempt to meditate could reintroduce self-monitoring and self-criticism.

The next exercise, loving-kindness meditation, brought a clearer shift. The narrator directed warm thoughts first toward himself, then toward people close to him, and finally toward strangers and humanity more broadly. The bars fell farther below baseline than they had during breath-focused meditation. The narrator’s pleased recognition that he was good at the exercise also carried its own irony: self-congratulation could itself become another self-referential thought. The experiment thus offered two distinct observations rather than a single measure of success: following the breath produced a small, uneven reduction, while loving-kindness produced a deeper one, with the possibility of self-consciousness remaining present even in apparent calm.

A Mental Territory Learned Through Experience

The narrator’s account of meditation extends beyond the measured runs. A brief daily practice had become a means of staying in touch with a kind of thinking first encountered during psychedelic experiences. The connection is not presented as a claim that meditation recreates a trip. Rather, those experiences had made a mentally quiet place more accessible, and meditation sometimes allowed him to enter it again.

He describes this territory as a sustained, liminal stream of consciousness, somewhat like the edge-of-sleep state in which images and fragments of story arise and pass away. Thoughts and images seem to arrive of their own accord, yet attention can also introduce a subject or shift to another one. The ego is not absent, and the mind has not been shattered or wholly displaced; instead, the stream takes a loose, unforced course. The person is immersed in experience rather than directing it toward a result. At times, this wandering has yielded usable ideas, images, or metaphors.

The narrator can only sometimes return to this state in daily meditation. He does not claim certainty that it is the intended destination of meditation, nor that it can be summoned on demand. Its value is precisely that it enlarges what consciousness can feel like: a mode of being that might otherwise have remained undiscovered, and that the narrator occasionally finds again without pharmacological assistance.

Return, Persistence, and Limits

The altered way of being does not endure unchanged. After roughly a month, the narrator’s experience had mostly returned to baseline. Familiar mental habits exerted their pull, while other people’s expectations reinforced established ways of being. The account therefore resists a simple narrative of permanent release. Meditation provides occasional access, not immunity from habit or a continuous state of expanded awareness.

What remains is memory of another possible way to inhabit experience. Like the intervals of relief described by people interviewed about depression, the remembered state can serve as a possibility and a destination even after it has faded. The narrator treats psychedelic images and experiences as landmarks to revisit and interpret, while meditation offers one limited means of approaching the associated mental openness again. Its significance is not that it conclusively explains consciousness or guarantees transformation, but that a fleeting experience can become a reference point for practice—and that the practice can make a previously unfamiliar state part of a person’s repertoire.