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About streets, poetry and mathematics

October 15 2014

Hi everybody,

Last Thursday, Patrick Modiano received the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I would like to talk about another french writer whose work fascinates me: Jacques Roubaud. Mathematician, member of the Oulipo, he devoted his life to the study and production of poetry, he composed only by walking, without taking notes, memorizing the verses until he could write them down. "The Great Fire of London" is his masterpiece, he describes a mysterious "project" partly autobiographical, on a light tone, often funny and moving, in a complex structure full of Oulipian constraints. He manages to make us guess what may be the depth of literature, poetry and mathematics by organizing his knowledge and feelings in a story with "interpolations" and "bifurcations". If you love the game of go, the Grail cycle, troubadours, Japan, memory theories, libraries or literary games you should like these books. The first three «branches» have been translated into English as "The Great Fire of London," "The Loop" and "Mathematics:".

About mathematics, here is a conjecture of mine (I didn't find its description anywhere else):
The number 28 is the only number that can be written as a sum of the first n integers (1+2+3+4+5+6+7), m first primes (2+3+5+7+11) and p first non-primes (1+4+6+8+9). I was not able to prove it (I suspect it to be related to the Riemann hypothesis).

Some time ago, I had the idea of searching connections between the names of intersecting streets around me. I stumbled upon interesting stories, starting with those linking "Lugeol" street, where I live, and "Lacanau" street which crosses it. It happens that both streets have a relation with San Francisco:
Lacanau is a seaside resort near Bordeaux, it hosts the annual Lacanau Pro, the first international professional surfing competition to be born on French soil. Gabriel Medina won the 2011 edition at only 17 years and a few months later he triumphed at the San Francisco Rip Curl Pro Search.
Lugeol street is named after Dr. Lugeol, a doctor appreciated for his liberal ideas and his generosity. In 1856, he declared the birth of Clodomir Largarde of father unknown. It turns out that the mother was actually married and gave her maiden name to avoid a scandal: her husband, Urbain Balmigère, had left Bordeaux to San Francisco for at least 3 years and has since disappeared. I guess Balmigère gave in to the lure of the gold rush, but I do not know what became of him. Do any of you living in San Francisco have heard of the name Balmigère ?

A game : get outside, sit on a public bench or any other suitable place and note what you see or what the atmosphere inspires you, it can be as short as a koan. Send me the text accompanied by the name of the place where you did the observation. If you allow me to publish it, I will place your contributions on a google map.

A bench in Bordeaux (44.837055, -0.571995)
There are many pigeons here. Half a dozen children are running towards them, laughing, to make them fly, and then move away until the birds come back. Indeed they are returning, landing in a rustle of wings, in a wave that flows back again at the arrival of the children...
"So what happens in this book?" says the young mother to her son on the bench next to me, when I'm about to open my own. It makes me wonder if 'humans readings books on a bench' is as typical as pigeons coming and going...

Have a nice day!

Henri Bourcereau
@mmai
thelistserve@rhumbs.fr

noeud tendeur

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What the jhanas feel like

Jhanas are like swirling the paintbrush of your consciousness across a palette of altered sensations. These states vary in intensity; some are comparable to psychedelics, MDMA, or dissociatives.

Here’s how each state feels to me. I’ve kept my descriptions vague, because I think it’s more fun to discover them yourself. I’ve also included their short descriptions in parentheses from this wiki.

J1 (Pleasant Sensations): euphoric, bright, sunny, yellow
J2 (Joy): gratitude, beaming, radiating, hot pink
J3 (Contentment): content, reasoned, soft, wide, robin’s egg blue
J4 (Utter Peacefulness): dissociative, stillness, bathtub, cashmere, felt, muted lavender
J5 (Infinity of Space): disembodied, infinite, outer space, grayscale
J6 (Infinity of Consciousness): beauty, benevolence, grace, psychedelic, rose petal pink
J7 (No-thingness): —— (nothing in nothingness)
J8 (Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception): surreal, dissolution, black velvet studded with colorful ’80s rhinestones and gold that wink in and out of existence
J9 (Cessation): [cannot be described; no direct experience; consciousness is switched off]

Practice between retreats

In the three months between retreats, I only did 2-3 dedicated practice sessions, and not very seriously (maybe 15-30 min apiece?). But I did “practice” the jhanas all the time, in the sense of being aware of my body and mind, how I was reacting to things, and guiding myself towards different mental states. I popped into J1 all the time throughout the day, almost reflexively, and I’d sometimes tap into J2-J4 when I wanted to deepen certain sensations. This felt more like wielding a skill, though, versus dedicated practice.
General tips for practice

To access the jhanas, you basically induce the “opposite of a panic attack,” as I’ve heard others describe it. Before getting into my specific method (see next section), here are a few general recommendations. Remember, again, that the number one most important thing is to relax, have fun, and don’t overthink it.
Experiment with different techniques

It really does seem that everyone is different, so my method may not work for you. It’s your brain; go with what feels right. For example, to invoke a positive sensation, some people tap into feelings of gratitude, forgiveness, or altruism. I preferred a fairly mechanical, detached approach where I just thought of my brain as a machine, and which levers I needed to pull to induce various sensations.
Flow state » relaxation

For me, at least, the trick to jhanas was not “relaxation,” but something closer to “flow state.” Relaxing, to me, is like being at ease, where no new thoughts come to mind. Flow state, on the other hand, means I’m highly engaged with a task for a sustained period of time, and that one task is all that matters. IME this is at odds with how I’ve been told to practice mindfulness meditation. So if you’re struggling to “relax,” maybe try tapping into flow state instead.
A jhana is like a sneeze

You’ll hear meditators talk about not “grasping” onto sensations or trying too hard with the jhanas. This can be frustrating: what does it mean to both try, and not try too hard? I think of it like sneezing. Sneezing requires some degree of intentionality, but it’s a physical reflex that only happens if you don’t think too hard about it. Like sneezing, jhanas are more like a release than a force of will.
Pace yourself and listen to your body

For me, the jhanas came hard and fast. I struggled at one point between wanting to slow down, versus feeling like I was “supposed” to practice more. And I didn’t trust what I was experiencing at first, which led me to push myself more than I ideally would’ve.

Jhanas are weird because they’re considered a form of meditation, so there are a lot of meditation-like protocols around them (put in lots of hours! no phones or devices! avoid talking to people!). But I think these recommendations are just meant to help you cultivate the attention required to invoke jhanic states: they don’t help you process the experience itself. If you’re going through a transformative experience, locking yourself in a room without friends, family, or outside support might not be such a good idea.

So, make sure you listen to your needs. If things get overwhelming, it’s okay to stop, process, and ground yourself. Spend time with your friends. Go outside. Hug your pets. Write about it. You can always come back when you’re ready.

The biggest milestones for me, which prompted seeking outside input to make sense of my experience, were: J5, J6 and J7 (experienced together), and J9 (cessation). At these points, I made sure to slooowww down and process what was going on. If you get to any point in your practice where you’re feeling WTF about it, I’d highly recommend Rob Burbea’s talks, which are thoughtful, philosophical lectures on each jhana.
Instructions for accessing the jhanas

Here’s the method I used. If it doesn’t feel right to you, I suggest experimenting with different techniques. In particular, try switching what you use as your “object of joy,” and see if that helps.

(Note, of course, that you will likely progress through these stages over multiple sessions, spread out over days or weeks or months. Feel free to just read the first set of instructions, then continue only once you’ve mastered each stage. Pace yourself!)
How I entered J1<>J4

Relax your body deeply, clearing your mind of any distractions. (My personal hack: try falling asleep, but stop before you actually do.)
Think about someone, something, or a memory that sparks a pure, uncomplicated feeling of joy. I thought about my child. Don’t focus on the thing itself, but on the joy that arises as a result of thinking about it.
Allow that joy to grow, then loop upon itself, as you feel more and more joyful. If the joy begins to dissipate, “pulse” more joy by thinking about the person/thing/memory. Don’t think too much about what you’re doing. Your hands and chest might tingle; that’s a good sign. Eventually, the euphoria will hit. Now you’re in J1.
To progress to J2, don’t do anything. Just stay in the moment and enjoy the sensation. If it doesn’t dissipate, it will begin to evolve on its own. Notice how it’s changing, until you find yourself in a qualitatively different state.
Repeat the previous step to get to the next jhana. Stay with that state, be in the moment, don’t try to change or interact with it. It will evolve into the next state, and so on.
As you get familiar with each state and what they feel like, you’ll be able to locate them in your body and move between states using muscle memory. So to get from J1 → J4, I just move the focus of my energy from my head (J1), to heart (J2), to stomach/groin (J3), to flowing out through my legs and all around me (I call this one, J4, “bathtub”). To move from J4 → J1, reverse the order.

As I became more comfortable with the jhanas, I dropped the first relaxation step. Then I dropped my meditation object, or “trigger.” With a bit more practice, I found that I could pop into J1 instantly and progress through my “jhana flow” from there.
How I entered J5<>J7

J5-J7 work a little differently. Because they are dissociative, you no longer have your body for reference. The technique that worked for me was thinking about expansion (or “softening”) and contraction.

J4 → J5: Expand and soften my awareness, as if the walls of the “bathtub” were falling away. Imagine you’re sitting in the pitch dark and trying to sense what’s around you, or you’re in a room and you sense someone behind you. You’re not focusing on anything specific, just trying to be more aware.
J5 → J6: You’re staring at an infinite space; now become the infinite space. For me, this feels like floating “forward,” as if my consciousness is merging with the space before me.
J6 → J7: I just stay in J6, keeping the sensations soft, until it fades into J7. Sometimes I can accelerate this process by reminding myself that the J6 experience is finite, and it has to end sometime. But I find that J6 tends to dissolve on its own.

To get back down from J7 → J4, I contract my awareness. I remember that I have a consciousness (J6). I remember that there is space (J5). I remember that I have a body (J4). Then it collapses down, like closing a book.

As you get more comfortable with J5-J7, you can move between states deterministically by directing your “gaze” (I think this is actually my attention, but I think of it as my gaze):

To get from J4 -> J5: I gaze sort of out and slightly down
J6: I glide forward into the space
J7: I sort of gaze inwards, into my center. This feels like a “flattening” of self, collapsing into a line or a horizon.

How I entered J7<>J9

Jhanas are typically separated into two buckets of “light” (J1-J4) and “deep” (J5-J8), but in my view, J7-J8-J9 form their own special trio, because J8 is a tricky state to navigate.

J9 can’t be directly experienced, because you’re unconscious – just as how you can’t experience being under general anesthesia. And J8 is a fleeting, unstable state, because noticing you’re in it, beyond the faintest bit of awareness, will send you back to J7. But J7 is stable! So we can use that as our anchor. Think of it as your base camp before attempting to summit Everest.

The helpful advice I received was to focus on getting very comfortable with J7, deepening and maintaining that state, and then - when you’re ready - “shooting the gap,” or catapulting yourself across J8 to land in J9. I think of it like skipping rocks. A light touch will get you to the other side (J9), but if you’re too heavy-handed, you’ll sink into the pond (end up back in J7) and start over. (I’m sure there is a way to train yourself to linger in J8, and I’d be curious to cultivate this skill, but so far, this method works for me.)

The best way I can describe J7-J9 is to compare it to lucid dreaming, where you’re dreaming, but strangely alert. J7-J9 is like that, but for the act of falling asleep. First, the heaviness of your body sets in (J7). Then, nonsensical sounds and thoughts begin to arise, also known as hypnagogic hallucinations (J8). And then you’re asleep (J9).

If you want to cultivate your J7-J9 skills, I’d suggest paying attention to what it feels like to fall asleep at night, noticing the progression from wake to sleep. The difference is you’ll be highly aware – not drowsy – while in the jhanas.

So, to get from J7 to J8: relax more deeply into J7, be patient, and notice where reality is breaking down. There are likely fleeting, nonsensical thoughts floating through your mind; try to ever-so gently notice them. Notice that they’re nonsensical. But don’t react to them.

It’s hard to describe how this works. In J8, you have to get comfortable with the fact that they may be thoughts or non-thoughts, you might be noticing or not-noticing, things could be happening or not-happening…and just let it be. The image that comes to mind for me is some cartoon I watched once (maybe Adventuretime, or Rick and Morty?), where the characters end up in a bizarro world where their lines and shapes and colors are drawn in strange ways, and the background is now white and empty, but they’re still talking to each other. Kinda like Picasso’s bulls:

[Source]

Everything is surreal and breaking apart, but you have to be cool with it. You might flit between J7<>J8 a few times before landing in J9.

J9 is equally bizarre, because you’ll only know you experienced it after you come back. You know how if you’re given general anesthesia, and the doctor tells you to count down from 10 to 1, and you’re counting, totally awake, feeling so confident that you’ll make it to 1…and next thing you know, you’ve woken up again, and the whole thing is over? That’s what J9 feels like. You’re alert, you’re alert, you’re alert…annnnd, you’re back. Hey, where were you? It feels like you winked out of existence for a bit. I found that I almost always regained consciousness in J7 – usually in a very deep and delicious state of absorption. You can also play with inducing multiple cessations within one session – going from J7-J8-J9-J7, and looping that a few times – before voluntarily ending the session.