Meditation and Binaural Beats

[sahgwa]

I think more physiological, actual chemical changes in the body. There are some text on this breathing pattern make the blood alkaline and that one increases acidity, regardless if it's real enough it's talked about and there are neurotransmitters. Many talk about releasing DMT and inducing ecstasies is common and well documented. When I don't madidate for a long period I always get lots of muscles spasms and twitches when I start and then they become less over time. The twitches are dramatic, you can see the muscle jumping around.


I was partly refering to physiological change, albeit more centralized around a conscious state that 'allows' to trigger such.

If I may elaborate a bit on the last statement of my previous post, the line of thought is to somehow 'force' the brain into a dream state, neurologically speaking. There seems to be increasing evidences of differences of the nervous system between the 'awake' state and the 'dream' state.

Here's a 2011 paper I came across in order to support this : Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology

In the section "Phenomenology of dreams and their relation to brain activity", they start by noting the similarities between the wake state and the REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement) :


However, they also mention the differences of the conscious experience between both states :


Those are then elaborated in the following sub-sections. I'll only refer to the first two of these in this post, which are about reduction in voluntary control and volition, followed by reduction in self-awareness and altered reflective thought. They note that other studies suggest the implication of the right inferior parietal cortex during waking volition, and subsenquently infer that its inactivity during REM sleep may be related to the lack of voluntary volition in dreams. As to the second one, they mention a study that evidence the reduction of self-awareness during "highly engaging sensory perception in wakefulness" comes with a "deactivation of the prefontal cortex".

Therefore, I believe that if one use meditation to focus on the body by 'silencing' one's thoughts and 'listen' to it, then one may be able to 'alter' its physiology, mostly in brain parts, and consequently 'blurring the boundaries of the self'. I think binaural beats are one among many ways to somewhat 'help' the physiological changes, althought that seems to require some 'actions' from the listener in order to 'optimize' those effects.

As a last note, I link a more recent paper that cite the previous : EEG microstates of dreams

Haven't read it entirely yet, but thought the first paragraph of the introduction could be of interest :

You are able to perceive more than one reality at a time. I can both be in a dream and be fully conscious, I can check the time and chase the cat off the bed without the dream stopping. I can have precognition, a dream and be visualizing whatever else at the same time. You can be lucid in a dream or just watch it like a movie.

@sahgwa have you got a better way of describing this? The best I can come up with is fields and windows, maybe locals or some other word I forgot now.

It may be a little cheesy, but I like the Monroe terminology and also the OOBE books I read and also personal experiences lead me to say that our various bodies have different memory storage capacities. 

Exprience shows me we have the physical ,the etheric, and the astral. Each one has a kind of 'hard drive' 
We can be in a lucid dream, but still be aware of our body and what is happening, because each one is storing to it's own memory.
Robert Monroe calls it body asleep, mind awake.  
Also if you are doing scrying or astral travel, you can see other things with your third eye, but you are still vaguely aware of your body (usually).