By Stillman Brown
I have a recurring phenomenon that arises when I’m meditating: my vision becomes slightly blurry and everything in my field of sight is tinged in white, like the shapes in my room are covered in downy white mold, except that the mold is shifting like sand on a tympani that is rolling with constant, mild vibration. It’s odd and psychedelic and sometimes a little frightening.
My reaction to it follows a pattern of alarm, worry, reactive openness, a willingness to ‘see where this goes,’ followed by a juvenile sense of happiness that I’m getting a free high. I usually experience it a little more, and then will my eyesight back to normalcy. This experience doesn’t qualify as an altered state of consciousness – I might just be falling asleep on the cushion – but these waking hallucinations (if that’s what they are) beg the question, what does one do with altered or abnormal phenomena while meditating?
The first question is, how to define altered? I suspect that any mind-state outside of mindful awareness would be classified by a Buddhist as “altered,” as it entails thinking, wanting, desiring, and generally letting the flimsy construction you call your Self run roughshod over your attention tot he world. Broadly, abnormal is a departure from the feel of your sensory perception most of the time, even if the world is jarring and loud and artificially lit, which is anything but ‘normal.’
Once you’re recognized an altered state, what next? Is it a harbinger of insight, or an indication that you need a cup of coffee? I find that consciousness-shifting insights, what Jack Kornfield (Or was it John Kabat-Zinn?) called the “fireworks” of meditation practice, are rare, spontaneous, and overwhelming. Conventional understanding falls away, replaced by a transcendent image, feeling, or thought that immediately reveals levels of consciousness beyond what I see and feel in my day to day. I’ve only had two, maybe three of these experiences, and I don’t think my Fuzzy Vision qualifies. It’s more chronic, pedestrian, and gradual.
I suppose wonky sense experiences, radical and mild, can be treated like thoughts – notice what’s happening and then let it go. ‘Let it go’ is not a sexy answer to an exotic feeling, but it’s the best I’ve got.
Have you ever experienced an altered ‘state’ or your own version of Stillman’s Fuzzy Vision? What was it like? Did you parlay it into budget pseudo-inebriation? Did it lead to greater understanding? Share your comments!