Daniel P Brown, "Mahamudra Meditation Stages"

http://abhidharma.ru/A/Tantra/Content/Raznoe/0028.pdf

 

Pointing Out the Great Way 

https://www.math.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/~bloff/files/pointing.pdf 

A DMT Visualisation 

This only demonstrates the dissolution of "reality" into a more pointillistic and flickering experience - it is not necessarily an accurate demo of the theory !

https://youtu.be/TtnSgXTEJkU

NotebookLM Summary on Tachiscopy 

Tachistoscopy, or the use of a tachistoscope, is a research method that has been extensively used by Daniel P. Brown and his colleagues to investigate the speed of perception and information processing in meditators.

Definition and purpose of the tachistoscope A tachistoscope is an electronic device that displays stimuli for very short periods of time, often in the range of milliseconds, in a field of vision on a screen. It has been used to measure the speed of the mind in advanced meditators and to determine whether meditators can actually accelerate their perception or whether this is just an illusion of the mind.

The specific device used was a ‘Scientific Prototype Model N-1000 3-field tachistoscope’. This model was equipped with Sylvania FT45/CWX light bulbs and had a built-in fixation point, a small red light-emitting diode. The tachistoscope can vary the duration of a stimulus and the interval between successive stimuli to investigate the influence of time on perception recognition. It allows the investigation of temporal information processing that takes place before visual recognition and is independent of confounding factors such as attention focus, movement or eye fixation.

Key experiments and findings

1.

Recognition of simple light flashes:

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Experimental setup: Participants sat in front of a viewing hood and looked through a tunnel approximately two metres long at a blank screen. Simple flashes of light were projected, without letters, images or anything similar. The duration of the flashes was gradually reduced to determine the individual ‘flash threshold’ of each participant.

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Results: Yogis were able to perceive flashes of light that were much shorter than before, and they were able to distinguish between two flashes of light separated by a much shorter interval. The control group (staff) showed no change. This showed that the minds of yogis actually become faster and can perceive information or flashes of light of much shorter duration, as well as distinguish between flashes that are much closer together. On average, people could see flashes of light lasting about 10 milliseconds, but the yogis became about two to three milliseconds faster, which is a significant effect since visual thresholds are normally extremely stable.

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Long-term effect: The improvement in perception speed was a long-term effect achieved through the meditators' entire practice history, not just through a three-month retreat. Nearly all yogis who participated in a course became faster.

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Connection to ‘mind moments’: These results were interpreted as relevant to the ability to recognise ‘mind moments’ (my moments), which are very brief and require rapid discrimination between successive moments.

2.

Use of elaborate content (letters): Another tachistoscope experiment used elaborate content, namely the letters A, T and U, and conducted a backward masking test. The results were largely inconclusive, with no significant differences in recognition threshold or masking effect before and after a three-month mindfulness retreat, especially in highly focused individuals.

3.

Recognition of discrete moments of mind: Advanced meditators were able to shift their perspective to see very discrete moments of mind rather than a continuous mode of perception. They were able to describe the emergence, brief existence, and disappearance of a flash of light, as well as the gap between them, as seven distinct events occurring in the range of milliseconds.

Speed of different mental abilities Tachistoscopy was used to compare the speeds of different mental processes:

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Thought elaboration: Slow, about 500 to 3,000 milliseconds.

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Directed attention: Faster, about 200 to 250 milliseconds.

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Intention of awareness: As fast as the tachistoscope can measure, less than 10 milliseconds (approximately 8 milliseconds as a technological limit). This ‘lightning-fast awareness’ works like the speed of light.

Meditation training, especially concentration training, enables the meditator to switch from a ‘thought mode’ to a ‘pure awareness mode’ and to operate with the lightning-fast intention of consciousness.

Analogy to meditative states The tachistoscopic representation has similarities with the continuum of a yogi during ‘insight practice,’ as the yogi trains their mind to perceive a sequence of discrete, discontinuous events. The ‘artificial conditions’ created by a tachistoscope are exactly those that the yogi creates for himself through extensive training, which supports the hypothesis that tachistoscopic experiments may be a way of interpreting ‘insight practices.’

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Search Task: Early insights into emptiness can be understood as a complex tachistoscope search task. For the yogi, the main search task is to determine the ‘entity’ of the mind and phenomena in each successive mental event. The meditation instructions for searching for or recognising emptiness refer to the type of target stimulus as defined by tachistoscope researchers.

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Variables of perception: The variables that are important in tachistoscopic studies (duration and luminosity of the stimulus, inter-stimulus interval) parallel the phenomenological reports on the stages of insight practice. The ‘yoga of unspreading’ and the meditation term ‘spreading’ are associated with the inter-stimulus interval in tachistoscope research.

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Psychological moment: According to tachistoscope researchers, information processing begins when interactions are translated into spatio-temporal units of information, which is referred to as the ‘psychological moment’ – the most basic unit of observation for the ordinary psychological subject or the yogi during ordinary insight practices.

Significance for Daniel P. Brown's work and teachings The discussion of tachistoscopic research and yogic training in Daniel P. Brown's dissertation is the basis for some of his modernised ‘pointing-out instructions’. These instructions take into account the knowledge of the retreat participants' ability to perform search operations at high speed. He also referenced the results of these experiments in his retreats in 2021. The mind's ability to perceive and analyse events in milliseconds is central to understanding concepts such as emptiness as ‘high-speed search’.