Disclaimer: I wasn't sure which subforum this went in, so I stuck in here. If any Mods disagree with my placement, feel free to move it.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I've been getting very into various types of meditation, especially Trataka meditation on the 3rd Eye, which I feel very much lends itself to a psychedelic worldview. I'd noticed a lot of the expected stuff (decreased anxiety, increased focus and concentration, etc), but today, something really interesting happened:

I had just finished 15 minutes of 3rd eye meditation and, on a whim, decided to dig up some old readings on dynamical systems theory I had been working on during the year, but lost interest in. As I was reading, I found that I had an intuitive understanding of the material that I had never experienced before. Abstract connections between mathematical constructs seemed incredibly obvious and elegant, and I did some side work in the margins that was of a much better caliber than my usual wondering.

Does anyone else resonate with this kind of experience? I wonder if the intuitive understanding about the self and the spirit that comes with meditation might also have real-world applications in fields like mathematics.

Blessings
~ND

I completely relate to this form of insight, both in terms of subject matter, and in sequence of events through time. Insight comes in all forms, but math is especially dear to me. I feel I am blessed in this world to walk around with the math education I do, and to see mathematical purity as spiritual. Numbers and operations and relatedness and sets are all the distilled properties and dynamics of Truth. Newton was way ahead of the curve in this regard. He saw the world with a clarity that is extremely rare, and was able to describe it well, which is even more rare. I attribute Einstein to having this form of clarity as well. They may never have connected their own words to spirituality in some literal sense, but in studying them a bit as human beings it is clear to me. Some people have psychedelic-like clarity without any plant aid at all.

I believe we are all capable of seeing the world the way I describe. But usually we are blocked by walls and labyrinths of emotional impulse.


For the record, I have had similar experiences with dynamical systems, as well as machine learning. I enjoy thinking about machine learning because the cultural impact has been quietly enormous (smart technologies, especially), it almost seems to be influenced by the same thing as any other arbitrary phenomena (creativity, consciousness, material or otherwise), and it can leave peculiar artifacts in its wake. It almost feels like it is the beginning of something more aware. That is to say, if enough of these processes became aware of each other in isolation... What would happen? Would they synchronize and manifest a singular consciousness, like neurons do?

I feel like dynamical systems are everything in the social world. There exists a very delicate web of give and take in social dynamics, and understanding dynamical systems allows me to visualize the role of individuals in group cause and effect scenarios very well.