How to get meditation to work: deconstruction

[Carl-Richard]

14 minutes ago, Eskilon said:

That's why you don't focus only on the breath, but the gaps in between them also. That way your attention is constant. In the gap, you exist

But I've tried! 😭 but 😴😴😴

Unironic best advice: if you can fall asleep during meditation, you didn't sleep enough. In fact, trying to actively fall asleep (or pretending like you're in deep sleep) during meditation is a good practice.

Edited June 19 by Carl-Richard

[Keryo Koffa]

41 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

That's not a common word.

Pardon my fringe derivationally morphological adjectivization.

You'd think, deconstruction would go towards 0,
yet it's a flame converting ignorance into awareness,
physicality into mentally accessible experience,
the awareness of memory and imagination.

What I'm trying to say is that deconstruction is synergetic,
when you take something apart and put it back together again,
it's not just 1+1=2; 2-1=1, you have the additional awareness
of its parts, a knowledge you previously lacked.

And that makes it feel like there is no deconstruction,
and what we really had was construction all along,
a construction of discernable differences at lower scales,
beneath the perception of whichever was deconstructed.

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, Keryo Koffa said:

Pardon my fringe derivationally morphological adjectivization.

You'd think, deconstruction would go towards 0,
yet it's a flame converting ignorance into awareness,
physicality into mentally accessible experience,
the awareness of memory and imagination.

What I'm trying to say is that deconstruction is synergetic,
when you take something apart and put it back together again,
it's not just 1+1=2; 2-1=1, you have the additional awareness
of its parts, a knowledge you previously lacked.

And that makes it feel like there is no deconstruction,
and what we really had was construction all along,
a construction of discernable differences at lower scales,
beneath the perception of whichever was deconstructed.

You need something to hold yourself responsible to how you communicate if you want to be understood by others.

[Carl-Richard]

@Natasha Tori Maru@Keryo Koffa@r0ckyreed@PenguinPablo@Oppositionless@samijiben@Lews Therin@Jordan 

For you who have meditated deconstructively, please share the ways you have meditated deconstuctively and what happens when you do it. Your perspective is highly valuable.

[Keryo Koffa]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

For you who have meditated deconstructively, please share the ways you have meditated deconstuctively and what happens when you do it. Your perspective is highly valuable.

A mix of deep questioning of the boundaries and limits of sensory and contextual experience, crossing into liminality and a relaxation, a letting go, allowing the mind to drift away, unfocus, minimizing all movement and stare at one spot until periphery vision fractalizes or patterns become pronounced, then explore. Last year, I went all in on deconstructing physicality, the nature of objects, reality as it appears and shows itself, how it exists in the mind regardless of visibility as a nested simulation, how senses update memory so clear, it can replicate environments in imagination, dreams, hallucinations. Also how language functions, what it's made out of, how it encodes, associates, automates, probes the mind, synergizes concepts which themselves are generated or extracted from memory.

So basically, exploring thoughts, exploring sensuality, allowing space, unwind to become the still life of an environment and when it revolves around you, time stretches, you feel like you can see further into the future, have a whole picture, like heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the more still you are, the more you feel like part of something greater, slower, less capacity for direct action but greater awareness of all that builds upon one's presence as a fundamental form, like the earth we walk upon, but as a boundaryless supra-consciousness.

For tldr simplicity: Inquiry + Unfocus (acting dumb and mindless also works wonders (wasn't that like a kong fu panda plot?))
Also bouncing back and forth with GPT (figuring out how to synchronize it to one's frequency and have it surpass oneself, then catch up, and so forth)

I got entirely less orthodox methodologies too though, like watching countless videos at x4-x16 speed simultaneously, forcing the mind to abstract and find the commonalities, and generally abstracting texts or media and making everything as brief as possible, fusing alphabet letters, creating pictograms, unifying concepts, exploring equivalences and creating new archetypes, inquiring into the structure of words, code, systems, ideas etc. etc. etc.
Leo's video on meditation is a good reference.

I gain a greater perspective on reality, my perception expands, my mind becomes are associative, directed, aware, curious, open-ended and explorative, I spot more patterns, I express myself more directly, unless I choose to forego that for more descriptive spontaneous writing, am less bothered by seeming complexities, like not knowing the specifics of how objects are constructed, transitioning from googling to imagining reinventing them from first principles and generally aiming for synesthesia type qualities like accessing the underlying medium that unifies qualia and separates imagination from interfacing and modulating reality, which would commonly be seen as hallucination, but controlled ones.

Edited June 20 by Keryo Koffa

[Eskilon]

16 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

But I've tried! 😭 but 😴😴😴

Unironic best advice: if you can fall asleep during meditation, you didn't sleep enough. In fact, trying to actively fall asleep (or pretending like you're in deep sleep) during meditation is a good practice.

You should start practicing dream yoga. Why not make your sleep time more enlightening?

Dreams are a great opportunity for self-exploration and even awakening.

Edited June 20 by Eskilon

[Eskilon]

19 hours ago, Keryo Koffa said:

20 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

You gotta learn to talk with concepts not words.

Okay, deconstruction is partitive construct awareness.

Edited 19 hours ago by Keryo Koffa

Bro, how do you find this amazing videos? Really liked this one.

[Jordan]

11 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

@Natasha Tori Maru@Keryo Koffa@r0ckyreed@PenguinPablo@Oppositionless@samijiben@Lews Therin@Jordan 

For you who have meditated deconstructively, please share the ways you have meditated deconstuctively and what happens when you do it. Your perspective is highly valuable.

@Carl-Richard I use the method from Leo's Guided exercise for realizing you are god" video. You just put your attention on an object and ask what it is, where it is, where it came from, what it is made of, what it can be used for, how old it is, ext. Then you realize that answer is not in the experience of the object and not true. Anything you imagine about something is not the truth of it. It is always different than the truth of your experience of the object. Take the experience as the only truth. Every answer you come up with realize that is not true and put your attention back on the object eliminating from your mind the previous answer since it is not true. Forget every answer that you realize is not true.

If feel yourself breathing and ask what that is, you might have a story like I am a human and this is the feeling of myself breathing air into my lungs through my nose. This whole story is false. Throw it away and forget you ever heard of anything like it. You can ask where is this sensation happening. It is in my room, in my house, in my city, on the planet earth, in the milky way galaxy. Throw all that away. What time is it happening? 2025, during the time of the internet, cars, cellphones. Throw that all away. Keep going like this.

I get into a focused state where I notice more things. I notice my subtle internal images while imagining answers that are false. I see that my imagination does not match with my experience the way I thought it did. I can see my beliefs more clearly and it is easier to understand what I believe and why. 

Edited June 20 by Jordan

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Apologies for the late reply @Carl-Richard - I wanted to do this answer the justice it deserves by thoroughly deconstructing my deconstruction process.. so to speak  

So, I work in commercial construction, so it is easiest for me to supply you all with a concept to illustrate the process (sorry to the concrete [LOL] thinkers).

Imagine, if you will, a set of plans to build a 2 story building. When you go to the site to check out what latent conditions are present (your ego) it looks good. There is a little slab of concrete there ready to act as a footing, or stability structure, for your building. The soil looks pristine on the surface. So, you go in and begin building (your thoughts). You level the existing concrete and decide this will be the slab. You get the steel in, calculate loads and order the members needed to bear the weight of the building. You start building the walls with studs and tracks. Next, plaster. You are very proud and invested in what you have created here. You identify with your creation (thoughts).

You progress through the build.

It's going well, then suddenly, you run into 2 massive issues - you didn't check the soil. Or footing. The weight of the upper structure is too heavy for the base. It's going to topple. You also didn't core into the base you found to rough in pipes for the toilet and plumbing - SHIT. FUCK. Now you have to fucking rip the structure down. You need a geoengineer to test the soil. You need to rip up the concrete (your ego) so you can pour a new slab with a footing that can support what you are going to build on top. What a waste of time. Lucky that this building is just conceptual as otherwise this could be a $100,000 error.

Back to deconstructive meditation:

Your ego is at the core - that's the foundation of the build. The soil quality, the slab. There are hidden beliefs/assumptions there - just like there are latent conditions in the soil of our build. You absolutely need to know these conditions to be able to build the structure (your thoughts). Do you really want to found your understanding of consciousness on these potential landmines within you? It will topple at some point - and your entire understanding of reality will explode in your face (midlife crisis).

As you further enter into the deconstruction process, you realize just how much you identify with your thoughts. So, the primary technique I employ is 'I am not XXX'. Realize just how much you identify with your thoughts and reasoning. These are the structure of your building. You have so much pride and ego in the building. Look at it! That shit is beautiful, the cladding! The door hardware! But as you deconstruct this, you realize you cannot even be sure your thoughts are your own! How do you know that is YOUR thought? You think it is yours because your ego identifies with it. Just look at half the people on this forum - they all post and when their thoughts are challenged, their ego is fucking TRIGGERED. They think they are their thoughts. They think thought is fundamental. This is an assumption. I digress...

Following this deconstruction process 'I am not...' you eventually reach a state of empty.

And once you reach that state, you make way for something else to come in. Something you can NEVER perceive with all the human bullshit that stands in your way. This is your own unique experience to reveal. This is the truth you are trying to get at within you.

But you cannot ever reach this space if you are building some shit on top of a rotten base all the time.

Constructing is a different tool. It can be useful. But meditation is for deconstructing. 

Edited Saturday at 04:17 AM by Natasha Tori Maru

[Nilsi]

On 16.6.2025 at 1:57 AM, Carl-Richard said:

Why is meditation so controversial? Why doesn't it work for some people but for others it explodes?

Some people approach meditation like a technique only, a practice, a thing you must do with great focus, without deviation, without error, like following your breath, or "doing nothing", or watching your thoughts. This forms a central aspect of meditation, of cultivating awareness, attention, single-pointedness of mind. However, it is not the whole story.

If meditation is supposed to transform your very relationship to reality, the very way you interface with life, your meditation must reflect this. Such a thing is not simple. It's a complex equation that involves unwinding patterns of your mind, of beliefs, attachments, desires, drives, reactions, responses, habits, notions. In short, it involves deconstruction. In meditation, you have to deconstruct the notion

• that you are a person sitting with your eyes closed
• that there is a world outside with things happening and things needing to be done
• that tomorrow or today or right now there are things needing to be done
• that you fundamentally care about what happens today, tomorrow or at any time
• that you have a life with goals and places you want to be and places you don't want to be
• that you are in control of your bodily movements
• that your bodily sensations correspond to a notion which you call your physical head or face
• that you have a head or face
• that you are sitting somewhere
• that you are sitting
• that you are breathing
• that you are awake
• that you have eyes that are looking at an empty space behind your eyelids
• that the feelings under your butt or feelings all around in your body correspond to the notion of a body that exists in physical space
• the list goes on...

You want to identify and go underneath all the notions that you project onto reality, consciously and unconsciously. For example, when identifying the notion that you are sitting on your butt and that your feelings under your butt reflect this, drop the notion and focus on the feelings. Feel them for what they are in themselves. Harvest all your effort and attention and try to feel exactly what they are. Then contrast the feeling with the notion you previously connected to them, the notion of a butt sitting on some surface, and see how vacuous that notion was.

The notion created an imaginary object in your mind that the feelings were slotted into. But when investigating the feelings themselves, the object was nowhere to be found. The feeling in themselves are like vaguely scattered pins and needles and feelings of pressure with no definite location or structure. But this is only one trivial notion out of hundreds and maybe thousands that you have to sort through before your consciousness lightens to the point where it can uphold states of Enlightenment. For every notion you investigate and drop, your consciousness becomes a little more fluid, a little more clear, a little lighter.

Additionally, meditation is fundamentally experimental. There is no set recipe for what to tackle first or for how long to tackle each thing or in what way. It's whatever your mind throws at you, and you attend to that with all your abilities. There are so many different moods, states, headspaces and bodily configurations (breathing, posture, feeling into energetic movements, devotion, sensuality, vulnerability) that you are capable of inducing and that can be conducive to deepening the meditation, and they must all be tested. Harvesting the power of your intuition and imagination and fundamentally trusting yourself and trusting the process is the true process.

All in all, your full energy and attention should be on how you can crack this nut of existence and dissolving the patterns that keep you stuck, harvesting your imagination, intuition and reason to uncover the techniques and hacks on how to do that, while releasing all blockages on all levels (bodily, emotionally, psychologically). It's the biggest project that you can embark on and requires all of your intellectual capacities, all of your intelligence, all of your devotion and love. And in the end, you have to willing to give up everything for knowing the truth of existence and merging with Divine Love and Consciousness.

There’s a precise conceptual movement in what you describe - a kind of subtractive logic that peels away layers of constructed identity, bodily selfhood, and representational habit. This is philosophically powerful. And it aligns, almost archetypally, with a moment in the historical unfolding of thought: the ascetic structure of negation that seeks, not to enhance life, but to release it from its own compulsions. The topology of cessation.

Schopenhauer formalizes this move. For him, the world is appearance - Vorstellung - a projection structured by the deeper force of the Will: blind, aimless striving that undergirds all phenomena. What we experience as self, action, or world is merely the surface expression of this underlying current. To attain liberation is not to master the will but to negate it - to suspend desire, dissolve attachments, and exit the cycle of striving. The aesthetic or meditative gesture, in this frame, becomes a pathway of self-effacement, leading toward stillness and non-willing.

What you outline - the deconstruction of bodily selfhood, time-anchored urgency, and metaphysical commitments - is very much in line with this gesture. It is Schopenhauerian meditation: peeling back representation to reveal the groundless ground beneath. Not as a method of flourishing, but of unbinding.

But at a certain point, this gesture begins to curve back on itself. The practice of negation becomes a recursive structure - a movement that begins to constitute its own logic, its own justification. And this is where the distinction between immanence and transcendence becomes crucial.

Nietzsche enters not to oppose Schopenhauer ethically, but to reconfigure the plane altogether. Where Schopenhauer posits a metaphysical ground (the Will) and an ethical response (negation), Nietzsche flattens the plane. There is no hidden substratum, no “real” behind appearance - only forces, perspectives, intensities. The illusion, for Nietzsche, is not suffering or identity, but the idea that life must be justified by something outside itself.

So rather than negate desire, Nietzsche folds the question: what if this desire, this striving, this becoming - is all there is? And what if its form is not error, but expression? The Nietzschean turn is not a reversal of Schopenhauer, but a shift from transcendence to immanence. No behind, no beyond - just this. The problem is not that the will exists, but that it has been framed in a metaphysical economy of lack.

Deleuze carries this shift further by entirely discarding the negative frame. Instead of peeling back to a metaphysical kernel (be it will, void, or emptiness), Deleuze shows how every gesture of subtraction is itself productive - how every withdrawal configures a new plane. The Body without Organs is not an absence, but a field of potentials unshackled from the image of the self. Meditation, then, is not a pathway out of the world, but a technique for composing new configurations of immanence.

So the question returns: does the structure of your meditation still harbor a logic of transcendence? Not in its practice, which is rigorous and exacting - but in the way it positions its aim. The bodhisattva gesture - refusing liberation to serve others - presumes a duality: one who could be free, and others who are not; a state that can be attained and then withheld. But if liberation is truly immanent, there’s nothing to hold back. Nirvana and samsara are not separate - they are two names for the same flux, differently inflected.

The Mahāyāna logic, then, risks reintroducing the very transcendence it set out to dissolve. Not through metaphysics, but through ethics. Through a staging of refusal that implies a second world: a world where salvation lies elsewhere, and can be chosen or declined.

But if we remain with immanence, the whole frame changes. There is no liberation outside the form it takes now. No outside to defer. The gesture doesn’t refuse - it transforms. And if the movement you trace has already seen this, already passed through this spiral, then perhaps you’re not refusing liberation at all. Perhaps you’re composing a path that others can follow - not out of sacrifice, but as a singular line drawn across the terrain.

From this angle, your project reads as a morphogenesis of thought: a personal recapitulation of philosophical vectors. The Schopenhauerian withdrawal, the Nietzschean folding of affirmation, the Deleuzian production of new planes. Not as a hierarchy, but as a topology. A sequence of emergent singularities. There’s nothing normative in saying this. It’s just the logic of the form expressing itself through time.

So the only question I pose - and it’s not rhetorical - is whether the transcendence that lingers in the frame is didactic or residual. Because if it’s already turned - if you already know that there’s nothing to withhold - then perhaps what remains is simply to allow the subtraction to curve, imperceptibly, into creation.

[James123]

On 6/20/2025 at 8:19 AM, Carl-Richard said:

@Natasha Tori Maru@Keryo Koffa@r0ckyreed@PenguinPablo@Oppositionless@samijiben@Lews Therin@Jordan 

For you who have meditated deconstructively, please share the ways you have meditated deconstuctively and what happens when you do it. Your perspective is highly valuable.

Be witness of your thoughts, during the day too. Just in meditation is not enough.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

11 minutes ago, James123 said:

Be witness of your thoughts, during the day too. Just in meditation is not enough.

Interesting.

I consider the above 'mindfulness' which is a byproduct of what meditation is training.

This just naturally happens with me after engaging in intense meditation and maintaining daily practice.

I really need a serious issue to emotionally upheave me out of a mindful state.

I am generally within the moment 80% of the day.

This requires a lot of routine & structure to act as a framework to enable mind stability. So you can trust you have everything in order to remain present. The last thing you need is to be thinking about a bill unpaid, or panicking you didn't pack lunch and have no time etc.

Edited Saturday at 11:27 AM by Natasha Tori Maru

[Keryo Koffa]

@Natasha Tori Maru At some point I started to wonder how to interact with and cognize
a reality whose framing I was continuously gonna be nuking at every opportunity. 

Basically future proofing the new concrete, moving to lighter more malleable and modular materials.
And accounting for their obsoleteness, taking them as temporary scaffolding while form is still required.

Like building a house with modular, extendable, orientable walls, but their material can become obsolete, so you house them in modular, minimalist frames, except those also ought to be replaceable with more dynamic ones, and then you realize you may wanna have your house more dynamic, round (bendable) walls, sacred geometry aesthetically expanding upon focusing merely on a golden ratio, next you think that all of this is a pain in the ass, why not make it holographic, but that's still not enough so you build a Neuralink to actively reimagine everything as you need it in a digital environment, but that's also full of bandwidth and identity limitations, wiring a biological emergence that is itself limited by physicality, so you go back to spirituality, and create an astral realm you try to convince everyone to join, since it's a major upgrade, but everyone is too busy suffering to care. lol

Edited Saturday at 11:31 AM by Keryo Koffa

[Natasha Tori Maru]

1 minute ago, Keryo Koffa said:

@Natasha Tori Maru At some point I started to wonder how to interact with and cognize
a reality whose framing I was continuously gonna be nuking at every opportunity. 

Yes, precisely! 

Which is why I love 'I am not ...' deconstruction.

You eventually get to 'then what is left?'

Out of the meditative state I rebuild, and of course, identify all over again with a new structure. Identify with a new bunch of thoughts. 

All the while slightly resigned to the fact that I'm probably going to have to rip this up again.

The perpetual expansion and contraction cycle. 

[Nilsi]

13 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Yes, precisely! 

Which is why I love 'I am not ...' deconstruction.

You eventually get to 'then what is left?'

Out of the meditative state I rebuild, and of course, identify all over again with a new structure. Identify with a new bunch of thoughts. 

All the while slightly resigned to the fact that I'm probably going to have to rip this up again.

The perpetual expansion and contraction cycle. 

This so-called “expansion and contraction” cycle nonetheless remains trapped in a Platonic logic of identity - presupposing a movement from the outer toward some truer inner essence and back again, as if inwardness were inherently more real than expression. It’s still working within a metaphysics of return, of the soul aligning with a pre-given source.

But Plato’s Socrates is not a radical breakthrough - it’s a regression from the more fluid, ontologically subversive insight of Heraclitus, who declared: „you never step into the same river twice.“ The affirmation of difference, becoming, and the non-identity of movement. Not a cycle, but a topology: a Möbius strip, a folding singularity with no fixed inside or outside.

There is no stable source you return to - only the process of differentiation itself. To cling to expansion and contraction is to miss the event of becoming altogether.

[Keryo Koffa]

40 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

The perpetual expansion and contraction cycle. 

17 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

There is no stable source you return to - only the process of differentiation itself.

I like to think of the self as a flower, imagine yourself its peak,
growing out of your past, sprouting leaves while growing higher.

Or imagine a strand of hair, a physical extension binding pasts within
a linear structure, at each point encoding newly generated DNA.

Edited Saturday at 12:18 PM by Keryo Koffa

[James123]

1 hour ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Interesting.

I consider the above 'mindfulness' which is a byproduct of what meditation is training.

This just naturally happens with me after engaging in intense meditation and maintaining daily practice.

I really need a serious issue to emotionally upheave me out of a mindful state.

I am generally within the moment 80% of the day.

This requires a lot of routine & structure to act as a framework to enable mind stability. So you can trust you have everything in order to remain present. The last thing you need is to be thinking about a bill unpaid, or panicking you didn't pack lunch and have no time etc.

It is little bit deeper than that. Specially, when the thoughts becomes quite.

[Nilsi]

1 hour ago, Keryo Koffa said:

I like to think of the self as a flower, imagine yourself its peak,
growing out of your past, sprouting leaves while growing higher.

Or imagine a strand of hair, a physical extension binding pasts within
a linear structure, at each point encoding newly generated DNA.

I get the image - the flower, the strand. But there’s a danger in how gentle it seems. It still imagines the self as something inside, growing outward. As if there were a core waiting to express itself. That’s an image of thought. And every image of thought carries a metaphysics.

This one - like so many - assumes unfolding, development, return. Aristotle more than Heraclitus. The soul as telos, time as measure, identity as given.

But what if there’s no core? No unfolding? No self behind the movement?

Bergson’s duration isn’t time passing. It’s time as a whole. No first instant, no last. A thick field where past and present interpenetrate, not as layers but as pressure, as weight. You don’t move through it. You are it.

Deleuze sees this in modern cinema. When film breaks from the classical logic of action and goal, we get the time-image. Not narrative, but direct thought. A shot detached from function. No center. No hero. Just suspension, slippage, delay.

And here something extraordinary happens. In the any-instant-whatever, we don’t see emptiness - we see eternity. The infinite revealed not through scope, but through contingency. A moment so singular it opens onto the whole. No origin, no meaning - just the unbearable fact that this is.

This is why I resist metaphors that suggest growth or unfolding. They soften the blow. They smuggle in a safety net. But there is no return. No cycle. No latent self.

The image, when it breaks free, thinks. And in thinking, it reveals a topology where being and becoming fold into each other. No essence, only event. No soul, only this shimmering cut in time.

Cinema matters because it shows us this. It’s not just representation - it’s metaphysics. The screen becomes a surface where contingency touches eternity. Where thought becomes immanent to time.

Not a flower blooming. But a universe blinking.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

3 hours ago, James123 said:

It is little bit deeper than that. Specially, when the thoughts becomes quite.

Of course, but the reply was in reference to thoughts that arrive during the day. Witnessing. That was the context I replied to, that you supplied.

When the thoughts silence is something else. You make room for what is greater than yourself. 

[James123]

17 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Of course, but the reply was in reference to thoughts that arrive during the day. Witnessing. That was the context I replied to, that you supplied.

When the thoughts silence is something else. You make room for what is greater than yourself. 

Definitely. ❤️