Entries this day: AM_meditation Getting_to_Jo's Neurofeedback.jp Wandering_home free_hugs meat_sauce_vegetable_curry rabbitrobot zzz_funniest_thing

AM meditation

4:58pm JST Sunday 13 January 2008 (day 13808)

This morning slept, meditated, including having my brain alert while my body fell asleep.

This was only after several several several times of falling asleep (basically forgetting to maintain awareness of my physical body and focusing entirely on my outer mind of blah blah blah and some visuals) and recalling my plan to stay awake and do the meditation.

I was following (my version of) the Clairvision technique: awareness of the larynx, then awareness of the area between eyebrows, and then awareness of visuals and then sleep. no dang not sleep, I'm supposed to become aware of darkness, so I would go back to awarenss of larynx and try again.

and I would repeat the cycle. I got to an almost well-defined experiential state in my brain; awareness of larynx, awareness between eyebrows, awareness of visuals, and as I began to consider the shift to awareness of space / darkness, I would succomb to my busy outer brain of distractions. It happened at least 10 times before I got to the point of mind awake, body asleep.

I don't know that this counts as becoming aware of the darkness, but I counted it as a success in my persistence of meditation and subsequently let myself consider my meditation finished. It had been easily 30 minutes.

Getting to Jo's

5:12pm JST Sunday 13 January 2008 (day 13808)

Ami woke me up with a bit of a start at 11:30 or so; I dunno if I woulda woken up on my own (with my angels' help), but Ami was my angel this morning.

Ami heated last night's stew for my breakfast while I took a shower. Got back upstairs and Ami was looking for her pills; she said she took them the night before, but then they just seemed to have vanished; we nearly took the room apart looking for them.

I headed out to Jo's a bit later than I had planned; I got semi-stuck on email (got a reply from Peter of Zeitgeist and I was going to reply when I realized the time. Zoomed out and perfectly arrived at the bus stop as the bus was arriving (this is as rare as it seems it might be; the window of opportunity is like a minute (though today it was down to perfect, like I didn't run, didn't wait; just walked and got onto the bus as the door was opened for me walking on just after the girl who had been waiting for the bus to come.

Anyway, this got me back on time to meet Jo and I made it up to Ikebukuro and checked my computer to see which line to take next. Shizah, I had effectively closed the window by replying to Jo that I could bring headphones, so the previous message from him had scrolled up so it would require an HTTP request to view it. No free internet signal = no directions. Dang.

I was able to find the destination station on a different window, so I got the correct line, but I still didn't have directions from the station. Called Ami, and blessedly, she was able to log in as me on gmail (my password is not trivial) and forward the directions to my phone. I'm debating changing my gmail password now.

(( Oh stupid me; I could have used my phone to log in to gmail. idiot. Ah well. ))

Got to his house 20 minutes ahead of time and was a bit hungry so I walked to the nearest convenience store and got some fruit jello type stuff.

Joked a bit with the counter girl by pretending to throw the jello thing to her. It's about the size of a raquet ball; I said, "大手玉" (juggling ball).

As per normal, I requested no bag, and surprisingly, she understood immediately (I usually have to ask twice (or three times)) and said thank you. Then she went to get a spoon for me and then stopped herself; "あっいらない、ね。" (oh, you [therefore] don't need [a spoon]).

Actually, I was counting on a spoon since I don't have one with me (though sometimes I do).. But I took this as a blessing from my angels, encouraging me to slurpily suck the jello out of the dish. Awesome. This I did happily and arrived back at Jo's with 12 minutes to spare.

Neurofeedback.jp

5:41pm JST Sunday 13 January 2008 (day 13808)

Dialed Jo's apartment number at 1:50pm by my phone clock. (I specify the chronograph because for some reason, this phone does not get the correct time from the network!) He asked if I was ready to sit for about 30 minutes. I peed, refilled with water and was ready.

As he stuck three little tabs to my head (one behind each ear and the other on the top right back of my skull), he told me a bit about the process. Said that I would hear music which reflected my brain activity, and that I would reach a different state of consciousness, and perhaps even go out of body. "I don't know where you go, but you might go somewhere."

I was like, "awesome! I'm ready."

He got the music track set up and plugged my headphones into his computer.

I basically heard 4 things. One was a recording ostensibly from a beach: I could hear seagulls squawking and waves crashing. One was a recording of chanting that I couldn't recognize except that it sounded like it was done in an echoey area. One was a semi-background white noise, which I assumed was supposed to put my brain into an interesting state of awareness, perhaps like hemisync. And the last was the "music" based on my brain activity: basically beeps and bloops of varying pitch that happened with such infrequency that I would have to label it as "sparse" if I were reviewing it as a song for KTRU.

I found the seagulls quite too squawky, the contrast with indoor chanting and outdoor beach quite strange, and the repetition of those to tracks to be distracting. (they lasted perhaps 4 or 5 minutes before rolling back around, including a brief silent gap between the end and the start)

Despite this, I was able to occasionally focus on my breathing, and after about 30 minutes, able to actually sleep a few times (sometimes with but usually without awareness of my body)

Except I was pretty much aware that my neck started to hurt, but I set myself to relax as much as possible while sitting upright in a chair (not a normal meditation posture; especially in a chair that tilts!) and finally, finally he came back to the room and clicked off the sound, which was quite an abrupt, but welcome end to my "meditation."

I was pretty sure it had been more than 30 minutes. He mentioned it had been 45. That would probably explain it.

He asked how it had been.

Um, well,

He asked if I saw any visuals.

Um, well, no.

He seemed a bit surprised and explained that most people do. He suggested that perhaps I will have very vivid dreams tonight.

Well, I have vivid dreams every night, and when I am thinking towards it, I have lucid dreams that I would consider quite vivid.

He showed me the alpha wave and theta wave graph on his computer. For most of the graph, my alpha was way up high and my theta was about a third to half as high. A couple of brief times, brain activity seemed to be super low.

He did something and the graph disappeared. Thanks to ahem, buggy software that happened to be running on Microsoft Windows, the 45 minutes of data was lost in an instant.

"Sometimes it does that," Jo agreed.

I was like, "well, let's do it again;" I was ready to do it with different (no) music, and perhaps while *watching* my brain waves on the screen so I could get more immediate and constant feedback.

I asked him about the beeps and boops; he said those are uncommon; that they are points of high delta activity.

Rare? Wait, where was the "music" based on my brainwaves?

[bing bong], his next client. One of the paying variety.

- - - -

I'd be interested in doing this again, but perhaps with a bit more careful selection of music, etc.

Wandering home

7:03pm JST Sunday 13 January 2008 (day 13808)

After the session, I wondered what to do. Just wanted to go home, feeling a bit disappointed in the uninteresting results of the session. Cosidered stopping by Shinjuku, but decided against it because Ami suggested it as our plan for tomorrow. Wandered into the 7/11 again cause I was hungry, but ended up just getting an ice cream (my favorite in Japan: vanilla ice cream bar with white chocolate center and white chocolate shell.

I pretended to toss it to the girl behind the counter, and she pretended to catch it, so I really threw it and she really caught it.

Considered chatting a bit with her, but decided there was no point and just walked to Ikebukuro, stopping for a bit at a mini train line; basically a glorified trolley cause it got its own path, but had to stop for larger street crossings. For some reason, I didn't take a picture.

free hugs

7:09pm JST Sunday 13 January 2008 (day 13808)

On the way home, I stopped in Shibuya for 1.5 hours of free hugs, including being video-interviewed by a guy who got a decent amount of footage with a high rate of huggage. The guy seemed to have a french accent and a translator to help him communicate with Japanese, which came in handy for everyone but me, I guess, including the two girls I joined for free hugs that day, which by the time he arrived had turned into four girls.

It was freeeezing, and despite a hand warmer given to me by one of the girls, I was too cold to happily give hugs so I gave myself a break, them each a hug, and went home.

meat sauce vegetable curry

7:13pm JST Sunday 13 January 2008 (day 13808)

Ate veggie curry (with bits if meat in the sauce for flavoring) at CoCo's curry place near Motosumiyoshi Station.

rabbitrobot

12:14am JST Monday 14 January 2008 (day 13809)

Sweet.

I've wanted to do this for a long time, but just never knew how. Now I'm the proud owner of a bit of code that is logged on to AIM as rabbitrobot.

It will eventually be more fully featured than currently. Right now it just replies with "You're not the boss of me." unless you are logged in as my brother or me. PS: if you log in as me, please let me know my password; it's locked in my local computer, but I can't remember what it is. I wanna change it so you can't use it anymore. hahahhaa.

Oh, the robot is named rabbitrobot.

zzz funniest thing

1:58am JST Monday 14 January 2008 (day 13809)

I just looked at the log of rabbitrobot to see if anyone had talked to it.

AOL System Msg: Your screen name (rabbitrobot) has signed in from another location. This screen name
  is currently signed in at 2 locations. To sign off the other location(s), reply to this message
  with the number 1. Click here for more information.
rabbitrobot:  You're not the boss of me.

Hahahahahahahahaaa!! I imagine I find it so funny because it's two robots talking back and forth, and it's repeated about 20 times in the log.

And cause I'm so tired.