MIND Deep State

Economic and political instability, along with unprecedented levels of mental ill health, have led to what researchers are calling the "third wave" of meditation research. And with benefits ranging from ecstasy to lifealtering insights, it's never been more enticing.

- Claudia Canavan

On a meditation retreat just last year, in the gentle hippy beach town of Mazunte in Mexico, Iexperienced ahigh comparable only to the feeling of MDMA flooding my system.

I was suffused with aboundless love that felt as if it was rolling through my body and out through my fingertips, flitting through the thick, hot air and into the people around me.

The daisy chain of petty jealousies and grinding ruminations encircling my mind seemed to dissolve. I didn't realise I was crying, but I touched my face to find it sopping I'd come to the centre, with its mosquitoes and 40°C heat, in search of something like this.

I'd had a not dissimilar experience while sitting at home and tinkering with YouTube meditations the previous winter, and had arrived here on the advice of a friend who's well versed in this stuff. It worked. I achieved this state after two days spent mostly in meditation of different kinds, eventually trying a practice in which I concentrated, hard, on the centre of my chest. It was this that caused the ecstasy to erupt.

Like most euphoric experiences, this one didn't permanently shatter the bad stuff in my head. But the experience left a deep impression on me. If I managed to get to that place once, surely I could go back? What even was it? And where were the other people who'd had this experience? Days later, scrolling X, I found people talking about the jhanas.

State of Absorption