[ThJ]

I mean, it looks that way, but who walks around telling that to people? I recognise it as that. I took some interest in Zen Buddhism, years before this happened, and would sometimes experiment with meditation and controlling my breathing.

“In the oldest texts of Buddhism, dhyāna (Sanskrit) or jhāna (Pali) is the training of the mind, commonly translated as meditation, to withdraw the mind from the automatic responses to sense-impressions, and leading to a "state of perfect equanimity and awareness.”

I don’t know if it’s perfect exactly but the whole training the mind to reduce automatic responses to sense impressions sounds exactly right to me.

I still have some difficulty controlling it but it gets better every day. It seems that the more I dare myself and confront my fears, the better I get at self regulating my emotions.

And damn do I wish there was science to this, because I was very committed to a scientific viewpoint before this happened, which is rather inconvenient at the moment, because my only source of information about what I’m currently experiencing is religion.

[yowlingcat]

Out of curiosity, how old are you, if you don't mind me asking? I recall going through some reasonably similar stuff when I was 19. Curiously enough, in my case, I found biofeedback to begin to start pulling me into some similar terrain.

Now, ten years later, I feel much further away from it than I have before. However, your experience isn't the first I've read where breathwork allows you to control mental "elevation" (for lack of a better phrase) at will -- it makes sense, given the way that breathing integrates into the mind/body connection.

[ThJ]

I’m 36. Did not expect this to happen at my age. I’ll be 40 in 4 years and I thought I was too old to learn things about myself.

[caleb-allen]

I find your comments all fascinating. I have gone through some sort of spiritual experiences recently and have also had a similar scientific perspective. And how do I reconcile? The subjective with the objective?

I think the book Waking Up by Sam Harris gave me what I needed to take a step in trusting my own subjective experience. And realizing that there is knowledge and wisdom that science has not enveloped. And that that is okay--it doesn't mean it's out of reach for science, just not there yet.

My two cents.