Disclaimer

Folks, thank you so much for taking the time to contribute. It’s been very insightful for me to review your reports and note not only the similarities to my own observations but also the differences. Some differences I’ll readily accept; others I might challenge. I could be wrong, of course, and if you strongly disagree with something, please do so. Just remember, our collective goal is to find common ground and trace the outlines of a shared reality that emerges from our individual interpretations.

Fortunately, all of the ideas I hoped the group would uncover have indeed appeared in your reports. Let’s walk through them.

Silent knowledge / reality vs philosophy

Most participants agreed with the proposed axioms. “I am” seems to be the cleanest. While we could spend hours debating what “I” and “am” signify in various philosophical frameworks, setting all that aside, everyone seems to agree that “I am” feels like a direct observation of reality. Regardless of how the mind wrestles with meaning, the statement “I am” just resonates as true at a fundamental level.

This brings us to our first foundational concept: “silent knowledge.” This is knowledge gained through direct observation, requiring no further clarification. The words we use to express it may differ—“I am,” “I exist,” “I perceive”—but it all points to the same shared observation.

Developing the ability to recognize these moments of silent knowledge is critical. There will be many more. This kind of understanding isn’t obtained through philosophy or logic (though logic can sometimes help fill gaps); it’s obtained through direct, individual experience.

If you look though the reports you can spot more of such ideas that were shared. I’ll highlight some of those in the next sections.

Counter example from the discussion, where I want to object. Consider the axiom “I am not dreaming right now,” which sparked some disagreement. After careful thought, I stand by it. If I pause and ask myself, “Am I dreaming?” I’m 100% sure I’m not, at the moment of writing this text. That’s another piece of silent knowledge—immediate, undeniable. Yes, we can argue about life being a simulation or a dream in some grand philosophical or religious sense, but as lucid dreamers, we know there’s a tangible difference between dreaming and being awake. In a dream, recognizing “I am dreaming” can be uncertain, but awake, “I am not dreaming” is solid. Let’s accept this as a shared silent understanding for now.

Intention

The questions “How do you move your hand?” and “How do you move your attention?” both boil down to the same core principle: intention. When we try to break down the sequence of how we move a hand, we come up with vague steps like “I decide,” “I imagine moving my hand,” or “I think of the final position.” But the actual moment of “I move it” is invisible at first. It’s not directly explainable or observable.

Yet we all agree we can do it. We know it’s there. In the absence of a better term, we call it “intention.”

Exploring intention in depth is a valuable long-term goal. For now, consider it a kind of “dark space” within your own mind. There’s no obvious stimulus, no discernible process at first glance—just something we can feel is there, enabling action. We’ll return to this.

Attention

This was the main focus of the meditation. Everyone honed in on the concept of attention, or more precisely, the “focus of attention.” Let’s synthesize some key points that emerged from your reports:

  • Attention has a focus that can be high or low, and can even get “lost.”
  • We can move or direct our attention, albeit not perfectly.
  • Attention can shift between different sensory modalities.
  • There appear to be different mechanisms or modes of attention—some voluntary, some involuntary.
  • (super important!) Attention can be splitted! Many noticed the difficulty in observing their own involuntary focus while maintaining a deliberate one. This skill—dividing, sustaining, and guiding attention—is a big part of meditation.
  • Attention can become “sticky,” especially with distractions like phones. It can get stuck and stay there if we’re not careful.
  • (super important!) Superruub61 noted another critical property. “When recalling the past, that attention seems to go “inward” into my own mind.” Attention can move between places and modalities of perception. It can move between visual and audio “realms”, it can go to “mind/thoughts realm”. Mind/thought realm has some “geometric” properties to it. Meaning that when moved between different concepts like “remembering past”, “thinking about future”, “day dreaming”, “just chilling”, “beeing stuck in a phone” one can establish almost a “map” and say that some stuff is “lower”, “deeper”, “to the left”. This map may not be exactly linear and space can be “bended”, but certainly there are directions there. Same for FryingMan: “For attention to memory, it felt like focus was moving “inside”, entirely away from sensory input to an entirely different “place” or phenomenon”. Same story about directions and “places”.

It’s fascinating how many observations can arise from something as seemingly simple as focusing attention. While these insights may feel obvious or naïve, what’s critical is that we can all verify or debate them based on direct experience. At this stage, any disagreements likely stem from differences in language rather than fundamental phenomena.

Over the coming days, consider repeating the same meditation practice. See if you can clarify these concepts further. One promising approach is to start mapping the “places” where attention travels in your inner world—where memory, imagination, planning, thought, and emotions reside. Think of it as building a rough inner cartography. These regions can be elusive or feel like “dark matter,” but they are there.

Finally, keep in mind the importance of silent knowledge. Logic and reasoning have their place, but this practice relies heavily on direct, wordless experience. We’ll soon encounter “hallucinations” or phenomena that shift and transform shape. Working skillfully with them requires a solid foundation in recognizing silent knowledge as it arises.

Stay curious, keep exploring, and pay attention to attention itself. More insights—and more challenges—await us.

Logs of reports

FryingMan

pre-meditaion

Axioms: I am Yes. I have senses Yes. I am not dreaming No, I think this is a theorem, a philosophy, not an axiom There is an external world No. I think this is a theorem, a philosophy.

I think much more accurate to say that “I perceive forms”, either as an axiom or a theorem that follows from “I am” and “I have senses”. I don’t see the 2nd two axioms as relevant, frankly. We have the experiences we have, I think that is sufficient to build up from the base. “Waking/dreaming” and “external world” are irrelevant, IMO. I need to finish the first meditation, but my immediate impression is the following: What is moving? Nothing is moving. All senses are present all the time, and focus of attention is the application of a filter rather than a moving part. The language of “movement” of attention is just that: a language form that tends to override the wordless experience of attention of sensory data. So as my attention “moves” from, e.g., lower left to upper right, I am simply adjusting my filter as to which sensory data is becoming emphasized.

post-meditaion

For attention to memory, it felt like focus was moving “inside”, entirely away from sensory input to an entirely different “place” or phenomenon The first move from visual to memory was disorienting a little bit, it took me a moment to regain my “balance” and to access memory. In terms of foundational statements: I am. There is a fundamental base awareness that is aware of itself and aware of sensory input and able to access other functions like body motor control and memory and mind, the ability to think. The base awareness seems separate from all of these. Attention seems to be able to go only to one place at a time. Moving attention from one point to the entire scene at first took effort, and was not instant, it was like the point of attention took time to grow and stabilize from one point to a larger region. The visual sense is the strongest, and the processing of the mind takes this visual input and produces the illusion that the self is a body located in a 3-dimensional space. The function of the mind seems to be to take the visual input and to assign meaning to the perceived forms through memory and conditioning. Auditory attention also seemed to be “placed” inside the head. The body seeems like it is also a conditioned part of the illusory environment created by the mind to visual and other sensory input. Moving a body part is like a dream expectation: there is nothing in between thinking of the movement and the movement happening.

Superruub61

1.1 You are alive. Something is happening that allows you to say, “I am.” You are not dreaming right now. Something lets you assert, “I am not dreaming.” You have senses (vision, hearing, etc.) that let you perceive an external world. You have a body, and you can voluntarily control parts of it.

I (can) think thoughts
I (can) feel emotions
I have a past, present and likely a future 
I know information, which I have either discovered or has been told to me

1.2 I (consciously or not) decide to move my hand I move my hand

1.3 I didn’t write everything down in a detailed coherent story. These are basically some points I felt are worth mentioning.

Vision starts to get funky after a while “What moves?” Basically just my attention, that would he the best word to describe it. When recalling the past, that attention seems to go “inward” into my own mind. My sitting position turned out not to be very comfortable. As a result I moved quite a bit during this excercise. I was able to keep my eyes on my object for the entire duration though. In the end, when it was said to evaluate the excercise, I didn’t do so. I did, for a little bit, and then my mind wandered to other things. I mentally noted the topics that came up, but didn’t feel like forcefully redirecting to the evaluation. I didn’t know when the 10 minutes would be over, as I did not know whether there was a sound that would play when the audio was over. Therefore I guessed. I was only 20 seconds early. The focussing of attention got easier over time. Focussing on my entire vision instead of just a part was the easiest of them all for me, as that’s something I’ve done before. Also, focussing on parts of the vision was kind of tricky with the funky vision I get when staring at something.

Vedant849

My report is all over the place, it was harder to directly type on discord than I thought. I will retype it in obsidian soon. Sorry.

Spoiler for those who haven’t done it yet.

My reports:- When I was looking at the point, the things in my surroundings lacked outlines and looked like blobs of colour.

From today’s meditation, I theorized that focus was something that lets you “observe” the things in your surroundings or in your mind. The things have always existed there it’s just that focus lets us observe and sometimes alter them. The focus as I defined earlier was the thing that moved during the exercises. Rather than moved, I’d say it teleported on to the things.

Focus can be voluntary or involuntary. At a certain point I realised I was focusing on the voice message involuntarily. Just because I voluntarily focused on something doesn’t mean that the focus will stay voluntary.

Thoughts are memories which we choose to focus on. Memory is any information stored in your brain. Memory can be altered by focusing (in this case the type of focusing will be thinking). Past thoughts are also memories (according to the way I defined it). Plans are also thoughts.

During the last exercise in the meditation, I found it hard to observe my involuntary focus while focusing on it voluntarily. But I think it was totally random.

Task 1.1 I wasn’t able to make out many axioms but the one I was certain about is “you can think”

Task 1.2 I thought the answer to this was simple. You thought about moving your hand i.e you had the intention os moving your hand and hencr you moved

After doing the meditation i had another answer to the question and that is you focused on your ability to move your hand. The ability was always there but focus let you move it

Superruub61 — 12/11/2024 6:19 PM About the second bit, you described your attention not as moving, but as teleporting. which is interesting, because as i was doing it, i thought to myself that it didn’t move, but it went from one place to another. Which might be the very definition of moving. But still, that feels more accurate, as does teleporting, as it doesn’t “move” across the bit inbetween