Hey Rawatcher,

I’ve been enjoying your comments, and although I don’t speak
Australian, don’t write me off as a non-wanker just yet (pretty sure I’m no
wankee).

One thing that deepened my own interest in navel gazing was
a spate of articles in the Science Times section of the NY Times many years
back regarding advances in brain mapping, neuroscience, cognitive science and
artificial intelligence.  Inspired by
these, I started to read a lot in that vein, and also started to make
interesting self-observations during my ‘meditation practice’.  Like when mental activity slowed and then as
it returned to ‘normal’, it became easier to see distinctions in what I noticed
and was manufactured in my brain.  For example
when I stop listening (hearing whatever noise was around me), that I’ve stopped
consciously listening is not taken note of (because if I noticed it stopped,
then I would go back to listening). 
However, after I had stopped listening for a while, then when I started
to notice noise again as I started to come back to ‘normal’, busy awareness, I
was able to take note that it had reoccurred. 
So whilst quieting down as different types of sensations, thoughts and
feelings dropped away, these reductions went unnoticed. But if I was quiet
enough, I could notice these things as they reappeared, and as distinct occurrences. 

The tie-in to brain science had to do with how my
subjective mental perceptions were saying hello to the way distinctly different
experiences finally getting charted and biologically understood by using new
non-invasive technologies like advanced MRI, PET and such; and actually seeing
the bio-electro-mechanics of feelings Vs. thoughts, or of one feeling vs.
another.  It is hard to describe, but
there started to become more precision in how I saw my own functioning, and I
became a bit more able to pinpoint thoughts and feelings and how these came to
exist, the connection of certain memories with certain feelings and such.  And as so my subjective ‘meditation’ practice
became better informed by brain mapping science, a little more objective
precision was added to help sort out my Jungian bodymind mash up. 

Getting more deeply in touch with my lab-rat self forced
me to rethink my inner workings, and develop a more integral map of what it is
that comprises ‘me’.  I extrapolated this
‘map’ into an inventory for every component of my life, which then helped me to
assess my experiences, behavior, roles, relationships and my person (and, I started
to come up with long, weird, Germanic sentences like: Certain basic evolutionary urges led to the creation of the human
endowed with distinct, naturally occurring human 'processes', which in turn
manifest in human activity in action and as interaction as 'roles'.   Herein, the 'persona' is the collective
structure of embedded tendencies formed by the cumulative experience of these
processes in combination with the dynamics created by the experience of
cumulative behavior.   The persona is the
integrated, cumulative and collective assembly of structures established via
both the subjective inner and the observable exterior experiential data base
and is distinct from the processes and the roles that occur in the present time
continuum.  To evolve and thus change the
persona requires both internal and external actions that focus on potentials,
which in turn has a direct effect on the structures, which in turn then
modifies both the experience of one's processes as well as the actualized
actions and roles.) 

I think this process also served to further distance me
from a religious or mystical view of meditation, instead seeing it more as a
study of the mechanics of consciousness.  Somewhere in this process, any linkage of my
internal experience to GMJ was completely severed, and I found actually that
his meditation techniques (although not that bad as techniques go IMHO), became
an impediment to going ‘deeper’, although it did take some time to disengage my
Knowledge meditation habits.

But there remains delightful mystery
as to what happens when I meditate, like what exactly does happen that I sit
down in one state of mind, and get up some time later inexplicably joyful and
more creative.

But essentially, this is the way I see it (and note that my own semantics are separating the meaning of consciousness from awareness): There is
something looking out from behind our eyes, and this ‘something’ has a quality
of awareness, and although continually involved in the pageant of consciousness
during the waking state, awareness does not have the ability to see itself, in
the same way the eye cannot see itself. 
Even in a mirror (which is as close as it will come to seeing itself),
the eye can only see an image of itself. 
Awareness is like this, cannot see itself, or even experience itself,
inasmuch as ‘experience’ requires two things, the experiencer plus that which
is experienced.  Awareness itself is
monolithic.  Given that it cannot see nor
experience nor recognize nor remember itself, the best it can do to know itself
is somehow ‘rest ‘ in itself.  Therein
lies the rub.

I think that awareness always trying to but unable to ‘know’
itself.  So there is this pervasive sense
of ‘urge’ that sets in, urge to grow, urge to know, urge to experience, urge to
do, urge for all these specific things, all rooted in this pervasive sense of urge.  ‘Urge’ is for something we are not or do not
have, for somewhere we are not, for some time past or future. 

But if still enough, this urge goes away, or at least
unnoticed.  And I would say the feeling
of this is quite extraordinary.

You make the excellent point of “but
who knows what he might have attained or achieved otherwise”, and I have no
answer for that.

Mike