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Are fruitions seizures?

Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
7/23/11 3:05 PM
Judging by the MCTB description, it appears that fruitions are a type of seizure. A momentary seizure is described in Wikipedia as "a brief loss of awareness" caused by "abnormal excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain". In MCTB words, the mind tries to sync with itself, and everything strobes in and out. It seems that the awareness tries to be aware of everything at once, everything locks into this single wave of neuronal activity, finally the mind locks up on itself and all activity breaks down and you have a seizure.

I'm not disputing the insight value of fruitions regarding the Three Characteristics, and I'm not trying to say all seizures are fruitions - obviously a seizure can be caused by many unrelated kinds of "syncing", (for some people - simply looking at a strobing light). Still, one has to question the medical value of advice that not only teaches you to self-induce a seizure, but also says that if you achieve that, you will be having periodic seizures for the rest of your life?

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
7/23/11 5:15 PM as a reply to N A.
Some more food for thought. From http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/21/3/355 :

"Postseizure increases in brain levels of dopamine and serotonin, as well as alterations in norepinephrine metabolism, have been consistently observed in animal models of epilepsy."

This could be the "bliss wave" observed after fruitions. The quote is from a paper where a woman with epilepsy would self-induce seizures to treat her depression. Was Buddha a seizure junkie?

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
7/23/11 5:50 PM as a reply to N A.
Buddhists seem to be pretty healthy, so I'd say, whatever cessation is, it's certainly not something to worry about.

It's not like this practice was invented in the last 10 years and we don't know what the long term effects are. It goes back millennia...

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
10/15/11 6:57 AM as a reply to End in Sight.
End in Sight:
Buddhists seem to be pretty healthy, so I'd say, whatever cessation is, it's certainly not something to worry about.

It's not like this practice was invented in the last 10 years and we don't know what the long term effects are. It goes back millennia...


... unlike some of the advice the industry gives. Remind me again: Is sunscreen causing cancer or preventing it this year? Should we take Vioxx® or is it now killing us? Is the food pyramid still mainly meat, dairy, and refined "grain products" with daily aspirin and Zetia® to balance it out?

This may seem a little off topic, but I think it's important to keep in mind that the industry has its own interests, and if they were making us healthy and happy, they wouldn't be able to sell billions of pills a day, so yes, listen to what your doctor has to say, but don't fall into the trap of blindly assuming that normalcy (even in medical terms) is necessarily optimal.

Be that as it may, If we want to start warning people, I'd say mostly by the time they post here, it's too late, because they have already had A&P. At that point, the only way one can stave off those "seizures" is by staying in the dark night, or does anyone know of a way to get someone stabilized in the 11th ñana?

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
7/24/11 3:09 AM as a reply to N A.
Just yesterday I was Googling keywords "seizure, fruition, EEG" and got nowhere. Quite a coincidence you'd post this, but I often find that what I'm thinking about appears on Dho soon after.

Here's what made me do that search. You know when you're asleep how your brain still sort feels like it's working? (well mine does anyway). Sometimes I get what feels like a total shutting down of brain activity, as if someone pulled the plug out. It makes me panic and the panic makes my brain start up again and I wake. I wanted to know what it was. To me it felt like the 're-booting' described on here. I reckon if an EEG was running it would momentarily 'flat line', however I don't feel better after wards, nor do I have any insights. Any ideas?

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
7/25/11 5:04 AM as a reply to C C C.
C C C:
Just yesterday I was Googling keywords "seizure, fruition, EEG" and got nowhere. Quite a coincidence you'd post this, but I often find that what I'm thinking about appears on Dho soon after.

Here's what made me do that search. You know when you're asleep how your brain still sort feels like it's working? (well mine does anyway). Sometimes I get what feels like a total shutting down of brain activity, as if someone pulled the plug out. It makes me panic and the panic makes my brain start up again and I wake. I wanted to know what it was. To me it felt like the 're-booting' described on here. I reckon if an EEG was running it would momentarily 'flat line', however I don't feel better after wards, nor do I have any insights. Any ideas?



CCC! Please think about my fourth Path achievement!...but seriously:

Your description of your sleep experience mirrors an experience I had recently. as i was dropping off there was suddenly this complete "plug pull", i had the impression of a 1950's tv being shut off ..with the point of light, the "blip" of conciousness being shut off and the startled awakening immediately afterwards. i wondered then, as now, whether that was was a fruition or not. my experiences are so misaligned with the standard path / map model that i am afraid of even asking the question here :-)

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
8/9/11 12:03 AM as a reply to tom moylan.
Some more observations:

If fruitions are a type of seizure, A&P events seem more like partial seizures. A full seizure is when your mind locks up and shuts down. A simple partial seizure is when part of your mind locks up but you remain conscious. The "locking up" in both cases is due to synchronicity in neural activity, in case of vipassana - while trying to pay attention to everything equanimously. The seizure being partial rather than full indicates that you weren't actually paying attention to "everything" - like Daniel describes in MCTB, not the entire universe strobes in synchronicity, some things ("the subtle background and the sense of the observer") remain stable.


Some of the features of simple partial seizures according to Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_partial_seizure)

* preserved consciousness (unlike a full seizure / fruition)
* experiencing of "unusual feelings or sensations" (whatever that means)
* altered sense of hearing, smelling, tasting, seeing, and tactile perception (sensory illusions and/or hallucinations), or feeling as though the environment is not real (derealization) or detachment from the environment (depersonalization)
* usually the event is remembered in detail

At least these seem to match descriptions (and my experience) of A&P events.

As with fruitions, I'm not trying to suggest that all simple partial seizures are A&P events; A&P is a very specific kind caused by a very specific mechanism so it has its own distinguishing characteristics.

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
10/14/11 11:17 PM as a reply to N A.
As a pre-1st path who seems to have made it into equanimity, I can't say I've experienced fruitions personally. However, my experiences with jhana and with my more intensive insight experiences make me think "some kind of temporal lobe weirdness involved here." Could fruitions be a very specialized form of temporal lobe seizure?

http://www.epilepsy.com/epilepsy/epilepsy_temporallobe

They quote a "suspected temporal lobe seizure" in Dostoevsky that has some resonance:

He remembered that during his epileptic fits, or rather immediately preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up with vigor and light; when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away for ever; these moments were but presentiments, as it were, of the one final second…in which the fit came upon him. That second, of course, was inexpressible.

Next moment something appeared to burst open before him: a wonderful inner light illuminated his soul. This lasted perhaps half a second, yet he distinctly remembered hearing the beginning of a wail, the strange, dreadful wail, which burst from his lips of its own accord, and which no effort of will on his part could suppress. Next moment he was absolutely unconscious; black darkness blotted out everything. He had fallen in an epileptic fit.


What's interesting is that the way you folks discuss it, you don't have to deal with the second piece of it--just the first. That actually sounds like a rather fantastic trick, to get some very specialized form of temporal lobe seizure (very often associated with spiritual experiences) that gives you the upside (and possibly more upside) but not the really unfortunate downside.

Or, this could be just me spinning my wheels. Just thought I'd pass it on.

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
7/24/11 10:08 AM as a reply to N A.
My wife has epilepsy, her seizures are generalized. Usually, they are tonic-clonic, though in rare cases she has short absences.

The short absences would be closest to what you are alluding to. She's not able to induce these, and she doesn't like them at all. While she's able to remember events up to the beginning of the seizure, there's never a clear memory of the exit, and she reports a "memory hole" from the end of a seizure up to about 15 minutes later - usually, she takes a nap after a seizure, and the time between seizure and nap leaves no memories. She also reports headaches after a seizure.

Compared to my own experience of fruition, there are no parallels to the form of seizure my wife has. I have clear memories of the last moment before and the first moment after fruition. There are no headaches (no bliss wave either). I feel refreshed, not tired after a fruition, focussed instead of confused.

I realize that there are many, many forms of seizure, and I'm not a neurologist, just husband to someone who has had seizures since childhood. I have, at various times, entertained thoughts similar to yours about the relationship between neurological disorders and meditation experiences - for example, I experience a high-pitched "sound", similar to descriptions of tinnitus, but not distressing at all. Some meditators report visual experiences similar to descriptions of migraine auras.

It's certainly an interesting subject. There are people who study the effects of meditation at the neurological level - I think the person posting as anonpathein here on the DhO has contact with a few of those researchers. Maybe he has something interesting to add.

Cheers,
Florian

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
7/24/11 8:59 AM as a reply to N A.
N A:
Still, one has to question the medical value of advice that not only teaches you to self-induce a seizure, but also says that if you achieve that, you will be having periodic seizures for the rest of your life?


OK. Upon questioning the medical value of such advice and practices, you will discover many reports on the benefits of fruition (and stream entry), benefits that are not only numerous, but also quite unique.

RE: Are fruitions seizures?
Answer
7/24/11 5:27 PM as a reply to N A.
I actually just had a conversation with a meditator who thought that perhaps they had both, meaning fruitions and seizures (partial complex perhaps) but felt that they were quite different, and is going for formal EEG and MRI testing soon: it will be interesting to see what that shows.

Regardless: my experience in the ED with seizures generally breaks down into 3 general groups, though there are some strange seizure-like things that don't fall into these broad categories:

1) Full clonic-tonic seizures: in which the body shakes uncontrollably for some minutes usually while the person has no recollection of what happened, they tend to pee on themselves, bite their tongues often, and wake up quite confused and altered, with cognitive deficits that persist for minutes to hours, often headaches, and generally feel quite poorly for some period of time.

2) Partial complex seizures: in which there are various movements and perceptual alterations, depending on where the seizure takes place (motor cortex vs temporal lobe vs others), but the person is somewhat awake for them and remembers them most of the time. No one likes these and they seem to produce no short or long-term benefits.

3) Absence seizures, in which the person simply seems to go blank for some number of seconds, usually less than a minute, and then returns, like there was a gap and they just shut off and then start back up, usually without memory of what happened, and no obvious bliss wave or much of a problem afterward except as was caused by not being there for some short period of time.

With basically no exceptions, none of these patients find anything good, rewarding, or insightful, and at best find them annoying, at worst life-threatening.

I have had more clear Fruitions than I can count, easily in the thousands, and in all sorts of activities, such as driving, swimming etc., (contexts in which one definitely wouldn't want to have what I have come to know of seizures) and have experienced no downsides (beyond occasionally noticeable eye blinking for a second or so that people have occasionally commented upon) and many benefits from them, so, regardless of what they are, and even if they one day are shown to show EEG changes similar to seizures, they clearly should be regarded in some completely different light, as they are not obviously pathological in any way that I have ever noticed.

Anyone out there have good evidence or personal tales to the contrary?

Daniel