On your own · 21 of 24

The point

Let the mantra go entirely, and do nothing at all.

A point of consciousness in a black void

This is the state the whole course has been walking towards, and Campbell's description of it is plainer than you would expect. You want to relax and get to know your consciousness. Get to the sense of being, so that you experience yourself as a piece of consciousness. That, he says, is what he calls point consciousness — a point of consciousness floating in a black void.

The void is not mystical. It just means you have stopped processing sense data. Everything is still arriving — somebody sounds a horn, the phone rings, you can still hear it. You are simply not working on any of it. And then: just hang there, being aware that you exist.

Asked what to do to maintain it, his answer is a single word. Nothing. If you do something, you will lose it. By then, he adds, you will probably have let go of the mantra. You will have let go of the breath. You will just exist.

Two guards. First, expect a feeling rather than a picture. He is explicit that beginners should work in a feeling space, and that expecting a cinematic experience — hovering, looking down at yourself — is your intellect writing the script, and it will not go like that. Second, this is a doorway rather than a destination: he calls it the start point, not the end of anything.

At first you may hold it for a few minutes. That is what it is meant to be at first.

Campbell's own words

Campbell, on reaching point consciousness; Campbell, Q&A: Maintaining Point Consciousness(opens in a new tab)

Letting go of the body and of sensory processing is the part of this practice most likely to feel strange. Buzzing, vibration, drifting or a sense of distance from yourself are all common and pass on their own. Campbell's view is that there is nothing here to be afraid of; that is a claim about his model rather than a clinical one, so treat your own experience as the authority. If it becomes disturbing, open your eyes and stop — nothing is lost by doing that.

Before you start

Lighten up. Do not be intense or serious about this.
Sit somewhere comfortable and quiet where you will not be disturbed. A chair is fine. He does not specify anything beyond that.
Close your eyes.
Pick a time when you are not already churning. First thing on waking or last thing before sleep tend to work; straight after a big meal, or while you are angry about something, tend not to.
Twenty-five minutes. The last stretch is deliberately silent — there is nothing to say during the part that matters.

How long

Campbell’s own instruction is twenty minutes, twice a day. The shorter lengths early on are ours, not his — starting at twenty is how most people stop after a week.

The two buttons during a sit

Campbell’s mantra is not a fixed thing you repeat for twenty minutes. Its size is a dial, and you move it during the sit against how much thinking is going on. His instruction is symmetrical: if intruding thoughts constantly stream into your awareness, give the mantra a more active form; as thoughts disappear and do not return, decrease the complexity.

Busier: Your mind keeps wandering off. Give it more to hold, so there is less room for anything else. At the busiest: fill your mind with the longer chant: ah-lum-bar-dee-dum · ah-lum-baa-dee-dum. no need to make an actual sound. let it be busy.
Simpler: Nothing much is intruding any more. Let it thin out — there is no point crowding a mind that has already gone quiet.

Keep going down and you reach the end of it: If the sound slips away and no thoughts come in behind it, let it go. Drift in the quiet blankness of your consciousness. That is the whole aim — the mantra is scaffolding, and you take scaffolding down when the building stands up. Arrow keys work too, if you have a keyboard to hand.

Keep this tab open. The screen stays awake and dims itself, so the phone can lie face down. On iPhone, locking the screen or switching apps stops the sound — a browser limitation rather than a setting.