Alien Meditation: Unusual Path to Beginner’s Mind

Author: ​Nebo D. Lukovich

Learner, Reader, Student of Life

Nebo D. Lukovich

​​Beginner’s mind is a state of consciousness in which the mind is completely open, without any preconceptions about people, events, surroundings, or anything else.  It is an incredible state of novelty, awe, and curiosity.
 
Entering the state of beginner’s mind is one of the cornerstones in several spiritual traditions, especially in Zen Buddhism. However, it is not important for religion only; it is one of the key practices for spiritual development and personal growth in general, even for some atheistic or agnostic practitioners. Similar to mindfulness, beginner’s mind brings about deep inner peace; it opens up the sacred heart and its ability for love and compassion; it activates creativity and unveils numerous hidden gifts.
 
How do we grow beginner’s mind and make it take deep roots in our everyday life? Simply, we need to learn how to enter this state of consciousness first and to practice it persistently. 

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Beginner’s mind brings about deep inner peace; it opens up the sacred heart and its ability for love and compassion; it activates creativity and unveils numerous hidden gifts. 

Typically, the practitioner should enter the present moment. They have to intentionally put aside all preconceptions about the current situation; to pretend that they know virtually nothing about it; to feel genuine curiosity; to willingly observe everything as they are seeing it for the first time in their life.  
 
Nevertheless, for some people, this practice can be insufficient for developing a strong and enduring foundation for a pure, innocent state of mind. That's why everyday meditation sessions are critical. And I am going to introduce you here to a completely new kind of meditation that will not only take you into the state of beginner’s mind but will also, if practiced steadily, help you expand your consciousness in many ways.
 
We will name it ‘Alien Meditation,’ because you will first imagine yourself as an extraterrestrial being in an alien environment, so that your real human body and everyday surrounding seem strange and new, at least for a while.
 
Practicing this meditation will enable you to delve deeply into the profound state of beginner’s mind, while your consciousness and creativity will be expanding tremendously.

Practicing this meditation will enable you to delve deeply into the profound state of beginner’s mind, while your consciousness and creativity will be expanding tremendously.

The Alien Meditation

There are no big preconditions or prerequisites required for the Alien Meditation sessions. You don't need to sit with your legs crossed, nor do you have to specially prepare your meditation space with aids like scents or candles (of course, you may do that if you want). Nevertheless, it's important that your meditation space is quiet and that nobody will distract you.

It's absolutely enough for you to meditate in your normal, everyday sitting position. Your posture should allow for the relaxation of your body and mind before the session. However, as you are going to enter a deeper level of the mind, so you might easily fall asleep, it would also be good that your posture generates some mild discomfort during the whole duration of the session. For example, your posture may be strictly upright, and that alone should generate slight discomfort for some practitioners.

Now, you may do the Alien Meditation by following these steps:

1. Take a few deep breaths, and as you are exhaling, relax your body completely. Now, imagine an extraterrestrial being in their natural environment. Everything should be different from your human experience. 

Here's an example of your mental practice in this phase:
- Visualize a bizarre creature that has many short legs and four arms. Its head is big, but flat, with many eyes all around it. Its vision covers 360 degrees, the full circle. It breathes the air differently – through pores present everywhere on the scaly skin. It has no heart – instead, its equivalent of blood is being pumped by many muscles embedded into veins. It is very intelligent, but it mostly thinks in pictures. It communicates with others of its kind using infrared electromagnetic waves emitted from special organs in its head.
- Imagine a living environment that is totally dissimilar to this on Earth. The air is thick and windy, the gravity is strong. All other critters are short, moving very slowly. The sun is big and red, not moving at all.

(Remember, this is only an example. Your visualization can be completely different. Further below you can find several other ideas about the alien surroundings and possible extraterrestrial forms. Of course, you can invent your own varieties.)

2. Imagine that you are this alien being. Become one with it. Feel its body and sense its environment.

Visualize yourself as this extraterrestrial entity, in their body, surrounded by their entirely outlandish environment. Feel your alien body, your four arms, and many legs. See your environment all around you with your all-encompassing eyesight. Feel familiar with this environment. Try to conceive a myriad of smaller images gotten from your numerous, small, insect-type eyes, overlapping and merging into a larger whole. Perceive your surroundings with your other senses. Note that you are moving very slowly, and you are not breathing at all.

3. Return to the present moment, here and now, perceived by your human body, but this time pretend that you are the previously imagined alien who now operates your current human body.

The end state of this meditation is to feel the wonder of embodying a completely novel form of being – the earthly existence. Feel everything as though you are experiencing it for the first time ever. Feel it here and now.

Virtually everything is fresh and odd to you. Sense your strange, new body. Feel your weird head, two arms, legs, and feet; their movements, their soft tissues. Sense your bizarre breathing process. With wonder, feel the beating of your heart. Sense the gentle touch of fresh air on your skin, for the first time. See with awe the detailed, clear, 3D image of your environment, thanks to your human eyes. 

​The end state of this meditation is to feel the wonder of embodying a completely novel form of being – the earthly existence.

​Pretend that your thoughts, emotions, and sensations are completely different than those of your fictitious alien existence.
 
Try to remain in this state of novelty and awe as long as possible. Enjoy it. Whenever you feel that you cannot stay in the beginner’s mind anymore, switch again to your imaginary extraterrestrial existence, stay in it for a minute or two, and return to your human world, into the beginner’s mind.
 
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Alien Varieties 

In this section, you can find some ideas on possible alien forms and their natural environments. Feel free to change these concepts or make your own. Be creative.
 
Physical environment 

The key point here is to imagine alien surroundings that are weird from our “earthly” point of view. In this way, after visualizing such an environment for some time, our normal surroundings can seem strange to us.
 
Your imagined environment could be:

• Land – with various options, for example, natural (barren or lush with vegetation which could be of strange colors), artificial (a kind of city, inside a room, etc.), or something entirely different. 
• Water – natural or an underwater cityscape, or something else.
• Aerial – like flying low or high above the ground, in a clear or cloudy sky; pay attention to colors around you, that might also be very different than those of Earth – the sky might be red, green, yellow, brown, or of any other color.

• Space – either a kind of void between planets, stars or galaxies, or interplanetary or interstellar space full of gas and dust.
• Some other kind of environment (e.g., interior of a star, inside a black hole, plasma environment, a different type of space and time within another universe or dimension, even some sort of magical/fantasy worlds).

  
Alien Appearance
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The shape of alien bodies in your imagination should somehow resonate with the environment. For example, if the creature exists in low-gravity conditions, it is probably very tall, slim, and slow comparing from our point of view. On the other hand, if it lives on a “super-earth” planet, it will almost certainly be short, muscular, with several pairs of legs, and so on.
 
You may also imagine beings living in the high-pressure atmosphere of a gas giant, perhaps with shapes resembling whales with some sort of wings, or elongated birds, pterodactyls, or some completely different form that might be adapted to flying in compressed gas.
 
You might envision entities comprised of energy only (which we are, too, as spirits). These entities can live perhaps in all kinds of environments, although often without any ability to manipulate with its parts or aspects, depending on the environment itself.
 
Or you may imagine yourself as some sort of machine intelligence – perhaps an AI life form, with a machine “body,” able to operate in almost any environment. 
 
Inner World  

Alien consciousness, thought process, and perception might be completely different than ours. From our point of view, alien thoughts might not be like ours at all. For example, they could think in pictures, extremely slowly or swiftly; maybe they are completely emotionless (like AI), or they very often feel some sort of inner charge (emotions) related to various experiences. Regarding the inner world of aliens, you can imagine anything, but it has to be different than your usual inner experience.

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Concluding Thoughts

Open your mind and do this meditation regularly. Unleash your imagination. Of course, you may go beyond countless plausible alien entities and worlds, conceivable by science or science fiction. You can imagine beings, like dragons, wizards, goblins, fairies, or any other beings form fantasy worlds, but to me personally, the variety of Sci-Fi types of critters is immensely more versatile. Anyway, there should be no limits to your creativity.

What really matters is that you become someone or something entirely different during the first two phases of meditation, so that, in the third phase, you can experience this world with awe and amazement, like you see it and feel it for the very first time.

Do not forget that the purpose of this meditation is manifold. This practice will bring you a sense of total novelty in your everyday life. Your consciousness will begin to expand in astonishing ways. Gradually, you will be removing many unconscious contents of your mind, layer by layer. And, what’s equally important, your creativity will simply explode.

Have a wonderful, miraculous day! :-)