Autosuggestion Leads To The Meditational Mac Daddy

The Anti-Guru Appears Just in Time

The anti-guru appears just in time. How autosuggestion paved the way to the Meditational Mac Daddy, Jiddu Krishnamurti.

“The cessation of thought is the awakening of intelligence.”

Autosuggestion Before Meditation

My meditational odyssey began in 1972. I was a high-level athlete that had used Soviet autosuggestion, a mental recalibration technique, for many years. What is the definition of autosuggestion? Autosuggestion is a mental imaging technique wherein the athlete repeatedly visualizes themselves performing the about-to-happen athletic drill or effort.

Each successive visualization requires an increase in clarity, detail, and nuance. The more vivid the visualization, the more successful the athlete becomes in blurring the line between fantasy and reality. The more real the imagining, the more effective the result.

The autosuggestion protocol is simple: create and repeatedly watch a mental movie of the about-to-happen athletic task. After ingraining a mental pattern of repeated success, the athlete opens their eyes and turns internal visualization into external reality.

What I learned was that over time and with repeated practice, the line between fantasy and reality blurs, and this is a good thing. After years of autosuggestion, the degree of detail I was able to conjure improved dramatically.

Mental Movies for Maximum Effort

As my ability to conjure up vivid images improved, so did my performance. The better I got at autosuggestion, the better I got at lifting massive poundage. The best and truest autosuggestion mental movies are wordless, without internal commentary.

Let me put a finer point on it: in my autosuggestion movies, I observe myself and my training partners as I ready for my all-out top set or competition lift. My partners and I will talk in my visualization, but only in profane bursts and the usual pre-lift exhortations training partners tell one another.

I focus with all my being on the final internal vision of me conquering the about-to-happen poundage or drill. Then I do it.

I wanted to see if there was anything past autosuggestion, which had served me well and which I would continue to use. I decided to explore the different meditational schools. My goal was to learn about the individualized techniques and practices. How did they differ from one another? What were the meditational commonalities?

Searching Through the Meditational Schools

Coincidentally, a flood of meditational information became available in the early 1970s. Every week I would head to the local “spiritual bookstore” to scoop up new material on meditational methods, gurus, protocols, masters, and modes. Was meditation the next logical step beyond autosuggestion? I began my own formal daily practice.

I hoped to discover meditational practices that would catapult my performance to the next level. I was devoid of any spiritual aspirations. I sought to learn and practice the techniques, shorn of any spiritual ambitions. It was all about upping my athletic game.

Hindu, Zen, Taoist, and Tibetan Practices

I began my studies with the various types of Hindu meditation. I read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. I studied Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, Ma and the meditational methods of the Pondicherry Ashram. I studied Gopi Krishna, from whom I learned Kundalini “breath of fire” breathing techniques. The Ice Man, Wim Hof, makes modern use of these ancient Hindu meditational breathing techniques to withstand cold. I pointed this out when I wrote the foreword to Wim’s book.

Later in life I developed a relationship with Sri Chinmoy Ghose, the Indian mystic and guru to John McLaughlin, Santana, Roberta Flack, Carl Lewis, Clarence Clemons, etc. We talked about meditational techniques and techniques unique to the Pondicherry school. I asked him how the meditational mindset could be better “tuned” to aid athletics. He had highly specific recommendations.

I explored Rinzai and Soto Zen at length and in depth. Rinzai uses koans, unsolvable riddles designed to short-circuit the logical conscious mind and allow the student to have a kensho experience, a glimpse of enlightenment. Over time and with practice, that glimpse, that sliver of kensho is expanded.

The Soto school is simplistic: “just sit” and good things will happen. Over time and with practice, a vast mental silence is cultivated by “just sitting.” This approach appealed to me mightily. The Soto school was light on dogma and talk and heavy on practice: practice being sitting in a specific structural alignment using regulated breathing. Adherents would sit in Zazen posture for hours each day “lightly residing in the immediate present.”

I moved on to Chinese Taoism and was particularly taken with the Taoist linking of the meditational mindset to movement. The martial animal forms were wedded to meditational mindset and set into motion. Formal Taoist meditational sitting sessions preceded the practice of the sacred “internal” martial arts. I began the study of the Chinese internal martial arts: Pa Kua, Hsing I and Tai Chi.

I dug deep and long into the mountain-dwelling Tibetan cave monks, initially alerted to them and the Dzogchen sect through Thomas Merton’s Eastern Journals. The hardcore cave monks live in mountainside caves year-round, sitting eighteen hours a day. They exhibited an ability to ward off cold with “tummo fire-breathing” techniques.

Jiddu Krishnamurti and No-Method Awareness

It took me ten years to work my way through all the schools of meditation that interested me. Right about the time I was looking around for another meditational cult to study, the Sufi mystics and Whirling Dervishes were on my radar, a happenstance occurrence caused me to put the brakes on further religious-related meditational exploration.

While riding on the Washington, D.C. Metro to Dupont Circle, I sat in a seat where someone had left a paperback book, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things. Thus began a 50-year relationship with my psychological mentor.

What grabbed me about Krishnamurti’s approach was how he homed in on the nucleus of the meditational atom: the goal of all schools of meditation is the ceasing of conscious thought. Only when thought subsides can reality be perceived.

Every school of meditation I had studied was just that: a school. They each presented highly formalized “methods” for meditating. Each school used a method that, if used correctly and consistently, would enable the meditator to access the wordless, blissful state of “pure being.” Krishnamurti said, how about we forget about the schools, gurus and methods and just skip ahead to the “pure being” part? And that it was possible and doable.

Krishnamurti felt all organizations were inherently corrupt. How can the meditator attain a non-mechanical state of wordless bliss using the “mechanical methods” taught by various religious sects? He sought a shortcut to that mindset of electrified hyper-alertness, characterized by a lack of internal dialogue.

K felt that it was an irresolvable conflict to use a rote method to attain an ethereal state. Besides, he asserted, anyone and everyone can attain the meditational mindset without master, guru or method. He insisted that you don’t need a guru, religion, or authority figure to teach yourself how to attain the profound mental silence that is the hallmark, the commonality, that links the meditational schools I had studied. Profound mental silence is true meditation.

His strategy for attaining deep mental silence was to “cultivate deep awareness.” And you didn’t need to run off to an ashram. The strategy is simple: “Can you simply observe? Can you look at something or someone so intently and completely that thought falls silent?” This is a slippery paradox. As Krishnamurti points out, stated differently, it is impossible to observe an object or person fully and completely if thought is active and chattering.

Without thought to distract us, we can observe deeply and wordlessly. A quality of consciousness emerges out of alert silence that offers us “freedom from the known.” Krishnamurti would talk about “emptying the content of consciousness” and how, when allowed to grow quiet, our overheated, stressed-out brain could fall silent. In my experience, during these silent periods, the brain seemed to heal, repair, recover and rebuild. When called back online, the quieted and rested brain thinks faster, clearer and more precisely.

Training, Immersion, and Wordless Focus

I was routinely attaining the thoughtless state of mental silence during and after my hardcore training sessions. My post-workout bliss was characterized by a glow, a contented silence and a feeling of euphoria brought on by what I called a hormonal tsunami, unleashed by my herculean, past-capacity efforts.

The exact chemistry is not the point of this article. The point is the lived experience: crushing effort, total focus, physical exhaustion and mental euphoria combined to produce a state of blissful mindlessness, an electrified silence, which I later discovered was the goal of meditation.

Krishnamurti said that just because the meditator does not use some sort of formal, recognized meditational system, with ritualized posture, stylized breathing and breath counting, K viewed this as the height of mechanization, doesn’t mean meditational bliss is to be denied. On the contrary, Krishnamurti said anyone, anytime, anywhere can attain the core, the nucleus of meditation.

No guru, no method, no masters. Just learn to observe life so intensely and completely that thought falls silent of its own accord. Tasks that cause us to become totally immersed cause the conscious mind to fall silent. A jazz musician in the middle of an improvised solo is not thinking about his next note. The ballplayer moving to shag a hot grounder isn’t thinking; he’s mindlessly moving. An athlete driving for a basket or a man squatting 600 pounds is completely focused and not preoccupied or multitasking. Complete focus requires mental silence.

The Awakening of Intelligence

In my reading, Krishnamurti’s magnum opus is The Awakening of Intelligence. A careful reading of this guide to the inner universe reveals that the book’s title is the second half of a single sentence that forms the bedrock foundation of his philosophy.

The sentence lies hidden within the bowels of the book, just another Krishnamurti quote, placed deep in the book with no special attention, no highlighting. How many people read that book and skimmed right over this essence of the nucleus, this all-important sentence?

“The cessation of thought is the awakening of intelligence.”

The meditational schools I studied all seemed to seek, in one way or another, to put the meditator into a wordless state. When the thinker, the observer, falls silent, the inky film that obscures reality dissolves, allowing the meditator to perceive reality. Reality always unfolds in the instantaneous present.

Krishnamurti encourages us to live a life full of immersion tasks. Engage in hardcore training and tasks that cause you to lose your sense of self. Allow that overheated, stressed-out brain circuitry time to quiet down. Mental silence is a learned skill that improves with time and practice. And no need to run off to the ashram.

Safety Note for Autosuggestion, Meditation, and Hardcore Training

This article preserves Marty Gallagher’s RAW first-person perspective on autosuggestion, meditation, Jiddu Krishnamurti, mental silence, and hardcore training. It is not individualized medical, mental-health, neurological, meditation, breathwork, cold-exposure, rehabilitation, or programming advice.

Autosuggestion, intense visualization, prolonged meditation, breathwork, cold-exposure techniques, all-out lifting, high-effort conditioning and attempts to force mental silence are not automatically appropriate for every person. Anxiety history, panic symptoms, trauma history, dissociation, psychiatric conditions, cardiovascular disease, blood-pressure concerns, medications, sleep disruption, injury history, and recovery capacity all matter.

Do not use breathwork, cold exposure, meditation or training intensity as a substitute for qualified medical or mental-health care. Build gradually. Stop or seek qualified guidance for panic, dissociation, faintness, dizziness, chest pain, unusual shortness of breath, numbness, sharp pain, confusion, severe distress, uncontrolled bar path, repeated technical collapse, or any symptom that feels different from normal training effort.

Equipment Notes for Training, Focus, and Immersion Tasks

Equipment does not create autosuggestion, meditation, or mental silence. A tool simply gives the athlete a concrete task that can demand total attention.

For resistance-training immersion tasks, readers and facilities can compare dumbbells, Olympic weightlifting bars, and kettlebells. Specific options such as IRON COMPANY urethane hex dumbbells, the American Barbell 7-foot stainless steel 20 kg needle-bearing Olympic power bar and IRON COMPANY premium powder-coated kettlebells may fit certain training spaces when the user, room, floor, load, and intended use align.

For conditioning tasks that can also demand rhythmic focus, compare exercise bikes and treadmills. Specific options such as the TKO AirRaid fan bike and the Spirit Fitness CT900 slat-belt sled treadmill may fit some environments when the user, space, floor, and intended training style align.

The tool supports the task. It does not replace awareness.

Related Meditation and Awareness Reading

For more Marty Gallagher writing on meditation and awareness, read Pure Meditational Awareness and Meditation: Meditational Fundamentals.

RAW with Marty Gallagher, J.P. Brice, and Jim Steel Podcast