Summary

At Wright’s first meditation retreat, he accessed what seemed to be a new plane of existence. He had a visual experience filled with orange and purple lights, not a hallucination but still a mental visual. Throughout the course of the retreat, he had often criticized himself for failing to meditate properly, though his teachers urged him not to do so. Meditation is an experience, they would say, don’t be hard on yourself. However, he had found it difficult to quiet the self-critical voice in his head.

Suddenly, in the hallucination, he was able to see the self-critical voice in his head. One part of his mind was sending those messages to the rest of his mind, which made Wright dissociate with that voice. “It wasn’t clear,” Wright writes, “that he was worth paying attention to” (249). The experience...