I'm not meditating and had the same thought/expiernce/revelation.
My direct thought (me) what I feel is me, is trying to influence the rest of me and it just not always work.
One theory is, that you are reading/expierincing what already happened (like subseconds ago) and you can only try to influence the upcoming behavior of your whole system.
It almost sounds like it, but I can't control those thoughts. They happen on their own. I've been told one of the ways to successful meditation is learning to be a passive observer of these thoughts, to let them happen but not engage in them, but I definitely don't know how that works.
For me, meditation started a fundamental shift in how I think about free will, and oddly nobody I've mentioned it to in real life has felt this.
I used to feel very in-control of my own mind, but after intentionally sitting and monitoring for thoughts, labeling those thoughts, etc, I became sensitive to how thoughts can really come out of nowhere. You can't predict what you will think next. That strikes a little deeper than a nature/nurture argument where you might say "oh, I just behave a certain way I guess, its in my genes". You start to wonder if you're just being forced to watch the movie that is your own life.
I personally feel like my life is a mostly-good movie, and there's reason to predict it will continue that way, but for many people, they're stuck in a bad movie. Some people may feel imprisoned by that. But not feeling in control can also be liberating, depending how you look at it. So I definitely agree that it's a double edged sword, or that YMMV.
(Overall, I've enjoyed meditation, and I try to do it about once a week, just to remind myself that there's another mode of thinking that's available to me.)
My experience might be similar in a way, in that when I started meditating I became aware in a more direct way of how self-referential my mind was. It does things, but then it also does things that can observe it doing things. That is both interesting and liberating, in that there are processes I can't control (which I think aligns with your feeling of lack of free will), but also processes which I can can control. It is quite comforting to feel like I'm not trapped on a single level of thought, which is sometimes uncontrollable.
Yes, thoughts pop up on their own. The brain is a team made of a generator and a critic. They learn and work together. The generator is like a language model, it will make some contextual association or random jump. But then the critic allows to evaluate this fresh thought. Doing this multiple rounds before acting is necessary for reasoning.
When you meditate you let your generator run free and unrestricted or try to quiet it, while the critic should stop from interfering. By lacking its interference you just sit without an explicit goal. You're not achieving anything, you have no purpose. Just being.
That is nice to do sometimes, I think it's a very artistic perception, but insufficient for the requirements of life. In life you need to engage the critic, you need to construct your solutions. The meditation experience is like some kinds of music, sports and art, a nice thing to cultivate, but not the pinnacle of consciousness.
Consciousness has a really important job to do, it fights for its own existence, it creates consciousness. Nobody else is going to help it if it doesn't help itself.
When I meditate concentrating on my breath,my mind interferes with my breathing and it becomes uncomfortable if I dont relax
I believe this acts as some negative feedback for the control freak self inside me. Every time I exert unnecessary control it becomes uncomfortable.
Meditating long enough may show me that the mind will wander in its own ways regardless of what I maybe doing at the moment, and its best for me to let it wander on its own ways and focus on what I am doing. Thus helping me understand that all the thoughts about ego, and judgements is just come process on the sidelines, and different from the core of me, the core that is focused on what I am doing.
This is the impression I have of where meditation is taking me.
What has happened to me the more I meditate is the discovery of these two basic ways of interacting with the world. The first stance feels very familiar, it is the me that spends most of its time:
1) judging the present, e.g. "How does the present moment live up to my expectations of it? How can I change the present moment to meet my goals or aversions?";
2) expecting the future, e.g. planning or fantasizing "What will I do if X happens? I must have X by Y or I won't be happy.";
3) replaying episodes from the past, e.g. "I wish I had/hadn't done X. I wish Y had/hadn't done X to me. When I had X I really felt great."
4) reacting to and getting caught up in emotions - anger, fear, desire, aversion, etc.
After meditating, a categorically different stance towards reality becomes available: that of non-judgmental pure awareness. That part of you that is the awareness before all the other stuff begins, the awareness from which all the other stuff emerges.
One way to tell the first stance from the second is the presence of judgement. If you're judging then you're not experiencing pure awareness. That's how you know that your experience, that of "another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do" is not what people seek with meditation - it's merely another form that ego takes: judgement of oneself instead of judgement of others or of the present moment. That kind of duality is just the ego showing just one of its multitudes of forms.
The more you meditate, the more time you fall into nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, and act from that perspective instead of the other ego-directed perspectives.
The great contemplative traditions have written extensively on these matters - the difficulty is finding a tradition or teacher that fits one's learning style and cultural context. I would not look to science for a fundamental understanding of these things, as these are subjective matters which science is ill-equipped to address (that's not to say science can show us the very real objective effects of the subject process of meditation).
That's a really interesting phenomenon. It sounds like your subconscious mind decides that, after a lot of activity, now is the time for meditating and your conscious mind just has to go along with it. Best wishes to you.
I think it is concentration. Although I think concentration has a bit of an active feel to it, as if you're usually doing it in order to accomplish something. When I meditate I just try to be aware of what's going in my mind, my body, and my breath without judging them. The idea of a controller and a controlled entity is just a feeling that comes from an active attitude that you're somehow preserving. If you simple watch yourself it will become apparent that ways of thinking like this don't necessarily represent reality. They comes and go.
It's just something that happens once you learn to see the thoughts themselves arising, rather than feeling like you are thinking them.
This occurs automatically, once you start meditating, typically within just a couple weeks even for those people (like me) who "don't get it" at first.
Not only that, but if meditation has taught me anything, it's that your "conscious rational thought" isn't really conscious. ...like, basically at all. The decisions are getting made unconsciously and then kicked up to your conscious attention, already made.
I don't know what people feel or do when meditating this way. But one thing I felt in the last years is that our mind is a bit two-part. One feels, the other kinda decide to focus or amplify that. Meditating is a bit like relaxing the second and avoiding vicious feedback loops.
Sorry I might be wrong here but I feel you are not doing it right. I am told to "not think" during meditation, while you mention "Thinking about those things" which seems not "not think".
Obviously I am no expert or actually even any good at meditating, but maybe try learning from a different teacher who might be able to help you out in this.
Just to reiterate, I might be wrong here and if that's the case just ignore my comment :)
Maybe you're interpreting the words "effort" and "manipulation" too strictly. During a meditation session, the brain could still be doing the activities from the definition, even though you might not feel like you're doing much at all.
Or, conversely, perhaps during meditation you're less conscious.
NB: I'm not an expert on anything related to this.
I would not say that meditation is about eliminating thoughts from the mind. That might not even be possible. It is more about setting intentions and sticking to them.
For example, I might have some thoughts that are rooted in a specific desire. Perhaps I feel an urge to see what's new on Hacker News. I already did that 15 minutes ago, but so what. I'm thinking about what a great feeling it was last time I found something cool on this site. So I stop what I'm doing, navigate to Hacker News and proceed to waste 45 minutes reading through comment threads.
Of course, there's another option. I could simply ignore the desire and do something else- like whatever it is I had otherwise planned to do with that time. But this is not so easy. Chances are, I will succumb to the desire and then rationalize to myself that this is, in fact, how I planned to spend my evening the whole time.
With meditation, we practice by setting an unusual and specific intention, such as monitoring the breath. That way, if you notice yourself doing anything other than that, such as walking around, planning your weekend or replaying some event in your mind, you know that you are not doing what you intended to be doing. By returning to what you originally intended to do, you strengthen your ability to behave in an intentional manner, rather than being powerlessly yanked around by whatever idea happens to pop into your head at any given moment.
I'm not sure whether meditating for very long periods of time is healthy. But most of us struggle greatly to do it for even 10 minutes. That's because 10 minutes is longer than our attention span: even if we firmly resolve to pay attention to something for that long, we inevitably get distracted by something else within a minute or two, and completely forget what we were supposed to be doing in the first place. Don't you think that's troubling?
My direct thought (me) what I feel is me, is trying to influence the rest of me and it just not always work.
One theory is, that you are reading/expierincing what already happened (like subseconds ago) and you can only try to influence the upcoming behavior of your whole system.
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