Decades ago I was a frequent and very long term meditator who practiced chi-kung and off the body chi-kung healing touch. It’s been studied that your screen refresh rate goes up if you meditate frequently; as numbers flash by on a computer screen you can see more of them distinctly even at very fast rates.
So during this time in my life I was keenly aware of what happens during the first 1/2 of a second of eye contact.
It’s a really magical time. It’s incredible how much information humans share in that time. I always try to translate my concepts in a rational scientifically reasonable world view, but sometimes more information is conveyed by being more poetic or even metaphysical. Some experiences I’m at a loss to find any frame of reference for whatever.
During that period in my life, I was able to make people turn around to see if I was looking at them or not. I even did this in a meditation hall, where people are not supposed to move. Very consciously, I picked out people, and one by one told myself that I would make them turn around. I then used my gaze and felt into them with my eyes.
One by one, people turned around. But they were annoyed, and gave me a harsh glare. As if I were being disturbing.
My energy was not good at that time. I was highly sexually supercharged, and had no outlet. I was a fucking mess, and a hyper aware, spiritually powerful mess.
During that time my best friend was an accomplished meditation practitioner with deep social connections and long association with many top teachers. Teachers who you hear incredible stories about; about people stopping all thoughts for a few days after a brief encounter, and so on. The stories are so common that it’s a thing, in Buddhist circles. Anyway, I remember vividly one day walking down the street with him, and people would smile in their eyes and lips and say hello to him as we walked past. Not one person said hello to me. Over and over. It wasn’t random. It was awesome. I was a bit jealous, and felt excluded. But I also realized that this was a hell of a life lesson. Maybe one day I’d get to the bottom of it.
Well, last night was amazing. I took some ritalin, which increases my clock refresh rate of course, and drank a bit. As people walked by, I noticed what happened in that quick instant as our gazes met. And most everyone I looked at shared a gaze with me. Finally! I was not harsh anymore. I was open, loving, accepting, joyful, calm. People didn’t feel unconfortable in my gaze, and the spark was full of comraderie and shared human condition.
Later J and I went to the disco, and I had the feeling that my gaze was a bit magical. I had the feeling that girls were checking me out and being attracted. Well, I’ve been delusional before, who knows when drinking and doing a mild stimulant. But then as we were dancing near a troupe of 4 very hot very young girls, one of them danced in front of me then started grinding on me. I held my ground, and let her grind, all the while J was burning up with jealous anger. This was so blatant. I was loving it, and J and I were talking about it as it happened. So funny. While this was happening I was having a lot of eye contact with the other girls. It was amazing. My vibe was so on last night, like nothing I ever remember. (Well, that’s not quite so. I’ve had some other great days. But I think this was a peak of peaks.) The eye contact went very well; I really wish I had better words for it. The girls appreciated the attention, didn’t turn away, and we shared the joy of sharing gazes, all the while dancing.
The whole time I was doing chi-kung on my girl. She feels this when I do it, and sometimes ask me to “do magic on her”. My hand was resting on her spine. Her vibe is also very good.
I’ve danced with very hot girlfriendss in clubs before, and sometimes my vibe has been very good and I’ve felt that I’ve helped to improve the mood of the club. You can be fun grandpa, and have a social effect on crowds. People like to respect older folks and see them having a good time. It’s happened a few times, if I’m not being delusional. But last night I really felt I was getting eyeballed and checked out by a great many attractive young women. Inside the club and out. It was quite unusual, for me.
I told J that it was her love that was powering all of that. She couldn’t appreciate my metaphysical frame of reference, but it does make sense to me.
People are highly evolved to make snap judgments about vibe, and are incredibly attuned. I have no idea how so much information can be conveyed so fast. Subjectively it feels like it happens in the eyes and eye contact, but who knows. Of course I get social validation by being with a doting attractive young woman, and that can cause people to try to grab me from her, for fun, like that girl and her troupe were playing at. But think about it for a moment. If they can sense my vibe, what about hers?
Before I’ve been to clubs with girls with a bit more scatterbrained vibes. That’s also a reflection on me.
This time my vibe was at a lifetime peak, plus she has a more well rounded character and vibe than other hotties I’ve been with. Hot and not crazy. That’s a much more powerful combination. And when I say her love powered the interest in me, I’m talking about her vibe as if it’s a metaphysical force; that’s the best way to imagine it. A force people feel, that changes who I am, and makes people more interested in me and what it is she is clearly getting from me.
I’ve long been aware of a duty to hold a good vibe. Our vibes hugely influence each other. Even strangers on the street.
One of my teachers has the practice to make as much eye contact with strangers as he can. He has that much belief in the power of the gaze.
I could write all the very positive eye-contact down to a being a bit high and delusion, but for the the real physical actions; that girl was grinding on me for maybe 10 minutes, and her friends were so comfortable in the situation. I knew I was in a rare zone, and then real effects.
Hard to put into words my vibe, but:
1) Lately I’m not hungry for sex from other girls. I used to always be. So I can look at a hot girl with appreciation, without exactly wanting to fuck her now. That seems to have a strange counter-intuitive effect. J has me very calmed down, in a way I don’t remember ever feeling before.
2) I was thinking about improv lately, and I think that relates to being in the moment – even that impossible to act upon 1/10th of a flash of energy second when eyes meet. You can be sort of egoless, groundless, open, and connected. And loving. It’s a state of improv and fluidity and trust.
Blogging has really helped me in my life. It always helps to have contemplations to work on, and then bring the organized insights to the public page, and then use those to go further. Lately I’ve been talking about my old chi-kung social habits. I stopped being social about chi-kung for many years, because it’s so completely out of the frame of reference of most people.
But it’s not, though.
We all know how eye contact feels so different with different people.
I’m lucky to have had seeds planted in me many years ago, by those advanced personalities. And I include my father and grandmother in the group of advanced personalities whose beingness was itself a teaching. It’s time to publicly acknowledge the esoteric teachings and practices and not be ashamed of standing out as a weirdo because of them. It’s very valuable stuff, and thanks to the teachers, and gratitude. Maybe I can pay it forward a bit.
Random Xpat Rantings 
I have had similar experiences with meditation, eye contact, social dance, and girls on the street turning around to look at me after they have passed me. Also the effects in social dance environments – salsa clubs e.g. – and nightclubs are dramatic and repeatable. But I have to meditate a lot to be able to achieve it. For an introverted intellectual guy like me it feels like a comic book superpower when it happens. It should be impossible according to my whole life’s experience with the laws of nature. But I have done repeated experiments and gotten repeated results. When I am in top form I can go with no woman on my arm, and dress like a bum (but clean,) and get the same result. So much information is passed through posture, movement, and eye contact…. It is hard to convey to someone who is asleep to it.
For a reader who is wondering what we are describing there is a scene in a movie with John Travolta playing an angel, where he walks into a bar and entrances all the women like a pied piper.
the film plays it over the top but I can tell you that it does happen like that. I have seen other guys do it and I have also done it myself. I have a lot of theories on how it works. Maybe its time I start blogging.
Totally over the top exaggeration, but notice that Travolta starts out in his own world and then he doles out the eye contact AFTER women notice him, like his attention is reward. Then the girls start competing for it and a frenzy ensues. Its a true thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W29xpRD0BwE
I like that example, even if it is extreme.
I’ve seen people do what looks like chi-kung or tai-chi as a style of disco-dancing. When I dance usually it’s a form of chi-kung. If I hold my hand above my head, I’m actually trying to feel body-centered emotions and energies that I associate with that space from long habits of chi-kung practice, and I try to feel into the energy of the room. It’s a good way to connect to the positive energy of the crowd. It’s life affirming and celebratory, and as I’m embodying that connection and celebration, that connection becomes a real interactive thing; people feel/sense my vibe and it’s a feedback interaction.
I really can bring up the energy and positivity of crowds. Not from an invisible force, but from in the usual ways; people feel better when they notice other people around them who feel good and are positively interacting. And as your video points out, you can get more subtle in your positivity. And people aren’t used to seeing that level of body-mind-space suble-energetic presence and awareness, so that’s slightly exciting and becomes a mutual celebration of the human condition.
I remember as a teenager me and some friends had as a life phillosophy and near religion to party hearty. There was something in that, if you replace the word party with celebrate.
Disco crowds can actually sometimes be bored and depressed. I’ve seen this change to a crowd being energized and into a more genuine party mode. Sometimes that happens just by the night progressing, but if there is no live band, music alone doesn’t always get people to act as a crowd and share their celebration. Being out can actually be a very lonely experience for a lot of people.
I also reach below my feet in a lot of chi-kung dance moves, and move the energy up and down visibly, while being spacially aware. And I try to move much less than the girl; dancing is about appreciating her, much more than it is showing off how well I can dance. She’s the focus, I’m there to celebrate her. Which helps her to celebrate me; women like to be celebrated, and appreciate it.
It’s subtle, and noobs or keyboard jockeys won’t have the life experience to get that point. It’s not pedestalizing to be really into a woman and to let her know it. That’s part of what people do that’s cool; we appreciate each and compliment each other. It’s only pedestalizing if you get needy and over-compliment as if you could purchase attraction with compliments.
It’s not supplicating to appreciate. I suppose that was a key, and new element, to my more magnetic vibe that night. Less hungry, yet more appreciative. It’s surprisingly not a catch22 or paradox. Sort of a Buddhist ideal, as Buddhists are always talking about the 3 “kleshas”, or disturbing emotions, and forever hinting at some mysterious alternative way to interact, that is compassionate and loving and appreciative, yet not needy.
The 3 kleshare are passion, aggression, and indifference. But passion is a contentious klesha, and some say it’s not an issue at all. That’s a subtle one. The interesting klesha, I think, is indifference. Also sometimes translated as ignorance. But apathy is said to be a type of emotion that gets in the way of this mysterious enlightened non-dual present open hearted mind.
So appreciation without necessarily tying that to getting a phone number and a fuck winds up being strangely attractive, as a state of being. Not exactly a state of doing; it’s an interactive state of being.
In the same way that improv is actually not just something that you do, it’s actually a state of being. My recent post on improv shows brain scans that support that theory. It’s how you hold your mind and interact;, not just some sort of verbal or musical fluency and quick-witetness.
My buddy/gury kept trying to tell me how seductive it was to not be too desirous, but I could not take the advice, because it’s also extremely seductive to be hugely turned on and into and uncontrollably want to fuck a girl. I’ve seduced girls with the power of that passion many times, and it’s a well documented and studied real dynamic.
This is a different dynamic that is also powerful, and more sublime. In some contexts it seems its quite a bit more powerful.
But you can’t make that state of mind, the way you can make a hamburger. You can’t create that interpersonal dynamic in the same way you might by singing a song or reading a poem or “doing the cube” or some script. It’s a subtle state of being that may take weeks or decades to fleetingly “attain”. And it most likely relies on external or interpersonal setups, such as “raising merit” in Buddhist speak, or feeling as if you are an overall positive force of mostly not too fucked up karma, in regular guy speak. And being loved and having a bottom bitch who you give love and frequent female-orgasmic sex to really helps a great deal. Our minds are also socially intertwined and interpersonal, so getting your life and shit together is a big part of what state control is all about.
Relevant: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190108-why-meeting-anothers-gaze-is-so-powerful
“But when you look another person deep in the eye, do not think it is just their pupils sending you a message. Other recent research suggests that we can read complex emotions from the eye muscles – that is, whether a person is narrowing or opening their eyes wide. So, for instance, when an emotion such as disgust causes us to narrow our eyes, this ‘eye expression’ – like a facial expression – also signals our disgust to others.
Yet another important eye feature are limbal rings: the dark circles that surround your irises. Recent evidence suggests that these limbal rings are more often visible in younger, healthier people, and that onlookers know this on some level, such that heterosexual women looking for a short-term fling judge men with more visible limbal rings to be more healthy and desirable.”
A friend recently asked me if I do any compassion related meditation exercises. I mentioned how a few days ago while at the gym I tried to feel love in my heard and connect to everyone in the gym. That wasn’t what he meant.
But I did something similar while in public yesterday. I felt chi and love between my palms resting on my crossed legs, and felt love connected to people as they walked by. Later as I strode home a few people spontaneously said hello to me. Later as I walked into the gym a girl beside her girlfriend said hi, as she was walking out. Strangers.
That never happens to me.
Unfortunately for my energy to be conducive to this, I go into a grandpa love type of place.
Totally non needy.
They say that you can’t be at your own funeral. It’s like that. To get that high serotonin, it’s not from a place where I really need that serotonin. I’m giving love, but not in a “I want to fuck you and need to be fucked” way.
Grandpa love. Probably a new life stage for me. I’m not totally happy about it.
But I kept up the practice throughout my gym workout. Later gave a girl who I used to think was snooty towards me a compliment on the way out the door, and she melted into a grateful smile.
Post-meditation meditation can be a real form of meditation. It doesn’t all have to be quiet and focused. And this type of loving kindness meditation can work well in crowds and public.