Conversing with Live Buddha: Dark Meditations

What if the mind that won’t stop is the very tool that can save you? I share how a midlife slide into rage, anxiety, and numbness led to a solo drive across America, a 1 a.m. call to my mentor, and two blunt words that changed everything: meditate. That moment didn’t make the pain vanish, but it gave me a path—one I followed from rest stops and dark highways to a daily practice that rebuilt my focus and steadied my life at home.

The story takes a turn when curiosity outpaces comfort. I lock myself in a room with zero light and near-zero sound and discover what happens when the brain loses its favorite input. Twenty minutes in, colors morph into light, whispers brush the air, and a phantom touch sends me bolting. No ghosts, no superstition—just the stark truth that the brain is a prediction machine. We unpack the science: the flood of sensory data, the tiny slice of conscious bandwidth, and why perception is a controlled hallucination corrected by incoming signals. Meditation shifts brain rhythms and autonomic state, so in darkness the mind guesses harder and dreams bleed into wakefulness.

Back home, I go all in—hours a day, sometimes all night—and the benefits ripple outward. Time compresses during sits. Worry loosens its claws. My kids adopt a simple daily practice and learn to steer their attention, even dropping heart rate on command during a school test. We connect the dots from ancient Taoist medicine to modern neuroscience, holding up The Secret of the Golden Flower alongside current research on neuroplasticity, prefrontal control, and emotional regulation. The takeaway isn’t mystical: training attention changes the brain, and changing the brain changes your life.

If you’ve been circling the edge of quiet, consider this your nudge. Try a few minutes of real silence, no phone, no soundtrack, and watch what your mind paints on the dark. If this conversation helps, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a quick review so others can find it. Your story might start with noise, but it doesn’t have to end there.

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Please contact me at theunclewong@gmail.com

Transcript

Setting The Stage: Meditation’s Edge

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yo, what's up everyone? Welcome back to Asian Uncle. I'm your host, Uncle Wong. So today we're going to talk about a relatively sinister topic. Everybody has heard of meditation, I hope. And that normally is equated with calmness, peace, serenity. But the Buddhist monks think that part of meditation is only the beginning. There's ways to manipulate meditation where it affects you differently. And so if you remember from previous episodes, meditation is a mind game. And we'll go into that a little bit detail. But I also want to preface by saying that from now on, all our episodes, I'm going to include educational material. Okay, because I believe if you're going to be spending 30 minutes of your time with me, then you should at least get something out of it. Whether it's from my experience, uh, it should be, for instance, about history, about science. You know, at least one thing you can take out of this conversation that will be helpful. Cool. Now that we have an understanding, let's get back to the topic. Now, meditation, this dark meditation method, is a way Buddhist monks use to stimulate the brain in a different way. You either you are stimulating it or you're trying to calm it. In other words, your brain has different waves. You're either this wave or that wave, higher frequency, lower frequency. And you're able to adjust that through meditation. You can even adjust it by the different hemispheres of your brain. Brain scans have shown that. Very remarkable. I wrote a lot about this in my book, which I'm going to share with you today. Now, I want to admit something to you, because I always seem like I'm the preacher, that I'm a high-level meditator. It's not the case. The truth is, I never meditated or really meditated until I came to the US, which was seven, eight years ago. Not even all my years of traveling to Tibet, India, meeting a Dai Lama, spending sometimes months at a time in temples. Of course, I pretended to. I sat there. But like most people, it's hard for me to sit there for a prolonged period of time without going crazy. Think about it. If you could do it yourself, you probably wouldn't be listening to this podcast. Because that sense of calmness is sometimes frightening. When you're all by yourself, it's hard to tell your mind to just shut the fuck up. And that's what Buddhism can teach you. How to make your mind shut up, how to refocus. And so with my ADHD, that was impossible for me. I'd rather chant mantras, I'd rather do dance, I'd rather do something else, or even do the burpees than sit there for a long period of time. And so, like most realities of life, you don't do something you're uncomfortable until you're forced to. And something forced me almost over the edge. I'm sure many of you guys can relate. It's called the midlife crisis. And it's easy to admit now, but back then that sudden urge, that unexpected urge of uselessness came out of nowhere. Well, at least for me, I knew it came out because I was bored now. From the bustling life in China, Hong Kong, to now doing nothing. Starting a podcast, talking to myself. Like with all this time on my hand, I felt like the business world, or in fact the entire world, took off without me. And I'm just useless. Because of that, I started to feel less confident. I started developing some temper issues. I became very impatient. It's hard for me to listen. I was just what I call mindlessly reckless. Anxiety plagued me all the time. I have night sweats. It was horrible. And so one day I I thought to myself, this is this is enough. I I need some time off, otherwise, these thoughts are going to start turning suicidal. It's not something that I want to experience ever again in my life. And as with most of you, the reason why I'm sharing this is because I think you all go through this sometime in your life, whether you're young, you're old, whether you reach midlife or not, anxiety, depression, it fucks with all of us, regardless. We all cope with it in different ways. And so for me, if I took any further, I'm I probably would end up divorcing my wife or just causing more problems in the family than I had to. So I did the next wisest thing. I rented a car and I left. I rented a car by myself, I drove from Washington to New York and back. Clear across America on the I-90. By myself with my dark thoughts. And that's how this journey began. And when I approached the border between Idaho and Montana, which is maybe eight-hour drive so far, I felt a sudden urge that I was not well. And at that moment, I think if I didn't make that phone call, things probably would have turned out much worse. I'm glad I did. And I called my mentor, I called Life Buddha, I called LB. Normally he doesn't pick up. It was probably one in the morning his time. But for some reason, that day at that specific time, he picked up the phone. It almost felt like he knew I was gonna call. And I ranted about my problems, how fucked up my life is. And I was questioning him, like, what do you mean? Calm my mind. He said, Meditate. You already know how to, you just never do. And that's it. That's all LB said to me. But those words meant the whole world. And of course I didn't immediately just sit down and start meditating and flow into space. But at least those thoughts of maybe suicidal have stopped. And I started to look forward to my journey. I knew I was going to come back. And I was starting to become appreciative of the climb. Um, I started to become appreciative of the solitude. And maybe this is my time to cope with myself, right? To face my inner demons. But many times when I drove at night, it's scary as hell. Because you see dead carcasses of deer gut spilled out everywhere, just roadkill. You know, many times too, I when I drove at night, I would see deers running across the highway right in front of me. And if I went any faster, you know, those suicidal thoughts probably would have came true without even me trying. It was very dangerous. And for some reason I wasn't scared. I wasn't crazy, but I just felt a sort of calmness. I listened to a lot of audiobooks, um, put on some music the whole way. Just me and myself. I didn't sleep in the hotels. Instead, I just parked somewhere, went to sleep, or went to like a rest stop. And one night I even stopped at my Philip Marine's house in Illinois, and I stayed over his house for a night. We had a couple drinks, very nice chat. And what's funny was the next day when I when I left his house, when I got on the highway in Illinois, I immediately got pulled over by a state trooper. And being like a middle-aged Asian, like things like that, does not it doesn't scare me. Except, you know, Uncle Wong fucked up a little bit that morning. I smoked a little bit of weed with my boy. Alright, so I was not very sober. And I think I might have said something stupid, kind of like the South Park episode when when when you got stopped, when you got stopped by the cops and he said what seems to be the officer problem. I think I may have said something stupid along those lines. But he asked me politely, like, uh sir, I'm good. Can we search your vehicle? And uh I was like, Yeah, sure, go right ahead. They escorted me to the cop car behind, and I sat in the passenger seat. I took out my camera, took a picture, and I politely asked them, Can you put my car back after you take it apart? And you know, T he looked at me kind of weird and said, Alright. And so almost immediately, two, three other cop cars pulled up, came out like seven, eight dudes just stripping down my car. And that's when I realized, yeah, I probably did look like um like a smuggler. I had California plates, I was driving by myself, I had a pillow and blankets in the backseat. You know, like and when he asked me where are you going, I said to New York to see my mom. And uh he's like, why not fly there? I think I said I like driving, or some stupid shit like that. But I I think the search was justified. But then once they didn't find anything, they didn't even give me a ticket. I was only going one mile an hour above the speed limit. That's why they stopped me. They knew something was going on, I guess. But, anyways, I drove down to New York, and if you ever drove anywhere in the world, you know that Seattle probably has the worst drivers in all of America. I'm not even kidding. Because once you drive to New York, you know you're in New York. Everybody drives nuts. Once you cross that border between Jersey and New York, you have to start driving crazy. It's like a different mode. And I stayed in Europe for a couple of days, met up with my college roommate, I stayed with him. And um, yeah, he he he gave me very good advice, you know, hey bro, just uh fix up your head and and and just reintroduce yourself to the family. And that's what I did. My drive back was surprisingly shorter, at least it felt like it. And I got off at some of the state parks in Dakotas to take a look. I'd never been there before. And when I got home, I I went crazy by Anna in a good way. Yeah, I took LB's words to heart and I meditated frantically. I spent hours meditating a day. Sometimes the entire day, entire night. I took it to an extreme. Not only me, but I mean my kids do it too. And a month or two later, it felt different. It's hard to describe the feeling, but I felt like I could focus on the present moment. A lot of the worries that I had dissipated. And I'm able to meditate for much longer periods of time. I'm able to sit there for, well, at least now, I could sit there for hours. And when I open up my eyes or come out of meditation, it only feels like seconds have passed. And while you're in the state of meditation, you just feel a sudden bliss. Well, not even a sudden, it it's more of a you feel a consistent, peaceful kind of bliss. It's amazing. Only people who have meditated know what I'm talking about. And then once I got good at it, I thought I'd take it a step further. And we were warned that we shouldn't be doing this type of meditation by ourselves unless we're guided by a mentor. Because if you didn't understand what you were about to encounter, then this experience will not be pleasant. Okay, and here it goes. This is what you have to do. You need to start by finding the darkest place you can find. Okay, wherever it is. It not only has to be dark, it has to be soundless. Meaning absolutely no light can shine through. You're not able to see your hand in front of you. Okay, pitch black, quiet. Prepare like you always do, sit, lie down, whatever, and start meditating. Now, here's where it gets crazy, and we'll go into the science of it right after. But because there's no signal, okay, if because your eyes have no signal going through them, nothing is processing through your head, or at least anything meaningful. In other words, your brain doesn't know what to interpret of the darkness because your eyes cannot technically see. So then you have to rely on your other senses. And during meditation, those senses heighten. And guess what happens next? Your brain starts to hallucinate. Your brain starts to think that you are asleep. Because while you're meditating, your heart rate, everything goes on, it mimics before you sleep. Yet you can control yourself not to fall asleep. By what? Open your eyes. And then maybe 15-20 minutes into the meditation, you would start feeling your dreams come to life. While you're awake, you start hearing noises that are probably not coming from the room. You start seeing color. But this color is different. It's not what you see in the rainbow. It's color that hard to explain, more like light. Not your standard it's not your standardized color for sure. And what's scary is your body would start to feel different. Meaning you can hear whispers, you can feel things around you that shouldn't be there. And when I first did it, it was very frightening for me because around 20 or 30 minutes into my meditation, I felt a hand touch me. Right on my back. And it fucking scared the shit out of me. I panicked. I ran out the room and I never did it again. That was a straight-up self-driven high. No drugs, just you and darkness. How you can trick your brain. Now, once that happened, I didn't I didn't make up stories, I wasn't superstitious. I really wanted to know why that is. And so I did the research. That's why I included this in my book. It might sound a little bit boring, but the reason why I want to tell you is because it's meaningful. You realize that what you see isn't actually, you know, people say seeing is believing, right? But what if I told you that what you see is not even true? Because you actually don't see anything. Your brain hallucinates through reality based on its best guesses. So directly from the book, scientifically speaking, again, you don't actually see anything. Your brain, as an average adult, weighs about three pounds. 60% fat, the remaining combination of water, protein, carbs, and salt. The brain itself is not a muscle, like most would assume. It's surrounded by blood vessels, nerves, and neurons. All that scrapular neurobiology. And it serves as a master control for our body. That's how we regulate. Our existing reality cannot be seen or felt by our brain because it's not its job. Nor can it. It's inside our head. So how does the brain perceive this so-called uniform reality? Well, according to research, the human body sends 11 million bits per second of information to the brain to process. But the conscious mind, meaning when you're awake, focused, can only process about 50 bits per second. That's very little compared to how much information actually sent. Now, what does the what consists of these 11 million bits of information? Most also do not know. Remember when I said I was meditating because I couldn't see anything? My other senses had to take over? Well, why is that? It's because out of the 11 million bits of information, your eyes alone stand more than 90%. And then your skin, ear, smell, taste in that order. Like I said before, in the most literal sense, unlike anything you ever learned in school, you don't sense anything. As a matter of fact, you can't really smell or taste either. When focused light is projected onto your retina, it stimulates the rods and cones, right? And then it sends to the brain through the optic nerves an interpretation. It needs an interpretation. It needs a visualization. It sends those signals to the brain for that. And these signals are sent by electric impulses, kind of relatable to what the sensation actually is. So your brain combines all these signals, compares it with its database, which is your past experiences and what it believes the world should be, and creates it for you based on the brain's best prediction. That's right. Your brain is assuming and predicting your vision and everything else you sense. Everything. And so, like I was describing the experience, since your brain cannot see, hear, taste, or smell, it needs your sensory information for it to predict. It doesn't we don't passively perceive the world. You know, instead we actively generate it from what our brain thinks the outside world should look like. So our brain is literally hallucinating and constructing our reality based on best guesses. Almost similar to what you would do, what your brain would do during a test. So we're hallucinating all the time. Even now, as you're listening to my words, you're hallucinating. Pictures are being visualized in your head. So the other senses, although it only stands 10% of the total information input, but it helps the brain adjust its guess based on those specific added conditions. Make sense? So we are fully dependent on our heads to make the best guesses and align them in our lifetime to create mutual benefit. We can only hope that our brain doesn't differ too much from others. Because when we all agree on the same hallucination, that's called reality. And when you see reality different, you're called crazy. Alright, so there you have it. Now you have an understanding that you don't actually see shit. Your brain does what? It takes those impulses, converts them into best guesses, and then hallucinates your reality. Your brain does this consciously when you're awake, and when you're unconscious, it does it by the way of dreams. And so with dark meditation, they found ways to trick your brain while you're awake. It sounds creepy, but if you're able to control that, then you're able to face your demons. That's the philosophy behind it. That makes sense. So that was an experiment gone wrong. And one day when I gathered the courage to do it again, I'll for sure share with you guys. But here's also another experiment that ended up even more interesting. I did it on my kids. I made them both meditate every morning when they wake up for around 15 to 20 minutes. And they have not stopped for the past six years. Physically, emotionally, I can feel their change. It's very obvious. For instance, I have not seen any of them get angry or lose their temper in years. And most interesting of all is one day my son was in school, they were doing a test. The test was supposed to be the heart rate of a teen athlete versus an overweight teen. The overweight teen, the heart rate floated around 100 BPM. And my son's resting heart rate was 65 around. And as the teacher was talking, my son dripped into meditation, and within a minute, his heart rate dropped down to below 30. Everyone was shocked. They didn't think that was healthy either. And so the teacher made him do it again. And indeed, by meditation, he's able to drop his heart rate much quicker, much more efficient than anyone. Or at least in his class. So very interesting. It helped him focus better. So there are definitely benefits. People's understanding of meditation is that it's derived from religion, Asian traditions, right? Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. And the Western country popularized it through yoga, for instance, or for its mental curing effects. But most people don't know that meditation, this concept, was already made popular in the 1930s. The way we meditate now, at least in the Western world, is made famous by a Taoist medical book from the 16th century. The key word here is medical book. It wasn't a religious text, it wasn't a superstitious text, it wasn't a text about the dead or the living. Nothing like that. It was a medical book from the 16th century called Tai Yi Chinghua Tun. It was later translated with the four by Carl Jung, by the way. And the title of the book is now called The Secret of the Golden Flower. And see, the medicinal effects of meditation wasn't proven until just recently because we didn't have the technology to back it up. And so when you compare recent studies and what it tells you in these old classics, you would find a lot of similarities in that both agree that meditation creates neuroplasticity. Meaning that religion and science came together and both agree on meditation creates neuroplasticity, meaning it could remold your brain. It could reshape your prefrontal cortex, for instance, the part of the brain that controls emotion, makes decisions. And in general, it helps you control your brain to make it do what you need it to do, what you intend it to do, and not let it control you, because that's where mental conditions come from. And so, regardless of your background, where you're from, you're going to be faced with this one day or another. And I really do urge you to give it a try. We always on our phones, listen to podcasts, music. You probably can't even drive without being silent. But one day, if you had enough, turn everything off, shut the fuck up, and meditate. That's all the time we have for today. Thank you for tuning in again. I hope this episode wasn't too boring. Uncle Wong signing off. Peace.