Using Meditation to Access Infinity Stone (Like) Powers

Altering your experience of time & your perceptions.

In 1963 Thich Quang Duc burned himself alive. He didn’t move an inch during the whole thing. He Sat completely still: no facial expression, no emotions, nothing.

He did this as a form of protest against the widespread persecution of Buddhists in Vietnam at the time.

I didn’t actually believe this story when I first heard about it, but Malcolm Brown — the new york times reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning piece on this — took pictures of the whole event.

In the piece Malcolm said:

“He never yelled out in pain. His face seemed to remain fairly calm until it was so blackened by the flames that you couldn’t make it out anymore. Finally, the monks decided he was dead and they brought up a coffin, an improvised wooden coffin.”

A large part of the mental and spiritual abilities monks have, that allow them to do crazy feats like this, is attributed to their rigorous meditation practices.

I’d heard about the powerful mental abilities people get from doing meditation. But what Thich Quang Duc did was like a Marvel superhero (in my opinion).

It’s stories like this that introduced me to the possibility that meditation could be used to open doors beyond just trying to feel a little less stressed throughout the day.

I’m definitely not a high-level meditator. I’ve not always been perfectly consistent with it. But I’ve done it relatively often for the past 10 years, and I’ve experienced first-hand some of the powerful mental abilities it can give.

These abilities stem from the awareness and presence you cultivate when meditating. Funnily enough, they mirror some of the infinity stone powers from Avengers.

Because I’ve not been the most consistent, I’ve only had glimpses and short experiences of these things, but they’ve been verified by more experienced practitioners.

Reality Stone:

Most forms of meditation involve observing your thoughts. Whether you’re focusing on the breath, some bodily sensation, or a particular feeling.

At some point, you digress and your mind wanders off into random thoughts:

Some TikTok video you saw yesterday, Will Smith’s slap, that loan payment you might miss because you’ve mismanaged your spending again (definitely not me), someone that’s been irritating you at work, general gossip etc.

Sometimes you’ll wander off into heavier thoughts. It could be some long-standing regret you’ve always had, something you hate about yourself, or upcoming events you’re concerned about.

These are the things we daydream about on a daily basis, but when you’re meditating the point is to become conscious of the thoughts while they’re happening (as conscious as you can).

A lot of the time, when you slip into this unconscious thinking, you don’t realise it straight away. You get trapped in the thought until at some point you notice you’ve gone off again and you’re meant to be meditating.

You’re not meant to fight this, you’re not meant to try and stop the thought cycle. You don’t react to the thought or feeling, you just observe it.

When it naturally stops, your attention goes back to focusing on your breath, the environment or whatever else the focal point of your meditation was.

In reality, it doesn’t go that smoothly. When you’re just starting out, you tend to spend the majority of the time daydreaming and not much time consciously observing. But it gets better.

There are lots of benefits to this practice, but the two I’m focusing on are non-reactivity and perspective.

Non Reactivity

When you get better at this practice, you’re able to observe your thoughts and feelings without trying to interpret them, react, or do anything with them. This translates through to daily life and you get better at being non-reactive.

When thoughts come up about the person who pissed you off at work, or how unfair it is that other people have certain advantages you don’t, you’re able to just watch them.

You watch these “negative” thoughts or feelings as if they were something happening outside of you. As if you were watching some drunk guy stumbling out of the pub yelling about something or another.

Normally, you’d react to the negative thoughts/feelings straight away.

You’d get upset, you might react in an aggressive way, you might go gossip about the person you think has an unfair advantage, you might do something underhanded, or you might just feel sh*t.

There’s no space between the negative thought/feeling and the way you react to it, so you’re controlled by it.

Perspective & Context

The separation you get from meditation allows you to look at the thoughts/feelings from a different perspective because you’re detached from them.

Rather than getting riled up and doing something that probably doesn’t benefit you, you can look at the thought/feeling and gain perspective.

It could be that you get cut up in traffic. Normally you’d feel that road rage and start screaming or swearing, or both.

But being able to notice that feeling and not react, you might realise that person could’ve been in a rush to the hospital because a loved one had been in an accident -unlikely I know.

You might notice that even if this person was just being an idiot, swearing and shouting won’t help.

You might even notice that when you’re angry, your fist gets clenched up, your body feels tense, your heart starts racing, and you don’t feel good.

As you notice the feelings in your body while you’re angry, you might start to notice that it’s actually hurting you, and not the other person.

You’re the one feeling upset, you’re the one with a raised blood pressure you’re the one holding that toxic emotion.

You might just come to the conclusion that you’re abusing yourself by getting angry. That realisation might be enough to make the anger disappear. And even if it doesn’t, at least you’re in a position to choose a different reaction.

The non-reactivity and perspective allow you to recontextualise your situation and form a different perception of it. This transforms it into something completely different.

Like Lee Atwater and many after him have said: “Perception is reality.”

This is similar to what the reality stone does in Avengers. It gives the user the ability to manipulate reality.

You can change one thing into something completely different. In Avengers Infinity Wars there’s a scene where Thanos uses the stone to turn the bullets from Chris Pratt’s gun into liquid bubbles.

Awareness does something similar: It can turn problems into gifts. It can turn advantages into disadvantages.

At my old workplace, there was a girl who used to get given easy leads and had extra help closing them. Some of us weren’t being given great leads and weren’t getting the support we needed.

A compulsive reaction would have been to get angry, bitch about how unfair it was and maybe just leave.

But being able to take a step back, detach from my initial feelings about the situation, and gain perspective, I was able to see that those thoughts didn’t help me regardless of whether or not they were true.

I was able to somewhat let go of them and focus on what was actually going to help me. I was able to come up with a new perspective; to turn the situation into something completely different.

It became an opportunity to be creative about finding my own leads. To reach other out to people wider in the business. To work harder and exercise some very useful traits like humility, persistence and acceptance.

I decided the situation was a test, to see how I’d react. If I’d bitch and complain, or focus on myself and level up.

Awareness can transform pain into strength. It can turn hate into love and transform sadness into joy.

Time Stone

Albert Einstein showed that time is not constant with his theory of relativity. The theory showed that time can pass differently for people depending on the speed at which their Travelling.

Steven Taylor also writes about our relative experience of time in The Fall.

I’ve mentioned this in previous articles: In the book, he explains why our experience of time is so much different to our ancestors and why time seems to move more quickly for us.

Our busy, forward-looking lives mean we’re always looking ahead to the next thing:

The next meeting at work, the next pay review, the next holiday, the next night out. We’re never really present, we don’t sit here, in each moment, fully engaged.

This makes us feel like we’re always behind. Like we’re always chasing something in the future. But we never get there, so it feels like time is slipping away, quickly.

This kind of experience has gotten even worse since the pandemic.

Meditation helps with this.

It helps you to become more present, and more engaged in what is happening right now, without looking to the next thing.

You still do whatever it is you need to do, this evening, or next week, you just don’t think about them more than you need to.

Rather than thinking about all the things you need to do for the rest of the day or in the coming weeks while you’re brushing your teeth, you just brush your teeth.

When it comes time to plan for the day, you plan for the day.

When the next task for your day comes up, you do that, without compulsively thinking about the next thing.

Each moment flows seamlessly into the next, creating a smooth, unobstructed experience of time.

This makes your experience of time feel longer and richer.

I’ve heard that some of the most advanced meditators can even make time completely stop for themselves (or at least feel like it has stopped).

I’m not entirely sure what I think of that, but the point remains:

Just like the Time Stone in infinity wars, meditation can allow you to manipulate time (at least your experience of it).

You don’t have to be an experienced or advanced meditator to start leveraging these abilities. Like anything, the more you do it, the better you’ll be at them. But even just starting out a few minutes a day, most days, is enough to start seeing results.

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