Can Meditative States Help Prevent Strokes?

Friday, 11 July 2025, 9:43 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

“Thoughts That Can’t Be Spoken” is a fascinating piece about a writer’s experience of a stroke. Alberto Manguel describes what happened after “a blood clot in one of the arteries that feeds my brain had blocked for a few minutes the passage of oxygen.” The essay offers inadvertent insight into the meditative state.

During and after his stroke, Manguel said that it was as if “thought had become demagnetized and was no longer capable of attracting the words supposed to define it.” Declaring that “thought forms itself in the mind by means of words, he said that it was like “the metal shavings gathering around the magnet of thought no longer stuck, but would dissolve into meaningless fragments.”

In some ways that sounds like what happens during meditative states, with one huge difference. Rather than the terrible injury of a stroke, the brain is functioning at its highest level in the completely quiet state created by methodless meditation. Is thought “demagnetized” both during a stroke and during meditative states?  

Meditation, in the sense I’m using the word has nothing to do with watching one’s breath or repeating a mantra, nor any of the tricks and techniques for quieting the mind that countless “meditation teachers” are peddling these days.

True meditation begins with passive observation ending the infinite regress of the observer, which allows the brain to effortlessly gather intense, non-directed attention that spontaneously quiets thought.  

During the meditative state, words are no longer able to instantaneously cluster and crystallize around a center. That is, the whole brain becomes attentive enough to thought as a single movement that words, images, memories and associations cannot attach themselves around an illusory self. 

The first time this happens to a strong degree it elicits fear, because one thinks that something may be going wrong. But if one questions and remains with the fear, it evaporates. 

Though it feels like the ground is dissolving from under one’s feet, what is actually happening is one’s liberation from conditioning and fixedness. There is the feeling of the fluidity of water in a completeness of being.

In another telling simile, Manguel said that as his stroke was happening, it felt like “I had come to a dam that blocked my way.” That’s somewhat how thought is experienced after awakening. 

Having had an experiential insight that temporarily ends thought, from then on thought feels like a dam that blocks perception and insight. In other words, there is a proprioception of thought. 

We habitually and reflexively take word formation and memory association as givens, but passive watchfulness of this automaticity ends it, at least for the time being. 

We believe that we control our thoughts but actually the conditioned and habitual programs of thought, which include the self, control us. The illusion is seen through during methodless meditation, and the ego, which is a bundle of memories and images plus will, is emotionally experienced as the basic impediment to direct perception and insight.

Evincing both a funny and disturbing reflexivity, Manguel concludes his essay by a mind-bending bit on nonsense: “Now, after my stroke, I try to make myself aware of the path my thoughts travel before transforming themselves into words on the page. I try, but it’s all too quick. My thoughts outwit me.”

“My thoughts outwit me” is psychologically absurd. What is the “me” that “my thoughts” outwit except a form of thought as well? 

“I try to make myself aware of the path of my thoughts” is a triple redundancy. Thought is actually a single movement; there is no ‘I’ that stands apart. Even to say “my thoughts” is a vicious circle, because there’s no “me” separate from “my thoughts.” 

The observer/self is the basic illusion produced by the human mind, the source of division, conflict and fragmentation. It is ripping apart the planet, yet like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it cannot stop.

With watchfulness and mindfulness however, awareness grows quicker than thought, and the illusion of the observer/self falls away. Then there’s just observation, and the brain naturally and unnoticeably gathers attention until the mind spontaneously ceases its chatter.

Thought dominates the human brain, and artificial thought is already ruling and ruining many people. Insight has its source beyond thought, and growing in insight is liberation from thought. 

AI will never have an insight. So as AI takes over more and more of the functions of thought, can the brain live in terms of insight, rather than the self and contents of thought? 

I don’t know, but it’s imperative, as the world becomes more fragmented and mad, that the serious individual regularly “de-magnetizes” thought in the brain. That’s the action of meditation, and it allows one’s inner life to grow despite living in a moribund global culture. 

In deeper meditative states, there’s simply a state of insight, in which there are no words or thoughts at all. Then the immanent sacredness of life and the cosmos comes as a benediction.  

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail