There are many meditative practices and techniques which have been and are still today employed, all of them having a great deal in common. The particular aspects or idiosyncrasies—each system, of course, possessing its own unique set—are immaterial. Some require a fixed idea upon which focuses all of his attention; some expressly forbid precisely this; many involve one sort of regulated breathing, others a very different kind. But these differences are completely external, as the essential goal shared by all meditative practices is that of quieting the mind. This is usually a preliminary step taken toward a greater control of, or even mastery over, the mind—this is something which is itself quite odd and deserving of review, that one “part” of the mind should “act” on another “part.”

However, there is a terrible danger encountered by anyone who begins a traditional meditative practice. When the neophyte learns the very early stages of meditation, his mind is a maelstrom of chaotic, madly interwoven, and competing thoughts and thought-fragments. The presence of these is endemic to the human animal, to his mind, due to the rather simple fact that the brains we have evolved are a great deal larger and more complex than is strictly necessary for our survival. Our pattern recognition systems, as an example, work at a breakneck pace every moment of our waking lives. This alone presents a continual torrent of background “noise” which our minds are made to bear at all times. 

What is not so obvious is the fact that this very noise evolved quickly and out of great necessity. Lower animals do not have this noise, nor do they have thoughts which have any real comparison to those which humans have, and so they exist in a sort of “silence” which keeps them safe from the Thrum.

The Thrum goes by many names, the more common of which is “Witchwhistle,” but is also known to some prior generations as, loosely translated, “voices in the dark.” The origin of the Thrum is unclear and precisely what it is is completely opaque to any inquiry. This is due in no small part to the fact that almost all of those who experience the Thrum do not thereafter have the capacity to describe it (or anything at all). 

The danger of meditation, of its early stages of quieting the mind, ridding it, bit by bit, of the carapace of background noise, is the following. The entry to this intermediate stage can be likened to a gate which leads into a tremendously long antechamber. Once he crosses the threshold of the gate, he enters this antechamber, which despite its external appearance, is completely black. Furthermore, when he looks backward at the gate, it begins receding, and his descent into quiet begins. This “descent,” however, is literal in the context of the metaphor of the antechamber. He begins to fall into a dark chasm which has neither light nor air—though he needn’t breathe, the lack of air gives no sensory indication that he is falling beyond the fact that the pinhole of light above is rapidly disappearing.

The chasm into which he falls is increasingly quiet, which is when he begins to hear the Thrum. What we know of the few who have survived this fall and decided to exit the infinite hallway as opposed to searching for its end, entering into a greater mastery of the mind, is that the Thrum sounds like many human voices, but too many to count. They are talking, laughing, screaming, weeping, and no two in the same language. The Thrum grows louder as the would-be mystic falls further and faster. No meaning can be discerned from the voices. As the light above vanishes completely, there are two simultaneous events. The first is that the cacophony of voices swells to a single sound which is both that of a human voice and the bellowing of a creature which has neither name nor description. The second is the appearance of a new light far, far below. Something glows in the deep and, as the fall continues, the glow grows in size, but not in brightness. This sour glow—usually described as a sickly, pale lime-green—grows to fill the whole of his field of vision. 

The only known way out of this fall is to follow another sound, should he be able to hear it above the wailing of the man-creature all around, which is the calm, instructive voice of his master, the one guiding him along the journey toward the aforementioned greater mastery over the mind. 

What is strange about this is that while many are able to hear this voice and progress in their meditative practice; a few are able, by powers unknown, save themselves from the fall into the glow of the Thrum; and some are lost forever to the dark, the din, and the terrible descent into whatever it is there at the bottom of it all; the overwhelming majority of those who begin some sort of guided meditation appear to take absolutely no notice of the dark antechamber leading to higher states. They describe no such experience, nor do they understand at all the very idea. One could speculate that these people are merely immune to the Thrum, but this seems untenable, lest we succumb to the ultimate pessimism: That most humans are not conscious beings who think thoughts as you or I do. 

What is more likely is that the Thrum has some vital and intelligent essence, and that it chooses only a select few to draw into its own, black enlightenment.