Jane Laurel Carrington:
I don't want to jump to conclusions here, but it's a fact that going off antidepressants can be really disorienting. That may not be the explanation for what happened here, but if you've just quit them then it's likely that you're getting withdrawal symptoms. Did you taper the medication carefully with a doctor's input? Or did you just stop taking it? Be careful with that stuff.
The doctor said that they would not lead to addiction. And the dosis was very low. I didn't feel withdrawal symptoms, just that I'm more alive and have a wider spectrum of emotions. Thanks for your remarks, I will keep it in my mind though.
J B:
There is really no definitive criteria for diagnosing an A+P experience outside of Vipassana practice, as far as I know. Chances are if you have had some kind of mind-blowing experience that was also terrifying, especially if it changed how you see your life, it was a kind of A+P. Chances are, if you're preoccupied with the question of whether or not to meditate, you had an A+P experience at some time. And, chances are, if you're experimenting with concentration practices and fascinated by past lives, you're going to stumble across the question of what composes your moment to moment experience of reality, if you haven't already. Once that happens, the only cure (known to me, anyway) is insight practice.
Haha, very down-to-earth comment! Motivating!
Daniel M. Ingram:
I agree, dreams are safe and learning that they are safe is a very important part of lucid dreaming, but even if you don't learn it, they are still relatively safe.
Good to know, that takes some fear from me.
Daniel M. Ingram:
I still think that powers, practicing in dreams, and that sort of stuff is very, very suggestive of A&P territory, so that would still be my best guess.
Is it possible to verify if it was an A+P?
Given my limited capacity to experience my moment to moment reality: How can I distinguish between limited capacity in the sense of lack of training from dark night ramnifications?
MCTB:
Whereas one might have felt that one’s attention had finally attained the one-pointed focus that is so highly valued in most ideals of meditation during the Arising and Passing Away, during the Dark Night one will have to deal with the fact that one’s attention is actually quite wide and its contents unstable. Further, the center of one’s attention becomes the very least clear area of experience, and the periphery becomes predominant.
Given my present identity crisis it is not easy to distinguish dark night dark mood from dark mood because of identity crisis.
MCTB:
There are two basic things that happen during the Dark Night, one emotional, the other perceptual. Our dark stuff tends to come bubbling up to the surface with a volume and intensity that we may never have known before. Remembering what is good in our life can be difficult in the face of this, and our reactivity in the face of our dark stuff can cause us staggering amounts of needless suffering. On top of this, we also begin to experience directly the fundamental suffering of duality, a suffering that has always been with us but which we have never known with this level of intensity or ever clearly understood. We face a profound and fundamental crisis of identity as our insight into the Three Characteristics begins to demolish part of the basic illusion of there being a separate or permanent us. This suffering is a kind of suffering that has nothing to do with what happens in our life and everything to do with a basic misunderstanding of all of it.
My plan is to keep my life functioning. And to try to ecperiency my moment to moment experience as it is. To learn noting. To see vibrations. How can I do the step from seeing the flow of sensations to see it "blink"?
MCTB:
Meditation can be the same way, and until one breaks out of this, things can get a bit mired down in the overstuffed cushions of Dissolution. However, when the perception of things ending becomes clearer again, there arises...
Perception of things ending... Can I fasten this up with the Note Gone technique from Shinzen Young? To learn all this seems like the right thing to do, independent of being in the dark night or not.