| | Today I had an experience similar to what I described before, but without the unknowing event. I did shamatha for about fifteen minutes and entered and exited the First Jhana in soft form a few times. Then, later in the day, I noticed the panoramic vibratory stuff and decided to take my lunch break and use it for insight practice.
I dropped right into High Equanimity by entering choiceless awareness. The sense field progressively dissolved over about twenty minutes. The vibrations became finer and appeared in higher resolution, by which I mean there were more of them. I suppose a better way of saying that is that the impermanent quality of the sense field became more complete as I noticed more and more tingles evenly spread throughout space. This was especially true in the visual and somatic fields.
As I became more concentrated(Kanika Samadhi?), I felt a pleasurable pressure in the front of my head in and around the area of my third eye. The feeling of pressure gently rose to the crown of my head. As it did, it became subtler and the area of activity shrank. It was a feeling similar to what I described in the first post, except the transition from the third eye to the crown, which I will call the 6th and 7th Chakras, was clearer and more fluid.
I felt the sense of expansive openness again as the vibrations, which where still perceived, faded a bit. I could still feel the "suchness tingles", but now the empty, open, expansive feeling was the predominant quality of experience. I think what happened is that I was shifting from feeing impernanence to Anatta, the No/Non-self characteristic, and seeing that panoramically like the vibrations.
Then I tried to balance the two qualities. I noticed that If I shifted back to only the impermanence characteristic, the pressure returned to the 6th Chakra in a way that felt somehow like regression. So, I'm not quite sure how to describe this, but I "ascended" back up to the 7th Chakra and then sort of tried to bring the awareness of tingling, fluxing impermanence "up" to that level so that the impermanence and selflessness could be perceived equally in a balanced, panoramic, clear, and complete way.
Then I noticed something like big waves of sensation, like the vibrations were lining up so tat the whole sense field throbbed a few times. Things didn't sync up totally as waves of integrated space like I think I heard Daniel describe in one of the cheetah house videos, but it was like I managed to watch all of experience undulate a few times. It only happened like four times though and I didn't manage to experience it again.
Then I noticed that my break was almost over and I got really sleepy. I had a moment of almost nodding off, but I stopped myself. I think the last time this happened the unknowing event I had was probably just me falling asleep for a split second.
The session was over, so I returned to work and went about my day with a boosted sense of wellbeing. I was more equanimous and my body felt more energetically balanced.
These expereinces seem to arise more automatically and then take less effort to mature when I do concentration practices. Even though I was doing Shamatha like three hours before the experience described above, I think that pumping my relatively weak concentration abilities somehow made that experience more likely to just happen naturally.
Also, both times thing Chakra thing has happened I've ended up feeling sleepy towards the end of the practice session. This is less than ideal, because not only do I need to stay alert to notice what's happening, I also need to keep my eyes open to watch for any discontinuities of experience which could be Fruitions and differentiate them from just quickly nodding off or any other sort of unknowing event.
SO,
A). I'm going to put more energy into developming my Jhanic abilities, and B ). I'm going to take better care of my body so that I have more energy and I'm not so sleepy at times when I want to practice
If I fully apply myself, I know that I can do this. The issue is learning to make effort equanimous so that I'm not backsliding by craving and grasping results of disciplined practice. I'm going on retreat as soon as possible, unfortunately that won't be for a while, so I will continue the "wearing down the hill" approach and allow EQ to gradually mature and then nail it on a Goenka retreat this Spring/Summer. |