| | Dear Dee,
Various schools of thought exist around here regarding NS, and various criteria get bandied about.
I personally am rather old-school about what you should call NS. There should be no experience, no time, no anything whatsoever about which to make a judgement, no basis for comparison, as the texts say, not even "nothing going on", but more like "total and complete world and attentional power outage and then recovery". In this it might be said to be very much like a Fruition except that the setup, entrance, exit, and afterglow are totally different. NS is like having the main breaker on all experience thrown and then popped back on again.
How do you differentiate 7th jhana (nothingness) from the state you are calling nothing going on?
How about 8th?
Are you sure it is not one of those? The would seem likely candidates...
Daniel |