| | I started meditating about 9 months ago. Nowadays, I try to do 35 minutes a day, which I usually manage about 4-5 times a week. I have recently started having a very peculiar experience. It feels like it should have a name, since it is clearly brought about by mindfulness practice and it is a very well defined state of mind, but I haven't been able to find a good match in the texts I read. I can almost make this happen at will, provided my mind is calm enough at the moment. I guess it's best described by an example.
The last time it happened when I walked from a point to another on the street, and decided that since it's idle mental time, I could as well practice some mindfulness. I took a breath or two, stopped the self-talk and tried to pay attention to the raw sensory experiences, noting each of them as they come, which is how I understand what insight meditation is, and the sensory experiences came flooding my mind.
In these cases, there is a moment of elation, and I either get overwhelmed by it, in which case it is over quickly, or manage to "surf" it, be aware of the joy itself but not wrapping my mind around it. In this case it feels like physically balancing on a thin plank, manuveuring between being too dull to be aware of everything and overfocusing on the bliss of the moment.
It's as if I was aware of all the sensory input that hits my mind: the warm sun bathing my skin, the touch of the ground on my soles and through my shoes, the noises the tram passing by makes, rainbow in the arc of water in a nearby fountain, the wrinkles on the face of an old man on the street, the fear that I will eventually also get old and frail, the face of a pretty girl with every single dimple and barely visible strand of hair, a light touch of lust she evokes in me... all these and much more just come and go. The trick seems to be to pay the right amount of attention to each of these: enough to be aware, but not too much so that my mind stops in its tracks. It feels like droplets of water hitting the ground while it's raining heavily, each of them a single experience.
It's also as if I could feel the chains of causality that resulted in me having these experiences: if I focus on it, like one focuses a camera or aims a searchlight, I feel the trace of droplets in the arc of the fountain, see the young boy the old man was and the coffin he will eventually be buried in, see the factory my shoe was made in, the animal whose hide its leather was made of...
It's an overwhelmingly blissful, enrapturing feeling. I'd have to think hard of anything that even comes close. Part of it is the flow of becoming aware of all the sensory input, sort of like playing a fast-paced video game perfectly, part of it is the effort required to keep up this state and part of it is the pure joy of experiencing. It's as if every, even the most mundane sensory experience suddenly acquired cosmic significance. It's certainly something that I do want to experience again and again. Almost addictive.
What's this? Is this a known landmark, or one of the "nothing to see here, move along" unusual things one experiences during meditation? It sort of feels like the descriptions of first jhana I read, except that I haven't managed to reproduce it on the cushion yet, and that I expect that achievement to take more practice. I do admit that my judgement is clouded by the fact that I do want to achieve it, though. |