Hey!
I've recently been in a 40-day meditation retreat in Pa-Auk Tawya, Myanmar, a center which strongly focuses on the development of concentration before insight meditation. (i.e. full mastery of the jhanas with various objects of meditation before Vipassana). Long story short, I did 20 days of Anapana, probably reached "at least" access concentration since I was getting a fairly clear Nimitta and getting some Jhana factors, but switched to insight meditation since I felt like like I wouldn't reach even 1st Jhana according the very strict criterias at Pa-Auk (i.e. 3 hours fully absorbed, etc.)
Immediately upon starting insight meditation on the 20th day, reality started "breaking down" before me in a very intense way. Here's a small quote from a blog post about my complete retreat experience :
Physically, my five sensory inputs were experienced with so much distance that it didn’t even feel like it was actually happening to me. I couldn’t even see properly! My sense of sight was so strongly perturbed, I could only “see” reality from far away, with my two eyes resembling two round separate windows. The best way I can describe is that it felt like I was “watching” a movie that included all 5 senses and thought. I was experiencing everything, yet none of it felt close to me.
Based on Daniel's book, it seems like this was probably Equanimity, especially considering the "watching a movie" thing. In the retreat, I kept attaining this state again and again, and the subject/object duality was puzzling me deeply. It didn't make sense that I was "over here" and that my experiences were "over there", so to speak. Then, after about 10 days, this happened:
Upon meditating, around the day 30-ish, there was a definite shift in the way “I” experienced reality. While observing sensations, it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t conscious of the sensations. The sensations were conscious of themselves.
It might not make sense to you readers, or perhaps you wonder why such a difference would mean anything, but at that particular moment, it made all the difference in the world. “Consciousnesses” were arising jointly with their respective sensations. It all came as a “package deal”. There wasn’t “anyone” watching, the “process” was just watching itself. Consciousness was permeating what it was conscious of, just like the color yellow is imbued in a lemon.
It seems like this experience is similar to what people in this community refer to as "Stream Entry", but at the same time, perhaps I could be fooling myself while being in High Equanimity or something. I definitely feel like that experience was a sort of an "Eureka" moment, although it wasn't really the kind of thing I would have normally "expected" as being SE. I feel like some change has occured, but I don't feel that much different on a "conventional" level, and 3 months after the fact, I still feel like I'm in a period of "integrating my insights" in my daily life.
I still meditate frequently, sometimes up to a few hours a day, but I mostly do it for enjoyment, as it's hard for me to find the motivation to pursue insight practices (i.e. what to do next?).
Has anyone been through similar experiences? Any thoughts?
If you guys are interested, here's the complete blog post on my retreat. It's pretty detailed : http://www.updevelopment.org/2014/09/pa-auk-tawya/
Thank you!