Before I start, here is my rough history of meditation:

- I started meditating in 2008 using the method in a book called "The Presence Process" by Michael Brown. This used a combination of breath awareness and a mantra. I entered first jhana "accidentally" without knowing what it was (that book is a Western self-help book and does not mention any Eastern practices). That happened within the first two weeks of practising.

- After completing the book I shifted to Shinzen Young's "The Science of Enlightenment" CD series, whose core message is, "Observe phenomena with mindfulness and equanimity". I quickly began to see sensations at finer and finer resolutions, and crossed the A&P, again without knowing what that even was. I continued this practice not just every day but literally all the time -- meaning I engrained a habit of constant mindfulness.

- I found MCTB in perhaps 2014. I was able to retrospectively identify many of the territories I had crossed through on my journey so far, which was helpful because I had had so many wacky experiences that I didn't have a name for. I began paying more attention to individual sensations and my practice morphed through various forms as I tried to absorb the methodology Daniel was putting across. Eventually however I went back to my Shinzen Young method because I was used to it and had already got great results from it, and felt that Daniel's methodology was a bit incompatible with my neurological type (a topic I have some theories about but won't go into here). One thing I took away from MCTB however was that I would get more results from going deeper into the meditation and really trying to see what was going on in the sensations etc. So, I started spending more time on individual meditation sessions, e.g. sometimes doing 8 hours straight or even longer (but this would not be every day).

I am now going to describe a specific experience I had starting in November 2015, which culminated in something profound happening in January 2016. I am going to strip out all labels and just describe, as best I can, the "raw sense data". Hopefully then some of you can help me identify what these experiences were.

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In November 2015 I began to notice that I had a wavelike ripple formation in the centre of my vision with eyes closed. This formation was small and was exactly in the centre, and was only noticeable with eyes closed when looking for it right in the centre. It looked a bit like this in shape:




However, the ripples were black and white and were made of the grainy stuff you see with eyes closed. They appeared to move outward as though emanating from the centre.

Despite being there pretty much every time I closed my eyes, for some reason I decided to pay them little attention and continued using the breath as my object during meditation.

Two months later, in January 2016, however, this changed. One day while semi-reclined on my bed, I decided to meditate directly upon the wave formation. Results were very sudden. The wave formation grew in size until it filled my entire field of vision. Emotions would interfere with the neatness of the pattern at first until I realized that if I relaxed into each emotion as it arose, the wave pattern would become coherent. After a few seconds of this, it became vast in size and filled my entire field of awareness, and my impression of having a body completely disappeared. So, my entire experience was just these waves. They would move and turn with my emotions. Eventually I got my emotional state so steady and relaxed that the waves were very coherent, and at this point it was like I was surfing on the waves toward a horizon which was infinitely far away (yet all the waves appeared to travel towards this horizon). My experience was similar to this Media Player visualization, starting at 25 seconds in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9k4i6FpKRw

However, the waves were coherent like the stable grid at the bottom (but not gridded; just endless waves) rather than chaotic like the crap at the top.

Question 1) What the hell is this wavescape thing?

Now, here starts the second part of my experience.

I exited the wavescape state by just opening my eyes and coming back to "reality". I stayed out of that state for a few minutes. Then I closed my eyes and saw that the wave formation was there in the middle again, as it was before. However, this time I did not focus on the waveform, but rather the space around it.

At this point there was the sudden, jarring sensation of my body very suddenly falling away, and me being propelled into outer space.

I was now in what I would call a "spacefield". The space all around me was completely devoid of anything, meaning there was absolutely nothing visual in there -- just total blackness. However, it was still tangibly three-dimensional "space". So, I could "sense" that it had volume despite it being black.

At the back of the "spacefield" was a "starfield" made of singular oval white dots. I began to focus upon the dots and found myself travelling through a strange cylinder with total blackness at the far end but seemingly endless amounts of these white dots on the walls of this cylinder. The white dots were laid out in uniform fashion. The "cylinder" was IMPLIED by the layout of the white dots -- so I inferred that I was travelling through a cylinder based on the layout and motion of the white dots. It was a little like this:




However, the destination point was NOT off to one side like in the above picture, but was instead straight-on. The uniformity of the dots in the above picture however is approximately correct. To reiterate, the dots were white in my experience.

Note 1: I had seen this tunnel of white dots before, which was during entry to a lucid dream. It occurred while holding my consciousness together and passing through the sleep phases while remaining conscious, and I passed through this tunnel briefly before emerging in the lucid dream.

Note 2: For a moment, when first entering the tunnel, the dots actually looked like little galaxies drifting by me, and reminded me strongly of the Hubble Deep Field scan:



However, they reverted to white dots again and the experience continued.

Question 2: What is the spacefield and what are the white dots -- and what is that "moving through a tunnel" formation all about?

Here is where things become even more interesting. If I relaxed and got some emotional tone, the dots would in fact begin to merge and become those wave formations from the first experience. Additionally, I could also "drop back" and experience them as dots again just by shifting my attention to the previous mode, though I am currently at a loss for words to describe how I did that. It was a bit like pulling on a gearstick in my mind. Using the "gearstick", I could pull back the white dots to a completely static starfield, with the infinite black space sensation still in between them all.

Finally, I began to zoom in on just one of the white dots, getting ever closer. While doing this, a few other white dots would strangely orbit the central one I was zooming in on. Also, the closer I got, the more the central white dot would just stay the same. At this point it looked really "bitty" -- like it was made of just one pixel on a computer screen. As I got closer, one of the orbiting white dots fizzled away, then so did the other one, then finally, after some bizarre feeling of intense trepidation, I had the feeling of something being ripped right out of the centre of me -- and the single white dot exploded, and all of reality ended. The moment where reality did not exist is just inferred by the visual at the end when the dot exploded, then the restarting of reality afterwards. I have no idea how long it lasted but it seemed just like an instant. Things faded back in after that. The moment reality ended was like a sudden fizz followed by indefinable nothingness.

I was then able to close my eyes and repeat the process as many times as I liked. I probably went through the whole sequence about 12 times in a row after that.

I then could not sleep for about two days, and felt totally wired. Every time I closed my eyes I would drop into that starfield with the infinite space. It literally felt like I was being shot into outer space each time. Even just watching television, my attention was so powerful that it would "glue" to the picture on the TV screen and that starfield would appear around in the periphery, and the starfield would then quickly fade in to fill the whole of my visual field and I would have that "leaving my body" sensation. It was happening literally every time I paid attention to anything.

In the end I took a valium just to make it end so I could fall asleep, which worked a treat. When I woke up that wave formation from the centre of my vision was gone, and it has not returned. However, this has now been replaced by something else: Everytime I look at anything, but particularly if I look into the distance, a sense of there being a horizon in front of me is basically always present. So, even as I'm looking at this computer screen, there is a sense of infinite depth extending through the screen and forming a horizon at some unimaginably distant point. The "screen" -- and everything else in my surroundings -- therefore looks like it's just this kind of translucent "stuff" suspended in a 3D "space". When I settle back and see that horizon, all the objects in my surroundings suddenly look completely ephemeral, like I could just move my hand right through them -- like they are mist, or clouds. This bothered me at first as I would get that intense panic feeling every time objects would appear to be this "dream stuff", but that has now completely changed and I have come to love seeing the world like that.

Question 3: What happened here?

Your input is greatly appreciated.