How did this experience occur?
When I was done listening to my audio book in bed I decided to experiment and see if I could repeat the experience. I did. Here's how it went:
After a good few minutes trying to get access concentration and keep it the all over body fizz started and with just a little help by thinking about the parts that were not covered by this feeling i managed to suffuse the body with it. It's quite clean at this point, and the breath at the nostrils is very clear and focused.
I know that the next step is to drop the continued attention to the object so I just think about it becoming automatic. After a little time there's a shift, and it does become automatic. Now it's easier to concentrate, the focus on the breath is not quite effortless, but it's approaching that description for sure.
I don't feel ecstatically happy so dropping happiness doesn't seem very intuitive. Instead I just focus on deepening the experience. It's very clear that the bodily bliss is linked to the inbreaths and outbreaths -- after some time there is another shift and things feel different and I'm able to concentrate on the body feelings better than the breath.
I know that I want to drop the body feelings but don't know how, so I just think about what it felt like before, how it felt to not have that body-bliss/fizz stuff going on and after some time, it drops -- not like the flick of a switch, but gradually and with some effort to allow the process of dropping it to continue. Things are cool, calm but not like on retreat. The mind is very quiet. I can let it think about stuff easily enough, but I don't have to, it's a choice, rather than like the continued maintenance of concentration in other states and stages. It's very peaceful, but after a while I begin to wonder if Im meditating at all.
I don't know if I could have got up and maintained that feeling. It felt like that on retreat, but then the feeling was very much stronger --so much so I am not 100% sure it's the same thing, though it seems likely as under retreat conditions all my experiences were more dramatic/deeper/"more" etc.
VipassanaOnce i'd had enough of this and figured i really outght to sleep I tried, but as often happens, the mind was now intent on meditation...
I made no effort whatsoever in the beginning to manipulate the process. In the past this has led to good things when the mind is in this state: The first thing that happened was a suffusion of body-fizz and a very focused, clear feeling in the mind - very shortly after, DN stuff -- though so tame compared to when I was really going through it on retreat and a few weeks back - hard to see all the stages, i never saw dissolution at all but I did see Fear, and then Reobservation --or at least extremely similar symptoms of those states (just less extreme). Then came low EQ, very recognisable - some greater time spent here before a switch into what I think is high EQ - where it all becomes very fine, very automatic, no efforty kind of stuff.
I didn't interfere. I tried to just allow the experience to "pull me in", to "sink" into the "???" and there was a bit of orangey/gold brightness and a feeling like if you held a champaign cork under the water in the bath and leg go --a rising up and a gentle 'pop' though not really a pop, more a 'emergence'. There was a big feeling of "something big approaching" and some fear of letting go with all of this.
No, i don't think this was stream entry. Though it does seem like progress. This happened once more from the start when i tried yet again to get to sleep after eating something to take my mind of it. This next time I tried to manipulate the experience at the end (i couldnt seem to help doing this) and didn't experience the climax but apart from that it was pretty much the same.
So, either this is ALL EQ and the DN stuff is less because it's just the same experiences but under different conditions. OR, it's A&P -> EQ but i've traversed the DN so many times now that it's not such a big deal. I can live with either explanation!
Does that sound about right?