I haven't heard enough about the arising and passing yet.
What I'd like is to know if it really is like some sort of atomisation of perceived experience and why this is profound. I'd like to know what sort of neural correlate this has too.
I still have no real idea whether I've experienced it or not. If, say, a strobing effect in the vision is A&P - as I've seen someone say - then I've experienced that but I can't say that in itself is profound (though seemingly it accompanies a fine sort of energetic state (to use wooly language)).
Here is an example of someone describing A&P in those terms - http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=13020
There's also a more subtle arising and passing, which is when sense impressions start to arise and pass, come and go, change, flux, very rapidly, like a seethe of bubbles in boiling water, or a shaken can of coke , or a fast flicker of a TV screen. Sounds can break down into tiny individual bits of noise, vision can flicker or kind-of strobe, tactile sensations can become... I dunno, it's hard to describe. Seething.
This can lead to the shocking insight that everything is impermanent, everything (or at least everything we can sense) is constantly changing, arising and passing away both on a mundane and supramundane level.
It's pretty cool.
Experiencing the sort of ecstasy where you merge with your surroundings and seem to be plunged into a pool of life
does seem profound (because it's such a major blow to your idea of being a fixed isolated self) but I would be hard put to say there was anything
especially atomised about it.
Although having said this I think that any sort of pleasure feeling from the pins and needles type you find in body scanning to the full on ecstasy does have a kind of atomised quality - that's why it's called pins and needles I think, because it feels like a mass of miniscule points of sensation.
If A&P is experiencing a quantisation of feeling and experience then it seems to me that most people experience that in their day to day life (relaxation, sex etc). so are there two types of atomised perception - one day to day and one found in meditation ?
Or, alternativey, is it just a matter of focus, that meditation will simply amplify and focus the normal experience of everyday atomised perceptions ? That seems to be my experience.
By that I mean that the practice I had was deep breathing and body scanning, getting to focus on the natural low level buzz in the body, the kind of pins and needles sensation of being alive. Eventually this led to ecstasy, but I would not say there was a qualitative difference between the two - simply that I normally perceived a trickle of "pins and needles" whereas meditation made me feel a waterfall of it. Or as the famous saying goes, a drop to an infinite ocean. If anyone would have listened I would have told them how it seemed to be like the difference between a bath and the reservoir from which you get your bathwater from - it's the same water, just the boundaries and depth have changed.
BTW
Oceanic metaphor for this sort of experience seems prevalent in Sufi and Hindu scripture and poetry, from what I've seen, but not so much in buddhism. Is this so ?