| | Hi Jackson,
Some of this sounds awfully familiar! After resting attention on a fluttering sensation (a certain vibration in my inner sound perception), I'll experienced the subsequent bunching up of energy behind the eyebrows, accompanied by REM or sometimes involuntary squinting, and a thrusting up" inclination or pull. In my practice, these occur around the entrance to 4th Jhana, this being the only one I've managed to attain with any good degree of hardness and regularity so far (pre first path, for reference). My entrance to 4th is not "up", but "out, opening up", however, and usually involves a 3-D visual perception of bright dots for a while - like seeing the depth and perspective in a star constellation, or like those "indras jewelled net" toys made of beads and thin wire.
Also, kasina practice tends to accumulate energy behind my eyebrows, and my first experience of hard fourth jhana happened on the day of my first sit gazing at a kasina.
According to the map you linked to, the immaterial jhanas and the pureland jhanas are subsets of the fourth, so it kind of makes sense to have these aspects present in fourth itself.
So, do you experience the bunching up of energy and the REM only in connection with PL-1/2? If so, how would you place my experience? A momentary experience just outside PL-1 before my mind settles in 4th, perhaps? Or some kind of siddhi related activity, not necessarily connected to PL states?
Very interesting.
Cheers, Florian |