basically I was asked to speak within a specific thought paradigm so he could try to prove his point either to himself or others whom he had been debating with lol...so I spoke the best analogy available in that thought paradigm....though I am not sure whether I gave him a victory or a defeat lol.

Tell me about this...how did it happen...what were the circumstances?

the approach: sitting with open-eyes. i was wondering how exactly 'i' investigate things... it seems like thoughts are a constant part of my contemplations, so i wondered if it was actually useful.. then i wondered if it was actually not the volitional thinking that was doing anything, but rather, that thoughts arose when in a skillful absorption (perhaps as a side-effect and not the main event), and that i mistook cause + effect and started fostering thoughts whenever i meditate, perhaps to trigger the skillful absorption. maybe that's why i always have trouble quieting the monkey mind - cause of attachment to thoughts.

anyway i started wondering if i entered a kind of thinking-jhana.. this led to contemplation on the 7 factors of enlightenment, more below. but anyway i was sitting with that in mind, and i suppose i started getting into arupa jhanas.

at some point something started happening that has before - the visual field got a bit weird. perception diminished, but not entirely - visual field was blurry-ish, not really well-perceived. perhaps 8th jhana. then certain aspects of the visual field started patterning themselves - this happened before, too - in this case, the pattern of the wooden hardwood floor started appearing everywhere. however, this time, some conditions were different, and the process was able to keep happening. it soon came that the entire visual field, which i could see crisply + clearly - as in not faded or dimmed or wobbly - was just a repeating pattern of piece-of-hardwood-floor. quite surreal indeed. then (and this might be out-of-order): a bit of a weird slip where all 6 senses integrated - might have been 'being' leaving - the disappearance of all vedana, along with coarse-rough ever-present touch sensations in my head, and then even that visual perception, along with any auditory or tactile perception, stopped happening. it was really clear, incredibly incredibly relaxing - and if being was indeed absent, then this state is a true refuge, so that makes sense.

i dont know how long the lack of being part lasted, though i somehow got the impression it wasn't long.

interesting thing was that, firsrt the state was entered, then there was a 'pang' of becoming in the 'middle' of it (but not really 'middle'). normally it would be associated with the center of my head, but that wasn't being felt, so it was really just somewhere out of space. then the pang faded. a very similar pattern occurs all the time - i associate it with releasing some clinging, though not sure if that's true. then the pang was totally gone, back into the pure absorption, then that, too, faded.

What is it a consciousness of? (I'm not sure whether one can have consciousness without objects.)

Could either of you describe how this differs from a very hard 8th jhana?

Sorry, my battery died before I could finish that last post....

The problem is that you are not staying still long enough that you can understand the nature of this residual awareness in the emptyness...your getting flashes of interupted minding, and as a result it feels like emptyness....but its not emptyness....

Try this....observe the observer....

Observe and object.....then close your eyes and observe what is inside you that is doing the observing....then observe what is doing that observing....keep trying to peel back the layers by observing what is observing the observing....keep going deeper into it....eventually you will come to a dead end where there is only empty formless stillness with no identity that is observing, or witnessing without seeming to be engaged in witnessing...you uncover your true nature as the still silent witness before it moves into a you....just stay there witnessing, not moving...by and by you will be able to stay there longer and longer....observe the observer until you get to the root of observing....you can change the words too "be aware of the awareness" and produce the same result....whichever words fit you best....do this for now...the rest becomes easy from here.