(EDIT: Cleaning up some of these early posts as they were done on ipad, which these boards don't seem to like.)


History: Got into meditation about 3-4 years ago through Sam Harris podcast, after a couple of decades of being a staunch atheist. Messed around with the 10 and 20 minute sessions for therapeutic reasons. BECAUSE SCIENCE SAID IT WAS GOOD.
but I guess we all have to start somewhere. I didn't get anywhere, but I guess it started laying the foundation.

In March of 2017 I took a deeper dive and did some longer session working on, I guess concentration (listening to a looping melody) with some vipassana (without noting). I didn't really know what I was doing (still don't) but did I bunch of 8-12 hour sessions over the course of 3 or so weeks.
This is where I had the seeing through eyes experience as well as the falling through bed experience.

Dark Night: From April 2017 to June 2019. Basically pretty disenchanted, doing ten minutes perfunctorily, and it clearly wasn't doing shit. But to be honest I've been in DN for my whole entire adult life and have manufactured a shitty, illusory self, that could use some unravelling.

At some point: ran into Daniel on Buddhist Geeks and thought he was complete loony tunes (probably during DN).
Read MCTB which led to my new practices starting in June 2019.


June: consisted of sitting in a walmart and staring at objects and candles, badly, for two hours, then trying to do Mahasi noting as much as I could stand, which was about only an hour as I found it difficult at the time. Mostly I think I just fucked around and the quality of meditations was low.
Powers experience?!!?:  Concentration work on a windy day. Staring through a metal loop on the top of a grocery cart (yes, walmart parking lot, in my truck) and suddenly the wind gusted and three carts were "pushed" away from my truck with a force and a random customer had to hustle to stop one from hitting a shiny Suburban. At the time the atheist said coincidence. Today, well, I'll reserve comment...

Late June: Mostly backburnered concentration aside from doing 30-60 minutes here and there. Did read into the concentration jhanas much, just stared a rock or a hole in a rock wall, or candle flame. Previous entry said I could stare at a object without blinking for an hour, but that's probably not true. With blinking, yes. (I have no idea whether that is good or not.) I did however check out the 1st jhana and saw the red dot with multicolored swirling fractals in one attempt and my bullshit detector, at the time, said, "hmm, let's switch to vipassana".

And so, I cracked down on insight training (mahasi noting) and the quality of those sits and things started to take off.

July 1st: was the first big A&P since the stuff in 2017. The electrified spine deal for 8-10 seconds and followed by lesser ones for the rest of the sit. Afterglow for a couple days.

Read MCTB2: and still think Daniel's a little out there (for the record). I'll save commenting on the 4000 page disclaimer about the powers, for now.

Daily practice: consists of maybe 20 minutes of concentration work
then two, 2 hour insight sessions and sometimes a third. one sitting, one laying

No full cessation, from what i can tell, many brownouts and just a lot of a&p junk, buzzes on and off cushion.

Just jotting down some interesting events...

Recent Phenomenology:

Slow Star Field - Like viewing space travel on a space ship moving at leisurely cruising speed

Hyperspace Star Field- Like going to warp where stars become streaks. Accompanied with piti rapture.

Pixelated Wormhole- Highly pixelated like 90s screensaver and colored violet.

July 28th 2019

Behind the Black Mirror- This one was the oddest and feels like what happened to Chris Marti before his cessation. A flash of a symbol. I've seen these a couple times, usually up in EQ. This particular one had build up, lasted maybe half a second. I'll attempt to describe. Looking through the back of one of those backlit restaurant specials menus with the colorful writing. It was frozen at maybe a 45 degree angle and reminded me of an old overexposed photograph. One word was written, seen backwards, and might have said KCUF.

I feel like maybe some old lamas are trolling me from the celestial homes in the van allen belt.

*EDITED*
What I'm working with today:

-third eye chakra fairly normal now
-faint concentric triangles appear when i focus on it
-these can be changed to squares and sometimes higher polygons
-when i try star shape, it turns to a complex pattern and fades out

Tried to follow the concentric triangle worm hole that seems to be corresponding to my wisdom eye and after a few piti bursts it might have led me to EQ since it was a luminous fog, but who knows.

It seems like I don’t have to note as much to plunge into the insight jhanas, and I might be cycling off the cushion.

Sometimes I wonder if piti are telling me "no, not yet, we have to build those routes."
I'll get buzzed sometimes when I'm thinking about certain concepts. Picturing what occupies the space between thoughts. ZAP.  Picturing looking through the back of my head into a mirror in search of the self, ZAP. Pondering pizza or thicc booty, no zap. Trying to discern every pulse of a very quiet sound, ZAP. So, either building bridges or frying brain.

Oh, the triangles occasionally turn the "tv snow" into a fractal.



 

Maybe the buzzing indicates that you are on the right track, that is, engaging with the dharma? But if it is very intense it is probably wise to keep building those routes gradually while remaining grounded. I have found that piti gets subtler and subtler over time, thankfully, as it started out very violently for me.

Hi and welcome, by the way! I hope you will like it here.

I see you guys talk about grounding and am not sure what you mean in a meditative context.

Should I have a copper wire trailing off my body and stuck deep into the ground?

Haha, nah, I doubt that would work. It seems to be basically the same thing as in recommendations for people who have traumas or are prone to dissociation. For me, hatha yoga and vinyasa yoga helps. It keeps me stable both physically and mentally, and that includes energetically. Eating and sleeping habits are important too. Contact with the elements of nature are healing for me. That kind of stuff. And metta.

Although - digging my bare feet into the ground does help. No copper wire needed.

So you mean the basic physical and nutritional upkeep that should be required by all humans?

More about concentric triangles! I'm sure I'll get bored of them at some point at move on.

They appear to be a sort of HUD, dead-center of vision, when the third eye chakra is lit up, a PERMANENT one. I know, that's a dirty word around here. Actually, it is definitely IMPERMANENT but it's now around more often than not.

It's faint, and I don't see it with eyes open in broad daylight, because that would be too cool.

The concentric triangles shift and lazily spin and bloom in full field splattering of dark and light and of various sizes. Sometimes I can perceive a tight spun fractal in the center of the smallest triangle. They also switch from triangle to cross or X form and start looking precisely like zooming into fractals (like the Mandelbrot Set without the bug or the seahorse tails.)

Until the triangle fractals, my visual experience had been VERY CLOSE, like eyelid close, even in EQ. Now, however, after I realized you can zoom into a fractal INFINITLY,(which nearly caused a panic attack i might add) I NOW KNOW AND SEE EVERY-- I can see, slightly, farther.

Quiet Narrator:
One more thing, a couple sits ago I got to a point where the narrator got quieter for a little while, which had never happened before and has not happened again since. Starting to unravel the self?

It is possible to see this with your eyes open. A dark room with a white wall might help. For me, it is a spinning orb. Sometimes the background spins in the opposite direction. I would try to increase concentration by paying close attention to the visual detail.

very cool 

2.5 hour sit, though the last 30 minutes felt forced

the other 2 hours though..

New ground!

I went to a new realm, new to me, somewhere in the many layers of EQ, where the narrator again got quiet, got very very quiet. Like freak me out quiet. Noting turned out to be exceedingly difficult at that moment and came out as stacatto, incoherent babbling. Not a stroke thankfully. Also, breathing seemed difficult, but maybe i was focused on the quiet narrator too much by, you know, not breathing after the exhale to concentrate better. Oh, and my tinnitus wailed at this point. Wailed like when a tv broadcast is interrupted and all you see is the colored bars and that annoying hum. I kept on forgetting to mention how my tinnitus gets louder the deeper i get in the stages.

Then I might have imagined the cephalopodic eye of a Lovecraftian Horror, possibily the entity that forces this organic lump to have endless thoughts of suffering.
And finally, like what seems to always happen around the 2 hour mark I feel like I get shunted out. Everything suddenly became clear, hearing especially, to the point where i thought that it might have increased in potency. But then I released I just came out of a very muted realm.

Just a quick one...there’s always little things i want to log but end up forgetting.

There's a realm/jhana I call half-and-half  where left side is dark and the right side is light. The dark side sometimes has lighting flashes, like heat lightning. I think it’s before EQ and might be my reobservation. Not sure, just attempting to peg down some landmarks.

And the third eye chakra was snuffed out completely in EQ. No triangles for Shaun. Which makes sense since that’s an a&p thing. Also, when i felt i was shunted out of the muted realm last night (didn’t have the chops to hang) i figured it must have cycled me back to a&p as everything, the sense doors, became so clear.

A number of rough sits.
All july I was mostly cycling into EQ in 45 to 60 minutes then wandering there (likely conceptualizing too much) and staying there until losing momentum.
A few of the sits I couldn’t even get into EQ going 1.5- 2 hours and got frustrated. Yes, noted it.

One interesting event was after a rough sit on a hot day, I stopped after about an hour, stretched my neck and arms and was fully prepared to quit, then i opened my eyes and was immediately pulled back into meditation, where the brain shifted insight jhanas and i sat another 15 min until the sun got to be too much.
I then sought AC and read for an hour and a half and felt the pull again, returned to the cushion and, i think, got right into EQ in 5 min.

There have been a bunch of times where i'll be doing everyday things and suddenly feel the pull of meditation. You know, the sort of lightheadedness that comes with shifting stages. The cycle goes on.

Then some more sits where i explored the knowledges of suffering more and for the first time heard the helicopter roter. I felt like i was slipping in my practice due to not being able to accesS EQ again.

Then I had a few sits where I would doggedly noted, power up like mad, enter EQ in 25 minutes, and after maybe 10 minutes in EQ, fucking eject out the other end and land somewhere back down in A&P territory, then struggle the rest of the sit and never get anywhere, just spin my wheels.

So then yesterday I calmed down the noting and found a more stable EQ in one sit, which was a bit of a relief.
Then the evening sit I had a sort of blip moment, (brownout again?) which startled me, but i don’t even think i was in EQ at that point, more like deliverance or REOB.

Just pinning down some locations on the map.

A&P: Full on third eye forehead stuff.

Dissolution: Looks like big stargate rings rotating lazily in different directions. Dopey, pleasantish.

Fear: Low grade anxiety for no discernible reason.

Re-observation: This was what I called the half and half realm previously, half white, half black, with heat lightning flashes in the peripheral.

EQ: White

EQ sub jana?: quiet narrator and really hard to note or form words.

EQ sub jana?: some dark pit.

There seems to be many layers of EQ. Many death shrouds to push past.

Perhaps some insight gained?
(the questions are me thinking aloud more than direct questions to DhO)
(but feel free to tackle any, but try not to answer questions with more questions. I know, that might be asking too much.)

---
In the Mindscape...

-all 6 sense doors are transient illusions, not objects
       -there are no objects

-your "stuff" doesn't exist
     -"your" doesn't exist

-all senses have varying degrees of amplitude that provoke proportional emotional reactions. i.e.- a gentle breeze < a car horn
      -who is emotionally reacting though?
      -are the amplitudes leveled with experience?
---
-there is no metta in the Mindscape as there is no object to aim it toward
      -is metta simply a by-product that bleeds through into conventional reality?
           -if so, of what? equanimity?

      -are powers also a by-product that can bleed through into conventional reality?
            -if so, of what? concentration?
            -or, are they nonsense?

-what are other Mindscape by-products?

---
-in the Mindscape, are the concentration and insight jhanas are one in the same, with different focus?

-the jhanas are not places that you go to
      -the jhanas just happen

-are the jhanas equal in importance?
     -is EQ more important Dissolution, Deliverance and Re-observation?
            -if so, is their importance hierarchy equivalent to their placement on the map?
---
-is every moment in the Mindscape a snapshot of the present?

---
-this forum doesn't exist in the Mindscape

This is worth more pondering and investigation, IMHO. What exactly IS a "snapshot of the present?" Is that even possible? Or is that really something else? (Hint - what is memory?)

I guess I was thinking if one was noting "be present....present...present...present...." and at each note a machine recorded the moment, a snapshot of all sense doors. Which would show sense fragments, i guess. 
Whether that is possible or just a thought experiment, i don’t know. Is there something else, probably, but my pre stream entry brain has found it.
As for memories, i want to say they’re just thoughts, simply another sense,  but again, the lense to actually feel that is not quite built i’d say.
I will keep looking

everything noted is from the past, except the note itself

What do memories feel like to you?

They feel exactly like every unawakened humans memories lol