| Thankyou for sharing from your yourney! I love reading this kind of reports. Additionally, your way of expressing things resonates with me.
I have been hearing the silence since before I started my practice, I think. I can construct locations for it and separate it into different tones, or choose to listen beyond it, to the source of it, which has no location. I think of that space or presence as what I think you were looking for at that retreat, although I have never had the opportunity to do any such retreat. The awareness recognizing itself. I like your description of it and I hope to get to where you are. For me it comes as glimpses, sometimes brief glimpses and sometimes somewhat longer ones. There was a brief period recently when I thought I could access it rather reliably, by listening to where the silence comes from (that is, the location that isn't a location), but that was very premature. I trust that it's there and I know that there is no way to take control of it. It is there when there is no controlling. At those instances, it feels so simple. Freefalling is all that it takes. Like falling and failing to hit the ground, in a paradigm where actually hitting the ground is an effort.
Silence coagulating - I love that description! Yes, it does coagulate. Different tones also seem to be accessible to different extents at different phases in the cycling too, I think. That is a very preliminary reflection, though. I may be confusing different things, but I have this hypothesis that something that used to annoy me a bit in the dukkha nanas before was really an extremely slow version of the sound. It was like the flickering noice of pressure changes in my right ear, like opening and closing something there (which was accompanied by irritation in my left eye). In one review phase (?) recently, I could trace the sound as it changed through different nanas, so it seems that it can be an auditory version of those nana-specific vibrations. Another time, when I was using the sound as a concentration object, it seemed that the bodily piti and the sound were distilled into bright light, before that gradually dissolved into (and beyond) nothingness. So one might say that it can both coagulate and be distilled, if that makes any sense.
Haha, I could have sworn that I heard voices in a gong yesterday. I think the boundaries between hallucinations and magickal creations is very fuzzy. I recognized the steps of it from earlier in life when I have actually developed auditory hallucinations (mobile phone signals, which I have heard is a very common hallucination among autistic people like me; there was a very ling thread about it on a forum that I used to frequent). It starts with interpretations of sounds within a noice that match roughly with a known pattern. From there the mind builds on it and fabricates it. It is interesting to observe the process gradually. This is off-topic, though.
The flat face - yeah, that happens often. That accompanies the dropping of the jaw. I find that very soothing, actually. Early in my practice, before stream entry, there were all sorts of weird tensions, but I enjoyed that too. It felt like all my senses turning themselves inside out, one at a time. It started with touch in my hands against my thighs, but that in itself didn't feel like tension. It was more the feeling that I could feel the touch from the other side, backwards. Like it wasn't really any me doing the feeling. I found that very relaxing and kind of funny but also natural. I recognized it somehow. With the other senses it was more like what you described, with tentacles turning around. I could kinesthetically feel the hearing move out from one ear and make a circle in front of my face and then crawl inside the other ear, listening to myself, and something similar with the other senses. I loved it, althought it physically hurt a bit and was full of tensions, but there was also the sense that it wasn't enough. Frustration about the remaining duality and the inability to turn around. This was not the practice that tipped over into SE. In the review phase after SE, there was sort of a buffet of these experiences combined together, but still with that sense of incompleteness. Only recently I went through what I think was the no self door, which completed that turn. What a relief that was!
Okay, so that is what this is? Microcomponents of looking at oneself. That makes sense. Thankyou so much! |