Flo:
Hello friends,
a few days ago I had another let's call it "interesting" experience that I am unsure what to make of it.
When sitting on the meditation cushion, I have sometimes experiences what feels like blinking with eyes closed. Sometimes when I was very concentrated that blinking happens in very fast succession. The last experience was a bit different though.
I went grocery shopping as usual and felt a bit uneasy - not sure why. However, a few moments later reality started slowing down a lot and at some point there were "frames" missing. I only saw every other picture of reality with a pause in the middle. When I was standing/moving in front of a shelf and tried to move my hand towards an item, part of the whole "sequence" was missing and another image appeared after the last one went missing. This made it quite difficult to grab something to say the least.
That went on for a minute or more and happened a good 5 to 10 times.
Is this what is meant by "mind-moments"? is it normal to perceive them with such a big "gap" in-between? It felt quite unsettling in an environment that isn't the meditation cushion.
Sincerely & thank you in advance
Flo
Hi Flo, and a belated welcome to DhO! After two months, this sort of amounts to your working practice thread. You said you practice a couple hours a day, but I couldn't find a description of your method or technique in this thread so far. Sorry if I just missed it, but I'd be interested to hear what you're doing.
The temporal distortion and sense of the perceptual frames starting to have gaps is indeed an "interesting" experience. It is a big step along the way toward realizing the deeply constructed nature of perception, and to understanding how our "normal" perception is at best a working compromise with the vastness of reality, a filtered and edited version tailored to social and material survival and the values associated with those.
Probably the most important thing to say is, be very alert now, after a spontaneous, off-the-mat experience like this. Like, maybe, don't operate heavy machinery for a while? And if you have an opportunity to test it, see if you can shut it down on purpose and relatively quickly make the gestalt shift back to the perceptual world where it's generally thought to be best to step out from under a falling piano. You don't want to be driving, for instance, and start missing perceptual frames. So context, context, context. In a safe setting, it can be fascinating to experience, and I tend to think it comes with the territory and is not uncommon. Your world view, de facto, has to expand after experiences like this, and a conceptual integration takes some time; and also, to get hit with a lot of experiences of normal reality getting shaky or dissolving entirely can be overwhelming, and quickly get into very dangerous territory. As a bipolar guy, I had a real propensity, a sort of greed, at times, for those conventional reality dissolutions, and paid the price in sanity. So be alert here. It sounds like so far, so good, with you.
Best wishes, happy new year, and it's lovely to have you here on DhO,
tim