Hi James (my grandfather's name !),

Not always easy to identify things but if you told us about your practice history, the frameworks you are familiar with, techniques used, previous experiences/events/changes you might have had, it might help us make more sense of this.

It could be several things - a formless realm, a weird one off freak out, something to do with your own psychological make up i guess (do you have a history with anxiety ?)...

However the first thing that comes to mind for me is dissolution, and then the classic freak out at things being all dissolved and weird. 

Let us know a bit more

Cheers

Hi James, and welcome to DhO. You sure jumped right in at the deep end of the pool!

Amen to what Olivier said about wanting to know more about your history and context. This is something that on the surface of it as you've presented it here could be a genuine, very strong experience of "dissolution" in a meditative context, and could just be something to work with meditatively, at a pace you can stand. (My standard in meditation stuff is "as much as I can stand," but you really have to be honest with yourself.) Given the degree of the panic attack response and you getting as far as wondering whether to go to the hospital, your psychiatric history is a determining factor now. I speak as a life-long bipolar disorder guy, with hospitalizations at points toward both the depressive and the manic end of the spectrum; and, lol, yes, as one who has been meditating his entire adult life too. 

The thing is, the meditation path leads us, inevitably, to emptiness. You had a very disorienting and terrifying taste of emptiness. The reason the path is so long and takes so much work is largely because of how much work it takes for the human person to accept that emptiness and its implications, and for the brain and mind and heart to re-order and attune to that emptiness and its implications. The spiritual path in a lot of ways is the work of acclimatizing to emptiness. But job one for you here is to not let this taste of emptiness fuck you up, psychologically, psychiatrically, and functionally in general. Trust your anxiety here, given your history, and take every necessary step you can to address it. There 's plenty of time to get emptiness right, we're all working on it here. But getting it wrong can really mess up your life. So first, do not harm here, to yourself first of all. So far so good, yes?

Hi, James.

I've been there. So scared by meditative experiences that I swore off meditating, questioned my sanity (or lack thereof), and wondered why hell I ever got into the process in the first place. This fear is overwhelming and convincing. But really, it's our first brush with the power of our mind, and these experiences show us just how much of our moment to moment experience is mind-created. I got over my fear because my desire to fix my relationship to ongoing experience required me to traverse these occurrences. And boy oh boy, I'm so happy I stuck with meditation because it's been a huge benefit to my life for many years.

You are likely not in any danger of truly going insane but you are now closer to seeing how your experience is constructed. That was what first scared me, but it turns out that's one of the biggest, most important and powerful realizations you will ever have.

If you can't shake the fear, talk to us some more, tell us more about your practice and consider seeing someone professionally who can help you with the fear.

Good luck, and stay in touch!

"However the first thing that comes to mind for me is dissolution, and then the classic freak out at things being all dissolved and weird. "

+1 on this. 

Dissolution was a freak out for me too. My otherwise pleasant and rapturous Shamatha was utterly ravaged and torn to bits and pieces was not pleasant at all. I had no idea what was going on. Back then I knew nothing about the Map of Insight. I continued meditating through this just to end in Equanimity Nana which felt so great I was clinging to it will all my being as it felt so "safe"! But this clinging resulted in me being catapulted back into the worst Reobservation ever so I gave up on meditation and gave up on this quest , as Chris said, what a terrible idea this meditation was. However once you cross A&P there is no way back. Point of no return. I had to face all this at some point. Many years later I did exactly that. Thankfully. 

So it's a normal development on this path. Nothing to worry about. But if you do have traumas maybe coupling meditation with talking therapy could be of benefit as freak outs can happen and they can feel nasty. 

You do seem to be getting attention of some fine folks here in your thread which I'm sure will be of benefit to you  

Good thing is that you are not alone in this  

Thank you all so very very much. I really appreciate the time it takes to formulate a response and feel honored to have you all understand and help me with this. This has been a very lonely road for me as I really haven't found a place where I can candidly talk about this stuff. I am grateful to have found DhO and the people here that seem to not have a chip on their shoulder about this stuff. I couldn't care less to having an ego about this stuff or care what attainments people claim to have. It's seems you are all genuinely here to help each other down the path which I appreciate deeply. The responses are all valued and I've read over them multiple times and will continue to do so. Let me give you a bit more information to help fill out the bigger picture.

I started meditating 20ish years ago as a treatment for depression and didn’t have any training in traditional techniques. Since then, I've done a lot of work on myself through therapy but definitely still struggle but thankfully not nearly as bad as when I was younger. I was into self help books along the lines of Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, John Kabat-Zin, etc. Nothing in the traditional sense of meditation practice other than what I had experienced for myself. I only now realize what I was doing and that the experiences had names to them. I had seen a video pre-YouTube days of a monk talking about walking meditation and ‘labeling’ things that come up. Now learning these as ‘sensations’ and ‘noting’ I now look back quite fondly at the time where I didn’t know the names to things I and just sat and observed. Saying that I really appreciate the dharma as I’m starting down a path where I desperately need the guidance.

Enter March 2020, I get Covid-19. 3 months later end up in the hospital cause I can't breathe. Eventually sent home with 'Long Covid'. So now I’m locked in my house, have chronic fatigue, and a head full of uncertainty about my future. I turn to back to meditation after it waning over the years. I come across Frank Yang which led me to Daniel Ingram and found an audiobook of MCTB and Pandora’s box opened up in the following months. All the meditation I had been doing for the last 20 years made sense. It had structure. It had a path. Please forgive my lack of understanding of a lot of the terminology as I feel like I'm filling in the blanks for things I've experience over the years.

I find that I have energy in the mornings and that I really like being awake before the world wakes up. My wife is asleep. Traffic is quiet. No where to go. Perfect. In around October I would guess I crossed the A&P after a crazy high energy meditation where I felt like I turned into a phoenix and exploded into fire and light. Since I'm not now a super enlightened being I would guess A&P or someone snuck some good drugs into my tea.

I went into a time of not wanting to do anything anymore. My career seemed pointless; my life seemed like it was pointless to keep filling it with 'stuff'. I wanted to run off in the mountains and sit under a tree. I found Steve James (Guru Viking) and joined his meditation club once a week. He got me onto Shinzen Young, things like the 10 bulls/ox idea of a Bodhisattva, the idea of the journey, a return to society, and to not throw it all away. It seems common for people to want to change everything when you get into this territory. I've only recently found Daniel's mind maps and kind of went, "oohhhhhhhh i seeee".

Questions:

1. How did going down this path affect your marriage/relationships? My wife is ... concerned. It's really hard to talk to anyone that isn't into this as saying things like, 'It feels like dying before dying' and 'James is slowly disappearing' really freaks them out. She's a bit like, 'Where does that leave me in all of this?'. I don't have a clear answer which is enough for me to want to put on the brakes and never sit again.

2. What can you do to 'stay on the rails' and not give it all up?

3. Why should I keep doing this? I am getting the feeling of losing the purpose of it all. Right now it seems more detrimental than anything. I do understand that is part of the path but disidentifying with the self on paper isn't all too appealing to the ego that has to die to get there.

More details into my average sit: 

Stretching and exercise
Breathing (Wim Hof)
Long out breath vocalizing “ahhhh”
Rapid noting
Body attention / scanning
First Jhana, “Feeling good”
Somewhat spontaneous rapid breathing
Jhanas 2-4
Slow noting
Insight / 3 characteristics
Rapid noting (sometimes shaking, twitching, high energy, thousands of tiny pin pricks of sensations)
Optional Jhanas 5/6, 7/8 - unsure
Alternating between subtle breath awareness and nothingness
NEW! Sustained nothingness (No perceived attention or activity)
Fear! Jesus H-Christ why fuck am I doing this?

Currently reading:

MCTB2 by Daniel Ingram
When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön
Seeing That Frees by Rob Burbea
The Science of Enlightenment: Shinzen Young
The Mind Illuminated: Culadasa John Yates
Practical Insight Meditation by Mahasi Sayadaw