I would like to describe my experiences, brief as they were, with this journey. I used to meditate a lot as a novice about 12 years ago and after hours a day of meditation I experienced something profound and a search engine lead me to realize that it was likely the first jhana which I had never heard of. That quickly lead me to discovering this website and the book. I began posting here around ten years ago and at first with much excitement I began progressing through the nyanas described in the book--at first more clearly and in latter stages unclearly. Finally, at last, I got into the fourth jhana which was tricky to note things as the notes became subtleties like noticing my own awareness or my own recognition of vastness or even of noting itself. To note that my own self, some being I identified with, was noting--or something like that--in those late stages of the fourth nyana. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong or fooling myself, not to mention it was a decade ago and I was young then in my early 20's. There was a moment when I had believed that I reached stream entry, although I did deeply desire it so maybe I was fooling myself?
Anyways, with that background provided, what is truly noteable is that after all of that effort and at least some degree of progress I abruptly quit meditation. I literally haven't meditated in around a decade. The reason I am motivated to post here is that every once in a great while, like what happened today, when some ordinary person begins speaking about meditation I will feel that they truly do not comprehend what meditation is. I will then try to explain to them what it is when otherwise this person has no idea I have any history with meditation which surely catches them offguard by surprise. Furthermore I do it with an intense passion that is disproportionate to the fact that I do not meditate or seek any spiritual path whatsoever. The intensity of my explanations usually backfires because they are a layperson who is really just seeking some mindfulness or whatever, not what it is that I'm soliciting. So why so overwhelmingly passionate?
Usually these people describe how they do know what meditation is but they'll just get frustrated when they lose focus, or nothing ever seems to happen or whatever. It's at those moments that I chime in to tell them in what surely sounds incredibly arrogant that they've missed the entire point because they don't have a clue what the goal is apparently. They should simply note that frustration or the distraction--"In, in, in, in, in, out, out, out, wandering, wandering, itch, out, out, fuck how long have I been daydreaming?, in, in, doubt, doubt, more doubt, in, in, buttcheek, out, out, out, daydreaming..." and then! Here is where I get extremely personal and where this very post is suddenly important: I tell them that time itself will seem to slow down and consequently they can note more things inbetween those previous slower notes. That all their senses and their thoughts are not happening simultaneously, they happen one by one linearly in how they are processed by the brain and hence create the sense of self; and as your notes speed up and as time slows down you will notice this reality as something not unlike a strobing pulse. The pulse will slow and you will see inbetween the strobes and see the nothingness, you will see the witness of what you really are beyond your organic human ego. You will see that the seeing and even that the understanding of it is ego, and so you will see the illusion that those pulsations provide and then you will go even beyond that to dwell in that inbetween and be nothing. Your normal waking life is the interdependent dance of reactions to outside and internal stimuli when otherwise you're nothing but an illusion that you are something. Perhaps there's some spiritual, agnostic woowoo but that's beyond the point. And well, that's the path.
Anyways--am I full of shit in my interpretation of meditation? Why did I suddenly quit? Was I always just 100% not meditating correctly or maybe what I thought was the fourth jhana was really the third jhana and I'm so trapped by disillusionment that I can't even perceive it? Is this a natural byproduct of stream entry? I even used to cycle in my daily life when I regularly meditated until that day that I thought I hit stream entry and then it finally stopped. Everything just stopped. Now I feel like I know at least something true about reality and life, but I still have a big ego and I still argue with people, I can still be a piece of shit. What's going on?
