Hi guys, I'm here at the diagnostic clinic to get some opinions on a possible cessation.
My background:
The first profound A&P experience that I'm aware of happened in 2017 via psychedelics, followed by a crash into a deep depression, and since then, I've been searching for answers like the rest of us here.
In early 2020, I found pragmatic dharma and have lurked and absorbed for the last couple years, watching most of Daniel's interviews, reading through books, articles, and forums on the DhO and KFD, and practicing with various methods.
My meditation practice is experimental, sporadic, and really quite inconsistent. Some days I will practice 15 minutes, some days up to 3-4 hours. Some days not at all, especially when I hit a difficult spot and motivation really falls off. But the itch always comes back, and practice seems to happen on and off the cushion whether I'm trying or not.
For the last several months, my preferred meditation methods have been:
-6 Sense Doors: Usually been doing this while walking. Starting with body sensations, and slowly integrating more and more into awareness- visual field, then sounds, smells, thoughts, then reactions to thoughts, then the felt sense of me/self, slowly training the mind to detect very subtle sensations.
-TV Static Kasina: Pretty much the same as regular kasina practice, but I use youtube videos of television static as the concentration object, which seems to help emphasize the impermanence aspect for me and keeps things visually interesting.
-Metronome: Inspired by Kenneth's railroad track practice, using sounds as the meditation object by playing videos of 500-1000 BPM metronomes and listening for the subtle audio 'gaps' between the ticks.
So yesterday, after 45 minutes of walking (6 sense doors) practice, I sat down and started up the metronome. Around 30 minutes or so into listening for gaps, the sounds seemed to go into slow motion and become increasingly slower and deeper, like "tick, tick, tick, wrmp, wrmp, wrrmp, wrrrrmp, wrrrrrrrrrrmp".
This is not unusual, but what happened next is a first for me: I remember feeling zoned out for a bit, then seeing some hyper-real 3D shapes/imagery (eyes closed) reminiscent of a light DMT experience for 1-2 seconds if even that. Then it felt as though I had fallen asleep and immediately woken back up with a slight startle. There was a mild endorphin rush like I had just finished a run, and I felt really calm and chilled out for the rest of the day.
I'm hesistant to consider it a cessation, because I know the mimics are common and I don't notice any drastic changes other than feeling somewhat less stressed out than usual. But I'm curious to see what you advanced practitioners out there have to say- if anyone has had a similar experience and whether based on what I described, you think it could be an actual cessation, a near miss, or just another A&P event.
Thanks in advance!
