Hello everybody. I'd be curious what diagnosis I get for that from you gurus.
I could not ever really communicate it to anybody, not to speak of proper feedback (which included mad friends, not so mad friends, a Sri Lankan Monk who counseled my meditation and 2 meditation teachers from the Mahasi tradition, Hannes Huber and Ven. Vivekananda from the Panditarama in Lumbini/Nepal. Beside that they were really excellent teachers). So there's still an residual urge to do so now. I hope it will at least contribute some entertainment. Well then...
Practice for about 7 years, somewhere between a few minutes to a few hours per day, basically to counteract sort of fear disorder (free floating fear, mid size panic attacs, dissociation phenomena, depression, confusion etc.), more or less vipassana as I found out later, with emphasis on concentration. The full content of the instruction I got was "Focus on the breath, nothing else. Nothing else. Don't influence it". So I did. Later I included disturbances as objects of meditation, because they seemed to change when doing so. No idea about maps, mindfulness, concentration or anything, MCTB did not yet exist, piles of derepression of stuff, I mistook it all as therapy.
Then 3 weeks of freestyle practice somewhere between goenka and mahasi style in a 50% meditation center 50% holiday resort in Sri Lanka, guided by the mentioned monk (a meditation alien of the forest tradition whom nobody liked but me). Massive derepression of really weird stories and really really weird states arising (most pronounced attacks of rage, weird but less pronounced greed), I asked myself when I ever could have repressed that. At some point things speeding up, stories and emotion passing through like flashes, feeling high. at some point becoming nauseating for 2 days, the monk said "nothing wrong eaten? hm, hm. Now the real thing started." I didn't know what to think about it. At a later point solid bliss manifesting with sometimes excess of energy and broadened perception, like being able to focus different things at once (panoramic, a term I learned much later), "outer clarity, inner silence"- states, wallowing in bliss until it got boring. Then again dark things, most pronounced fear for about one day leaving me somehow irritated for another day and finally establishing bliss again, fading out in a relaxed, light state with sometimes boredom arising and vanishing after focusing it. I asked "what next?" the monk said "you'll get enlightened". I thought, he was a strange freak. Nothing more happening except sleepiness, so I stopped. Later on I would repeatedly meditate for a few days on a stretch until I got the relaxed, balanced state again.
A half year later I drifted in some basic melancholia (vague chronic "feeling of not being able to live"), so I went in a "Mahasi light" retreat led by Hannes Huber. Unusual fatigue for days, sadness, tears. Hannes stopped me from observing phenomena, especially the sadness, only to make them disappear, so I surrendered to it (due to lack of alternatives, it didn't want to vanish anyway) and then something could resume there. At some point a microscopic observation took place that my perception works in a way that it takes all its information without exception from an underlying mechanism of rejection or aversion against basically everything, in other words, it processed only the information of the rejection of an object rather than the information of the object itself, leaving me fundamentally shaken with the alternative of either "me" or "the world". That undercurrent persisted maybe two days until the end of the retreat. The teacher didn't say a thing except "you see a lot". When travelling back home by train I stated that "usually I feel strange after retreats, but this time everything seems pretty ordinary". He said "I don't think so".
Next day back home instead of the usual post-retreat relaxation there was persistent restlessness, about as pleasant as medium toothache, all the Kornfield-approaches did not remove it, so I tried to meditate. A few minutes after sitting down a full blown Kundalini-syndrome (as I found out from Shivanandas Kundalini-Book, the only source of information available - "Relax, will pass in a few days. Maybe take some Valium") went through within minutes, as it seemed. I tried not to hold on to anything during it, fearing it would rip me apart, finally "the energy" blasting through the top of the head with following power cut and black out. When the system rebooted as far as I remember there was just black space and consciusness, then a pulsating ring appeared out of somewhere, the whole process felt like decending some elevator shaft. When the ring appeared, attention focused it out of its trained habit, after which the ring burst to minute particles showering on the surface of the body (which was present again then) from inside or maybe also as well from outside, I don't remember exactly, feeling like small icy, somewhat electric raindrops. Then more mental processes restarted, except some "inner dialog", leaving an impression of deep silence (after that Eckhard Tolle and Krishnamurti seemed quite comprehensible for a while until finally it restarted some days or weeks later, hard to say). A few minutes later there was another "energy outburst" from the upper chest region and then the main special effects section was over. The whole thing had taken maybe 1 to 1,5 hours of empirical time.
After opening the eyes the world surprisingly was still there, but in a strange way that later I described as if a veil had been removed, making way for intense clarity and brilliance, especially of visual impressions. There was a feeling of "death", massive bliss and joy, total absence of fear and the impression that I was 100% healthy for the first time in my life, giving an outlook on the weirdest of my friends as mislead children. Louis Armstrong's "Down by the riverside" appeared immensely mystic and moved me to tears (very pleasant also), as well as "Here comes the sun" by the Beatles. I attempted to write my last will (I was 35 by then), just to be rid of the burden that some money might not benefit the ones I wanted to.
When facing the world outside my flat there was the realisation that the differentiation of self and others was gone, which was quite confusing, especially when going by bycicle in the city or while being "nobody" sitting in the psychonalytic group therapy that I attended these days, where someone is supposed to be "somebody" (the therapist did not like transpersonal issues at all). But my body-mind complex was functional as usual (in fact extremely fast, precise and accurate), the social reactions where somewhat the same, except that some chronic doubt was gone that before had slowed down all decisions and a certain set of aversive reactions also was gone. Suddenly I could talk to certain people without the usual frictions. These effects proofed to be permanent. Regarding "Theravada defilements" getting drunk and sex was still nice, but awareness persisted even during orgasms and after 5 chech Budweiser and some Becherovkas, making these things somewhat disappointing. Selflessness, utter compassion, a "superconducting" state of mind with all phenomena passing through at an ultimate speed without any effort, enabling me to work at about double speed (but producing the same amount of errors than before, although the state of mind advertised itself convincingly as being infallible. Maybe this is also what the pope suffers from), strange visual hallucinations and occasional flashes of being able to see in one instant
everything, how the entire universe works, faded out in a few weeks. Fortunately I did not ask the universe for information about which stocks to pick because it seemed not to have worked out anyway, or seen from the other angle, as soon as I demanded the information it was not available any more. Neither the Kundalini nor the power cut experience ever reappeared, but the "no veil" visual perceptions did ever since then, at arbitrary occasions.
Still I had the Idea that meditative practice was about therapy and derepression, so I decided to practice intensively (3-4 days a week in the average) to derepress everything to be able to finally do some real retreat in the mahasi style. About a year later I did 10 days of a "real" Mahasi retreat with Hannes Huber in
Pian Dei Ciliegi (near Piacenza in Italy, a beautiful place with the best food I ever had in any center). I went nicely through very pronounced A&P including the A&P-Event (in an extraordinary dream) into some moderate kind of dark night (by then I had come across Ingrams MCTb) that later became a real pain in the ass, including psychosomatic symptoms of headache and sensations of moving pressure or dragging in the forehead, eyes, cheekbone and nose area. As I much later came to see the "physical" intensity was moderate but the suffering level delivered with it was sort of chronic pain.
Ok, what was that? Weird A&P? Stream Entry? Some other mess?
Tnx & Greetings! Yours sincere co-creeper on the path!
