I'm a pianist, and to practice, I've realized that I need to work freely and effectively with concentration and awareness to understand the mechanisms at play, play around with different techniques to see how the whole process is effected, and concentrate/stabilize the mind in order to sustain continuous effective practice, or even performance/the end product. The parallels to meditation are quite clear, I think. So for meditation, I've been "warming up" by switching my locus of focus rapidly from one knee to the other, or one hand to the other. It's like a drum roll getting progressively faster. I start at a comfortable frequency and then speed it up to my threshold, and try to push it just a little bit, then go back and forth for a bit. By this point, if I just "release the reigns" on my attention, I can observe it going from sensation to sensation all over, at a fairly quick rate (3 to 4 hz usually, depending on the moment). This is actually what has seemed to make progress for me.

So yesterday, I did this process of warming up the speed of sensate awareness, and then "released the reigns", letting my attention jump from sensation to sensation (but knowing the sensation), watching this just happen. Usually it just involves feeling various parts of my body like places where skin is touching something or where muscles are twitching (which does seem to be happening more lately, or I'm just noticing more) and cycling between them quickly. Then sometimes, I'll just lock in on one spot like my knee or a spot on my back. I notice that the further I get "involved" in this practice, the more things seem to be tingling. I suppose this is the transience aspect of phenomenon? When I open my eyes after practicing, everything I see seems to be tingling a lot too, like a low quality camera filming in the dark.

Anyways, I was practicing yesterday, and I got a text, which made my phone vibrate. First my mind jumped to the sensation of the phone vibrating, and then this immediately caused a feeling of anxiousness/butterflies/whatever it is when you're startled to arise in my stomach, where my awareness then went. Then, it went to my head where the feeling of the fear seemed to happen. The awareness went from the phone vibrating to the sinking stomach feeling to the startled feeling in my head in only a second or maybe less. When it happened, I didn't feel involved. It was like watching a chain of dominoes. The vibrating phone, the physical feeling of stomach sinking, and the mental/in my head feeling of startlingness all happened in a causal way, each seeming completely isolated from the other effects. Does this sound like the knowledge of cause and effect? I'm thinking so.


So I just practiced a few hours ago for about 40 minutes, going about practice in the same way. However, this time was much different. Everything my attention went to was very irritating, which I would take to be awareness of the characteristic of unsatisfactoriness. I realized that before this, there was aversion to settling the mind on these things, and that my awareness would let go of these things quicker, as though being burnt. This is to say, I didn't get a good look at those moments since they were unpleasant so I shooed them from awareness. But tonight, I thought about how that's probably the characteristic of unsatisfactoriness, so I didn't avoid these feelings of annoyance or unpleasantness. Soon, things were almost overwhelmingly unpleasant. It was almost like my awareness was swarming "me" with these unpleasant sensations like a beehive had just been shaken up. I was cool with it though, feeling relieved to just be more aware of them and not having some of the tension that seemed to accompany aversion to unpleasant sensations earlier.

So the tingling of sensation seems to be transience, and the unpleasantness of sensation seems to be unsatisfactoriness. Thinking about the nana of the three characteristics, I then looked into trying to find a self. This involved looking into sensations happening in my head. I found that emotions and thoughts could be found there, in an odd way. They were tingly like everything else, but they seemed to be locked deeper inside the head. I was trying to find self there, but then I started to see that even those emotions and thoughts were disappearing and reappearing from moment to moment. I knew from this that no self was resting within any of those sensations.

Next, I did something very hard to explain. Have you ever noticed how you can kinda make yourself shiver? I've been getting weird shivers from meditating, so I decided to evoke some of those shivers. It was weird, because when I'd do this, it would give me a feeling of the shiver drawing up from my body through the back of my neck, into my brain. My head would start to lean back, and my shoulders felt a bit tense. But it was cool, and I started realizing there was much more to it than just shivering. My eyes kinda started to spasm like they do when you're trying to hold them shut but can't seem to, but I was fine with my eyes being shut. It started to happen very rapidly, and the feeling started to get just... so intense. It felt like I was going through sleep paralysis (which I've been awake for from lucid dreaming experiments). It came in waves, but each was more intense, until finally, my head was tilted quite a ways back and my eyes were rapidly twitching. My breathing got fast and shallow, and it was hard to even worry about that, and I didn't worry about trying to gain control over it. I felt this really odd sense of pleasure in my neck and body being drawn into my head. It wasn't like a grinning pleasure though. Actually, the intensity almost made it scary, but I've read enough to know odd things can happen doing insight meditation, so I did my best to let it happen and keep a stable mind. It was dizzying, electric, almost sexual in an odd way, and powerful.

Each wave made it feel like it was getting closer and closer to the edge, till after a very intense wave, it seemed to continue but get more subtle and subtle. Then, I was left feeling as though after orgasm. It was this really chill, quite tingly afterglow feeling, like I had just had some odd orgasm in my brain. It was an ease at this point, and I mentally called off my effort and just sat and basked in the feeling, recollecting my poise. I found myself with my head tilted back, quick shallow breath, and various tensed muscles. I then chilled out and fixed all this. I felt as though in the arms of a lover after intense loving, except the feeling was more refined than sexual pleasure (even though it seemed oddly sexual), and I was not drained and exhausted. I felt acute and kinda empty, like a calm after a thunderstorm. Now, an hour or so later, I keep getting an odd dissociative-ish dizziness, where attention jumps around in my head and I kinda feel destabilized. It's almost nauseating, but not quite. Not necessarily unpleasant or pleasant. There's also a weird, edgy feeling to my perception after that experience. It's almost a feeling of being an alien freak or something. It's like I'm this odd being with blunted affect. It's like I'm tripping.

So, that's where I'm at. It was a breakthrough in my practice and I decided to stop lurking and post my experience. I feel like rapture really gets at that experience. It was so intense and... enrapturing. A very odd, tingling, flashing pleasure, like an ancient, refined and mystical spiritual pleasure lifting up into my head, in waves of growing intensity. Does this sound like the arising and passing away? I feel like my meditation yesterday touched on the knowledge of mind and body, the knowledge of cause and effect, and the 3 characteristics in the earlier part of my meditation where I began to see annoyance along with the tingles, and then tried to locate self but saw the things I thought to be self disappearing. So, following the map of insight given in Daniel's book, this would seem to put the arising and passing away next. Rapture also seems to be a description of the arising and passing away event. It was just... wow, so intense. That's a full experience, all the way. Does anyone see this as consistent with the map? Also, I must consider that I got close to A&P but didn't quite cross. It felt like a pressure was released though, and now that odd tingling tension of sorts is not so beehive-ish. It's like it's dissipating, like the band that was just marching and thumping all around me is now fading off into the horizon. Still the same band and song, but seeming to be farther and farther.

So first I seemed to feel the tingling (vibrations), which would be transience. This then led to the realization of how these things were really annoying and not really "doing it" for me, and kinda stinging in a way, like a swarm of many bees around me. Then, after eliminating aversion to perception of the "stings" of sensation and the annoyance of the sheer speed and quickness of sensation, I was able to separate the notion of "me" from these sensations, up to some emotion and thought. This makes me wonder... has anyone found that the three characteristics build on each other in this way? I've always been passionate about teaching and I feel like this may help someone progress if they know how to go about finding the three C's, and how an understanding of one can lead to the other, and how removing aversion of sensations can help clear up the three C's like it did for me.