I would like to describe a set of experiences and some of my speculation on what was going on. I will try to explain them outside of specific traditional models but I'm happy and appreciative to hear thoughts on where/how these experiences fit into maps/models/practices you are into.
As of a year ago, I have had two periods of several (3-5) days where a thing that I called the "autoregulating process" was active. I chose that name for the reason that it had two main qualities:
- There was no percieved effort from a "self" to keep it going or trigger it despite it carrying on for several days
- By extension it had a very impersonal quality to it (as opposed to what the narrative self feels like for some)
- The longer I look at my mind, the more it appears as a bunch of distinct pieces (if thinking in nouns) or processes (if thinking in verbs)
How did it feel? My mind on a day to basis, as of writing this, oscilates from these states quite frequently:
1. Natural, with reduced or removed physical tension and baseline sense of something being wrong (i.e. worry, guilt, etc.)
2. Unaware of physical tension, emotional state, and the degree to which the mind has contracted around thought/sensation
3. Aware of the those things but they are still apparent
4. Letting go of those things by releasing/relaxing percieved tension or bringing it gently to the forefront of attention/awareness
This autoregulating process felt like the mind decided: Screw state 2, I am going to apply state 3, or even just skip to state 4, so that I can be in state 1 almost all the damn time. Emphasis again that this was an impersonal process qualitatively; no sense of "I thought this through and decided to...blah blah blah" was experienced behind this change.
In the first case, the autoregulating process abruptly ended after a few days when I got in a disagreement with someone. It seemed as though the process was overcome my the negativity, reification, and tension of that situation; or it just ran out of momentum. The second time it happened, which lasted more like a week, it seemed to slowly lose momentum. There was desire to keep the momentum going but also an acceptance that desire is almost certainly not conduscive to the thing keeping going.
To put it even more plainly, both cases felt like the holy grail of psychological/spiritual development. Things just flowed and suffering was relaxed almost as quickly as it popped its head up. Not just overt suffering but also more subtle forms like obsessive thinking or inappropriate reifying/storymaking.
The trickiest part of this is to try to describe what step 4 actually feels like. The most palpable thing I can access on demand is when my mind is lost in a train of thought. In that case, if the mind is sort of looking for it, there's a percieved non-physical contraction of the concious space around the train of thought. Maybe put a different way, the volume/brightness on the other senses get turned down to almost nothing, and the volume/brightness in the train of thought goes up. Step 4 feels like that contraction expands outward and gets released, opening conciousness up to the other senses (i.e. turning the volume/brightness back up). The degree of the contraction/expansion/volume/brightness varies a lot though. It also has a strong quality of relaxation to it.
Lastly, my speculation: I think this has something to do with relaxing either attention (not to be confused with awareness) or relaxing the minds responses to the intention/impulse stream. The first time it happened, I definitely had a decent baseline of mental stillness and resolution, but I was deliberately doing a practice called "Do Nothing" (I heard about it in a Frank Yang video which discussed Michael Taft's Dropping The Ball thing). What I took from the instructions was that each time an intention popped up, or attention got fixed, to relax that away. The autoregulating process occurred maybe 30 minutes into that sit, though I had been doing lots of sitting in general in that period (which for me means 60 minutes a day on average).
In any case, correlation does not imply causation. I'm not sure if it happened as a result of focusing on that kind of practice (which I am not familiar with much at all) or that was incidental.
