Sometime in June or July of 2023 I was sitting on my living room couch, in an acute state of anxiety over the very real possibility that my contracting business might fail and go bankrupt. This would have broad implications for my life and my families life if it happened, and so basically I was stressing out. I was petting my cat who was the best kind of lap cat anyone has ever had, and trying to take deep breathes and calm down. Not because I knew anything special about breathing, but as a kind of natural reaction to acute anxiety attacks. Suddenly something happened. I can’t really describe the thing that happened itself, it was like something in me completely turned off and back on. I had no words for it, no language or ideology to describe it, and no way of knowing what it was, but in that flash of a second the thought that came was a sort of recognition: “oh…I’m doing this…to myself.” As if it was a recognition that I was the problem here. Not the job, or the business, or circumstances, but ME. I was causing this, and not just this anxiety attack, but everything in my life. For my entire life there had been this general level of anxiety and fear and unease. I now refer to it as a hum, but I wasn’t aware of it consciously until it shut off, which it did after this event. It shut completely off and has never come back. What it took with it was a boatload of thoughts and thought-streams, lines of thinking, bargains and trade-offs for everyday things, emotional wranglings, and a bunch of the normal psychological problems discussed by almost every psychologist I had ever heard or read about.Not the deep unconscious stuff, that would have to be worked through later, but almost all of the surface stuff. Afterwards (and still) there was what felt like a tremendous space inside my head, that I had never experienced before. There had been a similar incident in 2003, 20 years earlier, but it was more like just a suddenly blissful feeling that lasted a couple of days, and it hadn’t turned off the “hum.” That was still there, and I was still unconscious of it. The insight related to that incident was my wife and I were talking shit about one of her friends who was kind of a manipulative person, and my thought was: “oh… we’re ALL like that.” I had no practice or beliefs or ideologies that would have been helpful at the time, and it got written off as some weird thing that must happen to people at different times in their lives. It wasn’t even the kind of insight that could be shared with friends or anything, certainly not my friends at the time. After a short while it faded away and I was back to the way I’d always been. 

Part 2
There was a period of a couple of months which felt like a honeymoon of sorts. I had been a hobby writer of fiction and short stories, and editor at a couple of small online lit mags, and a hobby musician as well, since I was young. The creativity in me exploded. I was writing stories and poems (I’d never been able to write poems before), and working on musical projects for myself, my wife (also a musician), and friends I knew. There was a tremendous amount of bliss and joy. Shortly before the incident happened on the couch I had done a deep dive into engineering, mixing, and recording music in a small home studio I’d built. I was also talking in online writers forums, on Reddit, and searching YouTube for answers to what had happened to me and why. In this time it felt like it would last forever. The only frameworks I had for what felt like a religious experience or spiritual awakening was a few books I’d read in my twenties about such things. I’d heard of Terence McKenna, Gurdjieff, Alan Watts, J. Krishnamurti, but had long ago put that away, believing it was nonsense, or just something that didn’t really happen to real people. I knew the basics of western Christianity, as most westerners do, and it seemed like the mystical version of that story was the closest parallel to what had happened to me. I thought things like: “maybe THIS is what Jesus went through,” etc etc. I never developed a full blown messiah complex because what I thought was the story of Christ wasn’t actually true, it was a metaphor, and there was probably actually no historical man called Jesus. I still believe that, but at the time I was thinking along the lines of maybe his story was just a misunderstanding of reality, which seemed to also have been revealed to me. I knew the Buddha was a real guy and could see that at their core, Buddhist teachings were essentially the same as the teachings of Christian mystics, as well as Sufi and other traditions I came across while researching online. I was spouting off all over the place online with bliss fueled nonsense when a couple of guys whom I’d briefly known in writing communities, started commenting on my crazy posts with what sounded like knowledge of what I was talking about. They were not a team or anything; they seemed to not really care about the other one except tacitly. Anyway, they both helped me calm down in different ways, and started me looking at things more clearly. Neither of them would claim to be “teachers” or even acknowledge any kind of status or attainments. There was no teacher student relationship at all. Mostly they just talked to me as friends, and let me ramble on, sometimes agreeing with things, and sometimes pointing out things I was confused about, but usually framing them as things they had once thought or felt themselves until they came to realize XYZ… then I would process those conversations and come back with more ideas. Neither of them were “meditators” per se, but both suggested subtly that meditation might help some, so I started looking into that. That’s when I found Daniel Ingram, Angelo Dilollo, and a bunch of other non-duality and meditation stuff online. I reached out through email to both Daniel and Angelo, and one day got a response from Daniel who said he’d be happy to talk to me on a zoom call. He was very nice and somewhat helpful, but I was still looking for hard answers about what this all was, and of course, there are no simple answers to those questions. He recommended some books by Jack Kornfield and others which I read. I also read his book. None of those books were very helpful to me because I was looking for solid clear immediate answers, and those books are about systems and processes. I wasn’t ready to hear that yet or invest in any long term processes. He mentioned the DharmaOverground, and I kept that in the back of my mind. 

Part 3As the honeymoon bliss began to wear off, I looked for more and more ways to get it back.I didn’t realize at the time that bliss was just the minds reaction to what it thought it could “get” out of the whole thing. My business was still in bad shape and consequently my family life too. Over a period of a few months that reality began to come crushingly back, and all of that junk came bubbling up, and roaring in. In some ways it was much worse than it had been before. Panic attacks, acute anxiety attacks, and general melee, or what seemed like an endless stream of bad luck and bad news arose. The “hum” was still gone, but the feelings and sensations hit much harder than they ever had before. But I was not delusional (or maybe I was). I had this certainty that all of this was going to get worked out. I knew I had to do it, and it wasn’t going to be easy, but I was certain it would be okay somehow. One of the guys I was talking to suggested some breathing exercises which I started doing to ease anxiety when it came up. He also told me to go for long walks and do the breathing exercises. In my mind there was still that spaciousness, which seemed to be a permanent change, and I kept trying to reconcile that with the upheaval and visceral quality of feelings and sensations at a level I’d never really experienced before in my life. The other thing that stayed was what I’ve called an endless compassion machine. That was the seeing that other people had terrible difficulty in life and it made me feel for them in a way I never had. I understood their pain and suffering in a way that was completely different than the ways I had understood it before. I can’t overstate the change. I wanted to help everyone, and yet I knew that wasn’t possible. I was a middle class guy with a wife, three kids, and a failing contracting business. I had always been a pretty nice guy generally, in fact, somewhat of a doormat really, but this was different. Besides the compassion for everyone there was the realization that because I had been a doormat psychologically, a kid from a dysfunctional upbringing with lots of childhood trauma, and a mountain of piled up bad choices, that that had affected the way I built and ran my business. I started to channel some of the new energy into fixing that situation and to dig my way out of a mountain of debt and work problems, largely of my own making. I started to notice that a “big problem” would present itself and I would handle it in a way I never would have before. Simple things like refusing to do jobs without material deposits, demanding shorter time scales for open invoices where work had been completed, and firing customers and contractors that wouldn’t go along with the new program. Normal stuff I should have been doing all along but hadn’t. I had built up a bunch of contractors that took advantage of my doormat persona. I’m not blaming them, they were just doing business as they always had. I lost a bunch of customers and jobs, but almost miraculously I would run into new customers and contractors that would adhere to my new standards and things started to get better. I began to think someone or something was looking out for me. Some of the coincidences seemed almost impossibly fortuitous and timely. Many times I would be desperate for money, and about to file bankruptcy, lay my guys off, and start that whole ball rolling downhill, and someone would call with a big job and a big downpayment that would keep us going. During this time there were also a lot of synchronicities happening which enhanced that feeling that someone or something was looking out for me. More importantly though,This idea gave me the confidence and courage to keep going against what at times looked like impossible odds. It also allowed me to get myself into very difficult emotional places and “feel” those emotions, and sensations fully, without trying to push them away, or repress or ignore them. I remember many nights laying on the couch, deep breathing, and just holding the terrible feelings right where they were, facing them, and then watching as they would fade and be okay for a while. I also watched how they were triggered again, the words that would bring them, the little mental conditionings that would fire off when I heard certain phrases, or certain ideas came into my head. The catastraphising  loops that went off and how they would resolve into terrible feelings of dread and despair, which would again rise and pass away. This happened over and over and over again. It allowed me to start trusting myself and my life in a way that I never had before. I understand now that that way of thinking, that someone was looking out for me, the universe or something, was delusional, but that realization came as an insight later. What I learned to do in this time period was face difficult challenges which included difficult feelings and face them fully. 

I would go for long walks and do deep breathing exercises until I got light headed, then breathe normally for a while and open up my vision into a sort of panoramic mode, not focusing on anything intentionally. This puts your mind in a sort of observational mode, where you can see everything, but not necessarily focus on any one thing. If something arose in the landscape I wanted to focus on I would, and then go back to panoramic mode. When in observational mode, and with the mental spaciousness that was my new normal, there’s a way to watch yourself at the same time. So I started doing this all the time. It was just something I did intuitively, and the panoramic mode thing was something I’d done on and off for years—probably starting as a kid when I learned it could help with car sickness, which I always got really bad. This was just sort of a repurposing of an old coping strategy, and it helped me watch myself think, and feel, and BE in the world. I didn’t think of it as meditation but it was really. I also was laying down and breathing on the couch in my office, to deal with acute stress whenever necessary. I would put my headphones on, listen to some ambient music or sound bath thing, and close my eyes and breathe. One day I slipped into a pretty deep (at that point) meditative state. I hadn’t been expecting to and didn’t even know that was really a thing. I’d tried meditation in my 20’s which lasted about five minutes before I’d said “nope, not for me.” So I was caught off guard by it. It was the first time I’d felt that kind of clean peaceful feeling that comes with a meditative state. I began repeating this activity fairly regularly. Shortly before this I’d signed up at DhO and made an introduction. I came back to the forum and started reading about meditation maps and all the rest of the postings in that place. I wasn’t very interested in much of the map stuff or the Buddhist stuff, but I got a lot of good info about meditation techniques. I really didn’t understand much of what I read. I didn’t know what Jhana was, or any of the other Buddhist words, but I started to learn some of it. I read Daniel’s book again and it made more sense, at least some of it. I could understand that it was a very complete map of how to get from ordinary consciousness/awareness to something like A and P, and then on from there to fruition or enlightenment or whatever. My problem was it had too much second to second grit that didn’t seem relevant to my situation. It did drive me to experiment with meditation more, and I did that fairly regularly. It never felt effortful or like I was “working” at it, or had to meditate. I avoided meditation when tense situations arose and feelings were high. Choosing instead to just sit with the feelings and face them and remain as open as possible. Things in my family dynamic that needed attention were also more and more obvious. I could see where defensiveness, passive-aggressive behavior, and reckless neglect of both real world problems, as well as feelings and consideration for others and their situations, had left deep scars. I didn’t go back and try to heal old wounds or bring up the past much at all. I just started not doing destructive things with regard to my family, as I had done with my business. And it wasn’t that I started fixing my business and then worked on my family, it was all concurrent. None of my practice felt like a linear progression. All of it was happening at once, concurrently. I mean, formal meditation itself did progress sort of, but meditation itself was never actually the practice. It was something that aided my ability to practice. The real practice was the pursuit of the truth of things, and staying relaxed and open enough to accept those truths as they were. About this time I started engaging a little on DhO. I was also communicating regularly through mostly email with one of the guys who was helping me out. I wrote these long emails about what I was thinking, feeling, and experiencing, and would sometimes send them if there was something I thought important about one, and sometimes just delete them and forget it. He would usually respond, sometimes a quick note and sometimes pages of his thoughts about something or other. I also had a bunch of weird things happen around this time, like my body wanting to do odd stretches and bends, and forays into different foods I never would have wanted before or even tried. I was always a pretty picky eater, and it just wasn’t like me to experiment much with food.I stopped eating most fast foods and take-out, and started cooking all my food. Not because I was being health conscious or anything, I just wanted to. There was no discipline involved. It made me feel better to eat better food, and that fact was just obvious. I had never before noticed food making a difference in how I felt, or in the quality of my thoughts, but it was now very obvious. I started getting into meditative states regularly and hadn’t really any understanding of the difference between different styles or practices.I played with fire Kasina and watched the figure change colors and warp around, which was cool, but in a short time I could see that spot as a moving/shifting image or light just above my eyebrows (if my eyes had been open) without first looking at a light. Not the colors, but a black and white version. It would turn into things, figures, faces, animals, all kinds of stuff but I never really cared about making sense of the images, or adding meaning, more just about staying focused on it. I was aware this was concentration, and started experimenting with being aware of as much as I could at the same time. So, music in my headphones, the breath, the image, anything happening outside my meditation, thoughts (both overt thoughts and the wispy kind of underground ones), and feelings and sensations that arose in my body. I was doing this one day and suddenly I started hallucinating. It may have been a half-dream or hypnogogia type thing, but it was extremely vivid and shockingly real. I had been listening to my wife and son outside in the pool while meditating and suddenly they were in the room with me talking about something important and moving around oddly. It was dream like and I wasn’t scared until I stopped hallucinating and realized I had been doing so. I was scared to meditate for a bit after that for a few days. When I went back to it, it was fine. 

There were lots of small insights daily. I’m trying to remember some of the small ones but I don’t really. They were mostly centered around small behaviors, the behaviors of others towards me, and the compassion machine just made it impossible not to care about that stuff. Relationships, family dynamics, being helpful to myself and others I cared about, that sort of stuff. At this point people still had a big effect on me. When I was alone I could just sit and be still. I stopped watching TV or listening to news, and kind of stopped caring about what was going on outside my little bubble. Like the eating thing, and moderate exercise, I didn’t think about stopping that stuff, I just lost interest. I would still listen to meditation and non-duality speakers, and I was still heavily seeking something. At first it was to get the bliss back, but as it went on it became less and less about that, and more and more about finding the truth that would make more sense than the last iteration of truth I’d found. Ironically the right video would pop up just when I was thinking about something. This further bolstered the idea that someone or something was helping me out. I felt like I could lean into it more, and everything would work out fine. This was still scary in specific life circumstances, but generally it made for good open practice. I wasn’t reckless with my regular life, or ever feel like I was invincible or anything. I thought that what is supposed to happen WILL happen and I will find a way to deal with or handle whatever that was. There was still this background of certainty that this process is playing out, and would continue to do so until it finished. My feeling was that the end of the process couldn’t be overshot and I would keep going no matter what. I didn’t really care about maps, or systems, or where I was in any system. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, it can be fun, but it just wasn’t part of my practice framework. My reactivity dropped precipitously during this time. I wasn’t numb, or didn’t feel numb, but I literally noticed very clearly how things that used to really bother me didn’t anymore. I was long past traffic anger and things like that, but bigger things like my business failing, or my wife saying something that would have made me defensive in the past, didn’t land the way they once had. I was never complacent about my family obligations with regard to this non-reactivity, and I rarely just fucked off when I should be working or doing something around the house, or with my family. The reactivity just got to be a lot less, rather quickly. I started holding myself open during challenging times and facing situations full on as they were happening. At the same time I sort of looked back at myself while an event was happening and loosely held both together at the same time. The brain can only focus on one thing at a time, but somehow you can put yourself in a sort of panoramic awareness spot and understand several things at once. Or… leave yourself open, and the thing that needs your attention will get it when it needs it. This for me is related to being able to listen to someone speak without adding anything to what they are saying. Like not getting caught in a narrative your mind is telling about what another person is saying and actually just listening. For a long time we believe that we must focus on a speaker intently to understand what they’re saying. As it turns out this isn’t true. Understanding is instant. And unless it’s some kind of highly technical stuff you intellectually don’t understand but are trying to learn, then you get it right away. I messed with this idea a lot, and it’s where I came up with the idea of listening to a boring news cast and deliberately trying not to understand what was being said. What you notice when you do this is all the stuff you’ve been adding and how much energy is being put into this addition. You can do the same thing by finding where thoughts are generated and gently suppressing them, or letting them drift off without following them. You can feel the energy you’ve been wasting chasing them, adding to them, looping them, believing they are you. Not that there’s anything wrong with thoughts or thinking itself. People at DhO said they thought I was in A and P and posted links to Daniel’s book on the A and P. It sounded about right. I still didn’t have much interest in maps and my place on them. The program was rolling pretty fast and most of the time changed and brought new things without me doing much. I don’t mean to say it was all automatic, but the changes were so fast and clear that there wasn’t a lot of time to sit and think about things. There weren’t long periods of dead air that needed to be filled. I think that’s why the slow steady consistent practice model didn’t work for me. I see the value in it, but there was no time for that. The guy I was corresponding with mentioned a couple of times how fast I was adapting and changing. I wasn’t sure if this was true by comparison to others. I didn’t often compare myself to others. It seemed to me all people were individuals and would progress as was right for them. Before all this started I was a very competitive person. But it became clear early on that this was just my trying to fill a hole in myself that felt like lack, and that hole could never get filled. It was a pointless thing to do, and so I stopped. It wasn’t something I had to put effort into. 

Good stuff.

Thanks for all the great detail, brian.

Great read, thank you for sharing that Brian!

A few things stood out but I can really relate to this one:
"Afterwards (and still) there was what felt like a tremendous space inside my head, that I had never experienced before."

The analogy I came up with is that I felt like a gumball machine with the big glass/plastic globe, except there was no gumballs in it. My body felt solid from about the shoulders down but above that just felt like an open, centerless, expanded space.

The meditation progressed from lying down to sitting up, and then I tried lots of different positions. Sitting up made it less likely I would fall asleep, and seemed fruitful. I wasn’t consistent or even doing it daily. Several times a week for varying lengths of time. Some days I would do three or four sits and sometimes I would skip a day or three. I did a few long ones like three hours, and the after effects would sometimes last longer, and sometimes not. This is about the time I really realized that each sit was different. Not like every sit is totally different, but like each sit was unpredictable and the effects of each were different depending on an infinite set of factors and possibilities. Some days it feels like nothing was going on and sometimes you could sit for 30 mins and go really deep. I did notice that after a while my hands started to disappear. My feet got numb or tingly and started to disappear, and then eventually my whole body would disappear. At first it didn’t happen all the time, and it was still just as unpredictable, but it started getting more and more frequent. When I say my whole body disappeared, I still knew I had a body, and I could scan it if I chose to, but it was transparent feeling, and I had to place my attention on a certain part to feel it. From there it was easy to go into panoramic mind mode and allow many things to be happening at once. Not attending to any one but available to attend to anything if it were to arise. This is where I heard sound without adding anything to it for the first time. I saw how immediately after the sound the mind added an identification, a label, and then wanted to pursue its source. It had been my son dropping his weights onto the wood floor upstairs. This is where I got the concept of watching the mechanism in action. The mechanism felt almost foreign, as random thoughts were feeling more and more. I could see that there was the actual perception, then the mechanism started up and wanted to add to it. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just seeing how the whole mechanism works. The feeling it was foreign was that there was still something that felt like it was watching, and so what it was watching felt like “other.” Duality in action yeah? Now I can see that there’s really nothing wrong with duality, but I couldn’t then. The wrongness is what we believe about the duality. Like believing “I” am watching the dualistic nature of duality which is separate from “me” (or anything else for that matter.) and you can know this intellectually in words and even get the feels with it at times. Like there are times in meditation where you feel stuff really fully, and even times off the cushion where it blooms out and you feel it deeply, but then it goes back to normal and you don’t feel it; it doesn’t last. At this point in the story I started to get the idea that maybe I was being delusional about the “someone guiding, or looking out for me” thing. I really didn’t want to let that go, and I don’t remember what started this breakdown of the idea. I’ll try to remember what it was that started it off. I remember being really sad for a bit about this idea not being true. It was like someone taking away your security blanket. I felt naked and afraid.

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I’ve searched my memory about the exact catalyst that made me start thinking I was  delusional about someone or something helping me out, and I can’t remember. The closest I get is I remember where I was and what was happening around me when it first took hold. I was standing in my living room and what I remember were the feelings surrounding the event. Like with so many insights that came it may have been just some seemingly random phrase, not specifically tailored to blast a particular view that my mind used to do just that. There were pointings and synchronicities everywhere, not just in talks by spiritual teachers, or meditation teachers, but almost in the air like the universe was shouting it at us from all directions, and this whole paradigm of understanding shifted from “something out there helping me along” to ME helping me along. It ushered in a new sort of concept where everything in the frame of life was me, and all sensate experience, including thoughts were what I would refer to as “content” for a while. This idea would shift from everything is content to everything noted or noticed or “known” was the content, but at first I couldn’t actively make this distinction. Seeing as delusion that someone or something was helping me, and the subsequent model shift, didn’t happen immediately. I think there were several days of reassessing my practice, and what I can only refer to as grieving, followed by a kind of confusing search for another model or framework to replace it. I didn’t think of it in terms of a model or a replacement at the time. I was looking for truth, or the truth of it all, or maybe finer and finer iterations of truth. There’s a thing with certain non-duality speakers where they speak in this kind of minimalist o, base truth sort of way. “There’s nothing to do, and nowhere to go” kind of stuff. That is usually true at an ultimate level, but in the process you have to directly experience how it is true. You don’t have to document it, name and memorize its stages, or learn anyone else’s names for stages for the insights or anything else, but you have to directly experience the process, at finer and finer resolutions. Not that there’s anything wrong with following a system, and learning that systems stages and even dogma’s. Once you intellectually know the ultimate truth it’s easy to get caught in traps that your mind devises as it reifies itself and morphs into a version of what looks like whatever “truth” it thinks it knows. This happens over and over again, and I found at some point it was better to just assume any belief at all was just a reification and therefore “content.” And I said your mind “devises” these traps but it’s not actually your enemy or plotting against you. It’s just doing what minds do. It’s not actually “devising” any plot against you. I didn’t see much of any of that at the time though. More fear started coming up as my model was changing and I was grieving the loss of the old one. I thought maybe I should get more into meditation and that maybe some advanced techniques could help. I spent more time in the meditation forum reading and chatting with other meditators. I bought a book on Jhana which sounded like one of those advanced techniques I might be looking for, but discovered after a few chapters I had already been doing that kind of meditation. I still don’t understand all or really any of the different kinds and styles of meditation, their specific distinctions, or ways of practice. I went back to what I was already doing without thinking much about it.As I processed the grief, I realized what I had been grieving. It wasn’t the loss of someone helping me, it was the loss of my being “special enough” to be helped by something or someone out there in the universe. I talked to the guy who I’d been corresponding with and told him about it. He hammered the last nail in the coffin with something like ‘yeah, it’s nice to believe there’s something out there helping us, but there’s not.’When I saw clearly that I had been trying to cling to my “specialness” I started noticing all the other situations and ideas that had supported this clinging, and all the ways I was perpetuating this myth. I got a pretty good boost out of the exercise. Nothing like the original bliss but it was good. Around this time I started treating the bliss or joy that would come up the same way I faced negative feelings and thought loops, as “content.” They were no longer some prize to win or chase, they were just more content. That’s not to say you can’t or don’t enjoy good feelings when they come, just that you don’t add any funny ideas about what they mean, or indicate. The insight about needing to be special had implications for a whole bunch of things up and down the chain so to speak. It was the reason for so many things I did, behaviors I exhibited, interactions I had, relationships I maintained or burned, etc etc etc. 

Well, just to offer another side of it... there is a natural intelligence of the heart/mind that is at work in us. There is no way any of us could decide and do our path. Stuff happens that is so much better and deeper than anything our superficial mind could ever concieve. (This is also why intellectually knowing maps and formal practices doesn't really hurt, we'll see the real stuff, the heart/mind leads us there if we make space for it.) 

And this natural intelligence doesn't just end at some point. It keeps going.

... but the lessons become more subtle, more profound, and paradoxically more humbling. If someone doesn't learn about their own egotism along the way, they're missing like 99% of the wisdom.   It takes a funny kind of spiritual pride that keeps engauging in practices that leads to this kind of humbling.  But ultimately, it feels like purification. Purification is an acquired taste.

The tricky thing as soon as we think we are special, regardless of what "stage" or extent we've awaken up -- then we fall into all sorts of traps. If we think we have "more" natural intelligence of the heart/mind, life will find a way to kindly repremand us... or sometimes beat the stuffing out of us. Ugh, so true.

This is why things like the buddhist "6 Realms" are not just religious dogma, but actually guiderails for meditation practice...

Are we hell beings -- actively hating our own mind contents and fighting with it? (which causes endless pain and suffering)
Are we preta/hungry ghosts -- seeking more good and special experiences like an addict? (which causes endless seeking and suffering)
Are we animals -- just trying to follow a routine and endure the sit? (which does nothing to fix the heart of suffering, just endures it)
Are we humans -- developing sophisticated models and judgements and desires about experience?
Are we asura/powerful gods -- being ambitious and trying to achieve more and become even more powerful? (which causes them to eventually try something too big and they fail catastrophically) 
Are we deva/heavenly beings -- feeling prideful and simply trying to maintain and dwell in what we've achieved? (which cause them to ignore the world and then things slowly collapse around them like going bankrupt  -- slowly at first, then all at once)

And the human realm is the only one where people can escape... because only humans "can desire to see the mechanism of desire". Only humans can find the right "effort" to see how clinging to desires leads to suffering. Only humans can truly meditate, you could say. 

All the other realms can only lead to more suffering.

Anyway, this spiritual stuff is like playing with fire. If you disrespect it, it will burn you. 

But if we find ways to honor the natural intelligence of our heart/mind... it keeps leading onward.

Yeah, I have respect for all of that stuff. I think for me, I was a dude in my 50's that went from zero to A and P with no background or understanding of any of that. I went through a bunch of the process really quickly and often the best I could do is discover the how and why of it after the fact. Not all of it; I learned a lot of helpful stuff here and other places. I never really tried to resist any of it because it was very clear that that would be a bad idea. I know you've been through it and know what I mean. It's like people telling you to slow down and enjoy the waves, and what you're looking at is a thousand foot tsunami. There is no way to fight it at that point. 
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Brian, how are things now? What's your moment-to-moment experience like? What is the cutting edge of your practice?

Mostly during this time the practice didn’t feel like practice. It felt like responding to things that would come up. I think it always felt that way but without the delusion that I was being supported by the universe there was a feeling that I was playing tennis, and on the other side of the net was the part of me that I couldn’t see. There was nothing like me deciding to work on something and then delving into it for a while and really exploring a single aspect of practice. I thought about doing that, and maybe wished I could at times, but everything just came at once and there wasn’t time to stop and reflect. Someone at DhO suggested I go slower, but there was never time for that. Even the guy I was corresponding with told me I could slow down and relax more, or even forget about it for a while and just live my life. He said something like, don’t worry it will all still be here. There were bunches of things that had been connected to the last insight and those things popped up and got seen and then fell off. I probably talked about it like it was stressful, but most of the time it was just what was happening. All of it was completely intertwined in my life. Nothing was separate, or had space to breathe. There was no practice as distinct from my everyday life. It affected and was part of sleep, work, relationships, business, exercise, eating, and everything and anything that I did or could do. There were odd physical symptoms and presentations which I’m still not sure about. Headaches for no reason (I had never been prone to headaches), a loud clear ringing in my ears, the desire to move into strange stretching and bending postures, weird unexplained pain in parts of my body, and sleep issues. Some nights it felt like I never actually went to sleep in the way I knew sleep. It was like I hovered in this sort of meditative state where I was aware all night, but my brain was asleep. I figured maybe the meditation caused these kinds of side effects and it would either go away or get bad enough to do something about. Actually it wasn’t really “bad” per se. It never lead to sleep deprivation or anything. I felt fine in the morning, and it wasn’t all the time, it was random. I didn’t talk about this stuff with anyone. I wasn’t really sure what to say about it. My wife would have worried about me and wanted me to go see a doctor, and nobody in my life had any experience or interest in anything like spirituality, except the guy I was corresponding with, and people on forums. I had the feeling that as long as I could handle weird stuff it would be fine. I chalked it up as part of the deal, and was still completely certain that the process would play out as it needed to. I had always been kind of a weird dude, and so a lot of the weird stuff didn’t draw much attention. My wife and family noticed that I was doing things differently, acting differently, and doing things like not watching TV or whatever, and spending more time outside staring at the trees, but I told them I’d started meditating to help me relax and they liked that idea. Before all this I’d been an adhd, ocd, eccentric, tightly wound ball of anxiety. They mostly welcomed the change. I made efforts to spend time with my wife and kids like I always had. We watched shows together and did normal stuff. I was much less interested in TV and often just watched for their sake, and instead of getting caught up in a show or movie would watch in panoramic mode, or noticing fine details I had never noticed before. Like production glitches, what was going on in the background of something, or audio details. I didn’t want them worrying about me, so I kept that stuff to myself.All of this became practice as well. I was seeing so much more than I ever had. I watched everyone’s behaviors and habits and things they were completely unconscious of. Their defense mechanisms, pettiness, habits, and mental wranglings all became a study. I saw and understood progressively more and how people worked. It was beautiful, sad, wonderful, and amazing all at the same time. When I was around others they affected me deeply. I could often feel their emotions palpably. Sometimes it was uncomfortable. When I was alone these blissful or warm glowing feelings would come up, sometimes subtle, sometimes not. This usually didn’t happen around people. I tried all kinds of ways to cultivate these feelings, but they came when they did, and didn’t when they didn’t. They seemed to trend toward longer duration and more frequency and for a while I thought maybe that’s how the process went.Like they would just get closer together and one day become on all the time. That isn’t what happened, and in retrospect I can see a few things, that had I known what to look for, would have told me that that assumption was not right.For one thing, they were pretty random. And sometimes they were much stronger or gentler than at other times—for no apparent reason.They seemed to be related to insights. There are bigger and smaller insights, and though I never really made any correlation to insights at the time, that’s what I suspect most of them stemmed from. They were still “reactions” to insights, whether I realized that or not. There are thousands of little insights that happen along the way, as well as the big ones that most systems have actually mapped out. I can see how learning these maps before everything started would have provided some stability and consistency to practice, but I really hadn’t had any preparation, and I couldn’t stop the train at this point to gain much. The route of slow incremental attainments was impossible for me as far as I could see. 

Continuous moment to moment awareness is the short answer. I'll explain it in some more detail at the end of my story. 

There was a lull as the last big insight finished snapping all kinds of links in the chain. I was treating everything I could perceive as content of the illusion and started to be able to distinguish between the position that the content was an illusion, and not real, and the clearer idea that the content was real, but what wasn’t was what I thought and believed about it. I had been seeking to return to the bliss or whatever, and that desire continued to become dimmed as I watched the “content” in myself closer and closer, more and more in real time. Good and bad were both content, and eventually the seeking anything slowed down, allowing me to be more open and gentle with my practice. All of the listening to non-duality and meditation speakers became irrelevant over time as I already knew intellectually what they were going to say before they said it. The problem wasn’t the intellectual knowledge, and that meant it was something else. I wondered if it just needed time and patience while some kind of physiology got worked out, and I went with that for a while, which further diminished seeking desire and behavior. The phrase ‘it’s not in the words’ kept rolling around in my head. I started to think that maybe there was no way to learn it at all and it was just some crap shoot that happened to some people and not to others. The whole idea of “learning” faded until seeking sort of stopped. I kept meditating like I had because it was enjoyable. I would also sit for long periods doing nothing. I generally felt good. Reactivity was very minimal in all kinds of situations. Everything in a busy life happened the same as it always had, car broke down, one of the guys crashed my work truck and got hurt, somebody or other wasn’t paying my invoices, I got sick and gave it to everyone in the house, my mom had a stroke and was in the hospital, my cat got cancer and died, the insights happened and there was bliss, meditation deepened and went places I didn’t expect, and sometimes it didn’t, the IRS sent threatening letters, my daughter called when nobody else was home and just wanted to tell me she loved me and she missed the family, and I found a great pair of shoes that I really liked finally. I didn’t stop thinking about the process, I don’t think I could have. I just watched the mechanism as I understood it working. Noticing products of the mechanism in more and more real time allowed me to see the whole mechanism at finer and finer resolution. Saying that doesn’t really describe it. All of the teachings and what ever anybody else said about it stopped mattering. Nobody was an authority of any kind anymore. not that I denied anybody else in the world was not amazing or wonderful or nice or knowledgeable, or a master of something, it’s that didn’t matter for what I was doing, and couldn’t matter. I didn’t decide this perspective and use any effort to believe this narrative, or any narrative, it just happened. It became what it was. A few times while meditating I went really deep to what felt like a stopping point. This felt like being aware of nothing. It was stable and didn’t move. The only thing in it was a kind of flickering of very fast thoughts that never formed into anything but were somehow still meaningful.Early on in the big bliss phase just after the initial experience I’d had a dream that I was talking to one of the guys who was helping me, and asking him what this all was and he had (in the dream) said, “I’ll show you.” He touched my head and it opened up into something that these meditations felt like. It was thoughts, deeply meaningful, and yet moving so extremely fast that they couldn’t be watched or followed consciously. This was what these meditations felt like except more stable and still. Like watching a total solar eclipse and only feeling the energy around the edges of the blackness in the middle. There were no visuals, or anything else. I don’t know how long these experiences lasted. I had never timed meditations, but a decent guess would be fifteen or thirty minutes. I didn’t chase these experiences, they happened randomly. I would sit down to meditate and suddenly find myself there.There was no body, no discreet thoughts, and no me or anything else. These sits had long tails of after effects. Weird visual anomalies, flickering in and out of visuals, crackling little patches of energy on things, as well as the regular Jhanic afterglow of joy and contentment. There was a shift into a kind of dreamy state that was always there. I wondered if this was it. Like… well… is this what enlightenment is? There were no big fireworks or anything. I decided I would just keep doing what I was doing. Or well, I did just keep doing what I was doing. It wasn’t like there was a choice. There was the vaguest feeling of a self somewhere inside. I didn’t know if that would just fade away or what would happen. This went on for a month or so, and then one morning about 4am while I was half awake and in hypnogogia type land I had this dream that I was sliding down a hill on some kind of sled. The hill was made of grass and it was wet and slippery. At the bottom was a grassy gully and then another smaller grassy hill. Above the smaller hill was light coming up from what presumably was a big city or something.I was finally going to see this big city (in the dream that’s what it felt like) and get all the answers, but when the sled got to the top of the smaller hill I looked out at the city and it was un-understandably complicated, huge, and stretched out into infinity. There was a loud cracking sound and I woke up. I understood I was never going to get an answer to the question I’d been asking. When I put my feet on the floor “I” was not there.Not in the way that it had disappeared, but in the way it had never been there. I went down to the couch in my office and sat on it, in front of the big screen TV and watched my reflection in the screen and the room behind me all day without turning the TV on. I don’t remember a lot of details about “what happened” around me in regular life. My wife asked if I was hungry at some point and brought me food. I fielded a couple of calls about work and said something about whatever it was, and I fell asleep on the couch at some point. When I woke up the next morning, I was still not there. I didn’t feel foggy or confused. The clearest way I can think to say what I felt was undistracted and un-distractible. I felt great without feeling blissful. 

Since then it's been pretty much the same all the time. I still have to work and do stuff. Things still come up that need to be handled. I talk to people and they talk back. I sit a lot and do nothing, or listen to music in headphones. Tonight I'm going to hand out candy to kids for Halloween. 

I want to stress that I in no way wish to undermine or cast aspersion on anybody’s framework or ontology by posting this stuff. It’s kind of weird that I’m a writer of sorts and hadn’t written any of this out in the past. It was a fun exercise. Putting myself back in the head space of some of the phenomenon, and what I thought about it at the time was interesting. I also don’t wish to claim anything about an end to any of this stuff. I don’t see (from here) how an end would even be possible, and it seems to me that there are as many paths through it as there are people. I maintain that the best path is the one you’re on. 

" Tonight I'm going to hand out candy to kids for Halloween"

So sweet! Sugar is bad for kids!!!  

There were so many sweet kids that came by, but I have to say that one of these kids was a real dick. He looked me directly in the eye and grabbed a huge handful of candy from the bowl. Literally one third of the large bowl.
i thought to myself, wow, this kid is going to make a great politician someday. Or...a gangster. 

" I maintain that the best path is the one you’re on. "

Hm ...

Too many words! ... 

Papa, words are what was asked of him...

Brian, thanks for the epic journey. It ought to be helpful to anyone to see how someone else has traveled the path. Their path. There's a sweet spot of length: a paragraph here or there can seem glib; but a true blow-by-blow can also be tedious. What you've written feels like the right length (for me anyway) to read in the course of a day or so and really feel like I get the arc of what you've experienced. Your development has some interesting parallels with mine, and I appreciate the chance to compare and contrast. Thank you.

This is generally accurate at a micro level - no two people will experience identical things along the way. But there are patterns, insights, and meta-events that tend to repeat from person to person. Some of these are endemic to the type of practice they pursue, and others are due to the innate human-ness of us all. We talked about this on the topic that spawned this topic.

+1

If there weren't commonalities, we couldn't even talk about paths or practice. If there weren't differences, there would be no need to talk.

Yeah, I agree too. What would be an example of something endemic in a certain type of practice? You mean like kundalini? 

People who practice Zen are encouraged to ignore meditation-induced phenomena that are recognized as important to practices like Theravada Vipassana. As a result, Zen meditators almost never report experiences of nanas and jhanas, while nanas and jhanas are endemic to vipassana meditation, which vipassana meditators strive to experience. 

In simpler terms, we tend to get what we practice for.

Helpful?

Yeah, makes sense. So what would the benefit of a Theravada practice be over say a Zen practice? I don't mean objectively. Do you think there would be a more grounded and predictable outcome potentially with TV practice? 

I don't know what you mean by using the word "objectively," but here's my reply:

I started by practicing Zen and did so for a number of years. I moved to Vipassana after reading more about the practice and taking a few online instructional classes. The two practices were very different, but I was getting similar results. Soon after I found MCTB online in its earliest version (it was called the "Blook" at the time), downloaded it, read it, and thought what it was describing was improbable, written by a guy with a very assertive, over-the-top style, and unlikely to be worthwhile. That was my Zen training talking. After another year or so of middling practice with few insights, I read MCTB again and decided to try Vipassana practice using the Daniel Ingram methods described in the book. That proved to be the right choice for me.

I think the main difference between these two practice methods lies in personality and the innate attributes of each person. I don't really know what those attributes are, but when you try various practices for a while, things tend to sort themselves out, like they did for me. It was the difference between "just sit" and "here's what to do and here's what that practice should lead to - look for those things."

​​​​​​​EDIT: I know quite a few advanced Zen practitioners and we seem to be able to sync our insights regarding the three characteristics and non-dual experiences. So, at the end of the day, these two methods seem to yield similar insights. Also, the more insights I was able to find using Vipassana the more Zen made sense to me, so there's that, too.

Makes sense. By objective I meant that there is no truly better or worse practice. There is the practice that works for any one individual. One of the guys that helped me out is someone I would describe as a Christian mystic. He wouldn't describe himself that way, or any way at all, but if you had no idea about any of this enlightenment stuff you would think he was a Bible thumper listening to him. It's only when you can see the commonalities in all successful practices that his message comes through. 

To an extent, you can say that sort of thing about anything (types of exercise, modes of transport, systems of government, healthcare modalities, etc.) but different systems give different results. I have been listening to people report their spiritual practices and their results for decades. I would not say that they all give the same or similar outcomes. So I think there are two questions to ask: 1) what practice is likely to work for me; and 2) what kind of outcome do I want. 

In your case, you already have your outcome, and are not looking for a practice to get somewhere. But it is worth pointing out that it is unlikely that your outcome is very similar to the many other outcomes that result from many different practices. There will be commonalities, to be sure, just as there are in types of exercise, modes of transport, systems of government, healthcare modalities, etc. but there will be differences too, just as there are in those other fields of endeavor.