Hi everyone.

I found this site when looking for answers to what the A&P experience I had a week ago was. It is an experience I have had many times, and it started long before I had a daily meditation practice, but I didn't know what it was.

Four years ago I started daily meditation practice, using a mantra. The technique I used was sort of like Vipassana in that there was no hard concentration on the mantra (it just had a slight priority over everything that arose in the mind) and there was no effort to remove thoughts that arose and disappeared. I just allowed them to be. Since then I have changed it and have used more effort to improve concentration.

I chose mantra above just watching the breath because for some reason, the effects outside of meditation were much more pronounced (mental peace and equanimity, lack of anger, lack of fear etc.) I did some zazen at a zendo a year ago, and dropped the mantra for a few weeks, with the consequence that many dark night effects started appearing (although I did not know what they were at the time). Not that using a mantra entirely removed such phenomena, but I have to say that they, for the most part, have been relatively rare and weak the last four years.

Meditation radically improved my peace of mind in daily life from something very much like a bad dark night the years before I took up daily practice. At this point I cannot remember when I last felt really angry or afraid, and I have let go of so many attachments that I wouldn't know where to begin to explain it all. Also, positive emotions started arising, such as deep compassion for all living creatures, even insects. This led me to change the way I eat. At any rate, to get to the point here:

I have had a stronger drive to meditate than usual for quite some time now, which has resulted in my meditating twice a day for one hour, sometimes more. My usual routine was 30 minutes, twice a day. But finding this site, watching the videos with Daniel on Vimeo and reading A Reformed Slacker's Guide to Stream-Entry, increased my drive even further. I decided that I would turn my life into one big retreat and meditate at all times when not at work or asleep, until I reached stream entry. I decided to use choiceless awareness as the technique, since so many people who have attained this stage speak very highly of this kind of meditation.

So I started yesterday evening. One hour. Brief break, and then another. I found the technique to be incredibly easy to do. Almost no distracting thoughts and it felt quite effortless, and so I felt I could go on forever. And so I continued. I am not sure whether the following happened in the third or fourth session (I stopped counting them):

My perspective shifted so that I suddenly had sort of a third person view of the sense of self. There was consciousness watching the self, and the conscious sense of self being watched from the outside, so to speak. It felt like watching my self like an entity floating in the ocean. But then it started to fade, becoming transparent and ghostlike. Finally it simply disappeared, and it felt incredibly peaceful. When meditation has usually caused the "me" to feel a deep sense of peace, this was much better, because where this "me" used to be, there was now absolutely nothing. It felt like a yoke had been lifted off me. I felt tremendously light, tremendously peaceful, and felt a deep sense of completion.

At the same time, it felt like such as small thing. Definitely no big deal at all. In fact, I thought to myself that even bothering to tell anyone of this would be absolutely pointless, since it was such as small thing. Nothing to brag about, and no sense of self there to feel elevated due to this so-called achievement. And nothing was really lost anyway. All the six streams of consciousness were still there. Everything was as before, except this feeling of self. Now I see how unnecessary it is. As I am writing it is still not there. I wondered if it would reappear when I went to bed last night, but it has not. Even when I have tried searching for it mentally, I have failed.

It took quite some effort to write this, because this feels like a very small thing. It is highly anticlimactic actually, just like it says in the Idiot's guide. But I think that if I can contribute to anyone doing the same, that will be a good thing.

The strange thing is: There has been no dark night at all from the A&P a week ago and until this. If it happened at all, it must have been brief enough to go completely unnoticed. Also: the only retreat I have ever attended was a two day, Zazenkai (8 hours pr. day), and I suspect I would still have been writing this if I had not. I have spent a lot of time contemplating and reading huge amounts of books about this stuff though, so I would say that I have used a great deal of effort the last few years, but not just doing meditation.

So if I am going to interpret this according to Daniel's map, I would say that I was in the dark night territory for many years prior to taking up daily meditation practice. Then I must have reached equanimity and stayed there 90% of the time for four years (with increasing positive mental effects). And finally I have experienced stream entry (I had a brief ten second episode of non-self asleep a year ago or so, but I doubt that counts). I cannot possibly see how this could be otherwise, unless I am now deluding myself into experiencing the lack of self. I don't see how that would work.

A big thanks to all of you and to Daniel. Without you I this would not have happened.