Hello, I am new and wondering what people think of this experience. I am not associated with any particular school, practice, or religion.

Sometimes I can't sleep, so I lay there in meditation. One night, I laid there and did what I usually do: be aware of my thoughts passing by; it's extremely simple in terms of practice and there isn't much to it. The experience started off scattered with my mind constantly distracted. Eventually, everything slowed down after a few minutes. Maybe an hour later, everything went dark and thoughts seemed to seldom arise. I became aware of the gaps of darkness between each thought. I lose track of time at this point and the full session might have lasted three to four hours. What began to occur was a state of absolute silence where it felt like there were long periods of no thought and when rarely one did arise it was instantly evaporated when it came into my field of attention. So far, this is standard if I am able to maintain some level of focus.

The events that occurred next however were far from standard and the only instance of it ever occurring in my life. First, there were feelings of energy like hot electricity running through me. It felt invigorating like I was coming alive again; I'm usually mellow and not excitable. So far so good but momentarily something awful happened. I was struck by intense fear that felt like a panic attack. I began to say to myself that I was going to die if I kept this practice up. There was a very real and terrifying feeling that I was actually going to die. There was also a fear of going insane. It felt like as I continued my practice, my whole world was collapsing around me. It felt like who I was, who I am, and who I ever will be was about to come to a complete halt forever. The thought of this began to cause the fear to spiral out of control. Pressure was building inside of me very quickly as if I had set off a dangerous self-sustaining chain-reaction. Meanwhile, the energy levels were continuing to rise out of control and my the energetic feeling was very prominent.

In a last ditch effort to get it all to stop, as I began to panic and audibly say that I was going to die if I kept doing this, I stood up and remembered some slogan from somewhere: the opposite of meditation is hypnosis. So I began forcing myself to think and daydream as much as I could in an effort to get the fear to stop. It was strange because even as I interrupted my meditation by standing up on my bed and jumping around and forcing myself to think rather than be aware, the feelings kept getting stronger as if they were building momentum on their own accord without my volitional effort. Eventually though, it worked and it stopped. I sat on my bed staring at the floor wondering what just happened. I kept glancing at my hands because the energy I felt was still noticeable in them and I shook them expecting it to do something.. Of course, nothing happened. I was also hyper-aware of my 'self' and how it felt like it was about to get discarded and thrown out of the window if I kept my practice up.

Paradoxically, the next three days after this experience were probably some of the most peaceful days I've had. The energy I experienced remained with me for three days and each day it became progressively less noticeable until the fourth day when it wasn't noticeable at all. There was no anxiety, no struggle, no obsessive thoughts, or anything during these days. I eventually reverted back to my old self.

So, that's the story. Anyone know what this means? Also, I am a newcomer; I am familiar with mysticism in general but not the rhetoric used by people here.

You've had a breakthrough during which a massive load of repressed material came to the surface. This became too much for you, and you wisely shut the process off by thinking and imagining. This rebuilt your defense mechanisms. Three days of calm followed because at that point anything that wanted to come to the surface had come to the surface. No need to put this in religious or mystical terms, even though it felt quite out of the ordinary at the time.

Or else we could say you passed the A&P with the initial energy surge, then toppled over into a severe fear nyana, eventually moving into equilibrium. 

I had had a panic attack like that, lying in bed, about three years ago. My thumb was in a cast (I'd had surgery) and there was a sudden itch, which I realized I wouldn't be able to reach. I suddenly felt as if my entire being were encased in that cast on my thumb, and I became intensely claustrophobic. I got out of bed and walked for awhile, letting the concentrated energy ground itself through the soles of my feet. But I was a mess the next day, and had my doctor take off the cast. I found out there's a term for it, cast claustrophobia. 

The the full name for the fear nyana is insight into terror. The A&P (insight into the arising and passing away of all phenomena, or something like that) can be a real thrill, but then the dark side is that you see your own being as flickering energy. People tend not to like that very much. 

Happy travels. 

Maybe, I am not so sure about repressed material because the field of psychology is torn on this issue and experts to this day still debate over the issue of whether there is such a thing as a repressed memory. I have considered what you have said but decided to keep it on the side for now because of the controversy that surrounds repression. And you're right about the latter part of what you said, there is no reason to put this into religious or mystical terms. In fact, I am an atheist who believes in no religion nor spirit and through my eyes, all experiences in the realms of spirituality and meditation are translated into secular terms.

Have a good one.

I looked into arising and passing away and many of the things listed there coincide with my experience. I could not however find anything on the fear nyana that might explain what occurred afterwards. An idea is, maybe there was more than one state occurring at once but I don't generally view my experience as transition through several states but a flowing process. These are just semantics I guess.

While I'm sure we share the panic attack in common, I do not believe our contexts match. As far as seeing my being as a flickering of energy is concerned however, I'm afraid I didn't see it that way. Rather, what occurred was a mind-blowing fear that my identity was on the verge of annihilation and I was about to lose everything for good. At least, that's how it felt. It didn't feel like random panic without a context, it seems the fear was provoked by a threat of self-annihilation that was perceived to be very real.

Your experience does sound to me like Fear. Mine sounds like a phobia asserting itself, although I experienced Fear as claustrophobia (dreams of being in a coffin, that kind of thing). Your description of feeling that your identity was imperiled is spot on. 

But it's hard to know exactly, without hearing more about your practice in the days before and after. You have a fine level of precision in your report, by the way. Setting up a practice thread would be helpful. 

It's not repressed memory -- it would better be called repressed bioenergy. There's a book by Michael Washburn titled The Ego and the Dyanmic Ground that explains how the sense of a separate self gets constructed out of the primal ground of consciousness during the early years of life.