In response to the comments so far, here's some more background:
I was an active and political secularist and (now that I look back on it) anti-theist. I was two years into a happy relationship with someone I loved. Several events and realizations set me off, culminating in my college graduation, after which I found myself feeling very skeptical about my identity, about who and what I was.
I was sitting on my bed on a night when I was by myself, which was unusual since my girlfriend, who was normally with me at night, was out of town, really questioning how I could be defined by other people and place them in these categories, when it hit me suddenly that I had been brainwashed! I was not who I thought I was taught to be, I was something else and I was free to define that. This realization came with a sudden wave of bliss followed by orgasm-like waves of positive feelings (don’t worry, not done yet).
I realized I needed to change my path and live by this idea, so I started looking into my options and over the course of the night, put together my plan for the future. I knew what I had to do. I knew it would make my life much more difficult than it had been before, but that it would be worth it. I acknowledged for the first time that I had been living in sadness and misery and if I had any chance of changing that, I would need to work for it.
It was early morning and I had not slept, but I had just drastically changed many aspects of my path in life. It was at this point that I felt truly released from desire (all of it, as far as I could tell). While I had only a passing knowledge of world religions, it was immediately clear to me that this was nirvana as described by Buddhism.
This happened at a time when I had very few responsibilities. I spent the next several days mostly by myself ‘doing’ nothing. I basically sat around living this state of nirvana. I’m not quite sure how long it lasted, because during day 2 or 3 things gradually worked back to ‘normal’ and I was left a as a changed person who still had to deal with all the consequences of the changes I had just gone through. It was actually almost too much for me to take. I spent the next month struggling to handle it and was so nervous about what I had to do that I had to force myself to eat. I lost 20 lbs. that month before I settled down.
That was two and a half years ago. So what changed for me since then? The most obvious changes for me were 1) that I no longer have any strong feelings about death, whereas I had been terrified of death before, and 2) I’m happy. Even though I’ve dealt with the person I loved leaving me, increased anxiety, clinical depression, psychosis, the deception of someone I once called a friend, and regular acts of discrimination of a sort I had never experienced before, I’m actually a happy person and I can see that I had been sad for the prior decade, as least, without really knowing that life could have been any better. I had no real context for these feeling before exploring Theravada Buddhism these past few weeks.
What happened more recently was that I now really acknowledge that I’ve made the big changes in my life that I had planned out back then and all that stress and pain has been lifted. I found myself wanting to actually look into Buddhism to explore some outside views about where I am, spiritually. I found that the descriptions of the path are highly consistent with my own path, and the experience of those who describe ‘awakening’, especially the descriptions I found on the “I am Sotāpanna, and so can you ;-)” thread. I have found very few other comparable descriptions that I can relate to.
Obviously there’s more to this that I haven’t included, but feel free to ask me questions or offer advice/support! I’m kind of in the process of figuring out where to go from here.
