I've been chewing on the three doors bit of MCTB
...Regardless of the way that door manifests, there are some common
characteristics of doors that point to something beyond all of this. They
reveal something completely extraordinary about the relationship
between “the watcher” and “the watched” that it would take a very
warped view of the universe to explain, though I will try shortly. One
way or another, these fleeting experiences cannot be explained in terms
of our normal, four-dimensional experience of space and time, or
within our ordinary experience of a subject and object.
...A&P events tend to be very rich and thick, whereas there is always
a sort of silent and luminoustransparency to the way the Three Doors present.
....The no-self or emptiness door aspect has to do with the teachings
on the mirror-like nature of the mind, the Spirit of God moving upon
the face of the waters (that oh so mystical and overlooked line from
Genesis 1.2), God making man in his image, merging with a tantric
image of a buddha, seeing one's Original Face, thinking of who created
thought, and that sort of thing. It relates to directly observing the
collapse of the illusion of duality, the collapse of awareness into the
intelligence or cognition of the perceived. It is a bit like staring back at
yourself (or something intelligent regardless of whether or not it looks
like you) with no one on this side to be stared at and then collapsing
into that image. The emptiness door aspect tends to be the most
pleasant, easy and visually interesting of the three.
That sounds very much like something I encountered a few months ago, and maybe have been touching on over the last few years occasionaly.
What seemed to instigate it was to take the super-expansive, beyond-self aspect of the A&P seriously.
That is, years ago when I had the experience of being connected to a greater pool of life, ecstasy-in-all-things type experience, to take seriously the unity of it, rather than to dismiss it as another personal mind state dependent on the individual. To regard it as THE pool of life, which everyone seeks, in all times and places, rather than A pool of life which is personal to me.
I don't see how you can have it both ways - it's either personal or transpersonal, and many people seem to choose to see it as personal.
There's a tendency for people to talk about this as if unitive states are an aspect of individual experience - which is to deny the very unitiveness of it.
That's the energetic A&P event, but taking the encompassing non-dual aspects of that seriously seems (in my experience) to lay a foundation for much emptier, less ecstatic experiences - and that seems to be well described by Daniel in the above passage.
I would characterise it as I looking back at I, not centred in the body but distributed amongst all objects, not associated with any sensation, feeling, emotion, thought or mental movement, but a very abstract sense of I within the phenomenal, physical world of perception.
On reflection it seems to be profound and fairly spooky, though the spookiness could be an addition of my memory because it was at night.
It was quite brief, certainly wasn't permanent, and wasn't followed by anything other than return to my usual schmuckness.
So does that sound like the Three Doors emptiness experience that Daniiel describes, or some other jhanic or equanimous state ?
