How exactly were you meditating? Were you on retreat or not?

Thanks.

I was sitting on my front porch meditating using the tip of my nose as my object of concentration. Not on retreat - just a normal evening sit.

Sitting talking to/meditating with my mom with my eyes closed and I voiced the thought "what if I allowed my experience of reality to be inherently blissful, forever?"

It felt like someone blew a hole in my crown chakra with a rocket launcher.

Was meditating in the Thai Monastery in Bodh Gaya, India, with Christopher Titmuss and crew, had gotten so far up into Equanimity that the notion of doing anything had vanished, so I just sat there daydreaming. Visualized a God-gerbil on a gerbil wheel, and it connected with my awareness, which at moment was the same as Divine Awareness, and Poof!, stream entry.

I had received a Tamil-language mantra and empowerment of Muruga, Shiva's son, from my dharma-sister a week or two earlier. I didn't have the mantra in written format until later but the first time I said it in meditation, bang. The sessions lasted for 1½ hours, felt like a few minutes.

I was at home. A few months before I went on a two week retreat that had been amazing but left me wrung out and overwhelmed. Lots of concentration states, body movements, crystal clear equanimity, as well as floods of emotions like panic and anxiety -- but all of it experienced as states within awareness, objectified through noting. However, I was feel very fearful and alone. (Ultimately, I was trying too hard to make things happen -- don't do this! ) Anyway, I worked with a teacher for a few months, got my practice consistent again, and got back into just the joy of exploring the mind through meditation.

I had confronted my own striving and controlling nature and seen how it caused so much suffering. I had given up on trying to attain anything in practice. By then, I just sat and did my practice and whatever happened happened. It wasn't in my control, so why get frustrated by it? At the time before stream entry, I was in a kind of blissy state, looking at thoughts as thoughts, meditating on the mindstream, even the thoughts that seemed to be about the thoughts about meditating on the mindstream. It was nice and somewhat spacy/dreamy. And there was a small hiccup in reality, no big deal, and I kept sitting.

It became clearer what had happened a few days later when I noticed things were different, but when had the change occurred? Oh there was that hiccup a few days ago... When I checked in with my teacher, who had been tracking my sits over the months, I barely started describing things and he kinda laughed and said "Yeah, stream entry." 

These things are kind of predictable, yet no one knows exactly when it will happen. (My teacher had predicted SE a month earlier, but it just made me all ambitious and threw my sits off for a while!) People who are able to practice with a gentle touch, move through yucky stages with awareness, and continue to sit when nothing much is happening, without trying to control things or overly focusing on expectations... they are doing good work. Even if stream entry never happens, just going through that work makes you saner and happier than people who get angry and frustrated when they have to wait 5 minutes while standing in line...

Retreats greatly help, do them if you can, but retreats aren't essential. However consistent practice is essential 99.999999999999% of the time. Teachers or spiritual friends really help, too. In fact, I was hanging out with two people from the DhO community at the time. One had recently gotten SE and one who had awakened. Seeing that they were normal humans, going to work, raising their families -- that helped normalize the whole deal, too. No big deal, just human awakening.

Hope that helps.

Sitting in bed reading a book (Abiding in Non-Dual Awareness by Robert Wolfe). There was no specific sentence or idea that triggered anything. I looked up from the book, like any regular pause to rest that I've taken a million times, and it happened.

You had a cessation? Or some other sort of experience you are classifying as stream entry?

It was about two weeks after a four-day retreat for me. Was just doing my normal meditation routine: reclined in comfortable chair in my living room, following along with the breath at the abdomen, noting departures from the breath. In the moments leading up, I was just enjoying the relaxed, easeful feeling of warm, bright, stable illumination. Was about forty-five minutes in when a textbook cessation struck.

I was meditating at about 7:00 in the evening on a cold January Thursday, began with noting then just dropped everything and watched the show. There were energetic rushes up my spine, over and over, the last one blowing throw my crown chakra like a rocket (as another poster says here), followed by a massive bliss wave from top to bottom. I woke up the next morning to find myself no longer there.

Yeah, I had the same thing with kundalini shooting up through the crown and then descending down into the heart space where it disappeared. This happened in few seconds, fast. After this I've had no movement of kundalini in the spine but up to that point I had that a lot.

I was walking home after a yoga session, when I became aware of a strange tingling sensation on my lower back, and started to focus on that. Then few moments later, my perception abruptly changed. It was as if life had changed from 320p to Full-HD (my mind had become silent, making the 5 senses more pronounced). For the first time I also became aware of the automaticity of "my" behavior. Seeing clearly the conditioning behind reactions.

At the time I didn't really know what it was, except that something new and profound had taken place.

Not a cessation (if there was one, I missed it). Something else.

At home, finished my nightly meditation session, got close but failed to attain stream entry.

Few miniutes later lay in bed trying to sleep and somehow stared to investigate again and got stream entry.

Long before I'd heard of stream entry or the progress of insight. Looking back one moment stands out as the mostly likely candidate.

I was wandering about on Maui on a break day between two week long non buddhist meditation intensives. Found wonderful tree in the midst of a grove and sat down facing it. Intention, perhaps to let go of what I was not, but held very lightly. Unusually long (hours?) effortless sit. At one point the visualization of the counselor I was working with unexpectedly, spontaneously and suddenly transformed and there was a kinesthetic sense that something fell away. Bliss wave and high for days going into the next intensive. 

Definite shifts in how life was after that. One was that my ‘spiritual path ’ gradually started to shift. No longer as exclusive. more 'self' directed. (rites and rituals??)  Another was that my focus and perhaps facination with the (dark night ish) drama of  my and my friends lives faded other things somehow got more of my attention.

I know many people who woke up during the night, when for a moment their sleep surfaced from slumber, similar to Eckhart Tolle's case.

I had just finished a retreat in LA in June 2014 with Shinzen Young, practicing his Basic Mindfulness system (now he calls it something else). I drove to a gas station to get gas, and was then planning to head back to the retreat center to have dinner with some folks from the retreat. I pumped the gas and paid inside the station, and I was about to get back into my car. I had my hand on the door handle about to open it, the next thing I recall is sitting behind the steering wheel looking out the windshield. I have no memory of having opened the door and sat down. That was the first magga moment I can definitively call out as such. About a month later, I had a phala moment in Ashland, OR while watching some folks read the Declaration of Independence at a 4th of July festival. That was accompanied by an incredible rush of well-being. However, I specifically repudiate any claim that either of these is an attainment.

I already posted the link here at least a couple of times, but in case you missed it, it's The Slacker's Guide to Stream-Entry

It was October of 1984, on the 4th day of a 7 day retreat at Dharma Dena Desert Vipassana Center in Joshua Tree California.  It was late morning, I think around 10:30 A.M.  I was in the Zendo with about 20 other people, all of us meditating.  I was observing the breath when our teacher, Ruth Denison, said something close to, “now place your attention on the sensations of the body”.  At that moment I directly and clearly experienced impermanence in the sensations of my left forearm, which, if I remember correctly, led to the experience of no-self which led to the stream-entry process.  What led up to this was two years of meditation (including approximately 7 retreats of 4 to 21 days in length) as well as study.

Ruth Denison died a few years ago, but her center is still alive and well according to her website.
http://www.dhammadena.com/index.html

Jeremy

Thanks all for the responses. Interesting that so many people weren't on retreat. 

It happened to me one early summer day while driving my car to get new tires. I hadn't meditated in over a month after dealing with the death of my biological father.

On fifth day of solitary at-home retreat. After cycling through the nanas I was in high equanimity, attention was wide, panoramic and consistent.

I started investigating the fluttering feeling at the center of the head. Then I briefly zoned out a little bit for three seconds, and BAM, fruition.

I have noticed that this light zoning out very often precedes a fruition. Though not every time.

Hey that's interesting, I've noticed that things have happened, probably more than a couple of times, when I zone out just slightly, by that I mean that I just start think about something irrelevant, and I'm not sure if it happens when I notice that my concentration has slipped or, if the "something happening" made me notice it had slipped, i.e. I'm not sure if noticing the lapse in concentration caused it, or if it caused me to notice the lapse.

Fascinating! I too have started noticing this. Most of my Fruitions after getting Second Path have been like this. For a moment before a cessation occurs, I feel like I start to "zone out," or like the mind has started to wander, or like mindfulness has momentarily gotten dull.

When it first started happening, I believed my practice was getting sloppy. Don't believe that anymore, the more times this has happened. In fact, to "call up" cessations off-cushion, I do a similar thing of kind of "zoning out" into this diffuse, withdrawn awareness.

What are we to make of this?

I was warming up at home before my second 10 day retreat, sitting for an hour twice a day.  In the evening, near the end of the hour, the shift happend, the follow-on changes deepend over the next weeks and months so that I had to agree it was SE.

I was sitting in my car at lunch, meditating. I was in a very dreamy equanimity just drifting along when suddenly everything seemed to collapse down to a point. Something shifted and the meditation session was clearly over over. I didn't think that much about it, except I wondered if that had been "it."

The next day I had the most clear and stable jhanas I'd ever had, and could jump from jhana to jhana at will. Something had changed, but I still didn't connect it with stream entry.

It wasn't until I started getting review fruitions and powerful bliss waves a few days later that I realized what had happened.

I third this observation.  I've never been able to call up a fruition.  They only happen once I've let go of all effort in a moment of pure zoning out.  

I was (and perhaps still am) a wee bit skeptical that I had actually attained path, but the guidance from 3 different teachers has led me to believe that what I originally thought was stream entry was actually 2nd path.  I got stream entry on the 4th or 5th day of a Goenka retreat.  I had been striving my ass off for a few months, but was getting burnt out on striving.  I think this was key.  Stream entry hit me like a slap in the forehead, and a POP.  In retrospect, I think it was actually important to crave for stream entry so much, becuase I was bringing that craving to the surface and observing it and becoming equanimous to it.  You can only crave something for so long until you burn through that craving.

Hi, Teague, happy to hear you got path, whether first, second, or the whole show! 

It was on the 8th day of a solo retreat at home at about 9 am after about 5 hours of meditation in the morning. I had been doing alternating between an hour of sitting and an hour of reclining.  I was reclining on a futon and attention was on high frequency vibrations behind and above my head. Three quick blips of energy current and then for the first time in my life, no desire to do anything but sit there and just be content.  The days prior were spent attending to annata characteristic in combination with sensations of craving and a sort of mantra reminding myself occasionally "no one craving".

It's been a few years, there must be an old post lying around...

I had been chasing the MCTB experience of the Three Doors for a long time. I was letting the focus of attention ping-pong between "over here" and "over there", and the ping-pong was speeding up. Then I got into a reverie about moving up a curving ramp leading to a railway bridge not too far from the place I was sitting, with views through arched supports, followed by a noticeable cessation.

So no weird donut-shaped universes collapsing in on themselves, but it involved curving geometry, even if my imagination rendered it in terms of drab civil engineering.

Amusingly, I was sitting on a toilet seat (lit lowered) in a secluded bathroom. Quite the Seat of Enlightenment...

It was off retreat, had never done a formal retreat in fact, and had been meditating 2+ hours a day and keeping up mindfulness for as much of the time as I could in between sits, doing walking meditation when walking around in the office building where I was working, and doing noting practices such as "note all doorways I walk through" and so on. And I had a lot of support from my friends here on the DhO.

I had done a couple of self-led one-day retreats at home in the previous weeks.

Cessation is not an experience. Took me a long time to realize that.

Cheers,
Florian

Florian,

How long had you been practicing when you get stream entry?

Depends on what you mean by "practicing".

I had made a 100-day commitment to do intensive practice as much as daily life would permit. The events I described were towards the end of that period.

I had been doing meditation or similar practices in one form or another since early childhood, to varying degrees of intensity and regularity. In sum, a couple of decades of daily engagement with such practices, I'd say, even if only a few minutes a day for the majority of that time.

Does that answer your question?

Cheers,
Florian

"Cessation is not an experience. Took me a long time to realize that." this sound about right.

On my 3 retreats (3m,6m,6m of intensive retreats in Burma), I had many A&P cycles and blips experience. So many that I no longer pay attention to them. Once I told my teacher that I had a cessation. He said something like: It doesn't matter how many cessations you have but what do you understand out of that experience, that's what matter. Nowaday, I only value wisdom/understanding rather than perceptions/experience.
One should ask oneself: Do I still have doubt about the path? Do I knowingly break any of the 5 precepts? Though I still have a "sense" of a self, but do I really believe there is a "self" (soul)"? 
If the answers is "yes" on any questions above then probably one's not a SE.

Really notice when the mind letting go of defilements and that's when interest stuff taking place.

I was on my way to lunch with a calmed mind when someone passed me on the sidewalk.  I did not like this person, and when they passed me with a friendly greeting, I noted the arising of aversion.  As I was noting the arrival of this feeling, I recalled a teaching about dependant origination, and somehow, while also thinking about atoms swarming around and affecting one another, all the conditions perfectly aligned, and I slipped into samadhi.

It shocked me, this clear understanding of interdependance.  I kept walking, blissing out and seeing everything I was encountering with new eyes.  It must have been a half hour later, after I had finished my lunch, that I returned to my room, not really sure what was happening to me.  I had only begun practicing about 2 years before, and had never heard about stream entry at that point.  But I knew from Theravada teachings about no-self, and from FPMT teachings about emptiness.

Standing there in my bedroom, I just had to put this to the test.  I focused my laser like concentration to the window, where big fat spiders were crawling about outside, spinning their webs.  I had arachnophobia.  I approached the window and I noted the tendencies for fear, and then I was able to stop it.  I looked at these spiders, and I understood their plight.  I did the impossible and envisioned them crawling up my arm, unthinkabe before, and there was no involuntary shuddering.

Even more dumbfounded by all this ignorance I was destroying, I leaned back against the wall, and only then did I recall that stuff about no self, the aggregates, and so forth.  I finally turned my attention inwards, and searched for the self, and in one swoop, I began to understand what I was, and this dying self, as it was disintegrating, it cried in sadness, real sorrow wanted to arise, and then even this sadness was understood, and the only thing that actually managed to get to the surface, was the fruition itself, my moment of joy, my forever changed life, my liberation.

16th or 17th day of the retreat at Chom Thong. Usually, they tell you to go through a 3-day marathon to get the thing popped. But, I think it happened to me before they could send me into it.

I was sitting and the hardness in my head dissolved into vibrations. I was making sure to note the anticipation and wanting for the event. and then pop and some bliss particles fell throughout the body. Felt lighter and meditation was smoother and comparatively stress free. I told my teacher what happened. She told me to keep practicing, but I could catch a smile on her face. Next day, my weight was varying. And later, I seemed to be in review covering the same territory sometimes once or twice in half-hour.

My teacher told me to start all over again with fewer or no touching points. The territory now was certainly different. Something to do with the pain of the contact of the senses. Eventually, on the thirtieth day, I was told to do the three-day marathon. This time the cessation was more subtle like a shift. 

I had spent months consumed with understanding consciousness and buddhism, supported by meditation. I was reading a relevant philosophical book in a very deep state of concentration. My mind was totally focussed on the text, with no awareness of anything else.  At the very instant I read the last word of the book - bam!  There really is no self - leading on to direct realisation of the other two characteristics, 40 minutes of deep samadhi looking out the window, bliss waves, changed perceptions, some ongoing bliss waves and laughter for the next few weeks, a permanent reduction in clinging, some life changes.

Nowadays, I would interpret this using Culudasa's framework.  That is, my subminds were in agreement and totally concentrated on processing the words of the book. This striving intensified in the last few pages, right up to the very last word.  So when the book ceased, my sub minds remained completely focussed, but suddenly lost all input.  So I think that must have led to a brief cessation.  I just got really lucky.

Edited 

I wrote this  after a retreat.


Day 4

So I felt this craving arising for 1st path all morning. I think I may have fallen back into the 10th Re-observation nana because I went through a very rough couple of hours with some heavy and negative flow of sensations at the chest area. I was getting fed up with the craving for path and then Goenkaji gave the 2 hour no-moving addithana sit and I went through the most hellish pain I have ever experienced. I remember yelling in my mind "I hate you Goenka! Please, stop talking!" It was so intense and my knees felt like they were ready to explode. I came out of that sit exhausted and ready to give up. And I did. I unresolved my vow so to speak and just said "Right, whatever, I don't care if I don’t attain anything" The rest of the day I was like that. Totally couldn't give a stuff about 1st path

Day 5

4.30am to 6.30am: So I begin to practice and its back to high equanimity because I am relaxed and I will the mind up to what I believe was the 4th Jhana and start observing "Self". I have breakfast noting all the way:tasting, tasting, feeling, swallowing. It really was non-stop noting.I am quite relaxed now as I seemed to have stopped craving path.

8am - 10.49am: I continue to work as above and the blipping in and out of the sensations of the illusory "Self" starts getting slower (or rather they are not being read as "Self") and about 4 seconds are seen of the "Self" as just a dance of sensations along with those sensations in the head that are in between blips, so it seems the subject is joining the object and just becoming one massive bare sensate experience. 

Then at about 10.50, something clicks and that massive bare sensate experience of the sensations, previously known and seen as "Self", as "Nick", is seen so clearly. This simple insight felt so profound that this amazing feeling of happiness and pleasantness descended throughout the body. Nothing happens at this stage and the gong for lunch is sounded and I leave my cell to walk to the dining hall. All the while thinking of this mind-blowing insight which has been staring me in the face all along. I get there at about 11.05, sitting on a bench waiting to enter the dining hall.....and then the mind turns in on itself again onto that massive bare sensate experience of all these sensations just dancing about. No "Self" anymore. 

Then it just appears naturally. The knowing of the Anatta/Non-self characteristic. The thoughts...."Holy crap, this is just fluff. The "Self" is just so substanceless. Just fluff!". Then the knowing of Anicca/Impermanence characteristic arises directly after it and the thought, "Wow, it's just the sum of sensations dancing about, as soon as they arise they stop dead." When I think back to this moment, it felt like the actual written words appeared in the mind. With these two characteristics known fully, immediately the Dukkha/Unsatisfactoriness characteristic just made complete sense!!!!!! And then..

I felt my head being pulled up slightly at the crown of the head and I felt like something "big" was about to happen. There was a mental reaction of anticipation and I managed to start noting it, but as it all happened so fast I only managed to note it with the word "noted"......and I felt sucked up into something unknown and spat out....... and with my eyes closed it looked like the sun was right in front of my eyes. I opened them and just thought..."What the hell! What was that....?". I really just felt massively stunned for several moments. And then started asking myself "Was that it?" 

It felt almost like an anticlimax and I had been awaiting something more spectacular. So I am just stunned and waiting in line to be served lunch. And I'm just thinking "Was that it? What happened?" ...I sit down with my food and it just hits me.....Something is different! "What was it?". Then I clearly see that my mind feels like an open sky when it was previously cloudy. And that niggling horribly subtle agitation that seemed to constantly come out my throat had completely disappeared. I felt no craving for enlightenment. No desire to get it done. It was so unexpected. I was completely stunned. I couldn’t eat lunch because any appetite that I had wasn't felt anymore. I went straight to the teacher and he just told me to relax and lie down for some time, be aware of the extremities.

I waded into a stream at daytime when it was safe.

It happened at a festival, but before it I was constantly looking for the dualistic split in my sensations, mainly in the head and in hearing/seeing for weeks.

I drank and smoked weed this evening, and somehow the meditative investigating did its thing in the background, while I had a good time with my friends. At some point, vibrations of reality became very fast and intensive, and I was pretty overwhelmed, so I retreated in my tent. I lay down and closed my eyes. I was in strong fear, cause I had the feeling to loose grip in this world, to be pulled away into nothingness. It was weird, cause I knew the pull had a direction, but I couldn't tell where.
Many thoughts came very fast. Every new thought was an attempt, to "correct" the previous thought, to make my experience normal and stable again. Thoughts became faster, and I had death anxiety. At some point, I couldn't control anything anymore, and I was pulled through a no-self-suffering-door (MCT. "I" was being torn apart so violently. After everything was gone for a tiny bit of time, conciousness returned and my mind resetted. It felt like I would taste reality "first hand" for the first time in my life.

Hi Florian ! How are you ? Do you still come online ? I want to talk to you.

@streamsurfer: given rapidity and description of being violently torn apart, had you considered it possible that was the A&P instead? It can manifest that way. Just something to keep in your list of possible diagnoses.

Hi Florian,

I want to talk to you. How can we talk ?

@Daniel: yes I wondered about that, since it felt so violent. On the other hand, the entry was really smooth, and there was "the flip" of reality with my mindstream being nonexistent for a few moments. Though there was a big relief after and a feeling of "that's it", I gave it a year and countinued practicing, but directly after it my practice was changed in it's baseline, also having cycles very clearly. I also reality-tested it against retreats with 18 hours practice and a teacher, and I meanwhile dare to say it must have been it back then.

What do you meam by God and ”Divine” awareness?