Hello. 

I'd like to get opinions on an experience I had.

for background, I have little to no formal mediation practice. No formal sitting in the cushion practicing this or that. However, over the past 2-3 years, especially the last year I have cultivated mindfulness during waking life of how my mind impulsively is making decisions and becoming more intimately aware of processes going on.

last night while playing video games I was noticing this feeling of repulsion I have felt on and off for the past month or so. 

when I noticed the feeling, I noticed there were thoughts recognizing the feeling. I began to investigate. As I continually noticing the feeling, I would notice again the recognition of that feeling. I would then have a thought arise of "I'm not doing either of these" and that thought too, was also something I was not doing.

this little cycle of bodily sensation and thought and the realization that I am not doing either occurred back and forth.

as this mini cycle occurred a few times I noticeably shifted back into a spaciousness around that process. 

this is where I mention the Rude Goldberg effect. Those contraptions where a hot wheels car sent down a track will bump into a cup of water that dumps into another cup which pulls a string releasing a ball which rolls off the table and lands on a shovel which sends an object on the shoving flying into the air.... and so on.

this seemed to be happening with my meditation as I was playing video games.

I noticed feeling in my body, thoughts correlating to do, "I'm not doing this" , more feelings in my body, more recognizing thoughts... and so on.

it seemed as if every thought and feeling that arose was being more clearly seen as conditioned and arising corresponding to each other and I was not doing any of it.

even the intention of me doing it, or intention on inhaling or lifting my arm was noticed in the same way

the spaciousness around the processes happened a few times but was short lasted.

it felt like a causal chain of things occurring and previously what felt like intense experiences of repulsion or overwhelming sensations in my body seemed to not have as much grip because I was more clearly seeing them as not mine as I was not doing them, but they were sort of arising on their own due to the previous condition of the prior.

im not even sure what to really ask. I guess I am just looking to see if this has been similarly experienced by others.

​​​​​​​thanks

Welcome to an insight that is the very basis of what Buddhists call wisdom!

Congratulations.

This little fugue of action and perception is playing out as you live your life, all the time. You ignored it before so it had become invisible. Now you see it. What other things might it apply to in your moment to moment experience?

https://interestingengineering.com/culture/rube-goldberg-the-man-behind-the-worlds-craziest-machines


Had to look that up.  I didn't know he was a real person. 

Imho video games are great for observing how mind works and how it optimizes itself. They can be sufficiently demanding to require lots of optimizations while not being at all dangerous for the body so mind can try new approaches to the problem of optimization and feel completely relaxed and free to do self-observation.

BTW. Not sure if you are aware of it but doing vipassana while you play games is transferring some of the experience your gamer's mind got to the mind which does vipassana mixing them a little. Which is a good thing because like I mentioned mind feels pretty safe to optimize itself when playing video games and needs it to play well so it knows lots of good tricks.

You might want at some point in your practice investigate this spaciousness.
I mean you can and probably should do it right away but if you forget or do not think about doing it then at some point it might be highly recommended to do it.

It is hard to say what the experience you had to know if I had exactly the same type of experience or not but generally yeah, similar experiences yes. Even last night my mind had similar experience. It felt like my mind tried to recreate one aspect it picked up from your description. Kinda what happen when I read about experiences, my mind is like 'sounded fun, me too me too!'

Baseline for me is never doing anything and just observing mind observe what happened. Few years ago it changed to be like that. At first some obvious effort was put by mind to keep track of all the pointers to reasons experiences happened and then even that become so proficient it is hardly shown as the focus of what mind does. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Might as well enjoy whatever happens

No spaciousness though. I had lots of spaciousness when there was split between some kind of idea of me being able to initiate action and them happening autonomously. When I gave up on doing anything spaciousness disappeared along with confusion about my possible reactions to what happens. That is why I mentioned to investigate spaciousness. It might be somehow related to reasons the idea of doing/initiating action exists. Seems likely at least.

Wait what? Spaciousness disappeared? Is that a good thing? 
​​​​​​​
Are you sure it didn't just become the new normal, thus losing the sense of being spacious because the narrowminded heaviness was no longer the norm?

Nice! This is awesome! What a breakthrough!

There is no experiences of additional spaces between assumed observer and and observed phenomena in my consciousnesses because no faculty related to identification, observer, observed phenomena, space or even time is active (does not arise) when consciousness is active (arise)

Stated like this it sounds like nothing interesting is happening in my mind...

No space processing == no narrowness.
Even perception of size needs specialized faculty otherwise things appear size-less. I mean there is no concept of size. Faculty need to arise to even have concept of related to this faculty quality let alone experience complex sensual experiences.
Heaviness would require some more faculties which are only useful for whole body and some other consciousnesses like of hand when holding things. Doesn't seem like useful quality to have for most consciousnesses.

Of course I would not go as far as to say one should always avoid having any experiences which does not have any useful function in his/her consciousnesses. I will however say that one should avoid building mind around useless experiences because any active faculty generates noise, might take additional time (if it does depends on faculty and connections really, it might be squeezed to happen at the same time as other things if connections and noise levels permits it) and will take additional power. If spaciousness is absolutely integrated in to perception it might not seem like such a bad thing but it this little noise that operation of this faculty will generate and the little power it uses will have to be expended.

Generally when mind is empty things happen better and wider range of experiences can arise because there is less conflicts, less noise, etc. For example having full experience of observer and observed along with full blown sense of self is such power hog and so incompatible with many experiences that having it will greatly limit range of experiences which can be had. Not to mention it is tiring and hard to manage to avoid dukkha caused by neurons getting tired and them operating in noisy environment, etc. Would rather be able to experience colors with my spare noise and power limits than sense of self but for normal operation I stopped all this color synesthesia nonsense from arising for the same reason - it is after all power hog and it is is bad mind design to have it arise along with everything else all the time. Instead I made it so it is something which can be switched on and off. Takes a lot of time (for such ridiculous feature it took years) to configure anything to be switchable in real time though.

My recommendation would be to keep any experience you need, remove any which is not needed and you do not like and those which you like make arise when you want them to. You are the architect of your mind after all.

Thanks! I understand.

I appreciate the answer. You answered in a way that both answers the inadequately posed questions and made the effort to add the information that I wouldn't have been able to guess from my angle because I still cling to spaciousness. It doesn't at all sound like nothing interesting is happening in your mind. 

I think you did learn something on your vacation. I might be the case that I have learned something too. 

I notice that there is some anxiousness going on with regard to having to let go of the spaciousness, my new lifeline. However, that's probably because I still need it. I like the notion of keep what I need and remove the rest. Although, looking around in my apartment, I suspect that removing what I don't need will be a bit of a challenge, eheheh...