| Hi There,
Hopefully someone can further my understanding of some mystical experiences I've had over the past few years. I'd really appreciate some diagnosis in the context of the Vipassana insight map.
So, like many others, I got into Buddhism due to psychedelic use. After a particularly intense trip (a lot happened, but most notably, it felt like my head was connected to the space around it), I became very depressed. I don't want to get too specific, but this was a very dark period in my life. It only lasted for about a week, but it was dreadful. It culminated in two mystical experiences.
The first occurred when I started questioning "who" was experiencing my thoughts. This led to an immensely heightened sense of self and my sensory perception feeling very vivid for a few moments...and, afterwards, my sense of self continued to feel heightened if i willed it. when I say "heightened sense of self", I don't mean "self" in the egotistical sense. my ego felt very fragmented during this time...but, it was easy for me to feel like this concrete "I" was controlling all of my actions. Does that make any sense? my identity went from rich, to sort of...condensed.
The second mystical experience occurred when I spent some time really focusing on the way the bass in some music made my ears feel, and, additionally, the thought "I am Parks Barnard" (My name is Parks...can't really remember why I did this, I guess I wanted to reclaim my identity or something). Everything became incredibly blissful for like 20 or 30 minutes...my vision was incredibly vivid, and I remember loving everything around me.
Anyways...fast forward. I went to a 10 day vipassana retreat, and was having a lot of trouble. It was hard for me to do the meditations without trying to have certain experiences, a mindset that Goenka was constantly stressing us to avoid (it was difficult not to when the intercom was constantly reminding us of the experiences we could be having).
Additionally, all of his talk about Sankaras (undesirable mental habits) was stressing me out...I didn't like the idea that the seemingly trivial things my out-of-control mind were thinking up could have very lasting, negative affects on myself. I started desperately searching for some kind of idea to deal with this fear. I settled on the Socratic idea that the wisest believe that they know nothing. This implies that nothing can be truly known - including the idea of Sankaras. Thus, my fear of Sankaras was "logically" neutralized...since their ultimate truth wasn't known to me.
After investing in this idea that I knew nothing, I had this sort of melodramatic experience (it happened over the course of about thirty minutes) where anytime a thought would enter my mind, I would silence it with the idea that I knew nothing. At one point I was lying in my bed, sort of paralyzed by this increasingly overwhelming feeling/thought of "I know nothing". This eventually turned into feeling of oneness...subjectively speaking, I "became" the room that I was lying down in. It was a largely visually oriented feeling of oneness with the room...like, I was focused on my oneness with the image of the room in my mind's eye. but this was also intertwined with a general feeling of oneness, if that makes any sense. it was quite peaceful.
After this experience, as I would go about my day to day at the retreat, I'd feel more and more connected with all of the objects that came into my vision. Whenever i saw anything, I felt like it was apart of me. Watching objects as I moved past them sort of "tickled", like running my hand lightly over my arm or something. At one point, I looked up at the sun, and thought "how stupid to try to get to you with a rocket...i'm already so close to you that I am you".
after I started to get those feelings of oneness, sometimes when meditating I started to feel detachment toward my senses. a number of sensory objects would just kind of pass through me. it made me feel more peaceful...
for some reason, I never asked my meditation teachers about these experiences...I guess I just thought they would think I was weird or something, I have a lot of social anxiety so that probably kept me quiet.
after the retreat, the "oneness" and "detachment" feelings continued for awhile longer, but eventually faded as university anxieties took over. lately, while meditating, I've been feeling like I have pretty direct access to a less intense version of that feeling of detachment I described in the paragraph above.
If anyone can diagnose these experiences in terms of the vipassana insight maps, it would be much appreciated!
Peace, Parks |