Hi,

I've been lurking for a few years, thought about posting a few times but every time I just felt like I should use the time for practice instead. 


The past few weeks I have been having quite a lot of experiences related to the path, I don't know how to express it really, because it doesn't feel extraordinarily or anything, just more cycling through the stages of insight like many times before. I sort of feels like I'm making progress but at the same time like nothing ever happens. It's like the mind does its thing and there is nothing to do, but at the same time I feel like I'm not sure where to go from here. I have this sense of that I'm missing something and at the same time it feels like this must be it, so how can I miss something. And now I just felt like talking about it.

heres some background:

I read MCTB2 2-3 years ago. And a lot of stuff just made complete sense. This what was I had been going through for so many years not knowing what the hell had been going on. I had wanderd out into this territory not knowing if it was a real thing or if I was going crazy. I tried talking to a lot of people about it, but most seemed pretty oblivious to it. Yet I had this sense of it being so obvious to me and also helpful I kept on wandering these to me unknown lands.

Ten years ago I was severely depressed and heard about this goenka retreat. Went there and it was incredibly helpful to me. I saw how it was me who created my own suffering by making up these stories about me and my life and that I could somehow end this suffering by observing the sensations of my body instead of getting caught up in my thoughts, and to some degree also feelings and emotions. I had this bhanga experience, exactly as goenka would describe it, what I nowadays think more of as the A&P. I had a rough time after that until the 9th day and then this at the time incredible thing happened. I was sitting with the most severe pain in my foot. It was the most severe pain I had experienced in my whole life. I had sweat coming out of every pore of my body and my clothes got soaked as if I had have a shower. All of a sudden there was this release from the pain that was fantastically relieving. And when a got up it felt as if I had taken of this backpack filled with stones that I had been carrying my whole life. I felt physically lighter. I remember being incredibly happy. After that retreat I went from being pretty anxious often to having almost no anxiety for several years. The depression felt gone in a sense, at least compared to what I used to feel. We'll come back to that later. 


I went on a second 10-day retreat just 2 months later and I was pretty similar to the first one.  Just after I came back from the second retreat I took an RC-psychedelic drug with some friends. This experience felt transformative in a way that went beyond what I had seen in the meditation retreats prior to this, although I don't think that this experience would have happened without the retreats. I'll try to describe it more from the perspective that I had then, without projecting to much of the descriptions and lingo from MCTB that I'm used to now. I'll just mention that I have had 50-100 psychedelic trips and two more of those where somewhat similar to this one. I'll talk about them soon. So back to this trip. Right away things started to get pretty weird compared to what I was used to. I had the feeling that the room was talking to itself, there were these bodies in the room, me and my friends but non of them were me. They where simply a reaction to a reaction, every thing that was said was just a response to what had been said before. This way of perceiving thing went on for a while. I remember contemplating eternity from this perspective or state or what to call it and all of a sudden I got erased of sorts, my short term memory was completely made blank and I forgot what had happened just before. I went through some old memories and there was a lot of confusion until I came to the same insight, something related to what I had seen when I contemplated eternity and I or everything that I had associated with this I was just I erased again and again. I felt like I was dying over and over again and during these cycles I could see myself and all these embarrassing, pathetic aspects of myself from the outside, I realized how much petty and self loathing I had, how much feelings of inferiority and a lot of ridiculous identity connected to superficial things like my hair and clothes and behaviors. I remember that the last time I died I came back with this incredible feeling of having found what I didn't even knew I had been looking for. I threw away all of my clothes and ran around completely naked, cut of my hair with a kitchen scissor and just screamed out of joy and happiness, I felt so free from this prison that I had locked myself into. All from this completely open perspective. From the outside I think my friends thought that I had gone insane, but the sense of liberation that I felt was just amazing. And then things started to crumble, some pain in my muscles, the weight of the body. And yet something had been lost forever in a good sense, I felt lighter. I had this sense of something amazing that had happened. I knew nothing about it and no one that I talked to felt like they knew what I was talking about.

I went to more retreats, took more psychedelics. And at one point I had another experience were I died over and over again, afterwards something felt somewhat changed. Couldn't put my finger on it. At the retreats all I saw was sensations, arising and passing with incredible speed, very little solidity and every time I directed my attention there solidity dissolved. There was still a sense of self of a doer of sorts, something somewhere in the head a centre. But at this time I had know intellectual knowledge of no-self and suffering as described in MCTB pertaining to the 3C’s, so some aspects of experience weren’t even looked for.

And then after a 10-day course I took a LSD tab and right away something felt different. I felt that I could sense into my partner and a lot of that embarrassment and shame came up that I had seen in the first trip that I described. At one point I closed my eyes and was pulled in to this meditative state, all bodily sensations where gone, only this fractal pattern, then this openness, this known open, empty field and then all of a sudden it all come to a stop, but this was only experienced from the perspective of coming back. There had been no time, no nothing in between, it felt as if i could have been cone for just a moment or for an eternity. I had this profound feeling of having seen something very true and beautiful. And as if a lot of aspects of my life had been in violation to what I just had seen. I think I just intuited something about morality, that I had been hurting myself and others and now I felt as if a couldn’t keep pretending and justifying such behaviors anymore. I felt as wide as space, open to everything that passed through whatever was experienced. And there was this clock of sorts that had a tick and with every tick came a deep feeling of every aspect of reality being eternal and ephemeral and fleeing at the same time. We were outside when all of this happened. Going home I started to have these blipping out moment, I remember reacting to them, asking my partner what that was, not fully realizing that she didn’t see them. Over and over again our conversation was kind of interrupted by this feeling of a cut in the record or something. And all of a sudden a lot of similarities to the first trip started to come up. I went in to this vortex were the body was gone, and I died, everything came to a full stop, and I was spat out without any memory of who I was. This was full psychosis mode. Every time I came back I became someone else. I was a slave and a foot stool to some famous family, i got sucked in to this vortex and came back as a farmer from the American south having an incestuous relationship with my daughter, just to come back in some future world were I as a poor person had been left on earth when all the rich people had moved to a halolike construction orbiting the earth, and so on. It was pretty crazy and in retrospect very fascinating, and the experience itself wasn’t scary really because it kinda was from the perspective of a screen that could watch itself even though it was 3d and included feelings and bodily sensations and so on. When I came back from the trip I felt amazing. I felt like there was a shift, that I felt expanded all the way out to the edge of the room and even beyond that somehow. And this has persisted for almost 10 years now. I had this sense that everything was made out of experience and that it had its own existence where it was, as it was in the room, I still have.

 I had almost no idea about the maps, but I kept meditating, went on I think 3 more retreats, whereof one was for 20 days. And not much more happened that I put so much attention on. All of the above also felt pretty normal and natural. For many years it felt like I had a perspective that was very helpful and useful to me. I could use the vipassana as I had learned it from goenka in everyday life, and most of the time much suffering seemed to dissipate on its own without effort much faster than I used to do. And a lot of times it didn’t arise at all. 

But still I kept looking for something. And then I found Daniel’s book. Read most of it ~3 years ago and I immediately recognized that I was cycling through the stages of insight pretty fast. When I started to observe the 3C’s I could go through these super intense A&P’s 2-3 times a day on 2-3 hours of meditation. Had a lot of semi destabilizing dark nights. Did very little jhana practice but realized that I can drop the body quite easily. 


A lot of stuff going on in my dreams. In periods, several nights a week I have dreams where I realize that I’m dreaming or start to observe the 3C’s in my dreams and then I have these kundalini explosions, sometimes very pleasant and sometimes quite uncomfortable. I also have dreams where I go into these jhanic states, and I pass through what think of the arupa jhanas up to 8th jhana, experience come to a full stop and I come back to this incredible bliss. There is no sense of experience in between. And when I come back I have no sense of self or doer-ship, no sense of a centre. I can have thoughts of wow, I’m done or wow, finally 4th path, but I’m still in the dream and when I wake up this state is gone. Sometimes I also just end up in this agencylessness when I see things from a certain perspective in my dreams. If feels like every aspect of experience is valued equally and there is no centre, things just happen or flow naturally on their own, thoughts are there in their place as they are, but no sense of ownership. Sometimes I wake up and my body is still asleep and there is this feeling of agencylessness once again and I can feel my body turn in bed without feelings of doing or control.


And lastly my practice in general is mostly doing nothing, I just let experience come or pass through as it is, sometimes I try to see the 3C’s more clearly, but most of the time that is kind of baked into the experience without me having the feeling of looking for it. Experience feels very open and light, sometimes I think of it as emptiness and sometimes as fullness. In seeing I don’t have the feeling of looking at objects, objects are just there on their own, in their own place, but there is still some sort of referencing back to somewhere in the head. It doesn’t feel solid and sometime I have the feeling of looking for it and then it’s just like this kind of annoying bee buzzing around, and it seems like I can’t catch it and at the same time I get these confusing thoughts of ”it cannot be missed so what is it that I’m missing”. When it comes to the body I most of the time have the feeling that it takes effort to move it and that I have agency, but when I’m walking for example those feelings can disappear and it just seems like walking is a thing that occurs naturally on its own without any doing. All in all it feels as if I know what it is that I’m looking for since I have felt done or so to speak on several occasions, but that has flipped back into perceiving things the way I’m seeing it now, and that is that I don’t feel done, that there is some subtle aspect that I don’t see clearly that stands I the way of seeing it from this other perspective that right now is just a memory and I kind of see what it is and yet I don’t.

​​​​​​​I don’t know, maybe this isn’t detailed enough for you to give me any advice or if you want more phenomenology. I also think that it’s pretty hard to use language to describe these things, since so many assumptions about what we are are built into it but, I can try to clarify if someone has any questions. 

I don't know where all the space between paragraphs went. Can I change this somehow?

Yes, just click on Edit. 

Gonna retreat for ~20 days, starting tomorrow. Rough schedule will be short workout in morning and some breakfast 5-6 then meditate til 12, write and eat til 13. Then meditate til 9-11. Tend to sleep less after a few days. 


I will sit for as long as I feel like, then get up and go back to sitting. Will probably be 45 min sit up to 6 hour sits. And I’ll just scramble may way up to good concentration. I mostly don’t plan what to do before hand and when I sit down my mind just does its thing, but the techniques that I mostly do is mostly noticing 3C’s, some sort of do-nothing, kasina practice(fire or just go for the visual snow) and metta.


​​​​​​​Sat for three hours or so yesterday, I notice the cycles, but don’t feel like they do much, they are just there, if unfolds pretty naturally, no sense of doing anything, very little solidity, can have pretty intense sensations in the head but I see clearly how they come and go and are not stable, when I get up to move it feels like a connect to the feeling of being able to control the body and that I’m inside the head a bit more then when I was sitting. Other than that, the distinction between mediating and getting up and doing stuff seem pretty void. It feels as if there is no distraction, and when if feel distracted it doesn’t feel as if I could have been something else. 

So been meditating 12-15h/day for 7 days now. First few days went well, few cessations, felt like my concentration was better than normal. Then on the 3rd day I decided to double down on fire kasina, before I just did whatever happened when I closed my eyes.

It has been somewhat wierd, because the dot or the nimitta felt stronger in the beginning than it does now. First I had some sessions were I saw the 3rd screen it felt like I had quite a lot of visuals, the dot was stable and colors started appearing and so on. 

And then it felt like the visuals got more vague for every day that past. I don’t know how to go about it really. The vagueness seems really clear, I see distinctly what I see, so I’m not zoned out or anything. Is it just that I’m getting into more murky territory?

On day 6 it felt like I went through a full insight cycle with cessation, no path moment. Is that a sign of making progress?

And today I just decides to stay with the dot. The outlines of the dot gets really vague and blurry quickly, but I just followed what happened. Everything gets grey, and I hang on until after a while the image turns into black mountains with very light grey snow over them, I fly backwards over them until I get to a black room, where these lockers appear. Again the image is very vague, but I know in the mental impression what it is clearly but the image is barley seeable. These lockers has a purple/golden shine sort of in the centre where the dot/nimitta used to be. I recognize that the lockers are full of old left behind dirty clothes. I empty the lockers and get a sense of relief. 

I just keep hanging out here, the body feels amazing and after a while I realize that I’ve fallen asleep. Feels like I sort of cheated my way into fourth screen. Try to notice whats going on in the visual field, goes through kundalini like AP, then just stay with that until it calms down, have a cessation with afterglow more prominent than usual. 

I leave fourth screen, go back to the kasina, even weaker(but clearly so) than before. Can’t get the dot to stay, it’s just this vague nimitta. I stay with it, body feels uncomfortable, pretty dark nighty, I recognize the images that are common for me in fear/misery/disgust. Fear its very often monsters and other evil looking creatures, in misery I often see images of medieval times or the 19th century where people are poor or I see heaps of soldiers marching and stuff like that, and disgust is a lot of bugs and insects. I see all these images but very little color, almost black and white, with just some color in some part of the field. And very not clear outlines. 

The thing is I have the ability to see all this almost in the same manner when I’m not in retreat, so I feel a little bit confused wether I’m making resonable progress or not.

Oh, and I felt kinda sick for 2-3 days, heard that that can effect things. But as I said, the images where more clear, hade more color those days, than they do now.

​​​​​​​Does anybody have any input?

MAX, are you really meditating for 12 to 15 hours per day? Can you provide more phenomenological details on some of your experiences like cessations, jhanas, etc.?

Hi Chris!

Yes, meditate 12-15hour per day, have been doing that for 7 days now. first few days i did some walking but after i got sick I just stayed in. other than meditating i just eat and talked a little on the phone with my family and took a shower not much more. 


Well, don't know what more to say about the cessation, been having some cessations lately where I didn't catch the entrance very clearly but coming out feels the same as they have done before. The cessation in and of it self is no experience, but when i come out of it there is this grasping on to sensations, and it feels like that process starts anew. Most of the time when it happens there is mildy pleasant sensations, feel like "ah, that was nice" sometimes its a more cool chilled vibe to it. What is common for all of them is that there is a lot of clarity when coming out, feels open and spacious. When I've had cessations in fourth screen(which i think have happened 5-6 times) there is a lot mor bliss in the afterglow phase. Sometimes they can almost surprise me, like the last image before the cessation is quite distinct from the first image after the cessation, and I get almost uncomfortable or something. A few weeks ago it happened when I was falling asleep and it made me like jump a little. Yea, I’m not great at explaining but I’ve had 100s of what I think of as cessations. 


And in terms of jhanas, I’ve not explored that to much. I mostly do insight stuff. Have basically not read anything about jhanas either. But I can fairly easily have no sensations of the body if I try. This retreat I guess I entered forth Jhana when I saw the forth screen? I also saw tunnels a lot, that I went into, does that correspond to 3rd jhana? I can have very pleasant sensations throughout the body almost immediately if I focus on it, and I can make that quite deep or immersive if I close my eyes, I don’t find that to appealing so I mostly let that go immediately if I meditate and go for more cool, chilled sensations. And that is not by choice I just end up there.


​​​​​​​Yea, sorry if I suck at explaining, English is not my first language. Do you want more details?

Yea, what I mean by forth screen is just fully emmersive experience where I see with closed eyes as if they are open and the body is in that same space.

please feel free to make comments on anything that I said, but all that aside.

What i mostly think I need help with is, should i try to cultivate a stronger dot/nimitta before i pursue the images, tunnels and stuff like that or is it normal that the dot gets more vague(even to its vaguness is really clear) and it's just the murk and I can use that vagueness to cultivate even stronger concentration?

Can you explain the goal and purpose of your practice? Why did you start? What do you see as the benefits of meditation?

​​​​​​​Thanks!

The goal I guess depends on how you see it, meditation has given me so much so I'm just curious where it will take me. I find it fun and interesting to explore the workings of experience in such a direct way. I used to be a lot more depressed and have a lot more weird ideas and complexes about myself, I wouldn't trade what I belive that meditation has given me for any money, status or position. I have the sense that I have flipped it over a few times to what Daniel and others describe as 4th path, I would like to have that as a permanent perspective.

On the other hand, what is there to get? In many ways there just seem to be this unfolding moment, and barely that, and what ever i belive about it is just more ideas, concepts, just as empty as every other experience. Almost the whole field of experience seems empty in my direct experience, yet there is something that I just cant pin down och seem to get that feels like I'm missing and this seem almost like a paradox because this must be it, so how can I miss anything? I must see it, yet there is  this delusion of sorts of what I belive I belive, haha.

I started because I was in pain, and the experiences has been unbelivably freeing. My eyes tear up as I think about it.

Went through another insight cycle yesterady night with fruition. Today everything seems even duller and murkier than yesterday. Tried working more with the dot for a while but not much happened.

Would still appreciate advice if I should just stay in the grey/dull and work with that or try to go back and work with the dot?

Have some huge tension in my nose/forehead. Feels like a invisible force is trying to crack my skull open by pulling it apart. My eyes are relaxed and no muscles are tense. I know I´ve experienced this on retreat before, anyone knows what it is? 

The forehead/top of the head can get tight when the head is tilted forward. You might try slight adjustments of your head posture, aiming for a neutrally balanced position, and see if it helps.