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.
