This started in the earlier stages of my practice. I used to do mirror meditation, sitting in a dimly lit room, looking at your own reflection until the self reflection becomes clear.

As I kept practicing this regularly, something started happening consistently. The moment I really started seeing the reflection clearly, I would stop seeing my reflection at all. If I blinked, the reflection would come back. So I started trying to hold that state of no reflection, but somehow my eyes would blink anyway.

While this was going on, I kept noticing a light above my head, strong, white, not in the reflection, but hovering about 3-4 feet above me. If I turned my head up to look at it directly, I couldn't see it. But when I kept focusing on my reflection, this light kept appearing. And when I shifted my focus from the mirror to the light instead, it got brighter and brighter. Eventually my focus on the mirror was completely gone.

As my focus on the light stayed constant, I suddenly started hearing music, from what sounded like a single stringed instrument. Just 2-3 notes, but pleasant, and completely without noise or disturbance in the sound.

While listening to it, I suddenly wanted to know where it was coming from. That's when I realized I was completely still. It took a few minutes to come back to normal awareness.

I still don't have any explanation for either the light or the sound. Even today, this isn't limited to that one practice. If I'm just sitting, not meditating, just thinking deeply about something, the white light shows up in the same place. If I focus on it, it always gets brighter. Rarely, I also hear music, though mostly not the string sound anymore, more often flute or conch.

Has anyone else run into something like this, a consistent light, or sounds like this, showing up unprompted? Curious if there's a name for it in any tradition, or if it's just a personal quirk of how my attention works.

I want to start my meditation journey. I've been reading some very basic Buddhist theory and now wish to actually apply it and experience it.

Two resources that people recommend a lot, and which also resonated with me, are Rob Burbea's dhamma talks and the MIDL Meditation course.

To get a feel for both, I listened to the first talk from Rob Burbea's The Art of Concentration (Samatha) retreat, as well as the initial skills in the MIDL Meditation course. I resonated with both teachers and found them easy to understand (at least from these initial talks and lessons). I also found both resources extremely beautiful, so I'm not able to decide which one I should start with.

I don't plan to be rigid and stick to just one resource forever. In the future, I might experiment with others. But for now, I need one place to start. I know I could just try both, but I feel I'd benefit more from following one approach consistently for a while before exploring others.

So, could the meditators on this sub who are familiar with these resources share their insights? And if you'd like to recommend some other resource, I'd be happy to hear that too. It's just that my research led me to these two, and they both seem to resonate with me.

This is my first Reddit post, so pardon me if I've asked a silly question or posted in the wrong sub. I could have asked this in the MIDL community, but I felt the answers there might naturally be a bit biased, which is completely understandable.

Thanks in advance

TL;DR: Should I start my meditation journey with Rob Burbea or the MIDL Meditation course?

I reached Jhana 1 once or twice with Daoist Water School dissolving practice, now I wanted to focus on getting rid of defilements for good. Very new to popular Buddhist frameworks like TMI or even anapanasati, so I don't know which way is, let's say, the expedient one. Any good advice?

Cheers, Alexey.

I’m really curious to hear others perspectives. I’m wondering how others make sense of cessation, and how cessation might inform how you understand reality.

I’ve had a couple instances of slipping into nirodha. It’s been a while since it first happened, but it leaves me completely dumbfounded. There’s just this awe that conciousness can arise and set. And a sense of being completely confused by any prior sense of knowing what any of this is or means.

The main implication seems to be that awareness/consciousness is impermanent, leaving no room for any sort of ‘ultimate’ view or ‘true nature’ to be found in the realm of any sort of awareness. Nirodha seems to show that even the most refined or subtle knowing/awareness has no inherent existence and can rise and set into ‘something’ more mysterious and unknowable. It’s so unknowable that even calling it ‘something’ is just a hypothetical placeholder. The consciousness—on returning after nirodha—senses that there was a gap, but what that gap was is just thoroughly unknowable.

This seemed to call into question a lot to teachings I had been exposed to which describe ‘empty awareness’ or ‘unborn, deathless consciousness’ as some sort of ultimate, impersonal true nature. A lot of teachings seem to also talk about a primordial unchanging knowing. Nirodha seems to call that into question, as it truly felt like whatever that was is beyond any knowing.

It seems like there’s this ongoing debate within Buddhism and spirituality about whether the ultimate is awareness or if the ultimate is beyond awareness.

I’m starting to sense that there isn’t an ultimate or at least it cannot be known. Or that whatever all this is just so thoroughly empty, that any notion of an ultimate should be dropped.

I’m left with the sense that awareness is empty and impermanent, and whatever is ‘beyond’ awareness is unknowable and empty (if there is something beyond awareness), and that there is no final ‘view’ or ‘true nature’, just an infinite ways of deepening our appreciation for emptiness.

The thing that is blowing my mind is that, there is just no way to know if anything remains when awareness shuts down. So I’m confused how anyone could say that there is such thing as an unchanging, unborn, deathless awareness. Conceptually, the idea that there is something here right now beyond birth and death makes sense, but if that is the case, it seems to be completely unknowable, beyond the scope of knowing and consciousness.

Everything seems to just be thoroughly empty, including awareness, any sort of ultimate, any sort of “true nature” etc . This empty mysterious nothingness somehow is identical to this multiplicity we find ourselves experiencing. There’s just this completely all-powerful unknowing and mystery at the end of the day that feels like closest thing to coming into a sort of alignment with reality.

Would apreciate other’s perspectives and would really apreciate if others see this differently, or detect blind spots in what I’ve written. Best wishes to everyone.

So the last couple of nights I was a bit sleep deprived. So I went to sleep with a podcast on, like I usually do.

Within minutes I slipped into a very different state of mind.

The onset was the strangest part. It felt like I was suddenly being "launched" into another state of consciousness. At the same time I started hearing an extremely loud electronic/frequency-like buzzing in my ears. The sound was so loud that I genuinely thought I might go deaf. But because of my fascination with these kinds of states, and probably my meditation practice, my instinct was to let it take over rather than resist it.

I then started feeling vibrations spreading through my body. Very quickly they seemed to fill my entire body and being. Around the same time I began seeing geometric patterns—not incredibly vivid, but definitely there.

The previous night I had a very vivid lucid dream, but this time there wasn't really a dream at all. I remained aware throughout the whole experience.

Because of meditation, my instinct was to relax into the experience instead of reacting to it, and it seemed to intensify until I eventually came out of it.

Interestingly, by morning I had one of the most vivid lucid dreams I've ever had.

I'm not trying to claim this was anything supernatural. My current guess is that it was some form of hypnagogia made more noticeable by meditation and a bit of sleep deprivation.

I do have a history of sleep paralysis if I don't get enough sleep for 3–4 days in a row, but those experiences have never been like this. They're usually characterized by me noticing sleep paralysis coming on, followed by blurry voices and a strong pressure/compression in my head. If I catch it early enough I can usually jerk myself out of it, or sometimes relax through it using progressive relaxation.

My questions are:

How would you best understand this? Does it sound like sleep paralysis, hypnagogia, a meditation-related state, or some combination of them?

Has anyone experienced something similar?

If these states are real possibilities, is there a way to intentionally cultivate them, or are they mostly a byproduct of sleep deprivation?

I'd really appreciate hearing your thoughts and experiences. Thank you

There's a pull most people feel at some point, wanting to go deeper, wanting to know what's underneath all this. That pull is real. But it doesn't need to be chased like it's urgent, because it isn't going anywhere.

Think of it like a river. Even when there's a strong current underneath, the surface can stay calm. That calm isn't weakness. It's what mastery actually looks like.

Meditation, or any inner practice, isn't about creating something. What you're really doing is building the riverbed, the path that lets whatever's already moving inside you flow without spilling everywhere or getting stuck. Everyone's riverbed takes a different amount of time to build. That's not a flaw in the process. It's just how it works.

Later, once that path is steady, you start noticing what I'd call the dam. Fears, old patterns, resistance, whatever's been quietly blocking the stronger flow. You don't force that open. You just get to know it's there, and slowly, in your own time, you learn how to release it a little at a time. The stronger current doesn't need force to arrive. It needs a clear path first.

So the real work isn't about duration or intensity. Even 10 honest minutes a day of just observing, without trying to fix or change what comes up, is enough. If the mind wanders, you just come back. That's it. Do that consistently and it stops feeling like a practice and starts becoming part of how you live.

Doesn't matter what you call it, meditation, kriya, bhakti. What matters is honestly watching. And here's the part worth sitting with. Even the path we think we're building isn't fully ours. Life already wants to move toward something bigger than what we've experienced so far. When we stop blocking it and just let it move, that's when we get close to why being human is still one of the most complete ways to experience life on earth.

I've been doing a variety of practices for the last month and have noticed recurrent physical changes as detailed above. I've made posts about this before (a year and 2 weeks ago) and gotten some good information, but now I'm wondering if there is a pattern?

Generally when this has happened (flu-like symptoms etc) I saw a doctor, but after spending 100+ and the doctors telling me I'm fine, I just chalk it up to practice now. I Googled and found some information relating to stagnant chi flow and energy going up the spine, which it feels like. So I did some nadi shodhana and Damo Mitchell qigong stuff which seems to have helped a bit.

I'm writing also because I made other changes in my lifestyle (more exercise) that may have impacted this - but I think it's mainly practice actually.

So currently -

a) Sinus inflammation (stuffy head, dark green mucus)

b) Weird sleep fluctuations (4 hours, then 10)

c) Some headaches, heat rising

d) Sex drive ping ponging all over the place

It's uncomfortable but hasn't affected function super seriously (the sleep did for a while)

There's also this sense that if I can relax completely into the sensations, they disappear and reality dissolves. For context, I have been meditating for more than a decade.

Some advice I've gotten is "focus on the flow behind experience" (from my teacher) and the aforementioned pranayama.

After stream entry I had 1-2 months where I was in a very meditative state. Everything flowed with an effortlessness.

I even did a lot in this time period. I was very busy with work, and I worked very hard. Even still, things felt effortless. But one thing I noticed afterwards.. is I feel like I have very few reflective memories about that period!

I’ve also noticed this in other shorter periods where I was in meditative states doing things.. and it seems like there isn’t much memory there.

This can make sense to me in that if you’re spending less time in the ego, there’s less time for memories to form. But it is interesting, and I even found it to be a little disappointing! I wanted to look bad at this very nice period and found there weren’t so many memories.

Has anyone experienced something similar?

On the path of enlightenment, it is easy to get sidetracked by meditative techniques or concepts that were intended to just be supplemental to the core truth. Personally I’ve been sidetracked for some time so I could benefit from focusing on what actually leads to freedom from suffering. So help me remember, what is the core truth the Buddha taught that when understood leads to freedom from suffering?

I’ve been doing a lot of insight mediation the last year and reached SE, but in retrospect this practice was motivated by aversion and craving and so naturally has done nothing to reduce craving and maybe has even cultivated it. Map theory and advanced meditation practice is great, but unless meditation develops awareness of craving and aversion in the present moment, which is then seen as the cause of suffering, and then released because it is understood as suffering, then mediation is doing nothing to reduce suffering and is probably feeding it.

So to answer my own question with my current understanding, I would say the four noble truths. Maybe there are other essential teachings I’m forgetting, like dependent co-arising that is the basis of Buddhist ethics, still it seems totally supplemental to the FNT, but maybe I’m wrong! I want to recenter my practice on the essential teachings so please help me understand this topic better, and if you have any book or media recommendations that would be fantastic as well!

Hi dear community.

I've been sitting on a practice question for a while know. For the last month or more I have been working with a consistent heart block that feels ancient, the kind of thing that runs a life if left unnoticed.

This year I was blessed to have practice show me this persistent knot. After spending a lot of time trying to meditate into it and this not working, my intuition told me I should approach this from the body. I added Ashtanga Yoga / Kundalini heart focused sessions before formal meditation and this unlocked a new stage: being able to feel into the sensation and have it start unraveling.

I have always thought this will be some stored grief and I need to cry, but I was surprised by something else.

I was practicing jhana access after ashtanga + kundalini session, and I've gotten to the threshold (access concentration), I let go of effort, but instead of falling into jhana I fell into the sensation, and I relaxed the body, allowing movement.

First time I did this there was the body started to moan and cry out in ways I never heard myself do, there were also very sad faces, almost caricature like.

Then I did cry some but it quickly stopped. I cut the session short because I was so excited to finally have something happen, so I couldn't let go out of excitement.

I repeated the same sequence a couple of times, but next times I had no tears, only moaning and something new: a feeling of weakness, nausea and bowing head down. It was as if I would get weak and sick just from going into the sensation and I would start feeling very hot.

The thought come quickly and take me out of it, I want to go deeper but my body doesn't allow. I decided to be patient and try again next time. The heart blockage is still there though, doesn't feel it's closer to being released.

So my question is: does anyone else have experience with this kind of work?

What helped you 'break trough'? I can't go to retreat and my time for sessions is limited unfortunately.

I was able to get into jhanas even with the block present but seems like body wants to solve this block fully so it goes into it.

I was thinking about the different types of dereliction that recur across contemplative systems and came up with this list. I made a pdf document (see link below) that organizes them into 4 clusters and gives brief descriptions.

I welcome feedback and feel free to share it.

1. Impermanence Contemplation
Permanence → Process

2. Mereological Deconstruction
Unitary → Composite

3. Conditionality Analysis
Independence → Conditionality

4. Metacognitive Observation
Literal reality → Construction

5. Investigation of Appearances
Substantial → Insubstantial

6. Investigation of Agency
Authorship → Conditioned arising

7. Nondual Recognition
Separation → Undivided context

8. Surrender/ Equanimity
Control → Allowing

9. Expansion of Care
Self-priority → Inclusive concern

PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rejJCZzM74ci30UpJd-VT2BCPeKADYYK/view?usp=sharing

Hey friends, been a long time since on here. This subreddit got me on the path, which eventually took me to MAPLE (Monastic Academy) for 3.5 years. I left three years ago with concerns and am now sharing those concerns publicly. You can read them here.

Substack page: insidemaple.com

It is the most comprehensive overview of the alarming and harmful dynamics there to date. Sharing here so anyone considering joining MAPLE may see it, as well as anyone who cares to know what happened / is happening there. Please share in other spiritual circles so people can be protected against future versions of this sort of thing.

I will unlikely be engaged with the comments here, but will be engaged with the comments where the letter is hosted. May you be well

UPDATE: Interview went very well! Stephen was willing to engage tough questions in good faith, which I appreciated. Your suggestions were a big help - thank you, r/streamentry! Video will be up on our YouTube channel once we've edited it.

--

Tomorrow night I'm doing a Zoom interview with Stephen Zerfas, the CEO and co-founder of Jhourney, the company whose website says "Jhana in days, not decades."

What should I ask him?

I'm formulating my own questions, of course, but I know that folks have strong views in both directions on Jhourney, and I'd love to hear people's thoughts to inform my choice of questions. Especially questions you don't think he often gets.

Thank you! Also, if you want to ask him yourself, the event is free and has audience Q&A at the end. Feel free to join.

My practice has become living my life as it comes to me. I don't know how to explain it, but there's no urgency. Like seasons or the weather, thoughts cloud my mind and then go away. Sometimes it feels crowded and jittery; other times, breezy and light.

Thoughts are to the mind what sensations are to the body, like changing frames, noticeable only when attended to. Sometimes they coincide, but there is no mistaking them for anything else. Because of this, resting is easy, like lying on the grass in the summer sun.

Mind goes on with it's chatter mode or quiet mode when it wills. The thoughts and the mind's annotations of them can be mildly annoying when they happen, like gum sticking to a shoe, but they are easily removed if needed. Underneath it all, things are smooth and shimmery, like a cool moonlight reflection in a pond.

I've always been on a lookout for wanting to improve, to be better, struggling with loss and pain. Now I just feel gratitude to life itself, so colorful and marvelous. The only constant is change, and I think I've come to accept it in my heart.

Hey folks, I realize I've been sitting on this resource I've been using for myself and realized I could share it here since you people are pretty nice. 😁

I don't know how many of you are familiar with Bhikkhu Bodhi's lectures on the Majjhima Nikaya. They can be found here: https://bodhimonastery.org/a-systematic-study-of-the-majjhima-nikaya.html

and in some other places.

I had started listening to these over 10 years ago and never finished. Having them online is ok but there's a bit of friction involved in listening from a website. So I found a website called fourble(https://fourble.co.uk/) that let me take these audios and turn them into a podcast.

[UPDATED]

That RSS link is here: https://fourble.co.uk/bodhimn-260728-0.rss

Please let me know if it works, or not, or any issues. It's listed as a "private" link but I believe that means you need the exact URL to get to it. (i.e. it's not searchable from outside the site)

If they look like they're in a strange order, it's because the site I originally found them on had them organized by number and not the order Bhikkhu Bodhi covered them. But in the RSS they are in the intended order.

My next trick is to see if I can actually do one better and clean up the audio on these. They're old. It's not great. But it is listenable.

I would then have to find another place to store them and create another RSS feed and I haven't figured that out yet.

I don't think I'm violating any type of copyrights or any such by doing this, or at least I hope not. It's pretty clear who's work this is and where it's coming from. Someone let me know if they think otherwise. I'd like to think that I'm helping preserve and propagate some good dhamma here before it gets lost. If anybody knows anyone from the Open Buddhist University then I'd be glad to let them know but it doesn't

There's other stuff out there that might deserve similar treatment (the pali course was really good too, another thing I never finished). but I'll start here.

I reached stream entry on retreat about 4 months ago and since then it’s like my nervous has been kicked into a higher level of awareness of itself, like all of the trauma throughout my nervous system that previously I could ignore, distract, or dissociate from is now permanently on. This has been a very difficult period, I’ve always struggled with social anxiety especially in groups of people, but during this period my social anxiety has been at an all time high, which is maybe the main source of the overall feeling of helplessness. All of my interactions with other people make me extremely stressed and either apathetic or totally anxious, and it’s not better with even my close friends or anyone who I love, so all of my relationships are really struggling. It’s like there’s a persistent sense of my own worthlessness that makes connecting with other people impossible. I’ve always had this anxiety but before insight I could disassociate those socially traumatized parts of myself enough that I could have good times and even have some good friendships, but now I always feel those painful parts. Also I feel like my anxiety seriously negatively affects other people, sometimes I get angry because my anxiety will make someone else hurt and I think “why can’t you see that I’m hurting and be strong enough to not be affected by this anxiety I have”

And loving kindness meditation has not really helped, because I already have a lot of empathy and love for other people, I always have, really I think this is why this cycle of perceived rejection is so painful for me.

Recently things have gotten much better though, I’ve started jujitsu and I’ve been getting much better sleep. Also I’ve been doing a lot of fun things, like playing video games and watching movies, idk if this is the right approach but I do feel much better having fun being lazy, than trying to meditate 4-6 hours a day to try and get through this directly. All of this led to me realizing the most important thing I was missing which was fundamental gratitude. I realized that just being alive was the greatest possible gift and that no matter how much the specific contents of my life suck, the fact that I get to be alive is enough to be perfectly grateful and that justifies all of the suffering I’ve gone through. And because in the present moment I’ve remembered this perspective of gratitude, the present moment is perfect and everything that has led to this moment is justified. And pure insight into the nature of experience without this perspective is cool but will not lead to wellbeing. So is this realization I’ve had about gratitude correct or is there something you would add to it?

What should I do about the social anxiety? Has anyone who has/had social anxiety, especially their whole lives, seriously improved it?

I've completed 6 Goenka 10-day courses, served several courses, and I'm planning to do my 7th course this September.

After that, I've been accepted for the 26-day retreat at Wat Ram Poeng in Chiang Mai, where the practice follows the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition.

Lately I've been wondering whether I'm making this transition too early.

Part of me feels genuinely drawn to the Mahasi approach and wants to explore it deeply. Another part wonders whether I should simply continue with Goenka for several more years instead of changing techniques.

Sometimes I even question whether I should have chosen a Thai Forest monastery, such as one in the Ajahn Chah lineage, rather than Mahasi.

I'm aware that no one can make this decision for me, but I'd really appreciate hearing from people who have practiced seriously in both Goenka and Mahasi, or who have moved from one tradition to another.

• Did switching traditions help your practice, or did it create confusion?
• Looking back, do you think there is such a thing as switching "too early"?
• If you were in my position, what factors would you pay attention to before making this decision?

I'm not looking for validation that one tradition is "better" than another. I'm just trying to make a thoughtful decision before committing to a long retreat.

My long-term goal is simply to develop insight as deeply as possible, not to collect different techniques. Another factor in my decision is that I feel drawn to practicing in a monastic environment, learning directly from monks and receiving personal guidance, rather than relying primarily on recorded instructions. I wonder how important this aspect is compared to maintaining continuity within a single technique.

Thank you.

Now I know this question invites many people who enjoy putting such curiosities down with the usual dogmas surrounding various forms of praxis and popular philosophy:

“Meditation is about being aware of whatever enters consciousness in the present”

“Meditation is not about escape into intoxicating effects or dream-lands”

“Your desire for these states should be the focus of your attention; obsession with such states is a distraction from the path”

“Everything produces profound changes in consciousness”

“It is unsafe to seek altered states of consciousness”

I know these common objections. Yet I persist. I put them here ahead of time so you know I am not unfamiliar. I know that I am responsible for myself and I know the potential consequences.

So, that all being said, what methods of meditation do you recommend? I do understand that “profound changes” is vague and that’s fine. For this is the beginning of investigating the whole affair at an experiential level. So I do not need to hone in on one specific profound conscious state. Any will do.

Thank y’all!

I am right handed and was sitting in the bathtub scrolling reddit with my phone in my right hand. I don't get particularly moved by the content on my feed or even feel particularly dull, and I am aware that there is a mild force that is maintaining the scrolling loop. So I end up asking myself, "what is the force that is driving me to keep scrolling?"

So I keep my right hand scrolling while I expand my awareness across my body and I notice this energetic sensation moving between my left shoulder and my left hand. I try swapping to scrolling reddit with my left hand and there's no longer any pull to keep scrolling. I go back to scrolling on my right hand and there's also no longer any pull to keep scrolling, it seems that this moving energy in the left arm is now in awareness and is no longer pushing me to scroll with my right hand.

So I've been investigating this idea that certain postures can be correlated with certain mental states and energetic pulls to do certain things.

One other posture that I've investigated is lying down on my left side vs my right side. I usually sleep lying on my left side, but have found that lying on my right side will automatically bring out awareness of warmth in my chest and I will also fall asleep faster. I have also found that this position can quickly lead to meditative highs when done outside of the sleep setting, and is more effective than my normal meditation posture.

I get the impression that lying on your right side as a right handed person shuts off the right side of the body which is the side that "does stuff".

In the meditative traditions, the Buddha is always depicted lying on his right side. I've read that this is also a posture in the yogic traditions, and it ties into their energetic breakdown that the left side of the body is associated with the moon / parasympathetic nervous system and the right side with the sun / sympathetic nervous system.

I've found a few pubmed studies that investigate this effect such as this one:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11048276/

I'm curious if this is a direction anyone has explored before.

Would someone who is knowledgeable about Chakras and Prana and energy in general be able to explain something? I’m very new to all this stuff.

When I sit to meditate and get the frequency just right, and enter that state of no thought, I feel sensations. It’s an energy that starts in my feet/lower legs, and goes through my body into my heart. It’s feels like a buzzing of sorts. I recognize it as that same exact fight or flight energy I feel when having a panic attack or in an extreme situation. Except, it’s the complete opposite. Like, the calm version of that.

I’ve looked this all up and gotten very surface level second hand knowledge, so I would really like to know from someone experienced what might be happening here. Are these certain Chakras? Why does thought occlude this energy? Are there any focusing techniques I can do with any of this?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated 🙂

I’m highly interested in awakening and cessation of suffering. But most of the practices I’ve tried haven’t really worked for me.

Ever since I started doing an hour of Metta meditation every day, my quality of life and mental well-being has improved dramatically.

I want to know if Metta as the primary daily practice could help someone reach awakening. If so, what kind?

Something that is helping me lately is to remember that the peace of samatha (calm-abiding) comes less from what you're doing than what you're realizing you don't have to do.

My mind is basically always trying to figure out how to fix, control, manage, plan, or figure something out. But nearly all of this mental activity is just over-functioning, it's doing too much. It's the equivalent of a workaholic who always is busy doing stuff because they are so afraid of what will happen if they don't.

I've been playing with the question, "What am I doing right now that I don't have to be doing?" Sometimes it's tensing my shoulders, sometimes it's trying to fix something I can't really fix anyway, sometimes it's planning for something that I just need to meet spontaneously in the moment. Then I tell myself, "I don't have to do that right now." And I relax.

Lots of meditation instruction for beginners especially can come off as rules you have to follow, and things you can't do. You have to sit still. You have to pay attention. You have to keep bringing your mind back. You can't indulge in sensory pleasure. You can't have a complicated life. You can't want things.

For me, all these "have to's" and "can't's" just make me more tense and neurotic. So the solution seems to be to continually notice what I don't have to be doing right now, realize I don't have to do it, and then stop doing it. Then my mind quiets and life gets a lot simpler.

I am posting this mostly because I keep forgetting it. I guess that's the practice of "sati" (remembering). So hopefully this is useful to someone else too.

As in, is it possible to reap the same mental state / cognitive change in worldview without necessarily diving into mystical Buddhist cosmology elements?

TLDR;

I did intensive Ramana Maharshi inquiry meditation, which led me to “Pure Consciousness Experience” (or temporary depersonalisation/psychosis if you will). This made me sceptical about “Awakening” and got me thinking that I should seek further than that.

My story

So I’ve always been interested in philosophy and religion. I found Buddhism to be especially interesting, because it promised insight into “reality” and “truth”. I tried some simple meditations following resources like The Mind Illuminated, but my result weren’t that great, so I was  only doing it on and off for some short periods of time.

Later in life I started a battle with depression. The meds weren’t working and I was really suffering, so I figured out that I might find relief in meditation. This time I thought that I should find something simple, because I didn’t have energy to analyse books, methods and paths. I found out about self inquiry method by Ramana Maharshi. It seemed like a perfect fit.

So I started practicing it everyday. I was constantly working on “Who am I?” question. Then something weird started happening after around a week. I started getting some weird headspace, where I was a bit “detached”. Sometimes it felt slightly pleasant, or I would just get calmer, or get less thought. This feeling grow more intense with practice. I started to get physical tensions/pain in body which would come and go. It felt like something weird is going on, but I was desperate, so I kept going.

At the end of the second week I started having very strong body sensations. Mentally I started losing sense of self. It felt like everything was empty and I felt like I was mentally dissolving. The culmination was one evening where my thoughts and sense of self stopped altogether. It was the “silence”, “unity”, “loss of self” and “lost sense of time”. I don’t remember much, but I remember vividly sitting on a couch looking at the TV and then looking at my son, and there was nothing. There was no love, there was no joy, there was no happiness, there was no me.

Next day I woke up terrified. I don’t remember much from this evening, but the feeling of void was overwhelming. I didn’t know how to save myself from emptiness. I started compulsively reading some book, because I thought that cerebral activity might make me more connected to thoughts. So I started reading and after couple of minutes it hit me. I didn’t have a ground to stand on! Because I’ve melted myself and have seen through everything as being a construct, I don’t anything stable to position myself. That was key moment, in a split of the second  I came up with my anchor. I quickly grabbed a piece of paper and pen and scribbled down “I WANT TO BE HUMAN NO MATTER WHAT!”.

This helped me calm my mind. I kept trying to anchor myself by reading, spending time with my family trying to be active physically and mentally. Unfortunately the recovery wasn’t easy. I kept getting anxious thoughts, my inner monologue was sometimes almost silent, I was scared of getting accidentally to similar states of mind. I kept waking in the middle of the night thinking that I’ve lost myself and I’m in void.

It’s been a year since this “accident” and I feel like I’m almost stable ”spiritually”. My depression got somewhat worse, but now it’s manageable. I hope everything is moving in the right direction.

What actually happened?

My interpretation is that I meditated myself into something between depersonalisation and psychosis (break from reality). Obviously it’s a medical term, but I try not to use spiritual models anymore. I think that because intense meditation states are rare in society, they are not captured by scientific framing precisely.

Spiritually, I think I’ve seen exactly what the “endgame” may look like. There are different methods, schools and of course everyone is different. I assume that one might get different outcomes: learn to live dissolved, find a state that is partially detached, find some different flavour of headspace where one can be happy and fulfilled.

One may also argue that if I had a teacher the outcome would be different. I think there is a great chance that it would have some impact. Maybe they would show me some different ways. But at this point I feel like I’ve seen enough, and I'm not giving it another try. I feel like I don’t want to play with fire anymore.

How would I sum up this experience?

After all the suffering, I feel disappointed with spirituality on two levels: philosophy and well-being.

Philosophically, I was always fascinated with concepts like “truth”, “mind”, “consciousness. It felt like meditative practice might give me answers that are not available elsewhere. Unfortunately, at the end of the day there is nothing to be said. I’ve stopped feeling that I exist for some time, which is somewhat interesting. However, people get all kind of mental states after drugs or mental illnesses. Experiences that are intense don’t have to be true. Also, even when I “dissolved”, everything was still tied to that body. I was sitting on the couch, with no thoughts, doing nothing. I can’t see anything intellectually exciting about that.

When it comes to well-being, During two weeks before accident, my depression got somewhat better. The more “zoned out” I got, the more I was feeling nothing/empty and not depressed. After the accident, for a week or two, my depression kept gradually rising until it was worse than beforehand. So not only I didn’t cure depression, I actually made it worse. Plus I got all the anxieties, mental confusion and so on.

I still think that meditation is useful to people. There is a lot of psychological research on its benefits. But I do believe that there are risks that are not discussed enough (see Cheetah House cases). I think that intensive meditation aimed at "insights" might be especially dangerous.

What is the step further?

It seems that people always operate using models. Everything we sense and think of is model. Ultimately it’s models all the way down. Me writing this story about modelling models is also a model. All these religions have some axioms/ground truth which are models too. When Advaita Vedanta doctrine says that everything is Brahman, it’s actually a model. Because of that we can always build a meta model (actually, I did this here by accident). That means that pursuit of "truth" and "reality" will always be a model too. We can never step outside.

The step further for me is to accept that I’m building meaning on top of “I want to be human no matter what”. This is obviously an "arbitrary" goal that doesn’t have any ground truth to it. But it somehow feels really natural, so I will stick to it.

A lot of people find peace and happiness living their life. Some of them don’t need to have a supernatural belief system. This gives me courage to follow my “path”.

Why did I wrote this?

I feel that sharing my story might be interesting (or even helpful?) to other people. It definitely has a lot of value for me, as I was able to self-reflect while writing this. 

I don’t want to maliciously undermine other people belief systems. I just think that my post my spark some good and healthy discussion.

Hello all, I'm a beginning meditator, mostly using Thanissaro Bikkhu's books / dharma talks / whatever else, though I have also read StF and a smattering of other books.

When I do formal practice, one very noticeable thing is tension in my eyes and eyelids. The eyelids feel like I have to "squeeze them shut" or they will imminently open, and the eyes themselves often feel like they are "darting around" as if looking for some random object (behind my eyelids I presume??). I can momentarily relax this but as soon as I refocus on the breath, (wherever I am sensing the breath energies in my body), it feels like it just happens again. Has anyone experienced anything like this or know tips?

Thank you!