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What did I experience?
betaboy
Veteran
In my meditation today, I experienced something, but I am unable to describe it.
I was fully aware, awake. There was no pain or anxiety or any negative emotion. No boredom. No sensual pleasure. I wasn't asleep but fully awake.
What did I experience, then?
I was fully aware, awake. There was no pain or anxiety or any negative emotion. No boredom. No sensual pleasure. I wasn't asleep but fully awake.
What did I experience, then?
0
Comments
'I was fully aware, awake. There was no pain or anxiety or any negative emotion. No boredom. No sensual pleasure. I wasn't asleep but fully awake.'
does that answer your question?
Next!
Next!
but if it's beyond words, what labels could one satisfactorily append? sometimes talk is just extra. no excess!
your time might be better spent reading a mahayana sutra. Vimalakirti ..
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/jhananumbers.html
particularly:
""So as a teacher, he tried to instill in his students these qualities of self-reliance, ingenuity, and a willingness to take risks and test things for themselves. He did that not only by talking about these qualities, but also by forcing you into situations where you'd have to develop them. Had he always been there to confirm for you that, "Yes, you've reached the third jhana," or, "No, that's only the second jhana," he would have short-circuited the qualities he was trying to instill. He, rather than your own powers of observation, would have been the authority on what was going on in your mind; and you would have been absolved of any responsibility for correctly evaluating what you had experienced. At the same time, he would have been feeding your childish desire to please or impress him, and undermining your ability to deal with the task at hand, which was how to develop your own powers of sensitivity to put an end to suffering and stress. As he once told me, "If I have to explain everything, you'll get used to having things handed to you on a platter. And then what will you do when problems come up in your meditation and you don't have any experience in figuring things out on your own?"
So, studying with him, I had to learn to take risks in the midst of uncertainties. If something interesting came up in the practice, I'd have to stick with it, observing it over time, before reaching any conclusions about it. Even then, I learned, the labels I applied to my experiences couldn't be chiseled in rock. They had to be more like post-it notes: convenient markers for my own reference that I might have to peel off and stick elsewhere as I became more familiar with the territory of my mind. This proved to be a valuable lesson that applied to all areas of my practice.
Still, Ajaan Fuang didn't leave me to reinvent the dharma wheel totally on my own. Experience had shown him that some approaches to concentration worked better than others for putting the mind in a position where it could exercise its ingenuity and accurately judge the results of its experiments, and he was very explicit in recommending those approaches. Among the points he emphasized were these:
Strong concentration is absolutely necessary for liberating insight. "Without a firm basis in concentration," he often said, "insight is just concepts." To see clearly the connections between stress and its causes, the mind has to be very steady and still. And to stay still, it requires the strong sense of well being that only strong concentration can provide.
To gain insight into a state of concentration, you have to stick with it for a long time. If you push impatiently from one level of concentration to the next, or if you try to analyze a new state of concentration too quickly after you've attained it, you never give it the chance to show its full potential and you don't give yourself the chance to familiarize yourself with it. So you have to keep working at it as a skill, something you can tap into in all situations. This enables you to see it from a variety of perspectives and to test it over time, to see if it really is as totally blissful, empty, and effortless as it may have seemed on first sight.""
read more at the link above
Was it a catalyst-free happiness?
Or SHOULD WE SAY YOU ATTAINED ENLIGHTENMENT. Great we need a western Buddha - now would be great!
Or Khanika Samadhi, if it lasted less than an hour or so.
that means you do not know
so forget that experience now
never try to get 'that experience' again
if it will come again, let it come
if it will not come again, let it not come
continue whatever meditation you have been doing
you are 'on the way'
No improvement in description will allow you to contain it, for it has past and that which wishes to claim it only limits the greater worth of this present unfolding moment.