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interesting meditation experiences
today i sat down after eating my first meal. it is a rainy day today. i sat down, constantly chewing on my own experience as i'm sure we all do, chewing on ideas and concepts and our own feelings, moving them around, and trying to navigate through life and the eternal now, doing what buddhists do. then as i was sitting, suddenly KERPLOP!!! a hole opened up beneath me. and it certainly was a physical sense of beaneathality, it was a psychological feeling but it had a physical dimension to it. i noticed that everything heard and seen and felt around me by my body was one thing, while this rabbit hole that i fell down was another, yet not to invoke any ideas of duality, it was as if this space that i fell into (and it was 'i' that fell into it, at least the notion of i that i know nothing else of) carried everything else, all this other phenomena of body and mind, the whole world. INteresting!
so i thought it'd be a good idea to share interesting experiences and stimulate others to share theirs. i also had a good insight that, going along with tathāgatagarbha we have an immanent sainthood within ourselves, and we must tap into this at all times and consider the ego stream of mind as noise and do not pay it any serious attention, hear it and do not block it out but do not listen to it with serious interest. instead to rest our minds in the stronghold of bodhicitta and the womb of tathagata and take all appearances in the world as empty and impermanent, these negative things as dust in the wind, so why get irritated at dust. also, to listen to things motivated by anger, greed and delusion as fiction, looking at it with a comic slant, as if nirvana were just playing with itself!
so i thought it'd be a good idea to share interesting experiences and stimulate others to share theirs. i also had a good insight that, going along with tathāgatagarbha we have an immanent sainthood within ourselves, and we must tap into this at all times and consider the ego stream of mind as noise and do not pay it any serious attention, hear it and do not block it out but do not listen to it with serious interest. instead to rest our minds in the stronghold of bodhicitta and the womb of tathagata and take all appearances in the world as empty and impermanent, these negative things as dust in the wind, so why get irritated at dust. also, to listen to things motivated by anger, greed and delusion as fiction, looking at it with a comic slant, as if nirvana were just playing with itself!
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Psychology defines learning as a change in behavior. So if there is no change in behavior, have we really learned anything?
Now, enlightenment ... THAT's change. But if fireworks and insight don't create change, then enlightenment cannot lie there.
The practice of Buddhism retrains our mind and creates strong, new habits that eventually push out the old ones. As we start to automatically act and react differently over a sustained period of time, then we can say that we are indeed changing. And then we can say that we have found something that has true value.
this has happened to me before, in meditation and outside of it (outside of zazen), where i get a dose of alice in wonderland syndrome. it wasn't the real alice in wonderland syndrome where objects are fully perceived as being heavily distorted in size, but today in meditation when i closed my eyes it did feel as if my body was extremely distorted and much larger, while my awareness/imagination of the room and objects around me felt much smaller, and farther away. INTeresting!
i also got a newer sense of individuality, that is instead of people's actions and words and "essence" so to speak mixing and mishmashing all together inside my mind field, peoples' persons as individual and separate entities in the conventional sense i could feel much more distinctly. this also combined with the observation that we often get deceived by our ego into paying tribute to it, very hard to detect at its subtler levels of activity, in fact i'm probably doing it right now to myself, but it doesn't matter so much, so long as we keep certain principles in mind and stay dedicated to our meditation and practice. when a snakes sneaks into the garden it's not the gardener's fault, but the gardener does have to make the effort to repel the snake as best they can, to remember that there are children near by. yeah!
Wolves?? How can people meditate in such dangerous surroundings :eek:
Thanks for the advice Foible. I know for me at least, it's very valid. I had an intense experience while meditating once a few years ago, and my obsession with trying to understand it definitely hindered my practice! Even now I'll waste time thinking about it every once in a while, which is not helpful at all.
I'll be saving your words to try and remind myself to change this attachment of mine!
I just thought I would share that I have had this experience myself. I've also had the experience where it feels like I"m vibrating a little bit inside of my own body. Not sure if it makes much sense, but almost feels like my mind just rattling around inside my body? At any rate, I think I understand what you are saying.
I had a very similar experience a while back. Really brought home the fact that seperation is a concept as created as good or bad is created.
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I've had a few others since too.
Every now and then i'll get very lost in thought or analysis that i'll get a sudden sense of getting my sight back. Like, while I was in thought I was in complete darkness and a curtain get's pulled open in a very literal way.
Another thing that's started to happen is that I've started to get sense memories coming up randomly (and quite a lot) from when I was child. (20 years ago) Certain smells, tastes, feelings and sensations I haven't had since I was small.
I've also started to find myself doing metta practice in my dreams.
But your's is way weirder.