2.5 weeks post-path
Despite all my outlandish claims I am a sceptic at heart. I am well aware that the buddhist path is supposed to take 30 years or more to walk, unless you’re one of the lucky few who gets hit with a jolt of instant awakening. My path was some new riff on buddhism, with a veer toward family at the end, so I’ll just note the phenomenology I am experiencing here and you can make your own judgement.
I have no symptoms of either ADHD or PTSD. I have no head noise, no urgency to achieve, no suicidal images, very little internal chatter, and no rejection sensitive dysphoria. I feel like I am adequate as I am.
I have no notable cravings. I have preferences and enjoy things, but liking something is very different to craving it. This includes self-image and aversion to negative emotions; they can still arise but they just drift by.
My field of consciousness is becoming more diffuse. Yesterday in particular I wasn’t really aware of a self-container and was instead experiencing things ‘from within things’. This is something that was formerly contained to sitting meditation but now seems to be suffusing daily life.
The first week after this cessation event I was confused and oscillating; once I released my scaffold as just another fabrication I settled back into my ‘self’ like a man on a bungee. Now this overcompensation seems to be releasing and, for lack of a better way of saying it, it feels like my body-container is empty and my bodily sensations bleed into the field around me like ink in water.
I have a peripheral knowledge of everything in my sphere of consciousness and rarely laser-focus unless necessary, like when driving. This is an easy and open awareness, like things are washing over me. The flip-side of this is that I don’t feel the old pressure to plan things so I kind of potter around and timing always seems to work out. My sense of urgency is gone, though I am sure I can act quickly if something really is time-critical (like hugging my kid just now).
Things which would previously drive me insane no longer do; sloppy eating noises for example. They aren’t pleasant but neither do they hurt my head any more; I might even go so far as to say that they aren’t actually all that unpleasant, but maybe that's because they're from my chold. The industrial noise that often comes through our foundations from hundreds of kilometres away still drags my attention away but doesn't grate quite like it used to; white noise helps when sleeping or meditating and I no longer obsess over it.
Sleep is great and generally 8-10 hours at night with a nap during the day. I don't exactly lucid dream, but I am aware of when I am dreaming and I am able to switch the dream off if I want to. I seem to easily wake after REM cycles at the moment, several times per night, but not in a ‘waking up argh’ kind of sense. It’s more like I have one foot in each world at all times and I can just roll over and appraise the dream, then close my eyes and resume it. ‘Resume’ is the operative word because these dreams seem to retain coherence throughout the entire night even if I get up for a toilet break. I will have maybe 6-7 cycles of dreaming, with each one being an episode in some overarching story.
The stories are all positive and have been about helping other people to achieve liberation, but the one last night seemed more about just settling into the new persona and dropping the drive to help. An ex-athlete telling me to stop training so hard because those days are over, and a cessation of magical medicine which gave us all super powers because I no longer found them necessary or entertaining.
Meditation is great now that I have been able to resume it. The first couple of weeks saw my mind a little too diffuse and my desire to strive completely gone. It was like I had crossed the finish line in an ironman and the body would not run any more. The goal had been attained so the motion stopped of its own accord. I no longer cycle through dark night phases.
I meditate maybe 90-120 minutes per day with a 45min-ish session immediately before bed. I also set up a bike on a stationary trainer for the winter so that I can continue my Z2 sessions on the balcony and maintain physical fitness and D2 receptor density.
The meditation is easy and I settle immediately. I progress quickly to focusing on consciousness itself and have nudged the threshold of nirodha samapatti a couple of times but always get a little excited when I do and fall into the trap of trying to observe. I meditate because I want to meditate now, not because I feel driven to. I am curious: what exactly is this thing I call a world, and a me? And I like the way I feel when I have been meditating so will continue to do so. I also feel like I shortcut my way around a lot of the benefits because of how fast my process was so will accrue them now.
I still do my humming in the bath but it is easy and there is no sense of folding algorithms or waveforms within the mind. The neural network feels stable and coherent, and this is no doubt because I was able to make my scaffold coherent to the point where I believed it just as likely as this world we call ‘real’.
It is strange, to no longer be driven.
It is unusual, but incredibly comfortable, to no longer feel contained to this sack of flesh; to feel and know that each one of these sensory inputs is enveloped by the consciousness that does the knowing.
It is new for the world to feel full and the self to feel empty.
This is very different to previous encounters with nibbana.
For n1, n2, n3 and n4 it felt like a peak experience; a ‘bang’ headsplosion and then utter joy and relief and messianic visions and wanting to help everyone else experience what I had just experienced… and then a settling down into a more ‘normal’ frame of being as I was gradually recontainerised.
This one - n5 I will call it but the line became blurred toward the end - feels the opposite. The actual event that clinched it was standing in front of the mirror and realising that both the real world and the scaffold are fabricated, and this thing called a self was fabricated within both. It was a release of the self: the idea of the physical body (as it appears to us) being anything beyond a mental fabrication, maybe just being a server in the cloud which needs food for power and bodily functions for memory offload, maybe being none of the above.
It was an acceptance that I do not and will not ever know, and it was lacking fireworks. It was a stowing of the raft and a disembarking from the waves of the river, with both feet landing squarely back on the earth and the undulations ceasing. There was a little residual wobbliness and then stability.
But now it feels like I’ve started walking on the other side and the changes are beginning to assert themselves. The lowered sense of duality and irritability or restlessness. The curiosity without a drive to ‘fix’ something. The acceptance of all that has been and all that will come to be.
It’s unusual but it’s nice. I have never felt like this, but it’s also very subtle and easy to doubt; like ‘is that toothache really gone’, while you probe your mouth with your tongue. I have more time and bandwidth for everyone outside of myself. I can sit and stare at the forest with my decaf and not feel like I should be doing something else.
I kind of don’t care whether I’m an arahant or neo-arahant or whatever. These are all words which point at something which is not ‘now’, and I am more curious about what ‘now’ is.
So yeah - let’s see how things continue from here. Time for some breakfast.
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