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pleeppleep comments on Mindfulness Meditation Thread - Less Wrong
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I've been doing this for a while now and reached the end that the author calls partial enlightenment. I dislike the term however. It sounds so new agey.
The only thing that has happened is that I now see myself as an inseparable part of the physical universe both on the level of belief and alief. This insight makes life's problems seem less acute as they cannot target a permanent self on the alief-level. I still get sad, feel pain and pleasure but I see them more as fantastic stories about reality made up by my brain than the actual reality of (physical) cause & effect. I can also trust my instincts and subconscious mind more as I no longer fear losing myself when I surrender to pure feelings and motions beyond verbal thought.
This insight is only about a week old and I'm still making sense out of it so I'll end up with a more detailed description of what happened:
I progressed through the first two stages using other meditations but I quit smack in the middle of stage three. Back then I had no idea that feeling awful was a normal part of progress and I spent the next two years depressed in a Dark Night. Please don't do this to yourself! It sucks big time.
Last summer I ran into DavidM's article and started practicing. I worked through the pains of the Dark Night and finally broke out of stage three. However the boredom of early stage four sucked the motivation out of the practice and I took a break until I realized I was slipping back into depression.
So with the support of some friends and strong green tea I started meditating and hunting for the vibrations that permeate all experiences. I finally reached the end of stage four and could see the observer clearly. Like plucking out a flower I picked up the experience of the vibrating observer and realized that it was simply an automatic label the mind puts on thoughts and actions that it finds really important. Having now gained control of the label I could put it anywhere and immediately become it. So I became the universe and the mind was filled with joy.
The habitual mind (that is feeling like my usual self) eventually returned but it now has a dreamlike character and with a little meditation I can attach the feeling of self to basically anything and feel that I become that thing. I can also not attach the self to anything and just let the mind rest in a non-dual awareness.
I know it's been a while since you left this, but I was wondering; do you pass through the stages of depression, boredom, and insanity that he mentioned just by consistently meditating for a few months? No one else who talks about Vipassana seems to mention them. Also, do all the weird things that happen occur just during meditation, or are they constant?
It took me couple of years to get to the point where depression started to dominate so I guess a lot of the groundwork was already done. It did really only take me only a couple of months of regular practice to get the fruits of DavidM's method. The heaviest bouts of depression, boredom and insanity occur during meditation but some of that "leaks" to the daily life as well. The really weird stuff I had like a visualisation of a creature that chops of your body parts and dances around with them laughing only occur in meditation. There are no hallucinations outside of meditation and even in meditation you mostly have control of the visualisations and know that they are not real or important. It's more about letting go and the mind sometimes does crazy stuff before settling down. I would be surprised if meditators in general didn't have crazy episodes from time to time. Talking about them is taboo in most traditions. It does make sense because the mind wanders around and picks up stuff associated with meditation. If you hear or read a lot about strange stuff that can appear in meditation your mind will start playing around with the ideas and then you have sort of imagined visualisations that are doubly irrelevant. My issue here is that when people start to practice meditation alone all of the insane stuff can be quite frightening if you don't have a teacher or peers who can guide one through them. So for the lone meditators it's good to know a little about the weird stuff so they don't give them too much attention or freak out.