Meditation and its results

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That is quite likely. During a meditative state one is more aware of internal (bodily and mental) phenomenon and also external sensory input. I'll add the following which seems relevant here that I edited from my post in the spiritual experiences thread:

I practice Shikantaza Zen meditation. Unlike concentration based forms of meditation, shikantaza is more of an opening up of awareness rather than a narrowing down of it. The mind is usually full of noise from passing thoughts and sensations and they take our full attention. However, with practice, the noise of the mind can be stilled and you become aware of what remains of the thoughts arising and passing through your consciousness then departing. It is a bit like sitting next to a fast moving motorway / autoroute where cars are whizzing past so fast you don't really notice the individual vehicles and there is a constant roaring sound of vehicles. When the thoughts (mental noise) in the mind subside, it is like being on a deserted road and you clearly see an individual vehicle emerge in the distance, go past you slowly and disappear into the distance again. You can see much more detail. You can also hear any background sounds like birds singing.

In a deep meditative state some of the activity which is normally in the realms of the subconscious falls under the gaze of consciousness. It was always there in the background but people are generally unaware of it because their attention is entirely taken by conscious thoughts and a deluge of sensory information coming from our surroundings, jobs, TV, telephone and so on. In this deeper state of meditation you can become aware of the birth of each thought and where it came from (instincts, prejudices, lust) and so on. You can see the thought arise pre-language then see it being converted into verbal (word) form - if you speak more than one language you can see the thought being clothed in words of one or the other language.

Going deeper still into meditation you become aware that the sense of "I" or "me" is also a mental construct. There is no "I" or "me" witnessing these thoughts. The sense of self arises and passes just like any other mental construct. At this level of meditation "you" are essentially a witness of mental phenomenon going on in your brain. You are extremely alert - wide awake and sharper than you are during the normal waking state. Sensory information is more intense too - colours are deeper, sounds are more audible. You notice things that usually escape your attention... a tiny insect, barely visible, climbing a tiny blade of grass; a gentle breeze blows a dead leaf off a tree and you watch it descend.

At this depth of meditation you are aware that your most fundamental nature is that of consciousness. It isn't that you have consciousness so much as consciousness illuminates "you". Expressing this another way... there is no sense of individuality, the passing sensations of "I" or "me" appear within consciousness and are gone again - they are no more my real "self" than any other passing thought or emotion. My whole personality is a series of conditioned mental input / output responses - they are not "me"; but then "me" isn't me either. I am consciousness itself.

There is nothing supernatural or paranormal about any of this. This depth of awareness is available to everyone, in fact it is there all the time, but our attention is always distracted with the surface noise of the mind. Many of the things I've discovered about the functioning about my mind/brain also correspond with discoveries during the advances in neuroscience. The beauty of shikantaza meditation is that it is simply opening up to what is there. It is not about creating hallucinations or fancy imaginings, it is about shifting the attention from the usual clamour going on in the brain to the more subtle and deeper nature or our existence. An analogy is sometimes given that most people spend their time bouncing up and down on the surface waves of the ocean and they are oblivious to its profound depth and the immense beauty below the surface.

^^That reminds me of when I'm in a busy nightclub and I'm on the dance floor.

I always do the same thing. I stand there right in the middle, with everything buzzing around me, I close my eyes and I listen for the slowest beat in the music, until that's all I can hear.

Everything slows down, It is a really nice feeling.

I know that the place is full but it just feels like me.

I don't know if that is like meditating. But it is peaceful.

At this depth of meditation you are aware that your most fundamental nature is that of consciousness. It isn't that you have consciousness so much as consciousness illuminates "you". Expressing this another way... there is no sense of individuality, the passing sensations of "I" or "me" appear within consciousness and are gone again - they are no more my real "self" than any other passing thought or emotion. My whole personality is a series of conditioned mental input / output responses - they are not "me"; but then "me" isn't me either. I am consciousness itself.

I don't know whether what I do would pass as dancing. :wink:

^^Great dancing, it made me laugh.

I think a lot of people are surprised at my public displays sometimes because I am generally so quiet :lol:

i lie on the floor of my room, attention is drawn towards my pulse, first in the neck, then in the heart. soon i feel the pulse in every corner of my body. then there is only this pulsing and nothing else. the pulse becomes a smooth energy field. i am aware that i no longer feel my heart beating. a faint whisper of a thought 'death'? i accept, i give up. any sense of physicality drops away. aspects of experience predominate and fall away in layers. a state stabilizes. a borderless, centerless, pure clear light. everything is just this light. i am not 'somewhere' in relation to the experience. there are no thoughts, and no tactile phenomena. at some point i open my eyes and notice something remarkable. i'm in my bedroom. i mean the bedroom is there, but i'm not there. i'm not anywhere. everything is vivid and immediate, perfect. time stands still. my visual field has no location. my mind is silent. i have no experience of a body, except for the feeling of my skin gracing the air. a hand makes an appearance in the visual field to reach out and touch something, but it's not 'my hand' it's just colors and shapes and shades. there is no sense of an observer, no subject-object split. i know by their absence what phenomena comprise the feeling of being located in experience.

while it's nice to talk about useless exotic unrelateable descriptions of indescrablable experiences, i'm going to try to keep this down to earth. i'm sure there are many things that have been called the key to good meditation. the one that stands out for me is the necessity of inquiring into your direct, immediate experience. it's not about looking for that hidden backdoor to "the subconscious realm" or "piercing the veil." let all the nonsense you're accustomed to attending to subside, and you may find that what you were looking for was always already there, only you were standing in the way.

i never gave much thought to spirituality before i started meditating in 2009. i'm not a 'believer'. to me mindfulness was just a possible treatment for depression. i picked up some books by thich nhat hanh, extracted a methodology and practiced diligently from the moment i awoke until the moment i fell asleep. after practicing continuously in this manner for three months, something interesting happened, as inadequately described in another thread:



after years of near-constant depression, suddenly i felt perfect. absent were tensions i had never before recognized as tensions. the sense of a place from which experience is experienced was clearly not an actual place from which experience is experienced. no witness. eventually, the sensations that seemed to imply a witness returned; this seemed to me like a terrible mistake. i thought that i was somehow supposed to make them go away and feel perfect all the time, which would be nice. so for the next year or so i was routinely frustrated in meditation because, while i no longer doubted that "enlightenment" was a realistic possibility, i still had no sense of whether the practice i had undertaken would lead in that direction.

i picked up a book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, by daniel ingram in april of [whenever]. i would recommend this book to anyone who is serious about awakening, whether buddhist or not (it's downloadable for free, so go read it now). the book is nondogmatic and straight to the point. after reading that and Living Dharma by jack kornfield, i had a pretty good sense of how to meditate effectively. i started practicing 5 hours a day, then 10 hours a day, and resolved to go on in this manner until i attained a "path" [as defined in MTCTB]. after about three months, that happened. i was lying down, my senses were strobing and womp-womping and suddenly the whole of experience was slurped into a momentary discontinuity. when i came back online, my heart region was vibrating nicely, like a silent bucket of marbles swirling in my chest, whatever that means.

after that, my practice became more directly about inquiring into specific sensations that seemed to imply a sense of self, a doer, a feeler, a thinker, as opposed to indiscriminate direct analysis of all phenomena [in terms of the the three characteristics], which is also good and useful. the problem was that, no matter what i saw, i would ultimately defer to thought as though "the final answer" would have to be determined in the form of a sentence. eventually i was prompted by another meditator to question that, i.e., "can a thought think?" deferring always to thought is another way of treating an experience as an experiencer. it will seem irrelevant or nonsensical to someone who still assumes that thought entails a thinker. oh well. thought has no direct access to experience, nor does anything else for that matter. you can't even think about something precisely while it's happening (the mediating subject which both thinks and experiences is only a useful abstraction) except by construing identity and persistence of phenomena (the construing of which is not, and does not disclose, ACTUAL identity or persistence).

I've come to a decision anyways. I think I'll stick to just clearing my thoughts, it works for me fine.

I don't really think I need to go all religious about it.

I like to keep things simple me :D

I'm in the border between access concentration an 1st jhana. The best teaching session I ever heard is recorded in the video bellow. It's the outline of the buddhist meditation path from a person with a lot, if not all the personal experience of it. I assure you that it is well worth the time spent listening to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdxFS-j5oD0

That is quite likely. During a meditative state one is more aware of internal (bodily and mental) phenomenon and also external sensory input. I'll add the following which seems relevant here that I edited from my post in the spiritual experiences thread:

I practice Shikantaza Zen meditation. Unlike concentration based forms of meditation, shikantaza is more of an opening up of awareness rather than a narrowing down of it. The mind is usually full of noise from passing thoughts and sensations and they take our full attention. However, with practice, the noise of the mind can be stilled and you become aware of what remains of the thoughts arising and passing through your consciousness then departing. It is a bit like sitting next to a fast moving motorway / autoroute where cars are whizzing past so fast you don't really notice the individual vehicles and there is a constant roaring sound of vehicles. When the thoughts (mental noise) in the mind subside, it is like being on a deserted road and you clearly see an individual vehicle emerge in the distance, go past you slowly and disappear into the distance again. You can see much more detail. You can also hear any background sounds like birds singing.

In a deep meditative state some of the activity which is normally in the realms of the subconscious falls under the gaze of consciousness. It was always there in the background but people are generally unaware of it because their attention is entirely taken by conscious thoughts and a deluge of sensory information coming from our surroundings, jobs, TV, telephone and so on. In this deeper state of meditation you can become aware of the birth of each thought and where it came from (instincts, prejudices, lust) and so on. You can see the thought arise pre-language then see it being converted into verbal (word) form - if you speak more than one language you can see the thought being clothed in words of one or the other language.

Going deeper still into meditation you become aware that the sense of "I" or "me" is also a mental construct. There is no "I" or "me" witnessing these thoughts. The sense of self arises and passes just like any other mental construct. At this level of meditation "you" are essentially a witness of mental phenomenon going on in your brain. You are extremely alert - wide awake and sharper than you are during the normal waking state. Sensory information is more intense too - colours are deeper, sounds are more audible. You notice things that usually escape your attention... a tiny insect, barely visible, climbing a tiny blade of grass; a gentle breeze blows a dead leaf off a tree and you watch it descend.

At this depth of meditation you are aware that your most fundamental nature is that of consciousness. It isn't that you have consciousness so much as consciousness illuminates "you". Expressing this another way... there is no sense of individuality, the passing sensations of "I" or "me" appear within consciousness and are gone again - they are no more my real "self" than any other passing thought or emotion. My whole personality is a series of conditioned mental input / output responses - they are not "me"; but then "me" isn't me either. I am consciousness itself.

There is nothing supernatural or paranormal about any of this. This depth of awareness is available to everyone, in fact it is there all the time, but our attention is always distracted with the surface noise of the mind. Many of the things I've discovered about the functioning about my mind/brain also correspond with discoveries during the advances in neuroscience. The beauty of shikantaza meditation is that it is simply opening up to what is there. It is not about creating hallucinations or fancy imaginings, it is about shifting the attention from the usual clamour going on in the brain to the more subtle and deeper nature or our existence. An analogy is sometimes given that most people spend their time bouncing up and down on the surface waves of the ocean and they are oblivious to its profound depth and the immense beauty below the surface.

THAT'S great and kOOl..

My Cat feels the same way about It...!