Vippasana Experiences

A man is told that his eyes are blue when he knows they’re brown. He should know, he’s seen through them for 40 years. Just to prove it he looks in the mirror and sees that, in fact, they are blue. At first there’s a sort of shock and bewilderment but that quickly gives way to the calming knowing, perhaps remembrance, that they have always been that way. They didn’t just change. “That’s right…that makes sense. I guess I knew that, somehow. Fascinating, nearly overwhelming but ‘normal’ and anticlimactic and the same time.”

This is the best way I can describe the experiences I have been feeling as my Vipassana meditation practice has been maturing over the past year. The hard work of sitting each day with Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration has provided many initial benefits but, lately, over the past few months, clear deeper insights are beginning to come. I’m certain they’ve always been there, but were not clear, covered up in layers upon layers of delusion that a being’s life inevitably amasses to make life ‘easier.’ Studying Buddhist lessons via multiple authors and traditions provides the base of understanding, surely, but to actually experience first-hand these truths is truly wonderful and vital to really knowing their meanings – intense and quiet at the same time.

1. Annata (not-self) – while sitting before a 4-day meditation retreat, I experienced a deep and powerful focusing of mind yet unattained in previous sits over the past year. The effort and mindfulness worked together allowing my concentration to become as sharp as a knife, cutting through the fetters of my mental habits. A cascade of awareness, like an energy expansion from my core, radiated outwards, expanding physical elements of my body outwards, in concert with the universe in its constant expansion. My body, my concept of solidity, began to lose its definition in my mind. There was no longer skin, hair, organs, bones. Each was experienced not as a concept of a whole, but as aggregate parts. Tissues disappeared and were felt as cells with intercellular void space between them. Their fatty-lipid bilayer holding the nucleus, ancient, primordial mitochondria and all of the cell’s components, along with the massive space between them, was experienced simply as expansion, space and energy. This expansion was realized, then, as a concept for my mind to grasp and deal with the experience, so it too then fell away leaving only direct experience. Now the nucleus and all of its chromosomes, DNA, was experienced as mostly space…seemingly infinite space between physical sub-parts. All that remained of my ‘body’ was subatomic particles interacting via the physical laws of energy and the same immense space that defines, in inverse terms, our universe. One in the same. Always there and never experienced through our five senses, only via our sixth. For an unknown period of time, I was able to experience what I believe to be Samahdi – the pure, focus of attention, undeluded by concept, motivation, or habit thought so that only the experience is known thereby allowing insight to flow. This was a taste of a level of meditation that I can only hope to achieve with more regularity in this lifetime, but don’t expect to. How it came to be during this sit is as of yet unknown to me.

2. Consciousness – During a sit last week, a subtler level of Samahdi, one without the nearly overwhelming experience of energy, expansion, space and dissolution of the body into its aggregates, led to the direct experience of multiple-layered streams of thought and possibly an independent partnering consciousness of them. To better explain this, consider the ocean in its tremendous dark depths. Life exists at all depths but is not directly known by us through our five senses as most all of that life does not emit sound or light enough for our eyes and ears to detect them, yet they are all there moving, interacting, reacting, pushing, pulling, consuming, living, dying, rotting and their aggregate parts being assimilated into new life forms and the ocean floor to become limestone. During this particular sit, my awareness grew and dove to similar depths in my mind which I have not yet experienced in my 40 years. At least 2 deeper layers of thought exist below my daily conscious mind and I doubt that there is a limit to the total number of layers, or depth of the mind. As I maintained the role of a quiet witness, or observer, I watched as random streams of thought floated through the darkness and my mindfulness follow behind it, separate, unattached. These deeper thoughts did not dissolve and lose their power as easily as the more surficial mind habits but, eventually, they fell away. I suspect these depths are more powerful given that the unfocused mind typically allows them to run amuck unchecked. I am hopeful that by witnessing these deeper levels I can uncover habit energies that have affected my existence and gain some form of understanding, acceptance, of what they truly are, which is as of yet to be determined by future insight.

3. No Birth, No Death – Last night, my sit provided me the insight, via direct experience beyond the academic paper pages of Buddhist writings, of all that apparently challenges most Western religious devotees. Mind you, this insight and the academic descriptions of it are not intended to contradict or challenge Western religious teachings, they are simply realizations of existence that stand separate from those Western teachings and are not meant to take their place. For what I believe to have been approximately 10 minutes of somewhat on-again-off-again focus, I experienced the constant flow of change without beginning and end. Each moment was observed as infinitely small and constantly rising and falling in and out of existence. In fact, there was no one true moment to grasp onto, so complete release of grasping habits fell away. When this was clearly understood via experience, Annata was again realized.