Cutting power to the conscious brain (Part 8) (Patreon)

Continued from previous post: Psychedelic states while meditating sober (Part 7)

By this point, really long sits were the norm. Whereas in the first couple days of the retreat, I had to take several fidget breaks and was anxiously awaiting the timer to ring for the two hour sits, by Day 9 I stopped setting the timer because the 2 hour timer would disturb my sit. In fact, I forgot to mention in my last post that on Day 8 while I was zoned out of the external world and zoned into the black void of my mind, the two hour timer rang and continued ringing for about 30 minutes until I finally felt my sit was over. The best way I can describe this feeling of being checked out of external reality is like wearing a VR headset - you’re totally dialed in to what’s going on in the headset, but if someone is in the room doing things and making noise, you’re still aware of it.

My longest sit on Day 9 was four hours. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it in this series yet but come the 4th day of the 10 day retreat, I was alternating between sitting on a cushion on the floor and in a chair. David Johnson wrote in the book The Path to Nibbana that “there is no ‘magic’ in the floor.” (This was refreshing to me. I always wondered what the point of the exceedingly painful “lotus” position was.) Once I entered the jhanas 4 and up, I was “locked in” to the state. I could fidget quite a bit, cross my legs etc without snapping out of the jhana. That said, it would make it a little weaker and I progressed faster if I could stay perfectly still. 

 
Moving on, after my four hour sit and a late lunch, I sat down around 4:30 PM for another session. Things progressed a bit faster as my mental focus and hang of the technique seemed to have received a boost from that super long session. Before long I found myself working on equanimity, the last of the 4 emotions you’re supposed to radiate out of your head. The order is loving-kindness > compassion > altruistic joy > equanimity. (Note: If you’re asking what in the world is a jhana and what does he mean by “radiating” emotions, please read my previous posts) I wouldn’t say equanimity is like apathy, but more like “no emotional reactivity.” If loving-kindness, compassion and altruistic joy were drinks like orange juice, milk and apple juice, then equanimity would be water. As the equanimity seeps out of my head like smoke, it feels like a cloth is slowly being wrapped tighter and tighter all over my head. This was a signal to me that I was descending down into the jhana mind void. After a while the equanimity just would’t come out, I tried to squeeze a bit more out like the last bit of a tube of toothpaste, but it felt like trying to wiggle your toe when you foot is asleep. Then, after the equanimity ceased, a wave of pressure floods into my eyes like a pair of ghost-eels are devouring my eyeballs and squeezing themselves tightly into my eye socket. It wasn’t painful, but just a strange sensation. As I mentioned in my other post, with the TWIM technique, you’re not supposed to push too hard and you’re supposed to back off a bit if you feel tension in your head. I didn’t follow that instruction right and ended up with the eye eels.

Let me also note at this point that my progression through the jhanas was unexpected and I didn't really feel like I knew what I was doing most of the time. I felt like Larry in that episode of Curb your Enthusiasm where he is coming out of an airplane bathroom and trips on his excessively long shoelaces, plowing into and knocking over a man harassing one of the flight attendants. The flight attendant thanks him and all the passengers clap.

So, after the eye eels, most of the sensation of my body had faded and my awareness was totally on my mind, which is mostly a black void with thoughts flickering and floating by. They weren’t the typical thoughts about my daily life - none of the planning about what I’m gonna do when I finish my retreat, people I need to contact, things I want to do et cetera, it’s mostly just flashes of random images and disconnected sounds and words that don’t make much sense.

It was kind of frustrating to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do. Every now and then I would see something like a bright light emitting warbling membrane in my mind and would get excited, but then it would disappear. I still had doubts about whether I was even in the jhana I thought I was. I kept going through this cycle of trying to relax, trying to find one thing to focus on, and getting excited by new interesting visuals. The things I tried to rest my focus on either faded out of sight or transformed into some other abstract colorless shape so I felt kind of restless. It was like trying to sit on a big dog that wouldn’t stay still.

After a while I was tired, bored and annoyed with the whole display. Rather than looking at all the things flickering and floating by, I was just uninterestedly staring into the distance.

Next thing I knew, my awareness was fading back in - like I was groggily waking up in the morning but skipped the part where I went to sleep. I heard a voice mumble something like who’s Joseph or where’s Joseph? as I was floating away from a rock face in a pitch dark cavern. The rock face had a door on it that looked like the door to Bilbo Baggin’s house and above that door was a cylindrical wooden sign that had my name on it. The only reason I could see this was because it was all illuminated by what looked like a star shaped blue night light. 

(Like this door but it was varnished wood, not red)

I was very confused by all of this - Where am I? How did I get here?
Suddenly, I felt a very pleasant warm feeling in my face and then a massive sense of relief emanating from my neck/shoulders out to the rest of my body. One way I would describe it is as if you heard some potentially terrible news, like the 10AM bus your spouse always rides to work was caught in an explosion and all the passengers died. Then an hour later you got another call hearing that she actually took a cab to work so she was fine. It’s that feeling of relief, but some how much bigger and there is no content to it - it’s just pure, unflavored relief pervading through your whole body.

I leaned forward in my chair to rest my elbows on my knees and as I was doing that I saw my body shatter into a bunch of scattered electrified orbs and just as quickly, they reformed back into my body’s original shape. I was still trying to keep my eyes closed here but it was like looking up at the sky on a super sunny day - my eyelids started to twitch and flutter and they popped open. As I stared around the unusually vibrant room, I let out a big “Ahhhhh…..”

The room seemed so big and so quiet.

My inner narrator was offline, but my mind still tried to offer up some commentary: I heard the starting lyric from a song called Big Sky: “I know this silence. Been here before.”

(...May be continued)