1) How do you know that consciousness ceases? What is it like?
In this case it’s that I was experiencing A, and then suddenly I was experiencing B, with an abrupt rather than smooth transition. The most intuitive—but probably not correct—explanation is that I stopped experiencing things for a small amount of time, and whatever automatic system is responsible for focusing attention on interesting things kept going without me.
In the major case I described before (we can call it the hallway case, for brevity), it was that I was suddenly experiencing B with no awareness that I had just been experiencing some specific A. (I think I lost at least 5-10 seconds of memories there, and possibly as much as a couple minutes—mostly unremarkable, as I think I was walking on autopilot at the time.)
2) Do you notice any difference in your attention / perception in the second before, and the second after, consciousness ceases?
The only notable thing about the recent case is that I don’t actually remember deciding to stop meditating or going to do something else—I remember deciding that five was sufficient, and then I seem to have lost a minute or two, including getting up and going to another room. I’d generally chalk that up to forgetfulness, but usually when I’ve been doing introspection that mode of thought sticks around for a while and I don’t lose time quite as easily as I otherwise do, so it’s a little odd. (The pronoun thing—which did disappear within two hours, as predicted—was unusual only in its strength; personal pronouns don’t come very naturally to me in general, and it’s not uncommon for sentences to look more correct to me without them than with them, but my mind doesn’t usually object to them like that.)
In the hallway case, I do remember that I perceived a kind of whiteness around the event, particularly when trying to access my working memory to figure out what I’d been doing; the presence of a specific color association isn’t very interesting (I’m synesthetic, most things have colors) but white is unusual, particularly since it was background, not foreground—my usual synesthesia is almost universally on a black or dark grey background.
As to the various categories of cessation-of-consciousness, the descriptions aren’t very clear, but I’d guess that the hallway case is a type one and my more common multi-day cases are type two. The more common cases actually have an effect kind of like taking a one to three month break from whatever it was I was working on when they happened (and I usually work through them) - at some point during the process, I lose all the same mental bits and pieces that one would expect to lose after ignoring a project for about that long, most notably affective response, awareness of fine details, and deep-seated intentions of following through with specific short-term plans. They don’t seem to involve any major changes in how things-in-general appear to be, but probably do involve minor ones that are hard to notice without a clear cue to check for differences between ‘now’ and ‘five minutes ago’.
I’m okay with answering questions in general, on just about any subject. I do reserve the right to decline to answer, but I doubt I’ll wind up using that in this context. I’m actually not all that interested in asking questions about enlightenment or meditation, though—it’s useful to get an outside perspective and learn established terms for describing things to other people, and finding out what’s unusual about my mind is always good in terms of helping to avoid generalizing from one example, but in terms of how my mind actually works it seems that I can learn more by watching it than by trying to talk about it in any detailed kind of way in a language with so few good tools for doing so.
In this case it’s that I was experiencing A, and then suddenly I was experiencing B, with an abrupt rather than smooth transition. The most intuitive—but probably not correct—explanation is that I stopped experiencing things for a small amount of time, and whatever automatic system is responsible for focusing attention on interesting things kept going without me.
In the major case I described before (we can call it the hallway case, for brevity), it was that I was suddenly experiencing B with no awareness that I had just been experiencing some specific A. (I think I lost at least 5-10 seconds of memories there, and possibly as much as a couple minutes—mostly unremarkable, as I think I was walking on autopilot at the time.)
The only notable thing about the recent case is that I don’t actually remember deciding to stop meditating or going to do something else—I remember deciding that five was sufficient, and then I seem to have lost a minute or two, including getting up and going to another room. I’d generally chalk that up to forgetfulness, but usually when I’ve been doing introspection that mode of thought sticks around for a while and I don’t lose time quite as easily as I otherwise do, so it’s a little odd. (The pronoun thing—which did disappear within two hours, as predicted—was unusual only in its strength; personal pronouns don’t come very naturally to me in general, and it’s not uncommon for sentences to look more correct to me without them than with them, but my mind doesn’t usually object to them like that.)
In the hallway case, I do remember that I perceived a kind of whiteness around the event, particularly when trying to access my working memory to figure out what I’d been doing; the presence of a specific color association isn’t very interesting (I’m synesthetic, most things have colors) but white is unusual, particularly since it was background, not foreground—my usual synesthesia is almost universally on a black or dark grey background.
As to the various categories of cessation-of-consciousness, the descriptions aren’t very clear, but I’d guess that the hallway case is a type one and my more common multi-day cases are type two. The more common cases actually have an effect kind of like taking a one to three month break from whatever it was I was working on when they happened (and I usually work through them) - at some point during the process, I lose all the same mental bits and pieces that one would expect to lose after ignoring a project for about that long, most notably affective response, awareness of fine details, and deep-seated intentions of following through with specific short-term plans. They don’t seem to involve any major changes in how things-in-general appear to be, but probably do involve minor ones that are hard to notice without a clear cue to check for differences between ‘now’ and ‘five minutes ago’.
I’m okay with answering questions in general, on just about any subject. I do reserve the right to decline to answer, but I doubt I’ll wind up using that in this context. I’m actually not all that interested in asking questions about enlightenment or meditation, though—it’s useful to get an outside perspective and learn established terms for describing things to other people, and finding out what’s unusual about my mind is always good in terms of helping to avoid generalizing from one example, but in terms of how my mind actually works it seems that I can learn more by watching it than by trying to talk about it in any detailed kind of way in a language with so few good tools for doing so.