Earlier this year I read Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, which for the first time gave me a useful vocabulary for experiences I had already had. I describe the experiences, and then the names I’m mapping them onto.
My freshman year of college I was walking back from a class, really focused on some aspect of the material, when all of a sudden I started making lots of concept associations quickly, and it felt like everything I knew was assembling itself into one big tapestry, full of colors and patterns. Not a hallucination—even then I didn’t think I literally saw anything unreal—but during and after it did feel like the world around me was more full of color than usual, for a while. Euphoria, which lasted for the next day or so. Didn’t actually “learn” anything from it in the traditional sense. Maps to: Arising and Passing Away.
A year later I was at an Aikido class, staring intently at a demonstration, and my vision narrowed to a very tight spot, everything else blurring out. Maps to: first jhana.
From 2016 to 2018 I was going through clinical depression, and started meditating much more regularly. My depression manifested in part as a lack of emotion, motivation, and action, which made it artificially easy to quiet my mind and focus inward. Meditation was generally accompanied by strong feelings of peace, but nothing spiritual, Then I started antidepressants, and was very lucky in finding one that worked for me really quickly. My meditation practice changed dramatically a few weeks later. I became very aware of individual pulses of sensation throughout my body (“vibrations”) in vision, touch, and temperature. I felt increased separation from my own sense experiences, like I was watching them instead of being them.
I reached stream entry along the way shortly thereafter- there was a moment of having no experience at all. It was odd and unmistakeable. Then, for about two weeks, a single focused breath would bring up waves of bliss, and make my whole field of vision sharper and brighter. Maps to: second or sometimes fourth jhana.
Since then (it has been 9 months) I’ve noticed sustained changes in how I perceive the world around me. It’s like I’m seeing more of the raw sensory data, or can more often see through the model my brain builds for conscious awareness. For example, walls and tiles patters are more...swirly away from focal vision, and sometimes when reading text my eyes will unfocus or focus less without impacting the reading process much. When I look at a picture, it may go from normal to completely 2D or super-3D, and the same has happened when watching a TV from a wide viewing angle. A few times a week I’ll be walking and all of a sudden my surroundings snap into focus (visual, tactile, and auditory) much more than normal.
I don’t assign any mystical meaning to these experiences, but they have really changed what my algorithm feels like from the inside.
Earlier this year I read Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, which for the first time gave me a useful vocabulary for experiences I had already had. I describe the experiences, and then the names I’m mapping them onto.
My freshman year of college I was walking back from a class, really focused on some aspect of the material, when all of a sudden I started making lots of concept associations quickly, and it felt like everything I knew was assembling itself into one big tapestry, full of colors and patterns. Not a hallucination—even then I didn’t think I literally saw anything unreal—but during and after it did feel like the world around me was more full of color than usual, for a while. Euphoria, which lasted for the next day or so. Didn’t actually “learn” anything from it in the traditional sense. Maps to: Arising and Passing Away.
A year later I was at an Aikido class, staring intently at a demonstration, and my vision narrowed to a very tight spot, everything else blurring out. Maps to: first jhana.
From 2016 to 2018 I was going through clinical depression, and started meditating much more regularly. My depression manifested in part as a lack of emotion, motivation, and action, which made it artificially easy to quiet my mind and focus inward. Meditation was generally accompanied by strong feelings of peace, but nothing spiritual, Then I started antidepressants, and was very lucky in finding one that worked for me really quickly. My meditation practice changed dramatically a few weeks later. I became very aware of individual pulses of sensation throughout my body (“vibrations”) in vision, touch, and temperature. I felt increased separation from my own sense experiences, like I was watching them instead of being them.
I reached stream entry along the way shortly thereafter- there was a moment of having no experience at all. It was odd and unmistakeable. Then, for about two weeks, a single focused breath would bring up waves of bliss, and make my whole field of vision sharper and brighter. Maps to: second or sometimes fourth jhana.
Since then (it has been 9 months) I’ve noticed sustained changes in how I perceive the world around me. It’s like I’m seeing more of the raw sensory data, or can more often see through the model my brain builds for conscious awareness. For example, walls and tiles patters are more...swirly away from focal vision, and sometimes when reading text my eyes will unfocus or focus less without impacting the reading process much. When I look at a picture, it may go from normal to completely 2D or super-3D, and the same has happened when watching a TV from a wide viewing angle. A few times a week I’ll be walking and all of a sudden my surroundings snap into focus (visual, tactile, and auditory) much more than normal.
I don’t assign any mystical meaning to these experiences, but they have really changed what my algorithm feels like from the inside.