Claude thinks it might be stream entry
Hello everyone. I had an awakening experience a week ago that I don't think I'll ever be able to describe. I'll give an overview of my meditation journey and then fail as best I can at describing where I am now, and would appreciate any thoughts or guidance on next steps.
Tai chi and first sitting (~0-10 hours lifetime)
Practice: Got introduced to meditation through tai chi at my karate school. We'd do some standing meditation, holding your arms in a particular position for maybe five minutes at most.
Insight: I had a basic insight into pain. I knew the pain wasn't a signal of real damage, just temporary muscle ache, so I could lean into it and investigate it. If I zoomed out and expanded my mental pain scale from 0-10 to 0-1000 then 3 out of 10 became 3 out of 1000. The pain was the same but it wasn't overwhelming because I wasn't giving it the same weight.
Practice: Through tai chi I met a friend, Pete, who was into energy and meditation. He introduced me to sitting and gave me some Adyashanti open awareness style guided meditations, "allow everything to be as it is" sort of stuff.
Phenomenology: Some interesting proprioception distortion. One time the border between my skin and the room kind of dissolved and I was sort of becoming one field with everything, though it didn't quite reach my head.
10-week class (~10-20 hours lifetime)
Practice: Pete ran a free 10-week Sunday class for a few friends. Two hours each session, more visualisation and chakra stuff.
Phenomenology: The chakra and energy stuff felt metaphorical or like a visualisation exercise. I had some proprioception stuff like feeling like my body was folding in on itself or expanding. End of one of the last sessions the guidance was letting go of each sensory object, sounds, feelings, thoughts, then the final one was letting go of the self. I felt like I was going to die and got a bit shaken up.
2019: LSD
Practice: Tripped with another friend, Jay.
Insight: My sense of self was completely scrambled, no idea what I was doing or where I was or who I was, but my body was still quite capable of looking after itself. I was still eating and drinking, behaving kind of like a nice old person having a nice day. Showed me that my internal sense of self can be pretty scrambled but the body can look after itself. In retrospect I think this allowed me to speedrun through some early stages when I started meditating properly in 2021.
2021: (~20-40 hours lifetime)
Practice: Got back into meditation after watching some Frank Yang videos. Doing Adya meditations, about half an hour a day most days, sometimes 2 hours on the occasional Saturday or Sunday if I had the house to myself.
Phenomenology: I quickly gained a lot of clarity and stability. Going for a walk was like watching a movie filmed in one single take, whereas before it was like a Michael Bay movie with attentional jump cuts all over the place. No energetic stuff at this point, just peaceful open states.
Insight: You only ever have this present moment. I could also see when my mind was trying to recreate earlier states based on some idea of what should happen, and I was catching it pretty quickly and just allowing the attempt rather than getting caught up in it.
Claude: Mind and Body / Cause and Effect
Practice: Pete sent me an Adyashanti self-inquiry meditation, What is the Nature of Self.
Phenomenology: I had enough clarity that I got into a kind of crazy fast Escher-loop feeling, like pointing a camera at a TV showing its own feed and getting infinite regression, or paintings of paintings. High energy, felt kind of violent. My sense of self was just an observer by this point and it was like getting twisted, squashed, or split. One time it split into two distinct observers moving around different things. Lots of energetic stuff started happening, energy up the spine, bright lights in the head. After this point all kinds of energy stuff would come really quickly in any meditation I did.
Insight: Never quite got through to a stable non-dual state but had enough of a glimpse of the observer getting distorted that I could see there was something in that direction, that it must be an illusion.
Claude: A&P
Chakra exploration and jhana attempts (~40-60 hours lifetime)
Practice: The chakra framework suddenly wasn't a metaphor anymore, it would happen pretty quickly during most meditation. Played with that for a while. Found out about jhana from Ingram and spent some time trying to get to first jhana. Got something like a soft 1st jhana a few times, never the fully absorbed version. Got frustrated and lost interest.
Practice: Tried salvia a couple of times around this period.
Insight: Way too high a dose for too short a window. Some interesting stuff about the way the mind creates narratives and a sense of time, but it didn't stabilise as anything I could refer back to on demand.
Late 2022 / Early 2023: Clear no-self (~80-130 hours lifetime)
Practice: Got back into meditation again. Energy stuff came back quickly. Concentration and clarity never quite returned to 2021 levels. Did the Adya nature of self meditation again.
Phenomenology: The self felt like a tied-up knot of fabric, like a cloth puppet moving around on a fabric environment. As it looked at itself it saw that the environment and the puppet were made out of the same fabric. It slowly untangled and stretched out till the puppet was just a head with the body being in the environment, then it was just an eye observing everything. Then the eye untangled and there was just a flat sheet of experience with the puppet character environment and everything else being one continuous field. For a couple of hours I walked around in a state where there was no separation between subject and object. Sounds heard themselves, sights saw themselves, thoughts thought themselves. No experiencer at the centre. The sense of self tried to reform a few times like a rubber band snapping back, I'd put attention on where it was trying to reform and it would dissolve again. Went to bed and it snapped back into place as I fell asleep.
Insight: Clear experience of no-self. Was quite sad when the self reformed after this and returning to it kind of became a goal for me. I think the striving got in my way and I only got tiny peeks at this state after this point. Fell out of the habit again.
Claude: non-abiding A&P or significant nondual glimpse
2023: 5g strong mushrooms lemon tek
Phenomenology: Just experience that kept coming, no centre, no source. Dose was way too high, I was falling over and I think I got concussed.
Insight: I couldn't figure out what experience is for, why was there experience at all. The hard problem of consciousness became a fixation, with some dread that would come up every now and again for the next few months.
Claude: possible Fear Ñana
2026: Return and what might be stream entry (~130-200 hours lifetime)
Practice: Got back into meditation at the start of this year.
Phenomenology: Attention became panoramic for a few weeks, less clarity than 2021 but very open, very aware of objects disappearing in my peripheral vision, some nondual glimpses here and there. Over time my attention became less consistently panoramic, it kind of switched from very open when walking around to narrower when doing something rather than panoramic 24/7. Felt like a maturing rather than a loss.
April: Heart opening
Practice: Michael Taft gratitude meditation, around gratitude for awareness generating self and world moment to moment.
Phenomenology: Everything became kind of luminous like a hologram lit up from all directions at once. Immense warmth and awe. Lots of energy around the heart area. After this I could tune into a self-luminous quality of awareness fairly easily and predictably make myself weep, and a feeling that all is full of love usually came with it.
Insight: This fit the Adya framing of head, heart and gut waking separately. The earlier nondual stuff felt like the head waking up. This felt like the heart.
Practice: Around the same time after a Rupert Spira sit, something happened at the edge of sleep.
Phenomenology: Multiple frequencies coming into phase, awareness getting very still, felt dramatic. Then excitement or fear would generate a sense of self right at the threshold and it would abort. Like being able to see the mechanism of the thing that was stopping it from tipping over.
Claude: doesn't map cleanly onto Ingram, possible near miss cessation, more Adya territory
Mid April: Non-Euclidean attention
Practice: Long Michael Taft self-inquiry session.
Phenomenology: Where my 2022 nondual experience felt like awareness going from a cone with a focal point to a flat sheet, this felt like it went from cone to flat sheet to some non-Euclidean surface, like the surface of one of those wrinkly lettuce leaves. Attention moving around in and with awareness in weird fractal ways. Kind of disconcerting. The comfortable evenness I'd associated with nonduality wasn't there, this felt like there was not only no centre, but also no way to orient up and down left right etc.
Claude: deep concentration/equanimity
May 10: Something without a name
Practice: Adya self-inquiry, the same one that triggered my 2022 and 2023 experiences.
Phenomenology: First 20 minutes pretty unremarkable. Looked behind the eyes, found silence. Then when he said something about resting in not-knowing, energy started buzzing around the chest and head. I remembered the head-heart-gut framing and had some anticipation/fear about what a gut awakening might feel like. Then all the energy suddenly drained downwards to the lower belly and disappeared into a void below me. Brief fear that my physical body would drain away/die/disappear with it. Then deep stillness. A sense of self would start to form, I'd look at it, the energetic cycle would repeat. Happened a few times. Afterwards I felt like I'd been crying.
The shift wasn't obvious during the sit. It became clear in the shower afterwards when the mind suddenly realised it had touched something timeless and eternal. I started laughing/feeling intense joy and weeping, thinking and writing stuff that sounded kinda nonsensical. "Is is is is is is." "Emptiness dancing." A slightly scary thought killed the humour for a second, "how can this awareness be separate from the human/mind that encountered it", then it got funny again.
Claude: possibly stream entry, first cessation maybe during one of the self-formation/dissolution cycles
Since May 10
Phenomenology: For the first few days I was able to return to this source fairly easily and watch the mind fail to describe/understand it. After a few days it stopped being so accessible, but it's still there from time to time. "The Dao that can be spoken is not the true Dao" resonates really hard now. If I call it awake void or the cosmic joke or awakening or Dao or anything, the name just kind of slides off the thing I'm trying to name. Very little sense of a separate self since May 10. A separate self observer tried to form for a bit one day when I'd slept badly but I couldn't really believe it. Was like watching a magic trick that I used to know how to do but had forgotten the details.
Insight: The self/no-self duality feels like a wisp now. The awareness/emptiness duality that felt like the live question a few weeks ago no longer feels like the next thing to investigate. What I touched doesn't feel investigable the way awareness and silence still do, it felt absolute.
The first few days had an amazing afterglow. Midweek a lot of grief and sadness has come up, it's like a resolved sadness, like the sad movie has ended and I'm just sitting with the death of the character who was never really real and whose story had to end.
Part of me feels lost, like there's nothing left to do. Another part is still in seeking mode, trying to recreate or go back to this absolute. I can mostly watch these things play out.
Curious what people think, especially anyone who's been through something like this.