Hi all, this is my first post on this site. I was introduced by a fellow practitioner who advised me to seek guidance on the experiences below.

I would like to recount three different experiences. If that is too much for a single post or if I need to go about this in a different way, please let me know. Otherwise, I thank you for your patience and insight.

Experience 1
I had my first vipassana meditation retreat in 2006 in the tradition of Goenka. For the entirety of the retreat, I sprinted like I could see the goal and refused to ease up on the gas pedal until I crossed the finish line. I proceeded as I now understand to have been very quickly. In fact, after practicing for the last two years, my current faculties are still no where near what I achieved during the first few days of that retreat. I achieved what I now know is ‘access concentration’ during the first day and could maintain it for the full hour by day three and for as long as I wanted to by day 7, when I ‘knew’ I no longer needed sleep if I stayed in deep meditation throughout the night, which I did through the rest of the retreat. I could connect to my food and experience their energies throughout my body. I will never have peanut butter on retreat again; the following sitting of adhiṭṭhāna was pure hell. But I made it through that and every sitting of adhiṭṭhāna, regardless of the extremely magnified pains, without flinching. I quickly came to experience both intense and subtle sensations everywhere I looked, both deep inside and on the surface. I heard various rushing and pervasive gong-like sounds, saw many lights, and had many visions or hallucinations of what seemed like parallel realities or realms full of all forms of life and powerful, complex non-human entities. I saw sacred geometries, phantasmagoric monsters and demons, and every form of life and consciousness in between. I saw many different types of discrete consciousnesses inside my own body. And I saw what seemed like the moments preceding my death in multiple previous incarnations. When I slept, I received insights into the practice in the form of dreams that still resonate with me today. One dream-insight that “simultaneity is not genius” helped me achieve the ability to perceive subtle vibrations simultaneously throughout my whole body by focusing on an infinitesimal single point in the center of my head on day 5. On day 6, I went 'underneath' all sensation and dwelled in a place of infinite space. That place seemed at first charged with consciousness or pure awareness, but I passed through that in an instant, going deeper and deeper until I reached a place where there was nothing, infinite nothing. which filled me with an existential terror far exceeding anything I'd ever experienced, which, given my previous experiences prior to the retreat, was saying a lot. I now believe that to have been the formless jhanas and the  resulting dark night. Again, a dream helped me process that, pass through it, and continue the practice strengthened and renewed, though I had wanted nothing more than to flee for my life. After that, I could pierce the emptiness to connect to sizzling, electric-like subtle vibrations anywhere I chose to. I perceived a magnetic or gravity-like energy that entered my body through my crown chakra. I could fill my body with that, which led to the experience of emptiness or nothingness. Likewise, I perceived the vibratory or electricity-like energy arising from the soles of my feet while lying or from my root chakra while sitting. And I could pass through full-body awareness/subtle vibrations, into that state of nothing, and back again at will. It felt like I had achieved complete mastery of the technique as I understood it and of my body and mind. For two days or so then, I tried without success to mix those two states, those two energies/sensations. I would smash them together over and over again like two waves just to have them separate and pull back from each other. I 'knew' beyond a shadow of a doubt that was what I needed to do, so I pushed on. I focused my awareness on what I now know are each of my different chakras and experienced them opening. Each opening was accompanied by endless visions in rapid succession. When not in meditation, I felt tiny points on my body rotating in those locations. Once they were all open, I then started circulating my awareness in a circle through the center of my body: down the front of my chest to my root chakra and up my spine to the crown. As I did so, I started to see the point of my awareness as a fuzzy white dot, which I now think was likely the nimitta. I now wish that I had paused to observe it directly, but I pushed on. I 'knew' that if I could circulate my awareness rapidly around my body that I would be able to combine those two energies. So that's what I did. I pushed harder and harder to circulate my awareness faster and faster. And in a moment of insight, again I 'knew' that if I were to combine that with the breath, I would achieve that goal. So that's what I did. I took control of the breath. Perhaps ‘control’ was my mistake. When I did so, my awareness rotated many many times per second. I had both full-body subtle vibration awareness and dwelled in that nothing as I did so. All of a sudden, my awareness and sensations exploded. From my connection to the earth, an infinite amount of particles that would pop into and out of existence many times per second arose in an instant to completely eradicate my body and the rest of existence. It felt like my awareness then extended far beyond my bodily confines. I was not ready for that experience and got scared. My equanimity (which I perceived as that magnetic force entering through the crown chakra) failed me. I saw a vision of my body as blue and smooth from an omnipresent perspective outside of myself and 'knew' that I should bring awareness back to the breath in a new form of anapana. But I couldn't bring myself to do so. My fear got the better of me. I broke adhiṭṭhāna for the first time and opened my eyes. And as I did so, phantasmagoric and demonic hellscape images rushed from my eyes out into to the meditation hall, and I felt like the energies and sensations that had extended out into space around me to fill all of existence just a moment before snapped back into my body like so many rubber bands that had been cut. Many knots formed in my head, especially in my temples and around my eyes. During metta bhavana on the last day, I felt myself afloat in an infinite sea of pure love. It was ecstasy, and again, I 'knew' that this was the third element or energy to incorporate into the previous experience. It felt like the assistant teachers prolonged the session so that I could give it a go (and other students remarked on the length of the session after the fact). But I didn't have the courage to do so. 

I had not slept for the last 3 days of that retreat, instead meditating intensely throughout the night. When I came out of the retreat, I wanted nothing so much as to go back to my ‘normal’ existence and found that I had lost the ability to fall asleep. Instead, I could feel my awareness drop from my head into my chest as I would have fallen asleep, and afraid to lose control, I would yank it back under my control. I did not continue the practice after the retreat; although I experienced numerous psychotic breaks and could still feel my crown and third-eye chakras at almost all times for the next few years.

Experience 2
A series of experiences led me to try to reestablish myself on the path and attended my second retreat in late 2022. I had married and started a family in the interim and experienced trauma. This retreat was the polar opposite of the first. Where I could focus intensely without an errant thought for as long as I wanted to during the first retreat and achieved what felt like mastery, during this second course, my thoughts kept getting the better of me. I was in physical, mental, and emotional pain the whole time. I again saw numerous visions or hallucinations throughout, but none of them were ‘good’ or insightful. On the eighth day, I felt my chest open, like there was a furnace or vortex behind my sternum that burned with an intense energy. And I could breathe through a hole in my chest. As I did so, that vortex calmed down until I was filled with love. I saw myself as a huge stone garuda covered in black spikes during that time, and when the metta entered, I sprouted feathers everywhere and became light and white and soaring. I was filled with an immense courage and love. When I decided to go on the retreat, I did so with the agreement with myself that I would do so under two conditions: that I wouldn’t experience ego death (which I still feared) or anything that would put my marriage in jeopardy. When I was filled with that courage, I had a profound sense of accomplishment and ‘knew’ that I had achieved what I set out to achieve. I was so excited and full of life; I talked to the assistant teacher about leaving. Long story short, I decided to stay, to the profound incredulity of my ego. I laugh-cried like a crazy person in the moment I decided to stay. During the last adhiṭṭhāna sitting in the evening of the ninth night, I ‘knew’ that my ego is just the combination of my sankara and my karma and that if I were to sever the attachment to my wife (the source of my suffering) that I would experience ego death: both of the things I committed not to experience. And in that moment of insight, I experienced what can only be described as a ‘volcanic eruption’ from the chakra immediately below my belly button. All of a sudden, I was inundated by sensations that poured out from that spot and filled my body. And I saw an endless stream of phantasmagoric and demonic visions and hallucinations. My sensations became like lizard skin, among other things, and I felt like I was contacted by numerous lizard person-like entities that had found purchase within me. I hadn’t until that point felt my crown chakra open up as it had during my first retreat, but it did then. And it acted like a vacuum cleaner or black hole pulling that negative energy up into itself until all the negative visions and sensations became cleansed like a cosmic eraser. That process seemed to happen of its own accord, and it happened all night long. I didn’t sleep. It was effective everywhere in my body except for around that chakra and below. After the course, I ‘knew’ that my attachment, both craving and aversion, to my wife had been severed, and it felt like the thing that was the most precious to me in the world, my gem, had been stolen from me. But since then, I have continued to practice and realize that I don’t suffer as much and have been able to regain control of my concentration, to step more fully onto the path, and to love without selfishness or fear. I now have what feels like the triple gem in place of that false one.

Experience 3
I did a 3-day retreat and achieved similar levels of concentration as during my first retreat, though I could tell that my body still requires a lot of cleaning to get back to the point I was at during that retreat. There were still many blockages, areas of pain, and areas of no sensation. But during anapana, I started to meld with my breath. With eyes open, I could see/feel the trees breathing around me. Reality seemed to thicken around me. On the last day, I could see that I was still holding onto a sankara related to sexuality, and I ‘knew’ that it was in fact the last sankara I had to release. But I couldn’t bring myself to do so. The evening upon returning home from the retreat, I did rapé (a shamanic tobacco snuff that I had picked up after doing ayahuasca) and focused on opening my heart chakra. It didn’t work. That night, I listened to my wife talk through and release a sankara, and I realized that my sankara—that last sankara I refused to let go of—was partly responsible for the creation of hers. And I ‘knew’ that I had to and could with this newfound empathy, compassion, and understanding let it go to ease her suffering and that of all beings, including myself. That night, I woke up at about 2AM. My heart was pounding intensely, both hard and fast. It sounded like a shamanic drum to my mind. And I could feel entities arranged in a circle around and over me. Though I couldn’t see them, I recognized one of them as one of the assistant teachers from the 3-day course. I also found out later, that she and her husband were the ATs during my first retreat but that I hadn’t recognized them. I could feel that these entities were going to help me through this next stage. I ‘knew’ that I just had to focus on my heart and let myself meld with it like I had my breath during the retreat. At the bottom of my next exhale, that is exactly what happened, and I experienced my heart explode to fill the whole of my awareness, the whole of reality. It only lasted for the duration of the pause at the end of the exhale, but I knew that I had achieved something. The next day was nearly effortlessly joyful. I traveled with my family, played with friends, and dined with my extended family. It was joy for all involved, like reality had shifted for everyone. That night, I did rapé again and sat for meditation. And again, I ‘knew’ that I needed to let my thoughts stop, to let my ego rest, to surrender. I dwelled in the center of my head with awareness of all sensation throughout it and all of a sudden, absolutely all thought stopped. And where I had previously felt tension from the knots that had developed from my first retreat, that tension completely disappeared. I felt the sensation of energies flowing smoothly throughout my head. The next day, all bodily pain, all negative thoughts, all negative energies and emotions, were completely gone. I existed in that state for three days, and my family and I existed in effortless bliss the whole time. I could work and work and work without fatigue, like I was dancing with and being moved by the energies of the planet. An opportunity to work would present itself and I would just observe myself effortlessly doing whatever it was from moment to moment all day long. But the shards of the diminished ego that remained were terrified. I didn’t keep up my practice as strongly as I had leading up to those three days. On the morning of the third day, I gave into temptation—a thing I knew I shouldn’t have done—and when it was done, I felt all of the pain in my body and all of the negative thoughts, energies, and emotions return in an instant like being plunged into a burning hell. And the flowing energies in my head became all knotted up again.

Though I have deepened my practice since then, I have been continuously bumping up against that third experience and have been too frightened to let it happen again. Every now and then, I can see a moment approaching and ‘know’ that if I let myself go I can step right back into it. But I am too frightened to surrender to it.

Since then, I have sat another 10-day course, during which I experienced what I recognize as the third vipassana jhana, among other things, that the literature, particularly Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, has helped me recognize, but I have yet to find anything that describes the other three experiences, which is the reason I am writing this post.

If I had to venture multiple guesses, I believe I experienced the formless jhanas and the dark night during experience 1 and that the fuzzy white thing I perceived wherever I directed my attention was the nimitta. I believe the particles I experienced were likely kalapas (which Goenka-ji mentions). But I haven’t seen any explanation of the gravity/magnetic-like force that entered through my crown chakra, the vibratory/electrical-like force that entered through the soles of my feet/root chakra, their combination, or the explosion of kalapas and complete destruction of all things.

I haven’t seen anything describing the ‘volcanic eruption’ of the second experience and subsequent auto-pilot crown chakra cleansing that ensued.

​​​​​​​And as for the third experience, it sounds like I had perhaps experienced stream entry but reverted and would be what David C. Johnson calls a cåla sotāpanna, or little stream enterer, in 'The Path to Nibbāna'.

I recognize that I don't even know how to formulate the questions to ask, so any insight into these experiences and guidance would be much appreciated.

With much metta, gratitude, and humility,
Jason

Sounds like a lot of A&P to Dark Night type stuff. Totally normal. For me A&P during first path was often very volcanic, psychedelic, psychic, energetic. The A&P itself is a very important insight, the depth and profundity of which I am still coming to terms with a few paths down the line. 

If you're serious about understanding this stuff and deepening practice it can be really useful to keep a log here. You will be able to get much more refined feedback if we can see you log stuff over time. 

Thank you for the reply. That my experiences could be 'totally normal' eases my mind a bit.

​​​​​​​A&P as in 'arising and passing'? Sorry, I don't know the lingo.

​​​​​​​I am serious about understanding and deeping my practice. I'll follow your advice to keep a log. I posted on here before I really took a look around. It would probably help to take a look around and read others' experiences as well.

Thanks again!

Frankly I would resist the urge to boil down your incredibly wild and varied meditative experiences (Wow!!) into "the A/P" or "the formless realms".  Making sense is all well and good, but often for these things the most effective sense we can make of them is highly personal - our felt sense of these experiences and their aftermath.

Sure the A/P sometimes involves wild and crazy phenomena, and there are certainly some parallels with the experience you describe, but (soapbox moment): not all wild and crazy experiences are the A/P and the A/P itself is more than just wild and crazy experience - think an initial experience of impermanence and its effects.

My two cents: clearly you're one of those people whose meditative experiences manifest strongly in the realm of the wild and bizarre - congratulations lol.  And thanks for sharing, I appreciate reading such off the wall meditative "trip reports".

Clearly you have experienced some degrees of deepening.  On this forum, the A/P is a basic initial degree of meditative deepening, which can then usher in a period of meditative upheaval, culminating in a second degree of deepening: stream entry, aka an initial stable and lasting positive insight into immaterial perception.  Basically, initial incomplete insight experiences occur, things get crazy, further resolving insight occurs and sticks.  As a framework it works better for some, worse for others, etc, really just depending on personal preference and experience.  If that's you, great, if not, also fine, no need to attempt to shove the often round peg of personal experience into the square holes of the various maps.  

Moving forward, perhaps consider - do you have further goals for practice / a sense of being driven to further exploration and deepening on the path? Have these experiences transformed or relieved your experience of suffering in everyday life, and to what degree?  People basically always come to meditation seeking something, and where and how their practice develops generally depends on the degree to which that issue has been resolved.  The path as such is really what we make it, shaped by the strength of our desire to overcome suffering and illusion, personal preferences for practice, the inspiration of our experiences, random external influences and connections, etc.

I will agree and say the stages aren't particularly useful for making sense. I do think they're useful for providing context and some degree of orientation and for those of us that are prone to the high strange there can be some correlation between weird experiences and certain stages. I have found it immensely comforting to know "this shit happens". I used to have a teacher to whom I would report all my most psychedelic and profound experiences. The most I ever really got from him was "nice, this stuff can happen, no big deal".


These are great questions. In the face of wild psychedelic insights it is very pertinent to ask, what if anything has changed about my experience of suffering? How do you feel about this question now? Ask yourself again tomorrow, in a week, a month, etc.

 There is a long history of this stuff coming up in meditation practice, and a long history of students not getting the guidance they need. (There is also a long history of students not really listening/accepting the guidance they need because they get too attached to the neat experiences as evidence of specialness or advanced progress.) It's really important that there is a culture of being able to talk about this stuff and being able to get guidance on it too. 

While these wild experiences do happen... but the way they are created, percieved, and processed is very very important.

How the experiences are created is important. When they naturally emerge from doing the basic meditation practice, then it's not a big a deal. But when they emerge from the meditator going "off script" and experimenting with actively creating/participating with the visions, performing symbolic and intentional acts, and indulging in pride and greed -- then the baser nature of the person is being indulged and things are likely going to spin out of control. It's not that the experience are wrong, it's the intention -- the meditator is trying to "achieve" and "make progress happen", which seems appropriate, but this is just conventional egotism, not actual meditation (despite all the wierd meditation-related effects). 

How it's interpreted is very important too. For some people these experiences are wildly destabilizing and evidence of mental illness. For some people these things are interesting and evidence of a creative mind.  For some people these experiences are very imporant and evidence of profound spiritual progress. For some people these experiences are precious and evidence of their special self worth. Etc etc.

And how it's processed is very important. Does the student allow the experiences to rise and pass without resistance or indulgence? Do they avoid these type of experiences? Are they greedy and hungry for these experiences? Do they cling to past events as "I, me, mine" and try to recreate them, essentially stagnating in their development? Do people find them more grounded and friendly to be around? Or has the experience isolated them and made them less engaged with their life. etc.  Or do they see the vivid yet groundless nature of these mind events and use this insight to further embrace having a status-free, non-clinging, non-egotistical relationship with life experiences? etc. 


In general, this kinds of events happen during multi-day retreats and are generally called The Ten Imperfections of Insight (vipassanupakilesas):  An inexperienced meditator may be confused by any of the following experiences, mistakenly believing that he or she has reached nibbana. Though not in themselves obstacles, the meditator may be tempted to cling to these experiences, believing them to be important, rather than continuing to note the arising and passing away of mental and physical phenomena in the present moment. At such time the guidance of a teacher is invaluable.

see "The ten imperfections of insight) about 1/4 down this page : The Sixteen Stages of Insight (vipassanadhura.com)
The short list of the ten imperfections is "(1) illumination, (2) knowledge, (3) rapturous happiness, (4) tranquility, (5) bliss (pleasure), (6) resolution, (7) faith, (8) mindfulness, (9) equanimity, and (10) attachment." but definitely go to the page and read more about them to get a true sense of what is being described.


I also like the quote about half-way down  this page: The Progress of Insight (vipassanadhura.com): V. Purification by Knowledge and Vision of What is Path and Not-path While engaged in noticing, the meditator either by himself or through instructions from someone else, comes to this decision: "The brilliant light, and the other things experienced by me, are not the path. Delight in them is merely a corruption of insight. The practice of continuously noticing the object as it becomes evident — that alone is the way of insight. I must go on with just the work of noticing." This decision is called purification by knowledge and vision of what is path and not-path.

Normally, the stuff on the two pages I attached isn't helpful to a beginning meditator, so it doesn't get talked about much... but you are obviously someone who has already done some longer retreats, etc.  These ideas definitely should be discussed on retreat either as part of the dharma talks or in the private conversations with the teachers. Unfortunately, places like Goenka and other venues do not --- so they allow people to go deep in meditation but don't assist with the problems/challenges that come with multi-day meditation.

The original goal of this forum was to help provide this kind of information to serious meditators who wanted to be responsible for themselves and make good, solid, grounded progress in the path of insight. 

As you can see, those experiences you had are important, but are also the kind of things that distract meditators and prevent deeper lessons about the nature of mind from being learned and understood. The woowoo stuff is cool, but it can become a problem or a distraction or a temptation. Pretty much all experienced meditators have encountered these kinds of problems, distractions, and temptations --- thank goodness that this information is available to prevent getting stuck for a long long time. Without it, it's possible to even get stuck for the rest of our life

And of course this book is the core book for most people drawn to this website and which explains all of this in very direct and understandable english: Table of Contents – MCTB.org  It's available for free, but it's worth having a printed copy to read and re-read. For a lot of us, it was exactly the kind of information we needed.


I hope this is helpful in some way. Best wishes for your practice.





 

The chapter on the three characteristics can be worth referencing a number of time 

Hi Jason. 

Let me first begin by saying that I don't live inside your head. Whether I live inside my own head is also a matter of contention but I definitely don't live inside yours. All I can do is read what you have written, and look for signs that I have seen in my own practice and compare them to the signs that I see in your writing. Basis this I have some things I would like to share with you. I hope something of what I have written here is useful and it helps you in your practice. If you dont find anything useful please feel free to disregard what I have written.



1. In meditation we train attention to engage with the contents of what comes into awareness through the six sense doors. We 'track' objects with attention. By this I mean we apply attention on objects that we may have chosen - like the tactile sensations of the breath at the nostrils, or within one or more sense doors like only sounds for example, or we let objects self select in terms of permitting objects to pull attention to them. Once on an object we make attention stick to the object till it completely disappears.

2. To do this tracking we need to use short term working memory, we need to actively on an ongoing basis remember that we are meditating, remember our meditation instructions and remember the object of meditation as it is happening ... right now ... and now ... and now ... and so on

3. So whether we place attention on a chosen object like a mantra or the breath or we permit it to move between objects, a sense of continuity emerges. An experienced continuity of directed awareness/attention. This continuity leads to a deepening of samadhi. And whether we perceive attention as steady on one object or whether we perceive attention to be engaging momentarily with object 1 ... 2... 3.... n ..... samadhi deepens nonetheless and we get what is called upacara samadhi or access concentration. Uptil this point it is a preliminary serenity practice - we get calm, collected and so on

4. Staying in upacara samadhi or access concentration leads to all sorts of amazing phenomena ... initially ... for a period of time. This period of time for some people may last for months for others it may be seconds. The amount of acceptance, and disenchantment we generate for these amazing phenomena determines how long these phenomena last and how big a deal we make of them. All these awesome phenomena can and should ideally be regarded as a decompressing of the mind where a calm collected mind throws up all the unnecessary excitement it needs to engage in before it can access the next level of serenity and unification. When doing practices based on momentary concentration designed to generate insight yogis sometimes mistake these things as super awesome insight related things. But they are not and dont have anything whatsoever to do with insight. These things need to be let go of as and when they come without taking too much interest in them else they are corruptions of insight - like Shargrol said. The kicker here is that people who are talented at getting concentrated but dont have the native wisdom or lack appropriate instructions get these phenomena very early on, much much before insight or any of the insight stages have been attained.

5. Generally when all of the excitement settles down that is when, at a higher degree of relaxation and unification of mind, the tracking of objects leads to the tracking of the characteristics of objects. Now the characteristic becomes the object. From sound - sound - body sensation - thought - thought - body sensation ..... the mind moves on to tracking object - object - object - object ..... change - change - change - change ...... unreliability - unreliability - unreliability - unreliability ......... dukkha - dukkha - dukkha - dukkha ...... anatta - anatta - anatta - anatta. One cannot make this flip from object to universal characteristic happen. It happens on its own. And now one is in Insight  territory. This is insight practice. In this territory concentration practice and insight practice just seem like labels of convenience rather than any great distinction between them.

6. Uptil this point of relaxed unification of mind - when all ordinary awesomeness is gone! completely gone! ... any and every amazing thing that happens in meditation and out of meditation during daily life is to be taken lightly. Enjoy all positive experiences, lick your chops and .... let it go. Bear all negative experiences knowing that this too shall pass. Any negative experience that is particularly sticky can point to some weakness in our set of skills, something to work on. For example bands of tension around the head, painful piti etc is usually a sign of excessive power pumped into attention as compared to peripheral awareness - to me this indicates a need to rebalance power of attention versus peripheral awareness.

​​​​​​​I hope something here helped. I wish you great success.