And in my experience, worldly desires like romantic relationships and child-bearing are merely shadows of the ecstasy, bliss, and satisfaction of union with God/Emptiness/whatever you want to call it. Ideally, I will pull off a Rumi or Jhananda (Rumi was married, and Jhananda raised children.)
I feel strongly that you will not cease to hear from me. This community uplifts, supports, understands, and is a safe haven for me. I gain strength from you all, and that is precious to me.
That video reminded me of many excellent points, and made sense of my most recent deep experience. Thank you, Rougeleader. But what they discuss at the end is not exactly what I experience. I think I detailed it wrong. What usually happens is like a sudden loss of consciousness. I'll be in 2nd or 3rd jhana, and then suddenly I'm realizing I've been meditating. I check the time, and often as much as 30 or 45 minutes has gone by. This even happens in the middle of the day when I'm totally awake, so I struggle to see how it could be sleep. I don't know--it's like a seeming lapse in experience continuity.
And thank you for your well wishes.
What you say here again matches the way I would try to explain it. So maybe I am the one who has not detailed correctly. I find there is a definite loss of conciousness for some meditations and the time I am gone varies greatly. Its just me being aware of the charismatic sensations swelling over my bodily sensations and then boom, it is like I am waking up from a surgery or deep sleep without the heavy medicatied/groggy feeling. I find it doesn't always matter if I am tired or not, I may feel alert and rested and still find a lapse in my awareness for a non-specific amount of time. I've had it happen for seconds, minutes, and halfhour times like you describe, but nothing over 1 1/2 hours. Sometimes I lucid dream, but mostly it is nothing. So without an exact understanding of what is happen, I continue on and try to keep a still mind and to stay alert and aware of the charisms as long as I can, just in case it's nothing but sleep.
On a side note to all of this, I began journaling my dreams on my mobile device whenever I wake up almost two weeks ago now. This has been coupled with at least a night and morning meditation. I still have no idea I am dreaming in a dream, but I am mostly aware of my own thoughts and actions in the dream as if it were my daily life. It feels funny experiencing this because it feels like I don't really sleep, its like I go from my regular day life, then have a couple hours of weird and sometimes unpleasant dreams (haven't experienced anything necessarily pleasurable yet), and then I am back here to the daily life again. I wonder if I am jumping the gun by lucid dreaming before I have mastered the material jhanas? I didn't expect to find progress this quickly, but I have seen else where that one may have no attainment but still be able to lucid dream, so should I put the brakes on or just go for it?
Exactly the same for me, in regards to your comment about the apparent consciousness loss.
Yeah, the continuity that increased awareness during dreaming can bring is a little strange at first. Jhananda has talked at length about the impact of increased awareness and OOBE during sleep. There are benefits like improved equanimity and dispassion.
I can't journal like that anymore, because I wake up to my child and have like 20 things to do right away, so I don't experience much OOBE/Lucid Dreaming. Maybe you'll thank me later for mentioning things like that ^_^
Lucid dreaming progress happens really fast, in my experience. It's really up to you if you want to dive in or not. But eventually on this path you will begin OOBE/lucid dreaming when you sleep, anyway. That's just what happens when you begin to increase your awareness.
Other than the above mentioned obstacles to journaling and working on lucid dreaming, I also began to experience terrifying dreams. At least one of them was re-living a past death. But I also had some tremendously magical and pleasurable ones--like flying through a fantasy world where almost all my fantasies were being fulfilled--or having "intimate" encounters with angels.
The cons are only short-term, and the pro's are long-term--REALLY long term. As far as I understand and have reasoned, there is an obvious big pro that you will be moving closer and faster toward enlightenment. And that you'll have to experience all these things at some point or another on the path of enlightenment anyway.
I copped this discussion thread from rougeleader115's case history as examples of what I believe is not just spacing out, or falling asleep during meditation, but more an example of the experience of Space/time dilation during samadhi. The deeper we go into meditation states, and the religious experience, the more abstract, or profound, that experience becomes. As we get closer to entering the immaterial domains the even more fantastic the religious experience becomes.
A property of the altered state of consciousness of the meditation states, and the religious experience, is the loss of the sense of time and space. So, the fact that rougeleader115 and Jhanon are becoming lucid in their sleep state suggests that they are not just spacing out during meditation, but are very probably approaching the immaterial domains during their meditations and thus developing Space/time dilation during samadhi.
