My First Year of Meditation

[fqmorris]

My last post objected to your calling painful energy experiences a "wrong way" by definition of the pain felt.  I figured that I have pain in meditation, from experience, because I have need of release.  I wish I could choose another way, but I feel fortunate to have landed in a reality where I know spirit is real.  I have diligently sought a real path since early adolescence. My path in this lifetime is slow, so far...

[Jhanananda]

My last post objected to your calling painful energy experiences a "wrong way" by definition of the pain felt. 

This is not what I said, nor what I implied.  I simply found that there are many layers to the religious experience (samadhi); and it simply takes time to traverse all of the layers.  Therefore, we cannot know it all after a short period of time. 

I figured that I have pain in meditation, from experience, because I have need of release. 

People often feel pain in meditation.  Most of the time that pain is just from not learning to meditate skillfully.  In your case, it could be years of bodily trauma that is being released, because you are no longer holding on to that trauma.  Even so, you are likely to find many layers of traumatic experience will have to be gone through, which takes time.

Your reports reminds me of an experience that I had after 20 years of meditating at roughly the depth you are meditating at.  I was at a 10-day meditation retreat in the Arizona desert.  It was mid day, and I was sitting quietly meditating in the meditation hall at about the 2nd to 3rd stage of samadhi, where my mind was very, very still; and suddenly I felt all of my skin was on fire. My internal experience was that I was feeling all of the pain of all of the beings in this world, all at once.  It nearly drove me screaming mad.  But, I kept my equanimity, and remained mindfully self-aware.  The pain eventually passed.

I wish I could choose another way, but I feel fortunate to have landed in a reality where I know spirit is real.  I have diligently sought a real path since early adolescence. My path in this lifetime is slow, so far...

Yes, the advantage of meditating at depth, and the experience of the OOBE serves the mystic as proof that the spiritual dimension is very real.  That realization often gives us unshakable faith in our path, and determination to continue to the end.

[fqmorris]

I had my 2nd lucid dream this morning, shortly before waking up.  I knew almost from the start that I was dreaming, as I examined the environment (an office space where I last worked), and then started interacting with the people there, after I realized that they saw me and thought I belonged there with them.  At one point I started telling a female co-worker (that I thought I knew as a friend), that I wasn't really there, that I was dreaming.

Everything in the dream looked real, and very detailed, but as I moved around and through the environment, I realized that it kept changing layout, an impossibility in the real world.  That's how I first confirmed that I was dreaming. As I continued to explore the place it got more elaborate and colorful.  It started out as a single-level mostly white office place, but eventually looked more and more like a shopping mall with escalators and balconies and lots of shapes and colors.  And the costumes of the people went from normal to neo-Victorian, with bowa and ruffles on men's jackets, and made of brightly colored and shiny fabrics, almost looking clownish.

When we all found ourselves outside on a country road, a departed from the group, walking toward a wooded area away from town.  Then I awoke, and remembered everything I had just dreamt.

[fqmorris]

Also, from what you have already written here you are way beyond Namgyal Rinpoche.

It was this statement (which I know is false) that made me first suspect that you were deluded. I doubt that you know anything about Namgyal Rinpoche. You were just flattering me so that I would follow you to get more of the same.

Now I believe you are a vampire, in that, I believe you have some high level of attainment, but you are using it to boost your ego, specifically by misleading others into following you.

You may now boot me from this group.

[Jhanananda]

So, let's see, you have been meditation for just about a year, and I validated your meditation experiences and methods; but now you think you are an expert and that I am wrong.  Well, if you do not like what is said on this forum, then you can always unsubscribe without assassinating anyone's character, or invalidating anyone's experience.