Your oxygen requirement must have really plunged, I can't imagine waking up with someone pumping my ribcage lol! I guess that says that at least in fourth or beyond, external respiration stops or becomes shallow enough.
Yes, the oxygen requirement of someone in deep meditation seems to decline; however, until we have actually research data, we cannot conclude that the breath stops at any time during deep meditation. It just just slow, and become shallow.
Yes, it was a big shock to be dragged back from the heavenly domains by someone straddling my torso and giving my chest deep compressions, but it is the stuffy for comedy.
A new thing I realized...
When meditating yesterday, I realized that if I am already experiencing the auditory charism, it takes effort to go back into the tingling bliss of the first and second jhana (was wondering if going from first to second then to third could help me go into deeper states). But it seemed as if I could experience full body tingling this time, not just the ear.
If it takes effort to do anything with your awareness during meditation, then it should be avoided. Also, going from 2nd jhana to 3rd, is going deeper. Just allow yourself to develop along natural lines, and see where deep meditation takes you. We are just here to answer questions, not to direct your experience.
This time I took some time to explore the visual charism and under my eyelids there were lights flashing green, purple, orange, white, as if it were some disco ball lol. I've never really realized it because I always kept my eyes closed and turned my awareness inwards into my mind.
There is no reason to activate the mind in investigating the phenomena of deep meditation; however, when depth in meditation occurs, we are often presented with heightened awareness of the experience, which tends to leave a profound impression upon us.
The spherical light form is common in deep meditation. In Pali Buddhism it is referred to as a "
kasina." Click the link for more info.
A few memories came into my mind yesterday after the session.
I realized that when I was younger, I would unknowingly go into concentration practice. I remember when I was in a German class, when I finished my exam, I stared at this pin in a noticeboard, and then I realized I could go into an extremely hyper-focused mode, where everything around started to become luminous, almost to the point of obscuring my vision, leaving just the pin there. At that point of time, I was a quite rigorously scientific person, so I dismissed it as excessive activation of the photoreceptors in the eyeballs. The pin that I was focusing on disappeared, that was why I thought of it that way. But the point was, this wasn't the only time. I kept doing it again and again, focusing on random things in the car, in the park, in school, etc.
Spacing out in class is common for the proto-contemplative, and often produces our first experiences of deep meditation, which tends to direct us into the contemplative, and even mystical, life.
I also wondered why I haven't experienced a really drastic "dark night of the soul", then I realized that when I was young, I DID have a period of such depression. I believe I was about five years old, and I fell into a huge depression, saying that everything in the world was just redundant and people playing in their own sandboxes. Economies, mathematics and even the concept of money were just stories they've created to entertain themselves and distract themselves from who they are.
Being a kid, I was supposed to be addicted to television, but then after that period I didn't want to watch anything to do with television. I sort of realized, as if I was clinging on to lights appearing in an orderly fashion from a digital box and found it so redundant. All I wanted was to "space out", but in a way where I could look inwards. This was when I started seeing visions of this extremely bright point of light. To this date, I still can't figure out what it is.
Many of us who become mystics later in life have early insights, and naturally fall into meditation practices that go deep, such as you described above. The spiritual crises come at different times to us, so do not think that you are completely done with it. It will come when you are presented with a need to make a deep change in your life. Essentially I found there is a spiritual crisis following the attainment of each stage of depth in meditation.
Then I remember recently when I had a really bad sleep, I woke up to this vision under my eyelids. It was similar to this...
Except it was almost like it was a kaleidoscope. The words kept radiating out from the center. I tried to read the words and it seemed like they were ... Sanskrit maybe? Perhaps I should take up the language of Sanskrit? I've NEVER seen this language in my life before, so it can't be memory from this lifetime at least. My inner guess was that it was Sanskrit, since it looked a little squiggly, but I may be wrong.
PS: I was trying to find the name of this thing so I could find a picture of it, and it was only yesterday when I went to another cousin's house that I saw a picture of this "mantra" arranged in this manner. Kind of coincidental. So I saw the word "mantra" below it and then managed to google an example of it.
The image is known in Sanskrit Hinduism/Buddhism as a "mandala." I too had visions of mandalas and Sanskrit writing at various points in my youth; however, I traveled through Asia early in my teens, so I was exposed to quite a bit of Asian religious paraphernalia at a fairly early age. To me, seeing religious paraphernalia in a vision prior to exposure is evidence of reincarnation.
