One to contemplate:

98. 11/09/24:

    On 10/20/2024 something happened.

    In meditation I was with great desire attending to sahasrara, the nothingness above, the space of as-if golden light.

    Once some weeks before, I had had the believing thought that that state of nothing-doing or nothing-being up in sahasrara was me. I was up there, coming out, or on the edge, and I thought, this emptiness is really me. For a while I felt that was great progress, as it could use the stickiness of identity to help me go back to that place more easily. And indeed that proved to be the case.

    By now, then, I had meditated enough that going into the golden light of sahasrara and merging there for an hour or so of samadhi was starting to be predictable, at least I could do it if I had that desire, and was focussed away from all the distractions, which means basically I could do it when I wake up in the middle or later part of the night. Bed early and low (not zero) life stress was helpful, in my case.

    Then I had the thought, the climb up the seven chakras is an easy sorted sweep-off of all the stuff, the attachments and reactivities and personas; the climb, you might say, is also a personal journey involving constructed concept of self: the climber. (The hero's journey has a hero, after all.)

    Then: It’s like I’m up there in the emptiness and what is even left of me when all is empty? It's like the only thing left is this very concept and construction process, this noticed seeming need and action: the wiggly worm of the self construction job, and that’s all that’s left here, that me is all that's left I remember thinking, This is dumb. And then it went away. Not with a bang or a click or an event, just nothing after, the gentlest unnoticed transition.

    Hard to describe anything else. Of course I was into samadhi a while but the main thing is in and out no are longer significantly different, it feels free. I laughed and laughed. It's funny, that past past. V that it was suffering. N that somehow it is no longer. (I'm using N+V humor analysis, if you don't mind.)

    And now things are free. I feel unaware of myself in that particular way, like a heavy experienced construct, now it's much more lightness. I mean extremely light, like 100:1 ratio, like I can't even remember what it felt like to feel the bondage of myself.

    And after that and over time I have noticed other symptoms.

    • Me, the penny-pincher, spending a lot more at CostCo! $500 is my largest bill there ever. I spent it with zero qualms. Not the normal personality of my mother's son.

    • Noticing small things which I never saw before in mundane moments, a bird or a color or something, a new stroke mechanical pattern in swimming. Just what comes up in curious reverie, attending to the fountain of reality not my pre-existing categories of how things fit how I think they are supposed to be.

    • There is less rumination on plans. Not that shiny penny me does a lot of planning with my weak-ass two or three bits of cognitive capacity in my working memory, but it's like I'm not trying any more.

    • Ananda makes sense to me. Yet it's a bit of ananda.

      Remember the hindu psychology/philosophy claim, that the nature of ultimate reality is sat (truth) chit (consciousness) and ananda (bliss). That always made fine sense to me for sat and chit, but never for ananda, until now. So that's nice.

      Yes some Ananda just naturally there. Steady. Not as momentary relief in the awareness of the removal of long suffering, like a chain knocked off, not as some kind of reaction to this change, just as a natural, steady state. It's natural to see things with a small flavor of delight. Oh it's def much easier to see when thinking stops.

    • I asked Liz after 19 days, did you notice any change in me lately? She said, You've been more reactive to me lately. ahhahahah! lol. Sorry Liz!

      So yes that's one, less self-editing. Forgive me world, you may get to see how I really feel!

      Then she backpedals from "I see no bliss and equanimity" to "Do you see any of that?" Well, yes, but I'm not *acting* differently, or trying to, and I'm not claiming that anyone else can see my inner experience either.

    • In a way I shut down the self-obsessive rumination, at least for a while. I mean it occurred to me but I didn't want to write about it or share it for some time. I guess I've been in school and making presentations (Accent in Sanskrit and A Default, Biological, Tautological, Nomological Network) in the 3 weeks since the event and my habit of leaving crumbs for others seems to remain active enough that here I am again, writing my thoughts, as if others might be interested, but the point is that it took almost 3 weeks, which (the pause) is the out-of-character part.

    Stop there, please. Really, I have a bad case of logorrhea on this, or maybe I should say, I'm not sure who if anyone will be interested besides myself!

    ---

    But if you do enjoy hearing me noodle about, as I do, to understand what's going on in me and perhaps in us, perhaps potentially, please continue. Especially if you are suffering, and you think maybe if you understood things you could find a way to suffer less, that would be my hope, to help you.

    Sooo.. then a few days ago just noodling around in my mind I thought maybe I should do something, like maybe think about some tasks or other. A wave of foreboding, and hell made itself known. It's like a sticky hot goo of emotionally being dragged under. That thought of "I am" is hard to remove from the doing of one's tasks (my practice of seva, selfless service, is my great support).

    What is this sticky unpleasant goo? It's a deep deep question, to answer it I must explain, perhaps, everything.

    Layer Q: There is a conjunction of qualia, the experience of "I am"-ness, and the potentially rich conjunction of perceived relevant aspects of the situation which if any other one of them fails to BE you it still qualifies your existence as being YOUR context; this conjunction (of this and this and... and this) is the experience of being yourself in the situation, tracking what is going on to you, as you, somehow about you. The qualia are the parts and presentations of things that you directly experience, like this color or that weight or this intuitional capturedness.

    Layer R: Then there is a semi-underground reasoning system which may be partly what you see and experience in the qualia of your inner multimedia system, or partly consistent with those qualia, but really this and these are the reasoning bits, we might think of them as elements and predicates, tagged onto some (largely spatial) model of things, and the mental exploration and direct inference engines inside you are busily operating on those bits and adding new predicates and propositions to the known-or-thought constellation in the attentional constructed situation.

    Layers P and A: We may not think of the lower-level (P: perceptual) aspects like retinal image processing or inferential size re-scaling, etc on the inbound side (P) nor the (A action) muscle fiber coordination activities on the outbound side (A), since once we have learned them, probably with active attention at some point, they have become automaticized, and unless specifically attended to, a higher-level construct is all we need to be aware of, like in speaking we are aware ofq the ideas we are trying to express and not so much the grammatical calculations of agreement and reference merger or pronoun case or whatever (until gender issues make us pay them attention). But the system takes care of P and A let's say somewhat automatically, at least at the periphery.

    My angle in describing this is cognitive as if all this is mere information processing, but some of the information is motivational, from the valence bit of N vs V of N+V Humor Theory to activation level controls and desire-driven attention controls and the Maslow/chakra/logical/hormonal personality-substitution controller that frames our motivations and by pumping one set of hormones or another makes us sleep, or jump, or etc. For example, for some X to be my target and goal is not just informational; the information is tied into my perception and action systems giving controlling feedback.

    I loop back to Q then R. In the experienced Q space of qualia, such as colors or smells or internal proprioception or the perhaps circular or reflective sensation we label "I am", we may have all kinds of stuff going on, plus that sense of I am, and this is all, or doesn't need to be more than, a jumble. I experience the colors light and dark of the letters of page and book, I experience "I am", all this stuff is going on. Just a list of all these qualia, you might say, although I am tending to say they are all spatially located, and their spatiality (distance, direction, perhaps boundedness or boundaries), perhaps, is part of what they are, as qualia, as we do experience space, and stuff in space, somehow. And the I am part doesn't have to show up much since the R level reasoner can just stick it in enough to have it present for reasoning about how to feel and respond: I(X). That reasoned I(X) is the activity or event that constitutes self-attribution, and supports it, and its absence (in R) support non-self-attribution, because it's the reasoning system (R) that asserts the identity of self with aspect of situation, not the qualia system (Q), in the current, [I], ("Optional I") model of human emotion. (I wouldn't want it to be only about me, after all!)

    So it (R) semi-subconciously puts together the qualia of the book with the thought, there's the book, perhaps that's my book, I'm holding the book, I like this book, etc. The reasoning and subconscious reasoning systems typically put together a believed thought that I am X, for some X, or X is mine, for some X, in the understood, that is to say the reason-constructed, scene which may include any aspect of situation X and oneself. That cognitive event, I(X), is here called self-attribution: the believed thought that I am some limited thing.

    Sometimes you do something and really feel that "I am" qualia, like Liz with hot chocolate, says "I'm really myself drinking hot chocolate", so the reasoning side is also a learning side and it can put down in its Book of Knowledge, "I am a chocolate lover". But modulo such bleed-over events, when you identify with anything it's the reasoning side, not the qualia side, that makes the attribution: R not Q has the thinking part of the thought and R not Q decides to believe,

    So all that is going on, naturally, but in the non-self-construction mode referenced by Bliss Theory, the qualia of I may or may not be present, preferably not actually but the real point is the reasoning side is not tracking identity in the situation.

    It's one of those deep emotional beliefs in the hierarchy of motivations and reactivities, that one somehow must be tracking oneself all the time. Ugh.

    Then a moment free from it, wow, is such a relief, such peace of mind, so free and light and happy, as long as you don't remember your heavy heavy duty, then bong, slam, here I'm carrying it again, at least I'm the limited X which is doing its best, which is trying to figure out how to feel.

    The stickiness of the goo of self-identification is paertly because when we think something with belief we sort of stick it in our Book of Knowledge, whatever that is, and being something that we then Know, we take it for granted and act as if it were so, without much questioning and reevaluation. So once I'm back feeling like that Doer of My Deeds, and attributing that role and identity to myself, putting that into Knowledge means in a way making it hard to get out from under it. Sticky. Not that I really have to reevaluate and store new knowledge wiping out the old; it is enough to just stop doing that burdensome emotional thinking-action of reconstructing myself there. Can I tell if I've just decieved myself yet again? I think humility and persistency and regular meditation and the mantra "Namo Namah" (bending, bending) will make it clear over time. But the quick reaction against that heavy burdensomeness of carrying that thought around is probably most if not all of it. If I can push the misery away, namo namah, by a little reverence or forgiveness or trust or any of those high virtues, which opens the heart to the ego-free state, you might say, then Very Well.

    Did I answer the question? I hope so, at least partly.

    I'm happy, anyhow, that my experience is starting to reflect my ideas. Is it Alignment? Or just, self-persuasion by some BS ideas? You will have to decide for yourself. Although hopefully there may be experiments coming some day, if someone picks this up and runs with it. Me, I do as a good scientist try to be the enemy of my own ideas, and only settle on the good ones, but I can't rule out self-deception. That'll be your job.