Mystical Experiencer: Woman in her mid-fiftiesSubmission date: October 8, 2023Current location: United StatesAge at time of experience: 53Day 5 of 10 day silent Vipassana course. This is when everything changes for me. At the afternoon sitting, the drowsiness returns. I had been able to manage it and slow it down but it was always hovering waiting to pounce on me. It suddenly hits me-drowsiness is a sensation. Well, well poppies, how well do you surf? I let it wash over me and I feel like a mouse hanging in a tree in a hurricane. Wave after wave. Then I feel the tidal wave crest, break, and begin to slowly ebb out like a tide. Everything goes still. Something is strange. Tranquil. calm. Something is very dramatically… completely…. different. I have no thoughts.
The mind is still, empty, calm…. like glass… there is an ease in my consciousness that is beyond peace. I sit with this the remainder of the session observing it because it is so foreign, so interesting, so beautiful and there is something so strange about it, I feel I am looking right at something but I can’t see it-then it hits me. No earworm. The mind is silent, completely silent and absolutely still. These observations are not thoughts, just awareness. I felt so complete. I felt like the central nervous system reset. I spent the afternoon study hall just sitting with this, integrating it. Time has become strange like I am in an infinite moment. I went outside and walked in the garden. I could still think thoughts, but I had to decide to generate a thought, and like push it… there was no flow of thought. This was so fascinating, so curious…
I am walking through the garden in a state of perfect present total awareness. I am aware I feel connected to nature in a very different way. There is no sense of relationship in the connectedness, more like unified awareness maybe? Since returning. I have such difficulty describing this experience (which lasted FIVE days) because I have no accompanying narrative of thoughts or emotions to draw from. I just felt not separate, blank, empty, but full and complete at the same time. I was aware that I was not the body, not these sensations, not the thoughts, not the feelings, not the breath…and everything was perfectly self so, mutually arising. The bees, the flowers, trees, grass, rocks and everything together with this person walking, were all being.
Day 9: At the evening session, I suddenly feel a sense of this is amazing that I have done this {Vipassana course} and it is a great gift I have given myself and I say to myself “I am so proud of you” and I am flooded with an emotion of intense warm love and I begin to weep. I recognize the Bhakti feeling I get sometimes but it is a double overhead wave equal to the drowsiness but gentler. Ah Ha, it dawns on me that there is a sensation here and I go looking for it and I feel subtle vibrations of nurturing warmth flowing over me from head to toe and I feel I cannot contain it. Tears are streaming down my face. The sensation is emanating from the center of the chest and there is a feeling of undefined expansion.
Day 10: We learn Metta meditation, which I can see I did the night before. It is not depleted as I expected and flows out again, just bigger so I expanded it to the whole room every single session. Noble silence ended after the 8am session. I walk out of the session and I feel Sacred. Everything and everyone feels sacred to me. I am not ready to talk to anyone so I go to my room and sit with this sacredness. Everything feels so perfect, so beautiful, so complete, so sacred. I am not in a hurry to talk to anyone, but I stand in the garden contentedly with the bees and flowers under a crabapple tree. In my awareness I am part of the garden and it is part of me. Two women come out talking to one another, they are servers, they look at me and come straight over to me and say “you look absolutely radiant, you are glowing all over”.
When I returned home, I felt completely unattached to my life. I felt a little disoriented because the experience was so indescribable and I had no context to put it in but at the same time I felt this great sense of fulfillment, peace and bliss as well as an immense awareness of the unity and perfection of all things.