Inside the Circle

First, I want to say that the experience that some describe (“when everything seemed to 'light up', everything looked multi-dimensional, vivid, alive, REAL and at the same time 'dream like'”) is every bit as wonderful and blissful as it implies. It is indeed as though you are truly awake, and reality seems so real, with this transcendent kind of subtle glow, or light. You see the emptiness of the form you call your body and realize there is no self there.

The beauty, joy, and transcendence of this experience is so meaningful and great that proselytizing about it, to share it with others, to tell them how simple and easy it is, is a quite natural reaction. Believe me, the experience is not “dulling”, it is instead very aware.

Perhaps it will help to clarify matters if I share some of my own experience. My situation differs a little from some in that I went all the way. Instead of going back and forth between two modes of living, I continued to live the Way as my regular daily, full time mode of living. And, I lived this way for several months.

My experience then was that ideas, thoughts, concepts still existed. However, they no longer did arise within the form of physical presence.

The experience was that there was the reality of the world that was occurring. And the here of it was this empty spaciousness in which calm awareness took place. With this calm, being so wonderfully peaceful, right and natural, there was no longer any compelling to disturb it.

Thoughts then, no longer arose within the form one calls one’s body as they do in the “other mode” of living – through the gross manifestation of mental activity known as internal (or mental) dialog. Emotions/feelings also dwelt in this same calm manner – not arising. Beliefs and opinions were also not held onto.

However thoughts and concepts did exist. And, since at the time I was a freshman university student, I was required to write papers, read books, attend lectures and produce projects for the courses I was taking. But, instead of thoughts being experienced in the gross manifestation of the form I called my body, they were merely realized. It was as though they were taking place outside of time and space, transcendentally.

The experience was that thoughts came and went, at once, before they could take place in physical reality. So it seemed that they did not occur, one just knew what they were, like one knows how to play a note of music without thinking about it. One had the sense that thoughts were being realized even though they did not quite exist. And since clam and peace prevailed, the thoughts did not arise within one’s experience (of physical reality).

In the typical paradoxical tradition of Buddhism, they did not exist and they did (somehow) exist. (By the way, I was an honors student that term, so my academic performance did not suffer from living this way.)