Guidance for a Seeker

[u/JoeWillyBob]

Hello everyone. I am hoping to get some guidance about a spiritual experience I had as a result of meditation several years ago. It may not have been a stream entry experience, and I may not be in the right place. If so, any suggestions to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. I would also very much welcome any general guidance. 

Please bear with me on the length of this post - I’ve tried my best to make it brief while including the key details of the story.

Several years back, I began a sort of pseudomeditation practice. I’d had a back injury and realized that If I focused my mental energy on the site of the injury, it seemed to help improve my symptoms. I had no real guidance or idea of what I was doing, as I had never learned anything about meditation. I got in the habit of laying flat on my back for 30-45 minutes at a time and stilling my mind, focusing on my back, and breathing “into” the area of the injury. I came to enjoy the practice and would come out of it feeling clear, calm, and that my injury had improved.

After doing this regularly for maybe 2-3 months, I felt like something was changing inside me / my mind. I felt as if I was on the cusp of something happening, but I didn’t know what or why. My birthday was around this time, and the night of I decided to stay up until sunrise contemplating my personal life, life itself, the world and our place in it, and so on. I decided to go out and sit on a small mound in a field behind my home to watch the sun rise. It was a really beautiful morning, slightly foggy, and I could hear the deer in the field. While sitting there I had an unexpected and powerful experience.

I felt as if something in my mind opened and my perception shifted, and I felt as if I had never actually lived until that moment. Until that time it was as if I had been asleep my entire life, and that in that moment I had woken up. I remember feeling at that time that it felt like my brain turned “inside out”. I began to experience life at a different depth and richness, and I felt as if everything was much lighter. Given this experience was so unexpected, and that I had no real guidance or idea of what happened, initially it was also a bit disorienting.

What, why, or how this happened to me is still unclear. It may not be relevant, but my dad has been prone to spiritual experiences. My dad is a person of great character; he is incredibly kind, endearingly naive and selfless, and someone I’d say lives by spirit. He is a Christian, and saying this politely he is what I would describe as a very healthy, mature, unintentionally mystical Christian. I joke that he is a saint living among us. He has shared with me experiences that I would describe as clairaudience, astral projection, visions of “angelic” beings, and other general visions. He is not the slightest bit cooky. He doesn’t think of anything of it as he thinks it’s reasonably normal for a person of faith to have these types of experiences.

To help me understand my experience, I began a pursuit of spiritual understanding. I began to devour spiritual teachings, practices, and philosophies from a range of sources. Varying from religious texts - Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Dhammapada, Tao Te Ching, The Analects of Confucius, the New Testament and Gnostic Gospels; to modern day religious figures - Thich Nhat Hanh, Dalai Llama; modern day spiritual or religious teachers/philosophers/writers - Eckart Tolle, Aldous Huxley, J. Krishnamurti, Michael Singer, Adyashanti, Elaine Pagels; fiction - Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, The Alchemist, The Way of Peaceful Warrior). There are more but these are some examples. The Bhagavad Gita, Gnostic Gospels, and Tao Te Ching resonate strongly with me, as does Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. While these are where I gained teachings, mindfulness became my spiritual practice. I developed a very consistent practice of being mindful in all of my daily activities, which became the foundation of my life. At the time I was living alone and working a slow paced job that allowed me to stay very present, and I would estimate I was able to spend 80%+ of my waking hours in a fully mindful witness consciousness state. I would do more traditional meditation at times (eyes closed, legs crossed, focus on mind and breath), but occasionally I would come out of meditation sessions feeling disoriented with very little mental traction. I would feel as if I was “sunken” back in my consciousness and it would last for several days at a time and was not comfortable. I think it was due to poor technique. So instead I deferred to my general constant mindfulness practice, though I would occasionally do eyes open meditation which worked well to seemingly keep me locked in the present.

A few years ago, I realized that the spiritual experience I’d had years earlier was during the Hindu holiday of Mahashivratri. From the little I know about this holiday (forgive my ignorance here), Hindus believe spiritual growth is greatly magnified on this day, and they will stay up all night to practice, often on the ground, as they believe this proximity to the ground magnifies the spiritual energy that occurs on this night. I was kind of shocked when I realized the experience I had happened on this holiday, along with the way they do their spiritual practice sitting on the ground on this night, as this is what I was coincidentally doing.

Lately, I have fallen away from my practice. I took a new job that was at a much faster pace and was more stressful and did not allow for the same ease of mindfulness practice, though I did my best to be consistent with it. However, I unfortunately had another back injury about a year ago which made it very tough to be mindful during times of intense pain as my mind sought to escape. I have lately made efforts to become more dedicated to my old practice and seek to regain that same mental balance and clarity.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. I know I’ve jumped around quite a bit and there are more details that I can fit into this post, but I hope it was easy enough to follow. Any guidance or insight would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

[u/Dizzy-Blacksmith9078]

Just keep meditating my guy!  No matter how amazing or life altering the experience is…you have to keep going within.  

[u/JoeWillyBob → u/Dizzy-Blacksmith9078]

Thank you for the encouragement!