rhinoceroshorn wrote: ↑Sat Jul 04, 2020 11:56 pm
Pondera wrote: ↑Sat Jul 04, 2020 11:43 pm
Nirodha Samapatti is the cessation of perception and feeling. Not the cessation of experience.
By definition, sense consciousness (as a technical term) has ceased.
This means contact with sense objects is not the case. However the faculties remain (they simply don’t register feeling or perception).
Can one come out at will? In my experience, yes.
Thank you, Pondera! This was what I needed to know!
Have you tried to inflict any pain in yourself in NS (not in, but something planned)? You can't feel it, right? You can't move or think, right? It's like turning into a tree, right?
Well. Let me explain. I suffered intense psychosomatic pain for four years before being released from that and starting a journey into concentration which lasted four months and culminated in my experience of Unbinding.
I spent about half an hour in Unbinding before returning to the world of sense.
If you imagine that your body is really just old karma, the Unbinding of that karma is how we refer to “the cessation of feeling”. In fact you witness your whole body’s karmic fabrication unwind and loosen and eventually unbind. Feeling stops. All perception of “body” is released.
So, although I didn’t inflict any pain on my “body” - there was no “body” to really speak of.
Like a “tree”? Not really. More like a single point in space. You are aware of a few things in Nirodha Samapatti. You are aware that the experience is boundless; you are aware that it is pure and unsullied by perception and feeling; and you are aware that there is no time.
You can stay there as long as you want. After half an hour (conventionally speaking) I decided to draw the infinite potential surrounding me into my mind made body. That was, essentially, the act of will power which ultimately led me back into the sphere of perception and feeling.
I’ve experienced this ONCE. And although I’m aware of the path to follow in order to arrive at that destination again; It is a gradual path which I am currently developing.
Haven’t got back to that place quite yet.