The post is based on my practice with Nyi-med mediation, which I described here. It was the focus of my practice for more than a year. The post will be something of a sit-report (by analogy to trip-report) to start with— I will first describe the experience of nyi-med meditation in a narrativized, first person account of the experience. It is an amalgam of the different sitting that I had throughout the last year or so. I will try to make sense of it afterwards, extracting the important insights.
The experience
With a good nyi-med sitting you get to the point where time and space loosen up. Not that there isn’t time, it is that the relationship of “before and after '' is not experienced with some of the phenomena. Was this cry before or after that bark? Did I see this bird before I heard it? The sensations of sound, vision, smell, touch present themselves without being spatially or temporally related.
Space and time come out as sensations, not as containers for sensations. Vision changes once spaceness and timeness give way. The shape of what you see becomes paradoxical, Escheresque. Repetitive patterns stand out and become one thing, even if not actually close in space. Motion breaks up into independent islands of activity, like a collage of animated gifs, each ticking at their own pace.
It is a state of relaxation. Forcing the experience into rigid space-time is effort. With space, no longer being coherent, there is no centre to the experience. No spot to look at it from. Yet there is a ground to it, the unrelated, undifferentiated zero. Nowhere in particular, without time, an immeasurable background. It is present in everything that arises.
Sense of self, volition and attention arise in the same way as time and space—as dimensions of experience undivided from their content. Phenomena is an account of distinctions, which communicate in the space of awareness. There is no fixed structure in experience; the structure is itself part of the experience. It is relational. The apparent manifestations, the form, the qualia, are communication patterns of distinctions.
Structure of experience is inextricable from the experience itself. The structuring of the experience is the experience. Spacing, timing, selfing, attending, moving, expanding, sounding, feeling, doing. These distinctions all acquire the same taste. They feel like each other. Distinct, but of the same nature.
Making sense of it
I believe that for many, certainly for me, the early meditation practice is driven by a desire to understand, see the underlying structure of experience. What is attention? Self? How is my internal thought space related to vision? The important insight here is that there is no a-priori, unalterable structure of experience.
Kant in his "Critique of Pure Reason” considered space and time to be "a-priori'' forms of intuition, meaning they are fundamental structures of human experience and understanding, not derived from sensory experience. To put simply, we are wearing unremovable space-time goggles. This proposition feels apparent. The experience seems to be contained in space, which unfolds in time. Yet nyam-nyid experientially shows that it is not so.
Space-timing is an optional structure. It is also a structure like many others (self, attention, etc.), not something special. In some sense, there is nothing special in this view—everything is a dimension of awareness. To my machine learner mind, this looks like an extremely elegant system.
What arises are dimensions of experience, which means that the experience will vary across those dimensions. That is, if the ethical dimension will be present, there the good and the evil will arise in the experience, same as if there is before, so there will be after. This is an important point, which has a lot of practical meaning—the experience cannot be forced into one direction along a dimension. It is impossible to see beauty without seeing ugliness, or doing good without doing some bad.
When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.
Tao te Ching
The tension, effort, contraction in the experience is the attempt to separate the dimension of awareness and its content, to tear out the ground. This tension, this drag in the experience is “samsara”. The cycle of futile struggle. Once it is apparent, it can be released. Much like physical tension held in the body can be released after a good stretch or visit to an osteopath. Tension though is also a dimension of awareness like any other–this is what, I believe, the non-duality of samsara and nirvana in Vajrayana is about. An intuitive habit of releasing tension as it arises is what I understand to be self-liberation in Dzogchen terminology. Liberation is not about escaping from the world of experience but recognizing its true nature.
Beautifully put!
That last paragraph felt dense but rewarding to me. I had to read it a couple of times to get it.