Becoming awake awareness (1/2)

A report

I recently did a 2-week solo meditation retreat focused on the practice of Shi-ne. At some point, my experience shifted dramatically and it felt like a new “operating system” for my mind had locked into place. While I’ve had glimpses of awake awareness before, I’ve never been able to recognise it at these degrees of depth and duration. The experience made a huge impression on me, so I feel compelled to share a phenomenological report of the retreat, focusing on how it felt both practicing Shi-Ne and how my experience changed once the shift into awake awareness had locked in. 

The retreat container

Before I get into it, just a few key data points on the retreat container. 

• 13-day solo retreat (no human contact, electronic devices, books, etc.) 

• 8 hours of meditation per day as a target (I only did 6 hours on 3 days and 4 hours on the last day), split up into 1-hour sessions (occasionally 30 minutes). 

• 20 minutes of stretching and 1-2 hours of walking per day 

• Vegetarian food, 1 coffee per day, nicotine chewing gum on walks

Meditating up and down the hill

My retreat experience had 2 distinct phases, roughly mapping to the first and second weeks. The first week was tough. I had to acclimate to the new environment and I slept A LOT. Hitting the 8 hours of meditation a day was challenging, especially for the first few days. I usually went through a sequence of concentration meditation (Samatha), insight meditation (Vipassana), and then Shi-Ne. Over the course of the week, my mind was getting calmer and sharper. 

After a week of “grinding up the hill”, everything changed. That day, I decided to only do Shi-Ne and drop the supporting practices with a heightened sense of determination. In the third hour of meditating for the day, I found myself falling out of my body and into space. I became space. I thought I had recognized awake awareness before but I really hadn’t. Not at that level, this was something completely different. After this point, I was over the hill of my retreat and started riding down. Meditating was easy all of a sudden. My mind became vast like the sky and sharp like a diamond.

Some interesting/weird stuff I noticed 

I noticed a few interesting phenomena while meditating that seem worthwhile sharing. Even though all of the ones listed below occurred multiple times and the environment was controlled, I’m still cautious about robustness and causality. Not only is there an N of 1, but the interaction of expectation and perception is especially tangled up in meditation.    

• Increasingly vibrant and bright colours
  Already in the first week, colours seemed more crisp/vibrant and higher luminosity, which increased throughout the retreat.  

• Increasing frequency of noise
  I became more aware of both auditory and visual noise. Interestingly, the frequency of the noise increased over the course of the retreat in both auditory and visual channels (even in terms of body sensations, but less clearly). Both Vipassana and Shi-Ne practice seemed to increase this effect. 

• Synchronising of noise across senses
  Interestingly, the Shi-Ne practice seemed to have an additional effect of synchronizing frequencies across the different sense modalities (e.g. auditory and visual noise syncing up). 

• Persistent high-pitched tone
  During the second week, I noticed a very high-pitched tone in almost every sit. Like a subtle Tinnitus. The tone was clearly not coming from anywhere in the environment (only came up while meditating around the middle of a sit). Playing with a tone generator online, it seemed to be around 4000-5000 Hertz (matching it from memory).

From Shi-Ne to Awake Awareness

Another class of observations concerns the transition between the practice of Shi-Ne and the recognition of awake awareness. A few interesting phenomena seemed to accompany the deepening of Shi-Ne before opening up into awake awareness. 

• “Dimmer effect”: changes in the perception of brightness 

  A reliable sign that the Shi-Ne was becoming deeper was a wave-like, regular increase and decrease in the brightness of my visual field. Like somebody would turn a dimmer light up and then down again. The frequency was around 0.25 Hertz and generally lasted for 2-10 minutes. I had already noticed this before the retreat, but it happened much more regularly. This phenomenon is distinct from the more persistent and much higher frequency visual and auditory noise. 

• Noise frequency sped up before awake awareness locks in

  As described above, visual and auditory noise generally increased in frequency over the course of the retreat. It also noticeably sped up (and synchronised between senses) within a given sit, especially before opening up fully into awake awareness.

• Energy moving up and down the spine 

  On the tactile level, there were less regular phenomena. Most notably, a vibratory cluster of “energy” moved up and down the spine (neck to lower back) that appeared occasionally. 

The most striking experience was awake awareness locking in. There was a clear sense of swapping between foreground and background: Whereas normally, awareness is backgrounded (if perceived at all) and content across sense modalities (and attention moving between them) is in the foreground. After the shift, awareness - the raw fact of consciousness - was in the foreground, and all of the content seemed like a background occurrence. This was a fundamental change in perspective.  I attribute the shift to 

1. the increased time on the cushion (without distractions),

2. the little idiosyncratic tweaks I had made in my technique previously, and

3. the increased determination on that day. 

In terms of tweaking the practice, I noticed that speeding up the Shi-Ne practice (like “speed Vipassana”, but letting go instead of investigating) really helped. This could also have interacted with the increase in the frequency of noise that I perceived. Another element that seemed crucial was the “fullness” of letting go really mattered to enter this transition. There were also a range of metaphors and little adjustments that contributed, I will explore this in a follow-up article. 

Hanging out as Awake Awareness

Now, what was it like to come from awake awareness? At the core of it was a radical de-centering of perspective: “I” was no longer behind my face looking out at the world, but rather the whole field of awareness at once. Entering this state, there was a sense of vertigo, of falling in all directions at once. It was a shift of the locus of identity. If the only thing that changed was the perspective, this could seem like a mere oddity. It was much more impactful because the shift came with some drastic changes in qualia including: 

• Brightness/crispness of all sensations

• A pervasive sense of peace and subtle joy

• Identification with the qualities of awareness: Spaciousness, stillness, silence, timelessness

• Effortless mindfulness and equanimity

From this perspective, there is no time, no suffering, nothing to do, nowhere to go. It seemed like all of the resistance in the body-mind system dropped away, and energy could flow throughout the system without any impediment. I was the smooth, expanding, multi-modal sphere of awareness. Even though I could clearly perceive all of the sensations, thoughts, sights, sounds, etc. - they seemed like interesting epiphenomena in the background of an infinite ocean of wide-awake space. 

All of a sudden, meditating for 1h+ was effortless, almost trivial. The pain in my legs that set in like clockwork after 35 min became utterly insubstantial. Practices I had previously struggled with, like observing thoughts without noticing their content or doing Vipassana from awake awareness (“reversing the stack”) became easy to do. 

Glimpsing my way back

A few weeks after the retreat, the “afterglow” of the experience is fading slowly. While I’m mostly back to the old operating system of operating with attention coming from a constructed perspective within my head, awake awareness remains more accessible than before the retreat. When practicing Shi-ne in my daily sit, I can recognise awake awareness more fully and can often rest there. I’m also able to glimpse awake awareness regularly throughout the day more deeply and more often than before. 

Before going back to our usual programming of essays, I will share the idiosyncratic tweaks that helped me during the retreat, a personal recipe for becoming awake awareness in the coming week.