Time: 41 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and was instantly in touch with my visual field vibrating at around ten or twelve times per second. The vibrations were very fine. I observed a pressure on my forehead and watched that vibrate and pulse. My concentration was all over the place. Stories and tape loops, then back to reality, then lost again. After a while I seemed settle down. The disjunctive quality between sensation and mental construct became more and more pronounced. I observed that intentions preceded movements and often thoughts and feelings. There were some light-shows behind my eyelids at multiple points in this sitting. After one there was a sudden sense of being stretched-out and floaty. I could still feel myself in contact with the cushion, but my torso and head seemed adrift in space and my visual field took on a 3-D quality it usually doesn't have. I then had the scary realization that my touch sensations and visual sensations were vibrating in sync - that "I" was vibrating in and out of being - leading to the sticky question of what is it that "is" and "isn't" "I"?

Observations: This was a weird one.

Time: 37 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and was instantly in touch with my visual field vibrating at around ten or twelve times per second. The vibrations were very fine. I observed a pressure on my forehead and watched that vibrate and pulse. This gave way to waves of physical pleasure coursing and vibrating through my body, then a sort of "flat" mental quietude where all that was happening was my various sense doors vibrating. I was very are of the progression from physical sensation, to mental construct of that sensation, then new physical sensation, then mental construct of the new physical sensation, etc. Then there was a very pronounced series of white flashes behind my eyelids. From then on my concentration was diffuse and I would drift into stories and tape loops from time to time. The rest of the time I would observe my sense doors vibrating, including watching a lot of emotions like fear, pride, shame, lots of aversion, and sadness arise and pass away. Then a paraphrase of the Three Characteristics seemed to jump into my mind - it wasn't like I thought it - it was all of a sudden just there: things come and go, they're not me or mine, and they won't satisfy. Then there was a sudden sort of "pop" to my awareness as my previously diffuse focus zoomed in. All of a sudden I was observing everything much more clearly. My center of concentration was in focus and my emotions and thoughts, instead of being "in my head" seemed much more "outside it" along with my other senses like sound, sensation, etc. Everything was vibrating very quickly and the vibrations themselves had a very fine quality, like sand or graphite powder. Then I dropped back down into the light-show behind my eye-lids and back up to the very in-focus high vibration state described above. I think I cycled through these states maybe half a dozen times before the session ended.

Observations: This was an interesting session. It felt like I covered a lot of ground in the progress of insight. It was restful watching my emotions arise and pass and watching them prompt me to push, strive, and resist reality as it is. It was also a nice break to "pop" into the field of more focused concentration. Its hard to articulate how the Three Characteristics piece fits into this session. It was all of a sudden in my mind, fully formed, without thoughts leading to it or from it. Just there. I've never (to my knowledge) heard the voice of God during a meditation session - they've always happened walking around in my day-to-day life, so its hard to put my finger on this as a "God moment" . . . but I have my suspicions.

My dog meditates too.

Time: 45 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and was instantly in touch with my visual field vibrating at perhaps ten times per second. I felt a pressure on my forehead and observed that for a while until it gave way to waves of physical pleasure coursing through my body. That gave way to a state of mental "pleasure" and stillness. There was some long pulses of light/dark behind my eyelids and I found myself in touch with a lot of emotions: anxiety, shame, fear, frustration, etc. I would note the emotion and observe its physical effect on my body, then turn my attention back to my visual field to observe it vibrating. I fell back to the pulses of light phase and cycled back through to the emotional phase only to fall back again maybe half a dozen times. I experienced a lot of "half thoughts" where a tap loop or story would begin and I would note that it was occurring and it would end immediately.

Observations: This session I felt really scattered. Although I haven't been logging it here, I have been meditating for the last few days, during which I traveled to Chicago to attend my grandpa's funeral. I also strongly suspect I'm in the Dark Night. These to facts have left me feeling very raw and scattered.

Time: 25 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and was instantly in touch with my visual field vibrating at perhaps ten times per second. My concentration was pretty diffuse, and I drifted into stories and tape-loops at various points in the session. There were multiple light shows behind my eyelids, and a lot of emotions came up - fear, shame, loathing. I observed each of them arise in my body and tried to concentrate on observing them flicker in and out of existence just like the rest of the phenomena I experience. Vibrations during this session would slow and speed up at various times, with the slowest being maybe six vibrations per second, and the fastest somewhere more in the neighborhood of fifteen or twenty. The last half of this session was characterized by feeling my body sort of "hanging off of me" like I was meditating inside a sculpture made of living meat. Towards the end of the session, I got into a space that was more emotionally stable and calm with vibrations being very, very fine and fast.

Observations: I've felt like hell emotionally today and have been very spacey. I very much didn't want to meditate but have absolutely zero interest in continuing to feel like this, so I sat my butt down and watched my physical sensations come and go and tried to spot the Three Characteristics in them.

Time: 22 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and was instantly in touch with my visual field vibrating at perhaps ten times per second. I centered my attention on the point between my eyes and about one inch up on my forehead and observed a sensation of pressure build there. The sensation itself was vibrating. I turned my attention to waives of physical pleasure moving throughout my body. The waves themselves were vibrating in and out of existence. I turned my attention to a sense of extreme mental quietude and focus which was itself vibrating. All of these vibrations were at about ten to twelve times a second. There was some "sheet lightening" behind my eyelids and my concentration flagged. I experienced drifting in and out of concentration as I played several stories and tape-loops. Then there was a "jump" as my concentration re-engaged. There was a sense of unity that's hard to explain and a sense of peace. At the moment of the jump I again perceived sensory stimuli vibrating in and out of existence at maybe ten to twelve times per second, but now I realized that I had previously been focusing on when a sense was "there" in the vibration, whereas now I was focusing on when it was "not there". The not-thereness of the vibrations almost had a gravity of their own, and I had the sensation of almost physical falling into that not-thereness of each vibration. I dropped down into sheet-lightening shows once or twice more during this session and the process would repeat back "up" to unity-jump phase.

Observations: N/A.

Time: 20 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and was instantly in touch with my visual field vibrating at perhaps ten to twelve times per second. Whichever sense I focused my awareness on was broken into a very fine static-like series of information-noinformation-information-etc.

Observations: My grandfather died today. I'm feeling pretty broken right now.

Time: 30 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and was instantly in touch with my visual field vibrating at perhaps four to six times per second. I observed this for a while and the frequency of vibrations seemed to all of a sudden "jump" after a few minutes to maybe ten or twenty times per second. I observed a lot of visual "effects" behind my eyelids this seemed to recur throughout this sitting maybe half a dozen times, and consisted of bright lights, shifting masses of color, dots, etc. There was also a lot of overlap where I seemed to observe data from two sense-doors or more at the same time, like touch and sight, taste and sight, etc. I also experienced doubt and fear several times during this sitting. All of the above was vibrating rapidly, as if each set of data was a playing card in a deck that someone was very quickly flipping through, and each playing card of data was hitting me in the face as it flipped by.

Observations: It felt like I was cycling through a couple of the nanas during this sitting. Maybe entering Dark Night territory. I plan on reviewing the "Progress of Insight" section in Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha to get a more concrete idea of what is going on.

Time: 25 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and was aware of my visual field vibrating at perhaps four to six times per second. My awareness of my body was quite high. I observed waives of physical pleasure coursing through me, each wave vibrating at a high rate of speed. Then my awareness shifted to a sense of spaceous mental quietude that was itself vibrating even more quickly than the waves of physical pleasure were. Then there were a series of flashing white lights behind my eyelids. Then a series of more colorful psychedelic lights. My whole visual field began to break into a sort of shallow-focus frame-by-frame sort of experience that's hard to describe. Then I dropped back into the physical pleasure waves, and the whole process repeated. The process repeated maybe three times before the session was over.

Observations: N/A.

Time: 30 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and was aware of my visual field vibrating at perhaps four to six times per second. I perceived pressure at a point about an inch above the space between my eyes - I observed that sensation as it flickered in and out of existence and changed shape. My bodily awareness was pretty high and very enjoyable and once or twice gave way to an extremely peaceful mental quietude. I dropped into fantasies and stories once or twice, and repeated the above process maybe three or four times before the session was over.

Observations: Its been months since I've meditated on a regular basis, and over a year since I've kept any record of my session-by-session experiences here. Well, friends, I'm back in the saddle again.