Time: 45 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting in a chair with my hands on my knees.

Experience:  Awareness settled on touch-sense and after a moment sight-sense as well. The two flickered in and out of existence in tandem at a rate of about 12 times per second ("vibrated"). The texture of these vibrations was smooth. I reminded myself what the Three Characteristics are. Vibrations slowly sped up to about 16 plus times per second. Concentration and equanimity were high. Mind was doing its thing - trying to assign things a status of "I", "painful" or otherwise "undesirable" - all of these activities had been pretty absent from the scene for about a week, so this was new, but all of these activities were very transparently observable as mind just doing it's thing, and having nothing to do with anything other than that. I dropped into stories several times. There were no black-out-like fruition events. No lights behind the eyelids. In many respects it felt like the Dark Night, but the "unpleasant" character of it was CLEARLY a series of obsessive, repetitive, mind activities labeling it as such. The session ended.

Observations: This session was exhausting. It had a great deal of laser-like focus to it, and the sort of broad perspective that comes with mind-contacts being clearly discernible as such, but it was very new to me to go through a chunk of territory that was seriously unpleasant while seeing it just as it is, instead of being embroiled in the unpleasantness of it and "feeling" things "paining me". Instead the painfulness of experience was clearly the product of foolish, arbitrary mind-activity, and not anything to do with a "me" or the "thing" that was "painful".