OFF-CUSHION EXPERIENCE

Time: Approximately 2 hrs.

Situation: Shopping at Target yesterday afternoon.

Experience: The time approximation on this experience is a little misleading. In retrospect, since my last meditation session my present-moment awareness has been unusually sharp. I spent large swaths of the day observing each moment arise from nothing, briefly exist, and then pass away utterly. However, this reached a sort of peak while running errands with my wife at Target. My job was to push the cart, remind her of things we might need (pretty much all of which she already knew about), and give my two cents on various products when solicited. So I was essentially left to my own mental devices during our time there.

Then this happened: my perceptual universe began to pulse/vibrate rapidly; it was as if I was watching the world around me through a zoetrope. Each moment became, existed, and then was gone forever. My mind would sort of *snap* a mental construct of that moment as it existed so that it could "hold onto it and work with it." I would examine the mental construct and find that it was not at all the moment! Even as I observed it, the construct's margins would shift and its content would change. Then I would shift my attention back to my perceptual universe and find that the moment I had made my inaccurate construct of was gone utterly - in the blink of an eye - and the whole process would repeat.

This oscillation between (1) perception of moment, (2) perception of the creation of a mental construct of that moment, (3) perception of utterly new moment, went on and on at break-neck speed - perhaps two to six times per second.

Observations: I really don't know what to make of this. I did some reading in Ingram's MCTB in the sections on the Dark Night and insight stage 11 (equanimity). Nothing really caught a hold of me and made me shout, "that's what that was!" Its time for my morning meditation session now, so my game plan is to do that, then probably post to DhO's diagnostic section and see if I can't get some input from the other yogis.

Whatever this experience was, I can say this: I used to think of time as a stream with a future, present, and past. Now I think of time more like rain drops hitting a pool of still water. Each moment arises from zero, exists in the briefest possible sense (and even then is in flux) and then is totally gone. Huh.