Time: 45 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting Burmese-style with my hands on my knees, and exploring the jhanic arc using a samatha approach. I'll indicate what I think each bit of narrative corresponds to in terms of access concentration (AC) or jhana number (J#) by this method.

Experience: I closed my eyes and settled attention on the pleasant sensation of my body hanging from my skeletal structure (AC). Attention would occasionally wander, but gentle noting of this was sufficient to bring it back to the pleasantness, so there was a little effort involved (J1). Then effort fell away and the pleasant sensation blossomed into physical rapture. I focused on this rapture and it increased. It felt great and there was a little light show behind my eyelids (J2). After a while the physicality of the rapture became tedious. The immediacy of the rapture faded but didn't dissipate entirely, and my awareness and emotional state became still and  more spacious than previously (J3). Then the physicality of the rapture faded entirely and the still and spacious qualities of my mental experience came to the fore (J4). There was a sort-of blip in my attention, and although still experiencing the equanimity of J4, I was also perceiving the three dimensionality of space - it was vast (J5). A sense of unity with the spaciousness of space developed and awareness expended out to the edges of space (J6). Oddly, this unity got to be kind of boring pretty quickly, and awareness folded briefly in on itself (J7). Awareness opened up again, but was sort of "facing a different direction than reality" so that what I perceived wasn't quite reality but wasn't quite not reality either - this state was brief (J8). Then I felt a pressure at my brow chakra and I felt calm and loved (J9). The pressure crawled up my forehead to my crown chakra, which felt like it opened up and poured out well-being down my head and torso as my visual field glowed a light gray (J10). Then the pressure at my crown crawled back down my forehead to my brow chakra and it felt like my body began to vibrate with "something" from my prostate area to my brow chakra (J11). Then the vibrations spread up and included my crown chakra (J12). Then the order of all of the foregoing reversed itself, I descended down to AC, then slowly back up to J12, then to what I'm guessing is J13 - it was a place of just awareness. It wasn't rapturous or exciting. It was pure presence in this smooth, understated, totally sweet way. The the order reversed itself and I descended down to J2 when the session ended. 

Observations: I was pretty tired during this session, and about halfway through I decided that I would cut it short and take a nap . . . but I never quite got around to actually stopping. It was fun to ascend up the jhanic arc at a leisurely pace, just letting each transition happen on its own. I'm finding that each time I go through a jhana, I'm seeing a little bit more of it and seeing a little bit more of me experiencing it. Cool.