Having one of those 'might have been useful to have had some formal training at some point' rounds with my meditation practice again.
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Months ago, some weird and unsettling effects of meditation appeared very suddenly in the midst of my divorce.
I developed strange sensitivities to sensory input that would come and go, but felt distinctly like a new type of experience.
Imagine thought, or feeling, but neither.
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They felt most of all like spontaneous formations of meaning around sensory experience. Like some sort of... semantic synaesthesia?
E.g. A smell would carry a symbolic significance, and this symbol would interact those of other experiences.
Like thought patterns, but not.
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Accompanying this were a few more things. A tendency to switch rapidly between levels of resolution was one.
E.g. a very faint sound would become a dominant sense object that was perceived with extreme clarity, then attention would dissipate into the environment, then back.
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Any self-identification would also become very slippery and loose.
I'd spend most of my time lacking any definable centerpoint to my experience. No 'me'.
This would then spontaneously form around distinct experiences, and vanish just as suddenly. Me, no-me, smell-me, pain-me...
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Some experiences that went along with this were capital U unpleasant.
A whiff of coal that felt malicious and hostile, a darkness that hungered... ominous cracks in experience that often felt somehow sentient and aware of my presence.
Not a very happy change to felt experience.
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I quickly decided that this was a kind of going crazy I wasn't entirely up for, and decided to not feel that way.
So all of a sudden, I didn't. No warning, no fanfare. All of these new things I described above disappeared, all at once.
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None of these things fit comfortably into my models of what meditation is supposed to do, except a vaguely sketched HERE BE DRAGONS.
Thus, I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with them. Halfway expecting a Shinzen Young-esque period of seeing giant bugs everywhere next.
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