How should I describe the state when, through the deepest meditation I am capable of — through focus so deep it becomes unpleasant, and through the exhausting steering of attention from within, where the slightest impulse the size of the Planck constant distracts you — I deliberately induce peak experiences at the very edge of perception's width?
At this moment, my whole body begins to tremble, my chest tightens, my face goes numb, and my eyelids flutter. My lips tighten without the slightest effort, as if on their own. A slight cold in the limbs due to constricted vessels, a trance-like hum in the ears from the track in the background. Tears appear, almost sobbing. There is a temptation to block everything instantly, but this is just the last sentinel before death (of the ego). And all this happens without pain, without hyperventilation, without substances, in a static sitting posture. I initiate this solely with consciousness, somewhere around the fortieth minute of self-immersion, when I feel enough strength for the final push.
But this is not exactly a daily practice. Such a level of immersion costs me a great deal of will and energy. In other words, simply choosing to go there is perhaps the hardest thing I do in my life. I manage to achieve an experience of similar scale and purity perhaps once every six months. It is not something one wants to repeat often, because it is incredibly exhausting.
If I try to describe it at least somehow, I can say that at the peak, I feel maximal all-encompassing love and gratitude, and at the same time — fear and trembling before the grandeur of the Universe. There is actually no "I" there; it becomes everything, and as a separate entity, it is unnecessary there. It is simply dust blown away by this state. Before dissolving, it manages to emit some deepest impulses of gratitude, for which it receives the right to move further toward total dissolution. As if gratitude is its final ransom.
This is something that, when you try to describe it, puts up such strong resistance: it feels as if you are harming it just by trying to stuff it into leaky, soggy paper boxes named "words." They simply fly apart into shreds under the pressure of meaning, and you somehow paste those pieces onto the meaning later. These are just my naive attempts to convey at least the direction.
How is it even possible to experience something like this if our internal mechanisms are evolutionarily "wired" only for survival? After all, these sensations are not about survival at all. This is something that moves me toward an incredibly powerful core, which is perhaps not internal at all. Every such surge seems to bring me closer to it, granting a wider vision later, which manifests at a distance: the ability to perceive this world deeper, to be even more present, to switch modes of being more freely during life in the mundane. It is like a step, but in some other dimension that does not fit into words.
The scale of these sensations goes far beyond the limits of my conditioned mind and hints that the unconditioned mind is completely boundless and, perhaps, even located outside the body. What is all this? I don't know. And I will do everything in my power to never find the answer and at the same time always seek it. For the game of seeking is far more interesting than placing anything of any scale there and closing those only doors to meaning.