EXPERIENCES OF AWAKENING ~ Sheng Yen

 John Tan/Thusness said “This is very good.  Instead of self-view, u must learn to "plant" the seeds of anatta, DO, emptiness at that mind state.”

Andre A Pais shared:

EXPERIENCES OF AWAKENING ~ Sheng Yen 

At this stage, your mind is so concentrated that the act of meditation itself—both the counting of the number and the presence of the breath—is forgotten. As the mind becomes truly calm and concentrated, the act of effortful meditation itself seems coarse and distracting. Letting go of it, number and breath vanish, and body, breath, and mind meld into a single unity. 

At this point, you may feel as though spatial distinctions no longer pertain among body, mind, and the world. The opposition between self and other people seems to vanish, and the boundary between the internal and external dissolves. The previous sense of dividedness is replaced by a feeling of pure and harmonious being that is so wondrous as to be indescribable. 

This is the basic experience of samadhi, or what we variously refer to as "meditative absorption," "unified mind," and "one-pointedness of mind." However, there are many levels of samadhi, some shallow, some deep. They can range from the simple and relatively shallow experience of purity and oneness described above, to experiences of infinite light and sound, boundless space, limitless consciousness, limitless emptiness, and even the inconceivable experiences of enlightenment described in such Buddhist scriptures as the Avatamsaka, or Huayan, Sutra. 

Regardless of how sublime the content, such states of meditative absorption are still defiled by the presence of discriminating thought and attachment. This defilement is none other than the subtle sense of "selfhood." At deeper levels of samadhi, the mind becomes so supple and powerful that even the subtlest thought is experienced on an extraordinarily vast scale. Because attachment to self is still operating in samadhi, samadhi actually entails the magnification of self to a cosmic scale. 

The experiences of limitless consciousness, bliss, being, and other feelings associated with samadhi are actually the projections of what we call the "great or expanded sense of self." Until this particular impediment is removed, enlightenment has not dawned and one is still subject to the bonds of deluded existence. Samadhi experiences of this ilk will be no more than a mundane or worldly samadhi, and the spiritual insights generated from them, a mundane wisdom still tainted by defiling outflows.