This is part of my Meditation Journal where you can find dozens of more posts like this.
Update 6 May 2025 – It’s funny to go back and read some of my older posts. You can see that memory is flawed a bit and the story changes over the years. I remember recently telling someone that a different conclusion happened in the scene below. I’ll go with this original writing though! We don’t think that memory changes. We know it fades, but it also changes quite a bit. This was 17 yrs ago. This was after something changed in my ‘normal’ way of functioning. Anyway… 🙂
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I meditated at the top of the temple again today and it was just so relaxing… the weather was great, cloudy and a cool wind blowing. I sat for 30 minutes or so… and at times there were periods of no thought, no mind… no body really. Nothing. No memory, thought, nothing… but that experience was sprinkled with a realization of the body returning sometimes. The eyes were mostly closed, but at times they opened. So I stood up and walked around the structure, looking at the mountains on one side and the plains on the other…
I became aware of a feeling that the eyes should focus on one spot – opened, and concentrate all focus there. This was not a conscious feeling, nor a voice. I’ve experienced something like this before, yet this was different. The video might explain better. While focusing on one spot on the side of the mountain I had an experience unlike any before…
I’ve had 2-dimensional experiences before but this one was different in its scale.
Update: I forgot to continue the experience after I put the video link above. I have attention deficit disorder and sometimes that happens. Ok, here is the rest of what happened…
I focused on a point on the side of a mountain – a limestone karst here in Krabi, Thailand that was just a random spot on the mountain where my eyes naturally went directly in front of me and lower than I was vertically. There was no thought in the mind. The scene in front of me began to change.
There was some strangeness going on with the visual aspect of the mountain. Incredibly, though at the time my mind was not moved by it – just watched, the entire scene in front me – my whole field of vision turned from 3 dimensions to 2 dimensions. It started with the mountain which quickly turned into a 2-D image. I looked around at everything within my field of view – it was all the same, just 2-dimensions. I continued to look at the scene. It was if my field of view was now a painting.
Nothing was moving – the trees were too far away to see move if they were. There was nothing in front of me because I was standing on a Buddhist altar type structure at the far north side. There was nothing but some sharp rocks below me, beyond that a huge valley, and the mountain in front of me.
So as I watched the scene the mountain began to get lines running through it. I realized the mountain was turning into a jigsaw puzzle. It made pieces of a puzzle that could all be fit together and form the scene. I continued to watch.
The pieces of the puzzle started shaking – I could see white behind the pieces as they shook hard like they were going to fall down into a big heap. What was beyond the 2-D scene – ? What was the white area? It was strange and I cut the scene off before it could go further. It’s funny to say it, but on this day I had kind of had enough of these experiences. I’d already decided that enlightenment wasn’t a worthwhile goal. It wasn’t something to be sought after. If it was going to happen right now at this moment, I didn’t care. But I didn’t let it happen either. So, I guess I cared enough to stop it?
I stopped it by turning around and the scene though at first two dimensional turned back to 3-D and I was without thought for a time.
That was about it… I walked back down the steps in silence, went to eat my usual fried rice at my usual restaurant, and went about the rest of my night…
This is part of my Meditation Journal where you can find dozens of more posts like this.