Testimonies of the A&P- New Article for Hamilton Project

Hi guys,

I want to write an article to accompany the recent podcasts we had on the A&P. We will next follow on with several podcasts exploring the dark night onto equanimity and stream entry.

But first I would like to get some testimonies from any of our members here. For the benefit of all who read the blog and this place, i want to collect a number of testimonies of when yogis experienced their first A&P. The phenomenology of the experience. How it felt, what sort of things occurred. How did it change your life and/or practice? Then I will include it in the article for yogis out there in the world wondering what the A&P can entail. If you can, just write a paragraph or two on your first experience of the A&P in this thread. Posting here means it WILL be used in the article. Much appreciated!

Mudita,

Nick

"Spent yesterday feeling amazing. Doing normal routine things had a totally different feel. Kissing my girlfriend felt incredible. There was no me getting in the way (on the mind level) and it felt like everything was so free flowing. There were still pains and aches and hunger and the like, but even those were seen in the context of the whole of which they were only a small part and as such there was no suffering from the pain."

that's about all I wrote about it the first time I crossed it while working on my journal. That day was amazing. I was running and jumping around like a madman. I felt so good and energized it was crazy. The next day or so was a cooling off period and then the dukkha nanas hit hard. I felt so bad about losing that state at the time.

I think the first time I ever encountered it was while taking psilocybin in Amsterdam. I had been reading some books about consciousness and the brain leading up to that. I had taken a hard athiestic stance and was interested in trying to figure out how consciousness worked. There was always some missing something that books werent explaining. I had a huge spiritual experience the day I took those mushrooms, and I felt as if I had been given some answer. After a manic/hilarious/energetic period, reality sort of came apart completely and all that seemed to be left was bare awareness. It reassembled itself and the afterglow was just exquisite (I just lay there crying, awestruck, full of peace and joy. Everything was profound and amazing. That put me on the path of nondualism/meditation/buddhism etc. There was something I knew now I didn't know before and I never doubted it since then or even now. I still can't put it into words exactly, but it became the most important thing in my life to try and figure out or get back to that place/realization or to express it in some way.

First A&P on a Goenka retreat:
Sat for 2 hours without moving, through some very intense pain. Got up, opened my eyes and felt like it's the first time I'm really seeing human beings for what they are. Looking at my legs felt strange, like I was some sort of animal. Strong faith in Enlightenment and so on arose. Felt like just laughing out loud and saying to the guy in my room: 'This is funny to be silent, ey?!'
I became truly inspired to continue working towards enlightenment, though the rhetoric at the Goenka centres was putting me down, that it is close to impossible - but I should just keep meditating. 6 months later I found Daniel Ingram's book, so I was much better knowing of the maps.

Second A&P: Sat through some intense pain on a Goenka Satipatthana retreat, and then my whole body melted into intense pleasant vibrations. I could see how the mind is also vibrations, arising and passing. Then after sitting still for 2 hours without moving, because everything was just so pleasurable, fear starting coming up - Oh no! this is going to disappear. and sure enough, I entered the creepy dark night full of suffering. Came home and made a mess of things with my girlfriend, couldn't sleep all night, heard freaky voices from the wall

I believe that I first crossed the A&P when I was about seven years old.

I used to take a word (I'd just learned to write in school) and repeat it endlessly, disassembling it into letters and sounds until it felt strangely meaningless and disconnected, floating by itself, as it were. I found it fun to "destroy" that word in this way, and usually did this at bed time because I wasn't tired yet. So one night, as I was dozing off, looking at the wardrobe door, I had this vivid half-awake experience: God tossed the entire globe of the world at me, from in front of the wardrobe door, yet far away, several times, but I failed to catch it. I myself felt oddly huge, out of proportion, watching myself somehow, from a perspective of great distance. And all this was accompanied by a soundtrack like the first few bars of Jimi Hendrix' "foxy lady" at full blast. I was awake afterwards, and really scared, if I remember correctly.

Cheers,
Florian

Excellent so far!

Keep em coming! I'd love for some of the newer members to get on board and share some of their experinces. For the benefit of others!!!!!

Rather than post about my first A&P (LSD trip), I will instead post an episode which really sucked, as it was since then I didn't think so fondly of A&P anymore.

This was my second A&P revisit since having gotten myself into dark night, and I still thought that A&P was the best thing ever. I was a euphoric jumble of super self-confidence, and in a "let's party hard all night" kind of mood. I was immensely charismatic, and people would always slip into a trance when I spoke, sucking up the pleasure-vibes.

At some point that night, I started psycho-analysing a friend of mine, using the full extent of my charisma and enhanced discursive abilities to point out to him certain bad habits he had, certain personality traits, if you will. I was so clever and merciless in my description, that I caused him to feel uncomfortable with himself.

What an arrogant brute I was that night! How easy it was for me, under the euphoric high of A&P, to put myself in the position of the alpha male, stepping all over other people, dispensing judgements left and right! That episode certainly contributed towards my acquired dislike of A&P.

My 1st one at 15 may have been something of a group A&P, in a church service during a youth retreat. It was 1969 and I had no drug experience at that point. Gazing at a mural of Jesus I fell into a vivid dream and woke in an unselfconscious trance. I saw human-like images that looked like neon lights or shadows. A bolt of energy filled my head (I thought it was from God), and for the first time I felt I knew a higher love than ordinary human emotions. Reflecting on that brought me back to self-consciousness, and I turned to look at a teen standing next to me who appeared like a being of light with translucent layers extending both within and out from her ordinary appearance layer. Talking with some other teens in the summer night outside, several reported spiritual experiences. And while we were talking, we had an extended encounter with a vision of Jesus. What stuck with me was how confused and untransformed I felt while encountering a full blown vision of a deity, compared to the inner experience of a blast of love which seemed to change everything, inner and outer, even if just for a moment. Not long after that my social identity came unglued, I became volatile and got kicked out of school, ended up changing all of my friends and seeking out psychedelics (didn't know about meditation yet). I guess that was dark night and start of the search.

My second A&P at 16 was also shared. A friend and me were doing MDA and experienced incredible orgasmic bliss followed by hours of calm but touching feelings of love for humanity. Sat in a dry cleaner and restaurant (but couldn't eat) and just watched people lovingly for some time. Later in my room we started falling into an accelerated verbal questioning that culminated in an inner explosion that felt like being blasted far into vast expanses of space at fantastic speed. There was no question that we had experienced this simultaneously. Our ordinary frame of reference felt blown apart. Though we were fairly enthusiastic acid heads, this left drug experiences in the dust. So, we flushed all our remaining hits of the MDA down the toilet. Had some regret about that the next day, but we ended up quitting psychedelics anyway and both found out about Zen and tried unsuccessfully to find a way to become Zen monks. Maybe because this experience was artificially induced and I didn't have any training for it, my next 2 years were a hell of trying to hang onto my sanity as life lost its sense of reality and meaning. (Later I worked in the intake ward of the local psychiatric hospital and saw some young acid heads who evidently didn't have as much good fortune getting through that territory.) My friend didn't have such an intense dark night-like time. He was motivated to go to several sesshin but eventually lost interest in meditation.

It wasn't until a year ago that I had my next obvious A&P at a vipassana retreat. Had a charisma experience like Bruno reported and was amazed to see that even strangers (like cashiers) were affected by it, but that wore off in a couple of days. The subjective impact lasted for a couple of months. The year since then has been psychologically and physically pretty volatile, even though it was a gentle A&P. And I didn't really succeed in integrating that retreat experience into my daily life. I wouldn't want a drug A&P again, but I could still go for the retreat version. Haven't yet had a big one like that in everyday life practice.

Excellent¡ Keep em coming¡

"I believe that I first crossed the A&P when I was about seven years old.

I used to take a word (I'd just learned to write in school) and repeat it endlessly, disassembling it into letters and sounds until it felt strangely meaningless and disconnected, floating by itself, as it were. I found it fun to "destroy" that word in this way, and usually did this at bed time because I wasn't tired yet. So one night, as I was dozing off, looking at the wardrobe door, I had this vivid half-awake experience: God tossed the entire globe of the world at me, from in front of the wardrobe door, yet far away, several times, but I failed to catch it. I myself felt oddly huge, out of proportion, watching myself somehow, from a perspective of great distance. And all this was accompanied by a soundtrack like the first few bars of Jimi Hendrix' "foxy lady" at full blast. I was awake afterwards, and really scared, if I remember correctly.

Cheers,
Florian"

Florian, wow...I would do that too, repeating a word over and over in bed when I was very young, I would guess aroung 7 or 8. I would use a 2 syllable word like "table", and repeat it till it "hummed out". My memory of this is very distinct. I once asked my mother "What do you call it when a word isn't a word anymore?", much to her bafflement. Other than that, I never mentioned it to anyone. Years later when I heard about mantras, it immediatly thought of this.

I remember having dreams with all sorts of colors, of which my memories are not as distinct, and I don't remember the color dreams and word repetition as being tied together. I don't recall anything that stands put as a distinct A&P type of phenomena though.

Eric

Hey, what a great idea to share these kinds of stories. I'm amazed at what I've read by everyone so far, and find it very nice to be among some like-minded human beings! Here's to all of us on our own weird, glorious journeys!
I can recall a number of events starting from childhood that seem to fit the bill for A&P, but a truly decisive event for me was actually a powerful dream I had when I was 12 or 13 years old, and before any real contact with contemplation practice, drugs, or religion. It began as an ordinary dream, running, interacting with people, the usual stuff. Lucidity began to set in as I found myself climbing a huge mountain, into it's misty peaks- up there was "God's House", an amazingly beautiful structure that was at once a natural landscape, but also a home, built in the ancient, traditional asthetics of Chinese royalty, with paper screens and wooden floors. Almost like an optical illusion, inside was outside, and vice versa. Eventually I lost fascination with this place, and went to the edge of a massive precipice, looking out over an endless horizon of clouds and mountains. Somewhere out there, I heard what I knew was a crane calling, it's voice ringing out to me from somewhere beyond sight. This sound struck me like nothing else, shaking me to my core. Everything fell away, startling at first, but then extremely peaceful, as what was left, of course, was just simple awareness.
I woke from the dream with that feeling still in me, and it didn't leave for something like a week. Like others have said, it had a profound impact on charisma, and I walked around like a little self-proclaimed saint, and others obviously noticed and enjoyed this! It gave me an interesting reputation for a while after that, but eventually the DN hit in a big way, and things got rough and rocky indeed. I do beleive that the following 15 years has been a search, in one way or another, to hear that clear sound again.

Bump! Come on yogis who havent participated! Just a short paragraph about your first A & P please!!!!!!
For the benefit of others!!


Nick

I honestly don't remember the first one, but they began happening to me while I was in grad school and it was like I was leading a double life.

By day I was a mild-mannered psychology student. Doing research, writing papers, seeing clients, and by night I was this cosmonaut of inner space having experiences that made no sense according to the psychological theories that I was studying. I couldn't tell anyone that at night I was having intense experiences of lights, waves of blissful energy rupturing through me, and joy like I'd never known, because they would have thought I was crazy! The irony of all that has really stayed with me.

Hm, mine sounds pretty chessy, but here it is:
I was about 23, meditating visualizing lights and colors and all that Vajrayana jazz, when all of a sudden I felt I was one with the whole universe. It felt so peaceful for a few minutes, and then there was a light that appeared in front of me and was blinding. Nothing else could be seen. I asked to my self: is this God? and my reply from the light was "I am the one that is" and I started shaking in a seizure-like way. I started crying uncontrollably and the inner bliss of being right there before God was such that I thought I was going to pass out. I remember thinking "this is it! that is it!", "this has to be the ultimate" , "this bliss and joy can only be experienced once one is in direct contact with the almighty source of the everything" "i have arrived" "that's it". I probably spent 2-3 weeks feeling like the luckiest most spiritual being on earth.

About 2-3 months after, my awesome manic depressive and suicidal dark night stage began.

I've been wondering, is an A&P exactly the same thing as a kundalini awakening in Pragmatic Dharma talk? Separate but often related? In either case....

I was on a trip in Albany, NY in 1993 (age 18) to see the Grateful Dead play. I had been going to some retreats during the previous year, but was unable to meditate because I was too depressed (not a dark night, just a good old-fashioned depression). The trip to Albany involved my smoking quite a bit of pot, so by the end of the trip I was very relaxed. I remember making the decision to sit up in my hotel room bed and actually try to meditate on my own.

A few minutes in I began to experience a vibrating sensation in my hands. I was amazed. I drove home that night and sat up to meditate in my room. At some point I felt this pressure build in my back and, suddenly, it just released. There was a rush of energy and fluid up my back and it started beating up against the inside of my skull. I remember getting this image of pistons churning away--pounding in my head like you see in those oil-for-your-engine commercials. It must have lasted a few minutes. The psychological response was a little bit of awe and a lot of real fear. I did not take it well; I remember right afterwords feeling this terrible feeling that I would have to become a monk.

On the upside, I remember sitting in my high school math class the next day with this buzzing energy coming out of my hands. It was quite a shocker--very surreal. I remember thinking that everything everybody had ever told me seemed like a lie, because no one had ever told me about any of this.

I don't remember my first a&p but I am in now the most prolonged period of its effects...I have been feeling a&p like euphoria for the last 9 days now! In this stage the most mundane things have become totally euphoric. When my girlfriend talks about her new job I get the total bliss of happiness that I imagine parents get when their children takes its first step. I could cry when I watch an elderly woman smile. I rubbed both my tired legs the other day talking to them like they were dogs, all the time bursting with love and gratitude for their service to me. Yup, bursting with gratitude for my legs!

Metta to all on their journeys!
-Chris

Hi Nick,
My first A&P came during my period of meditation when I had no idea what I was doing. I had not yet encountered D. Ingram or Kenneth. So I'm sitting immersed in my usual strongly visual orientated meditations filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful sights and scenes when suddenly I experienced two double dips on the out breath followed almost instantaneously with a full electrification of the body. Life seemed wonderful for about ten days when I started feeling like my mind was beginning to slip and then the Dark Knight hit like a steam train. A&P events there after were marked by electrifying body experiences and or bright flashes of white or golden light.
Paul

I was in college and had started sitting with a transmission-based raja yoga group. The preceptor, as they were called, would have you sit alone with him in a room and you would both stare at a mid point in the floor. Who knows what was actually going on, as far as an actual transmission, but the suggestion was very strong. I can remember feeling pressure at the third eye and kind of a floating sensation even as I walked to the student center to go to my first meeting with this group. That struck me as really odd. At this time I was devouring Krishnamurti's works and so after awhile I started feeling really in conflict about my participation in this guru-centered raja yoga group. So even as I was sitting with this group, I was going on long walks/solitary sits by myself and just trying to listen with complete attention to the silence that is beyond sounds or words, and to look with unfocused eyes upon the landscape before me. [cont.]

[cont. from above]
One evening at about dusk, during the winter, with all of the trees black against the sky, I went and sat cross legged next to a still pond in a park and just stared and stared, listened and listened. Without warning a blast of energy shot from the base of my spine and seemed to course up my body with incredible power. The top of my head--all of these little undiscovered and uknown chakras up there--just blew open and then I just completely disappeared. There really was only this silent landscape and nothing else. The sensate world did not disappear. No void or anything--just this. I'm not sure how much time passed. It was just exactly like what Daniel describes in MCTB. I remember wondering whether I'd attained enlightenment. "Will this last?" I went back to my apartment and I could hear this band jamming across the street. I remember these waves of both compassion and revulsion coming over me: "How can we all be missing this!? It's RIGHT HERE." Just as Daniel describes, I became extremely devout and "religious." Someone told me that his girlfriend had said to him, "He looks at you like a religious servant or something." Ha!
We know what happens next: Nothing compared to that experience, which I kept unsuccessfully trying to get back. Just as Daniel describes, I eventually drifted, confused, to a dharma center. Trungpa's teachings on opening to all sensations--boredom, fear, contraction, etc.--were helpful, but I eventually reached a point of total disgust with both myself and the center and other sangha members. I couldn't even look at a picture of a monk without feeling complete revulsion. It was just stunning to me that I could be dealing with depression, yet again, after that A&P and what it had taught me. I felt like such a failure--a coward who didn't have what it takes to stick it out in the dharma. If I had only known, explicitly, about the dark night!

Found my old notebook last night, where I wrote down what happened where I hit the A&P the first time. It was at my first zen sesshin, when I was sort of a lurker on DHO and here, but not all that familiar with the way meditation is discussed here. This is a summary of the notes I wrote down when I got back from the retreat:

I got there Monday evening and the pressure built steadily. By Thursday afternoon, I was really stressed and anxious, I had the feeling of needing something, like I'd been holding my breath and forgotten how to breath in. At the Thursday afternoon dharma talk, the teacher discussed the first noble truth, and how it was a joyful thing. (I don't remember exactly how this was explained). He also said "we're already dead!" and laughed as if it was a big joke. This really got to me. I was sick and tired of the neediness and the anxiety and just wanted to end, to breathe in, to feel some relief.

After the talk, we had a sitting period, and I gave myself permission to really go after the anxiety, in the sense of finding out what it wanted, what the root of it was so that I could either stop it or satisfy it, or something. I didn't know what, I just wanted it gone so badly. My brow got really tense and there was the feeling of energy being blocked. I screamed at it in my head "you're not real!" The pressure built and built and then there was a moment where it felt like a limit had been reached and I had an urge to step back and allow space for something to occur. I did so and space arose around the tension, but the anxiety was still there. Then the bell rang and it was time for diner.

(cont)

I'm sitting at the dining table, and the anxiety's still with me, this urging rush, this need for something. My attention's on the anxiety, trying to somehow deal with it, when the phrase "stillness speaks" pops into my head. I'd read Tolle's book but not recently. It was a surprise to have it come up, as if put into my head. I thought to myself, "so what would it say?", and heard a voice clearly respond "watch me". I turned my attention to my experience as if I were about to watch a performance. There was a pause, and then the feeling of bubbles or boxes or something opening out from my mind. Each bubble/box contained a larger bubble/box within it, and the space grew as each opened. Space/stillness expanded, like watching a sped-up video of mold growing. Sort of bloop, bloooop, BLOOOP!

The whole thing wasn't something I did, or really knew I was doing, it just sort of happened and I responded to it. And at this point (FWIW) my notebook says "I realized that my thoughts are not real and I remembered that the distractions of the external world are not real". There was the feeling that all thoughts were just puppets I played with because I didn't like reality. It all fell away.

I jumped up from the table, threw my dish in the washing bin, and ran up to the graveyard. remembering, I guess, that "we're already dead!". I sat on a large rock in the middle of the graveyard, and there was this pop, sitting there, this moment of pure awareness. It was the experience of everything as awareness, flowing out of me with absolutely no barriers between the sensations of "me" and the sensations of everything else. It faded quickly, but I laughed at that, because I knew it wasn't something that I could lose. It was a taste of the truth of things. And after that, I knew, this **** is real, and it can happen to people like me.

Wow nice one Ian,
That story really had me going, very visual thanks for that!

cheers

Thanks Guys,

For all those yogis who haven't contributed a paragraph about your first A and P experience, I offer to include you in any boom boom metta generating sessions I wish to do over the next 3 months if you do write soemthing. Please say something about your experience for the benefit of others!!!

at the risk of not being a recipient of a Nikolai boom boom metta session: I believe this was my first a&p though I could be wrong. This was back in '93 so it's a rough sketch. I had been living at Esalen institute for 3 years, learning and receiving tons of bodywork, all kinds of groups, shamanic stuff, regular meditation, it was an amazing time, and I was primed for something. Then I went alone to Guatemala and stayed in a bungalow for 6 weeks and did lots of yoga and meditation. My body was very open and sensitive, and meditations were getting increasingly vivid. One morning tuning into very subtle breathing in the sacral area, which was abnormally blissful, my entire spine erupted into an all out orgasm, or so it felt. There was nothing subtle about it, it was out of control extreme gushing, emanating throughout my body. I was completely dumbfounded, as it came out of nowhere, I had no idea such an experience was possible, it kept going, getting more and more intense, I don't know how long, maybe 20 minutes, maybe half hour. This was in the middle of a period of 10 days in which meditations were markedly profound for me. It seemed to mark the start of a big change in my life. For one I felt an enormous amount of compassion. For the next weeks I felt very at home in my body, very relaxed, very intimate with breathing, meditation was a great ally as I returned to Esalen, where things eventually went into turmoil. I broke up with my girlfriend which was both liberating and agonizing, left Esalen, and later that year ended up in India and went much much deeper into meditation, including finding an enlightened teacher, as well as having extraordinary times in every way, most originating at Osho's ashram.