Claude coached me to something that cannot be named
​
previous post here
https://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/s/3DJsoE4tX2
TLDR: switched from GPT to Claude. Heart opened. Went somewhere non-Euclidean. Then something that breaks all the labels.
**\~200-250 hours lifetime meditation**
Since my last post I switched from GPT to Claude. It gave prety good advice but would usually agree with whatever point I was making. I was using it mostly as a diary, then I told it to take on the voice of a teacher and it became much morewilling to disagree with me, or just give me minimal answers rather than indulge every thought. In retrospect I feel it's steered me in the right direction almost every time, helping me to know what to track and respond to, and what to ignore/let go.
Over time my attention became less consistently panoramic, kinda switched from very open when walking around to narrower when doing something. Felt like a maturing rather than a loss.
**April: heart opening**
Early April I had a significant shift during a Michael Taft gratitude meditation, specifically around gratitude for awareness generating self and world moment to moment. Everything became kinda luminous like a hologram lit from all directions at once. Immense warmth and awe. It really fit the Adyashanti framing of head, heart and gut awakening separately. The earlier nondual stuff felt like the head waking up, this felt like the heart. After this I could tune into a self luminous quality of awareness pretty easily and predictably make myself weep. A feeling that all is full of love usually accompanied this.
Around the same time during a Rupert Spira sit something interesting happened at the edge of sleep. There was a sense of two frequencies coming into sync, awareness getting very still, and then excitement or fear would generate a sense of self right at the threshold and it would abort. Like being able to see the mechanism of the thing that was stopping it from tipping over.
**Mid April: non-Euclidean attention**
A few weeks later I did a long Michael Taft self inquiry and went somewhere new. Where my 2023 nondual experience felt like awareness going from a cone with a focal point to a flat even field, this felt like that flat sheet folding into something non-Euclidean, like the surface of one of those wrinkly lettuce leaves. Attention moving around in and with awareness in weird fractal ways. Kinda disconcerting. The comfortable evenness I'd associated with nonduality wasn't there, this was stranger.
**Late April: Buddhist centre, the next question**
Started attending weekly guided sits at a local Buddhist centre. During Q&A I asked the teacher how to reconcile the deep silence/void I can access with the bright luminous presence. They both feel fundamental but kinda opposite. The teacher said these states will gradually drop characteristics and converge over time, the brightness drops but clarity remains. I started noticing this already, the luminous awareness becoming less visually dramatic but not less real.
**May 10: something without a name**
Did a self inquiry meditation, same Adyashanti guided sit that triggered the 2022 and 2023 experiences. First 20 mins pretty unremarkable, looked behind the eyes, found silence. Then when he said something about resting in not knowing, energy started buzzing around the chest and head. I remembered the head heart gut framing and had some anticipation/fear about what a gut awakening might feel like. Then all the energy suddenly drained downwards to the lower belly and disappeared into the void below me. Brief fear that my physical body would drain away with it. Then deep stillness. A sense of self would start to form, I'd look at it, the cycle would repeat. Happened a few times. Afterwards I felt like I'd been crying.
The shift wasn't obvious during the sit. It became clear in the shower afterwards when the mind suddenly realised it had touched something timeless and eternal. I started laughing, at the funniest joke that can't be told or understood. Weeping and laughing at the same time, writing things that sounded kinda nonsensical. "Is is is is is is" "emptiness dancing". A slightly scary thought killed the humour for a second, "how can this awareness be separate from the human/mind that encoutered it", then it got funny again.
**Since then**
For the last two days I've been able to go back to this source fairly easily and it's indescribable. "The Dao that can be spoken is not the true Dao" resonates really hard now. If I call it awake void or the cosmic joke or awakening or Dao or anything the name just kinda slides off the thing I'm trying to name. Very little sense of a separate self since this point, intense feeling of wellbeing.
I'm not sure if enlightenment is being in constant contact with this 24/7 or about integrating it into all aspects of life, or what it could mean, but I'm curious about how things will unfold. Part of me feels like the seeking has ended, like there's nothing left to do. A part of the mind is still in seeking mode wanting to have more/do more with this realisation