Would you recommend if we have a moment of pure clarity?
Or enlightenment seeing through the veil.
Does the mind catalogue this as growth?
It's a tough one because I cannot verify internally what's happening inside of you.
Because there's.
.
.
There's something that happens with the mind.
It tries to throw up a variety of different things to get you away from the focus.
It's like we're trying to tame an animal and it's like,
Hey,
Come back to focus,
Come back to focus,
Come back to focus.
And it is doing whatever it can to avoid that containment.
Initially,
It will throw up random thoughts and then it will throw up pain and memory and trauma and other things.
And if that doesn't work,
It tries tiredness.
And you get through that,
And then what does it have left?
Pleasure.
Yeah?
It tries all of these different things and you'll be meditating and then there's this pleasure feeling that comes.
Now,
Ooh,
This is good.
Is this,
Does this mean,
Ooh,
This is the thing,
Right?
But it can be a bit of a trick or a trap.
Your mind's throwing up more stuff to get you away from it.
And rather than being mindful of what's happening,
You fall into pleasure.
You're no longer mindful.
Now I'm not saying that's what's happening in your example there or in that question.
But it could be,
Because.
.
.
And you read a whole variety of different people's first-person experiences of pure clarity,
Of enlightenment,
Of seeing through the veil.
And the words they use sound very pleasurable.
Sounds like this is a good feeling.
But then you're also aware that those good feelings are themselves something to be observed mindfully.
It's like,
Oh,
There are good feelings present here.
Return back to focus upon the breath.
Return back to observation of the mind where it's at.
It's very easy to identify aversion and to sort of go,
Okay,
I'm responding to an aversive,
A bad,
A negative stimulus.
But tiredness?
And also particularly.
Pleasurable experiences are harder.
But that said,
There have been moments,
Quite a number of moments in my experience of clarity,
Of seeing through,
Of insight,
Of expansion,
Of enlightenment.
Moments of these sort of feelings.
The primary one that I'm recalling,
There's actually two.
I was watching my son play.
Play with some cars when he was maybe one or two.
Just lining them up.
I was watching him and in that moment,
It's almost like who I was just disappeared and it was just the moment.
Just watching him play,
Everything disappeared.
And those just it was just a happening.
Now after that experience,
I felt this wave of like,
You could say joy,
You could say elation,
You could say a variety of other sort of synonyms of,
But it felt good.
But during the moment?
It was just a happening.
It just was like.
.
.
I wasn't there.
But everything was there.
It's hard to put this into words.
It was just a happening.
And there was no feeling,
But it wasn't an absence of feeling.
It was just,
Yeah,
Clarity or just a happening.
And another experience happened when I was doing a Vipassana retreat.
Sitting in strong determination,
Not moving the body.
And there's a lot of pain that can come.
Deep physical pain,
It felt like a fire knife stabbing into me.
But you sit with it,
You sit with it,
You sit with it,
And then all of a sudden.
.
.
It disappears?
And once again that feeling of just open expanse clarity.
And now even thinking back,
There's been other moments.
Went and meditated at 8pm.
Listening to the waves crashing upon the shore upon the structure.
Once again,
Just a moment of clarity.
Emptiness,
But not apathy.
And the more I think,
The more I realize there are these moments.
But what I've noticed now that I'm contemplating on those moments is that sometimes they last a long time,
Sometimes they're fleeting.
But the moment my mind starts to go,
Oh,
It's one of these moments,
I'm out of the moment.
I'm thinking about the moment.
I'm no longer mindful.
It's like,
Ooh,
That was a cool experience,
Which is a memory,
Which is a thought.
There might be latent feelings of pleasure in those moments.
But I guess what's happening in that moment is the pleasure of the moment.
That come down from that sort of clarity moment.
I know I'm speaking in circles here,
But it's hard to try and sort of put something that's a bit beyond words into words,
Which is why when you read the accounts of these experiences,
They feel trippy,
They feel abstract,
They feel a bit confusing.
In terms of the second part of the question though,
Does the mind catalogue this as growth?
Yeah,
Right?
It is catalogued as growth.
It's like,
Ooh,
This is good.
This means something.
Once again,
That's still a judgment.
So we return back,
Return back,
Return back to the focus of the breath,
Because to hunt those experiences results in them not coming.
You cannot hunt that experience.
It's impossible.
You must just simply
