An experience of the "mirror mind" phenomenon in a Mahamudra retreat with Daniel P Brown
And yet, I made two experiences that resembled very closely the description of "awakening" that is typical for the Buddhist Mahamudra tradition.
The first such experience happened in the course of a few minutes during an Ayahuasca ceremony. It happened spontaneously without any preparation, expectation or prior knowledge of Buddhism.
The second, which I describe here, happened in a proper meditation setting. It occurred during a 6 day Mahamudra retreat with Dr Daniel P Brown in 2011 (described here) and was likely triggered by the highly targeted instructions for mental operations given by the teacher.
These two experiences were not identical to each other, but they shared key characteristics.
I added a link to a similar but not identical in a previous Daniel P Brown Level 1 retreat by Charlie Morey, a well-known lucid dreaming teacher.
Meditation and psychedelic experience
My interest in Buddhism had been sparked by the mentioned mystic psychedelic experience three years before the retreat in 2021. It had sparked an interest in meditation as a possible way to "re-create" the particular psychedelic experience without substances. This used to be the common transition of many teachers of Buddhism in the 1960s who were introduced to mysticism through LSD. Let me just mention Jack Kornfield, Shinzen Young and Culadasa. Many more are mentioned in "Zig Zag Zen". For many years now, there is a conflict in Buddhist factions regarding whether psychedelics should have any role in speeding up or intensifying meditative insights. For me, there is no doubt that they can overlap and be supportive of each other.
Disclaimer on awakening!
Here is the warning in The Royal Seal of Mahamudra Vol 2, a key text for Mahamudra, to not brag about such experiences.
In brief, the borderline between an ephemeral experience and the realized essence is that when there is an experience—no matter how stably bliss and clarity may occur in the mind—its essence is not realized and its nature is not known. Experiences are stained by such conceptual mental stances as doubt, fixation on attributes, and clinging to superiority, as well as pride, self-importance, and verbally spouting one’s conviction.
So, what I write is not meant as bragging. I do not claim any achievement or "attainment" as the Buddhists call it. All I want to describe is a completely unexpected quasi psychedelic experience in an online meditation retreat.
The setting of the experience : a late night Zoom event
The retreat was an online Zoom event with a large number of participants around the globe. Due to the time difference between Germany and California, for me, I sat through a late evening / nightly event. I started at 21:00 and ended close to morning. This may have affected my receptivity.
I had a spacious and quiet yoga studio for myself.
My mental set before the experience: nearly movice
I came to the retreat with curiosity. I believe that I was "prepared" for the retreat in two ways:
Reading Culadasa
Starting at age 64, I had already done some meditation for a year, not very regular, but with increasing fascination, guided solely by Culadasa´s "The Mind Illuminated". This book is a compendium on concentration training (shamata).
Thus, I was somewhat familiar with some fundamental concepts and practices. Culadasa´s book had been excellent at providing a neurologically founded introduction to key concepts, such as the differentiated view on attention, awareness and metacognitive awareness as three pillars of consciousness.
However, I had never before been on a physical or virtual meditation retreat. Neither had I experienced the style of pointing-out instructions used by Daniel P Brown.
A mystical experience through Ayahuasca
But my mind was perhaps primed for special experiences through my mystical Ayahuasca experience two years before. The idea of priming the mind (the serotonin system) for meditative altered states through psychedelics is also mentioned by Shinzen Young as an explanation for his initial easy access to altered states in meditation.
Going into a trance
I remember on this day increasingly feeling like being in a hypnotic state.
This was surely an intended effect since Dr Brown has built hypnotic elements into the retreat. There is a deep connection between Mahamudra teaching and hypnosis.
When I think back, the entire meditation retreat had an air of trance for me. This is possibly true also for others participants since, in the times of sharing and asking, several participants had deep emotional moments and were in tears.
The mirror mind with Daniel P Brown teaching Mahamudra
I followed the verbal guidance of the teacher exactly, without thinking or trying to analyse. Dustin DiPerna, the senior co-teacher of Dr Brown, gave the pointing-out instructions in an extremely articulate way at the end of one of the typical 20 minutes guided meditations.
The next few minutes are not so easy to describe. I have a visual and emotional memory of them.
Suddenly my inner space somehow began to unfold as a giant luminous internal space that wrapped around the external space of the small room.
It slowly acquired a blue-ish luminescence. I had my eyes open, and I noticed that the lit physical room darkened down somewhat while inner space began to glow more and more intensely.
Somehow it felt as if my brain was going into an entirely different mode at the biological level (neurological research of brains during meditation shows that this is the case ). I had the distinct impression that "an additional module was coming on board". I could nearly "hear" the mind´s activity like an open burning gas flame.
I had the vague impression of approaching some kind of threshold, and I was careful to not interrupt the developing process of intensification by thinking. I guess this means that I had developed sufficient meta-cognitive introspective awareness. Thus, I was not completely lost in the experience but was monitoring it as it unfolded.
Then suddenly there was a kind of felt breakthrough. A wave of what I could call "recognition" developed within this blue-ish giant space. I use that term because it felt like that. The recognition came with a huge wave of an expansive felt "Ahh: THAT is how it is!" This phrase tries to capture the feeling. It resembled very much the description of the "Ahh.." that Dr Brown gives in his take on the Heart Sutra as the last stage of the entire Bhuddist path.
This recognition embodied the pointing-out instructions given at that moment. Their core was the instruction that
"awareness shows itself by itself through itself to itself".
This verbalisation, at that moment, had an immense effect on what was going on in me. My mind felt literally as it if it was looking at itself.
Reinforcing this "looking at itself", there now appeared an inner visual representation of this looking, as if the giant bluish space had somehow folded upon itself, consciously looking at itself and mirroring itself. There was only one consciousness reflecting itself through itself to itself.
I remember it very clearly, although at the time there wasn't really an observing self. Instead, my "I" was nothing else but this mirroring / reflecting / recognising itself process.
This very particular moment which lasted perhaps 10 seconds was identical in its experiential tone, and in the mirror / self reflection phenomenology to the "mirror" moment during my Ayahuasca retreat.
As in the Ayahuasca moment, this experience had a feeling tone of deepest sacredness, gratitude and coming home. Also, like in Charlie Morley´s experience, it was all perfect.
The coming home feeling was not like coming home from a day of work. It was more like coming home after a journey of a million years. It perhaps resembled some of the key metaphors in Mahamudra meditation teaching for that moment:
Mother and son meeting again after a long separation
Two people from one country, speaking one language in a country with a foreign language, meeting in another country and immediately recognising each other
And, in particular, the following one:
This singular and unique state of awareness can only be found within oneself. If that is the case, then, when one recognises one's essence, everything is brought together in a single moment within which a cognition is present that does not go beyond the knowledge of that singular essence, wich is rig pa. This is like a man and a woman who are in love and who meet together secretly in solitude in order to make love" (Garab Dorje)
The experience had no sexual overtone. If anything it could be described as bliss although there was no personal experiencer of bliss.
It's interesting though, that in the Tibetan literature sex is occasionally used as comparison :
Under "practicing the meditation with give special experiences", Shardza describes "familiarity"
The degree of bliss (caused by familiarity) is like a young girl first tasting sexual bliss. (S. T. Gyaltsen et al., 2022)
Afterwards: I am moved
The experience was utterly moving. I did not want to speak in the sharing. Instead I left the meeting and needed 10 minutes to process this moment which appeared deeply sacred. I had recognised that the core moment - mind seeing mind - was essentially nothing else than the mirror experience I had had with Ayahuasca, and I was deeply moved by the power of the spoken word (the Mahamudra pointig-out instructions) to shift the mind into a perspective like none one normally has.
Since then I know through experience into which depths meditation can lead.
On having no head
I found a particularly poetic description of that state in "On having no head" by D.E. Harding:
In numerous texts we are told how the enlightened man as if by magic engulfs rivers, mountains, seas, the great world itself, reducing them all to the Void here, to nothing at all; and then, out of this Void, creates rivers, mountains, seas, the great world itself. Without the slightest discomfort, he swallows all the water in the West River, and spews it up again. He takes in and abolishes all things, produces all things. He sees the universe as nothing else than the outflowing of his own profound Nature, which in itself remains unstained, absolutely transparent. Now he is restored to himself as he really is: as the very heart of existence, from which all being is made manifest. In brief, he is deified. Established at the unique Source, he cries: “I am the Centre, I am the Universe, I am the Creator!” (D.T. Suzuki) Or: “I am the cause of mine own self and all things!” (Eckhart) In the vivid language of Zen, the mangy cur has become the golden-haired lion roaring in the desert, spontaneous, free, energetic, magnificently self-sufficient, and alone. Arrived Home at last, he finds no room for two. Our own Traherne once more echoes Eastern masters when he exclaims: “The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the World was mine: and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.”
Appendix 1: Charlie Morey experiences a transformation of a room on the fourth day of Level 1 Retreat with Daniel P Brown
In May 2022, I came across a very similar description by the teacher of lucid dreaming, Charlie Morey.
He had attended the very last online retreat with Dr Brown before Dr Brown was too incapacitated due to progressive Parkinson.
You may listen to his description of the room transcription here on the Guru Viking podcast, starting at minute 9, when they talk about Daniel P Brown who both have experienced.
https://youtu.be/DqtKjv1qZkg?t=540
Appendix 2: the color blue
I came across the color blue as part of meditative experience in three books: Loel Guiness´ wonderful "Rainbow Body" and Almaas "Diamond Approach", and in Mike Crawley´s "The Secred Drugs of Buddhism" and other works on the connection between psychedelic substances and religions.
Rainbow Body: blue as precursor to "the visions"
Here I just want to quote Guiness
The signal that the visions are starting is the emergence, during practice, of a dark shadow shrowding the horizon. It is like a line of deep blue or even black..When this line appears, it is a clear sign that the tigle are starting to rise and the visions are about to begin...." (Guiness 2018)
Diamond Approach
Recently, since I like the Enneagram, I read the latest book ("Keys to the Enneagram") by A.H. Almaas, the creator of the "Diamond Approach". I am not an Almaas adept in any sense - he is too lofty for my more rational taste, having based his approach on his particular altered state experience.
However, I found a reference to the color blue which caught my attention. Not that I can do much within it, but it´s interesting.
Blue signifies an essential quality... It is the quality that has to do with spiritual knowing, which is direct knowing—gnosis or jnana. Gnosis means the knowing is immediate, where the known, the knower, and the knowledge are one thing—a total nonduality of knowledge. This capacity for knowing, whose center is located in the pineal gland at the center of the brain, becomes possible when the blue aspect is integrated. It unifies the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and its presence calms the mind, leaving it carefree and open to new and unexpected knowing. It is the knowing of Being manifesting specifically as a particular quality of presence. (Almaas, A. H.. Keys to the Enneagram (S.145-146). Shambhala. Kindle-Version.
Much of this is for me just speculation - e.g. that the center for knowing is in the pineal gland, or left/right brain unification. I was just interested in the universality of the color blue, which appeared in my experience ("Out of the blue").
Secret drugs of Buddhism (and Christianity)
The color blue is also mentioned quite often in Mahamudra literature. Mike Crowley (in "The Secret Drugs of Buddhism" refers to it as the color of the psychedelic Amanita Muscaria mushroom at one stage of preparation, which - he hypothesizes - is the basic for the ceremonial psychoactive Soma drink that underlies much of the Buddhist insights.
Blue is also the characteristic color of psilocybin when exposed to oxygen, and is referenced frequently in "The Psychedelic Gospel: The Secret History of Psychedelics in Christianity".
Resources
Almaas, A. H., Hudson, R., & Maitri, S. (2021). Keys to the Enneagram: How to Unlock the Highest Potential of Every Personality Type. Shambhala.
https://www.amazon.de/dp/1611809436
Brown, D. P. (2019a). Sacred Sundays with Daniel P Brown. Sacred Sundays. https://youtu.be/0swudgvmBbk
A very wide and deep overview of the tradition and background of Daniel P Brown´s teachings
Brown, D. P., & Thurman, R. (2006). Pointing Out the Great Way: The Stages of Meditation in the Mahamudra Tradition (Annotated). Wisdom Publications. https://www.amazon.com/Pointing-Out-Great-Way-Meditation/dp/0861713044
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Daniel-P-Brown/dp/0861713044/
This text is discussion topic on a conscious.tv series
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grBkn9fWD6Y
The book builds on the 1981 dissertation by Daniel P Brown "Mahamudra Meditation Stages".
Crowley, M., & Shulgin, A. (2019). Secret Drugs of Buddhism: Psychedelic Sacraments and the Origins of the Vajrayana (2nd ed.). Synergetic Press.
https://www.amazon.de/dp/0907791743
Culadasa (John Yates). (n.d.-b). Culadasa, reply to my question on the Mirror experience. Google Drive. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1djGK6tt3hNGnhvuCMFmZ_BlYdFNh0uj4/view?usp=sharing
Yates (Culadasa), J., & Immergut, M. (2017). The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness. Hay House Uk.
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Meditation-Integrating-Mindfulness/dp/1781808201
Culadasa (John Yates). (n.d.-b). Culadasa all Playlists on SoundCloud. SoundCloud. https://soundcloud.com/search/sets?q=culadasa
Culadasa (John Yates). (2018). What is Enlightenment? A Soundcloud Playlist of a 6 Day Retreat. SoundCloud. Retrieved June 24, 2023, from https://soundcloud.com/user782485559/sets/culadasa
This is a full record, in ok sound quality of a 6 day retreat
Culadasa. (2021a, February 12). My Journey: Episode 1 - The path of the lay practitioner, commitment, and the early years [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn050yBN37U
Samaneri, J., [Wisdom of Masters]. (2019, April 18). The Last Statement of Garab Dorje (Extended Version) - The Golden Letters - Dzogchen [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99wzfI_DApc
Garab Dorje (Fl. 55 CE) Prahevajra (Pramodavajra/Surativajra) was the semi-historical first human teacher of the Ati Yoga (Dzogchen) or Great Perfection teachings according to Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The "sex" metaphor is at around minute 27. This is a moving text in the rendering by Samaneri.
Psychedelic Medicine Podcast with Dr. Lynn Marie Morski. (n.d.). Psychedelic Medicine Podcast with Dr. Lynn Marie Morski - Predicting and Potentiating Peak Psychedelic Experiences with Sam Gandy, PhD. Google Podcasts. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9wbGFudG1lZGljaW5lcG9kY2FzdC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw/episode/MTEwMGQzODAtN2Q5NS00OWJiLWE1M2ItZmVjNjMyYTY2YjNk?ep=14
Guinness, L. (2018). Rainbow Body. Serindia Publications, Inc. https://www.amazon.de/Rainbow-Body-Loel-Guinness/dp/1932476873
Harding, D. (n.d.). On Having No Head : Harding, Douglas Edison: Amazon.de: Books. https://www.amazon.de/Douglas-Edison-Harding/dp/1908774061/ref=mp_s_a_1_1
Jayasara, S., [Wisdom of the Masters]. (2021, January 25). Milarepa (1) - Selected Pointers and Teachings for Meditation - Tibetan Buddhism - Kagyu [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiL8XdhMyMg
Gyaltsen, S. T., Gurung, G. S., & Brown, D. P. (2022). Self-Arising Three-fold Embodiment of Enlightenment: [of Bon Dzogchen Meditation] (English Edition) (2nd ed.). Mustang Bon Foundation. https://www.amazon.com/Self-Arising-Three-fold-Embodiment-Enlightenment-Meditation/dp/195695001X
Young, S., [Shinzen Young Videos]. (2016b, August 28). WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? ~ Shinzen Young [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtBa4nOO04
Guru Viking, & Young, S. (2021, October 1). Ep115: Jhana, Ego, & Orgasm - Leigh Brasington, Shinzen Young, Chelsey Fasano, & Dr Sanguinetti [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cDlMBrctbQ