I kind of resent that Not Suffering got old so fast. I was shocked for the first 6 months or so, and now all I can recall is a faint memory of anything ever being any different.
In ~October of last year, I stopped suffering regularly. For most of my life I've had 3 or 4 bad days per week, now it's closer to 3 or 4 bad days per year.
Buddhists love to say that what you learn is "pain without suffering", and I think that tracks. If what pain does is hurt, what suffering does is suck. My life still hurts plenty, but it almost never sucks.
All in all, it took me an average of 30 minutes of daily meditation for 1.5 years, and then 1 full week on retreat.
I'm unbelievably grateful for what I have. I wish everyone could experience what I experience, and I hope this document can help a few people get there faster.
What exactly did you do?
I started meditating in 2022, primarily doing metta (using the instructions from this guided meditation). In October 2023 I decided to go on a solo at-home retreat, focused on the jhanas.
After I came home from this retreat, my experience of reality quickly started to change & I have barely suffered since then.
On retreat, I was not particularly successful in mastering the jhanas. I did however have what you might (in retrospect) speculate was a cessation, which would explain why this retreat was so life changing.
Cessations can be thought of as completely turning off consciousness (and later turning it back on). Some buddhist lineages believe they are necessary for stream entry (that rebooting the mind allows it to reconfigure deeper parts, similar to how you reboot a computer after installing new drivers). Others don't care too much about them.
My experience was something like this:
Sat down and meditated, concentrating on the breath...
[blank space]
At some point I just... "noticed" that I was in something approximating the 4th jhana - a state of supreme equanimity. I had no clue how I got there, or how long I'd been there.
All I knew was that I was in incredible pain because of my poor posture, but that the pain didn't bother me in the slightest. Neither did I care about happiness. I was just extremely peaceful and content. The next morning I was noticing very vivid colors, and I was able to access the first jhana on each of the following two days.
How my perception changed after the retreat
After the retreat, I spent November and December cementing the benefits of the cessation. Most notably, it was a lot easier to pay attention to impermanence, and I took full advantage of that.
Impermanence, in Buddhism, refers to the fact that individual sensations only last a fraction of a second before they disappear & get replaced. And that's true across all senses. In the months following the retreat, I was doing Fire Kasina practice, a practice which involves staring at a candle flame.
Since staring had become second nature, I couldn't help but stare into the visual field at all times, and notice how much it changed from moment to moment. It was as if my brain had been rewired from paying attention to Things, to paying attention to Impermanence.
Sometimes, if I stared hard enough and got really concentrated, I would simply see the visual field blink in and out of existence, many times per second. And this is relatively common among meditators.
This then quickly triggered a cascade in the mind. Emotions started to feel like this too: really just sensations popping in and out of existence. Heat, cold, pain, pleasure, all of it felt like this too.
It's as if the nature of all consciousness started to feel like it was made of light. And when things are made of light, it's impossible to bump into them and hurt yourself - because they're not really there. They feel so thin and ethereal, and it means they can never hurt you.
Which brings me to my most recent tension headache.
The phenomenology of a tension headache
A natural question is, how do you know that you've specifically knocked out suffering itself, and not that you've just had an unusually good year, free of pain, struggle, and obstacles?
One way is to look at common life experiences that produce a reliable amount of pain, like tension headaches. The most recent one, I had on March 31st.
The way it felt was: definitely painful, but fleeting. I would try to pay attention to where the pain was, and every time I found a spot, the pain would instantly evaporate from there. And as the pain was evaporating, I could pay attention to - and delight in - the moments between moments of pain. And there seems to be a lot more empty space between moments of pain, than there are moments of pain.
I would be lying if I said it didn't still suck. But it didn't suck so bad that I would have rather been unconscious for that stretch of time. It was still at least ~fine.
If nothing feels real, can you still feel happy emotions?
One consequence of everything feeling thin & flimsy, is that it's really hard for complex emotions to form. They feel like sand slipping through my fingers, and won't manifest or grow roots.
For an emotion to successfully manifest in my mind, it has to be either super simple or super strong. This goes for both happy & sad emotions.
I still feel a lot of joy, love, and gratitude, because those emotions are really simple. They don't require a lot of intricate structure.
I have a harder time feeling anticipation, romantic love, a crush that gives me butterflies, "fun", anger, irritation, sadness, grief, loneliness, surprise, melancholy, and most other emotions.
However, as I've lost many complex emotions (both good and bad), it seems to have made space for the simpler happy emotions to flow in their absence.
How much euphoria do you experience?
Some, but not as much as I expected.
Everything feels better than it used to. However since a lot of things just felt bad before, a lot of things just feel mid now.
I do have good days, and those are very happy. And most of my "mid" days contain at least a few moments of euphoria, which can make me cry tears of joy.
I don't have many long periods of euphoria. Before ~awakening~, I had an ability & motivation to go into deep metta, and I would do it a lot because it felt good. I've lost that ability, but I don't desire it much either. It's hard to explain, but my motivations have shifted. As long as I'm not suffering & I can be effective in the real world, I don't spend that much time chasing highs. This is a big shift, and I frankly find it odd.
When "did you know"?
There's a saying:
If you think you're enlightened, spend a week with your family.
After my retreat in October, I went back home to Denmark, a terribly cold and dark country in the winter, and stayed with my parents. Neither the winter or my parents bothered me at all, which is when I started to suspect something big had happened.