Here’s the full thing: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/my-mind-transformed-completely-and/
Favorite highlights:
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Even though you are recognizably experiencing the same mundane life as everyone else, your interface with it is completely rearranged, such that the most basic shit seems pretty miraculous and strange. And this transformation deepens until you die, or so I am told by teachers I trust.
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Default consciousness seems to work well enough for most people. In fact, I don’t think this post-meditation flavor of consciousness would be agreeable to everyone, or even the majority
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I mean that the sensations that compose activities like “dreaming of the past” or “thinking about the future” or “imagining what could’ve been” are smaller in consciousness, like the present moment is a bigger desktop space and they are smaller icons
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Emotions are felt powerfully but have a translucence, like a refreshing breeze sweeping over a stale room, whereas they used to have a “stickiness” that caused my mind to latch onto them and turn them into fanciful stories about my identity.
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I thought I was going to save literature! I was so worried that I wouldn’t get everything right! What a wild, cinematic way to live! It’s kind of like remembering how boldly I acted the first time I got drunk. I wouldn’t want to live there, but there is a kind of appealing frenzy to it that I now cannot return to.
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And the amount of meditation it takes to vastly reduce suffering is comparable to the amount of time you’d put into a graduate degree—so recommending that someone adopts the spiritual path because they’re having a rough week is sort of like telling someone they should go get a master’s or a PhD because they don’t like their current job