Is This An Enlightenment Experience? Intense Joy In Meditation.

[WaterfallMachine]

And when I got to my next self inquiry session, it was amazing. I think this is the happiest I ever felt. I never even knew it was possible to feel this much joy. It's overwhelming. It's an utter overwhelming satisfaction with life. An absolute freedom from pain. But not that I'm jumping for joy, crying tears of happiness or shouting about all this happiness. I look calm. Peaceful. Content. A small genuine smile on my face. Strange how that works. 

 I somehow worked myself up to the kind of state where I'm pretty much feeling moderately happy for most of the day. I went through the day without fearing what other people thought of me and that's unusual for me. II didn't get the urge to have to be liked at all. I often have this hesitation in learning something new like how I'm trying to learn Python but strangely, I just jumped right in without fearing things. 

Is this an enlightenment experience? Am I being arrogant here or is this actually happening?

The thing is is this experience feels like nothing. But if you think about it, it's hard to word and define a concept of nothing. Is it an empty box? A dark black space? No, it's just nothing. But it's not a nothing where it looks like nothing. Not a nothing where you feel, smell, hear  or taste nothing. Its more similar to a change in interpretation. Except it's more of a removal of interpretation. A subtraction, rather than an addition to your viewpoint.

I'm really nerdy and I've been scrolling through NASA videos for fun so I figured I'd try a space analogy.

It was like the difference of how humans saw the Earth before they saw it from space and after. And a similar feeling too. There's something called the Overview effect which is something first seen in astronauts who go to space. We often see Earth like we do in maps and globes. With colors and boundaries and names. But from space, the Earth is just the Earth. The world is no longer defined with human boundaries such as race, country or religion. It's just the Earth, pure as it is. And this experience changed the astronauts to be more compassionate human beings. They felt a transcending awe. A drive. A certain article claimed that it was what inspired the environmental movement. 

And I feel something similar here. But instead of from the photo of the Earth, it's just in my home. The mental models and boundaries of the things around me were strip away. The "maps" and the "globes" I had in my mind seemed to step for my own picture of "Earthrise," of the room around me. And what was left was pure awe. An ecstasy. A meaningless. Yet a merging with life's greatest pleasure. And that is : Nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

 

[cetus]

@WaterfallMachine Nice! Sounds like you had a non-dual experience. I experienced something very similar too. It was as if I became aware of the collective consciousness of the entire planet. It was total love, acceptance and mostly compassion for the planet and all it's inhabitance. I was seeing the good, the bad, the suffering, the joy and accepting it all as being one planetary entity instead of fragmented parts. It happened again but this time it was the entirety of the universe. I was looking up at a deep blue sky with white clouds floating by one day. And I realized that just behind the blue sky with puffy clouds was the entirety of the universe. And something connected with that and it was as if the universe suddenly came out of the sky poured into me and consumed me.