going, going, gone...cessation (part 1)
- Wyrd & Highly Strange
- May 17
- 3 min read
Recently, I've been reading some books and journal articles on meditation and spiritual practice, primarily in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Both of these very diverse and massive traditions include the possibility of the experience of cessation, when all perception and awareness--and by extension, experience--fall away into a black void or nothingness.
(I'll muse about this black void in another post, as well as another form of cessation that I have experienced and that I've only ever heard one teacher describe.)
I don't always know the background of the authors. I don't know if they meditate or not, or, if they do, what they have experienced or understood. I can always tell, though, when one has not experienced cessation. How? Because they say it isn't possible.
First and most importantly, this experience is most definitely possible. It has arisen for me a number of times. Most of these experiences have been brief in retrospect. (There's no experience in the experience, so when I say "brief," bear in mind that there is no time--or anything else--in the experience!) What I want to articulate here is the first experience, which was the longest and most significant.
Many meditation teachers say that, as cessation approaches, the meditator feels fear...fear of death or dissolution...as if the end is near. You can think of this as the event horizon (see footnote). This was not my experience, so I think it's important to know that not everyone goes through this. For me, it was a graceful pull into an abyss, a welcoming blackness. There was a magnetic quality, but it wasn't as if I was being dragged kicking and screaming. It was more a gentle surrender.
Essentially, there is no experience at all during cessation. There's no one there, nothing there, but because there's no one there and no perception, there's no experience. It is only when cessation ends that perception and experience return. So, it's only in the rear view mirror that one knows cessation has taken place.
For me, the ending of that first cessation was a graceful as the entry. First, awareness returned, clear and bright, a contrast to the blackness from which it emerges. (For those familiar with the Diamond Approach, for me, this experience was the Nameless.) Next, knowingness arose. (I call this knowingness "consciousness," but not everyone defines consciousness the same way, so I don't use the word any more than I have to.)
The awareness became fuller, pregnant with knowing. Knowing what? Nothing in particular. It isn't a knowing of something; it's simply knowing. (In the Diamond Approach, this may be equated with the Supreme.) Finally, the world appeared. Rather, it manifested. Like turning up a thermostat or the knob on a stove, the world gradually appeared. I might even say that it was born.
When this experience happened, I had heard of cessation, but I really had no concept of it. It wasn't something I had studied or read about intensively. So, how did I know it was cessation? I just knew. The experience identified itself as cessation. Not in words, but in direct knowing.
The "afterglow" of cessation is like emerging from a deep cleansing. I felt very clear, very unburdened. As if a new day and a new life had dawned.
Different paths and teachers vary in how they understand and present cessation. I try to avoid plugging the experience into any particular path, even the Diamond Approach, because for me, it's simply a possibility in human experience. None of those authors I mentioned above will ever read this, but if they did, I would say to them, "Don't be too certain about what you think you know." The same, I might say, goes for me!
* In this image of M87 [galaxy] taken on 11 April 2017 ..., the shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. (Source)
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