Hi there Akhandha; I just joined because I read your posts and thought I might be able to help.
The way that you use language, the values implicit in your speech suggest that your experience is one of cessation, you are on the right path, and you will now tend to nibbana.
This might be useful:
Knowing directly the origin of nothingness to be the fetter of delight, one then sees there clearly. That's his genuine knowledge — the brahman who has lived to fulfillment.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .than.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
It's the idea or sense of absence and presence, existence and non-existence, that is the structure of what we may regard as impermanence, and this unstable polarity is dukkha, incompleteness.
The wheel of suffering turns on this incompleteness, this conundrum - I want to experience, I don't want to experience, to be or not to be. It is a sense of rejecting experience, rejecting life, wanting it to be other.
So, speaking of the dhamma gate you have entered, one finally takes up Buddhism to follow this sense of incompleteness, this voidness, through the jhanas to cessation, to escape; we turn ourselves inside out so to speak but find no final bliss or void, no complete being or end of being, no goal or escape,
not even nothing, and in this knowledge of the inapplicability of the extremes of existence and non-existence, dukkha, the sense of incompleteness, suffering, cannot persist, because we have realised there is no goal, no escape. All that dies then is the path, the seeking of either perfection or escape, life or death.
We now know that to speak of the existence or non-existence of being, self, life, is just speech: of unfolding life as it is lived, absence doesn't apply, presence doesn't apply, both absence and presence doesn't apply, neither absence nor presence doesn't apply. The Tathagata is deep, boundless like the sea.
Experience is not a physical thing with physical dimensions, there's no up or down here, no long and short, coarse and fine, fair and foul, light and dark, sun and moon; water, earth, fire and wind have no footing here, nor can experience be born or die; it comes from no past, it goes to no future, nor does it persist; life is unborn, uncreated, beyond cause and conjecture. None of the descriptors we use in Buddhism to speak of experience, such as consciousness, kandhas and so on, can apply to experience;
they apply to our illusions about experience. Buddhism is a conceit to end conceit. We can't even point to experience as an object, label suchness experience, or life (or suchness). But of course we can speak, as skillfully as we may.
The significance of Nirodha Sammapatti, the journey to the edge of the map of perception, tipping over what appears to be an edge, then back to the start, is that it shows us that there is no foundation, no destination, no absolute, not even the absence of an absolute, no permanence of bliss or void of death. That there is no polarity of life and death, or in other words, because here we are, there is only life, no death. And that understanding is what the Buddha called deathless, beyond bliss.
I think you're doing fine, anyway.
I hope this was helpful; I'm still learning myself, but I recognise your experience and the way you seem to regard that experience, the questions it has led you to form, so this is my response for what it is worth.
I got to rise very high in the sky, which is not proper to me. I usually have problems to rise high there - like something doesn't let me go higher and fear appears.
