I had a very insightful drive back from Arizona, with some of those big ones that stick in your memory.
I was driving along experiencing a degree of pain in my ass and legs from the continual sitting in one position, and I started to investigate the nature of the pain. I used my previous insights into pain as a lens and a perspective. The pain can be ignored, jhanified, or just watched and diffferent mental perspectives make the pain different. I was remembering this one insight I had that when there is total equanimity toward pain, it is no different than pleasure, nothing inherently bad/good about the two, and it was simply an empty mental orientation. I was taking that perspective and watching the pain change each moment, and suddenly there was a jolt that jolted my entire body from the heart (it seemed like my heart skipped a beat) and my whole body jolted from the heart, and there was a cessation, and in the afterglow I could not get over the thought that I just did something that affected my vital functions seemingly in a causal conditional fashion. It was like knowing of that pain insight did something to stop my heart and start it again. It was very strange and I hadn’t experienced something like that previously.
Also, the act of driving is very good for vipassaana. I got these direct insights into the fabrication of time and how time is a fabrication that leads to all kinds of other fabrications. Time has been a very salient feature of my insight. It was like I could see directly that each moment of driving was constantly taking reference of the other cars around me and my own car with a heavy dependence on time as a fabrication for orienting other fabrications. I would see the other cars as quick flashes of position 1 / position 2, then a mental orientation and a glance at another car, position 1/position 2, etc, and there was a quickness to to it all that was just amazing. Like seeing impermanence in the visual field and in every other sense door. It was amazing seeing that happen so clearly.
There was one time where I saw a Coca-Cola truck in the distance cross under a bridge, out of sight, then I had a thought/memory of the coca-cola truck followed by a prediction of the coca -cola truck re-appearing on the other side of the bridge, and also a recognition that nothing currently in the sense field indicated a coca-cola truck was about to re-appear on the other side. I saw that the prediction was based on a memory in the here and now, which did in fact make the coca-cola truck register in experience, then the coca-cola truck re-appeared again, and there was this clear seeing that prediction of the future is really just patching together of memories and extrapolating, but that didn’t seem to be any different than some mystical definition of prediucting the future, i.e. from a dream. There was something about the unreality of reality that really sank in there.
The way time works in all this is interesting- and I seem to be experiencing time much much differently than before. I think I may do some experimentation with this time aspect.