It is somewhat common for people relatively early on the path to have a BIG experience. It doesn't have to play out that way, but then again, a big initial awakening or opening is not exactly a rare event. What's going on? What is that about?
The experience referred to here often has some kind of taste of complete freedom or liberation, possibly great joy, love, light, energy, etc. In the Buddhist/Theravada progress of insight, this falls under the heading of what I simply call the "pleasant" phase (or the more arcane traditional label of the stage of knowledge of arising and passing) and manifests in a range of anywhere from pleasant to ecstatic. It may happen as a result of meditation, most commonly during massed practice on an early retreat of some kind, or from using a psychedelic, or from great personal trauma, loss, or exhaustion. Extremely rare individuals have stumbled into it by simply reading a sentence that gives them great insight.
The experience may be so "big" that a person may think they are enlightened. Indeed, they may have gotten a kind of glimpse. But as pure as that experience can be, it would generally be somewhat tainted by being viewed from substantially within the assumptions they currently hold. And in virtually every case, the person will contract back to something like their former identity and beliefs.
To my way of thinking a couple of things are going on here. On the one hand, in order to have a big experience, you need to establish through human culture a thorough indoctrination into attachment to language, concepts, beliefs, cultural assumptions, and identity. Check. Pretty much all people fall into this category. But in terms of "big" I'd say plausibly the more attachment the better. My speculation is that it might even "help" if the person is particularly rigid about some of these things, solidly married to their worldview, even neurotic about it. Not that you'd want to cultivate that.
The other side of the coin is that you then need a very complete relaxation of all these things. You need to stumble into a very "pure" consciousness that has dropped as many of these attachments, assumptions, beliefs and rigidities as possible. A complete letting go into pure consciousness, the metaphorical original mind or natural mind. Complete freedom. A thoroughly different point of view.
It is the gulf or contrast or difference between these two extremes that creates the ground for a big experience. The more radical the change in perspective, the bigger the relief, and the more dramatic it will be perceived. For some people who already "get it", it might not be as big, it might not ever happen that way. This would be like someone who has been meditating a little bit over time and slowly gets it, kind of like the apocryphal metaphor of boiling a frog. But for someone who is more thoroughly entranced by thought-addicted identity views, the bigger the experience might be. And again, pretty much everyone is substantially "attached", even if they've read a whole stack of Buddhist books.
The blue line in the graph above attempts to portray the theoretical progress over time of a typical person on the path. Slow at first, then perhaps a tipping point such as stream entry, and a resulting acceleration, and then a slowing down again as one asymptotically approaches some ideal. Actual progress would be much noisier and different.
The graph explains why the big experience, from a meditation perspective, is generally only possible, or more likely, earlier on or in the acceleration phase, because the gulf that creates the ground for the experience is vast at first, but as progress is made, the chance of experiencing something that big or dramatic falls away. As one moves towards the liberated perspective and leaves the attached perspective behind, any jumps into a very pure version of freedom seem more and more inconsequential, more ordinary. After a certain point, it cannot be perceived as big or dramatic, this is pretty much the way things are perceived all the time.
Although this kind of experience can be repeated, for a typical meditator it is also very common to have just one big experience, and this is commonly the biggest, most dramatic experience of a meditator's life. On the other hand, it is possible to repeatedly release into a very absolute experience, and some may have more of a predisposition to this kind of thing than others. Psychedelics do help to reach this kind of absolute, but even here some degree of meditative practice makes a big difference.
At any rate, the experience often provides the motivation to get serious about a meditation practice and continue on the path.
