I am very good at deep work, and concentrating on stuff. It is also easy to deal with stress and emotions in my day to day. My life feels like playing a third person video game with the FOV slider turned to 360 degrees. Every sensation comes discretely where I can see the beginning and end. 1 second is a really long time, enough room to fit 1000s of sensations, bounded only by your speed of perception. I am aware of how my mind constructs the concept of time, the idea of later. The cool part about hitting stages of enlightenment is that there is a quantum shift in how your brain processes, that I know I cannot regress to a previous stage. But I wonder if awakening is built from physical, neural correlates, then things like dementia or a traumatic brain injury might reverse some of the effects.
Another interesting note is that I have a much higher pain tolerance, as well as sort of better control of my body movements. I know some people describe enlightenment as a full body transformation, not just the mind.
One thing that is keeping me from progressing further is the inconvenience that comes with sleep alterations caused by meditation, and how it affects my work as a programmer. I still have obligations to participate in modern society, pay bills, keep relationships, etc. And I know if I didn't do this, I would be perfectly content doing nothing all day, just meditating. It's why retreats and the monastic life is so conductive to awakening. Maybe this is the ultimate FIRE goal, I'm just working on the FI :)
For the record, the Buddha has never advocated leaving society, especially lay followers. Whether we are a monk, at a retreat, in a family, we all have a duty to be a wise citizen.
