TTABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Introduction
Daniel Ingram: "For over 13 years, the Dharma Overground community has been a remarkable support for so many, including myself, on this strange, amazing, and sometimes profoundly challenging path. I hope that these posts reflect something useful and skillful, that you appreciate the context of the ever-changing and clearly somewhat bizarre social context in which they occurred, and that they all be taken with a grain of salt and a sense of humor. If you find them helpful, great! If not, no worries, as there is lots of great practice advice out there that hopefully will work for you and your needs and aesthetics. Hold all teachings lightly. Keep your wits about you. Be a light unto yourself. Keep your immediate experience as the first and last basis of the path. Practice well. Enjoy!"
Those few entries with a lightning-flash symbol (⚡) contain potential inflammatory material or strongly-worded commentaries that some readers may find controversial. Please skip over those entries and get to the friendlier ones if you don't find them useful.
Table of Contents
- Concentration
- Insight
- Arising & Passing Away
- 1st Path
- Fruitions
- 2nd Path
- Comparing Different Traditions
- A Glossary for Middle & Higher Paths
- 3rd Path
- 4th Path
- Actualism-Inspired Practices
- Magick
- Physical & Mental Health
- Psychedelics & Entheogens
- Energy Issues
- Teachers & Retreats
- MCTB & Morality
- DharmaOverground Community
- Phenomenology
- Recommended Books & Suttas
Concentration
2. Vipassana or Samatha: it doesn’t matter which objects are used but what is cultivated ➝
3. You can't do insight practices if you can't concentrate ➝
4. Concentration is not necessarily enough to get jhana ➝
5. Jhanas in daily life ➝
6. Kasina is easier than breath ➝
7. Kasina, some tips on how to practice ➝
8. Fire Kasina ➝
9. Mantras in Fire Kasina ➝
10. Fire Kasina: tension in the eyes and head ➝
11. Shannon's 25-day Fire Kasina Retreat Audio Diaries ➝
12. The Mind Illuminated ➝
13. TMI time commitment ➝
14. TMI Mind Map ➝
15. Comparing Mahasi Noting, Fire Kasina and TMI ➝
16. One must not be so quick to associate hard jhana with pure samatha and soft jhana with vipassana ➝
17. Jhana wars are old hat ➝
18. Jhanas: a wide range of both opinions and skills ➝
19. The basic qualities of jhana are in some ways influenced by the object ➝
20. Cognitive abilities and Jhanas ➝
21. Categorical and Dimensional Jhanic thinking ➝
22. Formless Realms, Thinking Dimensionally and Categorically ➝
23. Space, Formless Realms and Insight ➝
24. Pure Land Jhanas ➝
25. Pure Land One, the set up ➝
26. Formless Realms and Kasina ➝
27. Formless Realms and Lucid Dreaming ➝
28. My short list of powers, during Lucid Dreams ➝
29. (⚡) Nirodha Samapatti is a high and very rare attainment ➝
30. Nirodha Samapatti: a personal report, 10 years since the last experience ➝
31. Advanced Jhana Classification ➝
32. Why perceiving experiences as experiences feels vastly better and so is positively globally transformative ➝
33. Vipassana: what people want, and what they get out if it ➝
34. What is the most effective method of Vipassana? ➝
35. I know of no higher or more profound teaching than the Six Sense Doors and the Three Characteristics ➝
36. Stable, Continuous, Independent "I" ➝
37. Self doesn't exist, never has and never could ➝
38. When observing objects, each has their downsides and benefits ➝
33. Vipassana: what people want, and what they get out if it ➝
34. What is the most effective method of Vipassana? ➝
35. I know of no higher or more profound teaching than the Six Sense Doors and the Three Characteristics ➝
36. Stable, Continuous, Independent "I" ➝
37. Self doesn't exist, never has and never could ➝
38. When observing objects, each has their downsides and benefits ➝
39. Access Concentration is really all you need for insight ➝
40. Fast Noting, Slow Noting ➝
41. How to measure noting speed ➝
40. Fast Noting, Slow Noting ➝
41. How to measure noting speed ➝
42. POI is a bit like training to be a sherpa climbing the Everest ➝
43. Sherpa training, whose trail is the dharma path ➝
44. Jhana First Camps, Vipassana First Camps and Hybrids Approaches ➝
45. Vipassana Jhanas and the Progress of Insight ➝
46. How the Vipassana Jhanas and the Seven Factors of Awakening can help ➝
47. (⚡) On the Utility and Futility of the Maps ➝
43. Sherpa training, whose trail is the dharma path ➝
44. Jhana First Camps, Vipassana First Camps and Hybrids Approaches ➝
45. Vipassana Jhanas and the Progress of Insight ➝
46. How the Vipassana Jhanas and the Seven Factors of Awakening can help ➝
47. (⚡) On the Utility and Futility of the Maps ➝
48. Map-Obsession: Hindrances in sheep's clothing ➝
49. Overcalling and Misdiagnosing Experiences, A Shadow Side of the Maps ➝
50. An Unified theory of Meditation is not going to happen ➝
51. The Hierarchy of Vipassana Practice ➝
49. Overcalling and Misdiagnosing Experiences, A Shadow Side of the Maps ➝
50. An Unified theory of Meditation is not going to happen ➝
51. The Hierarchy of Vipassana Practice ➝
Arising & Passing Away
52. Arising and Passing Away ➝
53. Context ➝
54. Duration ➝
55. Intensity ➝
56. Energetic phenomena ➝
57. Time distortion ➝
58. 2nd Jhana ➝
59. Visuals ➝
60. Other Powers ➝
61. A&P and Out of Body Experiences ➝
62. Sleep Effects ➝
63. Physical Effects ➝
64. Mood Effects ➝
65. Sexual Effects ➝
66. Unitive Experiences ➝
67. Feeling Enlightened ➝
68. Perceptual Thresholds ➝
69. Insights into Selflessness ➝
70. Cognitive Abilities ➝
71. Feeling Called Out and Seeking ➝
72. The Dark Night stages that follow the usually brief A&P ➝
74. The Standard Pattern (the A&P-DN-weak EQ loop) ➝
75. From an earlier essay on A&P: some personal experiences ➝
53. Context ➝
54. Duration ➝
55. Intensity ➝
56. Energetic phenomena ➝
57. Time distortion ➝
58. 2nd Jhana ➝
59. Visuals ➝
60. Other Powers ➝
61. A&P and Out of Body Experiences ➝
62. Sleep Effects ➝
63. Physical Effects ➝
64. Mood Effects ➝
65. Sexual Effects ➝
66. Unitive Experiences ➝
67. Feeling Enlightened ➝
68. Perceptual Thresholds ➝
69. Insights into Selflessness ➝
70. Cognitive Abilities ➝
71. Feeling Called Out and Seeking ➝
72. The Dark Night stages that follow the usually brief A&P ➝
74. The Standard Pattern (the A&P-DN-weak EQ loop) ➝
75. From an earlier essay on A&P: some personal experiences ➝
1st Path
76. List of symptoms for ñana diagnosis ➝
77. Vibrations and ñanas ➝
Early Ñanas to A&P
79. Vibrations and ñanas ➝
80. A&P may be happening to vastly more people than anyone would have imagined ➝
81. A&P Event ➝
82. A&P, a standard dream pattern ➝
Dukkha Ñanas
84. Dark Night, a classical diagnosis example ➝
85. Regarding the (mistaken) notion that the Dark Night is a product of Noting/MCTB-style practice ➝
86. Dark Night in the Dharma Literature ➝
87. Bypassing difficult insight stages with strong concentration ➝
Equanimity
89. A&P vs Equanimity ➝
90. Falling Back from Equanimity to A&P ➝
91. Equanimity, Investigation and Honesty ➝
92. Hands on water metaphor ➝
93. The trick in Equanimity ➝
94. Equanimity Trap ➝
95. Counterbalancing my usual tone for those who have strong mindfulness, investigation and energy ➝
96. Formations, things are more flowy than vibratory in EQ ➝
98. Stream Entry: a short, straight instruction ➝
99. Stream Entry: an alternative (complementary) instruction ➝
100. Path in a very ultra-simplified nutshell ➝
101. (⚡) How long to achieve Stream-Entry on retreat ➝
94. Equanimity Trap ➝
95. Counterbalancing my usual tone for those who have strong mindfulness, investigation and energy ➝
96. Formations, things are more flowy than vibratory in EQ ➝
Stream Entry
99. Stream Entry: an alternative (complementary) instruction ➝
100. Path in a very ultra-simplified nutshell ➝
101. (⚡) How long to achieve Stream-Entry on retreat ➝
102. Stream Entry: Daniel’s answer to an online survey ➝
103. Stream Entry common mimics ➝
104. Stream Entry and No-Self ➝
105. (⚡) Misleading definitions of Stream Entry ➝
103. Stream Entry common mimics ➝
104. Stream Entry and No-Self ➝
105. (⚡) Misleading definitions of Stream Entry ➝
107. Cycling is totally normal for everyone ➝
DharmaOverground Community
⧬
It is not a question of which objects are used, but what one does with those objects and what is cultivated. For example, if you took the breath to be a smooth, beautiful, tranquilizing object that you devoted all your attention to in order to attain jhanic states (blissful, rapturous, peaceful, etc.), that is samatha.
If you instead noticed every single rapid sensation that made up the breath arise and vanish as well as tuned into any subtle dualities, sense of control vs naturalness, suffering, tension, etc. around the way the breath was perceived, as well as the rapid oscillation of those transient sensations with many other sensations, mental impressions, the sensations that make up investigation and effort, and all of that with a high degree of precision that cared not a bit whether or not that produced bliss or tranquility, that is vipassana.
There are techniques that contain a mix of those elements, and those are typically called samatha-vipassana, or shamatha-vipashyana if you want to get all Tibetan about it, and it becomes a matter of the degree of the incorporation of those elements and how skillfully both can be cultivated simultaneously.
So, in Goenka-ji's school, they use the breath for samatha, generating concentration, and they use body scanning as the object when doing vipassana.
You can actually use nearly any object for samatha and can definitely use any object for vipassana. Some samatha objects will limit how deep you can go into jhana. No object limits the depths to which you can go in vipassana, as all sensations equally demonstrate the true nature of all phenomena, that being the Three Characteristics.
… The list of objects that limit samatha jhanas are found on pages 375-376 of this text and other places. Also see Path to Deliverance page 75 or so and some other pages. (DhO)
You can't do insight practices if you can't concentrate. TMI is good stuff. I really appreciate Culadasa's meticulous approach. It is true that he is cultivating a mix of concentration and insight, but so do all insight practices, as you can't do insight practices if you can't concentrate.
There is concentration where you do try to just cultivate positive factors of mind and to focus exclusively on one object without investigating the Three Characteristics of the sensation that make it up: this would be "pure samatha" practice.
There is insight practice where you investigate whatever arises moment after moment without any focus or agenda for what attention does so long as it notices the Three Characteristics of whatever arises.
Then there are most meditation practices, those that have some focus, such as the breath, which means they have a bit of the samatha perspective, but they also encourage noticing other sensations as they arise and to notice things come and go, which are vipassana elements, and so we find that most practices have a mix of elements.
Still, to do even "pure vipassana", in which one's sole concern is the Three Characteristics of sensations without any other agenda, it still requires what is called "momentary concentration", that ability to notice the arising and vanishing of sensation after sensation after sensation without interruption, and that sort of concentration will often cause the arising of jhanic factors and exclude things like being lost in thought.
Still, to do even "pure samatha" in which one's sole concern is to keep the mind on an object and to cultivate positive jhanic factors, past a certain point any real keeping the mind on an object honestly will result in noticing the true nature of the sensations that make up that object, as they do come and go.
Imagine a plane, one axis of which is concentration and one axis of which is insight. It is nearly impossible to stay entirely to one side of the plane and not venture out into the middle where concentration and insight are blended to some degree, though some techniques and traditions definitely attempt to have more of one emphasis or the other, while some try to do both well simultaneously. (DhO)
However, there are also formless realm experiences that arise that are much more dramatically clean in both the way that they arise and the way they present after arising that seem to be starkly delineated from the progressively more formless versions. They arise rapidly, sharply demarcated from what came before, and they present very much as advertised in the descriptions of the formless realms.
While one could think of even these two variants, that of shades of formlessness and stark formlessness in shades of grey, in that a formless experience can present more and more starkly, sharply, cleanly that some others.
Equally, one who has had the stark, sharp, clean, highly-formless versions that fully meet the advertised ideal arise rapidly may think: no, there are two distinct modes, the softer progressive mode that is relatively formless but not truly formless, and the stark arising mode, and they seem very, very different.
I have at points held each of these views, typically arising depending on how recently I had the much cleaner version rapidly and sharply arise. My linguistic preference, however, is to be clear about which view you are holding at the very least. However, in my heart of hearts, I do feel that only the stark, categorically different presentation, that in which very refined versions of the formless realms arise in a strong shift, are the “true formless realms”, and everything else is something formed, however refined.
So, when describing experience and using the word “formless”, I advocate for adding additional words, qualifiers, and details such that people know what is actually being described rather than having to assume.
I use terms such as j3.j7, for example, to describe some third jhanic experience that really had very little form, space, or even consciousness in it but was still clearly third jhanic and not the extremely clean “true j7, Nothingness” that can also arise.
I might use the term j4.j6 to describe an experience that was much more fourth jhanic in its character but still had a significant aspect of vast, open presence, luminosity, and sense of all-pervading consciousness yet still had some form arising, however abstract, and so differentiate it from “true j6, Boundless Consciousness” in which form was utterly gone and it was like being in another realm of pure consciousness utterly removed in all obvious ways from the experiences of the space in which my body was sitting.
This is what is meant by “realm”, as in “The Six Realms”, as in somewhere and something else entirely, removed from the space in which we are practicing in the way that dreams and out of body experiences are.
Experiences at the level of a total shift in which realm we are experiencing represent strong meditative attainments. Often, we might get extremely short glimpses of such possibilities that last a mere fraction of a second. At other times, experiences of other realms can last many seconds, minutes, or even occasionally in very rare cases hours.
Most experiences of other realms are still formed and present with a diversity of features. However, a small proportion are truly formless and perform exactly as one would expect from the high descriptions of the formless realms, basically at the level of a Platonic Ideal but actually experienced.
Regarding the formless realms proper, those of the categorical variety, they very much tend to arise in strict sequence, shifting from j4 (the fourth jhana), to j5 (Boundless Space), j6 (Boundless Consciousness), j7 (Nothingness), to j8 (Neither Perception Nor Yet Non-Perception) and then out to the Post-8th Junction Point as I term it. Knowing this, if you have entered a state that has a lot of formlessness to it but doesn’t have that striking sense of utter detachment from your body and the space you are practicing in and didn’t arise in sequence, it is very likely of the dimensional version, some jX.jF (with X representing some jhana from 1-4 and F representing one of the Formless Realms from 5-8) variant, and not what I would term a true jF experience.
I don’t mean to disparage or downplay the value of formed jhanic experiences that have significant formless aspects, as such experiences can be powerful, profound, and even sometimes transformative, but I do wish to delineate that there are these seemingly categorically different experiences that truly do perform as “realms” and truly are “formless”, as well as experiences that clearly have some degree of formlessness and some degree of removal from ordinary consciousness and the space we are in.
By being able to think both dimensionally, that is, in terms of degrees and shades of grey, as well as categorically, that of a binary “true formless” or “some form remaining”, and by being very deliberate in how we express these modes of thought, we can be much better communicators as well as hopefully better practitioners.
Language that appreciates both the dimensional and categorical mode can help us to realize what might be possible and also how what we are experiencing might actually relate to those possibilities. It also helps avoid confusion when we speak and write about our experiences. (DhO)
Why perceiving experiences as experiences feels vastly better and so is positively globally transformative. Why do this? Well, the fundamental suffering caused by not perceiving sensations as experiences in some bizarre way does all sorts of unfortunate things to the mind and the way we perceive reality, and the righting of that, such that we perceive experiences as experiences, feels vastly better and so is positively globally transformative.
I can't remember the exact timing, but I know that it was not that many nights of this sort of practice later that I had the following dream. I was standing on a long, straight, dusty, country road with tall wild rose bushes lining either side as far as the eye could see. I was about three feet tall, dressed in a silver space-suit, holding a ray-gun, and beside me were two similarly dressed people of similar height. We were all staring down the road, waiting for something to happen. The sunlight was so bright that it was difficult to see, and its brilliance washed out the color of everything to some pale shade of yellow, green or white. Suddenly a dust cloud appeared far down the road, and out of it emerged a huge witch dressed in black riding a charging black horse. We stood our ground. The witch pointed her wand at us, a brilliant flash of light shot from its tip and engulfed us, and suddenly my world exploded, so that my body seemed like fireworks, flying all over space in sizzling flashes, and I suddenly transitioned from dreaming to waking. However, it took several seconds for my consciousness and sensate reality to reassemble itself into something coherent, and then I was buzzing all over and extremely alert. It would be 10 years before I would have any idea of what that was or what it meant. It is hard from this distant vantage point to get a grasp of exactly how this first event changed my life, as my mid-teens were a complex time in general.
The next time I remember crossing it was the summer after my junior year in college. I had been philosophizing heavily, hanging out with my friend who had also crossed the A&P and didn't know what it was, and we had been discussing the question of the observer or Watcher and how this related to the question of non-duality. So, one day I was just sitting on the couch, when I decided to take on the watcher directly. I began trying to catch it, second after second, really going after the visceral, perceptual experience of what was observing, and before I knew it, got into this rapid-fire back and forth, super-concentrated state of everything vibrating in my head, and the whole thing zapped back through my skull at very high speed into some black space, and it was done. I broke up with my girlfriend, moved into an apartment alone, and was pretty dark for a while.
The third time I remember occurred during the year after graduation from college. I was dancing in a club, and I began spinning around and got into some sort of very altered state, dancing wildly, with tremendous energy, feeling some kind of long-sought freedom, like something I had forgotten, and up through my being welled this amazing bliss and sense of power, taking over the dancing, moving me effortlessly but with this core of raw power in the center around which the world and my body were spinning and moving quite on their own, and then it peaked in joy and intensity and was done. After that I began to have to meditate to feel normal. I would go outside before work and lay down on the ground and breathe really slowly and somehow it would help a little. Shortly thereafter I quit the band I was running sound for and moved to California for a while.
The next time I don't remember, but I know the effect it had: I suddenly needed to go on retreats, so I did. I had done really no formal meditation practice, knew little of Buddhism, but on the advice of a friend I went on a 9-day intensive insight meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. About 6 days into it, after all sorts of back, neck and jaw pain, I was just sitting there, and all of a sudden I noticed that my body was not solid, but instead made of zillions of little particles of energy, all moving around, zipping in and out of reality, and my body exploded, everything flashed black and white, and I felt as if I had been dropped back onto my cushion from space. After that I was hyper-energetic, hyper-philosophical and yet convinced that philosophy held no further answers, but I had no idea what to do next. No one told me what had happened or what it could do to you, and shortly thereafter I quit my electrical engineering program and went to India.
The next time was about 6 months after the previous one, on retreat in India during a 17-day course at the Thai Monastery in Bodh Gaya. I don't really remember much about it, except that it left me feeling very inspired about practice and very dark about the world. I lasted 5 months doing volunteer service in Calcutta before I had to go on retreat again, so I went to Malaysia and sat in the Malaysian Buddhist Meditation Centre, and that is when I really learned to practice. It was 10 years from the first time I had crossed the A&P, and I was about to learn what the Arising and Passing Away was, which seems a bit late, but that's the world we live in, isn't it?
I was practicing very strict noting technique, and very shortly my breath began to move with the noting. I would note "rising" or "falling" and the breath would rise or fall in nearly perfect synchrony with the duration of the note and then stop, so each stuttering breath took many notes, otherwise it would just stop. The rapidity of this got faster and more powerful, so that I shook, sniffed, sweated and noted for days, and in between bouts I would plunge down with the breath as it went down and down and down into a realm of extremely slowed perception and time, like reality was moving through thick, narcotic syrup, and then the energy would come back, the rapid noting, sniffing, and now powerful vibratory energy would return, and it would cycle like this again and again. I was sitting for 2-3 hours at a time with amazing posture, barely sleeping 2 hours per night, and finally the whole thing died down. I was hungry for sex and chocolate, felt exhausted and sluggish, within a day I could barely sit for 5 minutes, and my mind felt like a hive of angry bees.
That night the abbot played an old, scratchy tape of a Burmese monk describing the stages of insight, and suddenly all was clear. I knew what had happened, knew where I was, and knew what to do about it. You can read about the rest in my book if you wish, but the summary points are these: 1) the maps helped me practice in the face of the Dark Night so that I got to Equanimity, 2) the tape failed to mention the post-retreat/real-world implications of crossing the A&P and entering the Dark Night (they call them "Dukkha Ñanas"), and at that point, despite having crossed the thing many times already, I was unprepared for what would happen next. Shortly thereafter, I canceled all of my medical school interviews so that I could go on a 1-year retreat.
I tell the rest of the story in my book, but hopefully these added shorts will give some idea of the basic points I wanted to illustrate, those being that the context and content can vary widely, but there are relatively predictable and identifiable key elements to the way it happens and what is likely to follow.
A few more brief stories from other points on my path...
I was meditating in my living room and suddenly could see though my closed eyelids. The room looked largely the same, except the color and light were somewhat different. This didn't last long, and in a sit shortly thereafter my body exploded again, very much as it had done before. By this time I knew what it was, and so I was prepared for what came next. I didn't quit my job or end a relationship. Instead I practiced well and shortly thereafter attained to Second Path in the break room at work during a training lecture.
I was taking a yoga class and had been strangely stiff and tense during it. Every movement was much more difficult than usual, my awareness of the pain in my body more acute. This faded towards the end of the 2-hour class, and then suddenly while bending back into a camel pose, this massive and very startling bolt of energy shot up my spine, causing me to flip suddenly forwards out of the pose. Shortly thereafter I decided to go on retreat during the coming summer in England.
I’ll give two more examples from some people whose practice I knew well at the time. One of them was lying on a bed taking a nap after lunch on a meditation retreat and suddenly could see through the roof out into the sky and felt that a big tornado suddenly blew into the room and that there were literally cats and dogs flying all of over the room, all of which lasted some seconds and then calmed down to reveal a normal room. The other one had a dream, and in the dream was touching bright jewels in a cabinet and each time the jewels were touched waves of buzzy pleasure swept up their hand into their arm and then shortly thereafter they were above the bed they were sleeping in spinning around in a faster and faster vortex of wind. Both people had substantial Dark Night manifestations after those occurrences for some months.
As you can see, the presentations of how things happened can look quite different, despite that fact that I will assert that each of those A&P’s was functionally the same in terms of its basic effect. This presents some difficulties in terms of study design, creating diagnostic criteria that someone not very personally familiar with the wide range of the A&P and the other stages’ presentations, as well as sorting out the common mimics (e.g. Mind and Body, Samatha Jhana experiences, Equanimity, Stream Entry, etc.). However, the effects are so extremely predictable in certain aspects that it must be possible to come up with a way to research on this topic. Having crossed the territory of the A&P a few thousand times at least by this point, it is easy to spot it as it happens and in people’s histories, but explaining exactly how this is done beyond listing these sorts of experiences and trying to externally reproduce a codified set criteria that represents the internal knowledge is obviously not easy to perfectly accomplish. (DhO)
Vibrations and Ñanas. Vibrations with rapture and powerful focus and clarity: almost always the A&P. Still, a few find the A&P disconcerting and it can be dramatic and scary for a few. Vibrations with edginess, irritation, complexity, like a cloud of flies or bees, with restlessness: can often be Dark Night territory. Some find Re-observation and Desire for Deliverance very vibratory. Vibrations that are basically neutral or slightly pleasant due to their openness and ease: often Equanimity, particularly if open, flowing, and progress to something wide, volumetric, and inclusive. (DhO)
A&P may be happening to vastly more people than anyone would have imagined. I would love … data about the epidemiology of awakening, being as I have an MSPH in epidemiology and care about awakening.
If and when someone finally does that study, I predict that they find the A&P happening to vastly more people than anyone would have imagined before, and it explaining phenomena as diverse as there seeming to be a church on every corner in the sleepy little back roads of Alabama to some of the PTSD that many soldiers experience after powerful experiences during war to Waco to some of the things researched by DARPA...
The first steps would be to operationalize the definitions of the stages and create criteria that are held in some loose way that is open to additional phenomenological description rather than close dogmas that limit further research, as well as increased emphases on developing practitioner/researchers that will be able to go into that territory with both solid training in the scientific method but also personal experience that helps them recognize what they are seeing in the field, as the eye can't see well what the brain doesn't know. (DhO)
A&P Event. Not all A&P events blow people's doors off. My smallest and shortest lasted all of a minute or two, starting with some unusually rapid attention alternating between the sense of the observer and the sense of what was observing that, culminating with a quick little non-blissful but somewhat tingly with the zap down own my spine. No lights. No bliss. No vivid dreams. That was the whole thing. It darknighted me anyway. (DhO)
A&P, a standard dream pattern. A&P events, while often blissful, are not always, and some can be darn scary and disconcerting. Since then, I have noticed what I call my standard dream pattern, a pattern I have seen hundreds if not thousands of times, and it reflects the cycles of insight.
The pattern is basically this: I start flying or am able to jump or sort of slide along the air over long distances, things are really cool, might be some sexual stuff around that phase as well as other really cool effects, like composing amazing music, seeing amazing performances.
Then things turn dark, ugly, scary in some way, might be trapped in a small box, fight with monsters, have people out to get me, be chased and now can't fly as high and they can grab my feet, might fall down long distances, fall into the earth, be strapped down and subjected to torture, might be injured or even torn apart but still be alive, might have my feet rotting off or all my teeth falling out, might have a standard college fear dream in which I am naked and forgot my pencil and there is an exam I never studied for, might have dreams of the emergency department and the bad sorts of things we see there, have my body be torn by harsh vibrations, etc. This is a very summary, incomplete list of the potentially disconcerting things that could happen in this phase.
However, if the dream goes on long enough and I don't wake up, I get to the amazing phase. In the amazing phase, remarkable things happen. I come to peace with the monsters and we make friends and some to some mutual, respectful understanding, or my body becomes streams of pure light streaking out through white clouds, or I am floating in a beautiful valley with waterfalls and golden magickal symbols hanging in the air of great profundity and import, or I interact with some benevolent goddess, or I teach people how to fly or cast spells and they get it and we are all happy, or I heal people, or I break out into some beautiful gathering of happy people in some paradise-like garden, or I am teaching meditation as a monk and resting in Dharmakaya awareness, etc. This again is a very incomplete list. This I think of as corresponding to the low end of Equanimity, ñ11.j2 as I might label it.
If the dream goes on, I might get to things even more profound but neutral, fluxing suchness, that sort of thing, that I correspond with very high Equanimity.
If you are looking for information on dream yoga, I must say that, while I am quite the active dreamer, I haven't done many of those practices. However, the work that has resonated most with me that I hope to have more time for shortly are Tenzin Wangyal's The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. I also highly recommend Alan Guiden's Traveling: An Accidental Expert's How to Leave Your Body Handbook, which, in full disclosure, just happens to be published by Aeon, who also publish my book, but I found it on the web long before they printed it.
I think that the dream experiences I have had have made me a better practitioner, as I think that the lessons we learn about things being torn apart and getting bad in dreams translate to our ability to handle deeper vipassana when awake, so I would count your experiences as more of a blessing than a curse. (DhO)
It could be wanting to control things. It could be watching that struggle itself. It could be wishing thoughts would do whatever or not do whatever. It could be just letting your stuff happen. It could be fluxing formless realms. It could be ultra-powerful concentration. It could be noticing the motion of attention as it creates space just by being itself and moving around making space. It could be that space and attention are the same thing. It could just be following the textures of form and mind as they synchronize. It could be being really annoyed that the mind isn't "behaving", whatever that is. It could be noting forms moving and changing. It could be some other formal practice just formally practicing or trying to practice. It could be any conflict, any harmony, any success, any failure, any neutrality, anything: but that thing, whatever it is, as it is, is the key, right then and really following it, really merging into that impermanence, really giving into not being able to hold off as an observer, really not being able to find any place in space that anything can stand on and hold out from, as the whole thing is allowed to show just how utterly unstable the whole thing really is with no reference points or practitioner or anything remaining uninformed and unviolated by that direct and totally absorbed, naturally fascinated following of all of that.
Staying on any of that: letting it take you out. Letting it vanish and take you with it. Letting it stutter. Letting it shift and squirm. Letting space flow towards disappearing totally with all that is in it. (DhO)
Equanimity Trap. [Here Daniel gives some advice on how to deal with, what to do, etc. It's a 2009 thread started by Kenneth Folk, with many 'old guard' posters participating.] A few things regarding timing: with strong, continuous effort and an appreciation of what one does at each stage to avoid the common traps and keep things moving forward, 10-14 day retreats can definitely be enough to "do it". Thus, one should not underestimate the value of them and of really making good use of that time.
If one can cross the A&P once, it will be much easier again. Same for Equanimity. Thus, once in Equanimity, one simply must avoid the common traps of resting, spacing out, solidifying peace or spaciousness or the like, and instead simply concentrate moment to moment on exactly what is going on in the wide field of awareness with a lot of engagement, continuity, openness and precision as to just what is occurring, particularly things like effort, expectation, doubt, joy, peace, spaciousness, and the like, including the standard bodily and mental sensations that arise, along with anything else.
While this may sound difficult, it actually may be strangely easy and natural with the right attitude. Thus, don't underestimate yourselves or what may be possible. All of us were surprised when we actually got anywhere also. (DhO)
To say that it is in the Mahasi tradition that this occurs could be read to imply one of the following:
It is true that some have Fruitions/Cessations without knowing what it was, but it is also true that plenty of people have experiences they think were Fruitions/Cessations that simply weren't, and this latter phenomenon is vastly more common.
… As to the perfectly understandable question regarding Fruitions/Cessations (not Nirodha Samapatti) being a criterion for Stream Entry but occurring after Path, one has to realize that in Abhidhammic phenomenology, as well as contemporarily verified phenomenology, the three stages of Conformity Knowledge (insight stage 12), Change of Lineage (stage 13), and Path (stage 14) occur as a package, taking three very rapid sequential mind moments, and leading immediately and unfailingly to Fruition (stage 15). So, once one gets to Conformity Knowledge, one immediately in the next moment goes to Change of Lineage (the moment that changes one into a stream enterer), then Path (the result of Change of Lineage, meaning the first moment of Stream Entry) in the next moment, then Fruition in the next moment, without any breaks, pauses or interruptions in that rapid, transformative process.
Thus, as one can't get Path (Stream Entry) without the immediate next moment being Fruition, Fruition (what we could call "cessation") can reasonably be considered a requirement for Stream Entry, as this package only comes as a package, with the whole package taking less than a second in practice, and so anyone that you are talking about asking, "Are they a stream enterer?", will by definition have had at least one Fruition unless someone somehow slipped the question in during the few microseconds between Path and Fruition, a situation of such brief duration and resolved by just waiting a few microseconds for them to have their Fruition, so, in diagnostic practice, when asking, "Is someone a stream enterer?", one typically looks for the entrance to Fruition (the three packaged moments), the gap that is Fruition, and the emergence from Fruition, as these tend to stand out, as do the transformations and capabilities that occur as a result of Stream Entry.
The true dropping of the illusion of a fixed, permament, independent, stable identity, that doesn't happen until arahatship, so is not a criterion for Stream Entry.
… Traditionally, you find the word Nibbana in the Pali Canon Sutta Pitaka (basket of suttas) pointing explicitly to arahantship, aka fourth path, and in the Abhidhamma the additional meaning of Fruition is found, though it is easily possible to read some suttas as having that meaning also, though this discrepancy is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Sutta Pitaka that I am aware of. Stated more simply, Nibbana in the Pali Canon tradition means both arahantship and Fruition, depending on context. (DhO)
It's very hard to experience the detailed phenomenology of the Three Doors as described in MCTB. [Daniel: this tone is a bit too harsh for non-DhO readers. But as this topic is your trademark IMO, never seen such detailed description in Buddhist texts, I really don't know what you want. One possibility could be to replace this entry with other text you have written on the topic.] Chasing my degree of phenomenology (of The Three Doors) has vexed many, including people who were very good meditators and were getting Fruitions. I could give many explanations for this, but the one I honestly think is most likely is that I had a mix of fervent obsession with this that burned fiercely hot for years and years and that was combined with what is probably some unusual, perhaps freakish, inborn talent for noticing how various meditative phenomena happen. I was out to prove the shit out of myself and my meditative abilities. Keeping to current forum themes, it was utter balls-to-the-wall alpha-male posturing gone haywire that just happened to be channeled into something extremely skillful.
Fruition criteria, falling asleep, hypnogogia, theta states and other stuff. The setup, entrance, exit, and afterglow criteria are all discussed in serious detail in MCTB, found in the wiki page of this site, and MCTB2 at www.mctb.org … Look in the Progress of Insight section and then in the Three Doors section, as well as the chapter that follows that talks about Stream Entry, called various things, including "Was that Emptiness?" in the MCTB1 and "What Was That?" in MCTB2.
That doesn't mean that what you are having is Fruitions or not, and some people aren't as impressed with them as others. However, that you think they are not means that they likely aren't. If they don't meet the criteria, be appropriately skeptical.
Other questions, as there are more criteria, involve asking "Am I a stream enterer?" Asking this looks to see if you cycle easily, rapidly, naturally, up through the stages of insight? Also, is there some fundamental reduction in suffering? Some stages can fool one into thinking they are cycling through complete cycles. Some stages, such as the A&P and Equanimity, can produce deep changes that some will think are permanent "traits", but one must sort those out, and that is not always easy, as they are common Stream Entry mimics.
If you don't get the sense that the Fruitions are in some way showing you something insightful about the true nature of experience, that is concerning, and, while you might just have very high standards for what insight should be, it also is very possible they just aren't Fruitions.
The best thing so is to keep an open mind, practice diligently without much attention to mapping but a lot of attention to what actually happens, and keep practicing clearly.
If they really are Fruitions, you are getting the benefit even if you don't think they are. If they are not Fruitions, best not to mistake them for Fruitions. So, given a choice, be skeptical, as it is much less likely to cause problems than overcalling your attainments. (DhO)
In A&P, some people – but certainly not everyone – can experience a pause, blip, glitch, gap-like thing, silence, black space, void-like depth, or something else like that at the bottom of the out breath at points during the A&P phase, as well as Dissolution, and some other transitions. These non-Fruition but very hard to comprehend, often seemingly formless, sometimes seemingly timeless or severely time-distorted events can be confusing, particularly to people who know the maps and are wondering if they were Fruitions. I have had numerous events like that along the way during various A&Ps, but definitely not all of them by any means, and some people never notice anything like that. (DhO)
Fruition duration: two hints. While duration has never been my strong suit, Bill Hamilton apparently could stay in Fruition for over an hour.
I have had thousands of Fruitions in formal meditation that utterly lacked those sorts of hard, definite, external temporal reference points, but, given how long the sit lasted and the setup lasted, couldn't possibly have lasted that long, but I had no reference points as to how long the Fruition lasted, and they all involved the world vanishing on the out-breath (at least during those Fruitions when the breath was perceived as part of the formations that made up the entrance, which is countless, as I have often used the breath as primary object) and reappeared on an in-breath with a characteristic breathing pattern and feel to it that is distinctive and essentially noticed 100% of the time.
Lastly, there have been a much smaller number of Fruitions that occurred on the cushion that had something external like a sound with definite timing (like a song playing somewhere in the background) that hinted at duration, but, being oddly cautious as I am, none were so definitive that I could be 100% certain that duration of any consequence had occurred, and repetition of these in some controlled way has been difficult, at least for me. Of these, when the breath was part of the entrance formations, it was always ending, and the breath was always coming up when reality reappeared. Thus, I can only conclude that Fruitions appear quantized when it comes to breaths, lasting for some regular count of whole breaths, which may also be 0 (see above), or at least in my experience.
Recently, I have recorded myself meditating over 50 times with a research-grade EEG on and sometimes video that involved at least one clear, high-grade (solidly met all the criteria and had great Three Doors phenomenology) Fruition, and, what I notice is that, for some, there is this marked reduction in a lot of the brain activity that lasts perhaps 2-3 seconds. The breath is always coming up when these end, but, as I tend to be breathing pretty slowly during Fruitions, it could be that the very last part of the out breath and some brief part of the in-breath is cut off from experience during this 2-3 second possible duration.
However, there are numerous problems in definitively interpreting those meditation EEG runs, and I would be extremely hesitant to claim duration based on them. Problem one is eye blink: even with eyes closed, my eyes nearly always clinch somewhat more tightly during the entrance to a Fruition, no idea why, and this looks like an earthquake of motion artifact on EEG, clouding interpretation. Various filtering strategies also can interfere with data interpretation, so one must be cautious.
Second, reduction in brain wave activity might be part of not only Fruition but also some part of the entrance and/or exit, so this also is entirely ambiguous data.
Third, marking the precise fraction of a second of the occurrence of the entrance to and exit from Fruition as they occur is extremely difficult, given what is happening, and precise timing of marks is key for having an ability to more definitely correlate the phenomenology to the neuro (in this case EEG) and thus do proper neurophenomenology.
I am working on these problems with some high-level academic friends who have vastly more knowledge of how to handle these than I do, but the work is slow and tedious. Part of those studies will eventually involve respiratory monitoring timed with the EEG, so hopefully at some point we will have much better data to work from. In the meantime, it is all experiential.
I hope that actually has some practical value rather than just being the basis for further dogmatic argument and avoidance of experience by obsessive intellectual activity. (DhO)
108. Disclosing your enlightenment experience ➝
Fruitions
109. Unknowning Events ➝
110. Fruitions, the real ones (though diagnosing fruition is a tricky business) ➝
111. Cessations/Fruitions is core Theravada doctrine and teaching ➝
112. (⚡) It's very hard to experience the detailed phenomenology of the Three Doors as described in MCTB ➝
110. Fruitions, the real ones (though diagnosing fruition is a tricky business) ➝
111. Cessations/Fruitions is core Theravada doctrine and teaching ➝
112. (⚡) It's very hard to experience the detailed phenomenology of the Three Doors as described in MCTB ➝
113. Fruition criteria, falling asleep, hypnogogia, theta states and other stuff ➝
114. Fruitions vary, but the vast majority of experiences aren’t it ➝
115. Fruitions duration: two hints ➝
116. Fruition duration: temporal reference points, EEG runs ➝
117. If you say that Fruition didn't change anything fundamentally about suffering, it is because you have attained something else ➝
118. Fruitions, stages, personal abilities and state shifts ➝
119. Fruitions and experiences on entheogens ➝
120. Fruitions are the same at all paths ➝
121. Nirodha Samapatti and Fruitions ➝
122. Fruition, Nirodha Samapatti and Animittam Cetosamadhi ➝
123. Full Nirodha and Nirodha Lite ➝
124. Getting repeat Fruitions ➝
125. Conformity knowledge is actually in many ways as or more important than the Fruitions ➝
126. Some advice for those who have recently achieved SE ➝
127. Things to work on during the Review phase, post Stream Entry ➝
114. Fruitions vary, but the vast majority of experiences aren’t it ➝
115. Fruitions duration: two hints ➝
116. Fruition duration: temporal reference points, EEG runs ➝
117. If you say that Fruition didn't change anything fundamentally about suffering, it is because you have attained something else ➝
118. Fruitions, stages, personal abilities and state shifts ➝
119. Fruitions and experiences on entheogens ➝
120. Fruitions are the same at all paths ➝
121. Nirodha Samapatti and Fruitions ➝
122. Fruition, Nirodha Samapatti and Animittam Cetosamadhi ➝
123. Full Nirodha and Nirodha Lite ➝
124. Getting repeat Fruitions ➝
125. Conformity knowledge is actually in many ways as or more important than the Fruitions ➝
126. Some advice for those who have recently achieved SE ➝
127. Things to work on during the Review phase, post Stream Entry ➝
2nd Path
128. 2nd Path is a pretty straight shot ➝
129. What changed after 2nd Path ➝
130. DN after SE ➝
131. What is required to get a new path ➝
129. What changed after 2nd Path ➝
130. DN after SE ➝
131. What is required to get a new path ➝
Comparing Different Traditions
132. Mixing the Actualism maps with any other maps is not helpful ➝
133. Is there a shortcut? ➝
134. Things I liked about Bill Hamilton ➝
135. Pros and Cons of goal-oriented and non goal-oriented traditions ➝
136. (⚡) Vajrayana and Theravadan perspectives can work nicely together, with some caveats though ➝
133. Is there a shortcut? ➝
134. Things I liked about Bill Hamilton ➝
135. Pros and Cons of goal-oriented and non goal-oriented traditions ➝
136. (⚡) Vajrayana and Theravadan perspectives can work nicely together, with some caveats though ➝
137. (⚡) For the vast majority of people, the teachings of the immediate, spontaneous realizers don't do it ➝
A Glossary for Middle & Higher Paths
140. Open Awareness ➝
141. Direct Awareness ➝
142. Awareness of awareness ➝
143. Natural State, Non-Dualistic State ➝
144. PCE (Pure Consciousness Experience) ➝
145. Bhavanga ➝
146. Rigpa ➝
147. Luminosity ➝
148. Non-conceptuality ➝
149. Cittas ➝
150. Javanas ➝
151. Jhanas ➝
152. Formless realms/jhanas ➝
153. (⚡) Pure Land Jhanas (TM) ➝
141. Direct Awareness ➝
142. Awareness of awareness ➝
143. Natural State, Non-Dualistic State ➝
144. PCE (Pure Consciousness Experience) ➝
145. Bhavanga ➝
146. Rigpa ➝
147. Luminosity ➝
148. Non-conceptuality ➝
149. Cittas ➝
150. Javanas ➝
151. Jhanas ➝
152. Formless realms/jhanas ➝
153. (⚡) Pure Land Jhanas (TM) ➝
3rd Path
156. 3rd Path on the Maps ➝
157. 3rd Path as sort of Dark Night ➝
158. Criteria for 3rd Path ➝
159. In 3rd Path, why not just ‘continue’ to ‘observe’ exactly what's going on ‘in the present moment’ and see the Three Characteristics? ➝
160. 3rd Path involves a few things ➝
161. What is meant by Direct Perception ➝
162. What Luminosity is ➝
163. Centerlessness experiences ➝
164. The ‘flavors of Emptiness’ debate ➝
165. What I mean by Emptiness ➝
166. Vajrayana, Theravada and Dream Walker’s simple map ➝
167. When it’s time for Vipassana, when it’s time for Dzogchen ➝
168. When having great Dzogchen/Rigpa experiences, try to see the same understanding and wisdom for things unwise, unblissful or disconnected ➝
169. The true essence of Dzogchen and Mahamudra is just paying ordinary attention to experience ➝
170. Toxic Evangelism, Hardcore Dharma and Relationships ➝
171. Non-Duality aligns with things that the Buddha taught ➝
172. True non-duality is not state-dependent ➝
173. Beware the seduction of the formless realms, longing for artificial relationships between the ultimate and relative ➝
174. Illusions I left behind, cycle after cycle ➝
175. Some gains, cycle after cycle ➝
176. Hold both views: the layer hypothesis and the true-wisdom-it-a-totally-different-thing hypothesis ➝
177. No Dog, Some Dog and The Simplest Thing ➝
157. 3rd Path as sort of Dark Night ➝
158. Criteria for 3rd Path ➝
159. In 3rd Path, why not just ‘continue’ to ‘observe’ exactly what's going on ‘in the present moment’ and see the Three Characteristics? ➝
160. 3rd Path involves a few things ➝
161. What is meant by Direct Perception ➝
162. What Luminosity is ➝
163. Centerlessness experiences ➝
164. The ‘flavors of Emptiness’ debate ➝
165. What I mean by Emptiness ➝
166. Vajrayana, Theravada and Dream Walker’s simple map ➝
167. When it’s time for Vipassana, when it’s time for Dzogchen ➝
168. When having great Dzogchen/Rigpa experiences, try to see the same understanding and wisdom for things unwise, unblissful or disconnected ➝
169. The true essence of Dzogchen and Mahamudra is just paying ordinary attention to experience ➝
170. Toxic Evangelism, Hardcore Dharma and Relationships ➝
171. Non-Duality aligns with things that the Buddha taught ➝
172. True non-duality is not state-dependent ➝
173. Beware the seduction of the formless realms, longing for artificial relationships between the ultimate and relative ➝
174. Illusions I left behind, cycle after cycle ➝
175. Some gains, cycle after cycle ➝
176. Hold both views: the layer hypothesis and the true-wisdom-it-a-totally-different-thing hypothesis ➝
177. No Dog, Some Dog and The Simplest Thing ➝
4th Path
178. Nibbana is used a number of ways in the texts ➝
179. What I mean by 4th path ➝
180. Technical/MCTB 4th Path vs a more sophisticated discussion of the goals and promises of practice and what is possible, and how developments may occur in a non-parallel fashion sometimes ➝
181. The Isolation of Blowing It ➝
182. It is not right to ask 'What is liberated?' ➝
183. 4th Path and the Whole Thing ➝
184. Some perceptual benefits of Full Enlightenment ➝
185. There are various modes of perception arising and vanishing, which may highlight various qualities over others, yet the divisionlessness of this full, rich, transient, direct, interdependent, causal field eliminates the subtle sense of some thing that is choosing modes ➝
186. Being done… in only one axis of development ➝
187. The ‘I’ in Arhatship ➝
188. Why ‘Arahat’ despite suffering ➝
189. Arahats and pain ➝
190. Arahats and emotions ➝
191. Arhats and a modicum of disturbance and non-emptiness ➝
192. The ironic thing of being an Arhat ➝
193. On happiness ➝
194. Meditative accomplishment can make people attractive ➝
195. Conceit ➝
196. There are real saints in this world ➝
197. Pain and Dukkha ➝
198. Pain Threshold ➝
199. Illness and the limits of practice ➝
200. Mindfulness and 4th Path ➝
201. Is non-dual experience an illusion? ➝
202. Awakening is vastly better than the other ways of perceiving reality ➝
203. Phenomena pretending to be Awareness ➝
203.5 This is it ➝ (new)
179. What I mean by 4th path ➝
180. Technical/MCTB 4th Path vs a more sophisticated discussion of the goals and promises of practice and what is possible, and how developments may occur in a non-parallel fashion sometimes ➝
181. The Isolation of Blowing It ➝
182. It is not right to ask 'What is liberated?' ➝
183. 4th Path and the Whole Thing ➝
184. Some perceptual benefits of Full Enlightenment ➝
185. There are various modes of perception arising and vanishing, which may highlight various qualities over others, yet the divisionlessness of this full, rich, transient, direct, interdependent, causal field eliminates the subtle sense of some thing that is choosing modes ➝
186. Being done… in only one axis of development ➝
187. The ‘I’ in Arhatship ➝
188. Why ‘Arahat’ despite suffering ➝
189. Arahats and pain ➝
190. Arahats and emotions ➝
191. Arhats and a modicum of disturbance and non-emptiness ➝
192. The ironic thing of being an Arhat ➝
193. On happiness ➝
194. Meditative accomplishment can make people attractive ➝
195. Conceit ➝
196. There are real saints in this world ➝
197. Pain and Dukkha ➝
198. Pain Threshold ➝
199. Illness and the limits of practice ➝
200. Mindfulness and 4th Path ➝
201. Is non-dual experience an illusion? ➝
202. Awakening is vastly better than the other ways of perceiving reality ➝
203. Phenomena pretending to be Awareness ➝
203.5 This is it ➝ (new)
204. About an Ultimate Reality ➝
205. By 'Ultimate' I mean the Three Characteristics ➝
206. An Ultimate Reality: an historical report on the evolution of my understanding on the subject ➝
207. Arahatship is not quite full awakening, Buddhahood is ➝
208. Post 4th Path Practices ➝
205. By 'Ultimate' I mean the Three Characteristics ➝
206. An Ultimate Reality: an historical report on the evolution of my understanding on the subject ➝
207. Arahatship is not quite full awakening, Buddhahood is ➝
208. Post 4th Path Practices ➝
Actualism-Inspired Practices
211. Trying to map AF/PCE to anything else is beyond not helpful ➝
212. AF emphasis as an opportunity to counterbalance some of the residual effects of a narrow practice ➝
213. (⚡) Chasing limited emotional range model dreams ➝
212. AF emphasis as an opportunity to counterbalance some of the residual effects of a narrow practice ➝
213. (⚡) Chasing limited emotional range model dreams ➝
214. I did benefit from giving emotional patterns more bare investigative attention ➝
215. By not promising total emotional sanitization, people will hopefully practice with a model that is less about denial, suppression and imitating some imagined emotionally perfected state, and instead go for something that is much more about clarity, honesty and recognition of basic sensate truths ➝
216. Actualism-Inspired Practice Basic Instructions ➝
217. Trent's advice ➝
218. Daniel's notes ➝
219. The Attention Wave ➝
220. The Veil ➝
221. PCE mode and Cycling mode ➝
222. Ways to get into a PCE ➝
223. The Three Characteristics and PCE ➝
224. Questioning the PCE and the feeling of being ➝
225. (⚡) AF and Arahatship: a heated debate ➝
215. By not promising total emotional sanitization, people will hopefully practice with a model that is less about denial, suppression and imitating some imagined emotionally perfected state, and instead go for something that is much more about clarity, honesty and recognition of basic sensate truths ➝
216. Actualism-Inspired Practice Basic Instructions ➝
217. Trent's advice ➝
218. Daniel's notes ➝
219. The Attention Wave ➝
220. The Veil ➝
221. PCE mode and Cycling mode ➝
222. Ways to get into a PCE ➝
223. The Three Characteristics and PCE ➝
224. Questioning the PCE and the feeling of being ➝
225. (⚡) AF and Arahatship: a heated debate ➝
Magick
226. We do magick all the time ➝
227. How can you not practice magic? ➝
228. Magick 101 ➝
229. A First Essay on Magick ➝
230. Strange Temporal Karma Magick ➝
230.5 Insight through Magick ➝
227. How can you not practice magic? ➝
228. Magick 101 ➝
229. A First Essay on Magick ➝
230. Strange Temporal Karma Magick ➝
230.5 Insight through Magick ➝
230.B Magick as something integral to experience ➝
231. Magick reproducibility ➝
232. Not all powers-related falling into the psychedelic category ➝
233. Astral triangles or the magickal implications of everything I do ➝
234. Siddhis in daily life ➝
235. Things could be vastly different than the way we were brought up to believe ➝
236. Much more interesting than the question of ‘what is real’ is the question of ‘what is causal’ ➝
237. How we relate to things that seem to be powers and what we do with them ➝
238. Powers are fascinating and fun, but are not without cost ➝
239. On Manipulation and Ethics ➝
240. Dealing with ghosts and spirits ➝
241. What to do when facing demons ➝
242. How to have visions ➝
243. OBEs are quite different from Lucid Dreams ➝
244. Astral Projection ➝
245. Strong concentration on candle flame: the most wild, crazy, repeatable, seriously stuff I ever got into ➝
246. The true rationalists here are who again? ➝
247. Much can be learned about mainstream science ➝
248. Scientific Materialism is a fascinating set of contradictions ➝
249. Current Physics is going to be like the illusion of Duality ➝
250. My Dream of a New Scientific Journal ➝
251. The way we think about reality happens on a spectrum of paradigms and modes of perception ➝
252. Fear of Death ➝
253. Rebirth ➝
254. (⚡) My past life experiences ➝
232. Not all powers-related falling into the psychedelic category ➝
233. Astral triangles or the magickal implications of everything I do ➝
234. Siddhis in daily life ➝
235. Things could be vastly different than the way we were brought up to believe ➝
236. Much more interesting than the question of ‘what is real’ is the question of ‘what is causal’ ➝
237. How we relate to things that seem to be powers and what we do with them ➝
238. Powers are fascinating and fun, but are not without cost ➝
239. On Manipulation and Ethics ➝
240. Dealing with ghosts and spirits ➝
241. What to do when facing demons ➝
242. How to have visions ➝
243. OBEs are quite different from Lucid Dreams ➝
244. Astral Projection ➝
245. Strong concentration on candle flame: the most wild, crazy, repeatable, seriously stuff I ever got into ➝
246. The true rationalists here are who again? ➝
247. Much can be learned about mainstream science ➝
248. Scientific Materialism is a fascinating set of contradictions ➝
249. Current Physics is going to be like the illusion of Duality ➝
250. My Dream of a New Scientific Journal ➝
251. The way we think about reality happens on a spectrum of paradigms and modes of perception ➝
252. Fear of Death ➝
253. Rebirth ➝
254. (⚡) My past life experiences ➝
Physical & Mental Health
255. Deep vein thrombosis risk would seem possible, but never heard of a single case yet ➝
256. Heartbeat as an object, not recommended ➝
257. Use of Earplugs ➝
258. Jhanas may have some psychological addiction component ➝
259. Meditation and Psychotherapy: have both options and learn when to apply them ➝
260. Vipassana’s shadow side ➝
261. Depersonalization, Dissociation and Derealization ➝
262. Bipolar Disorder and the Cycles of Insight ➝
263. Some ways to relieve suffering ➝
264. Tell Me What You Say Yes to, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are ➝
265. Bliss-iconize your own list of traumatic life events ➝
266. Psychiatric Medications and Insight ➝
267. The Icarus Project ➝
268. Clinical Mindfulness and Hardcore Dharma ➝
256. Heartbeat as an object, not recommended ➝
257. Use of Earplugs ➝
258. Jhanas may have some psychological addiction component ➝
259. Meditation and Psychotherapy: have both options and learn when to apply them ➝
260. Vipassana’s shadow side ➝
261. Depersonalization, Dissociation and Derealization ➝
262. Bipolar Disorder and the Cycles of Insight ➝
263. Some ways to relieve suffering ➝
264. Tell Me What You Say Yes to, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are ➝
265. Bliss-iconize your own list of traumatic life events ➝
266. Psychiatric Medications and Insight ➝
267. The Icarus Project ➝
268. Clinical Mindfulness and Hardcore Dharma ➝
Psychedelics & Entheogens
269. Smoking pot and meditative concentration ➝
270. Psychedelics and Meditation Progress ➝
271. Psychedelics are complicated ➝
272. Entheogenic Experiences and the need of flexible maps ➝
270. Psychedelics and Meditation Progress ➝
271. Psychedelics are complicated ➝
272. Entheogenic Experiences and the need of flexible maps ➝
Energy Issues
Teachers & Retreats
276. (⚡) Immortality Spells and Vanity Projects, the source of my disappointment regarding how Dharma is taught ➝
277. Teachers: on monetary compensation, enlightenment credentials and teaching ability ➝
278. Charging fees to teach ➝
279. Retreat in Asia vs in the West ➝
280. How traditional retreats are ➝
281. (⚡) On eastern monks ➝
277. Teachers: on monetary compensation, enlightenment credentials and teaching ability ➝
278. Charging fees to teach ➝
279. Retreat in Asia vs in the West ➝
280. How traditional retreats are ➝
281. (⚡) On eastern monks ➝
282. Teachers/Retreats with similar style to D. Ingram's teaching ➝
283. Christopher Titmuss ➝
284. A dialogue between Titmuss and a student ➝
285. (⚡) IMS's not-talk-about-it culture inspired MCTB ➝
283. Christopher Titmuss ➝
284. A dialogue between Titmuss and a student ➝
285. (⚡) IMS's not-talk-about-it culture inspired MCTB ➝
286. Mahasi tradition and noting 'authenticity' ➝
287. Shinzen Young might be looked at as a secularized and simplified Mahasi, but Mahasi was already pretty secularized and simplified ➝
288. (⚡) Goenka Centers are a mixed bag ➝
287. Shinzen Young might be looked at as a secularized and simplified Mahasi, but Mahasi was already pretty secularized and simplified ➝
288. (⚡) Goenka Centers are a mixed bag ➝
291. Body repair after a retreat ➝
292. Meditation goes wrong for some: 7 ironies ➝
293. On the alleged arrogance and dismissal of people's inhability to follow simple instructions on retreat ➝
294. (⚡) Teachers & Claims ➝
292. Meditation goes wrong for some: 7 ironies ➝
293. On the alleged arrogance and dismissal of people's inhability to follow simple instructions on retreat ➝
294. (⚡) Teachers & Claims ➝
295. (⚡) Teachers overdiagnosing early, beneficial, positive insights as being much more than they are ➝
296. List of conditions you should consider when trying to diagnose something ➝
MCTB & Morality
298. Overcoming attraction and aversion though insight ➝
301. MCTB and cycles: I still cycle, but it's really different from how it was before ➝
303. Abandoning Conventional Wisdom ➝
304. MCTB2 and Morality ➝
305. On Morality: three interrrelated debates ➝
306. Morality Practices ➝
307. Ascetic vs Hedonistic approach ➝
308. Killing ➝
309. Leaving your kids ➝
310. Dharma and romantic relationships ➝
311. Volunteering at homeless shelters is not necessary to get enlightened, but it is an interesting thing to do ➝
312. My 8-year trial of Vegetarism: Health, Dharma and Karma ➝
313. My vision of DhO (circa 2010) ➝
314. Dharma Underground, the prequel ➝
315. The First Great DhO Schism ➝
316. (⚡) The Governance of the DhO, or Anarchy vs Monarchy ➝
314. Dharma Underground, the prequel ➝
315. The First Great DhO Schism ➝
316. (⚡) The Governance of the DhO, or Anarchy vs Monarchy ➝
321. Midwestern construction workers and the dharma ➝
322. What we are doing in DhO is basically what they did back in the early Buddhist Sangha ➝
323. Mushroom-Culture and Pragmatic Dharma: both true, both imperfect ➝
324. Traditions predominance in DhO ➝
325. A few things that most of us would agree on ➝
326. How to keep reasonably high standards in DhO ➝
327. A call for a discussion of a much more nuanced, rich, complex, precise set of terms and phrases to help describe this amazing work we are engaged in ➝
322. What we are doing in DhO is basically what they did back in the early Buddhist Sangha ➝
323. Mushroom-Culture and Pragmatic Dharma: both true, both imperfect ➝
324. Traditions predominance in DhO ➝
325. A few things that most of us would agree on ➝
326. How to keep reasonably high standards in DhO ➝
327. A call for a discussion of a much more nuanced, rich, complex, precise set of terms and phrases to help describe this amazing work we are engaged in ➝
328. Morality and Pragmatic Dharma ➝
329. The Critiques of Pragmatic Dharma ➝
330. Debates and monitoring in DhO ➝
331. Debates on how to enhance DhO ➝
332. Transactional analysis and DhO ➝
333. DhO gender imbalance ➝
334. Types of DhO'ers ➝
335. Having a partner in the path ➝
336. Hurricane Ranch Dialogue I: Daniel Ingram, Hokai Sobol, Kenneth Folk, Tarin Greco, Vince Horn ➝
337. Hurricane Ranch Dialogue II: Daniel Ingram & Tarin Greco ➝
329. The Critiques of Pragmatic Dharma ➝
330. Debates and monitoring in DhO ➝
331. Debates on how to enhance DhO ➝
332. Transactional analysis and DhO ➝
333. DhO gender imbalance ➝
334. Types of DhO'ers ➝
335. Having a partner in the path ➝
336. Hurricane Ranch Dialogue I: Daniel Ingram, Hokai Sobol, Kenneth Folk, Tarin Greco, Vince Horn ➝
337. Hurricane Ranch Dialogue II: Daniel Ingram & Tarin Greco ➝
Phenomenology
338. Key Milestones ➝
339. Daniel's Practice Log ➝
341. My worst DN ➝
342. Three interesting shifts post 2003 (Attainments Survey) ➝
343. What I see behind the eyelids ➝
345. Some energy stuff ➝
346. Crazy-ass experiences ➝
347. Tantra Deities ➝
348. Formless-Light Vipassana Jhanas ➝
349. Choosing different working assumptions for Morality, Concentration and Insight ➝
351. Temporary speech problems ➝
Concentration
Vipassana 'vs' Samatha. There are people who are naturally more samatha-esque and more vipassana-esque, more concentration vs insight, as their baseline way of being and thinking about things.
If samatha people start with samatha, they generally do better, as it makes sense to them, they have more initial successes (jhanas), and so they develop good mental skills: concentration, peace, faith, etc.
If vipassana people start with vipassana, they generally do better, as it makes sense to them, they have more initial successes (ñanas), and so they develop good mental skills and insights.
The converse is also true: if you try to force people who are samatha people into insight, they find it harsh, unmovitating, counter to their natural inclinications, and often don't do as well.
Same for vipassana people, who initially may fail at achieving pleasant states and so be frustrated.
I personally have strong natural vipassana tendencies. I tried jhana practices at points early on and was really bad at them, but I could naturally schred reality into little flickering blips. Had I started in samatha, I think I would likely have failed. The path of insight was harsh, edgy, dysphoric most of the time, but I could do it, and luckily I have a natural tolerance for pain, so that part wasn't as bad for me as for some. Interestingly enough, after getting stream entry on my fourth retreat, I suddenly had 8 very well-developed and awesome jhanas with great ease, being able to rise through them just by gently inclining the mind that way.
However, my story is definitely not universally applicable. Some people do much better if they try jhana initially and will suck at vipassana. This is actually pretty common. They have the benefit of a much easier ride, but that easy ride is also potentially sticky, as it is much more tempting to jump into the now well-worn groove of jhana than see the true nature of phenomena, which is often unpleasant, suffering and instability being the natural characteristics of phenomena. Thus, they may fail to get insights if they can't be coaxed out of the sense of stable positive jhanic factors, as those are so attractive.
It is true that, if you can get samatha-first people to get into really strong jhana and then add in a moderate component of vipassana, they can do cool things like nearly totally bypass the harshness of the Dark Night, as they can do it in realms of light, sacred geometry, archetypical landscapes, and the like. I learned those skills much later on, as that was not my natural tendency, nor do I believe I could even have done it had I started that way.
Further, some vipassana people won't be able to have enough emotional stability to handle the Dark Night well, and, if you can't get them to add in some samatha to ease that transition, they will flounder.
So, as you can see, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Generally, people who teach and write tend to advocate for what worked for them, as it is hard not to see the world through that lens, and thus traditions and schools of philosophy and practice are born.
In truth, nobody can stick totally to one side of the samatha-vipassana axis, as there is always a bit of the other in there somehow, and more commonly people will oscillate between them, albeit with a general tendency towards one side or the other depending on their practice and their intrinsic wiring.
I personally think that people who master both do much better and would strongly advocate for people learning both at some point, but initially I think that people should lead through strength (a bridge concept, also found in the card game spades), meaning initially do something that they are more likely to do well at, as they are much more likely to develop that faith that comes from success and to persevere. (DhO)
Vipassana or Samatha: it doesn’t matter which objects are used but what is cultivated. In very simple terms, any technique that involves noticing the Three Characteristics of impermanence, suffering and not-self is vipassana. Any technique that emphasizes specific mental qualities, suppression of the hindrances, stillness, tranquility, bliss, equanimity, formlessness, as well as specific sensate experiences, such as visualizations or mantras or powers or whatever, etc. is samatha.
It is not a question of which objects are used, but what one does with those objects and what is cultivated. For example, if you took the breath to be a smooth, beautiful, tranquilizing object that you devoted all your attention to in order to attain jhanic states (blissful, rapturous, peaceful, etc.), that is samatha.
If you instead noticed every single rapid sensation that made up the breath arise and vanish as well as tuned into any subtle dualities, sense of control vs naturalness, suffering, tension, etc. around the way the breath was perceived, as well as the rapid oscillation of those transient sensations with many other sensations, mental impressions, the sensations that make up investigation and effort, and all of that with a high degree of precision that cared not a bit whether or not that produced bliss or tranquility, that is vipassana.
There are techniques that contain a mix of those elements, and those are typically called samatha-vipassana, or shamatha-vipashyana if you want to get all Tibetan about it, and it becomes a matter of the degree of the incorporation of those elements and how skillfully both can be cultivated simultaneously.
So, in Goenka-ji's school, they use the breath for samatha, generating concentration, and they use body scanning as the object when doing vipassana.
You can actually use nearly any object for samatha and can definitely use any object for vipassana. Some samatha objects will limit how deep you can go into jhana. No object limits the depths to which you can go in vipassana, as all sensations equally demonstrate the true nature of all phenomena, that being the Three Characteristics.
… The list of objects that limit samatha jhanas are found on pages 375-376 of this text and other places. Also see Path to Deliverance page 75 or so and some other pages. (DhO)
There is concentration where you do try to just cultivate positive factors of mind and to focus exclusively on one object without investigating the Three Characteristics of the sensation that make it up: this would be "pure samatha" practice.
There is insight practice where you investigate whatever arises moment after moment without any focus or agenda for what attention does so long as it notices the Three Characteristics of whatever arises.
Then there are most meditation practices, those that have some focus, such as the breath, which means they have a bit of the samatha perspective, but they also encourage noticing other sensations as they arise and to notice things come and go, which are vipassana elements, and so we find that most practices have a mix of elements.
Still, to do even "pure vipassana", in which one's sole concern is the Three Characteristics of sensations without any other agenda, it still requires what is called "momentary concentration", that ability to notice the arising and vanishing of sensation after sensation after sensation without interruption, and that sort of concentration will often cause the arising of jhanic factors and exclude things like being lost in thought.
Still, to do even "pure samatha" in which one's sole concern is to keep the mind on an object and to cultivate positive jhanic factors, past a certain point any real keeping the mind on an object honestly will result in noticing the true nature of the sensations that make up that object, as they do come and go.
Imagine a plane, one axis of which is concentration and one axis of which is insight. It is nearly impossible to stay entirely to one side of the plane and not venture out into the middle where concentration and insight are blended to some degree, though some techniques and traditions definitely attempt to have more of one emphasis or the other, while some try to do both well simultaneously. (DhO)
Concentration is not necessarily enough to get jhana. Concentration is not necessarily enough to get jhana. You must incline to jhana, incline to bliss, incline to silence, incline to rapture, incline to stuff that feels good, and resolutions for those things to arise helps, and taking any little bit of them as object and building it up to more than it started out being also helps. (DhO)
Jhanas in daily life. The range of the spectrum of jhana is wide. So many ways to develop them, aspects to make stronger or emphasize over others, ways to think of them, and a vast range of experiences within that vast landscape covered by the word jhana.
Kasina is easier than breath. For most people, kasinas strengthen concentration more easily than the breath, not that the breath isn't a great object, as it is, but for some different reasons. Might check out www.firekasina.org (DhO)
Definitions vary, and criteria for jhana are a hot-button political issue, but practically, any shift into non-ordinary meditative attention is going to have some jhanic elements to it, and it is just a question of how deep, how long, how steady, how clear, with what aspects emphasized, and the like, and that is a huge grey area of axes of development.
So, it is definitely possible to be walking around in states that have jhanic qualities, regardless of whether or not they meet some arbitrary definition of jhana, and it is very much possible to learn to shift into them very rapidly and sometimes very strongly with practice in daily life.
People seem to vary in terms of how much they are talented in this regard, but regardless of your inherent ability or proclivities, good training and repetition and hard work generally pays off for most, and so if you learn jhana, say, on retreat well, with repetition and resolutions and continued practice, many can get so they can replicate at least some version of those in daily life.
In my jhana-obsessed days (think late 90's to early 2000's), I got to the point that I could power-shift through the jhanas from 1-8 in about 10-15 minutes with a pretty high degree of depth and could even skip up to higher ones in a slightly lighter version without any setup at all just by closing my eyes and calling out the number in my mind and, with some energetic odd shudder, the whole system would shift into that way of perceiving things within few seconds. I hadn't practiced that way in quite a while, but some months ago when I wanted to see if I could still do that, within a few days of re-energizing those pathways there it all was again. Anyway, the take home point is that if you want them, go out and get them, and if you want them to be available in daily life, really give them attention and work that groove deep and you will find that they get much easier and are much closer to the surface, just like anything we really practice well.
The cycles of practice can interfere with jhanic ability sometimes, so if you are heavily into the Dark Night or some early new progress cycle, they might be farther away or not as clean, but come a Review cycle and they may be right back again... (DhO)
Kasina is easier than breath. For most people, kasinas strengthen concentration more easily than the breath, not that the breath isn't a great object, as it is, but for some different reasons. Might check out www.firekasina.org (DhO)
Kasina, some tips on how to practice. If you are looking for bliss, kasinas may or may not easily produce that initially: some will just get the visuals and not necessarily the bodily feelings, as the attention is on the colors and not the body, so if your attention is strong, you may not even really notice the body at all, just FYI.
Fire Kasina. Duncan B., Florian Weps, and myself went on about a two week retreat dedicated to the candle-flame kasina and the powers. Tommy M joined us for two days of it towards the late middle part. It was a screaming good time, great practice, great setting (we rented a medieval tower in Scotland called the Tower of Hallbar), great conversations about practice, and great food, as everyone there could cook.
We have started a website that we will populate with the material that comes out of that: www.firekasina.org and hopefully people will find things to inspire them to practice this and related techniques there, as they reveal lots of interesting things. It should also be noted that the contrast between what happened there to some of the various interests and threads here was a bit striking on returning to learn about what had been going on.
The visual kasinas have many benefits, some of which were noted by Florian above (in the DhO thread). I would add that the visuals add a great appreciation for things about the jhanas, as their widths of attention, their phase aspects, their frequency predispositions, and the like are greatly clarified when you can see it before you like a diagram. It similarly vastly increases the ability to phenomenologize well.
As Duncan said, he could now see clearly all of the stuff about frequencies and the patterns of attention in the jhanas that he had previously wondered how in the world I could know. Things about the Three Doors similarly became much clearer to those there.
When playing around with kasinas in high dose, one learns a ton about attention, about its regulation and control, about what it does, how it interacts with phenomena, and how this varies in various phases of practice. It is knowledge that is hard to gain in that same clearly defined way elsewhere.
They also help develop strengths of concentration that objects like the breath often don't, as the visuals give such immediate feedback on how concentration is doing in that second, sort of like what they are trying to do with million-dollar fMRIs and $80,000 EEGs but costing about a dollar for a candle or free by just using the LED on the camera of your phone or a video of a candle on your computer screen (thought it doesn't get quite the same retinal burn to produce a good learning sign.)
We actually used 30x300mm German church altar candles that burned very well and cleanly, and, if you do this, I recommend similarly good candles, as they make a difference in not having to deal with their maintenance, dripping, guttering, and the like. 30mm (1.25in) is a nice width for this, neither causing the flame to crater into a valley with tall waxy sides nor dripping due to overflowing the insufficient edges.
High-dose kasinas often produce siddis (powers), and siddis teach you lots of things about yourself and the experiential world and are just darn interesting. Plenty of people watch fantasy movies and yet few say, "Why would anyone watch fantasy movies?", and yet you somehow have to explain the fun it is to play with siddis to people: very odd, that.
One also gets to experience many strange ways of seeing things. Example: there is a stage up in the sequence where the visuals exhibit what we began to call pseudo-paralax, meaning that the distant parts stay relatively anchored when you move your head side to side, as if they were fixed things in the room, but the closer parts move with your head in a way that is graded by the closeness to you, such that you get this really strange thing that is like paralax but not quite the same as typical visuals.
There can also be this marked appreciation of color in all its rich shades and variants that applies not only to the images produced during the practice but also after you open your eyes, such that the colors of the ordinary world seem enhanced and the nuanced depths of shade and tone one can suddenly perceive are much more than they were before. This effect fades, but I can still feel something of that lingering a few days after I stopped and I really like it. It enhances the joy of simply seeing things.
The jhanas also have their own rewards: the deep restful states, the bliss, the rapture, the peace and the like are skillful, healing, very deeply enjoyable, and also allow one to enter into territory regarding one's stuff that is hard do to in less refined states. Just as one notices that one may have markedly reduced or totally absent physical pain from sitting while in jhana, which often contrasts sharply to the pain from sitting just minutes before the jhana set in, just so emotional issues perceived in jhana are much easier to handle. It is like getting a free pass to see what one is feeling and thinking about old wounds and current issues while not having so much pain around them, like becoming a much more objective and yet attentive party to them, and this allows degrees of clarity and wisdom to arise that it is much harder to find in non-jhanic states.
… Red dot initially is first jhana. When it gets the rapidly spinning gold inner parts that change with the phase of the breath, that is 2nd jhana. When you get the black/dark larger area and the complex somewhat 3D lines around it, that is 3rd jhana. When you get to the very nicely 3D images doing their own thing filling the visual field and perhaps the whole experience field, that is 4th jhana. There are other fine points and pathways, but that is the basics.
… The sense of mastery that one acquires as one progresses deeper and deeper into the sequences of presenting stages and visuals with more competence and skill as the practice progresses is very rewarding. You can clearly see the fruits of your labors exactly as the various phases become more clear and more accessible and you learn how to progress to the next phase of the visuals. It is hard to get that same sense of clear progress using other non-visual objects. In that same way, as the stages are so clear, one gets immediate feedback on one's attentional experiments in how to progress, and that greatly increases the meta-skill of how to figure out how to improve attention in deeper and deeper states, which is of such value to the competent meditator. There are probably more benefits, but that is a good start.
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How much time we stared at the flame totally varied. Initially, most of us looked at it fairly often. In general, we would look at the flame for a minute or two, get the retinal burn, close our eyes, see the red dot, it would get the spinning yellow stuff, then it would fade, move off to the side, and finally vanish, and we would open our eyes and do it again a few minutes later. Thus, we were looking it maybe 10-30% of the time with rapid cycles.
However, fairly rapidly, we began to push farther out into the murk, that which happens when the black/dark area appears around the place where the red dot was with the vague colors and complex but faint patterns. This takes time, and exactly when to stop is hard to determine. So, within a day or so, I am estimating, our ratio of open to closed eyes shifted farther to closed eyes, and our cycles got longer.
This is something you have to determine for yourself when you are doing it. I have no perfect answers. So long as you are paying really good attention to the visuals, more candle time with more rapid cycles is ok, but eventually you need to get good at going out past the red dot into the wider, more complex murk, as out past that murk is the high-def 3D stuff, traveling, the molten gold, the photo-realistic images, and all of that.
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I taught Fire Kasina to a class of beginning to intermediate meditators (one of which had crossed the A&P a few times and hit Equanimity a few times but not gotten Stream Entry yet) and everyone could get the red dot, many could get the spinning stuff in it, and the one person who had crossed the A&P and gotten to Equanimity a few times got a blue goddess who was seeming alive and intelligent and looking right at her after doing this for less than an hour the first time she did it … There is wide range of natural talent. Most people get more effects than they think they will.
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Depths of absorption vary widely, and a huge range is possible.
You will notice, as it says in the texts, that the red dot responses well to applied and sustained concentration, and, while those are in place and the red dot is glowing, the mind is relatively free of adverse negative mind states and distractions.
You will also notice the fact that the problem with the first jhana, particularly when not well-developed, is that it can rapidly revert to a pre-jhanic state.
On this retreat we constantly were dealing with the temptation, as jhana gets stronger, to leave off the visuals and attend to the more bodily effects of jhana, which are pleasureable, sometimes extremely so, which makes the temptation stronger. That said, strong focus on the visuals alone can produce deeply concentrated and profound states that nearly or totally lack the standard bodily components, as the mind is so focused on the visuals and not on the body.
You might notice that if you progress and can find a stable balance of dividing your attention between the red dot and the body that more physical jhanic things occur. This also takes a greater strength of practice, as divided attention is more complex to sustain, and it doesn't quite provide the nice, clear feedback that the visuals do in quite the same way.
Further, the first jhana is a huge thing, really, as are the others, and there are many focuses, emphases, variants and things you can develop all while being in it, as with the other jhanas.
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Fire is an intrinsically fascinating and natural object of concentration.
As to toxicity: I think I am the only one that noticed this. I am not sure why it happened and am merely reporting.
As to elemental imbalances: we did start bringing in water and earth later on during the retreat to try to balance things out and I think that helped on the retreat.
… I am at the moment going for a more balanced elemental approach, adding in more water, more earth, more air, more space. What that means practically is pretty hard to explain. Since that retreat, I have had a definitely increased appreciation of all of the traditional four/five elements in a way that I didn't before, both somatically/sensorily, as well as archetypically. For most of my Buddhist and Magickal practice, I didn't have that well-developed an appreciation of those elements, so this retreat, which was explicitly elemental, definitely helped. (DhO)
Mantras in Fire Kasina. Mantras are traditional in the commentarial versions of the kasinas. For the fire kasina, the Visuddhimagga, page 164, chapter V, section 7 says: He should not review the colour as blue or yellow, etc, or give attention to its characteristics as heat, etc., but taking the colour as belonging to its physical support, and setting his mind on the name concept as the most outstanding mental datum, and using any among the names for fire (tejo) such as "the Bright One" (pavaka), "the Leaver of the Black Trail" (kanhavattani, "the Knower of Creatures" (jataveda), "the Altar of Sacrifice" (hutasana), etc., he should develop [the kasina] using the obvious "fire, fire".
While a clunky bit of prose, I took it to mean that you can use basically any mantra you somehow associate with fire, though I have used one that has no obvious association with fire and it still worked fine. Really, there is something to be said for just using a mantra, as, for magick, having both auditory and visual components makes those things that arise seem and feel more real and powerful, and it also helps engage more parts of the brain which, left unengaged, are more likely to cause trouble.
As to face tension, it is stage dependent and drops at higher stages of practice, and the more attention you give to the colors and the more you ignore the tension, the better you are likely to do. Might back off the effort just a bit and relax a bit. Give yourself a nice big three oms if you find yourself getting too tense, long, rolling, beautiful oms, and then go back to the practice, and see if that helps. (DhO)
Fire Kasina: tension in the eyes and head. Tension in the head and eyes is normal in certain stages and passes. You need to get used to letting the kasina show itself once you close your eyes and track a bit less tightly. Also, focusing a bit more broadly, like taking in some of the background to the kasina in your sense of directed attention, can help the eye tension.
Also, more drifting can help, in which you stare at the light, close your eyes, follow the kasina images until they vanish, then just let the meditation run a moderate while longer, with gentle attention to the disorganized colors with very light intention to have them increase and organize just a little bit: this can help lessen the eye tension, as the less organized colors occur across the whole visual field, which requires a diffuse and non-tense focus. (DhO)
Shannon's 25-day Fire Kasina Retreat Audio Diaries. Shannon completed a 25-day solo fire kasina retreat last Fall with a bit of feedback from Florian and myself. Her audio diaries of her practice are extraordinary in many ways and are highly recommended for anyone interested in kasina practice, jhanas, visualization practice, using refined visual objects for insight practices, magick, out of body traveling, and lots of other related topics. Actually, one of the most uncanny things about her practice was the degree of psychological balance, poise and maturity in relating to these practices, as will become very aparent as you listen to her reports. It really helps to have that well-developed a foundation for doing this kind of work. May her fine work inspire many to wise and deep practice. (DhO)
The Mind Illuminated. What is taught in the book is how to understand, control, tame, direct, harness and cultivate attention, concentration and insight. It is an exceedingly meticulous yet very accessible and straightforward guide to getting the mind to stay on target and to see clearly thereby. The book is at once very traditional, being grounded in an old map and tradition, and yet very contemporary, being practical, at times scientific, and at all times helpful. There is nothing quite as detailed and thorough out there that I have seen to date.
He is sort of like Shinzen Young in ways, in his emphasis on being contemporary and non-sectarian, but he is yet a bit more traditional and vastly more thorough, sort of like the way the best 50's college-level electronics and practical chemistry textbooks are: they just get to the point clearly and keep doing that.
He doesn't wander or stray at all. He is not political. He has no apparent axes to grind. You will notice little of the personality of the author beyond his consistent clarity and desire to explain the exact mechanics and methods of what is the topic. The illustrations and diagrams are very helpful. I really think that the fundamental skills, terms, concepts and frameworks taught cut across meditative traditions, staying grounded in How To rather than some sectarian something. His blend of contemporary and traditional elements is fluid and easy, and never seems in tension but instead comes across as symbiotic and harmonious, reinforcing rather than contradictory.
Again, a remarkable work by a remarkable guy. I was lucky enough to meet him at the recent Dharma Teacher's convention in New York this June, and the maturity, depths and stability of his practice was clear. (DhO)
TMI time commitment. TMI stuff is great, thorough, meticulous, and likely just requires more time and perhaps more concentrated time to do its good work, and by concentrated time, I mean like 5-15 hours per day of practice, as that really ups the effect of any practice.
Yeah … I actually mean 5-15 hours per day. While there are a few unusual people who on relatively low doses of practice can get their concentration strong enough to get up to Culasada's described higher states in daily life, for most it will take retreats and/or much higher daily life doses of practice.
I know TMI, and actually reviewed and endorsed the book, as you might notice if you go to the web page for the book, and really appreciate the book. It is brilliant, technical, thorough, and excellent.
That said, it sort of depends on your standards for concentration and what you are trying to do. While progress on lower doses is definitely possible, and some have more talent than others, for most people to get what I think of as really good concentration takes higher doses, hence the recommendation. Plenty of people will never cross certain thresholds and figure out how to get to certain levels of practice without retreats, and those tend to involve the sorts of doses I mention. (DhO)
TMI Mind Map. During September of 2018, I was the resident teacher with Culadasa at his meditation center Dharma Treasure in Cochise Stronghold, and there I made a large mind map using iThoughts of the TMI system.
To create this, I combed page by page through the book TMI (this being the third time I had gone through it, the first being when Culadasa sent me a pre-publication copy to review and write a blurb about, the second being listening to the audiobook on the drive out across the country before going to teach there), as well as page by page through his shorter practice guide, as well as a shorter handout available on the website about the TMI stages of practice.
This mind map makes no comments on the system at all, but simply presents it as it is in summary form. I have plenty to say about the system, its pros and cons, its relationship to other systems, and the like, but this mind map has none of that. It also doesn't detail the Interlude sections of TMI as such, which are useful for understanding the TMI system, so you should refer to Culadasa's original works for that information.
Culadasa saw this mind map in early drafts and in its final form, but he curiously declined to make any specific comments on it, so his opinions on it are unknown to me. So, take it for what it is and nothing more. I present it in the spirit of Fair Use of one who was studying the TMI system and thought that my notes on it in mind map format might help others somehow.
All that said, here's the link to the TMI Mind Map page. As to subminds, no I don't have any problem with his subminds ideas at all. That is a misunderstanding. It is an older idea, one Bill Hamilton talked about a lot, though he called them "attention centers", but the functional concept was the same. As stated in another thread, I talk about this in my own way when I discuss the vipassana jhanas, particularly the fourth, which puts together the various functions of attention into one complete whole when it finally converges in Conformity Knowledge, insight stage 12. You can see MCTB, particularly the second edition, for more on that topic. My issues with TMI are many and complex, but subminds isn't one of them.
… As TMI puts both jhana and insight criteria all together into one linear map, and lacks the concept of the vipassana jhanas that help bridge that gap, it is like trying to compress a complex, multidimensional space into an idealized line, a line of relative safety through that complex territory that is considered optimal by the author, yet is not one that everyone sticks to in practice. Clearly, the problems are numerous, and it makes nuanced discussions that discuss the wide range of the actual meditative terrain we find in real living practitioners difficult if we are limited to those ten numbered stages.
Imagine that one had a map of Florida that only showed the interstates. While one could do a lot of driving and get around on those interstates, it still would be limited if one wanted to get off the main roads or if one somehow found oneself off of the interstate. The TMI map is like this.
I like interstate driving myself most of the time, as it is often fast and easy, but not everyone who practices can stay in those narrow safe zones of practice as idealized in TMI.
Yes, I appreciate the attempt and ideal, which is an ancient one, to construct the perfect blending of samatha and vipassana elements that eliminates all difficulties and provides all benefits. It is a great dream, but it is only that in practice. In reality, lots of complexities unfold in our practice, and few will stay perfectly on the straight and narrow. It is interesting that, if one has as teacher who has stayed on the straight and narrow, it is possible that they might not be able to appreciate the degree to which some wander off of their idealized path through the territory. Some have mentioned that TMI might have this particular shadow side, an inability to deal with the fact that its system, while skillful, it not always the perfect antidote it bills itself as when tested in the real world.
… IMHO, the gap where the DN lives is between stages 8 or 9 and 10. Dissolution maps well to TMI 9. Equanimity maps well to TMI 10. Yes, I am aware that to be in those officially by all TMI criteria one needs pretty strong samatha also, and here is the obvious discrepancy.
However, for the sake of this discussion, it is between TMI 9 and 10 that the real gap occurs.
In TMI 9 we gain Tranquility, so it has this third vipassana jhana element to it. In TMI 10 there is broad Equanimity, to there is this fourth vipassana jhana element to it. However, where someone will fall on the great samatha/vipassana plane (it is much more complex than two dimensions, but bear with me), will vary by the practitioner and technique.
TMI attempts to keep things far to the samatha side and then blend in vipassana when samatha is well-established. Again, it is a reasonable strategy that some will be able to pull off. However, plenty, having crossed the A&P, will then not handle the next phase well. While I can appreciate that, by building in some early emphasis on peripheral awareness and tranquility, one will hopefully be better able to handle the shift that comes with the third vipassana jhana to wide and out of phase, not everyone will do this well regardless of the technique they use.
If Dissolution hits hard after the A&P, many will suddenly find that, having had TMI Stage 6, 7, or even periods of stage 8 concentration abilities, suddenly are distracted, having a hard time, posture is not as good, pain is back, mind is wandering, sharpness is gone, things are fading and falling away, and then, following along with the TMI plan, will regress to trying some strategies from much earlier stages, such as TMI 2 or 3. This can be very disheartening, and TMI provides no normalization of the fact that for at least 2300 years this particular transition has been expected and well-documented. However, those recommendations, while not terrible advice in Dissolution, are lacking that normalization as well as appreciation of what Dissolution and the rest of the third vipassana jhana have to offer and teach. I get a reasonable number of emails about this problem, and have discussed it with numerous practitioners who are in Culadasa’s Teacher Training Program, as the problem is real and noticed by them also.
We also have a terminological problem, as Culadasa, like Shinzen Young, reserves the term “Dark Night” for the extreme end of the Dukkha Ñanas, whereas I, borrowing from the likes of Jack Kornfield, do not, and use it as a synonym for those stages, however mildly or strongly they present. This has caused a lot of complexity.
The rebranding of the Dukkha Ñanas when they hit in medium to mild form as “purifications” is a linguistic dodge for the problem that everyone that I have ever seen practice goes through some form of the Dukkha Ñanas after the A&P, though they are often mild and not that problematic. I watched everyone practicing TMI go through them that I spoke with at Dharma Treasure, but, as they were not extreme, Culadasa said they were not the Dukkha Ñanas, as he is firm in his belief that he has found the perfect solution to the problem of how to get across that territory without any issues, so he conveniently ignores them when they are not very strong, or simply describes them as “dispassion”, which, while one skillful aspect of them, is only one aspect.
… Again, because we have a strictly linear model in TMI, it does appear that ‘purifications’ don’t happen at any clear stage in some ways, particularly as plenty of people will have the expected difficult experiences when they go up through the stage of the Three Characteristics (typically happening somewhere around TMI 3-5), as well as have difficult experiences that happen when one falls back TMI-wise after the A&P (but is still making progress from a POI point of view), so, yes, clearly they don’t track perfectly.
… How strong Equanimity will be and its resemblance to TMI stage 10 will vary by the strength of the practitioner. However, from a POI point of view, the point is not to reproduce or repeat it, the point of Equanimity is to rapidly get Stream Entry, as that it the point of Equanimity, and then, having access to Review, one then has all the insight stages and vipassana jhanas to access, and, after mastery of Review, to access as one wishes. So, that critique is sort of missing the point.
… Clearly some degree of samatha is necessary for insight, a concept that the vipassana jhanas helps with nicely. It allows the maps to have that dimensionality to them. Might see this video for more on this: https://vimeo.com/69475208 [Regarding that ‘samatha stages don’t imply progressing in POI by default’, well] that’s an extremely complex topic. While it is true that some will be able to stay far to the samatha side of things without gaining insight, it is tricky. For example, when I go on fire kasina retreats, where the emphasis is entirely on samatha, people still move through he stages of insight anyway, despite there being no emphasis on the Three Characteristics specifically, though there is a great emphasis on noticing the fine details of what is going on, which does involve moment. Still, within about 3-8 days, nearly everyone will be in some sort of Dark Nightish territory despite no emphasis on that at all, and this holds up well even for those with large amounts of TMI background. The more I learn about how the path unfolds in practice, and I have been learning about this through literally thousands of emails and posts and many retreats, the more I notice that staying far to the dry insight side or far to the pure samatha side is very difficult, though some do manage it, and that’s ok.
… If one said that a map of Florida that only had the interstates was mapping a fundamentally distinct process than one that included the side-streets and minor highways, as well as beaches, forests, swamps, etc. would that ring oddly to your ear? It does to mine. Just sayin’. When one puts the POI together with the vipassana jhanas together with the samatha jhanas and has a sense of how one might move across and around that territory, one has a much broader, more nuanced, more complex map of what really occurs in real practitioners. Still, some people like smaller boxes, narrower paths, simpler frameworks, and find that satisfying, and who am I to say that they shouldn’t enjoy those if they work for them?
… As anyone who has done a practice such as “noting” well has noticed, one can clearly perceive what is going on, unify one’s mind to get to Conformity Knowledge and Stream Entry and beyond, and not have been that calm before one started making progress in insight. This experiment has been repeated literally hundreds of thousands of times. Still, many who do practices like noting will notice that jhanic factors arise, and, in fact, are very commonly noted, as in the Ten Corruptions of Insight.
… (About possibility that some of the similarities between TMI and POI might be coincidental,) Again, the stages of insight are something intrinsic to how attention develops. I have heard literally thousands of descriptions of them from Sufis, Christian Contemplates, those doing all sorts of “pure samatha practices”, from TM practitioners, from people who just got into a grove doing something that involved concentration in ordinary, worldly activities, etc. If one has followed the DhO for the 11 or so years of its existence, one will know this well. The evidence for the stage of insight being intrinsic to attention development is overwhelming, incontrovertible. To me, the question is how to move through the POI as one thinks best, which typically means either, "How to move through the POI with the least difficulties," which is what TMI attempts, or "How to move through the POI the fastest," which is what practices like Noting attempt. It is true that they give different flavors to the POI, but that is not the same as the POI not happening.
… I totally agree that TMI offers some extremely solid foundational tech, handles the hindrances and establishing a practice very well, does a great job with early to mid-level samatha instruction, has great and useful diagrams, gives useful emphasis on the differences between central attention and peripheral awareness, does a great job with intentions and resolutions, and, if taken in the spirit that he presents it in places, is applicable to a wide range of objects, techniques, and schools of practice. This is why I recommend TMI in my book and often recommend it to people for those exact reasons. (DhO)
Comparing Mahasi Noting, Fire Kasina and TMI. As far as I can tell, it is essentially impossible to do kasina practice the way we do it and not have the stages of insight show up with semi-freakish predictability. If you simply: look at a candle flame for a minute, close your eyes, follow whatever you see, however it is, until you feel you have nothing you can follow, open your eyes, and look at the flame for a minute, and repeat for, say 6-14 hours per day, people move through insight stages like clockwork.
It doesn't appear to matter if they are trying to or not. It doesn't appear to matter if you mention or emphasize the Three Characteristics or not. It appears mechanical, so far as I can tell.
As some here know, I got to teach for a month at Cochise Stronghold during Sept 2018. There were people doing three main practices with me and Culadasa there: Mahasi noting, fire kasina, and TMI-based. While not a huge sample size, the following were observed:
Everyone moved through the stages of insight. However, those doing Mahasi and fire kasina moved about as fast as each other and had more dramatic insight stage presentations, and those doing TMI moved the slowest and had the least dramatic insight stage presentations, in general.
As to how to start: start with a smaller disk if you are having the problem of where to look. Illuminate it brightly against a wide, dark (such as black) background. I still prefer candles (or oil lamps, which is actually what I generally use, as the glass cover of a good oil lamp keeps the flame steady, and if you are doing long sessions you can go through a lot of candles and I think it is easier to just buy more oil and refill the lamp).
Really focus on it with your eyes for a minute or two, then close them, see the after image, and convert that to the kasina object: it should become more and more "purified", meaning clearer, cleaner, and brighter. Stay with that as long as it is there to stay with regardless of what it does. When it is finally gone (assuming it goes away: at some point you will get good and it will get larger), open your eyes, and repeat. How long this cycle might take will vary depending on you and your practice. It might take a few minutes, it might take 10 minutes, or, if you really get the thing to glow and stabilize, you might be able to stay in one cycle of the practice for a long time, like the whole sit.
Don't pay attention to every little part, just focus on the color itself as it is and make it brighter if you can by gently inclining to expand it, realizing that there is a slight delay from intention to expand and the expansion, and that expanding it can take time to learn how to do, so just repeat again and again and again. Concentration practices really benefit from high dose over short periods of time, so many hours/day in the beginning really helps.
When doing that sort of practice, my preference is for the following:
Don't use a clock. Find a very comfortable sitting position where your back is erect and your knees and back are ok: use whatever position or bench or cushion or chair you need to be able to go for long periods. Go until you feel somewhat fried. Get up and do walking practice with really solid concentration on your visuals as you walk for a few minutes just until you can go back to sitting. Go back to sitting and repeat the staring, closing eyes, finding the afterimage, expanding and following the afterimage, etc.
Also, stick with one color initially. When you have done a lot of this practice in a short span of time (like, say, 16 hours/day for a week, or perhaps more or less, depending on you), you may begin to see the color everywhere, even when not doing the practice. For instance, if you were using red, after a while it might be as if you are wearing rose-colored glasses: this is a good sign of progress. When walking between sits really notice that redness. When laying down to sleep, notice the red color on the back of your eyelids. Every waking moment, see the redness somehow, somewhere, if you possibly can. That sort of commitment to the object will produce much more profound results.
Concentration like that, where the object pervades everything and is very strong, tends to really fade very rapidly once you stop. I remember on one retreat where I was able to do remarkable things once my concentration got strong, and within a day of stopping about 90% of the power had vanished.
... about looking at the afterimage with ones physical eyes: initially it really seems we are looking at the internal afterimage and then the more purified colors with our physical eyes, and lots of facial straining and eye and face muscle constriction and the like is common, but as practice goes on, we forget about all of that, realizing that looking at the internal image has nothing to do with the eye muscles and the face and focusing in that physical way, as the focusing is mental and so the face and eyes are forgotten and the image and the mental way of focusing on that comes to the fore. (DhO)
Fire Kasina. Duncan B., Florian Weps, and myself went on about a two week retreat dedicated to the candle-flame kasina and the powers. Tommy M joined us for two days of it towards the late middle part. It was a screaming good time, great practice, great setting (we rented a medieval tower in Scotland called the Tower of Hallbar), great conversations about practice, and great food, as everyone there could cook.
We have started a website that we will populate with the material that comes out of that: www.firekasina.org and hopefully people will find things to inspire them to practice this and related techniques there, as they reveal lots of interesting things. It should also be noted that the contrast between what happened there to some of the various interests and threads here was a bit striking on returning to learn about what had been going on.
The visual kasinas have many benefits, some of which were noted by Florian above (in the DhO thread). I would add that the visuals add a great appreciation for things about the jhanas, as their widths of attention, their phase aspects, their frequency predispositions, and the like are greatly clarified when you can see it before you like a diagram. It similarly vastly increases the ability to phenomenologize well.
As Duncan said, he could now see clearly all of the stuff about frequencies and the patterns of attention in the jhanas that he had previously wondered how in the world I could know. Things about the Three Doors similarly became much clearer to those there.
When playing around with kasinas in high dose, one learns a ton about attention, about its regulation and control, about what it does, how it interacts with phenomena, and how this varies in various phases of practice. It is knowledge that is hard to gain in that same clearly defined way elsewhere.
They also help develop strengths of concentration that objects like the breath often don't, as the visuals give such immediate feedback on how concentration is doing in that second, sort of like what they are trying to do with million-dollar fMRIs and $80,000 EEGs but costing about a dollar for a candle or free by just using the LED on the camera of your phone or a video of a candle on your computer screen (thought it doesn't get quite the same retinal burn to produce a good learning sign.)
We actually used 30x300mm German church altar candles that burned very well and cleanly, and, if you do this, I recommend similarly good candles, as they make a difference in not having to deal with their maintenance, dripping, guttering, and the like. 30mm (1.25in) is a nice width for this, neither causing the flame to crater into a valley with tall waxy sides nor dripping due to overflowing the insufficient edges.
High-dose kasinas often produce siddis (powers), and siddis teach you lots of things about yourself and the experiential world and are just darn interesting. Plenty of people watch fantasy movies and yet few say, "Why would anyone watch fantasy movies?", and yet you somehow have to explain the fun it is to play with siddis to people: very odd, that.
One also gets to experience many strange ways of seeing things. Example: there is a stage up in the sequence where the visuals exhibit what we began to call pseudo-paralax, meaning that the distant parts stay relatively anchored when you move your head side to side, as if they were fixed things in the room, but the closer parts move with your head in a way that is graded by the closeness to you, such that you get this really strange thing that is like paralax but not quite the same as typical visuals.
There can also be this marked appreciation of color in all its rich shades and variants that applies not only to the images produced during the practice but also after you open your eyes, such that the colors of the ordinary world seem enhanced and the nuanced depths of shade and tone one can suddenly perceive are much more than they were before. This effect fades, but I can still feel something of that lingering a few days after I stopped and I really like it. It enhances the joy of simply seeing things.
The jhanas also have their own rewards: the deep restful states, the bliss, the rapture, the peace and the like are skillful, healing, very deeply enjoyable, and also allow one to enter into territory regarding one's stuff that is hard do to in less refined states. Just as one notices that one may have markedly reduced or totally absent physical pain from sitting while in jhana, which often contrasts sharply to the pain from sitting just minutes before the jhana set in, just so emotional issues perceived in jhana are much easier to handle. It is like getting a free pass to see what one is feeling and thinking about old wounds and current issues while not having so much pain around them, like becoming a much more objective and yet attentive party to them, and this allows degrees of clarity and wisdom to arise that it is much harder to find in non-jhanic states.
… Red dot initially is first jhana. When it gets the rapidly spinning gold inner parts that change with the phase of the breath, that is 2nd jhana. When you get the black/dark larger area and the complex somewhat 3D lines around it, that is 3rd jhana. When you get to the very nicely 3D images doing their own thing filling the visual field and perhaps the whole experience field, that is 4th jhana. There are other fine points and pathways, but that is the basics.
… The sense of mastery that one acquires as one progresses deeper and deeper into the sequences of presenting stages and visuals with more competence and skill as the practice progresses is very rewarding. You can clearly see the fruits of your labors exactly as the various phases become more clear and more accessible and you learn how to progress to the next phase of the visuals. It is hard to get that same sense of clear progress using other non-visual objects. In that same way, as the stages are so clear, one gets immediate feedback on one's attentional experiments in how to progress, and that greatly increases the meta-skill of how to figure out how to improve attention in deeper and deeper states, which is of such value to the competent meditator. There are probably more benefits, but that is a good start.
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How much time we stared at the flame totally varied. Initially, most of us looked at it fairly often. In general, we would look at the flame for a minute or two, get the retinal burn, close our eyes, see the red dot, it would get the spinning yellow stuff, then it would fade, move off to the side, and finally vanish, and we would open our eyes and do it again a few minutes later. Thus, we were looking it maybe 10-30% of the time with rapid cycles.
However, fairly rapidly, we began to push farther out into the murk, that which happens when the black/dark area appears around the place where the red dot was with the vague colors and complex but faint patterns. This takes time, and exactly when to stop is hard to determine. So, within a day or so, I am estimating, our ratio of open to closed eyes shifted farther to closed eyes, and our cycles got longer.
This is something you have to determine for yourself when you are doing it. I have no perfect answers. So long as you are paying really good attention to the visuals, more candle time with more rapid cycles is ok, but eventually you need to get good at going out past the red dot into the wider, more complex murk, as out past that murk is the high-def 3D stuff, traveling, the molten gold, the photo-realistic images, and all of that.
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I taught Fire Kasina to a class of beginning to intermediate meditators (one of which had crossed the A&P a few times and hit Equanimity a few times but not gotten Stream Entry yet) and everyone could get the red dot, many could get the spinning stuff in it, and the one person who had crossed the A&P and gotten to Equanimity a few times got a blue goddess who was seeming alive and intelligent and looking right at her after doing this for less than an hour the first time she did it … There is wide range of natural talent. Most people get more effects than they think they will.
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Depths of absorption vary widely, and a huge range is possible.
You will notice, as it says in the texts, that the red dot responses well to applied and sustained concentration, and, while those are in place and the red dot is glowing, the mind is relatively free of adverse negative mind states and distractions.
You will also notice the fact that the problem with the first jhana, particularly when not well-developed, is that it can rapidly revert to a pre-jhanic state.
On this retreat we constantly were dealing with the temptation, as jhana gets stronger, to leave off the visuals and attend to the more bodily effects of jhana, which are pleasureable, sometimes extremely so, which makes the temptation stronger. That said, strong focus on the visuals alone can produce deeply concentrated and profound states that nearly or totally lack the standard bodily components, as the mind is so focused on the visuals and not on the body.
You might notice that if you progress and can find a stable balance of dividing your attention between the red dot and the body that more physical jhanic things occur. This also takes a greater strength of practice, as divided attention is more complex to sustain, and it doesn't quite provide the nice, clear feedback that the visuals do in quite the same way.
Further, the first jhana is a huge thing, really, as are the others, and there are many focuses, emphases, variants and things you can develop all while being in it, as with the other jhanas.
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Fire is an intrinsically fascinating and natural object of concentration.
As to toxicity: I think I am the only one that noticed this. I am not sure why it happened and am merely reporting.
As to elemental imbalances: we did start bringing in water and earth later on during the retreat to try to balance things out and I think that helped on the retreat.
… I am at the moment going for a more balanced elemental approach, adding in more water, more earth, more air, more space. What that means practically is pretty hard to explain. Since that retreat, I have had a definitely increased appreciation of all of the traditional four/five elements in a way that I didn't before, both somatically/sensorily, as well as archetypically. For most of my Buddhist and Magickal practice, I didn't have that well-developed an appreciation of those elements, so this retreat, which was explicitly elemental, definitely helped. (DhO)
Mantras in Fire Kasina. Mantras are traditional in the commentarial versions of the kasinas. For the fire kasina, the Visuddhimagga, page 164, chapter V, section 7 says: He should not review the colour as blue or yellow, etc, or give attention to its characteristics as heat, etc., but taking the colour as belonging to its physical support, and setting his mind on the name concept as the most outstanding mental datum, and using any among the names for fire (tejo) such as "the Bright One" (pavaka), "the Leaver of the Black Trail" (kanhavattani, "the Knower of Creatures" (jataveda), "the Altar of Sacrifice" (hutasana), etc., he should develop [the kasina] using the obvious "fire, fire".
While a clunky bit of prose, I took it to mean that you can use basically any mantra you somehow associate with fire, though I have used one that has no obvious association with fire and it still worked fine. Really, there is something to be said for just using a mantra, as, for magick, having both auditory and visual components makes those things that arise seem and feel more real and powerful, and it also helps engage more parts of the brain which, left unengaged, are more likely to cause trouble.
As to face tension, it is stage dependent and drops at higher stages of practice, and the more attention you give to the colors and the more you ignore the tension, the better you are likely to do. Might back off the effort just a bit and relax a bit. Give yourself a nice big three oms if you find yourself getting too tense, long, rolling, beautiful oms, and then go back to the practice, and see if that helps. (DhO)
Fire Kasina: tension in the eyes and head. Tension in the head and eyes is normal in certain stages and passes. You need to get used to letting the kasina show itself once you close your eyes and track a bit less tightly. Also, focusing a bit more broadly, like taking in some of the background to the kasina in your sense of directed attention, can help the eye tension.
Also, more drifting can help, in which you stare at the light, close your eyes, follow the kasina images until they vanish, then just let the meditation run a moderate while longer, with gentle attention to the disorganized colors with very light intention to have them increase and organize just a little bit: this can help lessen the eye tension, as the less organized colors occur across the whole visual field, which requires a diffuse and non-tense focus. (DhO)
Shannon's 25-day Fire Kasina Retreat Audio Diaries. Shannon completed a 25-day solo fire kasina retreat last Fall with a bit of feedback from Florian and myself. Her audio diaries of her practice are extraordinary in many ways and are highly recommended for anyone interested in kasina practice, jhanas, visualization practice, using refined visual objects for insight practices, magick, out of body traveling, and lots of other related topics. Actually, one of the most uncanny things about her practice was the degree of psychological balance, poise and maturity in relating to these practices, as will become very aparent as you listen to her reports. It really helps to have that well-developed a foundation for doing this kind of work. May her fine work inspire many to wise and deep practice. (DhO)
The Mind Illuminated. What is taught in the book is how to understand, control, tame, direct, harness and cultivate attention, concentration and insight. It is an exceedingly meticulous yet very accessible and straightforward guide to getting the mind to stay on target and to see clearly thereby. The book is at once very traditional, being grounded in an old map and tradition, and yet very contemporary, being practical, at times scientific, and at all times helpful. There is nothing quite as detailed and thorough out there that I have seen to date.
He is sort of like Shinzen Young in ways, in his emphasis on being contemporary and non-sectarian, but he is yet a bit more traditional and vastly more thorough, sort of like the way the best 50's college-level electronics and practical chemistry textbooks are: they just get to the point clearly and keep doing that.
He doesn't wander or stray at all. He is not political. He has no apparent axes to grind. You will notice little of the personality of the author beyond his consistent clarity and desire to explain the exact mechanics and methods of what is the topic. The illustrations and diagrams are very helpful. I really think that the fundamental skills, terms, concepts and frameworks taught cut across meditative traditions, staying grounded in How To rather than some sectarian something. His blend of contemporary and traditional elements is fluid and easy, and never seems in tension but instead comes across as symbiotic and harmonious, reinforcing rather than contradictory.
Again, a remarkable work by a remarkable guy. I was lucky enough to meet him at the recent Dharma Teacher's convention in New York this June, and the maturity, depths and stability of his practice was clear. (DhO)
TMI time commitment. TMI stuff is great, thorough, meticulous, and likely just requires more time and perhaps more concentrated time to do its good work, and by concentrated time, I mean like 5-15 hours per day of practice, as that really ups the effect of any practice.
Yeah … I actually mean 5-15 hours per day. While there are a few unusual people who on relatively low doses of practice can get their concentration strong enough to get up to Culasada's described higher states in daily life, for most it will take retreats and/or much higher daily life doses of practice.
I know TMI, and actually reviewed and endorsed the book, as you might notice if you go to the web page for the book, and really appreciate the book. It is brilliant, technical, thorough, and excellent.
That said, it sort of depends on your standards for concentration and what you are trying to do. While progress on lower doses is definitely possible, and some have more talent than others, for most people to get what I think of as really good concentration takes higher doses, hence the recommendation. Plenty of people will never cross certain thresholds and figure out how to get to certain levels of practice without retreats, and those tend to involve the sorts of doses I mention. (DhO)
TMI Mind Map. During September of 2018, I was the resident teacher with Culadasa at his meditation center Dharma Treasure in Cochise Stronghold, and there I made a large mind map using iThoughts of the TMI system.
To create this, I combed page by page through the book TMI (this being the third time I had gone through it, the first being when Culadasa sent me a pre-publication copy to review and write a blurb about, the second being listening to the audiobook on the drive out across the country before going to teach there), as well as page by page through his shorter practice guide, as well as a shorter handout available on the website about the TMI stages of practice.
This mind map makes no comments on the system at all, but simply presents it as it is in summary form. I have plenty to say about the system, its pros and cons, its relationship to other systems, and the like, but this mind map has none of that. It also doesn't detail the Interlude sections of TMI as such, which are useful for understanding the TMI system, so you should refer to Culadasa's original works for that information.
Culadasa saw this mind map in early drafts and in its final form, but he curiously declined to make any specific comments on it, so his opinions on it are unknown to me. So, take it for what it is and nothing more. I present it in the spirit of Fair Use of one who was studying the TMI system and thought that my notes on it in mind map format might help others somehow.
All that said, here's the link to the TMI Mind Map page. As to subminds, no I don't have any problem with his subminds ideas at all. That is a misunderstanding. It is an older idea, one Bill Hamilton talked about a lot, though he called them "attention centers", but the functional concept was the same. As stated in another thread, I talk about this in my own way when I discuss the vipassana jhanas, particularly the fourth, which puts together the various functions of attention into one complete whole when it finally converges in Conformity Knowledge, insight stage 12. You can see MCTB, particularly the second edition, for more on that topic. My issues with TMI are many and complex, but subminds isn't one of them.
… As TMI puts both jhana and insight criteria all together into one linear map, and lacks the concept of the vipassana jhanas that help bridge that gap, it is like trying to compress a complex, multidimensional space into an idealized line, a line of relative safety through that complex territory that is considered optimal by the author, yet is not one that everyone sticks to in practice. Clearly, the problems are numerous, and it makes nuanced discussions that discuss the wide range of the actual meditative terrain we find in real living practitioners difficult if we are limited to those ten numbered stages.
Imagine that one had a map of Florida that only showed the interstates. While one could do a lot of driving and get around on those interstates, it still would be limited if one wanted to get off the main roads or if one somehow found oneself off of the interstate. The TMI map is like this.
I like interstate driving myself most of the time, as it is often fast and easy, but not everyone who practices can stay in those narrow safe zones of practice as idealized in TMI.
Yes, I appreciate the attempt and ideal, which is an ancient one, to construct the perfect blending of samatha and vipassana elements that eliminates all difficulties and provides all benefits. It is a great dream, but it is only that in practice. In reality, lots of complexities unfold in our practice, and few will stay perfectly on the straight and narrow. It is interesting that, if one has as teacher who has stayed on the straight and narrow, it is possible that they might not be able to appreciate the degree to which some wander off of their idealized path through the territory. Some have mentioned that TMI might have this particular shadow side, an inability to deal with the fact that its system, while skillful, it not always the perfect antidote it bills itself as when tested in the real world.
… IMHO, the gap where the DN lives is between stages 8 or 9 and 10. Dissolution maps well to TMI 9. Equanimity maps well to TMI 10. Yes, I am aware that to be in those officially by all TMI criteria one needs pretty strong samatha also, and here is the obvious discrepancy.
However, for the sake of this discussion, it is between TMI 9 and 10 that the real gap occurs.
In TMI 9 we gain Tranquility, so it has this third vipassana jhana element to it. In TMI 10 there is broad Equanimity, to there is this fourth vipassana jhana element to it. However, where someone will fall on the great samatha/vipassana plane (it is much more complex than two dimensions, but bear with me), will vary by the practitioner and technique.
TMI attempts to keep things far to the samatha side and then blend in vipassana when samatha is well-established. Again, it is a reasonable strategy that some will be able to pull off. However, plenty, having crossed the A&P, will then not handle the next phase well. While I can appreciate that, by building in some early emphasis on peripheral awareness and tranquility, one will hopefully be better able to handle the shift that comes with the third vipassana jhana to wide and out of phase, not everyone will do this well regardless of the technique they use.
If Dissolution hits hard after the A&P, many will suddenly find that, having had TMI Stage 6, 7, or even periods of stage 8 concentration abilities, suddenly are distracted, having a hard time, posture is not as good, pain is back, mind is wandering, sharpness is gone, things are fading and falling away, and then, following along with the TMI plan, will regress to trying some strategies from much earlier stages, such as TMI 2 or 3. This can be very disheartening, and TMI provides no normalization of the fact that for at least 2300 years this particular transition has been expected and well-documented. However, those recommendations, while not terrible advice in Dissolution, are lacking that normalization as well as appreciation of what Dissolution and the rest of the third vipassana jhana have to offer and teach. I get a reasonable number of emails about this problem, and have discussed it with numerous practitioners who are in Culadasa’s Teacher Training Program, as the problem is real and noticed by them also.
We also have a terminological problem, as Culadasa, like Shinzen Young, reserves the term “Dark Night” for the extreme end of the Dukkha Ñanas, whereas I, borrowing from the likes of Jack Kornfield, do not, and use it as a synonym for those stages, however mildly or strongly they present. This has caused a lot of complexity.
The rebranding of the Dukkha Ñanas when they hit in medium to mild form as “purifications” is a linguistic dodge for the problem that everyone that I have ever seen practice goes through some form of the Dukkha Ñanas after the A&P, though they are often mild and not that problematic. I watched everyone practicing TMI go through them that I spoke with at Dharma Treasure, but, as they were not extreme, Culadasa said they were not the Dukkha Ñanas, as he is firm in his belief that he has found the perfect solution to the problem of how to get across that territory without any issues, so he conveniently ignores them when they are not very strong, or simply describes them as “dispassion”, which, while one skillful aspect of them, is only one aspect.
… Again, because we have a strictly linear model in TMI, it does appear that ‘purifications’ don’t happen at any clear stage in some ways, particularly as plenty of people will have the expected difficult experiences when they go up through the stage of the Three Characteristics (typically happening somewhere around TMI 3-5), as well as have difficult experiences that happen when one falls back TMI-wise after the A&P (but is still making progress from a POI point of view), so, yes, clearly they don’t track perfectly.
… How strong Equanimity will be and its resemblance to TMI stage 10 will vary by the strength of the practitioner. However, from a POI point of view, the point is not to reproduce or repeat it, the point of Equanimity is to rapidly get Stream Entry, as that it the point of Equanimity, and then, having access to Review, one then has all the insight stages and vipassana jhanas to access, and, after mastery of Review, to access as one wishes. So, that critique is sort of missing the point.
… Clearly some degree of samatha is necessary for insight, a concept that the vipassana jhanas helps with nicely. It allows the maps to have that dimensionality to them. Might see this video for more on this: https://vimeo.com/69475208 [Regarding that ‘samatha stages don’t imply progressing in POI by default’, well] that’s an extremely complex topic. While it is true that some will be able to stay far to the samatha side of things without gaining insight, it is tricky. For example, when I go on fire kasina retreats, where the emphasis is entirely on samatha, people still move through he stages of insight anyway, despite there being no emphasis on the Three Characteristics specifically, though there is a great emphasis on noticing the fine details of what is going on, which does involve moment. Still, within about 3-8 days, nearly everyone will be in some sort of Dark Nightish territory despite no emphasis on that at all, and this holds up well even for those with large amounts of TMI background. The more I learn about how the path unfolds in practice, and I have been learning about this through literally thousands of emails and posts and many retreats, the more I notice that staying far to the dry insight side or far to the pure samatha side is very difficult, though some do manage it, and that’s ok.
… If one said that a map of Florida that only had the interstates was mapping a fundamentally distinct process than one that included the side-streets and minor highways, as well as beaches, forests, swamps, etc. would that ring oddly to your ear? It does to mine. Just sayin’. When one puts the POI together with the vipassana jhanas together with the samatha jhanas and has a sense of how one might move across and around that territory, one has a much broader, more nuanced, more complex map of what really occurs in real practitioners. Still, some people like smaller boxes, narrower paths, simpler frameworks, and find that satisfying, and who am I to say that they shouldn’t enjoy those if they work for them?
… As anyone who has done a practice such as “noting” well has noticed, one can clearly perceive what is going on, unify one’s mind to get to Conformity Knowledge and Stream Entry and beyond, and not have been that calm before one started making progress in insight. This experiment has been repeated literally hundreds of thousands of times. Still, many who do practices like noting will notice that jhanic factors arise, and, in fact, are very commonly noted, as in the Ten Corruptions of Insight.
… (About possibility that some of the similarities between TMI and POI might be coincidental,) Again, the stages of insight are something intrinsic to how attention develops. I have heard literally thousands of descriptions of them from Sufis, Christian Contemplates, those doing all sorts of “pure samatha practices”, from TM practitioners, from people who just got into a grove doing something that involved concentration in ordinary, worldly activities, etc. If one has followed the DhO for the 11 or so years of its existence, one will know this well. The evidence for the stage of insight being intrinsic to attention development is overwhelming, incontrovertible. To me, the question is how to move through the POI as one thinks best, which typically means either, "How to move through the POI with the least difficulties," which is what TMI attempts, or "How to move through the POI the fastest," which is what practices like Noting attempt. It is true that they give different flavors to the POI, but that is not the same as the POI not happening.
… I totally agree that TMI offers some extremely solid foundational tech, handles the hindrances and establishing a practice very well, does a great job with early to mid-level samatha instruction, has great and useful diagrams, gives useful emphasis on the differences between central attention and peripheral awareness, does a great job with intentions and resolutions, and, if taken in the spirit that he presents it in places, is applicable to a wide range of objects, techniques, and schools of practice. This is why I recommend TMI in my book and often recommend it to people for those exact reasons. (DhO)
Comparing Mahasi Noting, Fire Kasina and TMI. As far as I can tell, it is essentially impossible to do kasina practice the way we do it and not have the stages of insight show up with semi-freakish predictability. If you simply: look at a candle flame for a minute, close your eyes, follow whatever you see, however it is, until you feel you have nothing you can follow, open your eyes, and look at the flame for a minute, and repeat for, say 6-14 hours per day, people move through insight stages like clockwork.
It doesn't appear to matter if they are trying to or not. It doesn't appear to matter if you mention or emphasize the Three Characteristics or not. It appears mechanical, so far as I can tell.
As some here know, I got to teach for a month at Cochise Stronghold during Sept 2018. There were people doing three main practices with me and Culadasa there: Mahasi noting, fire kasina, and TMI-based. While not a huge sample size, the following were observed:
Everyone moved through the stages of insight. However, those doing Mahasi and fire kasina moved about as fast as each other and had more dramatic insight stage presentations, and those doing TMI moved the slowest and had the least dramatic insight stage presentations, in general.
- Those doing fire kasina were both the weirdest by far and also the most fun.
- Those doing Mahasi were the edgiest but had some great, classic phenomenology and a clear appreciation of that.
- Those doing TMI were the least interesting and also the most confused, as the technique actually involves lots of complex modification of technique and strategies depending on stages that they might have had manifestations of some reasonable number of even during their last sit, making technique chose based on the formula somewhat bewildering. However, they were also by far the most stable.
One must not be so quick to associate hard jhana with pure samatha and soft jhana with vipassana. It is also worth making the subtle distinction between "soft jhana" and "vipassana jhana" as even vipassana jhana can be hard or soft.
For instance, the 4th vipassana jhana may be soft, in that one is walking around in it having some vague experience of formations as one walks around, and then attain to a Path or a Fruition off of that. By definition, if you were able to attain to a Fruition, you did it off the 4th vipassana jhana. As you were walking around and may not have even been practicing at that moment, that obviously was soft jhana, in this case soft vipassana jhana. Often when one is in the mature phase of a Review cycle after a path, these sorts of things will arise.
Contrast that with hard vipassana jhana, in which let's say one is 3 weeks into a retreat, with strong concentration, gunning for the next path with everything one has got, practicing 20 hours/day, and one enters into the 4th vipassana jhana, but in this case one is sitting, eyes closed, and the entire world has dissolved into pure, wide, formless waves of uninterrupted suchness, undisturbed by attention to any diversity except that formless fluxing, with no body felt, no sounds heard, nothing but that, and this goes on for a hour, until one finally gets the suchness to sync completely and gets the next Path and Fruition. This is clearly extremely hard jhana, in that the depth of concentration is profound, and yet, as it is achieved with a focus on impermanence, suffering (the tension of the fluxing, if you will) and no-self (the fluxing happening on its own and being all empty), and it lead to a Path and Fruition, that is vipassana.
Thus, one must not be so quick to associate hard jhana with pure samatha and soft jhana with vipassana, as this is not so straightforward, and the depths of concentration that may be achieved when doing insight practice may be great, though that degree of concentration is not necessary for the goal. (DhO)
Jhana wars are old hat. Jhana term wars are old stuff, of which Alan Wallace is just one of the more extreme ones, as there are others in his end of the thing. It is sort of like saying that only habaneros are peppers, or only Ferraris are cars. It sort of leaves no room for using the term jhana to describe a ton of interesting states that people can get into, just saying that only Ferraris were cars would leave you scratching your head about what to call all the other four-wheeled things rolling around on roads. It also cuts you off from plenty of the useful stuff in the Pali Canon and commentaries, as well as lots of other texts, advice that applies to those other degrees of meditative attainments and states.
Jhanas: a wide range of both opinions and skills. There is this wide range of what people are capable of regarding jhanas, clearly. There is a wide range of opinion on what jhana is, clearly. Anyone who has hung out here long enough knows all about this perennial debate, all about B Allan Wallace, all about Pa Auk, all about Ajahn Brahm, all about Ayya Kyema and Leigh Brasington, and most of the rest of it, as it comes up again and again and again, sometimes somewhat deficient in good pragmatic arguments for one set over the others based on people's real-world experience, so it is nice to see some adding those into the debate here.
Specifically: anybody got to a place where their body was totally gone, bright white pervaded their entire field of experience stably for 4-24 hours, and there were no thoughts of any kind during that entire period? If so, would honestly love to hear your reports and descriptions, as well as why you feel that anything less than that couldn't possibly be jhana.
I personally find the duration criteria noxious, to be honest, not only due to the obvious time problem, such as the set up for Nirodha Samapatti taking a minimum of 32 hours by the 4-hour per jhana criteria (or 8+ days using the 24-hour criteria found in BAW's work?), during which point someone would likely have to at least pee...
If the body and form disappear with retained high perceptual and mental clarity but it only did so for 5 minutes, was that not some formless attainment? Really?
It would be sort of like a marathon runner saying that anything less than running a marathon is not really running.
It gets, well, a bit macho, even for this place. It is not that there is anything wrong with running marathons, nor is there anything that intrinsically toxic about having some benevolent and skillful pride at that accomplishment, as that is an impressive thing to do, but to then take that and say that everyone else who did it for slightly less or moderately less isn't running isn't just obnoxious, it shows a level of rigid categorical and concrete thinking that is unseemly in an adult, lacking the nuance we all hope people develop as they mature from childhood.
Am I similarly being noxiously prideful about having the ability to think with nuance and in shades of grey and dimensions rather than ultra-rigid categories over those who apparently can't? Perhaps, and I will try to show more sensitivity towards their condition.
So, we likely have at least 4 types of people here:
MCTB goes out of its way to make sure that it says the world of jhanas is wide, and, at the extreme end, you can get into some really, really hard jhanic states that last a long time, such as what BAW talks about. I can appreciate macho stuff as much as the next guy, but without giving a set of terms to describe all the other jhanic states BAW's work is very incomplete and somewhat alienating to those who are attaining to concentration states but just not taking it as far as he is.
Further, from a pragmatic point of view, what I personally care most about is awakening, using jhanic states as a support for a healthy life, and also using jhanas as a support for the powers, and you don't need nearly that much concentration to do all of that, just like you generally don't need a Ferrari to get to work or a habanero to make your food tasty, though I appreciate both of those things. (DhO)
Jhanas: a wide range of both opinions and skills. There is this wide range of what people are capable of regarding jhanas, clearly. There is a wide range of opinion on what jhana is, clearly. Anyone who has hung out here long enough knows all about this perennial debate, all about B Allan Wallace, all about Pa Auk, all about Ajahn Brahm, all about Ayya Kyema and Leigh Brasington, and most of the rest of it, as it comes up again and again and again, sometimes somewhat deficient in good pragmatic arguments for one set over the others based on people's real-world experience, so it is nice to see some adding those into the debate here.
Specifically: anybody got to a place where their body was totally gone, bright white pervaded their entire field of experience stably for 4-24 hours, and there were no thoughts of any kind during that entire period? If so, would honestly love to hear your reports and descriptions, as well as why you feel that anything less than that couldn't possibly be jhana.
I personally find the duration criteria noxious, to be honest, not only due to the obvious time problem, such as the set up for Nirodha Samapatti taking a minimum of 32 hours by the 4-hour per jhana criteria (or 8+ days using the 24-hour criteria found in BAW's work?), during which point someone would likely have to at least pee...
If the body and form disappear with retained high perceptual and mental clarity but it only did so for 5 minutes, was that not some formless attainment? Really?
It would be sort of like a marathon runner saying that anything less than running a marathon is not really running.
It gets, well, a bit macho, even for this place. It is not that there is anything wrong with running marathons, nor is there anything that intrinsically toxic about having some benevolent and skillful pride at that accomplishment, as that is an impressive thing to do, but to then take that and say that everyone else who did it for slightly less or moderately less isn't running isn't just obnoxious, it shows a level of rigid categorical and concrete thinking that is unseemly in an adult, lacking the nuance we all hope people develop as they mature from childhood.
Am I similarly being noxiously prideful about having the ability to think with nuance and in shades of grey and dimensions rather than ultra-rigid categories over those who apparently can't? Perhaps, and I will try to show more sensitivity towards their condition.
So, we likely have at least 4 types of people here:
- People who can get into ultra-hard jhanas with perfect unwavering stability for greater than 240 minutes and also who can think with nuance and realize that someone in that same or very similar state with all the defined jhanic factors present for, say, 239 minutes and 59 seconds, was actually in jhana also.
- People who can get into ultra-hard jhanas with perfect unwavering stability for greater than 240 minutes who are congenitally incapable of conceiving that those who were in some very similar state with all jhanic factors present for, say, 239 minutes and 59 seconds, were also in jhana.
- People who can't get into ultra-hard jhanas with perfect unwavering stability for 240 minutes who can yet think with nuance and realize that someone who was in a very similar state with all defined jhanic factors present for, say, 239 minutes and 59 seconds, were also in jhana.
- People who neither can get into ultra-hard jhana with perfect unwavering for 240 minutes who also are incapable of conceiving that those who were in a similar state with all classically defined jhanic factors present for 239 minutes and 59 seconds were also in jhana.
The basic qualities of jhana are in some ways influenced by the object. The jhanas may take many objects, but some aspects of them are more clear with visual images, some aspects more clear with mantras, some aspects more clear with the breath, some aspects more clear with the jhanas themselves as object, some aspects more clear with space as object, some aspects more clear with love/compassion/etc. as object, etc. In short, the basic qualities of jhana are in some ways influenced by the object, but they are more fundamental. Thus, one who knows how can be in various jhanas with all manner of various objects, though there are some specifics about which objects are conducive to certain higher jhanas, all of which is spelled out in the standard references.
Cognitive abilities and Jhanas. As to cognitive increase after jhana, I think that for me it varies and depends on other factors. It is not often that my cognitive abilities are really tested heavily after jhana these days, but I do remember an example from 7 years ago.
I was studying for my Emergency Medicine board exam, which involved long hours of pouring through tons of obscure facts for a test that, at the high end, is much more about whether or not you can remember facts about things you might never see in a whole career, of which there are many, or memorize facts that have nearly nothing to do with clinical practice (such as some obscure epidemiological fact about some cancer), or figure out how to take the sorts of odd test questions they will throw at you, such as, "Which ONE of these [5 next tests or steps all of which you would always do basically simultaneously] is the best one to do now?", really annoying stuff like that.
Anyway, about 5 hours into one day of this sort of thing after about a week of it, I found my mind getting fatigued, but I didn't have many study-days left, and I really needed to keep going to finish all my study materials, so finally I closed my eyes, rose up from 1st-8th jhana, came out to that Post-8th Junction Point that has so many options to it, and my standard one would have been a Fruition, but the thought occurred to me, "I wonder if Nirodha Samapatti would help?"
The question was an honest one, as the thing about the massive afterglow of that state is that it is at once really clear and also really chill, and I wasn't sure if the really chill part would be good for intensive cramming for another 5 hours or so. The first time I attained it was right before a shift at the CDC's National AIDS Hotline, and it was really not conducive to talking to people on the phone for hour after hour.
Anyway, I decided to go for it, so I inclined that way, and, surprisingly, it happened, despite my setup not being that good and the last time I attained it probably a year before if not longer (hard to remember exactly at this point). When I came out, the afterglow was as it always was, really, really heavy, really really chill, like the best part of slow motion.
I opened my eyes and turned them to the textbook. It was like magic: steady, heavy duty, rock-solid, undistracted concentration on the material that lasted for hours. It was some of the best studying I had ever done, and I really think it helped on the exam. So, that is one more data point for you.
As to the question of one-pointed concentration, I think it is much more a question of the depth and continuity of recent concentration than the object. That said, some objects really do lend themselves much more to powers, particularly mantras and visualization practices, or, even better, the two combined, which can really get things going fast, but if you get your concentration strong enough and do enough of it in a short period of time, then even vipassana on the whole field of fluxing experience, which is obviously as many-object-ish and as wide as you can get, done really well, can make powers really accessible anyway.
Past a certain point, I do think that the question of one-pointed gets sort of strange. I personally find that really concentrated 4th jhana just doesn't do narrow well at all, preferring naturally to be much wider. Visualized images get volumetric, living, and detailed beyond what one would ordinarily think of as one-pointed. The whole visual field can become the visualization. Mantras become luminous and so wide as to seem almost silent, which is an odd thing, but still true, at least for me. I haven't had that lack of one-pointedness detract from powers experiences at all, and I think that complete and all-encompassing aspect of the higher jhanas it what makes the best powers experiences happen. (DhO)
Categorical and Dimensional Jhanic thinking. There are reasons to think of jhana categorically and dimensionally, and both have their uses and downsides.
Categorical jhanic thinking asks the question, "Was that a jhana?" in a way that is binary, yes/no, black/white, without any nuance or shades of grey. Plenty of people think about jhanas this way, even some very senior famous teachers, and it has its points. Generally, these traditions have very specific criteria for the type of jhana they are interested in, or how they conceptualize jhana if they acknowledge only one type. People who use words like "sutta jhanas", "bodily jhanas", "Ayya Khema jhanas", "Visuddhimagga jhanas", "luminous jhanas", "Pa Auk jhanas", "Ajahn Brahm jhanas", "B Alan Wallace jhanas", etc. are thinking this way. Some acknowledge multiple discrete types, e.g. Culadasa, while others, such as BAW, only acknowledge one type of jhana as really being "jhana". These different "types" of jhana have criteria that sometimes diverge widely from each other, and, at the high end, can sometimes get pretty macho. There are experiences that can validate and reinforce these strict, dichotomous perspectives, such as suddenly shifting strongly into a very specific state that meets very specific criteria or expectations.
Dimensional jhanic thinking is more nuanced, more shades of grey, more concerned with the specific phenomenology of whatever experience is arising, and less concerned with whether or not some specific state meets some, potentially arbitrary, fixed set of categorical jhanic criteria. Dimensional jhanic thinking is more along the lines of identifying the jhanic factors present and assessing the degree of strength with which each one is presenting at that time and the difference between what is being experienced from some sense of "ordinary, non-jhanic mind". For example, one might be experiencing very strong concentration, a bit of bliss, some rapture, a moderate amount of tranquility, a large degree of freedom from the hindrances, pretty narrowly focused attention, and a moderate amount of applied and sustained thought, and one might thus think about that as being somewhere in the range of experiences that fall into the general neighborhood of the first jhana, which is a pretty large neighborhood from a dimensional point of view, with a very wide range of possible manifestations depending on the practitioner, technique, strength of concentration, etc.
I use both categorically and dimensional thinking when thinking about jhana in my own practice and when talking with others about practice, and each has its pros and cons. More interesting to me is the question of the pragmatist, which asks, "Ok, what do you value and what are you trying to do, and how do dimensional or categorical thinking help or harm that process?"
Said another way, categorical thinking helps if there is something specific we wish to accomplish that we can only accomplish with a specific type of jhana, and so we can gauge whether or not we have attained to that jhana so we can know if we have an appropriate foundation for whatever it is that is useful to do with that jhana. That goal for many may simply be, "I really want the personal merit badge that comes from having felt or been told that I met someone's specific jhanic criteria they wrote down," and that is ok, as chasing specific jhanic criteria can develop interesting skills that may have other utility also and can lead to various valuable experiences and lessons along the way beyond just the specific type of jhana.
Dimensional thinking helps a lot when just trying to identify and develop various jhanic qualities and the degree to which they have been developed/are presenting, as well as identifying degrees of other factors, such as dullness, restlessness, etc that might be reduced or transmuted into something positive. For example, we might notice that a bit of rapture is showing up, tune into that rapture, and learn how to amplify it while also learning what makes it fade. It also holds up better across a wide range of experiences that contain jhanic factors to various degrees, providing a totally different meta-perspective on jhana that can be useful to the practitioner, particularly when talking with people who cultivate jhana differently from the way you do. A dimensional thinker may be more inclined to explore and learn more individual factor control, doing things like learning extended, compound, and custom jhanas, for example.
It is common for categorical and dimensional practitioners to irritate each other, with both having valid critiques of the downsides of the other's approach, and often being pretty attached to their own way of approaching jhana. It is a large topic that I keep thinking I will do a long video on sometime, as the topic comes up again and again and again and again and again and again in conversations and posts. (DhO)
Formless Realms, Thinking Dimensionally and Categorically. There are formed jhanas that have form: edges, colors, shapes, experiences that are distinct, well-differentiated, and rich in their features.
Formed jhanas can get progressively more refined, subtle, abstract, trending towards formlessness.
Various aspects of experience may disappear, body, sights, sounds, images, etc., and this may happen progressively, non-linearly, often fading, reappearing, fading, though, if we are inclined to formlessness, hopefully following a general, if meandering trend in that direction. So, in these experiences, we have a spectrum of formlessness, a formlessness that exists in shades of grey, a moving progression in the general direction of an ideal.
I wouldn't use the terms hypnotic or light trance to describe those experiences: they were very strong, complete, hard, stable jhana, though there are certainly others that are more profound, such as the formless realms, but those were not my object during that set of exercises. The key is that the experience lead to what you want, not what different people happen to term that state. There are no external merit badges of any worth that you get for attaining to what someone calls whatever. The experiences themselves are either beneficial or not, create the effect or insight you are looking for or not, etc. (DhO)
Cognitive abilities and Jhanas. As to cognitive increase after jhana, I think that for me it varies and depends on other factors. It is not often that my cognitive abilities are really tested heavily after jhana these days, but I do remember an example from 7 years ago.
I was studying for my Emergency Medicine board exam, which involved long hours of pouring through tons of obscure facts for a test that, at the high end, is much more about whether or not you can remember facts about things you might never see in a whole career, of which there are many, or memorize facts that have nearly nothing to do with clinical practice (such as some obscure epidemiological fact about some cancer), or figure out how to take the sorts of odd test questions they will throw at you, such as, "Which ONE of these [5 next tests or steps all of which you would always do basically simultaneously] is the best one to do now?", really annoying stuff like that.
Anyway, about 5 hours into one day of this sort of thing after about a week of it, I found my mind getting fatigued, but I didn't have many study-days left, and I really needed to keep going to finish all my study materials, so finally I closed my eyes, rose up from 1st-8th jhana, came out to that Post-8th Junction Point that has so many options to it, and my standard one would have been a Fruition, but the thought occurred to me, "I wonder if Nirodha Samapatti would help?"
The question was an honest one, as the thing about the massive afterglow of that state is that it is at once really clear and also really chill, and I wasn't sure if the really chill part would be good for intensive cramming for another 5 hours or so. The first time I attained it was right before a shift at the CDC's National AIDS Hotline, and it was really not conducive to talking to people on the phone for hour after hour.
Anyway, I decided to go for it, so I inclined that way, and, surprisingly, it happened, despite my setup not being that good and the last time I attained it probably a year before if not longer (hard to remember exactly at this point). When I came out, the afterglow was as it always was, really, really heavy, really really chill, like the best part of slow motion.
I opened my eyes and turned them to the textbook. It was like magic: steady, heavy duty, rock-solid, undistracted concentration on the material that lasted for hours. It was some of the best studying I had ever done, and I really think it helped on the exam. So, that is one more data point for you.
As to the question of one-pointed concentration, I think it is much more a question of the depth and continuity of recent concentration than the object. That said, some objects really do lend themselves much more to powers, particularly mantras and visualization practices, or, even better, the two combined, which can really get things going fast, but if you get your concentration strong enough and do enough of it in a short period of time, then even vipassana on the whole field of fluxing experience, which is obviously as many-object-ish and as wide as you can get, done really well, can make powers really accessible anyway.
Past a certain point, I do think that the question of one-pointed gets sort of strange. I personally find that really concentrated 4th jhana just doesn't do narrow well at all, preferring naturally to be much wider. Visualized images get volumetric, living, and detailed beyond what one would ordinarily think of as one-pointed. The whole visual field can become the visualization. Mantras become luminous and so wide as to seem almost silent, which is an odd thing, but still true, at least for me. I haven't had that lack of one-pointedness detract from powers experiences at all, and I think that complete and all-encompassing aspect of the higher jhanas it what makes the best powers experiences happen. (DhO)
Categorical and Dimensional Jhanic thinking. There are reasons to think of jhana categorically and dimensionally, and both have their uses and downsides.
Categorical jhanic thinking asks the question, "Was that a jhana?" in a way that is binary, yes/no, black/white, without any nuance or shades of grey. Plenty of people think about jhanas this way, even some very senior famous teachers, and it has its points. Generally, these traditions have very specific criteria for the type of jhana they are interested in, or how they conceptualize jhana if they acknowledge only one type. People who use words like "sutta jhanas", "bodily jhanas", "Ayya Khema jhanas", "Visuddhimagga jhanas", "luminous jhanas", "Pa Auk jhanas", "Ajahn Brahm jhanas", "B Alan Wallace jhanas", etc. are thinking this way. Some acknowledge multiple discrete types, e.g. Culadasa, while others, such as BAW, only acknowledge one type of jhana as really being "jhana". These different "types" of jhana have criteria that sometimes diverge widely from each other, and, at the high end, can sometimes get pretty macho. There are experiences that can validate and reinforce these strict, dichotomous perspectives, such as suddenly shifting strongly into a very specific state that meets very specific criteria or expectations.
Dimensional jhanic thinking is more nuanced, more shades of grey, more concerned with the specific phenomenology of whatever experience is arising, and less concerned with whether or not some specific state meets some, potentially arbitrary, fixed set of categorical jhanic criteria. Dimensional jhanic thinking is more along the lines of identifying the jhanic factors present and assessing the degree of strength with which each one is presenting at that time and the difference between what is being experienced from some sense of "ordinary, non-jhanic mind". For example, one might be experiencing very strong concentration, a bit of bliss, some rapture, a moderate amount of tranquility, a large degree of freedom from the hindrances, pretty narrowly focused attention, and a moderate amount of applied and sustained thought, and one might thus think about that as being somewhere in the range of experiences that fall into the general neighborhood of the first jhana, which is a pretty large neighborhood from a dimensional point of view, with a very wide range of possible manifestations depending on the practitioner, technique, strength of concentration, etc.
I use both categorically and dimensional thinking when thinking about jhana in my own practice and when talking with others about practice, and each has its pros and cons. More interesting to me is the question of the pragmatist, which asks, "Ok, what do you value and what are you trying to do, and how do dimensional or categorical thinking help or harm that process?"
Said another way, categorical thinking helps if there is something specific we wish to accomplish that we can only accomplish with a specific type of jhana, and so we can gauge whether or not we have attained to that jhana so we can know if we have an appropriate foundation for whatever it is that is useful to do with that jhana. That goal for many may simply be, "I really want the personal merit badge that comes from having felt or been told that I met someone's specific jhanic criteria they wrote down," and that is ok, as chasing specific jhanic criteria can develop interesting skills that may have other utility also and can lead to various valuable experiences and lessons along the way beyond just the specific type of jhana.
Dimensional thinking helps a lot when just trying to identify and develop various jhanic qualities and the degree to which they have been developed/are presenting, as well as identifying degrees of other factors, such as dullness, restlessness, etc that might be reduced or transmuted into something positive. For example, we might notice that a bit of rapture is showing up, tune into that rapture, and learn how to amplify it while also learning what makes it fade. It also holds up better across a wide range of experiences that contain jhanic factors to various degrees, providing a totally different meta-perspective on jhana that can be useful to the practitioner, particularly when talking with people who cultivate jhana differently from the way you do. A dimensional thinker may be more inclined to explore and learn more individual factor control, doing things like learning extended, compound, and custom jhanas, for example.
It is common for categorical and dimensional practitioners to irritate each other, with both having valid critiques of the downsides of the other's approach, and often being pretty attached to their own way of approaching jhana. It is a large topic that I keep thinking I will do a long video on sometime, as the topic comes up again and again and again and again and again and again in conversations and posts. (DhO)
Formless Realms, Thinking Dimensionally and Categorically. There are formed jhanas that have form: edges, colors, shapes, experiences that are distinct, well-differentiated, and rich in their features.
Formed jhanas can get progressively more refined, subtle, abstract, trending towards formlessness.
Various aspects of experience may disappear, body, sights, sounds, images, etc., and this may happen progressively, non-linearly, often fading, reappearing, fading, though, if we are inclined to formlessness, hopefully following a general, if meandering trend in that direction. So, in these experiences, we have a spectrum of formlessness, a formlessness that exists in shades of grey, a moving progression in the general direction of an ideal.
However, there are also formless realm experiences that arise that are much more dramatically clean in both the way that they arise and the way they present after arising that seem to be starkly delineated from the progressively more formless versions. They arise rapidly, sharply demarcated from what came before, and they present very much as advertised in the descriptions of the formless realms.
While one could think of even these two variants, that of shades of formlessness and stark formlessness in shades of grey, in that a formless experience can present more and more starkly, sharply, cleanly that some others.
Equally, one who has had the stark, sharp, clean, highly-formless versions that fully meet the advertised ideal arise rapidly may think: no, there are two distinct modes, the softer progressive mode that is relatively formless but not truly formless, and the stark arising mode, and they seem very, very different.
I have at points held each of these views, typically arising depending on how recently I had the much cleaner version rapidly and sharply arise. My linguistic preference, however, is to be clear about which view you are holding at the very least. However, in my heart of hearts, I do feel that only the stark, categorically different presentation, that in which very refined versions of the formless realms arise in a strong shift, are the “true formless realms”, and everything else is something formed, however refined.
So, when describing experience and using the word “formless”, I advocate for adding additional words, qualifiers, and details such that people know what is actually being described rather than having to assume.
I use terms such as j3.j7, for example, to describe some third jhanic experience that really had very little form, space, or even consciousness in it but was still clearly third jhanic and not the extremely clean “true j7, Nothingness” that can also arise.
I might use the term j4.j6 to describe an experience that was much more fourth jhanic in its character but still had a significant aspect of vast, open presence, luminosity, and sense of all-pervading consciousness yet still had some form arising, however abstract, and so differentiate it from “true j6, Boundless Consciousness” in which form was utterly gone and it was like being in another realm of pure consciousness utterly removed in all obvious ways from the experiences of the space in which my body was sitting.
This is what is meant by “realm”, as in “The Six Realms”, as in somewhere and something else entirely, removed from the space in which we are practicing in the way that dreams and out of body experiences are.
Experiences at the level of a total shift in which realm we are experiencing represent strong meditative attainments. Often, we might get extremely short glimpses of such possibilities that last a mere fraction of a second. At other times, experiences of other realms can last many seconds, minutes, or even occasionally in very rare cases hours.
Most experiences of other realms are still formed and present with a diversity of features. However, a small proportion are truly formless and perform exactly as one would expect from the high descriptions of the formless realms, basically at the level of a Platonic Ideal but actually experienced.
Regarding the formless realms proper, those of the categorical variety, they very much tend to arise in strict sequence, shifting from j4 (the fourth jhana), to j5 (Boundless Space), j6 (Boundless Consciousness), j7 (Nothingness), to j8 (Neither Perception Nor Yet Non-Perception) and then out to the Post-8th Junction Point as I term it. Knowing this, if you have entered a state that has a lot of formlessness to it but doesn’t have that striking sense of utter detachment from your body and the space you are practicing in and didn’t arise in sequence, it is very likely of the dimensional version, some jX.jF (with X representing some jhana from 1-4 and F representing one of the Formless Realms from 5-8) variant, and not what I would term a true jF experience.
I don’t mean to disparage or downplay the value of formed jhanic experiences that have significant formless aspects, as such experiences can be powerful, profound, and even sometimes transformative, but I do wish to delineate that there are these seemingly categorically different experiences that truly do perform as “realms” and truly are “formless”, as well as experiences that clearly have some degree of formlessness and some degree of removal from ordinary consciousness and the space we are in.
By being able to think both dimensionally, that is, in terms of degrees and shades of grey, as well as categorically, that of a binary “true formless” or “some form remaining”, and by being very deliberate in how we express these modes of thought, we can be much better communicators as well as hopefully better practitioners.
Language that appreciates both the dimensional and categorical mode can help us to realize what might be possible and also how what we are experiencing might actually relate to those possibilities. It also helps avoid confusion when we speak and write about our experiences. (DhO)
Space, Formless Realms and Insight. As to space, paying attention to it depends on what aspects you look at, and even how you look at those aspects. For instance, space is made of many fresh, transient sensations of various sense doors, including visual, mental and physical, as well as proprioceptive and auditory, and if you investigate those and tease those apart, one can see the sensations that make up space in the same light of insight that one sees other things if one practices insight practices well. If you pay attention to the width and openness and steadiness without looking closely or noticing things like the true nature of those sensations, then it will definitely be more on the formless jhana end of things. (DhO)
Pure Land Jhanas. While in theory one might jump to any jhana out of order using any object, in practice I personally find that I need to get up to the 8th jhana, come out, and then, in that state I call the Post-8th Junction Point, suddenly things are available that weren't before, including the jhanas that we theorize correspond to the Pure Abodes as well as Nirodha Samapatti. That's just one practitioner's data point, and thus not good science. I must admit that, as I have relatively easy access to the 8th jhana, I have never really tried hard to do it the other way. That said, one can definitely, with strong enough concentration and practice and interest, craft all sorts of remarkable jhanas, creating fusions and combinations of elements that one wouldn't find in the more standard sequences, and I used to play around a lot with that sort of thing back in the day and really enjoyed it. (DhO)
Pure Land Jhanas. While in theory one might jump to any jhana out of order using any object, in practice I personally find that I need to get up to the 8th jhana, come out, and then, in that state I call the Post-8th Junction Point, suddenly things are available that weren't before, including the jhanas that we theorize correspond to the Pure Abodes as well as Nirodha Samapatti. That's just one practitioner's data point, and thus not good science. I must admit that, as I have relatively easy access to the 8th jhana, I have never really tried hard to do it the other way. That said, one can definitely, with strong enough concentration and practice and interest, craft all sorts of remarkable jhanas, creating fusions and combinations of elements that one wouldn't find in the more standard sequences, and I used to play around a lot with that sort of thing back in the day and really enjoyed it. (DhO)
Pure Land One, the set up. Can you slow the thing down just slightly, shift focus to the samatha aspect a bit more, and control when you shift from one state to the next?
Formless Realms and Kasina. Formless realms don't have any color except to speak of, though it is hard not to think of Nothingness as anything other than black, and it is hard to think of Boundless Consciousness as being any color other than a "color" I will loosely call "mirror" or "clear light".
That said, on my retreat in February, when I was doing a mix of practices, mostly kasina, some otherwise, I was able to get into formless realms by the usual methods, which for me is just to send my mind in that direction and watch it go there, but that hardly helps if you are trying to access them for the first time.
Thus, I present three methods:
Formless Realms and Lucid Dreaming. I have periodically lost and regained the ability to enter the formless realms, as, at least for me, to get them be truly formless, truly non-bodily, truly stable, and very "pure" often requires giving them attention and repetition in a short space of time. I hadn't given them much attention recently, so I thought it would be fun to go back and revisit them. It is common for me, particularly after doing a lot of color kasina work, which I have done a lot of in April, what with a 15-day fire kasina retreat and all, to have a hard time getting the colors to go entirely away, as they do have an inertia to them.
So, the last three nights I did give them very specific attention for about an hour each night before going to sleep, using gentle intentions and resolutions, really working on a good set up and getting j4 clean and deep, and work on that tricky balance of having the colors fade while keeping attention wide and open. Last night I was successful in getting to some really nice formless realms with the colors gone, except that boundless consciousness somehow didn't have that really clean, vast, luminous thing as well as it might have, but j7 and j8 were both really clean. After practicing, I fell asleep.
I woke up at 4:30am, not sure why, and so started practicing again, getting j4 really well-developed, then drifting towards formlessness. I again fell asleep, not sure after how long, maybe 30 minutes or so.
I then had a lucid dream in which I was able to fly. I have a few modes of flying in my dreams, which typically progress in sequence. There is the j2 mode, in which by sending attention towards something, I fly towards it easily, and this one is frequent and easy in my dreams. However, I often don't remember to switch to the second mode, the j3 mode, in which I have to switch attention around and push down with my hands and/or feet, and that then makes me fly, and, if I don't remember to switch modes, I start sinking and things typically turn more sinister. In this dream, I remembered to switch modes, and so I kept rising up into the air easily.
I then suddenly started accelerating rapidly, and shot out above the atmosphere, piercing the edge of the atmosphere like one would go through a giant Earth-surrounding membrane, and there, out in space, was Boundless Space in its full glory, and then I noticed the sunlight streaming through space, and Boundless Consciousness arose in its full glory, clean, pure, vast, open, bright. I stayed there a bit, then sank back down through the membrane to Earth and form, this time controlling the flying in a very j4 mode, which just involves the most subtle intent to move and the movement occurs.
This is the first time I can recall getting to really good j5 and j6 in a dream. (DhO)
My short list of powers, during Lucid Dreams. I have been lucid dreaming and flying in dreams since I was a young child, and wanting to have more lucid flying dreams was what really got me into meditation in the first place. I also have pretty magickal dreams, with lots of powers of various kinds. I actually keep a list in my mind of the powers I have done, and rejoice when new ones show up.
My dreams tend to follow a pretty standard pattern: non-lucid part, start to be able to fly/skate/jump far/hover/drop down from a height slowly, or something similar, this gets more intense, dream gets more vivid and lucid, then the dark part begins, flying is harder, running slower, themes more sinister, and then the combat phase begins, typically culminating in a stale-mate of some kind, which then leads to some very lucid and wondrous dream-scape and amazing experiences.
My short list of powers, which is partly redundant with the above:
It would be interesting to see what happened if you had more proper and controlled set up, such as shifting sequentially after a few minutes from 1st to 2nd to 3rd to 4th to 5th to 6th to 7th to 8th (then possibly to Fruition) then to whatever that thing is, letting each develop a bit more and shift only when you are really ready for them to shift, letting each form more of a stable base for the thing, such that it perhaps lasted a bit longer and you could really check it out and it wasn't so vibratory and shifty-sounding and more samatha-esque, more of a refined, stabilized, steady experience.
When I was getting into that thing that happened out past 8th and was jhanic and seemed like a fusion of things, it had the qualities of spaciousness, like 5th, with bliss like 2nd, and ease like some of the best of 3rd or 4th, but was more calm, easy, and really, really nice in a way that 4th is not, that being due to the bliss and the openness of the 5th-like aspect, that was what I called Pure Land One, in conjunction with Kenneth Folk's mapping thoughts on this.
Anyway, see if you can make the whole thing more consciously set up, a bit less vipassana-cyclic, a bit more Review/Mastery practice-like, and see if that helps clarify if you think it is Pure Land One, as, in the end, only you can decide that. (DhO, check Russell and Nikolai posts too)
Formless Realms and Kasina. Formless realms don't have any color except to speak of, though it is hard not to think of Nothingness as anything other than black, and it is hard to think of Boundless Consciousness as being any color other than a "color" I will loosely call "mirror" or "clear light".
That said, on my retreat in February, when I was doing a mix of practices, mostly kasina, some otherwise, I was able to get into formless realms by the usual methods, which for me is just to send my mind in that direction and watch it go there, but that hardly helps if you are trying to access them for the first time.
Thus, I present three methods:
- Get your concentration so strong that your mind will do whatever you want it to do, colors, formless realms, powers, traveling, images, realms, whatever, and just walk up the jhanas from 1-4 and then simply ask for boundless space and the rest to arise. That, for most people, will take very good practice conditions and some time and talent.
- Get up to the 4th jhana and get used to it, established in it, good at it, so that you can be in it and notice some things about it. You might notice that it is wide, diffuse, open, expansive, and has a sense of transparency, a sense of boundlessness, and how cool those aspects are. Just hang out in the 4th jhana noticing these aspects, getting more familiar with them, more comfortable with them, and, if you are lucky, at some point there will come a shift, and that shift will be into taking those aspects as object, which is one way to get to boundless space. This how a person who is more on the attractive/desirious side of practice and personality might proceed.
- Get up into the 4th jhana and get used to it, established in it, good at it, so that, over time, finally you become naturally bored with it, detached from it, so that you have gotten over it, are uninterested in it, but just keep paying attention to that detachment from the equanimity, the neutral bodily feeling, the peace, and all of that. This is not something that one can fake, but something that will just arise given time. When one no longer has any natural interest in all of that but is still practicing, the mind might shift away from those things to just vastness. This is how a person who is more on the aversive side of practice and personality might proceed. (DhO)
Formless Realms and Lucid Dreaming. I have periodically lost and regained the ability to enter the formless realms, as, at least for me, to get them be truly formless, truly non-bodily, truly stable, and very "pure" often requires giving them attention and repetition in a short space of time. I hadn't given them much attention recently, so I thought it would be fun to go back and revisit them. It is common for me, particularly after doing a lot of color kasina work, which I have done a lot of in April, what with a 15-day fire kasina retreat and all, to have a hard time getting the colors to go entirely away, as they do have an inertia to them.
So, the last three nights I did give them very specific attention for about an hour each night before going to sleep, using gentle intentions and resolutions, really working on a good set up and getting j4 clean and deep, and work on that tricky balance of having the colors fade while keeping attention wide and open. Last night I was successful in getting to some really nice formless realms with the colors gone, except that boundless consciousness somehow didn't have that really clean, vast, luminous thing as well as it might have, but j7 and j8 were both really clean. After practicing, I fell asleep.
I woke up at 4:30am, not sure why, and so started practicing again, getting j4 really well-developed, then drifting towards formlessness. I again fell asleep, not sure after how long, maybe 30 minutes or so.
I then had a lucid dream in which I was able to fly. I have a few modes of flying in my dreams, which typically progress in sequence. There is the j2 mode, in which by sending attention towards something, I fly towards it easily, and this one is frequent and easy in my dreams. However, I often don't remember to switch to the second mode, the j3 mode, in which I have to switch attention around and push down with my hands and/or feet, and that then makes me fly, and, if I don't remember to switch modes, I start sinking and things typically turn more sinister. In this dream, I remembered to switch modes, and so I kept rising up into the air easily.
I then suddenly started accelerating rapidly, and shot out above the atmosphere, piercing the edge of the atmosphere like one would go through a giant Earth-surrounding membrane, and there, out in space, was Boundless Space in its full glory, and then I noticed the sunlight streaming through space, and Boundless Consciousness arose in its full glory, clean, pure, vast, open, bright. I stayed there a bit, then sank back down through the membrane to Earth and form, this time controlling the flying in a very j4 mode, which just involves the most subtle intent to move and the movement occurs.
This is the first time I can recall getting to really good j5 and j6 in a dream. (DhO)
My short list of powers, during Lucid Dreams. I have been lucid dreaming and flying in dreams since I was a young child, and wanting to have more lucid flying dreams was what really got me into meditation in the first place. I also have pretty magickal dreams, with lots of powers of various kinds. I actually keep a list in my mind of the powers I have done, and rejoice when new ones show up.
My dreams tend to follow a pretty standard pattern: non-lucid part, start to be able to fly/skate/jump far/hover/drop down from a height slowly, or something similar, this gets more intense, dream gets more vivid and lucid, then the dark part begins, flying is harder, running slower, themes more sinister, and then the combat phase begins, typically culminating in a stale-mate of some kind, which then leads to some very lucid and wondrous dream-scape and amazing experiences.
My short list of powers, which is partly redundant with the above:
- flying
- gliding
- jumping very long distances
- running really fast
- scating on roads and/or water like one would ice-skate but generally faster
- falling gently from great heights without injury
- levitating without horizontal components of movement
- telekinesis
- casting lightening
- casting fire
- firing bullets from my fingers
- making things vanish, such as things held in my hand that I squeeze and they disappear
- walking through walls/windows/ceilings/floors: which typically results in appearing in some very different realm on the other side, but not always, and as the years have gone on I have gotten a lot better about intending before I do through about where I will end up
- killing (just willing beings to die and them just dying)
- casting light
- phase shifting to other energy/emotional frequencies, such as becoming a being of loving-kindness and thus being able to walk through beings of anger without them harming me
- healing
- creating items out of nothing
- shifting the landscape to suit my tastes
- talking with odd entities
- radiating various colors and qualities of energy
- having out of body full-on travels out of dreams
- casting spells of destruction
- traveling off the planet to other worlds
Nirodha Samapatti is a high and very rare attainment. Nirodha Samapatti is not Fruition. It is not different at 3rd vs 4th path. It is entirely its own thing. It is very, very different in terms of setup, entrance, exit and after-effects. This is not a term to be watered down, soft-pedaled, or re-framed. It is a high attainment that performs as advertised. It is very rare. I know few people who can and have done the real thing.
Claiming to have gotten something that people were calling NS was all the rage here a few years ago, but every one of those descriptions back in the day sounded nothing like the real deal to me. They described the passage of time. They didn't have massive, extremely long-lasting afterglows, they didn't precisely describe the right entrance and exit. It was mostly described by people who also did things like describing true formless realms as having some form, which the real formless realms don't. Yes, there are plenty of attainments that have some formless elements mixed with form (that I describe as things like j4.j6 as opposed to j6, for example) but the real formless realms are still just like you would figure: formless. Body gone. Forms gone. Differentiated things gone.
With the rejuvination of some forces of dharma in the online world that have had a previous habit of watering down these sorts of attainment criteria in the past, let me advocate for keeping the standards high. I admit to profound annoyance at the occurrence of trends to over-call weak practice.
They lead to people practicing badly, mis-labeling meditative occurrences, settling for low standards, and being short-changed of the possibility of actually experiencing the real thing, as they think they have and so go no further. They then spread this mush around and create the same problems in others and even form clubs out of this.
I was strangely relieved the last time this trend here on the DhO ended. I hope it doesn't start again.
Keeping this real and about practice: the last time I tried for NS I failed. I was on my last retreat in February, the fire kasina retreat, and I just couldn't get the colors to go away, as I had been focusing on them for so many hours for about 10 days at that point, so probably 100+ hours or so, and, since I couldn't get the colors and shapes to go away, I so couldn't get true formless realms, as they were burned so hard onto my practice at that time, and so I couldn't do the proper set up at all and nothing beyond a mere Fruition happened at the end, which was disappointing but not surprising.
The first probably 30-50 times I tried for NS, I failed. That was in late 1996. I could get the set up, but NS just didn't happen. I tried again and again anyway, sit after sit, and was lucky to have a life that allowed 3-5 hours per day of practice then. Finally, after many attempts and about a month of failing, I got it totally by surprise, which is the environment it happens best in, actually, as you have to be able to forget about the intention to have it happen for it to happen. This is obviously as hard as it sounds. You also have to have all the right pre-reqs and setup, and then there is clearly something else that you need to have, and that just seems to come from practice for a very few practitioners. (DhO)
Nirodha Samapatti: a personal report, 10 years since the last experience. Very brief retreat report: I went on retreat solo down at the Gulf beaches of Florida for 17 days, just got back last night. I did mostly elemental concentration practices, fire kasina, water kasina, light kasina, that sort of thing, with a moderate amount of brahma viharas thrown in for good measure.
Plenty of jhanic factors arose, sometimes very strongly, pervading the body and producing deep tranquility and stability of mind and body, but none for 4 hours with perfect unwavering stability. Plenty of visions arose, as I was doing a visual-based kasina, some to become so complete as to immerse me entirely in a world as real-feeling and looking as this one, just not this one.
Instead, long before 4 hours elapsed, my body would sometimes vanish, space would open up, the sense of consciousness would pervade a vast space, that would disappear to nothing, then that would vanish also, then form would reappear again.
Then, on day fourteen, just on a lark, I did something I hadn't done in 10 years. After the world reappeared after even nothing had vanished, I made a quiet resolution to attain to Nirodha Samapatti. About 30 seconds later: total mental power failure, like someone had pulled the plug on experience itself, then power back up, then massive afterglow. It felt like coming out of deep anesthesia, for those who have had surgery or some fully-sedated procedure.
Since it had been 10 years since I had done this, I was stunned by the afterglow. This time the effects were clearly evident over 24 hours later. My body felt totally different, like every single little hint of muscle tension or pain had just vanished.
I went to get a massage during this time, and the massage therapist commented, "Wow, you have no tension at all!", which is basically unheard of for my back, which does bad things sometimes and basically always has some moderate number of knots. I had had two massages by her during the previous 15 days, and each time there had been plenty to work on. She also kept commenting that my skin feld oddly cold, but I felt warm myself. She said this was very different from how it had felt before. I am not sure what to make of that, but just offering it as a phenomenological data point.
My mind felt so weirdly chill yet uncannily clear that at points I thought, "Holy shit, what have I done to myself? How long is this going to last? If this persists until I have to drive home, will I be able to drive in this state of profound relaxation and react appropriately if there is a need for fast maneuvering around some dangerous situation? Could I work a shift at the emergency department in this state at the required speed?"
Both luckily and unluckily, after about a day the body and mind were beginning to feel mostly back to my retreat-baseline, which was still pretty chill but not anything like that.
I also now remember why I hadn't done this in 10 years, as my current life is totally unconducive to having to navigate in that afterglow, which, while remarkably pleasant, has elements that would make much of what I do feel like being drilled by a dentist, as, as the texts rightly say, the mind post NS inclines to peace and solitude.
BTW: I know for certain that this power-down didn't last for 4 hours, as I sat down at about 2:30pm and got up about 3:15pm or so, and the setup took at least 20 minutes, I would guess. How long Nirodha lasted, I don't know, but clearly less than about 25 minutes.
Clearly, this would not qualify as any jhanic attainment for the 240-minute Kids, and they would likely scoff at it. For me, it totally blew my doors off, and I am pretty used to meditative experiences and afterglows. De gustibus non est disputandum. (DhO)
Advanced Jhana Classification. [This text is already at DhO's wiki, but it's included here in order to complete the topic, have it as a bridge with the Insight Section (coming next) and to rescue some interesting entries of Nikolai, Tommy and Tarin Greco in the thread.] Here is a proposed method of classifying the jhanas that is more sophisticated and flexible than the original simple classification system found in the Pali texts and commentaries. It is basically the system I use in my head, and yet I realized that I haven't written it down anywhere in quite this fashion. I hope that one day something like this system is converted to something more secular, such that it can serve as a technical shorthand or language for discussing meditative attainments in general. Until then, here goes with the serious geekery:
Claiming to have gotten something that people were calling NS was all the rage here a few years ago, but every one of those descriptions back in the day sounded nothing like the real deal to me. They described the passage of time. They didn't have massive, extremely long-lasting afterglows, they didn't precisely describe the right entrance and exit. It was mostly described by people who also did things like describing true formless realms as having some form, which the real formless realms don't. Yes, there are plenty of attainments that have some formless elements mixed with form (that I describe as things like j4.j6 as opposed to j6, for example) but the real formless realms are still just like you would figure: formless. Body gone. Forms gone. Differentiated things gone.
With the rejuvination of some forces of dharma in the online world that have had a previous habit of watering down these sorts of attainment criteria in the past, let me advocate for keeping the standards high. I admit to profound annoyance at the occurrence of trends to over-call weak practice.
They lead to people practicing badly, mis-labeling meditative occurrences, settling for low standards, and being short-changed of the possibility of actually experiencing the real thing, as they think they have and so go no further. They then spread this mush around and create the same problems in others and even form clubs out of this.
I was strangely relieved the last time this trend here on the DhO ended. I hope it doesn't start again.
Keeping this real and about practice: the last time I tried for NS I failed. I was on my last retreat in February, the fire kasina retreat, and I just couldn't get the colors to go away, as I had been focusing on them for so many hours for about 10 days at that point, so probably 100+ hours or so, and, since I couldn't get the colors and shapes to go away, I so couldn't get true formless realms, as they were burned so hard onto my practice at that time, and so I couldn't do the proper set up at all and nothing beyond a mere Fruition happened at the end, which was disappointing but not surprising.
The first probably 30-50 times I tried for NS, I failed. That was in late 1996. I could get the set up, but NS just didn't happen. I tried again and again anyway, sit after sit, and was lucky to have a life that allowed 3-5 hours per day of practice then. Finally, after many attempts and about a month of failing, I got it totally by surprise, which is the environment it happens best in, actually, as you have to be able to forget about the intention to have it happen for it to happen. This is obviously as hard as it sounds. You also have to have all the right pre-reqs and setup, and then there is clearly something else that you need to have, and that just seems to come from practice for a very few practitioners. (DhO)
Nirodha Samapatti: a personal report, 10 years since the last experience. Very brief retreat report: I went on retreat solo down at the Gulf beaches of Florida for 17 days, just got back last night. I did mostly elemental concentration practices, fire kasina, water kasina, light kasina, that sort of thing, with a moderate amount of brahma viharas thrown in for good measure.
Plenty of jhanic factors arose, sometimes very strongly, pervading the body and producing deep tranquility and stability of mind and body, but none for 4 hours with perfect unwavering stability. Plenty of visions arose, as I was doing a visual-based kasina, some to become so complete as to immerse me entirely in a world as real-feeling and looking as this one, just not this one.
Instead, long before 4 hours elapsed, my body would sometimes vanish, space would open up, the sense of consciousness would pervade a vast space, that would disappear to nothing, then that would vanish also, then form would reappear again.
Then, on day fourteen, just on a lark, I did something I hadn't done in 10 years. After the world reappeared after even nothing had vanished, I made a quiet resolution to attain to Nirodha Samapatti. About 30 seconds later: total mental power failure, like someone had pulled the plug on experience itself, then power back up, then massive afterglow. It felt like coming out of deep anesthesia, for those who have had surgery or some fully-sedated procedure.
Since it had been 10 years since I had done this, I was stunned by the afterglow. This time the effects were clearly evident over 24 hours later. My body felt totally different, like every single little hint of muscle tension or pain had just vanished.
I went to get a massage during this time, and the massage therapist commented, "Wow, you have no tension at all!", which is basically unheard of for my back, which does bad things sometimes and basically always has some moderate number of knots. I had had two massages by her during the previous 15 days, and each time there had been plenty to work on. She also kept commenting that my skin feld oddly cold, but I felt warm myself. She said this was very different from how it had felt before. I am not sure what to make of that, but just offering it as a phenomenological data point.
My mind felt so weirdly chill yet uncannily clear that at points I thought, "Holy shit, what have I done to myself? How long is this going to last? If this persists until I have to drive home, will I be able to drive in this state of profound relaxation and react appropriately if there is a need for fast maneuvering around some dangerous situation? Could I work a shift at the emergency department in this state at the required speed?"
Both luckily and unluckily, after about a day the body and mind were beginning to feel mostly back to my retreat-baseline, which was still pretty chill but not anything like that.
I also now remember why I hadn't done this in 10 years, as my current life is totally unconducive to having to navigate in that afterglow, which, while remarkably pleasant, has elements that would make much of what I do feel like being drilled by a dentist, as, as the texts rightly say, the mind post NS inclines to peace and solitude.
BTW: I know for certain that this power-down didn't last for 4 hours, as I sat down at about 2:30pm and got up about 3:15pm or so, and the setup took at least 20 minutes, I would guess. How long Nirodha lasted, I don't know, but clearly less than about 25 minutes.
Clearly, this would not qualify as any jhanic attainment for the 240-minute Kids, and they would likely scoff at it. For me, it totally blew my doors off, and I am pretty used to meditative experiences and afterglows. De gustibus non est disputandum. (DhO)
Advanced Jhana Classification. [This text is already at DhO's wiki, but it's included here in order to complete the topic, have it as a bridge with the Insight Section (coming next) and to rescue some interesting entries of Nikolai, Tommy and Tarin Greco in the thread.] Here is a proposed method of classifying the jhanas that is more sophisticated and flexible than the original simple classification system found in the Pali texts and commentaries. It is basically the system I use in my head, and yet I realized that I haven't written it down anywhere in quite this fashion. I hope that one day something like this system is converted to something more secular, such that it can serve as a technical shorthand or language for discussing meditative attainments in general. Until then, here goes with the serious geekery:
The basic building blocks of the system are the jhanas, which briefly noted are as follows:
1. First Jhana: involved narrow attention, sustained effort
2. Second Jhana: involved slightly wider attention, more motion of objects, and is significantly more effortless
3. Third Jhana: involves wider field of attention with center of attention out of phase, and has distinct phase problems in general
4: Fourth Jhana: involved more naturally spacious attention and has a much more balanced sort of attention than the previous ones
5: Boundless Space: a byproduct of noticing the spacious aspect of the 4th jhana
6. Boundless Consciousness: a byproduct of noticing the conscious aspect of the 5th jhana
7. Nothingness: like the 3rd jhana version of the formless realms in that it is like Boundless Space except that the phase of attention is tuned to anything but that and also not to anything else, so it notices that there is nothing there in that space, sort of like the advanced phase problem version of 3rd jhana taken to an extreme
8. Neither Perception Nor Yet Non-Perception: what happens when you detune even from the already very strangely off-tuned 7th jhana and don't even notice that: the pinnacle of phase out-ed-ness without even attention to that.
Add to this the notion that these 8 jhanas can fall on a continuum from hard to soft, meaning that you can be really, really into the jhana or in a softer, less absolute version of that same territory that is still different from what I will loosely call "ordinary" consciousness, whatever that is, and yet not in it as hard as is possible. This falls into shades of grey and may often involve transitioning from one way of perceiving things to the other.
Add to this that these 8 hard or soft jhanas can also be more analog or digital, more smooth or vibratory/fluxy, and thus there is an axis of development that relates to how samatha or how vipassana they are, how concentration heavy or how insight heavy, how seemingly stable vs how discontinuously they are perceived.
Add to this the notion that you can actually be in a sub-jhana aspect of each of those 8 jhanas, such that you could be in the 4th subjhana of 3rd jhana, for instance, or the 8th subjhana aspect of 1st jhana, just to take it to extremes, which can easily occur in those with strong concentration.
Add to this the notion that you can actually split this finer, into sub-subjhanas, meaning, for instance, that you could be in the 7th subsubjhana of the 3rd subjhana of the 4th jhana, just to make it interesting, or the 4th subsubjhana of the 1st subjhana of the 3rd jhana, which just happens to be Dissolution, which is an insight stage, which brings me to the next layer of complexity, adding in insight stage, or ñana terminology.
The insight stages of specific relevance are the first 11, namely:
1. Mind and Body
2. Cause and Effect
3. The Three Characteristics
4. The Arising and Passing Away
5. Dissolution
6. Fear
7. Misery
8. Disgust
9. Desire for Deliverance
10. Reobservation
11. Equanimity
Note that you can break these down by subjhanas and subsubjhanas and also subñanas and subsubñanas. Beyond about 3 levels it gets less useful, but I can really see distinct uses for those 3 levels of complexity.
Add to this that different focuses of practice, namely different objects, can really color how these present, with mantras and visualization objects producing really different effects or experiences of these variously classified stages and states than, say, vibrations or the breath or bliss, or whatever.
Thus, for instance, to really use this, one might have been really applying effort on the breath and gotten into something that was highly effortful but the breath became abstract and then vanished along with the body and all that was left was some sort of slowly shifting vague thing in space that is now nearly entirely formless and yet there is still somehow this really heavy first jhana effort, narrow vibe to the thing and it happened early in a retreat. You could classify this numerous ways, but I would tend to call that something like the moderately balanced insight/concentration part of the 7th subjhana of the 1st jhana.
When I tend to think in shorthand about these things, I tend to use notation in my brain that looks like this:
bj1.j7: meaning balanced (b) samatha/vipassana 7th subjhana part of 1st jhana
Or, to give another example using alternate notation for another experience:
ñ5.sj3.ñ11: meaning the Equanimity part of the 3rd samatha jhana part of Dissolution, where ñ demarcates that the number that follows it is a ñana, and the sj demarcates that the number that follows it refers to the smooth or samatha aspect of the 3rd jhana.
Or, to give another example:
ñ11.vj4.vj6: meaning the Boundless Consciousness sub sub aspect of the 4th vipassana subjhana aspect of Equanimity, which sounds needlessly picky until you notice enough to realize that that sub sub aspect can easily be found and experienced.
Or, to give another example:
sj4.sj8: meaning the 8th subjhana of the 4th jhana, which would be distinguished from proper 8th jhana in my mind by the continued presence of form, or, to get even more precise:
hsj3.hsj4: meaning the hard (h) 4th subjhana aspect of hard 3rd samatha jhana, as opposed to:
ssj3.ssj4: meaning the soft (s) 4th subjhana aspect of soft 3rd samatha jhana.
Or even:
h!sj6: meaning simply really hard straightforward Boundless Consciousness
Or, to get more simple:
hsj8: meaning the hard samatha jhana version of the 8th samatha jhana, which I personally consider redundant for a few reasons: one, you can't investigate the 8th jhana, as isn't possible if it really is 8th, and two, because true 8th is always hard if it is actually 8th as I think of it, and if it wasn't, then it probably was j4.j8 or something like that.
Or, you could be fluxing way up in the formless aspects of Equanimity, something I might label:
ñ11.hvj7 for really hard versions of the fluxing of the Nothingness aspect of Equanimity, and by hard I mean really well developed, not stable, just so there is no confusion about this.
Or, if you managed to get one of the Three Doors off of that, those 3 moments would be:
ñ12.hvj7, ñ13.hvj7, ñ14.hvj14, with the h's being redundant, as the 12-14th ñanas (Conformity, Change of Lineage and Path) being always hard, meaning fully developed by definition, and the designations of subñana actually meaning something slightly different here, as they don't have subjhanic aspects, being only one moment as they are, but referring to the object they took to see the full truth of completely.
Yes, there are the Pure Land jhanas, which I tend to label 9, 10, etc, depending on how many you think there are, which is debated, but let's keep those numbers open.
There is also a special place I refer to as the post-8th junction point, a nexus of options that open once you have been to some version of the 8th jhana or perhaps after j4.j8, which seems to do it pretty well also, but not quite as well.
In this system, you can say things really quickly, like the instructions for getting Nirodha Samapatti would be to rise naturally from sbj1 to sbj7, enter j8, come out, resolve and enter NS, meaning that you should use a softer version of the jhanas 1-7 with a balance of samatha and vipassana aspects without having either predominate, enter 8 proper, come out to the post-8th JP, and enter NS.
You can also detail nuanced aspects of certain phases of practice, such as the different phases of the A&P, Dissolution, and Equanimity, which have many little aspects to how they develop and where you can take them.
Or, you can add the object, such as:
light.hñ4.sj2 Meaning that, at that moment or phase of practice, the light that some see in the hard version of the insight stage of the A&P was taken as object and practice took on more of a 2nd samatha jhana feel, meaning the light showed itself and wasn't vipassinized or seen as pulses, but instead was more of a concentration object at that phase and the light showed itself on its own and didn't require sustained attention to manifest.
And you can add duration, such that you might note light.hñ4.sj2.5minutes: meaning that you stared at the white light for 5 minutes in that subjhanic phase of the A&P.
There are numerous pitfalls in thinking about things in this way, and one can easily make really large mistakes, such as mistaking 1.7 for 7.1 and things like that, but realizing that this sub-aspect nature of things is even possible allows one to ask the question and hopefully also provides a way to sort out 1.7 from 7.1, which are developmentally really, really different and have profoundly different implications for practice.
In this classification scheme, you can allow for all sorts of things, such as Alan Wallace's 1st jhana, which might be written h!!!sj1.24hours, meaning that it is really, really, really hard and lasted 24 hours, or certain people's versions of the formless realms which also are really light and actually contain form, and I think of as s!!!sj1.7, meaning the really, really, really soft version of some formed version of the Nothingness aspect of 1st jhana, as they are making effort to see it and are so light they can talk in it.
Anyway, you get the idea, and hopefully some of this nuance of aspects and terminology will help people describe and categorize their experiences, as well as utilize the standard advice for various phases and aspects as they apply to those experiences for deepening in them and also realizing what is possible beyond them. (DhO)
Insight
- Take time: if you actually perceived all thoughts as experiences, you can't have a true sense that time is actually real, as all sensations of past and future occur now, and, being perceived as experiences, are known to occur now and not actually be time in any real sense. This is transformative.
- Take agency: by actually perceiving experiences as experiences, such as intentions to do things being perceived clearly as experiences, it becomes clear that they all arise on their own naturally, causally, without anyone to create them, just part of the process, and this immediate felt experience of natural unfolding beats the crap out of the way in which somehow there is the notion that we are doing things.
- Take perception: when everything just perceives itself as it is, where it is, on its own, with each sensation simply representing itself, this is vastly better than the mode of perception in which we believe that some vague sensations that are crude impressions in the general area of the head are the perception of other sensations that already occurred. This is a vastly upgraded way of perceiving experience and highly recommended.
- Take thoughts: when we perceive thoughts as the experiences they actually are, we notice that thoughts are these small subtle sensate experiences in space. Seriously, how troubling can the actual experiences of thoughts be? They are so subtle most of the time, a very small percentage of what is actually occurring, and that proportionality makes thoughts assume their proper sensate place in experience, and this is vastly more manageable and easy to handle than when we contract into thoughts and lose the rest of the framing experiences that give them proportion.
- Take pain: when we perceive pain exactly as it is, where it is, in the context of the rest of our sensate world, perceiving it as experiences in space along with the other sensations, perceiving it clearly to arise and vanish, perceiving it to be in proportion to its actual size and intensity and proportion of the wide world of sensations, allowing it to stand for itself, this is vastly better than the previous way where we would be reacting to pain long after it is gone and blowing it way out or portion in comparison to how much of experience it actually takes up.
- Take desire: when no patterns of sensations are extrapolated to be some thing that could get closer to other sensations, that sense of bending, of pull, of drawing, of aching to get closer: this weird pulling of some illusory cluster of sensations to get towards some other cluster of sensations stops when we actually perceive sensations as clear experiences. When all of those sensations are clearly noticed to just be sensations, then such a weird illusion simply can't occur. The same happens with aversion. It is not that preferences can't arise, or that emotions can't arise, but that weird mental pull-push that occurs when some sensations are taken to be some self and some sensations are taken to be some stable thing that the pattern of sensations taken to be self could have some push-pull relationship to are known as they are, that push-pull part of the pain vanishes. Further, emotions, being perceived as part of this wide-open, proportional, transient flux of natural experiences, are given the same clarification as pain, and so the bodily sensations that typically make emotions troublesome are perceived proportionally, and the thoughts that cause such difficulty when exaggeratedly perceived instead are noticed to just be the little decorations of space that they are.
- Take ignorance: it actually takes all sorts of processing power to maintain a sense of a reference point between some pattern of sensations taken to be a self and all other sensation, as the brain has to keep up this strange moving dance, carefully ignore that sensations are the experiences they are, and then generates all sorts of additional mental complexity related to this elaborately crafted, processor-intensive illusion it has created, all of which is useless, delusional, and painful. The stopping of this painful process that happens when sensations that were thought to be self are just noticed to be more experiences marks a vast upgrade to the operating system and this beneficial upgrade is very palpable in this body-mind.
- Take clinging: when experiences are clearly perceived as being the experiences they are, it is impossible for any clinging to occur, as the natural perception of the natural transience of experiences is just hardwired into the fact of noticing naturally that experiences are all transient, so what could cling to anything, and what could be clung to? Clear perception of sensations reveals that clinging can't possibly occur when experiences are actually known as they are, as their transience is instantly known by the nature of sensations being what they are.
In short, learning to perceive thoughts as thoughts, intentions as intentions, and other sensations as other sensations can, if done well and thoroughly in a way that brings all of these into clear experience, make every moment of experience significantly better than it is perceived the other, dualistic way that misses that experiences are actually experiences. (DhO)
Vipassana: what people want, and what they get out if it. People often go into meditation seeking stability, pleasure, peace, and an enhanced sense of self. Vipassana delivers instability, a knowledge of suffering, and a deconstruction of a coherent, separate, stable sense of self, so it is understandable when people run into a conflict between what they want and what they get.
Thus, it is very common for people to complain that they investigated and found instability and suffering. Yet, it is a mark of understanding, though convincing people of this is hard, as is convincing them that it can lead to something that is much better than their current way of viewing experience.
That restlessness, disgust with your experience, and desire for deliverance, and continued re-observation of that deep frustration regarding your experience are likely stage diagnostic. Standard advice applies.
It is common in (DN) stages such as these to try to circumvent these painful insights entirely through jhanas, which is not impossible, just quite difficult for most, as it typically requires a degree of concentration that most can't manage in daily life. If one can do this, such as simply passing through these stages in realms of fluxing complex sacred geometric images, it is possible to bypass much of the pain and difficulty. Still, that is rare air stuff, and most people find that, with reassurance that they are on the right track, they get through it just fine without having to resort to the time and resources it takes to cultivate that degree of concentration power, and it ends up being a lot faster and not as bad as they feared it would be. One of the messages that these stages can send is that things will always feel this way, which is not true. I recommend you read Practical Insight Meditation, pages 29-32 or so, found here. (DhO)
What is the most effective method of Vipassana? "What is the most effective method of Vipassana?" is a pretty loaded question. Definitions of "effective" vary widely. Tolerance for risks and side effects also vary widely. Some definitions of "effective" might advocate for speed over comfort, while as others would advocate for comfort over speed. Some definitions of "effective" might involve simultaneously cultivating jhanic qualities (TMI), while others might advocate for relentlessly dissecting experience (more hardcore strains of Vipassana), while others might be much more about a very organic acceptance of this moment however it presents (more some aspects of some Dzogchen/Mahamudra but also Vedantic and some Zen traditions).
When I try to answer that question, I like to know a lot more about the person asking it, as that will determine most of the answer I give. So, I will ask you a few questions:
TMI, Seeing that Frees, and MCTB are obviously all solid resources, but they also have some obvious paradigmatic differences and different feels. Which calls to you more and why? Do any aspects of any of them not feel like as good a fit, and, if so, why? If you have trained in the Goenka tradition, what will you be bringing from that in terms of maps, models, goals, techniques, and paradigms?
Which teachers will you be in contact with during this retreat, and would they be ok with the diversity of resources you are going to be using? Will they have the expertise to navigate the various different conceptions of and effects of practice found in those resources? (DhO)
I know of no higher or more profound teaching than the Six Sense Doors and the Three Characteristics. I have been behind many curtains for "secret teachings", and none are more profound than this one. This was that simple framework that I found most powerful for insight practices. It just requires honesty, subtlety, bravery, and perseverance. Mara's Armies await. When they attack, avoid lashing out at others. Instead, investigate within your fathom-long body. This is the teaching of the Buddha. This is the way of the Dharma. This is what has been practiced well by the Sangha. Check Daniel’s video on the Six Sense Doors and The Three Characteristics. (DhO)
Vipassana: what people want, and what they get out if it. People often go into meditation seeking stability, pleasure, peace, and an enhanced sense of self. Vipassana delivers instability, a knowledge of suffering, and a deconstruction of a coherent, separate, stable sense of self, so it is understandable when people run into a conflict between what they want and what they get.
Thus, it is very common for people to complain that they investigated and found instability and suffering. Yet, it is a mark of understanding, though convincing people of this is hard, as is convincing them that it can lead to something that is much better than their current way of viewing experience.
That restlessness, disgust with your experience, and desire for deliverance, and continued re-observation of that deep frustration regarding your experience are likely stage diagnostic. Standard advice applies.
It is common in (DN) stages such as these to try to circumvent these painful insights entirely through jhanas, which is not impossible, just quite difficult for most, as it typically requires a degree of concentration that most can't manage in daily life. If one can do this, such as simply passing through these stages in realms of fluxing complex sacred geometric images, it is possible to bypass much of the pain and difficulty. Still, that is rare air stuff, and most people find that, with reassurance that they are on the right track, they get through it just fine without having to resort to the time and resources it takes to cultivate that degree of concentration power, and it ends up being a lot faster and not as bad as they feared it would be. One of the messages that these stages can send is that things will always feel this way, which is not true. I recommend you read Practical Insight Meditation, pages 29-32 or so, found here. (DhO)
What is the most effective method of Vipassana? "What is the most effective method of Vipassana?" is a pretty loaded question. Definitions of "effective" vary widely. Tolerance for risks and side effects also vary widely. Some definitions of "effective" might advocate for speed over comfort, while as others would advocate for comfort over speed. Some definitions of "effective" might involve simultaneously cultivating jhanic qualities (TMI), while others might advocate for relentlessly dissecting experience (more hardcore strains of Vipassana), while others might be much more about a very organic acceptance of this moment however it presents (more some aspects of some Dzogchen/Mahamudra but also Vedantic and some Zen traditions).
When I try to answer that question, I like to know a lot more about the person asking it, as that will determine most of the answer I give. So, I will ask you a few questions:
- What is your definition of "effective"?
- What would be your definition of "success" on this retreat?
- What is your tolerance for risk and instability?
- How stable is your underlying mental health?
- Do you have any significant trauma history?
- How well do you handle difficult emotions skillfully?
- How is your sense of "ego strength" in the traditional, Freudian sense of being able to enter into difficult emotional territory with some sense of objectivity?
- How much do you prefer more structured vs less structured techniques and approaches?
- Which maps do you prefer, if any?
- What is your basic personality like, in terms of more spacious, more analytical, more intuitive, more heartful, more desirous, more aversive, more calm, more energetic, etc.?
- What are the difficulties you ran into on your previous group retreats, and how will you handle them on this solo retreat?
- Any unusual strengths you bring to your practice that you might use to your advantage?
TMI, Seeing that Frees, and MCTB are obviously all solid resources, but they also have some obvious paradigmatic differences and different feels. Which calls to you more and why? Do any aspects of any of them not feel like as good a fit, and, if so, why? If you have trained in the Goenka tradition, what will you be bringing from that in terms of maps, models, goals, techniques, and paradigms?
Which teachers will you be in contact with during this retreat, and would they be ok with the diversity of resources you are going to be using? Will they have the expertise to navigate the various different conceptions of and effects of practice found in those resources? (DhO)
I know of no higher or more profound teaching than the Six Sense Doors and the Three Characteristics. I have been behind many curtains for "secret teachings", and none are more profound than this one. This was that simple framework that I found most powerful for insight practices. It just requires honesty, subtlety, bravery, and perseverance. Mara's Armies await. When they attack, avoid lashing out at others. Instead, investigate within your fathom-long body. This is the teaching of the Buddha. This is the way of the Dharma. This is what has been practiced well by the Sangha. Check Daniel’s video on the Six Sense Doors and The Three Characteristics. (DhO)
Stable, Continuous, Independent "I". That reality is too transient, too causal, to interdependent to be able to produce a stable, continuous, independent "I" is very obvious in theory and at least superficially obvious in practice even to relatively inexperienced meditators, so it is really just a process of clearly perceiving layer upon layer of sensations until none are not perceived well and then making this the default mode of attention. (DhO)
Self doesn't exist, never has and never could. The self in question doesn't exist, and never has and never could, which is an essential point. Working backwards, discrimination was always not self, clarity was always not self, thought was always not self, memory was always not self, perception was always not self, effort was always not self, investigation was always not self.
The trick is to figure out how to take basically the exact same stuff and see it clearly, as when you do this well, suddenly you find that what seemed like the same stuff actually implies things totally different from when it was poorly perceived, and it shows directly:
- All things happen on their own
- There are no fundamental boundaries in the field of experience at some basic, transformative level
- There never was an observer or controller or doer
- There was never any continuous existence of anything from a direct sensate point of view, which, being the basis of all other extrapolation, is the fundamental thing
It is sort of like that classic drawing that viewed one way looks like an old women, and viewed another way looks like a young one: same picture, completely different ways of viewing it.
Or those 3D pictures that initially look like a bunch of similarly repetitive nonsense but if you cross your eyes just right you suddenly see floating 3D images in space that you couldn't see before: same image, very different way of perceiving it. (DhO)
When observing objects, each has their downsides and benefits. Physical sensations are not very interesting for most but are very accessible. Their predictability can make us dull, but we are unlikely to get stuck in them.
In contrast, more mental phehomena, such as "awareness" as conceptualized above and leading to regressions, bodily distortions, odd raptures, visions, etc. is obviously fascinating, but those objects that are fascinating tend to engage us in their specifics rather than their universal qualities, their impermanence, their emptiness, and any suffering involved in their apparent duality.
Thus, if we choose mental objects, we must be doubly vigilant that we make sure to notice them arise and vanish, sensation by sensation, otherwise we likely are just playing in more rapture-esque territory.
These bodily distortions, regressive watching questions, head swelling feelings and the like, as well as the notion of convergence and something exciting coming from them, are the product of taking mental objects as object in the early 1st and 2nd vipassana jhana but without much strong investigation. Thus, we find a imbalance of the seven factors of enlightenment: rapture is strong, concentration is strong, investigation is weak, and without investigation, one might make some progress, and one might even accidentally cross the A&P, but one learns bad habits, and may not be prepared for what tends to come next.
Thus, the rapture-happy practitioner, faced with the Dark Night, will tend to try to re-find the glory of their lower attainments, and yet, as this is regression rather than progress, they will likely falter.
Thus, if one needs to do the experiment, play with rapture-heavy objects, but realize that they will fade, and when they are gone, more advanced and challenging work begins. Or, one could just stick with the moment to moment noticing of less interesting objects. (DhO)
Access Concentration is really all you need for insight. There is a ton of ways to define it, but specifically, what MCTB2 means by it is that you can stay with your objects object after object but before interesting states have arisen. Say you can note second after second for some significant period of time without hindrances derailing your practice: count that as access concentration (and watch some people who put the bar much higher for "access concentration" roll their eyes in disgust), but that's really all you need for insight, sort of, and that sort of involves the topic of the stages of insight and how they correlate with the vipassana jhanas (watch some traditional sutta-head roll their eyes in disgust at that one also, but ignore them, as this stuff works, and you can note "eyes rolling", "eyes rolling", and have it all work out). (DhO)
Fast Noting, Slow Noting. I guess it sort of depends on what you want to use the noting for. To gain real insight, you have to have the mind's speed of receptivity be on par with how fast reality is arising, to use relative terms. Reality arises pretty fast. So, if you do slow noting, you are sort of using it as a very general frame, a frame within which much fine and important detail occurs. If you are very mindful of what occurs in that big frame, all the little details, but without using noting to get to that level, ok.
How to measure noting speed. Start by counting "one one thou sand", which, if you say it at a normal pace, should take a second. The syllables number four, so that is 4Hz, one pulse or syllable per every 1/4th of a second, or four syllables per second.
Ok, now get musical with this, if you have some musical sense, as this makes counting frequencies a lot easier. You can make it two triplets and get 6Hz by saying or thinking "one and one thou ow sand" in a second.
Try doubling the pulse of each syllable, which could be done various ways, such as "oneone oneone thouthous sandsand", and still think this in a second, so you now have 8Hz. You could try tapping this with your hands, and you will notice that it is pretty easy to tap 8 times per second. Making them triplets gets you 12Hz, still pretty tappable. Making them quadruplets gets you to 16Hz, getting hard to tap for most people, but your mind can easily go faster than your fingers, so still mentally pretty doable. Getting faster than quadruplets requires some diving into the experience and likely some dedicated practice. I tend to just double the quadruplets and get 32Hz, which then allows some extrapolation of frequencies in the range between 16Hz and 32Hz.
Speed 32Hz up either feeling that pulse and just speeding it up a bit, or starting with five syllables (which, multiplied by eight gets you 40), will get you a sense of what 40Hz is like, which is zipping fast. There is an app called Audio Function Generator (Pro), which can create wareforms of various types and is great for getting a sense of how fast these pulses are. I have no financial relationship to this app, BTW. If you set it on the waveform farthest to the right (looks sort of like a very flipped sideways "Z") and put in the frequency you are interested in, you can start to learn how fast these are. There are other sound generating apps and devices that will also work.
You can listen to each of them and get a sense of how fast each pulse is, and then, after doing that, if you have an ear for it, you can more rapidly get a sense of how fast pulses of experiences are without having to do all the counting, though the counting is really useful in the beginning when trying to learn how to do this.
Like so many things that initially seem daunting, this just requires practice.
I remember when I first started playing scales on my guitar, and it took me seconds to get my fingers to move to the position for each note, and I felt like I had some sort of movement disorder, I felt so clumsy, but now I can play scales faster than I can easily see my fingers hit each note, and yet they do hit them, and I can hear my fingers hit them, but it is now faster than my eye can follow when I get up to maximum speed. Learning to play scales fast took me a lot of practice, many, many hours over years. This process of leaning to count frequencies actually came more easily than playing scales fast, but I still found a lot of work.
Be patient and start with the slower pulses and build up until this is natural for you, if you wish to play the "how fast is my mind going" game, which is a pretty fun game, if you are a serious dharma phenomenology geek like I am.
… I have only achieved discrete, countable/extrapolateable speeds past about 40Hz or so in very rare, fleeting moments, usually on the tale end of the ramp up of an A&P-style event, but have easy access to stuff in the mid 20Hz range. (DhO)
POI is a bit like training to be a sherpa climbing the Everest. If one expects the POI to just be linear, we go up, up, up, it doesn't work that way for most people most of the time.
Starting with the POI, to use an analogy about fetishizing brought up on Reddit, it is a bit like training to be a sherpa climbing Everest. You initially start with porting things back and forth to one of the lower basecamps. Sometimes it is raining and windy. Sometimes it is clear and beautiful. Sometimes it is dark, sometimes light. Sometimes the going is easy, sometimes not. However, by walking up and down that trail again and again, carrying various loads, dealing with different conditions, you slowly learn that part of the trail. This takes time, and it is not linear. Sometimes you don't get all the way to the camp and have to stop or go back. Sometimes the going is very easy and surprising. Sometimes there are animals. Sometimes you sprain your ankle on a slippery rock. Yet, you learn how the trail is, with all its little landmarks and signposts, trees and curves, views and struggles. You become a competent sherpa. This takes time, and a map on paper is helpful, but very small in comparison to what you learn by walking that trail many times in various conditions.
In the same way, most start off at the beginning, notice thoughts as thoughts (Mind and Body), notice some things about intention, notice things come and go, notice the Three Characteristics, even if they are not focusing on those. Sometimes we have powerful jhanic factors, the sun is shining. Sometimes our mind is stormy. Yet, the basic, fundamental insights are oddly the same, though the overall experience can feel quite different.
In the same way it goes for the other parts of the path, above the first basecamp. There may be differences, some areas intrinsically more rocky, some intrinsically colder, some warmer, some more prone to rock slides, some more prone to amazing vistas and easy walking. There is still Weather that can vary a lot. Seasons change. Snows comes and go. Winds vary. Yet, the trail is the trail just the same.
It is also true that we can have different gear. Some will travel very light, use fewer ropes, have less backup equipment, carry a smaller first aid kit, sleep less, climb more. Others will pack heavier gear, but sleep more comfortably, have more backup ropes, more pins in the rocks, better food, and their climb, while slower, may be a lot easier and more pleasant, and possibly safer in some ways. These are reasonable lifestyle choices, with pros and cons, and each must choose their own style as they go up the mountain. Neither can totally compensate for what ends up happening on the mountain, as it is Nature, and Nature does what it does, but, on average, one can predict how things might go for the hypothetical two different groups.
However, while the POI and TMI are often portrayed as opposites, the beauty of the concepts of vipassana jhanas comes in to turn a black and white discussion into one of adult thinking and shades of grey.
It might seem on the one hand that the fast POI people are the light gear, sleep less, use less ropes, take more risks, moves fast types, and the TMI people are more build lots of skills before the climb, carry a lot of backup gear, bring warmer sleeping bags and nicer food types, and this is true in generalizations. Both are very valid choices. (DhO)
Sherpa training, whose trail is the dharma path. This stuff is clearly intellectually fascinating for many when they get into it, all the weird happenings, the strange side-effects, the kundalini stuff and kriyas, the highs, the lows, but I like to think of this as training to be a sherpa, except that, in this case, the trail is the dharma path, and your own experiences of heart, mind, and body.
If you train to be a sherpa, you have to walk the same trails again and again for years. Each time you walk up and down the path, you learn something about it by just going there, just participating in the process, in a way that you could try to explain to someone, could talk about, could write something about, make maps of, but it would be nothing like the fact of just doing it.
You walk the trail at dawn, at midday, at dusk, at night. You walk it in rain and shine. Some days, the trail is easier. Some days, it is hard. Some days it is pouring hail on your head. Some days, lightning crashes around. Some days, wind threatens to blow you off the path. Some days the light breeze is so pleasant. Some days, it is utterly gorgeous. Some days, you feel lucky to have made it home. Sometimes the creeks you have to cross are low. Sometimes the creeks you have to cross are roaring torrents. Sometimes there is ice and snow. Sometimes it is blistering hot. Sometimes it is freezing cold.
From all of these varied direct experiences on the trail, having walked it literally thousands of times, you become a seasoned sherpa. You learn that trail so that you are an expert in it, have true, direct knowledge that comes from experience and handling various situations on that trail, so that you can guide people safely on that same trail in all sorts of conditions, however it presents that day or night. You know how to read the clouds, the wind, the smell in the air, the tracks on the ground, the leaves on the trees. You know the seasons and how they affect the journey. You know that, while you can explain all sorts of things to those sherpas in training that you are now teaching and to those you guide along the trail, they just have to walk that same trail again and again and again in all sorts of conditions and be present to them to really know it like you do now. (DhO)
Jhana First Camps, Vipassana First Camps and Hybrids Approaches. This question is another very old one, going back to the beginning, and you find tensions around this even in the Pali Canon, though there are very traditionalist Suttaheads that would say that the suttas causing the tension are not as authentic, being later additions, and ignoring their high degree of practical utility for practitioners. There are various schools of thought on this question also, which I will summarize into basic camps.
There are the Jhana First camps, those that say train first to get very stable concentration states, then, having left those, use the power of that trained mind to take on the Three Characteristics and attain to wisdom. May traditional Buddhist suttas clearly favor this approach, including the classic Fruits of the Homeless Life, DN 2. It is popular in Sri Lanka, and among the likes of Bhanta Gunaratana. You also find similar approaches taught by those such as Pa Auk, and some Thai Forest teachers. The pros are basically that it is true that a clear, well-trained mind that can get jhana can often manage the path of insight much more calmly than some of the other approaches, one gets the nice experiences of more pure jhanas (presuming that one can get into them without letting some vipassana slip in, which is actually kinda difficult), and some people have a natural gift for jhanas, and so a jhana approach may get them some early successes, reinforcing interest in practice.
There are the Vipassana First camps, such as Mahasi and others, that say that one doesn't need jhana, and may proceed straight to insight into the Three Characteristics of the Six Sense Doors. By doing so, one may attain to the vipassana jhanas along the way, being another conceptualization of the stages of insight but noticing their corollaries with more pure jhanas, while avoiding the traps that await for those who get into the track of jhanas and get stuck in them. Pros are that, for those who can take the heat, this method can be very fast. The downside is the heat, meaning emotional and perceptual instability, and that doesn't always go well. Some people also have a natural gift for this style and tolerance for the side-effects, and will do well in such traditions, whereas they might have had a hard time cultivating more pure jhanas, and so have gotten frustrated. I was one such type, but my personal history need not bias me against other approaches, in which I see validity.
Hybrid approaches are the last option, and we find TMI as one such tradition, and the goal here is to find the right balance of strong jhanic factors along with insight into vibrancy and lack of subtle dullness, the combination of which, at least in theory and in some practitioners, leads to that sweet spot middle ground where they have something of the best of both worlds. That said, not everyone can achieve that balance, and many will drift to one side or other at various points, either being too heavy on the samatha side but thinking that is insight, or being too heavy on the vipassana side, and getting blind-sided by the dark stuff, as talking about and normalizing the dark stuff is not as much TMI's strength. (DhO)
If, on the other hand, you do slow noting and are keeping to that level of resolution, meaning not really noticing the fine detail, the richness, all the little sensations, all the little back and forth interplay of sensation and mental impression, of intention and action, of memory and physical response, of the complex interplay of what makes up emotions, of the little interspersed sensations that make up what appears to be some self or observer or doer or controller, well then, you will be missing much.
It is not that you have to note fast, but eventually you do have to comprehend fast. It is not that you have to note everything, but finally you do have to comprehend everything.
I found fast noting of everything made for really fast progress in the early stages. Beyond that, I found chasing every little vibrating anything really fast and game-changing. I didn't note much in Equanimity, preferring something much more direct, full-field, and rich. (DhO)
How to measure noting speed. Start by counting "one one thou sand", which, if you say it at a normal pace, should take a second. The syllables number four, so that is 4Hz, one pulse or syllable per every 1/4th of a second, or four syllables per second.
Ok, now get musical with this, if you have some musical sense, as this makes counting frequencies a lot easier. You can make it two triplets and get 6Hz by saying or thinking "one and one thou ow sand" in a second.
Try doubling the pulse of each syllable, which could be done various ways, such as "oneone oneone thouthous sandsand", and still think this in a second, so you now have 8Hz. You could try tapping this with your hands, and you will notice that it is pretty easy to tap 8 times per second. Making them triplets gets you 12Hz, still pretty tappable. Making them quadruplets gets you to 16Hz, getting hard to tap for most people, but your mind can easily go faster than your fingers, so still mentally pretty doable. Getting faster than quadruplets requires some diving into the experience and likely some dedicated practice. I tend to just double the quadruplets and get 32Hz, which then allows some extrapolation of frequencies in the range between 16Hz and 32Hz.
Speed 32Hz up either feeling that pulse and just speeding it up a bit, or starting with five syllables (which, multiplied by eight gets you 40), will get you a sense of what 40Hz is like, which is zipping fast. There is an app called Audio Function Generator (Pro), which can create wareforms of various types and is great for getting a sense of how fast these pulses are. I have no financial relationship to this app, BTW. If you set it on the waveform farthest to the right (looks sort of like a very flipped sideways "Z") and put in the frequency you are interested in, you can start to learn how fast these are. There are other sound generating apps and devices that will also work.
You can listen to each of them and get a sense of how fast each pulse is, and then, after doing that, if you have an ear for it, you can more rapidly get a sense of how fast pulses of experiences are without having to do all the counting, though the counting is really useful in the beginning when trying to learn how to do this.
Like so many things that initially seem daunting, this just requires practice.
I remember when I first started playing scales on my guitar, and it took me seconds to get my fingers to move to the position for each note, and I felt like I had some sort of movement disorder, I felt so clumsy, but now I can play scales faster than I can easily see my fingers hit each note, and yet they do hit them, and I can hear my fingers hit them, but it is now faster than my eye can follow when I get up to maximum speed. Learning to play scales fast took me a lot of practice, many, many hours over years. This process of leaning to count frequencies actually came more easily than playing scales fast, but I still found a lot of work.
Be patient and start with the slower pulses and build up until this is natural for you, if you wish to play the "how fast is my mind going" game, which is a pretty fun game, if you are a serious dharma phenomenology geek like I am.
… I have only achieved discrete, countable/extrapolateable speeds past about 40Hz or so in very rare, fleeting moments, usually on the tale end of the ramp up of an A&P-style event, but have easy access to stuff in the mid 20Hz range. (DhO)
POI is a bit like training to be a sherpa climbing the Everest. If one expects the POI to just be linear, we go up, up, up, it doesn't work that way for most people most of the time.
Starting with the POI, to use an analogy about fetishizing brought up on Reddit, it is a bit like training to be a sherpa climbing Everest. You initially start with porting things back and forth to one of the lower basecamps. Sometimes it is raining and windy. Sometimes it is clear and beautiful. Sometimes it is dark, sometimes light. Sometimes the going is easy, sometimes not. However, by walking up and down that trail again and again, carrying various loads, dealing with different conditions, you slowly learn that part of the trail. This takes time, and it is not linear. Sometimes you don't get all the way to the camp and have to stop or go back. Sometimes the going is very easy and surprising. Sometimes there are animals. Sometimes you sprain your ankle on a slippery rock. Yet, you learn how the trail is, with all its little landmarks and signposts, trees and curves, views and struggles. You become a competent sherpa. This takes time, and a map on paper is helpful, but very small in comparison to what you learn by walking that trail many times in various conditions.
In the same way, most start off at the beginning, notice thoughts as thoughts (Mind and Body), notice some things about intention, notice things come and go, notice the Three Characteristics, even if they are not focusing on those. Sometimes we have powerful jhanic factors, the sun is shining. Sometimes our mind is stormy. Yet, the basic, fundamental insights are oddly the same, though the overall experience can feel quite different.
In the same way it goes for the other parts of the path, above the first basecamp. There may be differences, some areas intrinsically more rocky, some intrinsically colder, some warmer, some more prone to rock slides, some more prone to amazing vistas and easy walking. There is still Weather that can vary a lot. Seasons change. Snows comes and go. Winds vary. Yet, the trail is the trail just the same.
It is also true that we can have different gear. Some will travel very light, use fewer ropes, have less backup equipment, carry a smaller first aid kit, sleep less, climb more. Others will pack heavier gear, but sleep more comfortably, have more backup ropes, more pins in the rocks, better food, and their climb, while slower, may be a lot easier and more pleasant, and possibly safer in some ways. These are reasonable lifestyle choices, with pros and cons, and each must choose their own style as they go up the mountain. Neither can totally compensate for what ends up happening on the mountain, as it is Nature, and Nature does what it does, but, on average, one can predict how things might go for the hypothetical two different groups.
However, while the POI and TMI are often portrayed as opposites, the beauty of the concepts of vipassana jhanas comes in to turn a black and white discussion into one of adult thinking and shades of grey.
It might seem on the one hand that the fast POI people are the light gear, sleep less, use less ropes, take more risks, moves fast types, and the TMI people are more build lots of skills before the climb, carry a lot of backup gear, bring warmer sleeping bags and nicer food types, and this is true in generalizations. Both are very valid choices. (DhO)
Sherpa training, whose trail is the dharma path. This stuff is clearly intellectually fascinating for many when they get into it, all the weird happenings, the strange side-effects, the kundalini stuff and kriyas, the highs, the lows, but I like to think of this as training to be a sherpa, except that, in this case, the trail is the dharma path, and your own experiences of heart, mind, and body.
If you train to be a sherpa, you have to walk the same trails again and again for years. Each time you walk up and down the path, you learn something about it by just going there, just participating in the process, in a way that you could try to explain to someone, could talk about, could write something about, make maps of, but it would be nothing like the fact of just doing it.
You walk the trail at dawn, at midday, at dusk, at night. You walk it in rain and shine. Some days, the trail is easier. Some days, it is hard. Some days it is pouring hail on your head. Some days, lightning crashes around. Some days, wind threatens to blow you off the path. Some days the light breeze is so pleasant. Some days, it is utterly gorgeous. Some days, you feel lucky to have made it home. Sometimes the creeks you have to cross are low. Sometimes the creeks you have to cross are roaring torrents. Sometimes there is ice and snow. Sometimes it is blistering hot. Sometimes it is freezing cold.
From all of these varied direct experiences on the trail, having walked it literally thousands of times, you become a seasoned sherpa. You learn that trail so that you are an expert in it, have true, direct knowledge that comes from experience and handling various situations on that trail, so that you can guide people safely on that same trail in all sorts of conditions, however it presents that day or night. You know how to read the clouds, the wind, the smell in the air, the tracks on the ground, the leaves on the trees. You know the seasons and how they affect the journey. You know that, while you can explain all sorts of things to those sherpas in training that you are now teaching and to those you guide along the trail, they just have to walk that same trail again and again and again in all sorts of conditions and be present to them to really know it like you do now. (DhO)
Jhana First Camps, Vipassana First Camps and Hybrids Approaches. This question is another very old one, going back to the beginning, and you find tensions around this even in the Pali Canon, though there are very traditionalist Suttaheads that would say that the suttas causing the tension are not as authentic, being later additions, and ignoring their high degree of practical utility for practitioners. There are various schools of thought on this question also, which I will summarize into basic camps.
There are the Jhana First camps, those that say train first to get very stable concentration states, then, having left those, use the power of that trained mind to take on the Three Characteristics and attain to wisdom. May traditional Buddhist suttas clearly favor this approach, including the classic Fruits of the Homeless Life, DN 2. It is popular in Sri Lanka, and among the likes of Bhanta Gunaratana. You also find similar approaches taught by those such as Pa Auk, and some Thai Forest teachers. The pros are basically that it is true that a clear, well-trained mind that can get jhana can often manage the path of insight much more calmly than some of the other approaches, one gets the nice experiences of more pure jhanas (presuming that one can get into them without letting some vipassana slip in, which is actually kinda difficult), and some people have a natural gift for jhanas, and so a jhana approach may get them some early successes, reinforcing interest in practice.
There are the Vipassana First camps, such as Mahasi and others, that say that one doesn't need jhana, and may proceed straight to insight into the Three Characteristics of the Six Sense Doors. By doing so, one may attain to the vipassana jhanas along the way, being another conceptualization of the stages of insight but noticing their corollaries with more pure jhanas, while avoiding the traps that await for those who get into the track of jhanas and get stuck in them. Pros are that, for those who can take the heat, this method can be very fast. The downside is the heat, meaning emotional and perceptual instability, and that doesn't always go well. Some people also have a natural gift for this style and tolerance for the side-effects, and will do well in such traditions, whereas they might have had a hard time cultivating more pure jhanas, and so have gotten frustrated. I was one such type, but my personal history need not bias me against other approaches, in which I see validity.
Hybrid approaches are the last option, and we find TMI as one such tradition, and the goal here is to find the right balance of strong jhanic factors along with insight into vibrancy and lack of subtle dullness, the combination of which, at least in theory and in some practitioners, leads to that sweet spot middle ground where they have something of the best of both worlds. That said, not everyone can achieve that balance, and many will drift to one side or other at various points, either being too heavy on the samatha side but thinking that is insight, or being too heavy on the vipassana side, and getting blind-sided by the dark stuff, as talking about and normalizing the dark stuff is not as much TMI's strength. (DhO)
Vipassana Jhanas and the Progress of Insight. The Samatha/Vipassana thing is complicated. There are clearly suttas where the Buddha divides the two, others where they are integrated. Without going into some long textual debate, the practical reality is that there is an axis. The more one looks at things as being smooth, pleasant, analog, the more one is doing samatha. The more one looks at things as being discrete, individual, transient sensations and notices that suffering caused by the tention in the illusion of duality, the more one is doing vipassana.
How the Vipassana Jhanas and the Seven Factors of Awakening can help. The vipassana jhanas allow us to think with more nuance, as to the Seven Factors of Awakening. How the Vipassana Jhanas help:
If one learns to meditate very well, gains skills in samatha and vipassana, one will begin to see the correlations, how insights and jhanas relate to each other. One begins to notice through one's own experience that various factors can be optimized for in various ways. One can emphasize more jhanic factors or investigation, and, eventually, can learn to do both at the same time, and, eventually, learn to do those as one wishes, with a variety of objects, and tune the mind as one wants it to be, Weather permitting.
The vipassana jhanas concepts, which bridge the seeming gap between the POI the TMI stages, allow one to think of this as a multidimensional plane. One can notice which factors are present at any time. One can also notice the width of attention and phase issues (seeing the beginning, middle, end, or whole arising and passing of objects). One can notice the degree to which Mindfulness, Investigation, Energy, Rapture (piti and sukkha), Tranquility, Concentration, and Equanimity are present or absent. One can tune to try to optimize for those.
In this way, one can add or disgard gear, change one's hiking style, modify one's approach as the trail and Weather permit.
I personally recommend TMI to people so that they have, as they wish, strong support for those times when they feel they need more safety, more gear, more tech, more training before they get to steeper parts of the path, and it does those well. Yay, TMI! I similarly recommend other great works as well, such as Leigh Brasington's Right Concentration, Focused and Fearless and Wisdom Wide and Deep by Shaila Catherine, The Path of Serenity and Insight by Bhante Gunaratana, Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea, In This Very Life, by Sayadaw U Pandita, etc., as all of these and more help to build up and reinforce various capabilities so that they can know what is possible and have a better sense of how to do it.
I also highly recommend learning about the concepts of the vipassana jhanas, which come from U Pandita and Bill Hamilton and the like, as they are very useful tech, useful concepts, and they allow us yet another possibly very helpful take on the territory, adding in a dimension that helps resolve apparent conflicts like samatha vs vipassana, and instead makes it about balancing and cultivating factors, working with the natural shapes of attention, dealing with the strange phase problems that can arise in the third vipassana jhana, which is where the dukkha ñanas occur, dealing with questions related to wide vs narrow focuses of attention and objects, adding in another way of looking at the concepts of central attention vs peripheral awareness, adding in additional perspectives on metacognitive awareness, adding in the natural progression of the arising of certain patterns of emotions and reations to experience, etc. They also provide one more way of thinking about and dealing with Weather.
In this way, I strongly believe that refocusing the conversation on the Seven Factors of Awakening and the vipassana jhanas helps to resolve a lot of these difficulties and expand people's horizons out of narrow, linear maps, narrow camps, narrowly defined conflicts, and narrow practice patterns, and instead have a range of styles and concepts to help them navigate in territory that is often difficult to map in real-time even for experts, but that responds well to immediate analysis of factors and recognition of attention shapes and phase issues.
Culadasa often says that he is the only one talking about peripheral awareness vs central attention, or that he discovered this, but this is not true. This concept is built into the vipassana jhanas, and is much older than TMI. In particular, one will notice that certain phases of practice really shine when it comes to one or the other, and that the natural progression is to incorporate more and more of peripheral awareness into the scope of one's attention.
In particular, the vipassana jhanas map very well to the TMI stages, with the most obvious correlations being the second vipassana jhana correlating very well with TMI 7 (where the center of attention is amazingly clear and naturally able to focus on objects with piti and sukha present), and 8 (though, being broader and with more peripheral awareness, does start to have a bit of a third vipassana jhana aspect to it), and the third vipassana jhana correlating with TMI 9, and the fourth vipassana jhana correlating with TMI 10.
In the concept of the vipassana jhanas, there is the flexibility to recognize both their vipassana nature, that ability to perceive sensations clearly as they are, to notice them come and go, and yet also the jhanic nature of this process, that the jhanic factors progress through a predictable development to end up with a broad, expansive equanimity if practice goes far enough. They also allow for horizontal or lateral work, converting insight stages into jhanas and vice versa, moving sideways or diagonally on the great plane of meditation.
Further, if one is really into map theory, the fractal concepts of the subjhanas and subñanas, which initially can appear dauntingly and needlessly complex, are actually very explanatory of lots of what would otherwise appear like irregularities along the way.
I recall a recent, extremely gratifying conversation with a very strong, competent established practitioner who was for a long time also very non-mappy, not into all the stages and numbers, thinking they didn't apply to her practice at all, who then, on practicing further, exclaimed, "Wow, I can see them, all the little substages, just like the map predicts! Amazing! It is just like a fractal! I had no idea! This is so beautiful!" This was so delightful to hear, such a source of gratitude for this amazing tech that others who came before us were kind enough to share with us. Truly, when one sees that, it is beautiful, at least for me. It is not that you have to see that beauty, or even agree that it is beautiful once you have seen it, but, if you haven't seen it, perhaps consider reserve judgement.
Anyway, I offer these concepts that I do truly believe are beautiful, useful, that help bridge gaps, explain nuances, resolve conflicts, turn apparent contradictions into dimensions of practice to be explored, and develop and claim their own style of practice. (DhO)
On the Utility and Futility of the Maps. Vincent Horn posted a thread on Twitter about his experience teaching meditation. Daniel Ingram answers point by point in DhO, in a dialogue format.
V: The following is a twitter thread posted by Vincent Horn about his experience teaching meditation:The #1 most common question I receive as a meditation teacher is: “How do I know I’m on the right track?”
D: Most of which depends largely on their goals and ways of viewing the world, as people’s own sense of “right track” shows wide variability. Vince also makes a similar point below.
V: When I first was starting out as a meditation teacher I answered this question by helping people recognize and move through the traditional state-stages of the early Buddhist meditative path (ex. The 16 stages ofthe progress of insight, the 4 paths, the 8 jhanas, etc.)
D: Which is just one very narrow aspect of the path. It is good to have grown to appreciate the vast breadth of the path.
V: I quickly realized this was a sub-optimal way of teaching because: 1) Not everyone can easily move through the traditional state-stages and have success with this approach.
D: Very true.
V: It’s a system that becomes overlaid ON TOP OF people’s lives. Then they have to change themselves (including their motivational structure) and change the world around them (good luck!) to fit the practice. Again, most people can’t do this and frankly shouldn’t.
D: Models have their specific uses and functions. If a person’s meditative goal is to move through the stage of insight, then that map has value. If a person is experiencing effects that the maps of insight describe well and those experiences are causing difficulty, then the maps of insight can provide normalization and also helpful stage-specific advice. It is also possible that they describe some aspects of attentional development that have some universal application, and in this they can sometimes be useful also.
V: It presumes that the early Buddhist framework has the best answer on why and how you should be practicing. If this doesn’t align with why one is actually meditating it creates huge (and unnecessary) friction.
D: No, it doesn’t. That these maps are useful for some and not as useful for others is nothing profound, as this has been noticed on this forum (which Vince helped start almost 10 years ago) many, many times. This point about various goals and various maps being helpful or not helpful for those goals has been debated literally thousands of times on this website and many others, clearly showing that his point about friction, is obvious. The degree to which that friction is unncessary is also very complex. There are multiple interpretations, including the lack of utility or applicability of the maps, the lack of the ability of the person to appreciate or utilize maps that might actually have utility and descriptive power, and various other scenarios. One must look at the various factors in the equation, part of which is the maps, and part of which is the ability of practitioners to understand and properly apply them. It is not so simple. Friction can arise from numerous causes, including maps being applied to situations they don't fit well, maps being applied in improper ways, maps being insufficiently nuanced to match with what is going on, maps being taken too seriously, maps not being taken seriously enough, maps not being appreciated when they actually fit well with a situation but are not appreciated due to other causes (which might benefit from identification, not that this identification will always allow them to be overcome), maps being misinterpreted, etc. Identifying the cause of the "friction" is not always so easy.
V: The traditions usually say to change yourself to fit “the right view”, but I’ve found it’s much more effective to work with people’s own motivational structure and offer what I’ve found useful in response to that from all the methods and approaches I’ve practiced.
D: This has been noticed on this forum and its sister communities countless times. People have very diverse motivations for practice, and generally fail when motivations and their underlying capabilities and conditioning don’t align with some practice, map, or ideal. Then the question of which should be changed, the person or the ideal, or if there should be some meeting in the middle, or even some entirely different question asked, rightly becomes the essential complex discussion.
V: Now when I’m asked the question, “Am I on the right track?” I respond by asking a series of questions to try and help expose people to their own assumptions about what the path is, how it should look, and what their deepest motivations for doing this actually are.
D: As has been noticed again and again here, most people are not motivated to pursue insight directly and deeply, instead having many other perfectly valid and also questionable agendas and goals. As it mentions in the Foreword and Warning of MCTB, even most people who identify strongly as Buddhists are not into deep insight practice and the technical aspects of the Buddhist path. Assessing motivation is clearly critical to any conversation regarding what needs people are trying to get met by engaging with meditation traditions and those in them. Clearly, discussing insight stages with people who are not into them and not interested in those topics makes little sense, as Vince points out. There is still much valid debate about what to do with people who run into identity-reality conflicts when they believe they somehow should be into technical meditation but really aren't (as is very common), as well as those who believe for some reason that they shouldn't be into technical but actually are (as is also somewhat common).
V: Once we’ve uncovered the deep motivation the path begins to reveal itself and waking the path isn’t a struggle. It’s still challenging, but it’s the challenge of transformation, not the challenge of trying to force oneself into an ideological straight jacket
D: Anyone who is using the models as an ideological straight jacket or viewing models as an ideological straight jacket should, as Vince suggests, find a different relationship to the models, as they were meant to be descriptive, supportive, and normalizing, not impeding or limiting. One must beware that one not set up a straw-man argument which says, “Those who advocate for the ideologically straight-jacketing models are on the wrong track,” as those who use the models well realize their limitations and hopefully provide appropriate qualifiers and nuance to try to reduce the occurrence of people taking the models that way.
V: With this approach authority becomes less centralized. The emphasis is not on helping people get enlightened (with a preconception about what that is) but rather on helping people learn how to get enlightened, while not knowing what that will be like.
D: Discussions about what awakening is and what can or can’t be known about that, what can or can’t be modeled about that, and what can or can’t be predicted about that, as well as what various people think it looks like, would be long, so I will let this point go for the moment.
That said, in real practice, nobody can stay totally to one side or the other, and, in real practice, people oscillate from one side to the other to some degree.
So, it is nearly impossible to do pure jhana in a samatha sense and not see some of the true nature of phenomena and gain insight, and it is also nearly impossible to be doing strong vipassana practice and not chance into the samatha jhanas at times. What happens more often than not is what is described in sutta MN 111 where we get into something jhanic and then see some of their true nature and then get into the next jhana and see some of their true nature.
In this way, we get into Mind and Body, which is very samatha in general terms, and then get into Cause and Effect and the Three Characteristics, which are very vipassana, then get into the early A&P, which is very samatha in general, then get into the later part, which is very vipassana, then get into Dissiolution, which is very samatha, then get into Fear, Misery, Disgust, etc. which are very vipassana, then get into early Equanimity, which is very samatha, then get into late Equanimity, which is very vipassana, this all being a generalization.
Thus, they are at once different things and also integrated. I talk some about this in a video here.
So, if you are having the experiences you are having, those are clearly stages of insight experiences, regardless of what practice you are doing.
The stages of insight are very normal things to just show up, even in non-trained, non-meditating people, as is commonly reported here (as hundreds of people have posted about), and much more so in people doing various meditative practices, including those who are just trying to do samatha or jhanas or whatever they wish to call them. (DhO)
How the Vipassana Jhanas and the Seven Factors of Awakening can help. The vipassana jhanas allow us to think with more nuance, as to the Seven Factors of Awakening. How the Vipassana Jhanas help:
If one learns to meditate very well, gains skills in samatha and vipassana, one will begin to see the correlations, how insights and jhanas relate to each other. One begins to notice through one's own experience that various factors can be optimized for in various ways. One can emphasize more jhanic factors or investigation, and, eventually, can learn to do both at the same time, and, eventually, learn to do those as one wishes, with a variety of objects, and tune the mind as one wants it to be, Weather permitting.
The vipassana jhanas concepts, which bridge the seeming gap between the POI the TMI stages, allow one to think of this as a multidimensional plane. One can notice which factors are present at any time. One can also notice the width of attention and phase issues (seeing the beginning, middle, end, or whole arising and passing of objects). One can notice the degree to which Mindfulness, Investigation, Energy, Rapture (piti and sukkha), Tranquility, Concentration, and Equanimity are present or absent. One can tune to try to optimize for those.
In this way, one can add or disgard gear, change one's hiking style, modify one's approach as the trail and Weather permit.
I personally recommend TMI to people so that they have, as they wish, strong support for those times when they feel they need more safety, more gear, more tech, more training before they get to steeper parts of the path, and it does those well. Yay, TMI! I similarly recommend other great works as well, such as Leigh Brasington's Right Concentration, Focused and Fearless and Wisdom Wide and Deep by Shaila Catherine, The Path of Serenity and Insight by Bhante Gunaratana, Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea, In This Very Life, by Sayadaw U Pandita, etc., as all of these and more help to build up and reinforce various capabilities so that they can know what is possible and have a better sense of how to do it.
I also highly recommend learning about the concepts of the vipassana jhanas, which come from U Pandita and Bill Hamilton and the like, as they are very useful tech, useful concepts, and they allow us yet another possibly very helpful take on the territory, adding in a dimension that helps resolve apparent conflicts like samatha vs vipassana, and instead makes it about balancing and cultivating factors, working with the natural shapes of attention, dealing with the strange phase problems that can arise in the third vipassana jhana, which is where the dukkha ñanas occur, dealing with questions related to wide vs narrow focuses of attention and objects, adding in another way of looking at the concepts of central attention vs peripheral awareness, adding in additional perspectives on metacognitive awareness, adding in the natural progression of the arising of certain patterns of emotions and reations to experience, etc. They also provide one more way of thinking about and dealing with Weather.
In this way, I strongly believe that refocusing the conversation on the Seven Factors of Awakening and the vipassana jhanas helps to resolve a lot of these difficulties and expand people's horizons out of narrow, linear maps, narrow camps, narrowly defined conflicts, and narrow practice patterns, and instead have a range of styles and concepts to help them navigate in territory that is often difficult to map in real-time even for experts, but that responds well to immediate analysis of factors and recognition of attention shapes and phase issues.
Culadasa often says that he is the only one talking about peripheral awareness vs central attention, or that he discovered this, but this is not true. This concept is built into the vipassana jhanas, and is much older than TMI. In particular, one will notice that certain phases of practice really shine when it comes to one or the other, and that the natural progression is to incorporate more and more of peripheral awareness into the scope of one's attention.
In particular, the vipassana jhanas map very well to the TMI stages, with the most obvious correlations being the second vipassana jhana correlating very well with TMI 7 (where the center of attention is amazingly clear and naturally able to focus on objects with piti and sukha present), and 8 (though, being broader and with more peripheral awareness, does start to have a bit of a third vipassana jhana aspect to it), and the third vipassana jhana correlating with TMI 9, and the fourth vipassana jhana correlating with TMI 10.
In the concept of the vipassana jhanas, there is the flexibility to recognize both their vipassana nature, that ability to perceive sensations clearly as they are, to notice them come and go, and yet also the jhanic nature of this process, that the jhanic factors progress through a predictable development to end up with a broad, expansive equanimity if practice goes far enough. They also allow for horizontal or lateral work, converting insight stages into jhanas and vice versa, moving sideways or diagonally on the great plane of meditation.
Further, if one is really into map theory, the fractal concepts of the subjhanas and subñanas, which initially can appear dauntingly and needlessly complex, are actually very explanatory of lots of what would otherwise appear like irregularities along the way.
I recall a recent, extremely gratifying conversation with a very strong, competent established practitioner who was for a long time also very non-mappy, not into all the stages and numbers, thinking they didn't apply to her practice at all, who then, on practicing further, exclaimed, "Wow, I can see them, all the little substages, just like the map predicts! Amazing! It is just like a fractal! I had no idea! This is so beautiful!" This was so delightful to hear, such a source of gratitude for this amazing tech that others who came before us were kind enough to share with us. Truly, when one sees that, it is beautiful, at least for me. It is not that you have to see that beauty, or even agree that it is beautiful once you have seen it, but, if you haven't seen it, perhaps consider reserve judgement.
Anyway, I offer these concepts that I do truly believe are beautiful, useful, that help bridge gaps, explain nuances, resolve conflicts, turn apparent contradictions into dimensions of practice to be explored, and develop and claim their own style of practice. (DhO)
On the Utility and Futility of the Maps. Vincent Horn posted a thread on Twitter about his experience teaching meditation. Daniel Ingram answers point by point in DhO, in a dialogue format.
V: The following is a twitter thread posted by Vincent Horn about his experience teaching meditation:The #1 most common question I receive as a meditation teacher is: “How do I know I’m on the right track?”
D: Most of which depends largely on their goals and ways of viewing the world, as people’s own sense of “right track” shows wide variability. Vince also makes a similar point below.
V: When I first was starting out as a meditation teacher I answered this question by helping people recognize and move through the traditional state-stages of the early Buddhist meditative path (ex. The 16 stages ofthe progress of insight, the 4 paths, the 8 jhanas, etc.)
D: Which is just one very narrow aspect of the path. It is good to have grown to appreciate the vast breadth of the path.
V: I quickly realized this was a sub-optimal way of teaching because: 1) Not everyone can easily move through the traditional state-stages and have success with this approach.
D: Very true.
V: It’s a system that becomes overlaid ON TOP OF people’s lives. Then they have to change themselves (including their motivational structure) and change the world around them (good luck!) to fit the practice. Again, most people can’t do this and frankly shouldn’t.
D: Models have their specific uses and functions. If a person’s meditative goal is to move through the stage of insight, then that map has value. If a person is experiencing effects that the maps of insight describe well and those experiences are causing difficulty, then the maps of insight can provide normalization and also helpful stage-specific advice. It is also possible that they describe some aspects of attentional development that have some universal application, and in this they can sometimes be useful also.
V: It presumes that the early Buddhist framework has the best answer on why and how you should be practicing. If this doesn’t align with why one is actually meditating it creates huge (and unnecessary) friction.
D: No, it doesn’t. That these maps are useful for some and not as useful for others is nothing profound, as this has been noticed on this forum (which Vince helped start almost 10 years ago) many, many times. This point about various goals and various maps being helpful or not helpful for those goals has been debated literally thousands of times on this website and many others, clearly showing that his point about friction, is obvious. The degree to which that friction is unncessary is also very complex. There are multiple interpretations, including the lack of utility or applicability of the maps, the lack of the ability of the person to appreciate or utilize maps that might actually have utility and descriptive power, and various other scenarios. One must look at the various factors in the equation, part of which is the maps, and part of which is the ability of practitioners to understand and properly apply them. It is not so simple. Friction can arise from numerous causes, including maps being applied to situations they don't fit well, maps being applied in improper ways, maps being insufficiently nuanced to match with what is going on, maps being taken too seriously, maps not being taken seriously enough, maps not being appreciated when they actually fit well with a situation but are not appreciated due to other causes (which might benefit from identification, not that this identification will always allow them to be overcome), maps being misinterpreted, etc. Identifying the cause of the "friction" is not always so easy.
V: The traditions usually say to change yourself to fit “the right view”, but I’ve found it’s much more effective to work with people’s own motivational structure and offer what I’ve found useful in response to that from all the methods and approaches I’ve practiced.
D: This has been noticed on this forum and its sister communities countless times. People have very diverse motivations for practice, and generally fail when motivations and their underlying capabilities and conditioning don’t align with some practice, map, or ideal. Then the question of which should be changed, the person or the ideal, or if there should be some meeting in the middle, or even some entirely different question asked, rightly becomes the essential complex discussion.
V: Now when I’m asked the question, “Am I on the right track?” I respond by asking a series of questions to try and help expose people to their own assumptions about what the path is, how it should look, and what their deepest motivations for doing this actually are.
D: As has been noticed again and again here, most people are not motivated to pursue insight directly and deeply, instead having many other perfectly valid and also questionable agendas and goals. As it mentions in the Foreword and Warning of MCTB, even most people who identify strongly as Buddhists are not into deep insight practice and the technical aspects of the Buddhist path. Assessing motivation is clearly critical to any conversation regarding what needs people are trying to get met by engaging with meditation traditions and those in them. Clearly, discussing insight stages with people who are not into them and not interested in those topics makes little sense, as Vince points out. There is still much valid debate about what to do with people who run into identity-reality conflicts when they believe they somehow should be into technical meditation but really aren't (as is very common), as well as those who believe for some reason that they shouldn't be into technical but actually are (as is also somewhat common).
V: Once we’ve uncovered the deep motivation the path begins to reveal itself and waking the path isn’t a struggle. It’s still challenging, but it’s the challenge of transformation, not the challenge of trying to force oneself into an ideological straight jacket
D: Anyone who is using the models as an ideological straight jacket or viewing models as an ideological straight jacket should, as Vince suggests, find a different relationship to the models, as they were meant to be descriptive, supportive, and normalizing, not impeding or limiting. One must beware that one not set up a straw-man argument which says, “Those who advocate for the ideologically straight-jacketing models are on the wrong track,” as those who use the models well realize their limitations and hopefully provide appropriate qualifiers and nuance to try to reduce the occurrence of people taking the models that way.
V: With this approach authority becomes less centralized. The emphasis is not on helping people get enlightened (with a preconception about what that is) but rather on helping people learn how to get enlightened, while not knowing what that will be like.
D: Discussions about what awakening is and what can or can’t be known about that, what can or can’t be modeled about that, and what can or can’t be predicted about that, as well as what various people think it looks like, would be long, so I will let this point go for the moment.
V: Traditional maps and models become useful only insofar as they map onto a students experience and predilections. Interestingly, I’ve found they hold up fairly well and continue to be surprisingly useful.
D: I would suggest the qualifier that the degree of the teacher’s sophistication, breadth, nuance, and skill in using the maps might also come into play. I would also add that students are not static and can learn and grow to appreciate various meditative technologies that they might not initially have found as appealing.
V: My current guess as to why that is has to do with the deep structures of contemplative transformation as well as with people’s contemplative predilections. Some people’s awakening, even when it’s self-directed, has a “zen” or “vipassana” or “vajrayana” flavor.
D: I noticed something similar in my own practice, attaining Vajrayana-esque results with methods that were relentlessly Theravadin. Clearly, the various strains of Buddhism arose in response to practitioners and cultures with different styles and tendencies.
V: When I see those contemplative predilections that’s when I suggest people check out traditional sources. But it’s more about fleshing out one’s current understanding rather than using them as functional maps.
D: I agree, that careful conversations with any practitioner regarding what they are trying to do, where they come from, what they have tried so far, how that worked, what went wrong, what went right, where they are now, and all of that, can help inform a conversation about how to meet that person’s specific needs in that moment, balance what might be balanced, and enhance what might be enhanced. The basic questions, "What's going on with you now?", "What is the history of your practice so far?", "What do you need help with now?", "What skills and resources, as well as limitations and difficulties, need to be considered in providing you advice?" and "How will you judge the efficacy of any advice given?" are all a very good idea, as with any therapeutic, healing, educational, or similar endeavor.
V: The only functional map, IME, is one that’s being constantly reformulated using real-time data from multiple sources, including: oneself, peers, teachers, traditional sources, and wise people who exist outside of these systems. I call this triangulating the path.
D: This “triangulation” has been going on for thousands of years across continents, and certainly has been part of the nearly 10-year-long discussion here at the DhO, which Vince helped found with me on these original principles, as more data of good quality clearly helps move the field forward. May it continue with openness, skill, nuance, comradery, and an appreciation of the vastness and richness of the path. (DhO)
Map-Obsession: Hindrances in sheep's clothing. The maps of meditation can be remarkable technology, helping to explain, normalize, and contextualize strange experiences that can result from meditation or even just being alive. They can provide extremely helpful warnings of common pitfalls, help meditators figure out how to make progress through odd, unfamiliar territory, catch what they are missing, and even explore cool options related to whatever is going on that otherwise might have remained hidden.
However, as basically anyone in a map-based tradition knows all too well, they can also end up becoming a source of fixation, obsession, and distraction. In this, they become hindrances for those who are educated in the maps.
The standard Five Hindrances are desire, aversion, boredom, restlessness and worry, and skeptical doubt. Every single one of those can drive those prone to analysis to fixate on maps in a way that derails practice in exactly the way that the more standard, non-map presentations of the hindrances can, except repackaged and rebranded to appeal to those who have been given these empowering frameworks.
It is often very obvious when the hindrance of desire shows up in some mundane form. The mind fixates on something, some image, some dream in the future, a new phone, a new car, a fun vacation, a person we find attractive, some great meal we could have, etc. Hopefully, if we have some meditation skills, soon enough we notice, “Ah, this is the hindrance of desire,” and hopefully notice it as a pattern of sensations and get our meditation back on track.
However, the desire to achieve some future meditation goal, some next stage, some next state, some path: when that arises and becomes the object of desire, it can seem so sanctioned, so helpful, so much a source of motivation and inspiration, so what we are supposed to be doing in our meditation, that we hardly notice this is just the hindrance of desire repackaged in a much shinier wrapper, a wrapper so shiny we may hardly notice it for the ordinary, disruptive hindrance that it is.
By being pulled towards the future instead of this moment just as it is, we ironically thwart that same desire, as it is each immediate unfolding moment that forms the basis of progress, not some non-existent future moment unless we can notice the immediate experiences of the thoughts that make up that sense of future right now as they are, and notice that pull towards the future in our body just as it occurs.
If we can do this, we turn a hindrance back into meditation. If not, we reinforce the bad habit of obsessing on an imagined future without insight into that obsession, so that next time, it will be easier to fall back into that trap instead of actually making progress. We must guard against building that sort of wiring without turning it into an object of skillful inquiry as it occurs.
The same is true of aversion. When aversion arises, as hatred, irritation, anger, or some other emotion that pushes experiences away, hopefully we notice this hindrance as the hindrance it is and get back to meditation. We hopefully learn to notice when we are replaying an old argument in our heads, notice when we rehash old grievances, notice when we try to get away from our knee or back pain, notice when we get frustrated by our meditation experience, etc.
However, when the hindrance of map-fixation arises as aversion, while not pleasant either, it seems so much more important. We reject what we are feeling, seeing, hearing, thinking, smelling, and tasting as it isn’t what is supposed to be happening, so our mapping mind erroneously tells us. We reject whatever state or stage we are in. We reject the qualities that make up our actual experience for some imagined experience we would greatly prefer. We cut ourselves off from the sensations occurring now due to the ordinary hindrance of aversion, but again repackaged in the wrapper of the tradition’s Mighty Maps.
We can be so convinced this is good meditation when in fact it is just aversion fooling us again. If we can notice the sensations of aversion when they arise in this seductive way, we can make them a foundation of progress rather than further reinforcing the bad habit of cultivating hindrances.
Like aversion and desire, boredom can also camouflage itself in the garb of map fixation and stealthily attack. The breath seems so boring, we think, but jhana sounds so good. The feet are just feet, we think, but somewhere else is Nibbana. The technique is tedious and tiresome, but one day we will be awakened. Through boredom, which is common in the early stages of meditation, but even some later stages as well, we slip into daydreams of desire and aversion, or just ordinary dullness, but it is really fueled by boredom in these cases, a lack of ability to appreciate the vivid, amazing, remarkable truths that each of these seemingly boring sensations is trying to tell us if we just learned how to pay attention to them clearly.
If we can learn to perceive the remarkably fascinating intricacy of all the little vivid sensations of our meditation objects, experience, and boredom itself, we can turn these into sources of progress, but if we persist in the habit of boredom, again that habit is written into our minds and we are more likely to fall into it next time.
Restlessness and worry also often arise as map fixation in smart people. When they arise the ordinary way, worry about our job, relationship, finances, education, or just restlessness and ordinary anxiety on the cushion or when walking or whatever, we hopefully are able to recognize them as the hindrances they are. However, when they arise in more map-fixated forms, they may be a lot more pernicious.
Questions that seem so compellingly important can arise, such as, “Will I have enough time left on this retreat to get Stream Entry?”, or “What will happen if I leave this retreat still darknighting this hard?” Ordinary restlessness and worry have wrapped themselves in the cloak of mappiness and struck hard. We need to identify these as the hindrances the immediate patterns of sensations they are, or, like an evil grand vizier who has gained the ear of the sultan, they can lead us into trouble.
Similarly, skeptical doubt can creep in just like restlessness and worry, and often they gang up together for asymmetrical warfare guerrilla attacks, again disguised as oh-so-compelling map fixation.
“Is this really the right technique for me? Maybe if I did another technique I would get jhana or awakened faster?”
“What if I can’t handle the difficult meditation stages?”
“Everyone else seems to be getting to stages and states that I can’t; maybe I am just born to be a bad meditator.”
“My teachers aren’t giving me the right instructions, as I am still stuck in this stage and unable to get to some other stage.”
“What if there are other, hidden, secret teachings that lead to much better awakening variants than this technique?”, basically the map-based version of FOMO (fear of missing out).
Doubt can even manifest in more insidious forms, as we map and analyze each little bit of each stage and state as they arise, placing them into our mental map of “where we are”, being somehow certain that this is oh-so-important and that if we do this, something great will happen, and if we don’t, something bad will happen. We doubt that we can just let sensations show us their truths, and instead are sure we have to retrofit our own intellectual and phenomenological brilliance on top of them and that this is a great idea. It is not that we might not recognize familiar landmarks as they arise, as that is normal to a trained mind familiar with the states and stages, but if this becomes the focus of our meditation rather than the landmarks, then it can subtly or overtly derail practice.
If we don’t catch these sorts of thoughts filled with map-based doubt, restlessness, and worry, seeing them as the patterns of immediate sensations that they are, they will immediately derail our practice and ironically make the outcomes they fear much more likely.
In this way, we see that essentially all map-obsessed thoughts that derail practice are just the ordinary hindrances dressed up in compelling disguises. Thus armed, we can go back to basics, learn to recognize each of these hindrances when they occur, even in sophisticated forms, and apply the appropriate remedies. We can learn to see these sensations as they are. We can redirect an unhelpful fixation on an imagined future and a long-gone past to comprehension of this moment as it is, even if that moment involves sensations that ordinarily might become hindrances. In these skillful ways, we can avoid the very traps that all of these hindrances simultaneously fear and yet ironically create.
A very similar analysis of the causes of map-based fixation can be constructed from the later version of the Ten Armies of Mara, which has considerable overlap with the Five Hindrances but adds a few more of relevance, typically listed as:
Learning these skills is essential for meditators who have learned the maps so that they can draw on their amazing benefits while not being impeded by falling into the well-known traps that they can create if misused. (DhO) Link to text at Daniel's blog.
D: I would suggest the qualifier that the degree of the teacher’s sophistication, breadth, nuance, and skill in using the maps might also come into play. I would also add that students are not static and can learn and grow to appreciate various meditative technologies that they might not initially have found as appealing.
V: My current guess as to why that is has to do with the deep structures of contemplative transformation as well as with people’s contemplative predilections. Some people’s awakening, even when it’s self-directed, has a “zen” or “vipassana” or “vajrayana” flavor.
D: I noticed something similar in my own practice, attaining Vajrayana-esque results with methods that were relentlessly Theravadin. Clearly, the various strains of Buddhism arose in response to practitioners and cultures with different styles and tendencies.
V: When I see those contemplative predilections that’s when I suggest people check out traditional sources. But it’s more about fleshing out one’s current understanding rather than using them as functional maps.
D: I agree, that careful conversations with any practitioner regarding what they are trying to do, where they come from, what they have tried so far, how that worked, what went wrong, what went right, where they are now, and all of that, can help inform a conversation about how to meet that person’s specific needs in that moment, balance what might be balanced, and enhance what might be enhanced. The basic questions, "What's going on with you now?", "What is the history of your practice so far?", "What do you need help with now?", "What skills and resources, as well as limitations and difficulties, need to be considered in providing you advice?" and "How will you judge the efficacy of any advice given?" are all a very good idea, as with any therapeutic, healing, educational, or similar endeavor.
V: The only functional map, IME, is one that’s being constantly reformulated using real-time data from multiple sources, including: oneself, peers, teachers, traditional sources, and wise people who exist outside of these systems. I call this triangulating the path.
D: This “triangulation” has been going on for thousands of years across continents, and certainly has been part of the nearly 10-year-long discussion here at the DhO, which Vince helped found with me on these original principles, as more data of good quality clearly helps move the field forward. May it continue with openness, skill, nuance, comradery, and an appreciation of the vastness and richness of the path. (DhO)
Map-Obsession: Hindrances in sheep's clothing. The maps of meditation can be remarkable technology, helping to explain, normalize, and contextualize strange experiences that can result from meditation or even just being alive. They can provide extremely helpful warnings of common pitfalls, help meditators figure out how to make progress through odd, unfamiliar territory, catch what they are missing, and even explore cool options related to whatever is going on that otherwise might have remained hidden.
However, as basically anyone in a map-based tradition knows all too well, they can also end up becoming a source of fixation, obsession, and distraction. In this, they become hindrances for those who are educated in the maps.
The standard Five Hindrances are desire, aversion, boredom, restlessness and worry, and skeptical doubt. Every single one of those can drive those prone to analysis to fixate on maps in a way that derails practice in exactly the way that the more standard, non-map presentations of the hindrances can, except repackaged and rebranded to appeal to those who have been given these empowering frameworks.
It is often very obvious when the hindrance of desire shows up in some mundane form. The mind fixates on something, some image, some dream in the future, a new phone, a new car, a fun vacation, a person we find attractive, some great meal we could have, etc. Hopefully, if we have some meditation skills, soon enough we notice, “Ah, this is the hindrance of desire,” and hopefully notice it as a pattern of sensations and get our meditation back on track.
However, the desire to achieve some future meditation goal, some next stage, some next state, some path: when that arises and becomes the object of desire, it can seem so sanctioned, so helpful, so much a source of motivation and inspiration, so what we are supposed to be doing in our meditation, that we hardly notice this is just the hindrance of desire repackaged in a much shinier wrapper, a wrapper so shiny we may hardly notice it for the ordinary, disruptive hindrance that it is.
By being pulled towards the future instead of this moment just as it is, we ironically thwart that same desire, as it is each immediate unfolding moment that forms the basis of progress, not some non-existent future moment unless we can notice the immediate experiences of the thoughts that make up that sense of future right now as they are, and notice that pull towards the future in our body just as it occurs.
If we can do this, we turn a hindrance back into meditation. If not, we reinforce the bad habit of obsessing on an imagined future without insight into that obsession, so that next time, it will be easier to fall back into that trap instead of actually making progress. We must guard against building that sort of wiring without turning it into an object of skillful inquiry as it occurs.
The same is true of aversion. When aversion arises, as hatred, irritation, anger, or some other emotion that pushes experiences away, hopefully we notice this hindrance as the hindrance it is and get back to meditation. We hopefully learn to notice when we are replaying an old argument in our heads, notice when we rehash old grievances, notice when we try to get away from our knee or back pain, notice when we get frustrated by our meditation experience, etc.
However, when the hindrance of map-fixation arises as aversion, while not pleasant either, it seems so much more important. We reject what we are feeling, seeing, hearing, thinking, smelling, and tasting as it isn’t what is supposed to be happening, so our mapping mind erroneously tells us. We reject whatever state or stage we are in. We reject the qualities that make up our actual experience for some imagined experience we would greatly prefer. We cut ourselves off from the sensations occurring now due to the ordinary hindrance of aversion, but again repackaged in the wrapper of the tradition’s Mighty Maps.
We can be so convinced this is good meditation when in fact it is just aversion fooling us again. If we can notice the sensations of aversion when they arise in this seductive way, we can make them a foundation of progress rather than further reinforcing the bad habit of cultivating hindrances.
Like aversion and desire, boredom can also camouflage itself in the garb of map fixation and stealthily attack. The breath seems so boring, we think, but jhana sounds so good. The feet are just feet, we think, but somewhere else is Nibbana. The technique is tedious and tiresome, but one day we will be awakened. Through boredom, which is common in the early stages of meditation, but even some later stages as well, we slip into daydreams of desire and aversion, or just ordinary dullness, but it is really fueled by boredom in these cases, a lack of ability to appreciate the vivid, amazing, remarkable truths that each of these seemingly boring sensations is trying to tell us if we just learned how to pay attention to them clearly.
If we can learn to perceive the remarkably fascinating intricacy of all the little vivid sensations of our meditation objects, experience, and boredom itself, we can turn these into sources of progress, but if we persist in the habit of boredom, again that habit is written into our minds and we are more likely to fall into it next time.
Restlessness and worry also often arise as map fixation in smart people. When they arise the ordinary way, worry about our job, relationship, finances, education, or just restlessness and ordinary anxiety on the cushion or when walking or whatever, we hopefully are able to recognize them as the hindrances they are. However, when they arise in more map-fixated forms, they may be a lot more pernicious.
Questions that seem so compellingly important can arise, such as, “Will I have enough time left on this retreat to get Stream Entry?”, or “What will happen if I leave this retreat still darknighting this hard?” Ordinary restlessness and worry have wrapped themselves in the cloak of mappiness and struck hard. We need to identify these as the hindrances the immediate patterns of sensations they are, or, like an evil grand vizier who has gained the ear of the sultan, they can lead us into trouble.
Similarly, skeptical doubt can creep in just like restlessness and worry, and often they gang up together for asymmetrical warfare guerrilla attacks, again disguised as oh-so-compelling map fixation.
“Is this really the right technique for me? Maybe if I did another technique I would get jhana or awakened faster?”
“What if I can’t handle the difficult meditation stages?”
“Everyone else seems to be getting to stages and states that I can’t; maybe I am just born to be a bad meditator.”
“My teachers aren’t giving me the right instructions, as I am still stuck in this stage and unable to get to some other stage.”
“What if there are other, hidden, secret teachings that lead to much better awakening variants than this technique?”, basically the map-based version of FOMO (fear of missing out).
Doubt can even manifest in more insidious forms, as we map and analyze each little bit of each stage and state as they arise, placing them into our mental map of “where we are”, being somehow certain that this is oh-so-important and that if we do this, something great will happen, and if we don’t, something bad will happen. We doubt that we can just let sensations show us their truths, and instead are sure we have to retrofit our own intellectual and phenomenological brilliance on top of them and that this is a great idea. It is not that we might not recognize familiar landmarks as they arise, as that is normal to a trained mind familiar with the states and stages, but if this becomes the focus of our meditation rather than the landmarks, then it can subtly or overtly derail practice.
If we don’t catch these sorts of thoughts filled with map-based doubt, restlessness, and worry, seeing them as the patterns of immediate sensations that they are, they will immediately derail our practice and ironically make the outcomes they fear much more likely.
In this way, we see that essentially all map-obsessed thoughts that derail practice are just the ordinary hindrances dressed up in compelling disguises. Thus armed, we can go back to basics, learn to recognize each of these hindrances when they occur, even in sophisticated forms, and apply the appropriate remedies. We can learn to see these sensations as they are. We can redirect an unhelpful fixation on an imagined future and a long-gone past to comprehension of this moment as it is, even if that moment involves sensations that ordinarily might become hindrances. In these skillful ways, we can avoid the very traps that all of these hindrances simultaneously fear and yet ironically create.
A very similar analysis of the causes of map-based fixation can be constructed from the later version of the Ten Armies of Mara, which has considerable overlap with the Five Hindrances but adds a few more of relevance, typically listed as:
- Desire and sensual pleasures
- Discontent
- Hunger and thirst
- Craving
- Sloth and torpor
- Fear
- Doubt
- Conceit and ingratitude
- Gain, renown, honor, and falsely received fame
- Extolling one’s self and disparaging others
Learning these skills is essential for meditators who have learned the maps so that they can draw on their amazing benefits while not being impeded by falling into the well-known traps that they can create if misused. (DhO) Link to text at Daniel's blog.
Overcalling and Misdiagnosing Experiences, A Shadow Side of the Maps. As the years of reading Dharma Overground posts, getting emails about the dharma, and talking with people, including various dharma teachers, about the reports and languaging used by various practitioners who have had access to the maps have shown, it is extremely common for people to overestimate their dharma attainments, sometimes wildly.
The list of possible errors is very large, and I will not cover all the possible ways one can go wrong, instead focusing on the most common patterns and errors.
By far the most common occurrences occur around the Arising and Passing Away (A&P), typically mistaking it for much higher attainments. While there are strong warnings against doing this, it is very common anyway.
The A&P is so commonly mistaken for things like Equanimity, higher jhanas (third and fourth, as well as formless realms), and Stream Entry, or even some higher path, even on its first occurrence, that I now have to actively check myself when responding to emails and forum posts so that I don't automatically assume that this is what has gone on, as it is probably 50:1 that someone claiming Stream Entry has actually just crossed the A&P. Ditto for people claiming Second Path or higher, when they might have just crossed the A&P two or three times, counting each as a path.
I highly encourage people to read the criteria and descriptions of both the A&P and path attainments extremely carefully before calling anything a path, and to test out any purported realizations carefully for months to years to see if they actually hold up, meet all the criteria, and perform as they should.
The following are pathognomonic for (meaning diagnostic on their own) or highly suggestive of something that was somewhere in the territory of A&P and not a path: anything involving "energy", anything involving a "vortex", anything involving any spontaneous movements beyond just the eyelids flickering briefly, anything of which one thought the word "kundalini", anything that involves intense heat, anything that before the event involved significant bliss or rapture, anything that might be described as "orgasmic", anything that involved something that would be described as "intense", anything that involved anything that was "mind-blowing", anything that involved a bright white light in the center of attention, anything that happened in a dream, anything that was preceded immediately by hard bodily pain or tension, anything that was preceded immediately by very odd bodily asymmetry, twistings or odd postural problems, and nearly anything that occurred in the first few days of a retreat, and anything that might be described as "powerful".
If it had any of those criteria, the chances of it being a path attainment go down dramatically from the already low level of probability.
Other common themes of dharma misdiagnosis worth mentioning include mistaking the stage of Three Characteristics (insight stage 3) for the Dark Night (typically insight stages 6-10, as stage 5, Dissolution, typically isn't that unpleasant). It is very common in the first week of a retreat to have some dark periods that are typically accompanied by hard bodily pain, odd postural stuff, and this can also be accompanied by spontaneous crying, heavy emotions, and an increased sense of suffering. This misdiagnosis increases the chances that the next phase, meaning the A&P (insight stage 4), is then misdiagnosed as Equanimity or a path.
The Dark Night proper very rarely involves any spontaneous movements or postural problems in the way that the stage of the Three Characteristics does.
Equanimity almost never involves energetic phenomena like the A&P does, almost never involves bright lights, almost never has any significant spontaneous movements, almost never is described as "mind-blowing", but, just to add to the confusion, can have some powers manifest, though these are much more common during the A&P than in Equanimity. A substantial portion of people in Equanimity will hardly notice it.
It is common for people to cross the A&P many times on retreat and sometimes in daily life before getting a good sense of Equanimity, and this goes many times more for getting a path. The A&P can manifest in a wide variety of ways, not all of which are intense. The A&P can involve "blips", "gaps", "blackouts", and other strange moments that can fool people into thinking they are Fruitions, path attainments, and even formless realms.
Speaking of formless realms: they are truly formless, meaning there is no sense of a body during them, no sense of breathing, and instead they show their distinct characteristics in a full, profound, silent way. They are not "intense", but they are impressive, though it is a quiet, subtle profundity.
Paths should perform as paths. They should create life-long reductions in suffering. They should meet the other criteria, which you will find in places such as MCTB2. If one thinks one has attained a path, put it through its paces. Question it. Explore it, whatever it is. See how it holds up. See if you can do anything like what a trained stream enterer should be able to do. Go on retreats and performance test it against very good practice. See if you can get repeat Fruitions. See if you can sit down in the A&P and drop rapidly into Dissolution. See if you can call up the stages in order, out of order, and control their duration. Give it time, weeks, months, years. Practice well. See what happens and be honest about it. Investigate carefully the sensations and content of any ideals you have for spiritual perfection and attainment and see how they actually perform in living mammals such as yourself.
While it is true that the A&P can cause life-long changes in a practitioner (or anyone for that matter), being the first of the real points of no return on the journey, it doesn't perform like a true path attainment in terms of control and mastery of insight stages in a true Review phase. It doesn't lead to the rapid and natural cycling that Review does.
In particular, diagnosing Third Path should be done cautiously and with great skepticism. If you actually have it, it can handle this skepticism. If you don't, you will benefit from not being led astray. Waking reality should have a significant reduction in the sense of control, the sense of center point, the sense of agency, the sense of contraction into thoughts and emotions, as well as a significant walking-around appreciation of what the Tibetans would call "luminosity" and others might just call the intrinsic light of awareness that is built into sensations and space itself, all of which are utterly transient. There should be a significant appreciation of this moment being it, even if that sense is not perfectly complete. Third path should perform as Third Path.
Diagnosing arahatship should be done with even more caution, and I give the strict criteria for it in MCTB2. It should hold up across years, mind states, all challenges, all cycles, in a way that in every moment is very, very obvious if attention is turned to the question of attainments. Reality is immediate. There is no sense of Subject at all. There is no sense of localized perception in some central Watcher at all. There is no sense of anything that is held back or excluded from automatically co-emergent wisdom of clear comprehension and no possibility of this happening. There is a perfect sense of the naturalness of things unfolding causally, automatically. These are flawless, inviolable, automatic, requiring no effort, mindfulness, checking, or anything like that. They are hardwired into the mechanisms of perception. There are other criteria, and one should review them carefully with a critical eye when assessing any thoughts about having attained to arahatship and see how that sense persists across challenges and years.
Dharma diagnosis is easy to get wrong. Events must be taken in context. Criteria must be carefully applied, realizing that clear dharma diagnosis is challenging even for people with decades of experience in it who have helped thousands of people try to sort these things out. Models are imperfect, but that is no excuse for throwing them out, as they are based on millennia of expertise and experimentation.
Dharma misdiagnosis can have significant consequences for practice, fooling people into settling for events, occurrences, and attainments that are significantly below what they might have been capable of without falling into the traps of the maps.
This also hasn't even touched on the overlap between dharma experiences and mental illness, from mania to depression, schizophrenia, personality disorders, trauma, and all of that, which can make sorting out what is going on significantly harder and require attention and care. In general, if you have concerns about your mental health, talk with professionals who have that expertise and can help you. When trying to sort out dharma diagnoses, keep in touch with good friends and teachers who have sufficient expertise in that also.
This also hasn't addressed other medical issues that might be going on, of which the list is vast and too complex to describe here.
While it is true that some will underdiagnose, this is vastly less common than overdiagnosis. Many of us come from a culture where trophies for just showing up are now considered required and we all are sure we are above average, but this mentality is not your friend when it comes to meditation practice.
Overcalling attainments has become something of an endemic disease in those exposed to the maps. It annoys the heck out of dharma teachers who feel some responsibility to keep practitioners on the rails and in the realms of reality. Describe practice simply and clearly, being careful with dharma terms, until you and your teacher get some sense of a comfort with that sort of language, something that definitely won't happen with all teachers.
Use dharma terms and maps responsibly. Don't fall into the large group of practitioners who now go around proving right those that advocate for profound secrecy and proprietary restriction of access to dharma maps and criteria by making all of the mistakes that they use to justify keeping practitioners in the dark about maps. Be an upstanding advocate for free and open dharma by proving that practitioners can be smart enough and skillful with regard to the maps to not make them more of a problem than they problems that openly disclosing them is designed to cure, namely ignorant, lack-luster practice that gets nowhere, coupled with people crashing around after events like the A&P and Dark Night stages without normalization and contextualization, as well as supportive technologies for dealing with those.
If you are given meditation instructions, report in straightforward terms what happens in your six senses when you follow those instructions. If you wish to use dharma terms, discuss their precise meaning and skillful use with your teacher or dharma friends before attempting to simply describe your practice with them, and, if your dharma teacher or friends are not comfortable with the use of those terms, return to very straightforward, simple, non-dharma descriptions of what is occurring.
If you are practicing and notice that you are analyzing and trying to map and compare your experiences to those things you have read about or heard talked about, be vigilant and notice the sensations that make up analysis, as they can significantly derail practice.
Be very careful around comparison and competition that doesn't lead to immediate sensate investigation, and instead leads to emotional and interpersonal difficulties: these are significant traps that lay in wait for those who have been exposed to and try to use the maps of meditation. Comparison and competition, when it becomes unhealthy, can ruin friendships, communities, and practitioners themselves.
Also, various traditions may use terms radically differently than you do, using wildly different criteria and definitions for a whole host of dharma terms. Avoid getting into pissing matches with other practitioners and teachers that just lead to annoyance and contraction into tribalism rather than to wisdom, friendship, and clarification of the dharma. There are places and times where healthy dharma debate can be very skillful, but watch for those times when this is not the case. The traditions have been arguing with each other for thousands of years, and your rant that day isn't going to suddenly bring the factions together or resolve these conflicts.
In that vein, be careful with rigid, categorical thinking rather than dimensional thinking that can appreciate shades of grey. It's not that there isn't a place for some rigid categories and concepts in the dharma, as there is, but we must use care around such things and be sure that, when we use categorical thinking, it really is serving some useful purpose that can't be better served with language and concepts that have more nuance.
Luckily, at all stages of insight, careful, direct investigative comprehension of the Three Characteristics of the Six Sense Doors can further practice. If one is practicing samatha, then there are always greater depths of practice that can be explored. Further, whatever you have attained, as those have been doing this long enough all know, continued practice has a way of deepening whatever it is you have attained. The Buddha continued to practice long hours and go on yearly three-month retreats even decades after his awakening: may we learn from his example. (DhO) Text at Daniel's webpage
An Unified theory of Meditation is not going to happen. The chasms that would need to be bridged are vast, the arguments to be solved are huge, the territoriality to be overcome is nearly insurmountable, the long-standing feuds are too numerous, the intractable propaganda positions taken are too entrenched, and the level of understanding of most of the people that are running the sects and institutions that would have to be on board to make that happen are generally way too low.
Even Culadasa and I can't get along on numerous points, and we are so close in some ways it is like Holland and Belgium feuding with each other, and we think of ourselves as educated, sane, reasonable people, both have doctoral degrees [note: this was written before Culadasa's academic credentials came under dispute], both dream of having a scientific perspective applied to the dharma, and yet, and yet...
Even plenty of theoretically reasonable, smart, sane, well-educated, well-practiced people that are seriously into Pragmatic Dharma and came up in the same traditions haven't been able to get along on the DhO. Heck, Kenneth Folk and I haven't spoken in years, and we are as close as it gets, in theory, but, in practice, we all just seriously fucking suck in comparison to the level of maturity that would be required, and the degree to which we would all need to get the fuck over ourselves.
I think the experiment has been done, and the dream that we will do something like Chemistry did with nomenclature, or Mathematics with symbols, or Physics with formulae is not going to happen, as we are just too immature, too stupid, too blind, too attached to our little feudal kingdoms, proprietary brands, and the like.
My two cents this cynical evening. You can't know how much I would love to be proven wrong on this…
… Major chasms too vast to be easily bridged, and this is far from a complete list:
Then add in all the competition for market share, readership, social media views, and the like, and then add in the for-profit Mindfulness corporate entities, and imagine how they are all going to come together, I mean have a Mega-merger to Massive Consolidated Mindfulness, Inc. (DhO)
The Hierarchy of Vipassana Practice. After a number of conversations recently with various people, I realized that my conception of the hierarchy and essence of vipassana practice wasn't written down anywhere I could remember, so I thought I would write it down here. This is more geared to the type of concentration one develops on retreat, but may apply just as well in daily life for those who are diligent and skilled or aspire to be.
It would be nice to start at the top, even though people don't generally seem wired to do that, but just to keep it in mind:
At one's best, one attains to Conformity Knowledge, Insight Stage #12, in which one comprehends simultaneously two of the Three Characteristics of one's entire sense field completely including space, consciousness, and everything else in that volume as an integrated whole. That's what you are shooting for if you are going for stream entry at least, and it even works well for the sort of continuous complete mindfulness that works well for higher paths.
However, I will go back to the bottom, which is where most start and often return, and work back up from there:
Q: Does it matter what object I use?
Or, one might have been doing noting up through the Three Characteristics stage, but then began to notice energetic phenomena, heat and kundalini stuff show up that was too fast to note, at which point one might think, "Ah, I was really good at blasting through the A&P using more Goenka-style body scanning on a previous retreat and know how to do that, maybe I will give that a try, as it worked well before."
Or, one might have been rockin' it in the A&P by rapidly and directly perceiving fast vibrations and tingling interference patterns, but when one got to Dissolution notice that one's practice was completely derailed and one was just spacing out. One might reflect, "Ah, whereas before I was rockin' it in the A&P, now my practice has fallen to the bottom of the barrel, and perhaps attempting to do slow noting and build back up to more direct methods when I can would be better than floundering." Good plan.
Or, one might be high up in Equanimity and yet not be able to land a Fruition. One might ask oneself, "What core process, subtle background or foreground sensations, or other patterns of experience are not yet brought into the clear light in the way I have done for so many objects?" In this way, one sees what one is missing and, having learned to see those objects naturally also, lands it.
Working thus, one gets a sense of how one may adjust one's practice to accommodate what is happening and keep one riding the waves of changes that vipassana in all its forms can throw at one. (DhO)
The list of possible errors is very large, and I will not cover all the possible ways one can go wrong, instead focusing on the most common patterns and errors.
By far the most common occurrences occur around the Arising and Passing Away (A&P), typically mistaking it for much higher attainments. While there are strong warnings against doing this, it is very common anyway.
The A&P is so commonly mistaken for things like Equanimity, higher jhanas (third and fourth, as well as formless realms), and Stream Entry, or even some higher path, even on its first occurrence, that I now have to actively check myself when responding to emails and forum posts so that I don't automatically assume that this is what has gone on, as it is probably 50:1 that someone claiming Stream Entry has actually just crossed the A&P. Ditto for people claiming Second Path or higher, when they might have just crossed the A&P two or three times, counting each as a path.
I highly encourage people to read the criteria and descriptions of both the A&P and path attainments extremely carefully before calling anything a path, and to test out any purported realizations carefully for months to years to see if they actually hold up, meet all the criteria, and perform as they should.
The following are pathognomonic for (meaning diagnostic on their own) or highly suggestive of something that was somewhere in the territory of A&P and not a path: anything involving "energy", anything involving a "vortex", anything involving any spontaneous movements beyond just the eyelids flickering briefly, anything of which one thought the word "kundalini", anything that involves intense heat, anything that before the event involved significant bliss or rapture, anything that might be described as "orgasmic", anything that involved something that would be described as "intense", anything that involved anything that was "mind-blowing", anything that involved a bright white light in the center of attention, anything that happened in a dream, anything that was preceded immediately by hard bodily pain or tension, anything that was preceded immediately by very odd bodily asymmetry, twistings or odd postural problems, and nearly anything that occurred in the first few days of a retreat, and anything that might be described as "powerful".
If it had any of those criteria, the chances of it being a path attainment go down dramatically from the already low level of probability.
Other common themes of dharma misdiagnosis worth mentioning include mistaking the stage of Three Characteristics (insight stage 3) for the Dark Night (typically insight stages 6-10, as stage 5, Dissolution, typically isn't that unpleasant). It is very common in the first week of a retreat to have some dark periods that are typically accompanied by hard bodily pain, odd postural stuff, and this can also be accompanied by spontaneous crying, heavy emotions, and an increased sense of suffering. This misdiagnosis increases the chances that the next phase, meaning the A&P (insight stage 4), is then misdiagnosed as Equanimity or a path.
The Dark Night proper very rarely involves any spontaneous movements or postural problems in the way that the stage of the Three Characteristics does.
Equanimity almost never involves energetic phenomena like the A&P does, almost never involves bright lights, almost never has any significant spontaneous movements, almost never is described as "mind-blowing", but, just to add to the confusion, can have some powers manifest, though these are much more common during the A&P than in Equanimity. A substantial portion of people in Equanimity will hardly notice it.
It is common for people to cross the A&P many times on retreat and sometimes in daily life before getting a good sense of Equanimity, and this goes many times more for getting a path. The A&P can manifest in a wide variety of ways, not all of which are intense. The A&P can involve "blips", "gaps", "blackouts", and other strange moments that can fool people into thinking they are Fruitions, path attainments, and even formless realms.
Speaking of formless realms: they are truly formless, meaning there is no sense of a body during them, no sense of breathing, and instead they show their distinct characteristics in a full, profound, silent way. They are not "intense", but they are impressive, though it is a quiet, subtle profundity.
Paths should perform as paths. They should create life-long reductions in suffering. They should meet the other criteria, which you will find in places such as MCTB2. If one thinks one has attained a path, put it through its paces. Question it. Explore it, whatever it is. See how it holds up. See if you can do anything like what a trained stream enterer should be able to do. Go on retreats and performance test it against very good practice. See if you can get repeat Fruitions. See if you can sit down in the A&P and drop rapidly into Dissolution. See if you can call up the stages in order, out of order, and control their duration. Give it time, weeks, months, years. Practice well. See what happens and be honest about it. Investigate carefully the sensations and content of any ideals you have for spiritual perfection and attainment and see how they actually perform in living mammals such as yourself.
While it is true that the A&P can cause life-long changes in a practitioner (or anyone for that matter), being the first of the real points of no return on the journey, it doesn't perform like a true path attainment in terms of control and mastery of insight stages in a true Review phase. It doesn't lead to the rapid and natural cycling that Review does.
In particular, diagnosing Third Path should be done cautiously and with great skepticism. If you actually have it, it can handle this skepticism. If you don't, you will benefit from not being led astray. Waking reality should have a significant reduction in the sense of control, the sense of center point, the sense of agency, the sense of contraction into thoughts and emotions, as well as a significant walking-around appreciation of what the Tibetans would call "luminosity" and others might just call the intrinsic light of awareness that is built into sensations and space itself, all of which are utterly transient. There should be a significant appreciation of this moment being it, even if that sense is not perfectly complete. Third path should perform as Third Path.
Diagnosing arahatship should be done with even more caution, and I give the strict criteria for it in MCTB2. It should hold up across years, mind states, all challenges, all cycles, in a way that in every moment is very, very obvious if attention is turned to the question of attainments. Reality is immediate. There is no sense of Subject at all. There is no sense of localized perception in some central Watcher at all. There is no sense of anything that is held back or excluded from automatically co-emergent wisdom of clear comprehension and no possibility of this happening. There is a perfect sense of the naturalness of things unfolding causally, automatically. These are flawless, inviolable, automatic, requiring no effort, mindfulness, checking, or anything like that. They are hardwired into the mechanisms of perception. There are other criteria, and one should review them carefully with a critical eye when assessing any thoughts about having attained to arahatship and see how that sense persists across challenges and years.
Dharma diagnosis is easy to get wrong. Events must be taken in context. Criteria must be carefully applied, realizing that clear dharma diagnosis is challenging even for people with decades of experience in it who have helped thousands of people try to sort these things out. Models are imperfect, but that is no excuse for throwing them out, as they are based on millennia of expertise and experimentation.
Dharma misdiagnosis can have significant consequences for practice, fooling people into settling for events, occurrences, and attainments that are significantly below what they might have been capable of without falling into the traps of the maps.
This also hasn't even touched on the overlap between dharma experiences and mental illness, from mania to depression, schizophrenia, personality disorders, trauma, and all of that, which can make sorting out what is going on significantly harder and require attention and care. In general, if you have concerns about your mental health, talk with professionals who have that expertise and can help you. When trying to sort out dharma diagnoses, keep in touch with good friends and teachers who have sufficient expertise in that also.
This also hasn't addressed other medical issues that might be going on, of which the list is vast and too complex to describe here.
While it is true that some will underdiagnose, this is vastly less common than overdiagnosis. Many of us come from a culture where trophies for just showing up are now considered required and we all are sure we are above average, but this mentality is not your friend when it comes to meditation practice.
Overcalling attainments has become something of an endemic disease in those exposed to the maps. It annoys the heck out of dharma teachers who feel some responsibility to keep practitioners on the rails and in the realms of reality. Describe practice simply and clearly, being careful with dharma terms, until you and your teacher get some sense of a comfort with that sort of language, something that definitely won't happen with all teachers.
Use dharma terms and maps responsibly. Don't fall into the large group of practitioners who now go around proving right those that advocate for profound secrecy and proprietary restriction of access to dharma maps and criteria by making all of the mistakes that they use to justify keeping practitioners in the dark about maps. Be an upstanding advocate for free and open dharma by proving that practitioners can be smart enough and skillful with regard to the maps to not make them more of a problem than they problems that openly disclosing them is designed to cure, namely ignorant, lack-luster practice that gets nowhere, coupled with people crashing around after events like the A&P and Dark Night stages without normalization and contextualization, as well as supportive technologies for dealing with those.
If you are given meditation instructions, report in straightforward terms what happens in your six senses when you follow those instructions. If you wish to use dharma terms, discuss their precise meaning and skillful use with your teacher or dharma friends before attempting to simply describe your practice with them, and, if your dharma teacher or friends are not comfortable with the use of those terms, return to very straightforward, simple, non-dharma descriptions of what is occurring.
If you are practicing and notice that you are analyzing and trying to map and compare your experiences to those things you have read about or heard talked about, be vigilant and notice the sensations that make up analysis, as they can significantly derail practice.
Be very careful around comparison and competition that doesn't lead to immediate sensate investigation, and instead leads to emotional and interpersonal difficulties: these are significant traps that lay in wait for those who have been exposed to and try to use the maps of meditation. Comparison and competition, when it becomes unhealthy, can ruin friendships, communities, and practitioners themselves.
Also, various traditions may use terms radically differently than you do, using wildly different criteria and definitions for a whole host of dharma terms. Avoid getting into pissing matches with other practitioners and teachers that just lead to annoyance and contraction into tribalism rather than to wisdom, friendship, and clarification of the dharma. There are places and times where healthy dharma debate can be very skillful, but watch for those times when this is not the case. The traditions have been arguing with each other for thousands of years, and your rant that day isn't going to suddenly bring the factions together or resolve these conflicts.
In that vein, be careful with rigid, categorical thinking rather than dimensional thinking that can appreciate shades of grey. It's not that there isn't a place for some rigid categories and concepts in the dharma, as there is, but we must use care around such things and be sure that, when we use categorical thinking, it really is serving some useful purpose that can't be better served with language and concepts that have more nuance.
Luckily, at all stages of insight, careful, direct investigative comprehension of the Three Characteristics of the Six Sense Doors can further practice. If one is practicing samatha, then there are always greater depths of practice that can be explored. Further, whatever you have attained, as those have been doing this long enough all know, continued practice has a way of deepening whatever it is you have attained. The Buddha continued to practice long hours and go on yearly three-month retreats even decades after his awakening: may we learn from his example. (DhO) Text at Daniel's webpage
An Unified theory of Meditation is not going to happen. The chasms that would need to be bridged are vast, the arguments to be solved are huge, the territoriality to be overcome is nearly insurmountable, the long-standing feuds are too numerous, the intractable propaganda positions taken are too entrenched, and the level of understanding of most of the people that are running the sects and institutions that would have to be on board to make that happen are generally way too low.
Even Culadasa and I can't get along on numerous points, and we are so close in some ways it is like Holland and Belgium feuding with each other, and we think of ourselves as educated, sane, reasonable people, both have doctoral degrees [note: this was written before Culadasa's academic credentials came under dispute], both dream of having a scientific perspective applied to the dharma, and yet, and yet...
Even plenty of theoretically reasonable, smart, sane, well-educated, well-practiced people that are seriously into Pragmatic Dharma and came up in the same traditions haven't been able to get along on the DhO. Heck, Kenneth Folk and I haven't spoken in years, and we are as close as it gets, in theory, but, in practice, we all just seriously fucking suck in comparison to the level of maturity that would be required, and the degree to which we would all need to get the fuck over ourselves.
I think the experiment has been done, and the dream that we will do something like Chemistry did with nomenclature, or Mathematics with symbols, or Physics with formulae is not going to happen, as we are just too immature, too stupid, too blind, too attached to our little feudal kingdoms, proprietary brands, and the like.
My two cents this cynical evening. You can't know how much I would love to be proven wrong on this…
… Major chasms too vast to be easily bridged, and this is far from a complete list:
- A luminous, stable all-ground of consciousness vs the true emptiness of any real, stable consciousness: this single point has fractured traditions for over 2,500 years and likely will as long as there are practitioners. People get really pissy about this one.
- How to handle emphases on samatha vs insight: again a point that fractures traditions and has for millennia.
- Should you even use maps at all? Whole traditions are seriously into their non-mappiness, just as others are seriously into their mappiness, and never the twain shall meet.
- Gurus vs not? Whole traditions split over this.
- What texts to follow? Seriously, even the Theravada, typically a bastion of clarity on these sorts of points, have whole groups that throw out not only the commentaries but huge chunks of the Pali Canon as "not being authentic enough", and if they don't think most of the Pali Canon is authentic enough, consider their opinion on, say, the Mahayana Sutras.
- What is jhana? Seriously, even reasonable people can't seem to help but get all categorical in their thinking vs dimensional in their thinking, and so write off and disparage everything that doesn't fit into their narrow little boxes.
- What is awakening and what does it look like? Seriously a never ending clusterfuck of absurdity, dogma, and sectarian crazy happens over this one.
- Which object to use: breath, body, mantra, visualization, space, what? Whole traditions fracture over this one. Look at Goenka vs Mahasi vs TMI vs Pa Auk etc.: these are all theoretically in the Theravada, yet many adherants of these sects can barely even agree that the others might have valid points about how they do their practices.
- Effort vs non-effort/Goals vs non-goals? Whole traditions split on this one. Compare tons of neo-Advaita and Zen traditions with those more mappy ones and see how that is going to be resolved, meaning not likely at all.
- Sila: serious complexities exist: consider the vegetarian vs non-vegetarian traditions, the drinking vs non-drinking traditions, the entheogenic vs non-entheogenic traditions, the pro-life vs pro-choice traditions, and then add in all the disagrements about money and the dharma, and on, and on, and on...
Then add in all the competition for market share, readership, social media views, and the like, and then add in the for-profit Mindfulness corporate entities, and imagine how they are all going to come together, I mean have a Mega-merger to Massive Consolidated Mindfulness, Inc. (DhO)
The Hierarchy of Vipassana Practice. After a number of conversations recently with various people, I realized that my conception of the hierarchy and essence of vipassana practice wasn't written down anywhere I could remember, so I thought I would write it down here. This is more geared to the type of concentration one develops on retreat, but may apply just as well in daily life for those who are diligent and skilled or aspire to be.
It would be nice to start at the top, even though people don't generally seem wired to do that, but just to keep it in mind:
At one's best, one attains to Conformity Knowledge, Insight Stage #12, in which one comprehends simultaneously two of the Three Characteristics of one's entire sense field completely including space, consciousness, and everything else in that volume as an integrated whole. That's what you are shooting for if you are going for stream entry at least, and it even works well for the sort of continuous complete mindfulness that works well for higher paths.
However, I will go back to the bottom, which is where most start and often return, and work back up from there:
- Not trying to practice, lost in one's stuff, spacing out, mindfulness weak.
- Mindfulness weak, lost in one's stuff, but at least attempting some technique at times, even if one can't actually do it. People spend whole retreats at this level, unfortunately.
- Able to actually practice and follow basic instructions somewhat, such as noting, body scanning, or whatever you are trying to do. I'll go non-technique specific here, as this is a guide to the essence of the thing. Basically any technique or object or posture that moves you up this hierarchy and keeps you there is what matters, and nothing about the specifics of what you are paying attention to or how you are trying to pay attention to it is important so long as it serves that fundamental goal.
- Able to actually do a specific vipassana technique or set of techniques well with few interruptions.
- Able to actually do that with no interruptions.
- To be able to directly perceive the Three Characteristics of objects in the center of attention consistently and directly whether or not one is using a more specific technique or not. In short, if you can do this, at that time and for however long that lasts, whether or not you use a more formal technique is irrelevant.
- To be able to directly and continuously perceive the sensations that make up the coarse background components also in that same light of strong, direct vipassana awareness, meaning direct comprehension of the Three Characteristics of not only the foreground objects, but things like rapture, equanimity, fear, doubt, frustration, analysis, expectation and other sensations in the periphery, as well as other objects as they arise, such as thoughts and the component sensations of feelings as well as the primary object or objects, assuming one is even using primary objects at this point, which is not necessary.
- To be able to do #7 very well and then add core processes such as the sensations that seem to make up attention itself, intention itself, memory itself, questioning, effort, surrender, subtle fear, space, consciousness, and everything that seems to be Subject or Observer or Self all the way through the skull, neck, chest, abdomen and all of space such that nothing is excluded from this comprehensive, cutting, piercing, instantly comprehending clarity that is synchronized with all phenomena or just about to be.
- Able to do #8 naturally, effortlessly and clearly due to one's diligent efforts to write that wiring on the mind as one's new baseline default mode of perception.
- We are back where we started: one comprehends simultaneously two of the Three Characteristics of one's entire sense field completely including, space, consciousness, and everything else in that volume as an integrated whole and so attain to Change of Lineage, Path and Fruition. That's what you are shooting for if you are going for stream entry at least, and it even works well for the sort of continuous complete mindfulness that brings on higher paths.
Q: Does it matter what object I use?
- A: Only if that object at that moment in time helps you at least stay above the lower few levels of the hierarchy and hopefully progress up them.
- A: As all you have to do is comprehend the Three Characteristics of one's sum total reality for 3 moments, you only need really limited objects if you haven't gotten automatically fluent enough with other objects to attain to Conformity Knowledge on them. By way of example: if you can get your attention focused exclusively on the breath and comprehend the sensations that make it and the attention focussing apparatus, as that is all there is, that's all you need to understand. If you can't get it that focussed but have attained through diligent work a natural fluency in a wider array of other sensations, then broader attention will do you just fine.
- A: I would say scramble up the hierarchy however you can using any object you can and whatever dose it takes to get there, changing objects, focuses, techniques, postures, or whatever other factors need to be changed if those help you rise higher and stay there. This is the pragmatists approach to vipassana rather than the dogmatic traditionalists approach to vipassana. If a dogmatic and traditional approach gets you up the hierarchy, there is no conflict between these at all. If your dogmatic and traditional approach is not working at that moment, sit, walking period, hour, month, or year, try switching things around, preferably with the help of good guidance if available, to see what does get you up a notch.
- A: You can definitely stop when at that particular time you are at stage #6 or higher, but you could also continue so long as it didn't slow you down or restrict your ability to comprehend whatever arises in its rich and comprehensive entirety.
- A: Whatever at that time helps you progress or at least stabilize above the bottom levels of that hierarchy. Note: techniques take time to learn, so continuous abandoning of one poorly-learned technique for another poorly-learned technique is unlikely to do much of anything good, but if you have learned a few techniques well, they anything that works goes. One should realize that this is for most people a very dynamic and non-linear progression, with many risings and fallings up the ranks of the hierarchy, and learning how to shift focus or approach at the right time is a learned skill that requires constant vigilance and practice, but having the basic goals in mind should help guide you.
Or, one might have been doing noting up through the Three Characteristics stage, but then began to notice energetic phenomena, heat and kundalini stuff show up that was too fast to note, at which point one might think, "Ah, I was really good at blasting through the A&P using more Goenka-style body scanning on a previous retreat and know how to do that, maybe I will give that a try, as it worked well before."
Or, one might have been rockin' it in the A&P by rapidly and directly perceiving fast vibrations and tingling interference patterns, but when one got to Dissolution notice that one's practice was completely derailed and one was just spacing out. One might reflect, "Ah, whereas before I was rockin' it in the A&P, now my practice has fallen to the bottom of the barrel, and perhaps attempting to do slow noting and build back up to more direct methods when I can would be better than floundering." Good plan.
Or, one might be high up in Equanimity and yet not be able to land a Fruition. One might ask oneself, "What core process, subtle background or foreground sensations, or other patterns of experience are not yet brought into the clear light in the way I have done for so many objects?" In this way, one sees what one is missing and, having learned to see those objects naturally also, lands it.
Working thus, one gets a sense of how one may adjust one's practice to accommodate what is happening and keep one riding the waves of changes that vipassana in all its forms can throw at one. (DhO)
Arising & Passing Away
Arising and Passing Away. A lot of people here in DhO routinely question if they crossed the A&P. If you are hunting around sites like this one trying to answer that question, you probably did, as that is the sort of thing people above the A&P do … The Arising and Passing Away is … what I consider to be the first major dividing line or point of no return. The range of presentation of the A&P is so vast and complex that some will probably be amazed that the things I am about to describe could all by related to the A&P. I make no apologies for this, as I have traversed this territory literally thousands of times over the last 26 years or so and also had the opportunity to hear and read many people’s reports of the same territory. I will begin listing the aspects of its presentation range in no particular order as they come to me, just to get them down on paper. Realize that any individual crossing of the A&P may only draw from a few of the more specific elements below, but the functional effect will be essentially the same.
Context. The A&P can happen in a very wide variety of life experiences, while awake or in dreams, in people who meditate and people who don’t, early in childhood or late in life, during febrile illness, hallucinogenic drug experiences, yoga classes, breathing workshops, childbirth/labor, sex, exercise in general, long marches, prolonged solitude, traumatic experiences, and in many other circumstances. Most meditators I know actually crossed it before they got into meditation with no idea what it was (as happened to me) and it was the reason (often without knowing it) that they got into meditation or whatever thing they are into, rather than the other way around.
The context of the A&P will often hold a special place in the heart of the meditator due to the association with it, e.g. a person who crossed it while doing mescaline may have a lifelong affinity for those sorts of traditions and substances, while someone who crossed it while in the presence of a Christian faith healer may forever hold a special place in their heart for Christianity or that particular faith healer.
Duration. The A&P duration as it unfolds for some may take months and for some may be less than a second, and this can vary widely as one re-crosses it.
Intensity. The A&P for many will be a very memorable peak experience or set of experiences, but for others they may barely remember it or not remember it at all, depending on the way it presented and how old they were when it did it, as well as many other factors. For example, compare a person who has weeks of profound bliss pouring through their bodies while seeing visions of celestial lights on meditation retreat to a person sitting on a couch who had about a half-second zap of mild-moderate intensity energy through the back of their head and down their spine and nothing else at all. Both in timing and duration these would seem quite different, and yet functionally they may be the same from an overall map point of view.
Energetic phenomena. The A&P may, for many, involve energetic phenomena, but how this manifests can vary widely, including but not limited to:
2nd Jhana. As the A&P occurs in the basic territory known as the second vipassana jhana, a term I am not going to try to find an English equivalent for, it has the aspect of things happening on their own and showing up and happening naturally in many ways, as in “with the dropping of applied and sustained thought” (the traditional initial descriptor that separates it from the first jhana, which tends to involve effort and the feeling of having to do something). All the things that apply to the territory of the 2nd jhana in general enhance our understanding of the A&P.
Visuals. The range of visual effects that may show up in the A&P are quite wide and may be dramatic, and include but are not limited to:
Sleep Effects. Typically, the need for sleep will be reduced the closer one is to the peak of the territory of the A&P, which contrasts it with stages such as Dissolution (which comes right after it), during which the need for sleep tends to go up.
Physical Effects. Whereas in previous stages some practitioners may experience asymmetrical back and neck and body pain, such as spasmodic torticollis, subscapular trigger points and the like, as well as difficulty sustaining strict sitting meditation postures when on meditation retreats as an example, posture difficulties and bodily tiredness and pain from sitting tend to be markedly reduced in the A&P, such that when someone on retreat goes from having a hard time sitting still for the whole 1-hour sitting period with their head twisting or body swaying (standard marks of 3C) to sitting 4 hours without difficulty with the posture of a Buddha statue, just as an example, they are probably entering A&P territory. This also contrasts with what comes next, which tends to involve more pain but an increased restlessness and irritation when trying to meditate. These effects may not be as noticeable off-retreat, but one day people will know to look for the A&P shortly after coming to the doctor for wry neck or “having slept wrong”.
Mood Effects. The A&P tends to give people energy, up-beat moods, reduced depression if they were depressed, more energy for various grand projects and the like, more confidence, and an increased ability to concentrate. Paradoxically, it can involve more risk taking behavior (such as engaging in substance use or sex in a way beyond what one normally would), and also more interest in upstanding and strict moral codes and high moral standards and may actually spontaneously cure addictions and lives that may be considered immoral (as in “I have seen the Light!”, which they may literally have done, as this is the A&P). The parallels between the possible mood effects of the A&P and hypo-manic or manic episodes are so numerous that I would be amazed if one day a very similar physiologic basis wasn’t found to be common to both of them. Grandiosity, arrogance, and the like can accompany the mental power and energy that are commonly noted in this stage.
Sexual Effects. The A&P tends to increase libido and enhance sexual encounters in general and is the most sexual of the insight stages in general terms. When coupled with strong concentration (and sometimes even when not), it can lead to some interesting effects, such as male orgasms without ejaculations (a la tantric sex stuff), as well as all sorts of sexual overtones to the way one describes and experiences practice. Some will even describe effects as extreme as all sensations being like sex, or of sensations causing orgasmic-like ripples of pleasure through their body, or of making love to the universe, etc. People may tap into feelings of sexuality that seem generic or non-gender specific, which, for those who identify strongly as being mono-sexual rather than bi-sexual or generically sexual, can sometimes be some mix of revealing and disturbing. Sexual dreams are much more common in the territory of the A&P for some. More extreme things can occur, such as the sensations of having sex with seductive beings of a magical/astral/etheric/etc. nature. These sexual effects are in direct contrast to the sexual effects that tend to follow in subsequent stages, which are, in general, the exactly opposite of those in the A&P.
Unitive Experiences. The A&P can present with profound feelings of unity with all reality, like one is a part of all of reality and similar pleasant and profound feelings. Similar feelings of everything being empty of a self can arise, which is like the flip side of a unitive feeling. In a unitive feeling one feels that one is a part of everything or is everything, and the flip side is the feeling that as everything is connected and a part of a greater whole, then the sense of a self is actually just a part of the greater field of experience. These feelings in their full-on manifestation tend to be relatively brief during this stage, as contrasted with Equanimity later on when they may be more prolonged and profound and complete, and as contrasted with some of the stages of Enlightenment, when they may be some degree of permanent. However, some sense of this unity can seem to remain for some who have had this aspect present strongly on their crossing the A&P, influencing their way or viewing the world and philosophy. Further insights may be extrapolated from these unitive feelings, such as there being no one who dies as it is all just the universe, or similar extrapolations relating to the having a consciousness that is part of the eternal universe and thus immortal. Regardless of any ultimate validity to these feelings and intuitions, they can feel quite real to the person experiencing them. This particular set of A&P experiences are some of the more classic mimics for the later stage of Equanimity, and this can cause diagnostic confusion.
Feeling Enlightened. The A&P is a very common cause of people believing they are enlightened. Obviously, as the definition of enlightenment may be subjective and variable, if one defined it as crossing the A&P, then they would be. The model this from which this terminology designates enlightenment (at least the first stage of it) occurring at a later, more advanced stage, and for the sake of consistency and for other reasons will hold with that more strict definitions. However, the basic sense within the person that they have been irrevocably changed and given profound insights into the nature of things is common and compelling and also true. It is also not uncommon for people to believe they are very special and even unique for having crossed the A&P, particularly given the staggering lack of public descriptions of something that so many have actually gone through.
Perceptual Thresholds. My favorite of the criteria, particularly found in technical and skilled meditators but also found in many others: people during the A&P may have the ability to perceive sensations with a speed, precision, and consistency that may be radically beyond what they were capable of before, such that they may perceive sensations up to maybe 40 times/second arising and vanishing during certain peak perceptual moments, particularly during the middle phase of the breath and in the center of wherever they place their attention. The phase characteristics of the A&P borrows from the 2nd jhana in general and involves the ability to perceive the arising and passing clearly of phenomena in a way that can feel quite effortless, and any vibrations noticed tend to be harmonically simple and change in frequency sinusoidally. This is differentiated from the perceptual phase characteristics of the 1st jhana, where the beginnings of objects in the very center of wherever attention is placed are more clear and seeing them requires sustained effort and is generally much more slow and clunky, and the 3rd jhana, during which the endings of phenomena in the chaotic and complex periphery show themselves in a naturally irritating way that feels out of phase with attention somehow despite the sometimes intensely unpleasant clarity, and the 4th jhana, in which things are not nearly so fast or vibratory but instead tend to be experienced in a wide open, fluxing, panoramic and more spacious way.
Insights into Selflessness. Some may perceive that all phenomena are arising and passing away, and wherever they turn their attention may notice the transience of sensations. Extrapolating from this clear perception, they may realize: “Ah, this means that there is no permanent self.” Further, unitive experiences may have the same effect, and further, in some strange intuitive way the same basic notion of something having changed in the basic notion of self-hood may shift to something less solid. Also, the fact that the A&P experiences tend to happen in a way that is seemingly effortless or even unbidden, this experience of natural occurrences can also reinforce the notion that there is less control of things than one initially suspected, adding to the sense of there being somehow less of a self in things. These insights are sometimes called “Deep Insights” into Impermanence and Selflessness in the lingo of the time, a la Jack Kornfield and crew.
Cognitive Abilities. People who are in and have crossed the A&P tend to have an easier time with processes variously called things like “vision logic”, “metacognitive processing” and the like. For those who are prone to such things, they will tend to have philosophical talents beyond those who have not crossed the A&P, realizing that things like age, underlying intelligence however defined, exposure to philosophical and related branches of thinking, and education level can significantly effect how this presents. They will also tend to have an increased ability to understand and navigate in terminology that may reluctantly be termed “spiritual”, though this may show in other ways, such as an increased appreciation of things like the profundity and beauty of differential equations, the implications of modern physics for questions of Subject-Object non-duality, debates of free will vs super-determinism, and the like.
Feeling Called Out and Seeking. People who have crossed the A&P can feel called out, like they are somehow seeking something or on a quest, feeling special, like they are called to something higher, deeper, truer, cleaner, clearer, brighter, freer, etc. I assert that spiritual scenes, self-help groups, vegan restaurants, AA/NA groups, born-again Christian revivals, meditation communities, ashrams, monasteries, psychology and divinity graduate schools, yoga classes, health-food stores, militias, suicide bomb schools, Nepalese treks, eco-warriors, shamanic ceremonies in the jungle, New Age and Spiritualist groups, Wiccan covens, people who go around writing research grants to study meditation and enlightenment, and the like have a substantially increased presence of people who have crossed the A&P. I have no data to back up these claims at all but believe that I know it in some deep intuitive way, which is the sort of thinking you may find in people who have crossed the A&P and been doing this long enough at times.
The Dark Night stages that follow the usually brief A&P. The Dark Night, aka the stages of knowledges of suffering, meaning Dissolution, Fear, Misery, Disgust, Desire for Deliverance and Re-Obervation, follow the A&P like thunder follows lightening. Thus, if you can diagnose the A&P, I assert you can diagnose the Dark Night or at least its inevitability, even if it hasn’t happened yet. Thus, diagnosing the A&P is definitely the place to start. In terms of dynamic systems theory, only some people will manage to cross the A&P, but everyone who doesn’t have something catastrophic happen to their brain or die first who crosses the A&P will then progress inevitably to the stages of the Dark Night. Further, the Dark Night tends to last a lot longer than the A&P, very similar to the way episodes of depression following manic episodes tend to last a lot longer than the manic episode did. Thus, unless you catch people in the A&P, which can be quite brief, you are likely to encounter them dealing with the combined effects of having crossed the A&P but now being in some phase of the Dark Night or in its after effects. I cover the Dark Night extensively in MCTB, so please refer to that for more information.
The Standard Pattern (the A&P-DN-weak EQ loop). What I call “The Standard Pattern” is that people cross the A&P under whatever circumstances, hit the Dark Night, get swamped by it, finally barely touch some weak version of Equanimity, fall back, feel somewhat normal but are living again with the after-effects of the A&P and the Dark Night, being now past the point of no return. They will then tend to cross it again with some degree of frequency from months to decades, re-enter a more full-on Dark Night, and cycle this way until they may finally get Stream Entry or just die before that part of the process completes itself. The A&P can vary so widely that catching that it is what has happened, even if one has some understanding of the criteria, can be tricky, illustrated by way of example, from an earlier essay of mine (that follows in the next section). (DhO)
From an earlier essay on A&P: some personal experiences. My first time crossing it was around age 15. I was and still am a big fan of flying dreams, and so quite without instruction or guidance, I decided that I would practice flying before going to sleep so as to maximize the chances of me having them. I began to try to visualize planets of various colors, which ended up being like 50 foot wide billiard balls in space, some black, some red, some ivory, and in trying to do this I began to notice all sorts of things. I began to notice that there was a delay between the intention to visualize and the image arising. I noticed that it was very difficult to sustain any image, as it would arise and vanish. I began to notice it was nearly impossible to give attention to a sphere without going toward it. I noticed that the delay, the constant effort, the arising and vanishing of the images, and some other strained aspect of the process were strangely irritating. In short, I realized the first three stages of insight practice, but had no idea that these were stock, standard, expected, predictable, and had been mapped by some traditions for over 2,500 years, nor did I know what to expect next.
Context. The A&P can happen in a very wide variety of life experiences, while awake or in dreams, in people who meditate and people who don’t, early in childhood or late in life, during febrile illness, hallucinogenic drug experiences, yoga classes, breathing workshops, childbirth/labor, sex, exercise in general, long marches, prolonged solitude, traumatic experiences, and in many other circumstances. Most meditators I know actually crossed it before they got into meditation with no idea what it was (as happened to me) and it was the reason (often without knowing it) that they got into meditation or whatever thing they are into, rather than the other way around.
The context of the A&P will often hold a special place in the heart of the meditator due to the association with it, e.g. a person who crossed it while doing mescaline may have a lifelong affinity for those sorts of traditions and substances, while someone who crossed it while in the presence of a Christian faith healer may forever hold a special place in their heart for Christianity or that particular faith healer.
Duration. The A&P duration as it unfolds for some may take months and for some may be less than a second, and this can vary widely as one re-crosses it.
Intensity. The A&P for many will be a very memorable peak experience or set of experiences, but for others they may barely remember it or not remember it at all, depending on the way it presented and how old they were when it did it, as well as many other factors. For example, compare a person who has weeks of profound bliss pouring through their bodies while seeing visions of celestial lights on meditation retreat to a person sitting on a couch who had about a half-second zap of mild-moderate intensity energy through the back of their head and down their spine and nothing else at all. Both in timing and duration these would seem quite different, and yet functionally they may be the same from an overall map point of view.
Energetic phenomena. The A&P may, for many, involve energetic phenomena, but how this manifests can vary widely, including but not limited to:
- feelings of vibrations spreading out through one’s body
- feeling of vibrations in the spine or areas associated with “energy channels”
- actually seeing energy or “energy channels”
- the feeling that one can manipulate or control these energetic phenomena
- seeing interference patterns between experiences or what may be perceived as moving moiré patterns of energy and/or experiences in one’s body
- feeling these energies or vibrations change frequency with the phase of the breath, typically getting faster in the middle of the in and out breath and slower at the top and bottom of the breath
- vortexes of energy in one’s body, usually showing up going through one’s spine and/or through one’s ears or head into one’s spine, but can involve all sorts of other vortex-like phenomena. Vortexes are nearly perfectly diagnostic of the A&P.
- sometimes the A&P can involve full on explosions of consciousness and experience, such that the body may feel it has exploded into sparks or fragments or the space the person is occupying itself may seem to have experienced some rapid and violent distortion of its basic structure, which are usually very brief experiences
2nd Jhana. As the A&P occurs in the basic territory known as the second vipassana jhana, a term I am not going to try to find an English equivalent for, it has the aspect of things happening on their own and showing up and happening naturally in many ways, as in “with the dropping of applied and sustained thought” (the traditional initial descriptor that separates it from the first jhana, which tends to involve effort and the feeling of having to do something). All the things that apply to the territory of the 2nd jhana in general enhance our understanding of the A&P.
Visuals. The range of visual effects that may show up in the A&P are quite wide and may be dramatic, and include but are not limited to:
- bright white lights, which may be a quick flash or a steady white light, sometime preceded by jewel-tone sparkles or lights which are brighter and more vivid than typical phosphenes, and can either be just the light, or some bright image, such as a flash bulb, a match lighting, a car headlight, flashing police car lights, or other brightly flowing or flashing objects, etc.
- seeming to see through one’s closed eyelids, walls, roofs, or whatever else is around to see through
- spinning stars, dots, triangles, squares, and similar things, usually with the spinning frequency varying with the breath as noted above (faster in the middle, slower at top and bottom).
- many other dramatic visuals can happen during the A&P
- vivid dreams, lucid dreams, and full-on traveling out of body, either in dreams or straight off the cushion/walking meditation session or even in other circumstances
- partial traveling: such that, for example, one might feel one has put one’s “astral” or “etheric” hand through a wall while the rest of them seemed to stay “in-body”, to use standard jargon
- past-life experiences: these can vary widely, but generally present as a string of impressions, sometimes actually presenting in sequence in a trail in space, of what can seem like past existences, often with a lot of information about each one seeming to present in a very short space of time
- seeing one’s or other people’s auras and other similar energetic and colorful aspects
- being able to seemingly know things one couldn’t know, such as undisclosed facts about people one has just met or what cards one’s opponents in cards are holding, for example
- emotional and energetic manipulation: the seeming ability to alter the emotions and energy-body aspects of people around them or or people they make physical contact with, and even induce Kundalini experiences in others (DhO)
Similarly, sleep paralysis, when you can't move your body, is very common in out of body travel experiences and territory. It is common to come back from a travel out of body (simply travel hereafter) to a frozen body, and it is common to feel "the buzz", which is a sense that the frozen body is vibrating strongly.
It is very common to be inspired to practice and get stream entry after the A&P.
Physical Effects. Whereas in previous stages some practitioners may experience asymmetrical back and neck and body pain, such as spasmodic torticollis, subscapular trigger points and the like, as well as difficulty sustaining strict sitting meditation postures when on meditation retreats as an example, posture difficulties and bodily tiredness and pain from sitting tend to be markedly reduced in the A&P, such that when someone on retreat goes from having a hard time sitting still for the whole 1-hour sitting period with their head twisting or body swaying (standard marks of 3C) to sitting 4 hours without difficulty with the posture of a Buddha statue, just as an example, they are probably entering A&P territory. This also contrasts with what comes next, which tends to involve more pain but an increased restlessness and irritation when trying to meditate. These effects may not be as noticeable off-retreat, but one day people will know to look for the A&P shortly after coming to the doctor for wry neck or “having slept wrong”.
Mood Effects. The A&P tends to give people energy, up-beat moods, reduced depression if they were depressed, more energy for various grand projects and the like, more confidence, and an increased ability to concentrate. Paradoxically, it can involve more risk taking behavior (such as engaging in substance use or sex in a way beyond what one normally would), and also more interest in upstanding and strict moral codes and high moral standards and may actually spontaneously cure addictions and lives that may be considered immoral (as in “I have seen the Light!”, which they may literally have done, as this is the A&P). The parallels between the possible mood effects of the A&P and hypo-manic or manic episodes are so numerous that I would be amazed if one day a very similar physiologic basis wasn’t found to be common to both of them. Grandiosity, arrogance, and the like can accompany the mental power and energy that are commonly noted in this stage.
Sexual Effects. The A&P tends to increase libido and enhance sexual encounters in general and is the most sexual of the insight stages in general terms. When coupled with strong concentration (and sometimes even when not), it can lead to some interesting effects, such as male orgasms without ejaculations (a la tantric sex stuff), as well as all sorts of sexual overtones to the way one describes and experiences practice. Some will even describe effects as extreme as all sensations being like sex, or of sensations causing orgasmic-like ripples of pleasure through their body, or of making love to the universe, etc. People may tap into feelings of sexuality that seem generic or non-gender specific, which, for those who identify strongly as being mono-sexual rather than bi-sexual or generically sexual, can sometimes be some mix of revealing and disturbing. Sexual dreams are much more common in the territory of the A&P for some. More extreme things can occur, such as the sensations of having sex with seductive beings of a magical/astral/etheric/etc. nature. These sexual effects are in direct contrast to the sexual effects that tend to follow in subsequent stages, which are, in general, the exactly opposite of those in the A&P.
Unitive Experiences. The A&P can present with profound feelings of unity with all reality, like one is a part of all of reality and similar pleasant and profound feelings. Similar feelings of everything being empty of a self can arise, which is like the flip side of a unitive feeling. In a unitive feeling one feels that one is a part of everything or is everything, and the flip side is the feeling that as everything is connected and a part of a greater whole, then the sense of a self is actually just a part of the greater field of experience. These feelings in their full-on manifestation tend to be relatively brief during this stage, as contrasted with Equanimity later on when they may be more prolonged and profound and complete, and as contrasted with some of the stages of Enlightenment, when they may be some degree of permanent. However, some sense of this unity can seem to remain for some who have had this aspect present strongly on their crossing the A&P, influencing their way or viewing the world and philosophy. Further insights may be extrapolated from these unitive feelings, such as there being no one who dies as it is all just the universe, or similar extrapolations relating to the having a consciousness that is part of the eternal universe and thus immortal. Regardless of any ultimate validity to these feelings and intuitions, they can feel quite real to the person experiencing them. This particular set of A&P experiences are some of the more classic mimics for the later stage of Equanimity, and this can cause diagnostic confusion.
Feeling Enlightened. The A&P is a very common cause of people believing they are enlightened. Obviously, as the definition of enlightenment may be subjective and variable, if one defined it as crossing the A&P, then they would be. The model this from which this terminology designates enlightenment (at least the first stage of it) occurring at a later, more advanced stage, and for the sake of consistency and for other reasons will hold with that more strict definitions. However, the basic sense within the person that they have been irrevocably changed and given profound insights into the nature of things is common and compelling and also true. It is also not uncommon for people to believe they are very special and even unique for having crossed the A&P, particularly given the staggering lack of public descriptions of something that so many have actually gone through.
Perceptual Thresholds. My favorite of the criteria, particularly found in technical and skilled meditators but also found in many others: people during the A&P may have the ability to perceive sensations with a speed, precision, and consistency that may be radically beyond what they were capable of before, such that they may perceive sensations up to maybe 40 times/second arising and vanishing during certain peak perceptual moments, particularly during the middle phase of the breath and in the center of wherever they place their attention. The phase characteristics of the A&P borrows from the 2nd jhana in general and involves the ability to perceive the arising and passing clearly of phenomena in a way that can feel quite effortless, and any vibrations noticed tend to be harmonically simple and change in frequency sinusoidally. This is differentiated from the perceptual phase characteristics of the 1st jhana, where the beginnings of objects in the very center of wherever attention is placed are more clear and seeing them requires sustained effort and is generally much more slow and clunky, and the 3rd jhana, during which the endings of phenomena in the chaotic and complex periphery show themselves in a naturally irritating way that feels out of phase with attention somehow despite the sometimes intensely unpleasant clarity, and the 4th jhana, in which things are not nearly so fast or vibratory but instead tend to be experienced in a wide open, fluxing, panoramic and more spacious way.
Insights into Selflessness. Some may perceive that all phenomena are arising and passing away, and wherever they turn their attention may notice the transience of sensations. Extrapolating from this clear perception, they may realize: “Ah, this means that there is no permanent self.” Further, unitive experiences may have the same effect, and further, in some strange intuitive way the same basic notion of something having changed in the basic notion of self-hood may shift to something less solid. Also, the fact that the A&P experiences tend to happen in a way that is seemingly effortless or even unbidden, this experience of natural occurrences can also reinforce the notion that there is less control of things than one initially suspected, adding to the sense of there being somehow less of a self in things. These insights are sometimes called “Deep Insights” into Impermanence and Selflessness in the lingo of the time, a la Jack Kornfield and crew.
Cognitive Abilities. People who are in and have crossed the A&P tend to have an easier time with processes variously called things like “vision logic”, “metacognitive processing” and the like. For those who are prone to such things, they will tend to have philosophical talents beyond those who have not crossed the A&P, realizing that things like age, underlying intelligence however defined, exposure to philosophical and related branches of thinking, and education level can significantly effect how this presents. They will also tend to have an increased ability to understand and navigate in terminology that may reluctantly be termed “spiritual”, though this may show in other ways, such as an increased appreciation of things like the profundity and beauty of differential equations, the implications of modern physics for questions of Subject-Object non-duality, debates of free will vs super-determinism, and the like.
Feeling Called Out and Seeking. People who have crossed the A&P can feel called out, like they are somehow seeking something or on a quest, feeling special, like they are called to something higher, deeper, truer, cleaner, clearer, brighter, freer, etc. I assert that spiritual scenes, self-help groups, vegan restaurants, AA/NA groups, born-again Christian revivals, meditation communities, ashrams, monasteries, psychology and divinity graduate schools, yoga classes, health-food stores, militias, suicide bomb schools, Nepalese treks, eco-warriors, shamanic ceremonies in the jungle, New Age and Spiritualist groups, Wiccan covens, people who go around writing research grants to study meditation and enlightenment, and the like have a substantially increased presence of people who have crossed the A&P. I have no data to back up these claims at all but believe that I know it in some deep intuitive way, which is the sort of thinking you may find in people who have crossed the A&P and been doing this long enough at times.
The Dark Night stages that follow the usually brief A&P. The Dark Night, aka the stages of knowledges of suffering, meaning Dissolution, Fear, Misery, Disgust, Desire for Deliverance and Re-Obervation, follow the A&P like thunder follows lightening. Thus, if you can diagnose the A&P, I assert you can diagnose the Dark Night or at least its inevitability, even if it hasn’t happened yet. Thus, diagnosing the A&P is definitely the place to start. In terms of dynamic systems theory, only some people will manage to cross the A&P, but everyone who doesn’t have something catastrophic happen to their brain or die first who crosses the A&P will then progress inevitably to the stages of the Dark Night. Further, the Dark Night tends to last a lot longer than the A&P, very similar to the way episodes of depression following manic episodes tend to last a lot longer than the manic episode did. Thus, unless you catch people in the A&P, which can be quite brief, you are likely to encounter them dealing with the combined effects of having crossed the A&P but now being in some phase of the Dark Night or in its after effects. I cover the Dark Night extensively in MCTB, so please refer to that for more information.
The Standard Pattern (the A&P-DN-weak EQ loop). What I call “The Standard Pattern” is that people cross the A&P under whatever circumstances, hit the Dark Night, get swamped by it, finally barely touch some weak version of Equanimity, fall back, feel somewhat normal but are living again with the after-effects of the A&P and the Dark Night, being now past the point of no return. They will then tend to cross it again with some degree of frequency from months to decades, re-enter a more full-on Dark Night, and cycle this way until they may finally get Stream Entry or just die before that part of the process completes itself. The A&P can vary so widely that catching that it is what has happened, even if one has some understanding of the criteria, can be tricky, illustrated by way of example, from an earlier essay of mine (that follows in the next section). (DhO)
From an earlier essay on A&P: some personal experiences. My first time crossing it was around age 15. I was and still am a big fan of flying dreams, and so quite without instruction or guidance, I decided that I would practice flying before going to sleep so as to maximize the chances of me having them. I began to try to visualize planets of various colors, which ended up being like 50 foot wide billiard balls in space, some black, some red, some ivory, and in trying to do this I began to notice all sorts of things. I began to notice that there was a delay between the intention to visualize and the image arising. I noticed that it was very difficult to sustain any image, as it would arise and vanish. I began to notice it was nearly impossible to give attention to a sphere without going toward it. I noticed that the delay, the constant effort, the arising and vanishing of the images, and some other strained aspect of the process were strangely irritating. In short, I realized the first three stages of insight practice, but had no idea that these were stock, standard, expected, predictable, and had been mapped by some traditions for over 2,500 years, nor did I know what to expect next.
I can't remember the exact timing, but I know that it was not that many nights of this sort of practice later that I had the following dream. I was standing on a long, straight, dusty, country road with tall wild rose bushes lining either side as far as the eye could see. I was about three feet tall, dressed in a silver space-suit, holding a ray-gun, and beside me were two similarly dressed people of similar height. We were all staring down the road, waiting for something to happen. The sunlight was so bright that it was difficult to see, and its brilliance washed out the color of everything to some pale shade of yellow, green or white. Suddenly a dust cloud appeared far down the road, and out of it emerged a huge witch dressed in black riding a charging black horse. We stood our ground. The witch pointed her wand at us, a brilliant flash of light shot from its tip and engulfed us, and suddenly my world exploded, so that my body seemed like fireworks, flying all over space in sizzling flashes, and I suddenly transitioned from dreaming to waking. However, it took several seconds for my consciousness and sensate reality to reassemble itself into something coherent, and then I was buzzing all over and extremely alert. It would be 10 years before I would have any idea of what that was or what it meant. It is hard from this distant vantage point to get a grasp of exactly how this first event changed my life, as my mid-teens were a complex time in general.
The next time I remember crossing it was the summer after my junior year in college. I had been philosophizing heavily, hanging out with my friend who had also crossed the A&P and didn't know what it was, and we had been discussing the question of the observer or Watcher and how this related to the question of non-duality. So, one day I was just sitting on the couch, when I decided to take on the watcher directly. I began trying to catch it, second after second, really going after the visceral, perceptual experience of what was observing, and before I knew it, got into this rapid-fire back and forth, super-concentrated state of everything vibrating in my head, and the whole thing zapped back through my skull at very high speed into some black space, and it was done. I broke up with my girlfriend, moved into an apartment alone, and was pretty dark for a while.
The third time I remember occurred during the year after graduation from college. I was dancing in a club, and I began spinning around and got into some sort of very altered state, dancing wildly, with tremendous energy, feeling some kind of long-sought freedom, like something I had forgotten, and up through my being welled this amazing bliss and sense of power, taking over the dancing, moving me effortlessly but with this core of raw power in the center around which the world and my body were spinning and moving quite on their own, and then it peaked in joy and intensity and was done. After that I began to have to meditate to feel normal. I would go outside before work and lay down on the ground and breathe really slowly and somehow it would help a little. Shortly thereafter I quit the band I was running sound for and moved to California for a while.
The next time I don't remember, but I know the effect it had: I suddenly needed to go on retreats, so I did. I had done really no formal meditation practice, knew little of Buddhism, but on the advice of a friend I went on a 9-day intensive insight meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. About 6 days into it, after all sorts of back, neck and jaw pain, I was just sitting there, and all of a sudden I noticed that my body was not solid, but instead made of zillions of little particles of energy, all moving around, zipping in and out of reality, and my body exploded, everything flashed black and white, and I felt as if I had been dropped back onto my cushion from space. After that I was hyper-energetic, hyper-philosophical and yet convinced that philosophy held no further answers, but I had no idea what to do next. No one told me what had happened or what it could do to you, and shortly thereafter I quit my electrical engineering program and went to India.
The next time was about 6 months after the previous one, on retreat in India during a 17-day course at the Thai Monastery in Bodh Gaya. I don't really remember much about it, except that it left me feeling very inspired about practice and very dark about the world. I lasted 5 months doing volunteer service in Calcutta before I had to go on retreat again, so I went to Malaysia and sat in the Malaysian Buddhist Meditation Centre, and that is when I really learned to practice. It was 10 years from the first time I had crossed the A&P, and I was about to learn what the Arising and Passing Away was, which seems a bit late, but that's the world we live in, isn't it?
I was practicing very strict noting technique, and very shortly my breath began to move with the noting. I would note "rising" or "falling" and the breath would rise or fall in nearly perfect synchrony with the duration of the note and then stop, so each stuttering breath took many notes, otherwise it would just stop. The rapidity of this got faster and more powerful, so that I shook, sniffed, sweated and noted for days, and in between bouts I would plunge down with the breath as it went down and down and down into a realm of extremely slowed perception and time, like reality was moving through thick, narcotic syrup, and then the energy would come back, the rapid noting, sniffing, and now powerful vibratory energy would return, and it would cycle like this again and again. I was sitting for 2-3 hours at a time with amazing posture, barely sleeping 2 hours per night, and finally the whole thing died down. I was hungry for sex and chocolate, felt exhausted and sluggish, within a day I could barely sit for 5 minutes, and my mind felt like a hive of angry bees.
That night the abbot played an old, scratchy tape of a Burmese monk describing the stages of insight, and suddenly all was clear. I knew what had happened, knew where I was, and knew what to do about it. You can read about the rest in my book if you wish, but the summary points are these: 1) the maps helped me practice in the face of the Dark Night so that I got to Equanimity, 2) the tape failed to mention the post-retreat/real-world implications of crossing the A&P and entering the Dark Night (they call them "Dukkha Ñanas"), and at that point, despite having crossed the thing many times already, I was unprepared for what would happen next. Shortly thereafter, I canceled all of my medical school interviews so that I could go on a 1-year retreat.
I tell the rest of the story in my book, but hopefully these added shorts will give some idea of the basic points I wanted to illustrate, those being that the context and content can vary widely, but there are relatively predictable and identifiable key elements to the way it happens and what is likely to follow.
A few more brief stories from other points on my path...
I was meditating in my living room and suddenly could see though my closed eyelids. The room looked largely the same, except the color and light were somewhat different. This didn't last long, and in a sit shortly thereafter my body exploded again, very much as it had done before. By this time I knew what it was, and so I was prepared for what came next. I didn't quit my job or end a relationship. Instead I practiced well and shortly thereafter attained to Second Path in the break room at work during a training lecture.
I was taking a yoga class and had been strangely stiff and tense during it. Every movement was much more difficult than usual, my awareness of the pain in my body more acute. This faded towards the end of the 2-hour class, and then suddenly while bending back into a camel pose, this massive and very startling bolt of energy shot up my spine, causing me to flip suddenly forwards out of the pose. Shortly thereafter I decided to go on retreat during the coming summer in England.
I’ll give two more examples from some people whose practice I knew well at the time. One of them was lying on a bed taking a nap after lunch on a meditation retreat and suddenly could see through the roof out into the sky and felt that a big tornado suddenly blew into the room and that there were literally cats and dogs flying all of over the room, all of which lasted some seconds and then calmed down to reveal a normal room. The other one had a dream, and in the dream was touching bright jewels in a cabinet and each time the jewels were touched waves of buzzy pleasure swept up their hand into their arm and then shortly thereafter they were above the bed they were sleeping in spinning around in a faster and faster vortex of wind. Both people had substantial Dark Night manifestations after those occurrences for some months.
As you can see, the presentations of how things happened can look quite different, despite that fact that I will assert that each of those A&P’s was functionally the same in terms of its basic effect. This presents some difficulties in terms of study design, creating diagnostic criteria that someone not very personally familiar with the wide range of the A&P and the other stages’ presentations, as well as sorting out the common mimics (e.g. Mind and Body, Samatha Jhana experiences, Equanimity, Stream Entry, etc.). However, the effects are so extremely predictable in certain aspects that it must be possible to come up with a way to research on this topic. Having crossed the territory of the A&P a few thousand times at least by this point, it is easy to spot it as it happens and in people’s histories, but explaining exactly how this is done beyond listing these sorts of experiences and trying to externally reproduce a codified set criteria that represents the internal knowledge is obviously not easy to perfectly accomplish. (DhO)
1st Path
List of symptoms for ñana diagnosis.
- The focus on the mouth is classic subtle homunculus stuff (classic first jhana)
- bodily distortion stuff is also classic first jhana stuff
- Weird breathing patterns and strange muscle contractions are very common in Cause and Effect and the Three Characteristics, and can happen faster and more oddly in the stage of the Arising and Passing Away also
- Spontaneous neck twisting: Three Characteristics
- Spontaneous crying, and the feeling of disgust and also the strange spontaneous sounds: Three Characteristics
- Muscle spasms: nearly always the Three Characteristics, (though) interest in Kriyas and the like with the muscle spasms letting up and meditation improving, very likely early A&P stuff
- it is common for people to think that 3C is Dark Night, happens all the time
- Seeing things happening really fast on their own one after the other, that is usually A&P
- Heat: usually A&P
- Visions: usually A&P
- Happened at night: usually A&P
- The word "kundalini" seems to apply or even comes to mind: nearly always A&P.
- Energetics, strong concentration, rapture: all likely A&P
- Anything zooming like is nearly perfectly diagnostic of the A&P
- Practice in dreams is so A&P
- Out of body stuff is very A&P
- Sleep paralysis is very A&P related
- Low need for sleep: also very A&P
- There is the drop-down, deep aspect of the A&P that can be like being deep underwater in slow motion and nearly frozen in time
- The A&P can also cause some jewel-tone sparkles on occasion before sometimes seeing a white light like a headlight
- Orgasm up the spine: basically classic A&P stuff
- Unusual abilities around that time or the sense that one can do and know amazing things: common, relatively normal for A&P
- Anything alternating slow to rapid could just be the A&P, which can be edgy for some at times and is not always pleasant
- White light: almost always A&P, so you should put the Body Vanishing thing that can happen in Dissolution on the list
- Destabilization afterwards, very likely Dark Night
- Memory problems can be Dissolution as well as Equanimity or even Stream Entry, is hard to sort out
- Any state shift can cause a heavy flicker in consciousness if it hits hard enough: any shift between ñanas and/or jhanas can do it
- Descending into blackness or voidness: could be formless stuff, could be heavy dissolution also, could just be a nightmare that you woke up into from another dream
- Formless stuff can emerge and often does in both Dissolution and Equanimity, as well as a few other places on rare occasions
- it is common for people to think that the A&P is Equanimity or the 4th jhana: happens all the time
- Near Misses are often a very brief taste of NPNYNP (8th jhana)
- "Head Drops" of Equanimity, in which it is like we suddenly almost went to sleep, sort of like driving when you are totally exhausted and can't hold your head up well. They mimic all sorts of things
- Powerful sudden memories of apparently random places and events from my past, strong enough to explore and really feel into and flush out in remarkable detail if I wish (Equanimity)
- Strange things like Deja Vu (Equanimity)
- Cycling: might be Stream Entry
(DhO . There are several links, just posted the biggest one)
(A much more thorough (Daniel's) table is available at this link)
Vibrations and ñanas. (Regarding) fast vibrations (, it) is actually stage specific advice. In the beginning, most people seem to benefit from strong effort. There is lots to learn, to identify objects, see the Three Characteristics of them, etc. There are stages, however, where other factors come into play, and speed is not always the best option.
For instance, the A&P has the fastest vibrations of the bunch, but they are simple, pretty clean, and in the center of attention. Speed and power is good here.
In the Dark Night, vibrations tend to be chaotic, irritating, complex, wide, around the periphery, with a relatively blind center, and much that is distressing. Most begin to reject their own insights here, as Vince so aptly mentioned, and this is too bad. Tons of effort to see things as fast as possible doesn't work quite as well here, and a this is where one begins to try to make that difficult transition from being the separate, active practitioner to being a part of the process, but still most benefit from continued and diligent practice that stays with what is going on and its Three Characteristics, even if the vibrations are not quite so fast, though more complex.
In Equanimity what is vibrating is attention, formations, the experience field, or however you wish to put it, and these are slower than the previous stages and also more simple, in that they are more inclusive. Thus, powerful effort to go fast doesn't work well, though staying on exactly what is happening in a very continuous, inclusive, diligent way still works well here, and helps people avoid spacing out and falling back too many times. As those who have hit Equanimity with strong momentary concentration know well, it is amazing with lots of profound things to teach about reality, so again, effort here is good, though balance and finesse are also needed, too. (DhO)
A&P and Bhanga. Goenka conceptualizes of the A&P a bit differently, but typically uses descriptions I associate with the A&P and calls it Bangha. So, yes, there is some confusion that arises from that. So, consider that what I (and the Mahasi kids in general) consider the A&P to be what Goenka considers the A&P and Dissolution together, and you will likely do better. (DhO)
Vibrations and Ñanas. Vibrations with rapture and powerful focus and clarity: almost always the A&P. Still, a few find the A&P disconcerting and it can be dramatic and scary for a few. Vibrations with edginess, irritation, complexity, like a cloud of flies or bees, with restlessness: can often be Dark Night territory. Some find Re-observation and Desire for Deliverance very vibratory. Vibrations that are basically neutral or slightly pleasant due to their openness and ease: often Equanimity, particularly if open, flowing, and progress to something wide, volumetric, and inclusive. (DhO)
A&P may be happening to vastly more people than anyone would have imagined. I would love … data about the epidemiology of awakening, being as I have an MSPH in epidemiology and care about awakening.
If and when someone finally does that study, I predict that they find the A&P happening to vastly more people than anyone would have imagined before, and it explaining phenomena as diverse as there seeming to be a church on every corner in the sleepy little back roads of Alabama to some of the PTSD that many soldiers experience after powerful experiences during war to Waco to some of the things researched by DARPA...
The first steps would be to operationalize the definitions of the stages and create criteria that are held in some loose way that is open to additional phenomenological description rather than close dogmas that limit further research, as well as increased emphases on developing practitioner/researchers that will be able to go into that territory with both solid training in the scientific method but also personal experience that helps them recognize what they are seeing in the field, as the eye can't see well what the brain doesn't know. (DhO)
A&P Event. Not all A&P events blow people's doors off. My smallest and shortest lasted all of a minute or two, starting with some unusually rapid attention alternating between the sense of the observer and the sense of what was observing that, culminating with a quick little non-blissful but somewhat tingly with the zap down own my spine. No lights. No bliss. No vivid dreams. That was the whole thing. It darknighted me anyway. (DhO)
A&P, a standard dream pattern. A&P events, while often blissful, are not always, and some can be darn scary and disconcerting. Since then, I have noticed what I call my standard dream pattern, a pattern I have seen hundreds if not thousands of times, and it reflects the cycles of insight.
The pattern is basically this: I start flying or am able to jump or sort of slide along the air over long distances, things are really cool, might be some sexual stuff around that phase as well as other really cool effects, like composing amazing music, seeing amazing performances.
Then things turn dark, ugly, scary in some way, might be trapped in a small box, fight with monsters, have people out to get me, be chased and now can't fly as high and they can grab my feet, might fall down long distances, fall into the earth, be strapped down and subjected to torture, might be injured or even torn apart but still be alive, might have my feet rotting off or all my teeth falling out, might have a standard college fear dream in which I am naked and forgot my pencil and there is an exam I never studied for, might have dreams of the emergency department and the bad sorts of things we see there, have my body be torn by harsh vibrations, etc. This is a very summary, incomplete list of the potentially disconcerting things that could happen in this phase.
However, if the dream goes on long enough and I don't wake up, I get to the amazing phase. In the amazing phase, remarkable things happen. I come to peace with the monsters and we make friends and some to some mutual, respectful understanding, or my body becomes streams of pure light streaking out through white clouds, or I am floating in a beautiful valley with waterfalls and golden magickal symbols hanging in the air of great profundity and import, or I interact with some benevolent goddess, or I teach people how to fly or cast spells and they get it and we are all happy, or I heal people, or I break out into some beautiful gathering of happy people in some paradise-like garden, or I am teaching meditation as a monk and resting in Dharmakaya awareness, etc. This again is a very incomplete list. This I think of as corresponding to the low end of Equanimity, ñ11.j2 as I might label it.
If the dream goes on, I might get to things even more profound but neutral, fluxing suchness, that sort of thing, that I correspond with very high Equanimity.
If you are looking for information on dream yoga, I must say that, while I am quite the active dreamer, I haven't done many of those practices. However, the work that has resonated most with me that I hope to have more time for shortly are Tenzin Wangyal's The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. I also highly recommend Alan Guiden's Traveling: An Accidental Expert's How to Leave Your Body Handbook, which, in full disclosure, just happens to be published by Aeon, who also publish my book, but I found it on the web long before they printed it.
I think that the dream experiences I have had have made me a better practitioner, as I think that the lessons we learn about things being torn apart and getting bad in dreams translate to our ability to handle deeper vipassana when awake, so I would count your experiences as more of a blessing than a curse. (DhO)
Dark Night, a general warning. This from the Foreword and Warning of MCTB1:
Dark Night, a classical diagnosis example. You report that you had lots of powerful concentration, tingling, rapture, bright lights during sleep, and what you thought might be Fruitions but not sure, then all that faded, now you are searching around exploring trying to find something and feeling that part of the problem is the community, teachings, your sangha, and the way the dharma has been transmitted is inadequate and that is where the problem resides. You feel that there are secrets hidden from you behind a curtain. You feel abandoned by teachers and awakened ones. You feel cut off. You feel isolated. You are experiencing much frustration. You feel dissonance and are now attacking what you believe to be the problem. You believe that somehow what you call the preparatory practices as you understand them are inadequate to the task. You feel called to some universal dharma that you yet feel is elusive, so you then start writing long posts about how the problem is with the DhO and those on it in some moderately grandiose way, in the style of Martin Luther, who was also moderately grandiose. I reflect those things but not in any mean way, just describing what is going on. Plenty of us have been in similar modes and reacted similar ways.
Said another way reflecting my quick internal summary of the process, which, done over the internet and by forum posting is not always perfectly accurate, but still: yet another earnest meditator crossed the A&P and into the Dark Night, is now trying to figure out Equanimity, looking outward critically rather than inward inquisitively, as is common. They have inadequate concentration and likely not sufficient practice environment such as a retreat, inadequate contact with sufficiently wise companions on the path or inability to believe that simple techniques could yield profound results, not yet quite to the point of just facing the insights into suffering revealed by insight practice in their own heart-body-mind-space, and are still projecting this outwards rather than just seeing moment to moment the clear and unpleasant sensate experiences of frustration, wanting, paranoia, searching, looking, discontent, restlessness, irritability, blame, projection, and the rest, all of which are normal Dark Night phenomena that nearly all of us who have crossed the A&P are very familiar with and had to learn to deal with in our own heart-body-mind-spaces.
In short, I might suggest looking to the sensations that make up the core processes you are struggling with, those listed above, and add to the list of sensations to investigate things like anger, sadness, fear, bitterness, criticism, wanting, noticing when attention moves in or out, noticing the sensations that make up the urges to blame others for the sensations in one's body, noticing urges to blame the dharma for the sensations in one's body, noticing the motion of attraction and aversion to deep feelings in one's body, and just proceeding with those deep, profound, subtle investigations, turning the process inward to make those clear, all while also maintaining some sense that there is space around phenomena.
Sometimes proceeding eyes open yet with attention turned into the sensations in the stomach, chest, neck and middle of the head can be helpful, as going into the dark stuff with eyes closed makes some people lose perspective at times, though others do well with it, and you have to figure out which is best for you at each moment. It is hard in the Dark Night to turn the awareness back on ourselves, and easy to react outwardly on jobs, partners, teachers, friends, communities, teachings, society, and a whole host of other entities we somehow become convinced are the real problem, and we can easily miss that this might simply be a normal stage of meditative development and an opportunity to bring the simple, clear light of awareness to aspects of our own experience.
Truly, I know of no higher or more profound teaching than the Six Sense Doors and the Three Characteristics. I have been behind many curtains for "secret teachings", and none are more profound than this one. This was that simple framework that I found most powerful for insight practices. It just requires honesty, subtlety, bravery, and perseverance. Mara's Armies await. When they attack, avoid lashing out at others. Instead, investigate within your fathom-long body. This is the teaching of the Buddha. This is the way of the Dharma. This is what has been practiced well by the Sangha.
Might check out this video on Vipassana. Might also do a lot of metta practice and the other three Brahma-viharas, starting with really feeling each of those in your own body carefully before moving outward. Don't underestimate these "preparatory practices". As plenty of my Tibetan Buddhist friends have said, if people really did the "preliminaries" properly and as they were designed to be done, they wouldn't need any of the more "advanced practices". The same is true of these practices here. (DhO)
"In that same vein, I should further mention that the path I have followed has been dangerous, destabilizing more often than calm, excruciating more often than pleasant, harder to integrate than most other dharma paths I have heard of, and in general quite a rough ride. It has also been profound, amazing, and more glorious than most other paths I have heard tell of. Surfing the ragged edges of reality has been easier for me than slowing the thing down. In my explorations, accidents and adventures, I have learned a lot about not only how to make very fast progress in meditation but also a lot about how to do so without completely wiping out. I hope that I can pass on some of the knowledge of both in this book. This should be seen as another warning. This book and the path presented in it are not for the damaged and unstable spiritual seeker. You have to have your psychological trip fairly together to be able to handle the intense techniques, side effects and results I am about to discuss."
And here is the Dark Night section of MCTB1.
Hopefully, this, coupled with all sorts of other supportive advice, advice on jhanas, advice on the Seven Factors of Enlightenment and their balance, advice on the Brahma Viharas, and many other supportive focuses, such as the AYP energetics advice, etc. will be of some benefit for those who are attempting to get a solid sense of what is possible and what can be done about it.
The Dark Night should not be viewed as more or less than it is, and the problem is that the personal variability of the strength of the effect is so large that this is more general than specific advice, and the whole point is that YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
However, if you are poking around obscure technical fora like this one, you probably already crossed the A&P and have at some point in your life known some Dark Night effects, so it is very likely too late, but regardless, at least now there has been more of an attempt than there was before. (DhO)
Dark Night, a classical diagnosis example. You report that you had lots of powerful concentration, tingling, rapture, bright lights during sleep, and what you thought might be Fruitions but not sure, then all that faded, now you are searching around exploring trying to find something and feeling that part of the problem is the community, teachings, your sangha, and the way the dharma has been transmitted is inadequate and that is where the problem resides. You feel that there are secrets hidden from you behind a curtain. You feel abandoned by teachers and awakened ones. You feel cut off. You feel isolated. You are experiencing much frustration. You feel dissonance and are now attacking what you believe to be the problem. You believe that somehow what you call the preparatory practices as you understand them are inadequate to the task. You feel called to some universal dharma that you yet feel is elusive, so you then start writing long posts about how the problem is with the DhO and those on it in some moderately grandiose way, in the style of Martin Luther, who was also moderately grandiose. I reflect those things but not in any mean way, just describing what is going on. Plenty of us have been in similar modes and reacted similar ways.
Said another way reflecting my quick internal summary of the process, which, done over the internet and by forum posting is not always perfectly accurate, but still: yet another earnest meditator crossed the A&P and into the Dark Night, is now trying to figure out Equanimity, looking outward critically rather than inward inquisitively, as is common. They have inadequate concentration and likely not sufficient practice environment such as a retreat, inadequate contact with sufficiently wise companions on the path or inability to believe that simple techniques could yield profound results, not yet quite to the point of just facing the insights into suffering revealed by insight practice in their own heart-body-mind-space, and are still projecting this outwards rather than just seeing moment to moment the clear and unpleasant sensate experiences of frustration, wanting, paranoia, searching, looking, discontent, restlessness, irritability, blame, projection, and the rest, all of which are normal Dark Night phenomena that nearly all of us who have crossed the A&P are very familiar with and had to learn to deal with in our own heart-body-mind-spaces.
In short, I might suggest looking to the sensations that make up the core processes you are struggling with, those listed above, and add to the list of sensations to investigate things like anger, sadness, fear, bitterness, criticism, wanting, noticing when attention moves in or out, noticing the sensations that make up the urges to blame others for the sensations in one's body, noticing urges to blame the dharma for the sensations in one's body, noticing the motion of attraction and aversion to deep feelings in one's body, and just proceeding with those deep, profound, subtle investigations, turning the process inward to make those clear, all while also maintaining some sense that there is space around phenomena.
Sometimes proceeding eyes open yet with attention turned into the sensations in the stomach, chest, neck and middle of the head can be helpful, as going into the dark stuff with eyes closed makes some people lose perspective at times, though others do well with it, and you have to figure out which is best for you at each moment. It is hard in the Dark Night to turn the awareness back on ourselves, and easy to react outwardly on jobs, partners, teachers, friends, communities, teachings, society, and a whole host of other entities we somehow become convinced are the real problem, and we can easily miss that this might simply be a normal stage of meditative development and an opportunity to bring the simple, clear light of awareness to aspects of our own experience.
Truly, I know of no higher or more profound teaching than the Six Sense Doors and the Three Characteristics. I have been behind many curtains for "secret teachings", and none are more profound than this one. This was that simple framework that I found most powerful for insight practices. It just requires honesty, subtlety, bravery, and perseverance. Mara's Armies await. When they attack, avoid lashing out at others. Instead, investigate within your fathom-long body. This is the teaching of the Buddha. This is the way of the Dharma. This is what has been practiced well by the Sangha.
Might check out this video on Vipassana. Might also do a lot of metta practice and the other three Brahma-viharas, starting with really feeling each of those in your own body carefully before moving outward. Don't underestimate these "preparatory practices". As plenty of my Tibetan Buddhist friends have said, if people really did the "preliminaries" properly and as they were designed to be done, they wouldn't need any of the more "advanced practices". The same is true of these practices here. (DhO)
Regarding the (mistaken) notion that the Dark Night is a product of Noting/MCTB-style practice. I crossed the A&P at least 6 times over roughly 10 years before I ever did any formal meditation practice: this with no sitting, no tradition, no concept of meditation really, just by being alive.
Dark Night in the Dharma Literature. Check the Abhidhamma, typically found as A Manual of Abhidhamma, specifically page 478 of this book here. Check out A Path with Heart, the section on Expanding and Dissolving the Self, in the Dissolving the Self section. Definitely check out the Vimuttimagga, a few hundred years older than the Visuddhimagga and more practical often and easier reading, pages 299-301 here. (DhO)
Bypassing difficult insight stages with strong concentration. As to the question of can one bypass the difficult insight stages with very strong concentration and still make progress in insight, the answer is a definite "yes". In particular, it is possible with, say, candle flame meditation, my personal favorite kasina, to get concentration so strong that one cycles through the vipassana jhanas to Fruition in realms of light and color and sacred geometry and tantric beings and vast landscapes and hyper-real psychedelic fluxing patterns and the like with nary an adverse bodily feeling or emotional upheaval of any kind. I got to this level of practice on a 17-day retreat at Bhavana Society over Christmas break in 2001. This level of strong practice typically requires a mix of great conditions, enough time, and talent. Easy to do? No. Can it be done? Absolutely. (DhO)
Transitioning from Re-Observation to Equanimity. The transition from Re-Observation to Equanimity often involves things that feel to many like bad practice, like the wrong thing to do, such as really feeling the frustration and anxiety, such as giving up entirely, such as doing nothing, such as getting really tight and reactive and deeply and honestly going there to a degree that would seem somehow "unspiritual" or something.
A&P vs Equanimity. I have had three exchanges with serious practitioners this week where each one described what sounded like classic A&P (intense, loud, buzzy, ultra-amazing, rapturous, very pleasant, hyper-sexual, mind-blowing, energetic, kundalini-esque, powers-heavy) and call it Equanimity or High Equanimity. While perhaps just a series of coincidences, I wondered if somehow, somewhere, by someone there was some map theory getting out there that described High Equanimity in this way? WTF?
Perhaps I need to seriously go back over my own stuff and see if by some strange oversight I might be giving this impression that I would ever describe High Equanimity with any of those terms ever.
Just in case I haven't been clear, High Equanimity is not something people go around noticing, commenting on much, thinking is that strange. It is not something dramatic, energetic, kundalini-esque, powers-heavy, hyper-sexual, pleasant, rapturous, buzzy, loud, intense, or any of that stuff. It is so boring, so ordinary-seeming, so non-self conscious that the vast majority of people barely notice it at all.
… While there are these complicating fractal effects, often notice more in Second Path and beyond, such as what I would call ñ4.ñ11 and ñ11.ñ4, in which one can notice some Equanimity-like subphase in the A&P and vice versa, in general, this is really straightforward.
It is very common for people to mistake the A&P for all sorts of things (Equanimity, Stream Entry, much higher), as it is so totally impressive and amazing at times, but real High Equanimity (ñ11.ñ11 aka ñ11.j4) looks nothing like it, as mentioned above.
As I get about 50 emails and or have 50 conversations from and with practitioners who totally overcall what the A&P is to everyone that is getting to real Equanimity but not appreciating what it is and thus missing out on utilizing it to its full potential, it is worth trying to reverse this trend, as the tide is so heavily in favor of making the A&P into more than it is, which is understandable but also very unfortunate. (DhO)
Falling Back from Equanimity to A&P. Some people cross the A&P, hit the Dark Night, get to Equanimity, and get Stream Entry. They are the very lucky ones, as this is extremely unusual.
The vast majority of people who cross the A&P and then subsequently hit the Dark Night won't get to Equanimity in any easily recognizable way the first (or even second or third...) time around, and will then fall back, and later on recross the A&P, hit the Dark Night again, and at some point will get to Equanimity.
The vast majority of those will not get stream entry after attaining Equanimity, but will again fall back and likely recross the A&P again at some point.
Walking up and down this territory again and again is very common before getting stream entry, as the lessons at each stage are subtle, not easily learned, and they must be learned sufficiently for stream entry to arise.
I personally crossed the A&P at least 6 times in daily life before going on retreats, and so had at least 6 Dark Night episodes during that time, wasn't sure I ever crossed to Equanimity during that period, and then on retreat crossed the A&P on my first two retreats and hit the Dark Night again, also without an obvious Equanimity phase, and then crossed the A&P on my third retreat, hit the Dark Night, got to Equanimity, retreat ended, and then I fell back into the Dark Night, and then finally, on my fourth retreat, crossed the A&P, hit the Dark Night, got to Equanimity, and finally landed Stream Entry. This is a very normal sort of general pattern, and I call it the Standard Pattern for this reason. Notice descriptions here of very similar things by many, many practitioners. (DhO)
Then, in the early-mid 90's I also crossed it just doing very Thai-forest style vipassana on 3 retreats with Christopher Titmuss: no noting, just attending mindfully to what was arising.
I hit a heavy Dark Night after every single A&P and the chaos can be easily mapped by the trail of destruction my relationships, school, etc. as I had no idea what the hell was going on, coming to this in no tradition whatever that talked about: first the ignorance of standard Westernism, then the mushroom culture of the Thai tradition.
It was only after I learned noting on my first Mahasi retreat at MBMC that I got really high Equanimity and knew how I had done it and knew what came next that planted the seeds for getting beyond all that to something much better, a project that took years, but at least I knew what the hell was going on and could navigate it much more consciously and with vastly better techniques for doing something about it than I had before, and finally to this very, very different way of perceiving things and relating to things cyclic, which I must say is way, way, way better, and when I think about what my life would likely be like without having found the Mahasi stuff, it is very hard to imagine that I would have found anything anywhere near this effective, powerful, clarifying, empowering, and remarkable. (DhO)
Dark Night in the Dharma Literature. Check the Abhidhamma, typically found as A Manual of Abhidhamma, specifically page 478 of this book here. Check out A Path with Heart, the section on Expanding and Dissolving the Self, in the Dissolving the Self section. Definitely check out the Vimuttimagga, a few hundred years older than the Visuddhimagga and more practical often and easier reading, pages 299-301 here. (DhO)
Bypassing difficult insight stages with strong concentration. As to the question of can one bypass the difficult insight stages with very strong concentration and still make progress in insight, the answer is a definite "yes". In particular, it is possible with, say, candle flame meditation, my personal favorite kasina, to get concentration so strong that one cycles through the vipassana jhanas to Fruition in realms of light and color and sacred geometry and tantric beings and vast landscapes and hyper-real psychedelic fluxing patterns and the like with nary an adverse bodily feeling or emotional upheaval of any kind. I got to this level of practice on a 17-day retreat at Bhavana Society over Christmas break in 2001. This level of strong practice typically requires a mix of great conditions, enough time, and talent. Easy to do? No. Can it be done? Absolutely. (DhO)
Transitioning from Re-Observation to Equanimity. The transition from Re-Observation to Equanimity often involves things that feel to many like bad practice, like the wrong thing to do, such as really feeling the frustration and anxiety, such as giving up entirely, such as doing nothing, such as getting really tight and reactive and deeply and honestly going there to a degree that would seem somehow "unspiritual" or something.
It also often involves a greater degree of honesty than most people are willing to engage in. It also involves seeing Re-Observation clearly, on its own terms, as it is, which is generally pretty dysphoric, meaning really wrong-feeling.
Also, plenty of people just don't have enough concentration skills, which sounds contradictory, but the ability to stay with what is going on, fraction of a second after fraction of a second, in all its very rich and harmonic, rapid complexity, naturally tracking all the crazy stuff the mind is doing as it tries to wriggle out of Re-Observation, is really helpful.
Glad to hear you are still practicing. Think about trying some other approach, such as something a bit more Dzogchen, or a bit more Achaan Chan, a la "A Still Forest Pool". There is this thing people can get into that I call the Analogy of the Bicycle: if you are riding up a long hill, you may need to pedal hard, as, if you stop, you will start rolling backwards, but, at some point you may cross the top of the hill and start rolling down the other side, and so you don't really have to pedal much unless you want to, but plenty won't realize this and just keep pedaling as hard as they can, exhausting themselves and not enjoying the long coast down the other side. It can be hard to determine if you have crossed the top of the hill sometimes, but still, if you have been hitting Re-Observation that hard for that long, you probably are in this category, and some recognizing of the No-Self aspect of things, that they happen on their own all the time, that nothing is required to perceive things clearly as they already being inherent in things, that all sensations naturally perceive themselves, that space perceives itself, that all the things that are pretending to be this side and that side are just naturally, causally, easily occurring, and there is a way to rest in that natural, empty transience. (DhO)
Perhaps I need to seriously go back over my own stuff and see if by some strange oversight I might be giving this impression that I would ever describe High Equanimity with any of those terms ever.
Just in case I haven't been clear, High Equanimity is not something people go around noticing, commenting on much, thinking is that strange. It is not something dramatic, energetic, kundalini-esque, powers-heavy, hyper-sexual, pleasant, rapturous, buzzy, loud, intense, or any of that stuff. It is so boring, so ordinary-seeming, so non-self conscious that the vast majority of people barely notice it at all.
… While there are these complicating fractal effects, often notice more in Second Path and beyond, such as what I would call ñ4.ñ11 and ñ11.ñ4, in which one can notice some Equanimity-like subphase in the A&P and vice versa, in general, this is really straightforward.
It is very common for people to mistake the A&P for all sorts of things (Equanimity, Stream Entry, much higher), as it is so totally impressive and amazing at times, but real High Equanimity (ñ11.ñ11 aka ñ11.j4) looks nothing like it, as mentioned above.
As I get about 50 emails and or have 50 conversations from and with practitioners who totally overcall what the A&P is to everyone that is getting to real Equanimity but not appreciating what it is and thus missing out on utilizing it to its full potential, it is worth trying to reverse this trend, as the tide is so heavily in favor of making the A&P into more than it is, which is understandable but also very unfortunate. (DhO)
Falling Back from Equanimity to A&P. Some people cross the A&P, hit the Dark Night, get to Equanimity, and get Stream Entry. They are the very lucky ones, as this is extremely unusual.
The vast majority of people who cross the A&P and then subsequently hit the Dark Night won't get to Equanimity in any easily recognizable way the first (or even second or third...) time around, and will then fall back, and later on recross the A&P, hit the Dark Night again, and at some point will get to Equanimity.
The vast majority of those will not get stream entry after attaining Equanimity, but will again fall back and likely recross the A&P again at some point.
Walking up and down this territory again and again is very common before getting stream entry, as the lessons at each stage are subtle, not easily learned, and they must be learned sufficiently for stream entry to arise.
I personally crossed the A&P at least 6 times in daily life before going on retreats, and so had at least 6 Dark Night episodes during that time, wasn't sure I ever crossed to Equanimity during that period, and then on retreat crossed the A&P on my first two retreats and hit the Dark Night again, also without an obvious Equanimity phase, and then crossed the A&P on my third retreat, hit the Dark Night, got to Equanimity, retreat ended, and then I fell back into the Dark Night, and then finally, on my fourth retreat, crossed the A&P, hit the Dark Night, got to Equanimity, and finally landed Stream Entry. This is a very normal sort of general pattern, and I call it the Standard Pattern for this reason. Notice descriptions here of very similar things by many, many practitioners. (DhO)
Equanimity, Investigation and Honesty. Equanimity is important, but investigation and honesty are more important. Higher levels of true, full-spectrum, wide, deep Equanimity come naturally sometimes from really well-done investigation and honesty much more often than by focusing on trying to be equanimous, which most of the time is actually some sort of enforced and somewhat dishonest passivity, tolerance, flatness, indifference, immitation of Equanimity, etc. Something to watch out for. Better to just notice every little sensation arise and vanish regardless of what it was rather than have too much of an agenda for them, which attempting to be Equanimous is. (DhO)
... One must be careful with cultivating too much of what can feel like equanimity towards sensations, as this is often either aversion to unpleasant things (aka repression) or simple indifference, which can be heart-deadening, so be wary of such things. Better to stick to heartful and complete investigation and be less into trying to maintain something like a flat or neutral observer that is on this side and safe from the complexities of the human heart. (DhO)
Hands on water metaphore. Equanimity, real equanimity, can take it, whatever it is, be it effort, doubt, or whatever, but the thing is to not be afraid to be with it, really go into it, stay with it, as has been stated well above. Imagine that you are standing up to your waist in a pond and the ripples are calming down after a big storm, and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep your hand on the surface of the water so that the back of your hand stays dry and the palm stays in the water, regardless of how the ripples go. If you slack off, you miss a lot and the back of your hand gets wet, and if you try too hard, you create more ripples and the back of your hand gets wet, so the trick is to just stay on it, whatever it is, however attention moves, however things present, just on it, clearly and as continuously as possible, without trying to stabilize things particularly, or make them any special way, except just to stay the heck on it, just on it, no more and no less, second after second, realizing that you will likely have many periods of either spacing out or trying too hard, but that's ok, and how we figure the thing out.
If you have enough concentration to get into where things are just vibrating, in this case in a wide, relatively slow, sweeping 4th vipassana jhana way, and just feel how they wish to synchronize, staying with that feeling wave after wave, then you will dodge a lot of these issues, as that degree of concentration doesn't allow much philosophizing and worry about these sorts of things and also makes for strong, quick practice, but is certainly not necessary, just expedient. (DhO)
... I think that the concentration vs insight debates can be more integrated. I remember getting to places where I was able to feel wave after wave of pure suchness trying to synchronize, with very strong concentration, moment after moment, staying on reality like glue, riding wave after wave, feeling the tension as The Prisoner recommends, looking at the Three Characteristics but at the 4th jhana formation level of integrated waves of sensations, with a very powerful mix of concentration and insight, those fused so that the goal of momentary concentration was well actualized. Nothing seemed to get by and everything seemed to be noticed as it was with its true nature well attended to, like the power of the A&P but done panoramically.
It was not actually this phase that got stream entry, but I feel that it set things up well so that, once I got to the next stage, that of not even really practicing but yet being present in some natural way, stream entry was well supported. Curiously, for me stream entry arose after that in a place where I was really contemplating on how subject and object can be one, how awareness and manifestation could be one, and those things, and through this natural, almost daydream-like inquiry, I entered through the no-self door. This reminds me of what Yabaxoule does in some ways: a very hyper-engaged questioning of how the dharma theory aligns with experience and reality. Food for thought, anyway. (DhO)
The trick in Equanimity. The trick in Equanimity (is) staying into the thing just doing its thing, and that thing could be ANYTHING! Now, that thing could be the breath, could just be whatever happens, could be thoughts, could just be being really honest about what is actually going on regardless of what it is, could just be being yourself in some really ordinary and non-idealized way, could be really letting the mind just do what it wants to do, all while really being naturally present to that just as it occurs.
It could be wanting to control things. It could be watching that struggle itself. It could be wishing thoughts would do whatever or not do whatever. It could be just letting your stuff happen. It could be fluxing formless realms. It could be ultra-powerful concentration. It could be noticing the motion of attention as it creates space just by being itself and moving around making space. It could be that space and attention are the same thing. It could just be following the textures of form and mind as they synchronize. It could be being really annoyed that the mind isn't "behaving", whatever that is. It could be noting forms moving and changing. It could be some other formal practice just formally practicing or trying to practice. It could be any conflict, any harmony, any success, any failure, any neutrality, anything: but that thing, whatever it is, as it is, is the key, right then and really following it, really merging into that impermanence, really giving into not being able to hold off as an observer, really not being able to find any place in space that anything can stand on and hold out from, as the whole thing is allowed to show just how utterly unstable the whole thing really is with no reference points or practitioner or anything remaining uninformed and unviolated by that direct and totally absorbed, naturally fascinated following of all of that.
Staying on any of that: letting it take you out. Letting it vanish and take you with it. Letting it stutter. Letting it shift and squirm. Letting space flow towards disappearing totally with all that is in it. (DhO)
Equanimity Trap. [Here Daniel gives some advice on how to deal with, what to do, etc. It's a 2009 thread started by Kenneth Folk, with many 'old guard' posters participating.] A few things regarding timing: with strong, continuous effort and an appreciation of what one does at each stage to avoid the common traps and keep things moving forward, 10-14 day retreats can definitely be enough to "do it". Thus, one should not underestimate the value of them and of really making good use of that time.
If one can cross the A&P once, it will be much easier again. Same for Equanimity. Thus, once in Equanimity, one simply must avoid the common traps of resting, spacing out, solidifying peace or spaciousness or the like, and instead simply concentrate moment to moment on exactly what is going on in the wide field of awareness with a lot of engagement, continuity, openness and precision as to just what is occurring, particularly things like effort, expectation, doubt, joy, peace, spaciousness, and the like, including the standard bodily and mental sensations that arise, along with anything else.
While this may sound difficult, it actually may be strangely easy and natural with the right attitude. Thus, don't underestimate yourselves or what may be possible. All of us were surprised when we actually got anywhere also. (DhO)
Counterbalancing my usual tone for those who have strong mindfulness, investigation and energy. I just had this hour long conversation with a meditator who went to MBMC for 3.5 months and had a very hard time with the Dark Night, partially due to bad communication issues with the teacher there, and perhaps for other reasons, but it got me thinking about the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, and what differentiates Re-Observation from Equanimity and how one might counterbalance certain tendencies.
This particular meditator had strong determination, very strong intentions to practice well, a lot of investigation, lots of energy, very good mindfulness and analysis, got into the A&P territory very early on, but due to not having a clear A&P Event, which can sometimes not happen as a distinct peak experience, didn't know where they were, weren't told, and thus, when they slammed into the Dark Night with all the narrow focus and intensity of the early vipassana practice instructions, had a really hard time and failed to get to Equanimity despite a few months of that. A particularly long period of poor instructions that lead to marked fixation only on the worst sensations and attempts to exclude thought from awareness made things worse.
That they could slog it out for so long with things being that bad says they have more than enough tolerance for pain and dedication to get stream entry, and so in this particular case, the problem was a lack of the 5th and 7th factors: tranquility and equanimity. Particularly, they associated moment to moment practice with a high level of tension, which is not necessary to achieve that sort of investigation and mindfulness, but often occurs in gung-ho meditators.
In this particular case, I found myself sounding very different from how I usually do with the typical slacker meditators who lack good development of the first three factors. As this meditator had them in spades, I found myself talking about how space, awareness and phenomena are one, and how one should try to realize that these are already synchronized as the same thing by gently noticing the motion of a combined attention/space/phenomena thing until this caused the formations to synchronize and stream entry to occur.
Thus, this would be a practice that was wider, more inclusive, less focused on things like pain, neurotic thoughts, difficulties, and doubts, but instead an open moving attention that noticed that it was space and it was phenomena and that all those things arise together by definition.
There is no sense of space in which there are phenomena without sensations (phenomena) that imply space, as space is implied by sensations. Sensations can't arise without some awareness of them by definition, as one of the core assumptions of insight practice is that whatever sensations arise comprise the whole of that moment's reality. There can't be awareness without sensations that imply awareness, as awareness is actually implied by the manifesting of sensations.
In short, there are sensations that imply space and imply awareness, and imply subject and object, but by just letting attention move around and taking those swaths of space/sensations/awareness as object, this is essentially formations, which are the hallmark of the 11th ñana, Equanimity, and so this was what he was lacking and needed to find.
Essentially, this is what I do these days most of the time in my own practice. I sit and let awareness do whatever it wants, move however it moves, which is to say I let whatever manifests manifest, which is to say that reality does its thing naturally, and things synchronize more and more, stages of insight and jhanas arise, and Fruitions occur, all on their own, nicely, easily, no struggle, no problems. It is that spirit that this meditator needed more of, I believe, coupled with their already well developed talents, in order to get Equanimity and land Stream Entry, though I can think of multiple other focuses that might do the same thing, and I thought that I would post this to counterbalance my usual tone and focus and help those who also have strong early factors and weaker later ones. (DhO)
Formations, things are more flowy than vibratory in EQ. Formations are what we perceive when space and everything in it is known to flux together, whereas I usually use the term vibrations to refer to smaller things, smaller parts of the sense-field, things that seem like individual, specific objects, objects that are selected out, like noticing the tingling on your nose, like noticing a sound break into pulses, like noticing every little syllabic blip of an auditory thought, but in a way that doesn't get wide, volumetric, and sense-door integrated in that formation-esque way.
... Formations are a subtle thing, in that they are so ordinary, in that they are the ordinary phenomena that make up your world, the room, the body, space, thoughts, and plenty of people don't notice they are perceiving them, even very good meditators.
Path in a very ultra-simplified nutshell. Path in a very ultra-simplified nutshell: some specific layer of experience is now permanently hard-wired to auto-comprehend itself as it is, straightforwardly, directly, clearly, at a sensate level.
Initially, these layers are not that large, and what is changed can be hard to explain, though people will report various effects, with more extensive descriptions found places such as www.mctb.org . Later paths apply to broader layers of experience that are more obvious, more panoramic, more inclusive, and finally, at the last path, every sensation auto-comprehends its true nature automatically.
Paths are a complex topic, so this treatment is extremely superficial. It does, however, point to practical points of method, and that's the important part.
By noticing ordinary sensations clearly, one begins to build the wiring, the habit, the tendency to have the ordinary sensations of one's current layer of mind be clear. By noticing the Three Characteristics of those same ordinary sensations, one takes that clarity and uses it to build the wiring, the habit, the tendency to have the sensations that occur notice their true nature.
When these have been done sufficiently for that layer of mind, it can suddenly flip to a mode where that carefully-built wiring comes to life, it seems, turns on, and, once it turns on, that layer of experience auto-comprehends itself. There are multiple layers, generally, though counting layers is often very unhelpful. What is helpful is simply practicing sensate clarity, and practicing comprehending the Three Characteristics directly; however one finds them best formulated.
There are lots of techniques for this, so hopefully you will find some that work for you. (DhO)
It is that the field integrates, but as everything is otherwise largely the same, most people don't notice that much is different. Things are more flowy than vibratory, and counting formations is really not the point, as that involves something that is very much going in the wrong direction. You will notice that in MCTB it mentions nothing about specific frequencies in Equanimity, and that omission is intentional.
If you want to try it, which I don't really recommend, open your eyes and count the number of times you notice the space you are sitting in, but be sure to include the count in the counting, as the whole point of formations is that they begin to include everything, including effort, meditator, meditation, analysis, and anything and everything that seems to be on this side.
It is like the flowing pulses of attention/manifestation/space/phenomena begin to recognize that they perceive themselves all the way through, as an integrated fluxing volume with various qualities that we can pick out as being what we ordinarily think of as the six sense doors but now are actually starting to notice things in a put-together, integrated, all just as and where they are sort of way, which, as it is no different in specifics from the standard way we perceive things, is missed entirely by most people.
Thus, counting formations is a very 1st vipassana jhana way of looking at the 4th jhana, sort of like writing your college application essay in crayon, sort of like having to Fred Flintstone pedal your Ferrari, sort of like talking to someone on tin cans with string connecting them as opposed to video Skype: very primitive, very missing the point.
The point is that the whole thing, the whole field, begins to become and include the meditation. This is the lesson of the 4th vipassana jhana, and so we learn to flow with the whole shifting volume of attention and everything in it, front to back, in and out, this side and that side, doer and done, knower and known, Subject and Object, all part of the whole thing, together, and this is how, when the Three Characteristics of that are perceived naturally, totally, of the whole of everything in that moment of the sense field, then Stream Entry or Fruition or whatever arises. (DhO)
Attention moves around on its own. Attention moves around on its own: notice that totally, completely, fully, naturally, just as it is, in the whole field. It changes all the time: notice all of that. There is no such thing as attention, just sensations: know that all the way through. Every quality that implies attention is just more qualities: notice them all without exception until no quality can fool you in this way, as you know it to just be textures, aspects, flavors, colors, sounds, and the like, just sensations, simply sensations.
Everything that appears to be "this side": notice all of that until you are naturally really good at it, every pattern, every familiar and unfamiliar thing. Everything that appears to be "that side": notice all of that until you are naturally really good at it, every pattern, every familiar and unfamiliar thing.
If you don't have stream entry, you know you have to develop the above further, so do that and keep at it. You know you are missing something, figure out what. It is typically some "core process", such as figuring, wanting, striving, analyzing, expecting, fearing, wondering, and the like: those are all just more sensations: know these patterns as they arise until naturally they are seen as they are. By practice, it becomes habit. When it is habit, then it happens on its own. When it happens on its own, that is one less thing not clearly perceived, one more step closer to being clear about right here.
Simply, easily, clearly, naturally, completely, fully, honestly, devoid of ideals beyond just being with whatever shows up as it changes and fluxes and moves around and vanishes and appears. All the way down, all the way up, all the way through the center. (DhO)
Stream Entry: a short, straight instruction. Stream Entry is possible. Accept this moment and perceive it clearly again and again and again. Ground all future-goal-map stuff in this sensate moment, in this field of experience, and see all of those maps, goals, etc. as part of what is happening here at a sensate level: this is key! Settle into this moment really diligently: it is a paradox, but reminding yourself again and again that being here now is how it is done helps. (DhO)
Stream Entry: an alternative (complementary) instruction. Notice space, notice volume, notice everything all the way through that volume, all the way through your head, notice what is noticing, those sensations that seem to be you, notice that they are part of space, notice how they shift in response to that sort of question of what they are, notice what that new pattern of sensations is that seems to be noticing them, notice the physical and mental sensations all together, but broadly, widely, flowingly, allowing subtle tensions to show and resolve themselves, allowing the wide open thing to finally synchronize and disappear!
Read the section on the Three Doors. Incline to vanishing. Incline to comprehend everything as it happens all at once. Incline to a discontinuity that is not any of that but is found by simultaneously comprehending and getting into everything, like really buying into the whole thing, really feeling the honest, whole, human thing, the wanting, the tension, the center itself and all the rest, not with great effort, not with totally slack effort, just normal, ordinary, non-disruptive effort, like it was as easy and normal and natural as it actually is. Just staying on anything subtly fluxing in a volumetric way is good, regardless of what it is. Integrate more and more of what feels like your side into the whole field of what is being comprehended, doing this gently and easily, including that tendency to try to integrate things. (DhO)
Path in a very ultra-simplified nutshell. Path in a very ultra-simplified nutshell: some specific layer of experience is now permanently hard-wired to auto-comprehend itself as it is, straightforwardly, directly, clearly, at a sensate level.
Initially, these layers are not that large, and what is changed can be hard to explain, though people will report various effects, with more extensive descriptions found places such as www.mctb.org . Later paths apply to broader layers of experience that are more obvious, more panoramic, more inclusive, and finally, at the last path, every sensation auto-comprehends its true nature automatically.
Paths are a complex topic, so this treatment is extremely superficial. It does, however, point to practical points of method, and that's the important part.
By noticing ordinary sensations clearly, one begins to build the wiring, the habit, the tendency to have the ordinary sensations of one's current layer of mind be clear. By noticing the Three Characteristics of those same ordinary sensations, one takes that clarity and uses it to build the wiring, the habit, the tendency to have the sensations that occur notice their true nature.
When these have been done sufficiently for that layer of mind, it can suddenly flip to a mode where that carefully-built wiring comes to life, it seems, turns on, and, once it turns on, that layer of experience auto-comprehends itself. There are multiple layers, generally, though counting layers is often very unhelpful. What is helpful is simply practicing sensate clarity, and practicing comprehending the Three Characteristics directly; however one finds them best formulated.
There are lots of techniques for this, so hopefully you will find some that work for you. (DhO)
How long to achieve Stream-Entry on retreat. (Circa 2009) if you can (have) cross(ed) the A&P you should be able to do this on retreat in 1-2 weeks, usually less than that, perhaps a few days, and then getting through the Dark Night is largely a question of accepting suffering, keeping on practicing according to instructions, letting attention get wider, and then getting to Equanimity, which itself just requires wide, consistent, strong, accepting, inclusive investigation and presence.
Stream Entry: Daniel’s answers to an online survey. (1) What was your meditative experience before and leading up to 1st Path?
About 6 spontaneous A&Ps in daily life without formal training, then one 9-day vipassana retreat with Christopher Titmuss et al at IMS, tried to sit an hour or so each day after that, one 17-day retreat at Bodh Gaya with CT, sat about 30 minutes each day after that, one 14-day retreat at MBMC with Sayadaw U Raginda, sat at least 1-2 hours each day after that, then got it on day 6 of a 27-day retreat at Bodh Gaya with Christopher Titmuss et al again.
(2) How would you describe your meditative style/technique which ultimately led to 1st Path [Goenka scanning, noting, choiceless awareness, etc., a combination of techniques, etc.]?
Basically pure noting to power up to the A&P, pure direct vibrations in the A&P, pure noting when (I) fell back in Dark Night, then in Equanimity very direct full-field inquiry with relaxed general noting at times. Was sitting/walking in 45-minutes blocks on that 4th retreat.
(3) How many hours were you practicing a day when you finally achieved 1st Path?
Was day 6 of a retreat with about 15 hours/day of practice, something like that, but was noting from the moment I got up until the moment I went to sleep during those phases when I was noting, and then trying to maintain direct mindfulness during those periods when direct practice seemed best (like during the A&P when buzzy, fun vibrational interference patterns covered my body when standing in line for lunch, that sort of thing).
(4) Did you maintain continuity of practice throughout the day when you finally achieved 1st Path; meaning, did you maintain mindfulness throughout the day, how and when, etc.?
I stayed on retreat for 21 days practicing nearly every moment I was awake.
(5) What was your samatha vs vipassana balance when you finally achieved 1st Path [for example, did you do straight-up vipassana, did you do a combination of samatha and vipassana practices, did you achieve hard jhanas before starting vipassana, etc.]?
Pure vipassana.
(6) What was your retreat experience before and leading up to 1st Path?
See answer to question 1) above.
(7) What was your biggest stumbling block along the way to 1st Path? How did you ultimately overcome this?
Not knowing what I was doing: overcome by good instruction and straightforward, powerful techniques.
(8) Besides Daniel's book MCTB, what texts, resources, etc., were truly useful for your practice and were instrumental in finally achieving 1st Path? Did you work with any meditation teachers?
I actually hadn't written MCTB when I got Stream Entry, so I couldn't have read it yet ;) I read Practical Insight Meditation until I felt I knew it cold, having obtained it on my retreat at MBMC about 7 months before Stream Entry. I also read a book called Buddhism in Translations, by Henry Clark Warren: it has some suttas in it. I also had access to the Visuddhimagga for a brief period during that time at a dharma library, and a book called Path to Deliverance by Nyanatiloka. I got meditation instruction from Christopher Titmuss, Sharda Rogell, Subhana, Yvonne Weier, Fred Von Allman, Norman Feldman, Sayadaw U Raginda, the abbot of the Niponji temple in Bodh Gaya (I have forgotten his name), Katie (last name escapes me): (she?) had lots of retreat time in Burma and wandered through Bodh Gaya and was kind enough to help me when the Dark Night was at its worst and I had no idea what the hell was going on, Kenneth Folk and Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, in roughly that order. Many thanks to all of them and all the support people who worked to make those retreat happen.
(9) What do you most wish you'd known when you were working to achieve 1st Path that you know now?
More about the maps and more about how doable it was. Most: how close I had gotten on my 3rd retreat, and how much the Dark Night can screw up your life and what to do to reduce the effects of that between my 3rd and 4th retreat.
(10) What is your best piece of advice to pre-1st Path practitioners?
Have faith that it can be done and practice very well regardless of the sensations or stuff: the techniques themselves are so powerful and direct, and for those who can keep to the simple instructions, things can be very rapid. Keep in contact with those who have done it and hang out in person with them when possible. (DhO)
Stream Entry common mimics. I like this simple map: Kenneth Folk’s “An Idiots Guide to Dharma Diagnosis”. A few things worth mentioning are the common mimics and things that get mistaken for other things. A short list of the big ones:
The A&P can have qualities like that, and can be associated with deep unitive feelings, but it tends to have a lot more associated with it, though I know of one example where it didn't, and trying to make it come back and failing is a very common post A&P thing. (DhO)
Stream Entry and No-Self. It is true that there is the 10 Fetter criteria of something called "personality belief", which has been eliminated in theory in stream enterers. It is a subtle thing, but important. Having viewed Conformity knowledge, a stream enterer, particularly a trained one, on reflecting on what happened, can understand that there is no continuous self at an intellectual level based on memories of the pristine moment of Conformity Knowledge, but it is not a walking around experience, just something they have glimpsed for one pulse of experience. It is like getting an extremely short taste of what is truly meant by no-self. Said more specifically: Stream Entry is not the walking around elimination of some sense of self, nor is it the walking around sense of non-duality. Those are arahatship criteria, not Stream Entry criteria. (DhO)
Misleading definitions of Stream Entry. The whole, "the definition of Stream Entry is not fixed" thing is true in some senses, but very misleading in others. First, most of the contemporary definers that get referenced in these debates didn't train well and thoroughly in traditions that use the term, aren't familiar with the textual references, haven't often even seem to have attained to Stream Entry, and, if they did, never got trained in its full capabilities, are poor phenomenologists, have poor criteria due to poor training or coming from a not very phenomenologically sophisticated tradition, etc.
It would be a bit like if lots of people started defining algebra and basic arithmetic as "calculus" based on the colloquial definition of the term, which is often taken to just mean "math" or even just "decision making", as in, "The calculus of that relationship just doesn't work out."
In this way, recently the term "Stream Entry" has been badly abused, misconstrued, misinterpreted, often by people who were primarily trained in Zen, Mahayana, or Buddhist strains that, while ostensibly Theravada, were so heavily influenced by those traditions that they have lost the key meanings of the term. If you really want to be grouped into that bin of those who use the term "Stream Entry" that way, well, that's your choice.
So, while it is true that people can use words any way they wish, and often do, realize that there really is this attainable thing called "Stream Entry" that really does perform entirely as advertised, and really has all the correct phenomenology, really does impart the advertised capabilities, really does meet the traditional, functional definition as used in the tradition it actually comes from, just like there really is something called "calculus" that involves actually taking the derivatives and integrals of equations.
Speaking of weird definitions of "Stream Entry" and Goenka, wow, do they have some extremely odd conceptions of it per conversations with some in the organization. Goenka himself got a very incomplete, limited, naive, odd transmission of a very small part of the vastness that is the Theravada in its old-school best, and then that got warped by the Boomers, who were basically swamped by massive amounts of cross-traditional idealism that got smashed together into an incomprehensible nightmarishly garish version of spiritual development, and that is what passes for a definition of "steam entry" in the Goenka tradition.
I do know a few people who may have actually gotten "Stream Entry" in the classical sense of Fruitions, cycling, ñana control, permanent transformations, and all of that from practicing in the Goenka tradition, though often with some custom modifications that involved going wider and more natural, but the Goenka tradition not only doesn't know how to recognize Stream Entry, but, despite the frequent reassurances that they are "bound to be successful", very few are, and, when they actually are, it is a total disruption to their sense of hierarchy and culture that the tradition really can't handle it within itself, which is frighteningly ironic and a seriously tragic state of affairs for the largest vipassana organization in the World. (DhO)
I see many people go on long retreats with the notion that they have lots of time so they don't practice as well as people on shorter retreats. On the other hand, a long retreat gives people the ability to have time to fall back from Equanimity to the Dark Night if they can't land stream entry in the first shot, gain momentum again, get back up to Equanimity once or a few times, and try again.
Each time we cross from the Dark Night to Equanimity we learn more about how to do that. Each time we get into Equanimity we go a little deeper into it and get better at staying present in it. As we build up those muscles, we get closer. Some can do it on a straight shot, but most of us have to walk up and down the path a bit before crossing over.
As The Prisoner (Tarin Greco) so rightly says, go on the longest retreat for which you think you can practice well.
I cannot express in words how great it is to read Tarin's excellent advice (on how to schedule a solo retreat): (Tarin's:) Keep routines simple. Keep food simple. Be strict with yourself. Stay on schedule. Stay focused and disciplined. Do not slack. Too much effort is better than too little effort in almost all cases. Keep going no matter what. If you find yourself not on track, get back on it immediately, there is no time to waste. Note discouragement rather than taking it to heart. Take reality head-on. Develop an independent attitude and do whatever it takes.
Here's an example schedule:
4.30 awaken
5.00 walk
6.00 sit
7.00 breakfast
7.30 walk
8.00 sit
9.00 walk
10.00 sit
11.00 walk
12.00 lunch, shower, rest, sit, etc
13.00 walk
14.00 sit
15.00 walk
16.00 sit
17.00 walk
18.00 sit
19.00 walk
20.00 sit
21.00 walk
22.00 sit
22.30 recline
And an example set of reminders to have stuck on the wall:
1) don't indulge in your crap!
2) when in doubt or struggling: note/hit and accept pain.
3) if you have a question, the answer is in the three characteristics.
4) be mindful during transitions between activities.
5) analysis is not the same as practice.
6) practice at all times when awake.
7) stick to the schedule!
8) remember how precious these moments are and how much the dark night sucks.
9) when alone, practice just as hard; this is for you. (DhO)
Stream Entry: Daniel’s answers to an online survey. (1) What was your meditative experience before and leading up to 1st Path?
About 6 spontaneous A&Ps in daily life without formal training, then one 9-day vipassana retreat with Christopher Titmuss et al at IMS, tried to sit an hour or so each day after that, one 17-day retreat at Bodh Gaya with CT, sat about 30 minutes each day after that, one 14-day retreat at MBMC with Sayadaw U Raginda, sat at least 1-2 hours each day after that, then got it on day 6 of a 27-day retreat at Bodh Gaya with Christopher Titmuss et al again.
(2) How would you describe your meditative style/technique which ultimately led to 1st Path [Goenka scanning, noting, choiceless awareness, etc., a combination of techniques, etc.]?
Basically pure noting to power up to the A&P, pure direct vibrations in the A&P, pure noting when (I) fell back in Dark Night, then in Equanimity very direct full-field inquiry with relaxed general noting at times. Was sitting/walking in 45-minutes blocks on that 4th retreat.
(3) How many hours were you practicing a day when you finally achieved 1st Path?
Was day 6 of a retreat with about 15 hours/day of practice, something like that, but was noting from the moment I got up until the moment I went to sleep during those phases when I was noting, and then trying to maintain direct mindfulness during those periods when direct practice seemed best (like during the A&P when buzzy, fun vibrational interference patterns covered my body when standing in line for lunch, that sort of thing).
(4) Did you maintain continuity of practice throughout the day when you finally achieved 1st Path; meaning, did you maintain mindfulness throughout the day, how and when, etc.?
I stayed on retreat for 21 days practicing nearly every moment I was awake.
(5) What was your samatha vs vipassana balance when you finally achieved 1st Path [for example, did you do straight-up vipassana, did you do a combination of samatha and vipassana practices, did you achieve hard jhanas before starting vipassana, etc.]?
Pure vipassana.
(6) What was your retreat experience before and leading up to 1st Path?
See answer to question 1) above.
(7) What was your biggest stumbling block along the way to 1st Path? How did you ultimately overcome this?
Not knowing what I was doing: overcome by good instruction and straightforward, powerful techniques.
(8) Besides Daniel's book MCTB, what texts, resources, etc., were truly useful for your practice and were instrumental in finally achieving 1st Path? Did you work with any meditation teachers?
I actually hadn't written MCTB when I got Stream Entry, so I couldn't have read it yet ;) I read Practical Insight Meditation until I felt I knew it cold, having obtained it on my retreat at MBMC about 7 months before Stream Entry. I also read a book called Buddhism in Translations, by Henry Clark Warren: it has some suttas in it. I also had access to the Visuddhimagga for a brief period during that time at a dharma library, and a book called Path to Deliverance by Nyanatiloka. I got meditation instruction from Christopher Titmuss, Sharda Rogell, Subhana, Yvonne Weier, Fred Von Allman, Norman Feldman, Sayadaw U Raginda, the abbot of the Niponji temple in Bodh Gaya (I have forgotten his name), Katie (last name escapes me): (she?) had lots of retreat time in Burma and wandered through Bodh Gaya and was kind enough to help me when the Dark Night was at its worst and I had no idea what the hell was going on, Kenneth Folk and Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, in roughly that order. Many thanks to all of them and all the support people who worked to make those retreat happen.
(9) What do you most wish you'd known when you were working to achieve 1st Path that you know now?
More about the maps and more about how doable it was. Most: how close I had gotten on my 3rd retreat, and how much the Dark Night can screw up your life and what to do to reduce the effects of that between my 3rd and 4th retreat.
(10) What is your best piece of advice to pre-1st Path practitioners?
Have faith that it can be done and practice very well regardless of the sensations or stuff: the techniques themselves are so powerful and direct, and for those who can keep to the simple instructions, things can be very rapid. Keep in contact with those who have done it and hang out in person with them when possible. (DhO)
Stream Entry common mimics. I like this simple map: Kenneth Folk’s “An Idiots Guide to Dharma Diagnosis”. A few things worth mentioning are the common mimics and things that get mistaken for other things. A short list of the big ones:
- The A&P fools many into thinking it was Stream Entry.
- The formless realms do the same thing.
- The Three Characteristics and the Dark Night do share some commonalities, causing some confusion at times, though as stated above, if your body really hurts, probably 3C.
- Occasionally the A&P and Equanimity get mixed up.
- Mind and Body can be so profound for some people on rare occasions as to be mistaken for things as high as Equanimity and much further.
The A&P can have qualities like that, and can be associated with deep unitive feelings, but it tends to have a lot more associated with it, though I know of one example where it didn't, and trying to make it come back and failing is a very common post A&P thing. (DhO)
Stream Entry and No-Self. It is true that there is the 10 Fetter criteria of something called "personality belief", which has been eliminated in theory in stream enterers. It is a subtle thing, but important. Having viewed Conformity knowledge, a stream enterer, particularly a trained one, on reflecting on what happened, can understand that there is no continuous self at an intellectual level based on memories of the pristine moment of Conformity Knowledge, but it is not a walking around experience, just something they have glimpsed for one pulse of experience. It is like getting an extremely short taste of what is truly meant by no-self. Said more specifically: Stream Entry is not the walking around elimination of some sense of self, nor is it the walking around sense of non-duality. Those are arahatship criteria, not Stream Entry criteria. (DhO)
Misleading definitions of Stream Entry. The whole, "the definition of Stream Entry is not fixed" thing is true in some senses, but very misleading in others. First, most of the contemporary definers that get referenced in these debates didn't train well and thoroughly in traditions that use the term, aren't familiar with the textual references, haven't often even seem to have attained to Stream Entry, and, if they did, never got trained in its full capabilities, are poor phenomenologists, have poor criteria due to poor training or coming from a not very phenomenologically sophisticated tradition, etc.
It would be a bit like if lots of people started defining algebra and basic arithmetic as "calculus" based on the colloquial definition of the term, which is often taken to just mean "math" or even just "decision making", as in, "The calculus of that relationship just doesn't work out."
In this way, recently the term "Stream Entry" has been badly abused, misconstrued, misinterpreted, often by people who were primarily trained in Zen, Mahayana, or Buddhist strains that, while ostensibly Theravada, were so heavily influenced by those traditions that they have lost the key meanings of the term. If you really want to be grouped into that bin of those who use the term "Stream Entry" that way, well, that's your choice.
So, while it is true that people can use words any way they wish, and often do, realize that there really is this attainable thing called "Stream Entry" that really does perform entirely as advertised, and really has all the correct phenomenology, really does impart the advertised capabilities, really does meet the traditional, functional definition as used in the tradition it actually comes from, just like there really is something called "calculus" that involves actually taking the derivatives and integrals of equations.
Speaking of weird definitions of "Stream Entry" and Goenka, wow, do they have some extremely odd conceptions of it per conversations with some in the organization. Goenka himself got a very incomplete, limited, naive, odd transmission of a very small part of the vastness that is the Theravada in its old-school best, and then that got warped by the Boomers, who were basically swamped by massive amounts of cross-traditional idealism that got smashed together into an incomprehensible nightmarishly garish version of spiritual development, and that is what passes for a definition of "steam entry" in the Goenka tradition.
I do know a few people who may have actually gotten "Stream Entry" in the classical sense of Fruitions, cycling, ñana control, permanent transformations, and all of that from practicing in the Goenka tradition, though often with some custom modifications that involved going wider and more natural, but the Goenka tradition not only doesn't know how to recognize Stream Entry, but, despite the frequent reassurances that they are "bound to be successful", very few are, and, when they actually are, it is a total disruption to their sense of hierarchy and culture that the tradition really can't handle it within itself, which is frighteningly ironic and a seriously tragic state of affairs for the largest vipassana organization in the World. (DhO)
On Stream Entry, unification of mind and the Seven Factors of Awakening. ...What stream entry is and how it should perform, vary widely. My standards involve defined, traditional criteria. Many contemporaries will call many things stream entry that I wouldn’t, as they don’t fully perform as stream entry should as defined by the tradition I come from. Associating Culadasa’s Stage 8 with what I would call the mature end of the A&P is reasonable, but associating it with stream entry is not, in my view. Still, as I have said, plenty will call nearly anything that feels good or has some sense of lasting change to it “stream entry” or "awakening" or make up new terms that subtly or overtly imply those.
To say, “It happens differently,” to me is simply saying, “It isn’t stream entry, but we will call it that for the sake of various ulterior motives.” Again, I believe this sort of behavior short-changes those who don’t know there is something more to be had.
... It's entirely untrue that "with Progress of Insight, the mind isn't unified, but the method is consistent". Stage by stage, various parts of the mind begin to synchronize, pulse together, converge. That is the whole point of the Progress of Insight. In Mind and Body, the first vipassana jhana, the center of attention is more clear by being somewhat unified, and can perceive thoughts as thoughts clearly. In the A&P, the center of attention is much more unified, and so it becomes very powerfully able to perceive things clearly. In Equanimity, one sits on the edge of total unification, as mind, body, space, attention, everything are about to synchronize, which is what happens at true stream entry, though one must consult the other criteria to get this right, as it is very easy to get wrong diagnostically.
... (The method isn't) "simply to expose yourself to the truth over and over again until no part of the mind is un-accepting of it". It is much more than that. You might consult the section in my book called “The Seven Factors of Awakening”, found in MCTB2. It requires more than just exposure to the truth, as those truths show up in early insight stages, such as the Three Characteristics. Instead, it requires a very profound balancing of many positive factors of mind and a deep appreciation of those truths not just for objects but for space, attention, consciousness, etc. and even regarding qualities such as Equanimity. This is often lost on many practitioners, but it is a crucial point.
... (If a given method states that it) "doesn't rely on unification or repetition, but rather on a lack of struggle", (remember that in) the Seven Factors of Awakening, lack of struggle is cultivated explicitly in Tranquility, Concentration – which, past the first jhana, involves the dropping of nearly all applied and sustained attention – , and Equanimity, but it is also cultivated in Mindfulness – noticing what is there – , Investigation – noticing the truth of what is there – , Energy – making effort to be present just to what is going on right then – , and even Rapture – to be enraptured by what one is experiencing –.
One who thinks that the method is about struggle is missing much about the method done well, though cultivating the skills to clearly perceive what it going on and to cultivate those positive, present-oriented factors may involve significant work, but that is not the same as struggle, necessarily...
In insight practice, one cultivates positive qualities, clarity, investigation, equanimity, tranquility, being present, and is convinced of the truth of things by one’s direct own experience, with “direct” here being a synonym for “non-symbolic” in its best possible sense, in which it isn't always used.
... Definitions of stream entry vary widely, and I expect stream entry to perform as traditionally described in all aspects. One of those aspects is cycles, repeat Fruitions, and all of that. I see many people getting diagnosed with stream entry that don’t meet the full criteria at all.
This is not “my method”. These methods are very traditional, Theravada methods, and are clearly over two thousand years old, well-refined, well-tested, well-described in terms of how they function and what they lead to.
Further, to say that I “discourage optimism” is also wildly off the mark. My notion is that these things can be done, that one can be excited by that possibility, that one should be excited that we live in such remarkable times that many of us have such amazing access to so many traditional, time-tested techniques, that we have great living masters we can study with, and that we should feel immense gratitude for these opportunities.
However, I also believe in not watering insights down to such a degree that even relatively low-level though important insights get made to be much more than they are. This is not a lack of optimism, this is advocating for reasonable standards and definitions.
... Hopefully the meditation world will (someday) realize that calling every single positive stage of mind or lasting transformation “awakening”, “stream entry”, or whatever isn’t as helpful as they imagined it was.
... (I do say) what I think Stream Entry is (and what is not), and I say with more phenomenological specificity and clarity than you are likely to see written in nearly all sources. The places this is mentioned are many and various, but here are a few key ones, though you would have to read much more of the book to find them all: Conformity. These criteria need more of what comes later to balance them out, so must be taken in context: Fruition. This explains The Three Doors. This is key: Review. This one is long, but it is important: 37 models of the stages of awakening ... I would then also read some of the material in the Visuddhimagga related to the POI and Stream Entry, and, in particular, check out Chapter XX of the Visuddhimagga.
... I am not saying that steps that provide some sense of unification of mind are a bad thing, I am saying that overcalling the stages of unification as being more than what they are is a bad thing, and I am saying that overcalling stream entry when it doesn’t meet all the traditional criteria or lead to all the capabilities a true stream enterer has is a bad thing. Each stage of insight is a good thing, which is why one would do good practices to cause them to arise, and each step in putting the pieces of the puzzle together are a good thing, and each vipassana jhana, which brings more of the mind together in clarity is a good thing. Check out one of my favorite Suttas, and notice how many times something like the phrase "unification of mind" occurs, and what is then done with that positive quality: Anupada Sutta: One After Another .
... Overcalling early, beneficial, positive insights as being much more than they are shortchanges those who might just stop there and not realize that there might be vastly more than they had any idea was possible.
Without real stream entry, most will end up like those doing large amounts of horizontal work with the stage of Equanimity before first path, or will just end up dropping back to the A&P, Dark Night, Equanimity cycle again and again. I get emails and calls from people all the time who got something oversold to them, overcalled, and it doesn’t really perform as it should, and they eventually start to think, “Hey, wait a second, this isn’t really all that I want, this really doesn’t seem to be enough, this really isn’t all I hoped it would be,” and so start looking around for more. Some can be reached and shown that the traditional stages and paths are really doable in this lifetime, and that is true optimism, and also helpful for those who wish for those deeper, lasting levels of attainment.
... Scripted, self-induced hypnotic delusion isn’t the same as real insight, as much as some people who get really good at scripting people and hypnotizing them wish it would be, though, for some purposes, the effect may be the same. That’s a key point...
... I also fundamentally object to the notion that the development of attention is so system-dependent or tradition-dependent and not intrinsic to how attention develops. Given that I see people describing clearly going through the stages of insight who have never meditated, who are doing yoga, chi gong, energy work, massage and physical therapy, childbirth, entheogenic experimentation and ritual use, and a whole host of other modalities and in a whole host of other situations, I highly disagree with the notion that it is so modifiable by just following the correct spiritual leader or subscribing to the correct concepts.
I watched everyone who followed TMI go through the stages of insight while I was teaching there at Dharma Treasure for a month, in order, predictably. The difference in comparison to the Mahasi practitioners and those doing candle flame (two very different techniques) was that their progress was a bit more slow, their highs a bit lower, their lows a bit higher, their weird a bit less weird, and their phenomenology just a bit muddier. However, the basic pattern was very clear and had the same freakish predictability that I see in every other meditaiton context, retreat setting, etc. So, yes, some mild differences do occur by technique, with the general tradeoff being that if you want to progress a bit more slowly and perhaps gently you can do a technique that builds in a bit more cushioning, and that's a reasonable choice to make if you want that, but the pattern is the same. (DhO)
Cycling is totally normal for everyone. Cycling through states of sadness, fear, misery, disenchantment, anxiety, irritation, and the like are totally normal things for everyone, including meditators, and, in fact, these are some of the standard things that enlightened beings cycle through all the time. They can get a lot better, a lot easier to handle, a lot more clear, a lot more spacious, a lot easier to navigate, a lot easier to see the true nature of them, but that doesn't mean they don't happen. On Birth depends Old Age, Sickness, Death, Lamentation, Pain, Grief and Despair, so said the Buddha. (DhO)
Disclosing your enlightenment experience. I alienated a lot of people in my post-stream-entry high for a few months running while babbling about this stuff, though maybe 10-15 years later a very few of them had admitted that at least it gave them something to think about that was different from what they were used to, but that is a long time to wait for a very small payoff. I lost a few old friends permanently, though that may have been inevitable anyway...
... There are plenty of really kind, good, helpful, saintly, moral, generous, happy people who have nary a clue about these things, and there are plenty of really technically skilled, scholarly, meditatively talented, moderately to very enlightened people who appear to be nowhere near as impressive as the first bunch.
It nearly always seems to create division, projection, comparison, and worse.
... There are plenty of really kind, good, helpful, saintly, moral, generous, happy people who have nary a clue about these things, and there are plenty of really technically skilled, scholarly, meditatively talented, moderately to very enlightened people who appear to be nowhere near as impressive as the first bunch.
And then we have the preconceptions, the territoriality, the paradigm threats, the competition, the religious fixations, the fantastic projections, the solidity of views, and all of the rest: very easy to underestimate until you run babbling right into them, as I have done so many, many times, like a naive school kid skipping down the back alley behind a crack house.
And then we have the fact that it is really, really, really hard to not have some subtle or overt arrogance and condescension somewhere in your presentation, even if that is just the alienating use of specialized terminology, or the knowledge of the concepts and theory you use to frame and define your realization, even if it is only something that benign, which it generally isn't. (DhO)
Fruitions
Unknowning Events. There are plenty of meditative experiences that can create what Bill Hamilton called "unknowning events", meaning moments when consciousness just goes away and then comes back. Most are not actual cessations. The short list:
- Falling asleep or nodding off a bit: by far the most common.
- State shifts between insight stages and/or jhanas: happen at the end of the out breath, can invove the sense of transitioning from one state or phase of practice to another, often involve the sense of a blip out or pause or something like that.
- The Arising and Passing Away: which can occur in many contexts and take many forms. It can often involve the sense that consciousness has paused and restarted or dropped into something that is very hard to perceive and then come out again.
- Dissolution: often involves the sense of going into something pause-like, vanishing, disappearing, falling into some nothingness, and the like.
- Equanimity: can involve these sort of head-droppy things when it feels like falling asleep but isn't, feels like there was a gap but it doesn't meet all the Fruition/Three Doors criteria and doesn't create path or the after-effects of path.
- Formless realms: it is not actually that uncommon for people to briefly fall into formless-realm-like experiences and then rapidly come out of them, sort of micro-jhanas, and these can be described the way you describe them.
- Fruitions: the real thing should have the right set-up, right entrance, right exit, and right after-effects, as well as no experience at all during it. If it doesn't have those, it very likely wasn't a Fruition. (DhO)
Diagnosing Fruition is a tricky business, but it benefits from the general framework of examining carefully:
(1) The Setup: What came before it, such as stages of insight, jhanas, etc. and which ones, in what apparent order, in what setting, etc.
(2) The Entrance: given that many state shifts, such as from one jhana or insight stage to the next one, can involve 3-4 rapid "impulsions" or mind moments that lead to a shift which can appear to have some sort of hard to comprehent glitchy something in between, the best discrimininating microphenomenological advice I have it so look for the Three Doors as described in MCTB.org and involves the sense that all attention centers and all of experience converged together to result in perfect comprehension of all of experience at once in a way that totally demolishes Subject/Object lines through inclusion, though numerous stages might have that later aspect presenting pretty strongly, including strong A&P events and other state transitions.
(3) The Thing Itself: given that the mind has this tendency to want to make sense of things, determining what was a very highly incomprenhensible glitch from a true frame-cut, as occurs in Fruition, is tricky, and this appears to be at least moderately prone to wishful thinking and scripting, but, still, true frame-cuts can also become easier to detect if one is diligent and able to repeat this (see point 6).
(4) The Exit: meaning how exactly the mind comes out of the event and what it comes out to, which, after Fruition is a rapid, sense of a clean, refreshed restart of experience and Subject-Object dualism (in stages below arahatship).
(5) The Aftereffects: For first time Fruitions or for those at a new path, this should involve a powerful, blooming afterglow of a very particular "flavor" or body-feel, as well as new capabilities that come with a new path/Review phase. For repeat Fruitions, this afterglow will likely become diminished with time, but can get build up and become stronger if one repeats multiple Fruitions closely in a row.
(6) This is about repetition, meaning perhaps the ability to repeat what appears to be the event, and go through points 1-5 again and again, to determine if it really seems to hold up. (DhO)
To say that it is in the Mahasi tradition that this occurs could be read to imply one of the following:
- That the Mahasi tradition is the Theravada tradition: this is clearly untrue, as there are many strains of the Theravada that are not explicitly Mahasi-influenced.
- That the Mahasi tradition is the only tradition that represents the true Theravada and that the others are not valid: this is clearly untrue, and would garner great nashing of teeth among other Theravada strains.
- That the Mahasi tradition is the only one that incorporates the Abhidhamma: this is clearly not true, as many Theravada strains give great value to the Abhidhamma.
- That the Mahasi tradition is the only one among those Theravada traditions that incorporate the Abhidhamma to include the part in the Abhidhamma about awakening and its fine-grained phenomenology: this is clearly untrue.
It is true that some have Fruitions/Cessations without knowing what it was, but it is also true that plenty of people have experiences they think were Fruitions/Cessations that simply weren't, and this latter phenomenon is vastly more common.
… As to the perfectly understandable question regarding Fruitions/Cessations (not Nirodha Samapatti) being a criterion for Stream Entry but occurring after Path, one has to realize that in Abhidhammic phenomenology, as well as contemporarily verified phenomenology, the three stages of Conformity Knowledge (insight stage 12), Change of Lineage (stage 13), and Path (stage 14) occur as a package, taking three very rapid sequential mind moments, and leading immediately and unfailingly to Fruition (stage 15). So, once one gets to Conformity Knowledge, one immediately in the next moment goes to Change of Lineage (the moment that changes one into a stream enterer), then Path (the result of Change of Lineage, meaning the first moment of Stream Entry) in the next moment, then Fruition in the next moment, without any breaks, pauses or interruptions in that rapid, transformative process.
Thus, as one can't get Path (Stream Entry) without the immediate next moment being Fruition, Fruition (what we could call "cessation") can reasonably be considered a requirement for Stream Entry, as this package only comes as a package, with the whole package taking less than a second in practice, and so anyone that you are talking about asking, "Are they a stream enterer?", will by definition have had at least one Fruition unless someone somehow slipped the question in during the few microseconds between Path and Fruition, a situation of such brief duration and resolved by just waiting a few microseconds for them to have their Fruition, so, in diagnostic practice, when asking, "Is someone a stream enterer?", one typically looks for the entrance to Fruition (the three packaged moments), the gap that is Fruition, and the emergence from Fruition, as these tend to stand out, as do the transformations and capabilities that occur as a result of Stream Entry.
The true dropping of the illusion of a fixed, permament, independent, stable identity, that doesn't happen until arahatship, so is not a criterion for Stream Entry.
… Traditionally, you find the word Nibbana in the Pali Canon Sutta Pitaka (basket of suttas) pointing explicitly to arahantship, aka fourth path, and in the Abhidhamma the additional meaning of Fruition is found, though it is easily possible to read some suttas as having that meaning also, though this discrepancy is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Sutta Pitaka that I am aware of. Stated more simply, Nibbana in the Pali Canon tradition means both arahantship and Fruition, depending on context. (DhO)
It's very hard to experience the detailed phenomenology of the Three Doors as described in MCTB. [Daniel: this tone is a bit too harsh for non-DhO readers. But as this topic is your trademark IMO, never seen such detailed description in Buddhist texts, I really don't know what you want. One possibility could be to replace this entry with other text you have written on the topic.] Chasing my degree of phenomenology (of The Three Doors) has vexed many, including people who were very good meditators and were getting Fruitions. I could give many explanations for this, but the one I honestly think is most likely is that I had a mix of fervent obsession with this that burned fiercely hot for years and years and that was combined with what is probably some unusual, perhaps freakish, inborn talent for noticing how various meditative phenomena happen. I was out to prove the shit out of myself and my meditative abilities. Keeping to current forum themes, it was utter balls-to-the-wall alpha-male posturing gone haywire that just happened to be channeled into something extremely skillful.
For better or for worse, it looks like empirical evidence shows that, if you want to experience these things with that same level of clarity, you are going to have to work very hard for it for a long time like I did and also be gifted. There is a reason that nobody has ever before written the level of broad, detailed and relatively comprehensive descriptions about these things that I have.
I realize that this may sound like staggering arrogance, and perhaps it is, but it is a lot more useful to you than just that would imply, as it is at once a challenge and a warning: the challenge is that it can be done and the door is open to any who want to try, and the warning is that you had better be willing to go through these things thousands of times with a truly fanatical level of care about it over decades to get to the level I did, or you are likely to be disappointed.
Given what I know now, I honestly wouldn't bother unless such a project truly calls to the depths of your non-existent soul, like it called to me. Now that it has been written down, it doesn't have to be done again unless you are just that curious and really feel driven to see it all that clearly for yourself. (DhO)
Fruition criteria, falling asleep, hypnogogia, theta states and other stuff. The setup, entrance, exit, and afterglow criteria are all discussed in serious detail in MCTB, found in the wiki page of this site, and MCTB2 at www.mctb.org … Look in the Progress of Insight section and then in the Three Doors section, as well as the chapter that follows that talks about Stream Entry, called various things, including "Was that Emptiness?" in the MCTB1 and "What Was That?" in MCTB2.
- Sleepiness and sleep: People fall asleep all the time and don't know it. I have heard people sitting up snoring in meditation halls numerous times and they had no idea they had fallen asleep during their sit until someone either wakes them then or mentions it to them sometime after their sit. I have been in bed with people who were certain that they hadn't slept at all yet who had been snoring for hours and totally asleep, and they neither knew they went to sleep or woke up. Sleep is an extremely common reason for people to lose time in meditation and life in general.
- Hypnogogia: It is typically related to the strange images that occur in the territory of the border of waking and sleep, but other odd things can happen there also, including but not limited to traveling out of body, various inspired creative ideas, and odd time distortions. While one might blanketly call the territory hypnogogic, in reality it is not a homogenous, single state and has grades, shades and variants, as anyone who has spent a lot of time playing in that territory has noticed.
- Theta states. When not sleeping, Theta States are associated with all sorts of things, such as those in float tanks (sometimes called sensory deprivation tanks) saying things like, "Wow, that whole 2 hour float seemed to take ten minutes!", and yet they are 100% sure they were not asleep, never turned over, never went under, are sure they kept consciousness the whole time. I have noticed time distortion where long periods of time seemed very short, particularly in float tanks but also in meditation, and been 100% sure I was awake for the whole thing. At least the floaters often call these very deep states that don't seem to be sleep "theta states". Theta waves are more active in REM sleep, hypnosis, and even possibly fire walking trances, if my internet searches are valid, which they might not be. I claim no particular expertise in EEG interpretation, so, if you are an expert, your knowledge might trump mine in this case.
- Other Stuff. The problem is that not all states are easily classifiable, various flavors of the things above and states that might not easily fit into those categories. Time distortion is talked about in Culadasa's book The Mind Illuminated in attacks of severe dullness, for example. Dissociation leading to unnaturally long, peaceful or time-missing sits is discussed in Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness as a defense mechanism against trauma. I have had time distortion in the oddest settings, such as driving. For example, I was driving home alone from Maryland to North Carolina after running sound for a band until 2am and packing up until about 4am (and after a long week of work). It was about a 6-hour drive total. I was driving through Richmond, Virginia at 8am or so, and the next thing I know I am pulling into my driveway little more than 2 hours later, which is about how long it takes to drive from Richmond, VA to Chapel Hill, NC. The gap had nothing at all in it. No memories, no time, nothing. Somehow I navigated an interstate in a car at highway speeds with no obvious problems but my brain had no trace of it stored. It freaked me out at the time and made me seriously question my exhausted driving habits. What state is that? Was I sleep driving? Then there are drugs. The ER nurses I worked with would tell all these amazing stories of things that happened to them on Ambien that they found out about the next day. One made her entire kitchen into something like a giant thing of nachos, with chips, salsa, queso, and guacamole smeared everywhere, on the cabinets, counters, stove, floor, ceiling, dishes, etc. but had absolute no memory of this. This is one of the more polite examples. What state is that? How would you classify it? I am not saying you were doing drugs, dissociating, exhausted, or anything like that when meditating, just mentioning that there is a lot weird stuff out there, some of which may be related, but some of which clearly has its own aspects. (DhO)
That doesn't mean that what you are having is Fruitions or not, and some people aren't as impressed with them as others. However, that you think they are not means that they likely aren't. If they don't meet the criteria, be appropriately skeptical.
Other questions, as there are more criteria, involve asking "Am I a stream enterer?" Asking this looks to see if you cycle easily, rapidly, naturally, up through the stages of insight? Also, is there some fundamental reduction in suffering? Some stages can fool one into thinking they are cycling through complete cycles. Some stages, such as the A&P and Equanimity, can produce deep changes that some will think are permanent "traits", but one must sort those out, and that is not always easy, as they are common Stream Entry mimics.
If you don't get the sense that the Fruitions are in some way showing you something insightful about the true nature of experience, that is concerning, and, while you might just have very high standards for what insight should be, it also is very possible they just aren't Fruitions.
The best thing so is to keep an open mind, practice diligently without much attention to mapping but a lot of attention to what actually happens, and keep practicing clearly.
If they really are Fruitions, you are getting the benefit even if you don't think they are. If they are not Fruitions, best not to mistake them for Fruitions. So, given a choice, be skeptical, as it is much less likely to cause problems than overcalling your attainments. (DhO)
In A&P, some people – but certainly not everyone – can experience a pause, blip, glitch, gap-like thing, silence, black space, void-like depth, or something else like that at the bottom of the out breath at points during the A&P phase, as well as Dissolution, and some other transitions. These non-Fruition but very hard to comprehend, often seemingly formless, sometimes seemingly timeless or severely time-distorted events can be confusing, particularly to people who know the maps and are wondering if they were Fruitions. I have had numerous events like that along the way during various A&Ps, but definitely not all of them by any means, and some people never notice anything like that. (DhO)
Fruition duration: two hints. While duration has never been my strong suit, Bill Hamilton apparently could stay in Fruition for over an hour.
- Hint #1: According to him, he would spend hours reigning in the mind, calming it, pacifying it, smoothing it, preparing it to drop into something stable for a long time.
- Hint #2: Stronger concentration makes everything like this easier, and, by strong, I mean the sort of concentration that people get when they are, say, 180-250+ hours or so of actual practice time into an intensive retreat. It is not that some can't likely do duration in daily life, but, like Nirodha Samapatti, not many can, and those who can are likely those with unusual concentration skills. (DhO)
I have had thousands of Fruitions in formal meditation that utterly lacked those sorts of hard, definite, external temporal reference points, but, given how long the sit lasted and the setup lasted, couldn't possibly have lasted that long, but I had no reference points as to how long the Fruition lasted, and they all involved the world vanishing on the out-breath (at least during those Fruitions when the breath was perceived as part of the formations that made up the entrance, which is countless, as I have often used the breath as primary object) and reappeared on an in-breath with a characteristic breathing pattern and feel to it that is distinctive and essentially noticed 100% of the time.
Lastly, there have been a much smaller number of Fruitions that occurred on the cushion that had something external like a sound with definite timing (like a song playing somewhere in the background) that hinted at duration, but, being oddly cautious as I am, none were so definitive that I could be 100% certain that duration of any consequence had occurred, and repetition of these in some controlled way has been difficult, at least for me. Of these, when the breath was part of the entrance formations, it was always ending, and the breath was always coming up when reality reappeared. Thus, I can only conclude that Fruitions appear quantized when it comes to breaths, lasting for some regular count of whole breaths, which may also be 0 (see above), or at least in my experience.
Recently, I have recorded myself meditating over 50 times with a research-grade EEG on and sometimes video that involved at least one clear, high-grade (solidly met all the criteria and had great Three Doors phenomenology) Fruition, and, what I notice is that, for some, there is this marked reduction in a lot of the brain activity that lasts perhaps 2-3 seconds. The breath is always coming up when these end, but, as I tend to be breathing pretty slowly during Fruitions, it could be that the very last part of the out breath and some brief part of the in-breath is cut off from experience during this 2-3 second possible duration.
However, there are numerous problems in definitively interpreting those meditation EEG runs, and I would be extremely hesitant to claim duration based on them. Problem one is eye blink: even with eyes closed, my eyes nearly always clinch somewhat more tightly during the entrance to a Fruition, no idea why, and this looks like an earthquake of motion artifact on EEG, clouding interpretation. Various filtering strategies also can interfere with data interpretation, so one must be cautious.
Second, reduction in brain wave activity might be part of not only Fruition but also some part of the entrance and/or exit, so this also is entirely ambiguous data.
Third, marking the precise fraction of a second of the occurrence of the entrance to and exit from Fruition as they occur is extremely difficult, given what is happening, and precise timing of marks is key for having an ability to more definitely correlate the phenomenology to the neuro (in this case EEG) and thus do proper neurophenomenology.
I am working on these problems with some high-level academic friends who have vastly more knowledge of how to handle these than I do, but the work is slow and tedious. Part of those studies will eventually involve respiratory monitoring timed with the EEG, so hopefully at some point we will have much better data to work from. In the meantime, it is all experiential.
I hope that actually has some practical value rather than just being the basis for further dogmatic argument and avoidance of experience by obsessive intellectual activity. (DhO)
If you say that Fruition didn't change anything fundamentally about suffering, it is because you have attained something else. Fruition radically transformed my brain when it happened: meditative abilities radically improved at that moment and were permanently different from then on, comprehension of fundamental dharma points was radically improved from then on, suffering was reduced, though not so much as some later paths did, and so, while whatever you did may not have changed anything or reduced suffering or cut any "fetters" however we define them, when I attained to what I attained to, it very much did. Suddenly I cycled easily through the stages of insight. Suddenly Fruitions happened again and again. Suddenly I comprehended many extremely subtle workings of the mind, and the descriptions of mind moments and impulsions in the Abhidhamma, which again you seem to find incomprehensible, were suddenly directly obvious like it is obvious that I am typing now.
Fruitions, stages, personal abilities and state shifts. The skills in Fruition vary widely between practitioners and their phases of practice. In early Review, many will have a hard time calling up Fruitions, but not all. As Review progresses, particularly on retreat, Fruitions tend to get a lot easier. As Review becomes fully mature, Fruitions tend to be easy, but not for all. As the new stages of insight begin to show up, Fruitions can get harder, particularly after the A&P and in the next Dark Night.
Some people are just naturally talented in various ways regarding Fruitions and some are not. Some people can call them up easily without much setup. Some require meditation to cycle up through the stages of insight. Some people can get multiples, meaning they get a Fruition then incline back and get more in relatively rapid succession. Some find that one Fruition satisfies and getting repeats or even generating interest in rapid repeats is difficult. Some people can get duration, in which the Fruition lasts longer than an instant to external time (as there is no internal time during a Fruition). Some people find duration elusive or impossible. The cause of this seems partially to do with depths of concentration, partially to do with inclination, and partially to do with personal wiring.
These can all vary by the stage of practice and what practices one is doing at that time and in what dose.
My own story after Stream Entry: in the first few days, I would get about one Fruition per day or so. They started getting faster after that, so maybe a few per day. They started happening off the cushion, when walking, when reclining, when eating, etc. for me pretty rapidly. I finally started to get some sense of how to incline to them, but initially I wasn't that good at doing this. Finally, after some months (now back in daily life), I learned how to just incline that way, and, a few seconds to a minute later, a Fruition would occur. This was clearly in the mature stage of Review.
One large caution: it is very easy for Stream Enterers to state shift, and strong state shifts can mimic Fruitions, occurring with eyes blinking, happen at the end of the out breath, involve changes in mental state afterwards that may be blissful or peaceful, etc. Thus, some who think they are getting Fruitions by rapid inclination are actually just having hard state-shifts, as this is easy for many stream enterers, easier than rapid Fruitions by inclination. So, be careful when evaluating Fruitions, as all shifts and drop-outs and the like that might look like them actually aren't.
Getting good at sorting out which is which typically requires a lot of time, critical analysis, and practice. Many never get to be great phenomenologists, and that is ok. You can have a lot of wisdom and personal transformation without being a great analytical, technical practitioner. (DhO)
Fruitions and experiences on entheogens. The question of the correlations between experiences on entheogens and insight meditation come up again and again. While clearly there are some things that can be correlated well and even lined up perfectly, many experiences on powerful entheogens can defy standard classification, as they either are just too far out there, occurred during such perceptual distortion as to be unclear, are not repeatable, or seem to have nothing to do with ordinary consciousness once people stop tripping, so that reference points and words fail them when attempting to make sense of what occurred.
The criteria for Fruitions involve a whole host of specifics, like what came before, the entrance, the thing itself, the exit, what follows after, as well as the expected transformations and abilities that one would expect of a stream enterer.
Said another way, to claim Fruitions is to claim at least Stream Entry, as the two go hand and hand, and then the question remains, do you meet the rest of the criteria? You can find them here: What Was That?
You can also look before that section to the part about The Three Doors to get a sense of what Fruitions entail.
Mere gaps in experience, blank spots, jumps, skips, and pauses are not enough to meet the criteria. Lots of states and stages can create experiences like that. The A&P, Dissolution, momentary tastes of formless realms, and many other things can create a sense of a pause or gap. (DhO)
By far, the most straightforward explanation of why you suspect experience during Fruition and why you say that Fruition didn't change anything fundamentally about suffering is that you have attained to something else. Given that common things are common, and this is a really common occurrence, again, this is by far the most likely explanation. (DhO)
Fruitions, stages, personal abilities and state shifts. The skills in Fruition vary widely between practitioners and their phases of practice. In early Review, many will have a hard time calling up Fruitions, but not all. As Review progresses, particularly on retreat, Fruitions tend to get a lot easier. As Review becomes fully mature, Fruitions tend to be easy, but not for all. As the new stages of insight begin to show up, Fruitions can get harder, particularly after the A&P and in the next Dark Night.
Some people are just naturally talented in various ways regarding Fruitions and some are not. Some people can call them up easily without much setup. Some require meditation to cycle up through the stages of insight. Some people can get multiples, meaning they get a Fruition then incline back and get more in relatively rapid succession. Some find that one Fruition satisfies and getting repeats or even generating interest in rapid repeats is difficult. Some people can get duration, in which the Fruition lasts longer than an instant to external time (as there is no internal time during a Fruition). Some people find duration elusive or impossible. The cause of this seems partially to do with depths of concentration, partially to do with inclination, and partially to do with personal wiring.
These can all vary by the stage of practice and what practices one is doing at that time and in what dose.
My own story after Stream Entry: in the first few days, I would get about one Fruition per day or so. They started getting faster after that, so maybe a few per day. They started happening off the cushion, when walking, when reclining, when eating, etc. for me pretty rapidly. I finally started to get some sense of how to incline to them, but initially I wasn't that good at doing this. Finally, after some months (now back in daily life), I learned how to just incline that way, and, a few seconds to a minute later, a Fruition would occur. This was clearly in the mature stage of Review.
One large caution: it is very easy for Stream Enterers to state shift, and strong state shifts can mimic Fruitions, occurring with eyes blinking, happen at the end of the out breath, involve changes in mental state afterwards that may be blissful or peaceful, etc. Thus, some who think they are getting Fruitions by rapid inclination are actually just having hard state-shifts, as this is easy for many stream enterers, easier than rapid Fruitions by inclination. So, be careful when evaluating Fruitions, as all shifts and drop-outs and the like that might look like them actually aren't.
Getting good at sorting out which is which typically requires a lot of time, critical analysis, and practice. Many never get to be great phenomenologists, and that is ok. You can have a lot of wisdom and personal transformation without being a great analytical, technical practitioner. (DhO)
Fruitions and experiences on entheogens. The question of the correlations between experiences on entheogens and insight meditation come up again and again. While clearly there are some things that can be correlated well and even lined up perfectly, many experiences on powerful entheogens can defy standard classification, as they either are just too far out there, occurred during such perceptual distortion as to be unclear, are not repeatable, or seem to have nothing to do with ordinary consciousness once people stop tripping, so that reference points and words fail them when attempting to make sense of what occurred.
The criteria for Fruitions involve a whole host of specifics, like what came before, the entrance, the thing itself, the exit, what follows after, as well as the expected transformations and abilities that one would expect of a stream enterer.
Said another way, to claim Fruitions is to claim at least Stream Entry, as the two go hand and hand, and then the question remains, do you meet the rest of the criteria? You can find them here: What Was That?
You can also look before that section to the part about The Three Doors to get a sense of what Fruitions entail.
Mere gaps in experience, blank spots, jumps, skips, and pauses are not enough to meet the criteria. Lots of states and stages can create experiences like that. The A&P, Dissolution, momentary tastes of formless realms, and many other things can create a sense of a pause or gap. (DhO)
Fruitions are the same at all paths. Fruitions are the same at all paths, as there is no experience in Fruition, just missing parts of the movie reel of our life. Regarding the entrance, there is one striking exception, that of fourth path, as the subject-object experience is fundamentally and totally transformed. Specifically, the Suffering Door, where everything is suddenly ripped away from the sense of some "this side", has nothing creepy or violating about it at all, as there is none of that "attachment" to this side (or that side), to use a sticky word. Instead, this is just stuff happening as it does with no sense of grasping, resistance, solidity, or imperfection of the natural flow, unfolding, and vanishing of experiences. Some in third will notice that there is something less creepy about the Suffering Door, but this is different from the feeling at what I think of as true fourth when there is utterly no sense of some existential wrongness when it occurs.
Sorting out what is the A&P from EQ from Fruition/SE, etc. is a seriously problematic business. It is extremely easy to get this wrong, to misapply criteria, to misrepresent what is happening, and deception, both intentional and accidental is common. That doesn't mean that something good can't come from such attempts, but just realize how hard this is, and keep an open mind and long time horizon.
As to the A&P after Stream Entry: The stream enterer starts off meditating at a very mature, quick, lite version of the A&P. Even gentle reflection on anything can produce this state, as it is so close that the lightest bit of attention in that direction causes it to show itself. Yes, one can with strong resolutions and practice make it into something more powerful and long-lasting than the very quick, not-very-impressive thing it is for those with SE, but that's much more of an adhitthana (resolution)/second samatha jhana practice. A stream enterer will generally progress from the A&P to Dissolution within seconds to a few minutes, perhaps even by just dropping down the out breath.
As to further A&P's, here's the problem: after Review has some mastery, new insight stages will start showing up of the next path, and the A&P can sometimes be impressive on subsequent passes at higher path cycles, though the general/average trend is for it to get less dramatic as path cycles progress.
HOWEVER: those below Stream Entry can also go through cycles that are basically A&P>DN>EQ, back to lower stages, back up to A&P>DN>EQ, and may do this many times before Stream Entry. THUS, IT IS EASY TO MISTAKE this cycle for a post-path thing, particularly as, at the stage of EQ, for example, one might sit down in earlier stages that seem very mild and pass quickly and rapidly get up to EQ, which can MIMIC a REVIEW CYCLE.
Also, that point about it being murky and complicated to map in the post-Stream Entry cycles can easily be used as an excuse to map the pre-path A&P>DN>EQ cycle as being that, as it can be repetitive and murky pre-path. I personally crossed the A&P at l east 6 times in daily life before SE, as well as a few times on retreat. They varied dramatically in intensity and presentation, with some being oddly mild and others being pretty wild with no obvious rhyme or reason to why, though the first major one was among the most impressive of them all.
So, mappers, be wary, be skeptical, keep an open mind, map things over the long-term, meaning months to years, have high standards for SE criteria, and avoid being fooled by the very common mimics of the A&P and EQ.
Also, in addition to the A&P and some of the stuff in EQ that fools people into thinking it is SE, there are the head drops at EQ that can fool people into thinking they are Fruitions, Dissolution experiences, momentary formless realms, falling asleep, theta states (a la those who float in float tanks and lose many minutes of experience of time), etc., so be careful, and keep strict criteria for what to call Fruition and what to call something else.
This level of careful discrimination is a skill that takes most years to develop well, and many will call all sorts of things "Fruitions" or "Cessations" that simply weren't, both out of a simple lack of discriminating ability and also a desire to have experiences be them, so overcalling what is going on. (DhO)
Sorting out what is the A&P from EQ from Fruition/SE, etc. is a seriously problematic business. It is extremely easy to get this wrong, to misapply criteria, to misrepresent what is happening, and deception, both intentional and accidental is common. That doesn't mean that something good can't come from such attempts, but just realize how hard this is, and keep an open mind and long time horizon.
As to the A&P after Stream Entry: The stream enterer starts off meditating at a very mature, quick, lite version of the A&P. Even gentle reflection on anything can produce this state, as it is so close that the lightest bit of attention in that direction causes it to show itself. Yes, one can with strong resolutions and practice make it into something more powerful and long-lasting than the very quick, not-very-impressive thing it is for those with SE, but that's much more of an adhitthana (resolution)/second samatha jhana practice. A stream enterer will generally progress from the A&P to Dissolution within seconds to a few minutes, perhaps even by just dropping down the out breath.
As to further A&P's, here's the problem: after Review has some mastery, new insight stages will start showing up of the next path, and the A&P can sometimes be impressive on subsequent passes at higher path cycles, though the general/average trend is for it to get less dramatic as path cycles progress.
HOWEVER: those below Stream Entry can also go through cycles that are basically A&P>DN>EQ, back to lower stages, back up to A&P>DN>EQ, and may do this many times before Stream Entry. THUS, IT IS EASY TO MISTAKE this cycle for a post-path thing, particularly as, at the stage of EQ, for example, one might sit down in earlier stages that seem very mild and pass quickly and rapidly get up to EQ, which can MIMIC a REVIEW CYCLE.
Also, that point about it being murky and complicated to map in the post-Stream Entry cycles can easily be used as an excuse to map the pre-path A&P>DN>EQ cycle as being that, as it can be repetitive and murky pre-path. I personally crossed the A&P at l east 6 times in daily life before SE, as well as a few times on retreat. They varied dramatically in intensity and presentation, with some being oddly mild and others being pretty wild with no obvious rhyme or reason to why, though the first major one was among the most impressive of them all.
So, mappers, be wary, be skeptical, keep an open mind, map things over the long-term, meaning months to years, have high standards for SE criteria, and avoid being fooled by the very common mimics of the A&P and EQ.
Also, in addition to the A&P and some of the stuff in EQ that fools people into thinking it is SE, there are the head drops at EQ that can fool people into thinking they are Fruitions, Dissolution experiences, momentary formless realms, falling asleep, theta states (a la those who float in float tanks and lose many minutes of experience of time), etc., so be careful, and keep strict criteria for what to call Fruition and what to call something else.
This level of careful discrimination is a skill that takes most years to develop well, and many will call all sorts of things "Fruitions" or "Cessations" that simply weren't, both out of a simple lack of discriminating ability and also a desire to have experiences be them, so overcalling what is going on. (DhO)
Nirodha Samapatti and Fruitions. A clarification about Nirodha Samapatti: The word "nirodha" simply means "cessation". It is used with the qualifier "samapatti" to mean "The Cessation of Perception and Feeling", a very unusual accomplishment only available to a very small subset of advanced meditators, those way out past Stream Entry with full access to formless realms who are at least anagamis and who can figure out how to translate those two impressive attainments into the even more impressive attainment of nirodha samapatti. The term "nirodha" is sometimes used to refer to fruitions, which are discussed in the Abhidhamma, and here it simply means "cessation". So, if there is ambiguity, it is typical to clarify what one means, but, in the discussion of stream enterers, as they are incapable of attaining to "nirodha samapatti", by convention we generally presume that "cessation" simply means "fruition" in stream enterers' cases.
… Speaking of Nirodha Samapatti... a video (https://vimeo.com/248566139) on it to help clarify what is different about it from Fruition (and everything else). (DhO)
Fruition, Nirodha Samapatti and Animittam Cetosamadhi. One distinguishes these and other events where things seem to blip out, vanish, or whatever by the following criteria: the meditator, the setup, the entrance, the thing itself, the exit, and the after-effects.
However, while I can clearly spell out all of the details, and do in MCTB1/2, this is not the same as actually being able to do it in practice. It is like wine tasting, where some people can tell oak notes and road tar and cherries and all of that stuff, and some people just can't.
For Nirodha Samapatti, it is actually by far the easiest of the various experiences to identify clearly, standing out strongly from all of the rest of them as it does:
… Speaking of Nirodha Samapatti... a video (https://vimeo.com/248566139) on it to help clarify what is different about it from Fruition (and everything else). (DhO)
Fruition, Nirodha Samapatti and Animittam Cetosamadhi. One distinguishes these and other events where things seem to blip out, vanish, or whatever by the following criteria: the meditator, the setup, the entrance, the thing itself, the exit, and the after-effects.
However, while I can clearly spell out all of the details, and do in MCTB1/2, this is not the same as actually being able to do it in practice. It is like wine tasting, where some people can tell oak notes and road tar and cherries and all of that stuff, and some people just can't.
For Nirodha Samapatti, it is actually by far the easiest of the various experiences to identify clearly, standing out strongly from all of the rest of them as it does:
- Meditator: only anagamis and arahats with mastery of the formless realms and the ability to ride a strange line between samatha and vipassana with a high degree of balanced, tranquil, easy control can even think about attempting this, so it is already a strangely small crew. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of people that I personally know that I actually believe have attained to this. If you are not an anagami or arahat with strong technical mastery of jhana and insight, you haven't attained this, so you can remove it from your differential diagnosis. In fact, if you are asking the questions you are, it is pretty much guaranteed that you haven't attained this. The chances of most meditators attained this in their lifetime are so small that it is very rarely something to seriously consider as what might have occurred.
- Setup: You rise with very light, easy effort up through the jhanas to the 8th jhana while mixing in about 30% insight. You come out, and, having resolved gently to attain to NS either when you started the rise before the 1st jhana or resolving now, you chill and do nothing. NS either happens within a minute or two or it doesn't, and most of the time it doesn't.
- Entrance: Thoughts, body and consciousness itself vanish rapidly in an analogue fashion over less than a second. It is a total, dramatic power failure. This is easily distinguished from the Three Doors, as it involves none of these: rapid impermanence, something falling towards you, something falling away from you, or any other Door variant.
- Thing itself: No experience, time, or anything at all. To a person watching, they appear still on their cushion or laying down or whatever posture they are in and will be hard to get to come out of it by external stimuli.
- Exit: Exactly like the entrance but in reverse order, like consciousness and experience powering up again in a rapid analogue fashion. This is distinct from the restart after Fruition.
- After-effects: The afterglow is heavy and powerful beyond reason and oddly long-lasting, typically lingering for 5-24+ hours, like one had taken some perfect drug that was at once highly chill but also produced a great deal of stable alertness. I think of this as what people are attempting when they mix uppers and downers, but the NS afterglow is perfect version vs what people typically get when they do that, which is at once muddled and edgy, whereas the NS afterglow feels, well, sublime, divine, incredibly right. No other attainment has an afterglow this good. It takes the top prize with no close competitors.
- Meditator: One who has at least attained to Equanimity, Conformity, Change of Lineage, and Path insight stages the first time or is at least a Stream Enterer in Review. It doesn't occur to non-noble ones. So, the entrance criteria are vastly lower than NS.
- Setup: One rises through the stages of insight to Equanimity and attains to Conformity Knowledge. So, one requires much less meditative skill and technical competence than for NS.
- Entrance: Through one of the Three Doors, as describe in MCTB2. These are all quite different from the entrance to NS, which is analogue and doesn't involve the rapid presentation of the Three Characteristics in the same way as the Three Doors do.
- Thing itself: Again, like NS, there is no time, space, consciousness, etc. To a person viewing them, they typically have their eyelids blink and then come out of it clear and seemingly normal if it lasts a very short time, or, if it lasts longer, they would view them as a still mediator on their cushion without obvious response to the outside world. So, externally, during Fruition that has duration to it or NS, the meditator will appear largely the same, though their breathing may be much slower in NS.
- Exit: The mind restarts very rapidly clear and clean, fresh, bright, present, satisfied, like it has been reset and refreshed.
- After-effects: This bright, clear, refreshed feeling typically lasts seconds to minutes and then fades rapidly, the major exception being the first time a path, particularly stream entry, is attained, after which the after-effects can be more dramatic and longer-lasting, but are nothing like the NS afterglow, which stands out as its own thing.
- dDx (medical abbreviation for "differential diagnosis", meaning things that could mimic Fruition): a momentary blip into a formless experience, any state shift between one state or stage and another, the A&P, Dissolution, and some others. It is very, very common for people to think they have attained to a Fruition when, in fact, they have not. Probably 98% of people I talk with who are trying to determine if they have them don't at all meet the criteria, IMNHO. It is true that plenty of people are relatively poor phenomenologists, making sorting this out difficult, but it is still worth attempting.
Full Nirodha and Nirodha Lite. There is Nirodha in which the whole thing totally vanishes, totally gone, like a total mental power outage, the ultimate off switch, with the standard entrance and exit, and a massive, very long-tailed, heavy afterglow, and no perception of anything during the outage, nothing at all, and especially not of time.
Then there were people here who were proposing something they were calling Nirodha but had a sense of time passing. I have gotten into something that was ultra-stripped-down and was entered into using the Nirodha setup, but happened when I was really obsessed with duration of Nirodha, and it would last exactly as long as I had specified in my resolution, almost with a counter in the background going, and then end, but would not be nearly the ultra-complete, ultra-heavy-afterglow-producing thing that Nirodha in its full and incomprehensible glory is, and there definitely was some sense of time passing.
Really the two are so different as to be hardly comparable, and yet they can result from similar set ups. To say they share certain elements would be misleading, as Nirodha proper has no elements and the other thing clearly does.
Thus, I term that other thing, which is clearly not the same thing as full Nirodha, Nirodha "Lite", realizing that this is certainly my own classification for that other thing and not necessarily anyone else's usage. (DhO)
Getting repeat Fruitions. One possible Fruition is interesting, but more are more interesting. Try to repeat whatever it was. Repeat it a lot. Incline that way. Set it up again. Balance the factors. See what happens. If the thing you call Fruition happens again, then do it again more, and again, and again, and again. In this way, if it is Fruition, you will learn it variants, learn more of its lessons, learn more about how reality vanishes, what happens when it restarts, and it will write something good on the mind. If it is not Fruition, you will learn about whatever that thing is. One way or the other, further learning and clarity should hopefully occur.
The quest for repeat Fruitions teaches one very good lessons about balancing the factors and about what good practice really looks like and feels like. (DhO)
I personally have found that just sitting down, doing nothing except perhaps being a bit mindful in a wide-open open and largely agenda-free way, and letting the stages of insight roll through in their own time until a Fruition occurred has been best. If you wish, and if you have actually already had a Fruition and not one of the much more common mimics (A&P, Dissolution, Equanimity, Formless Something, etc.), you can gently incline the mind in that direction or towards that idea at the very beginning of the sit and then just forget about it. It has something to do with the synchrony of the illusion of attention/attender with fluxing space and whatever is happening as a part of that fluxing space. (DhO)
I personally have found that just sitting down, doing nothing except perhaps being a bit mindful in a wide-open open and largely agenda-free way, and letting the stages of insight roll through in their own time until a Fruition occurred has been best. If you wish, and if you have actually already had a Fruition and not one of the much more common mimics (A&P, Dissolution, Equanimity, Formless Something, etc.), you can gently incline the mind in that direction or towards that idea at the very beginning of the sit and then just forget about it. It has something to do with the synchrony of the illusion of attention/attender with fluxing space and whatever is happening as a part of that fluxing space. (DhO)
Conformity knowledge is actually in many ways as or more important than the Fruitions. Fruitions are very nice, make permanent changes to the mind at times (new paths or cycles or whatever you want to call them). Conformity knowledge is actually in many ways as or more important than the Fruitions, as that moment or two that occurs right before Fruitions, for those who recognize what it is, really shows one something profound about the true nature of things, something that can become more and more a part of one's waking, living, walking around experience.
In the early paths, at least in the system I work in, Fruitions tend to stand out, make an impression, and may be associated with the sense of the Ultimate, such as some Ultimate Potential that lives between the Frames of Manifestation, or something like that, at least in the meditator's way of trying to conceptualize something about Fruitions, as conceptualization and analysis is a normal activity of the mind.
However, as things go along, the focus of practice shifts to seeing all sensate manifestation as the point, and the luminosity, integration, emptiness, fullness, transience, causality, naturalness, centerlessness, directness, immediacy, vibrancy, and that sort of thing become more and more the focus, with Fruitions just being some nice thing that happens sometimes.
Thus, while you associate Fruitions with having some importance to what you call MCTB 4th (a term that basically everyone here defines at least slightly differently if not profoundly differently from how I define it, whatever...), in fact, at the higher stages of awakening they are not particularly important, except that just before them there is this glimpse of a totally integrated, totally instantly and directly self-comprehended (in that the field of manifestation/space/awareness or whatever you want to call it naturally and totally and effortlessly comprehended directly the whole of itself in both its relative and ultimate natures, there at that point being no difference between those).
I agree with you totally that Zen has no interest in anything like Fruitions, just the results of those Fruitions, and they could be classified as either the total sludge at the bottom of the barrel regarding the world of meditative phenomenology and mapping, or could equally be praised for not even wasting their time with things like how it all goes down, just with the results. I can make a strong case for both points, but I can make a stronger case for knowing both what the punch line is and also having gotten the joke that lead to it.
Regarding Tibetan Masters, I have had varied answers regarding this in my very brief conversations with them, and would consider myself no expert in their opinions on this matter, so will leave that to your expertise.
However, I can definitely say that recognizing Fruitions when the happen and realizing what they are and aren't can have pragmatic value, particularly in trying to remember what happened just before them, as that just before them was a taste of something that, when it develops and becomes more and more of one's waking experience, is extremely profound. (DhO)
Some advice for those who have recently achieved SE. Hopefully this advice will come in handy some day...
(1) Just because it was a bad idea for me to power really hard with strong resolutions to make further progress to 2nd shortly after Stream Entry doesn't mean it necessarily would be a bad idea for anyone else, but it is true that I don't recommend it
(2) Resolutions not to progress do have power: you just make them like you would make a New Year's Resolution, let it go, and it does its work in some strange way, like willing yourself to wake up at 6am just before your alarm goes off: how it happens, don't know, but it does...
(3) Just chill...
(4) New territory will begin to show up soon enough anyway whether you want it to or not, and if you pay a lot of attention to it things will progress faster, and if you practice more things will progress faster, and if you try to ignore them things will hopefully slow down.
(5) Are you on retreat? I was on retreat powering it really hard about 16 hours/day: this can cause trouble when done in an imbalanced way as I was doing: so long as you don't do this, you will probably be alright, and perhaps you might just do it better than I did and land second quickly: no way to tell unless you try it one way or the other and see.
(6) Playing around with jhanas is no guarantee of slowing things down: in fact, strong concentration in a stream-enterer will make things progress faster.
(7) Review is a good idea, but some might get it really well in weeks or less... (DhO)
Things to work on during the Review phase, post Stream Entry. I like the above advice (in the DhO thread).
Traditional advice would vary by tradition, but I found use in learning to notice the stages well and how they shift automatically in review phase when sitting, learning how each functions, what its paradigm and perspective is, what attention is like during it, and really noticing how each little part is different and has its own quality, but then I am a phenomenology guy trained by some phenomenology people.
I had a lot of fun playing around with calling up ñanas just by number and calling them up out of order. In this practice, I would just sit there and think, "Five", and Dissolution would show up, and then think, "11" and Equanimity would show up, and then "7" and Misery would show up, for an example, and just shift between those, noticing the specific qualities of each, and then noticing the universal qualities of them all.
If we learn the state shifts well and the jhanas well, then the next time we go through them we will have a much better handle on them.
The big transitions are worth practicing specifically: call up 10, Re-observation, then call up 11, then do the unthinkable and call up 10 again, then 11, then 10 again, then 11, and notice how you shift from one to the other and what that is like, such that, the next time you have to learn this for some new strata of mind, you will be more used to how one learns to go from one to the other in general terms and it will be more recognizable and less disorienting when you do it later for new levels.
Another fun one: it is typical after a Fruition to start again at the A&P, but instead, take that afterglow and cycle back to another Fruition: just incline back to that and see if you can get multiples. Not everyone can, and there seems to be some person-specifics wiring one way or the other, but it makes for something fun to play with.
More fun stuff: take, say, the 3rd vipassana jhana, starting at Dissolution, and see if you can walk back and forth between the 3rd samatha jhana and the 3rd vipassana jhana, noticing how things change when you do that. Try it for the rest of them, such as Fear through Re-observation. Shift back and forth, so that would go Dissolution, 3rd samatha jhana, Fear, 3rd samatha jhana, Misery, 3rd samatha jhana, Disgust, 3rd samatha jhana, etc. and really notice how things change and exactly what is different as you do that. Not everyone can do this, but if you can, you will learn something important that not a lot of people know.
Do the same for the A&P and 2nd samatha jhana. Do the same for Equanimity and 4th samatha jhana.
If you have the chops: play with the formless aspects of Equanimity ñana. Notice how to shift to fluxing space, fluxing consciousness, fluxing nothingness, up to NPNYNP (8th jhana), back out, see if you can get a Fruition, then back up to the formless stuff and around again.
Also, take each aspect of each ñana and really go into them. This is probably best done in order, though you can do it out of order.
Start with the A&P, notice its ultra-fast vibrational aspect as far as you can take it, then its rapturous aspect as far as you can take it, then its effortless aspect as far as you can take it, then, when you really feel the pull to Dissolution, drop down, down, down, as far as it goes, as slow as it goes, as far out as it goes, like dropping to the bottom of the sea, like taking Dissolution into formless territory, to really see how dissolved you can be, how out of phase you can get, how low can you go, how wide, now peaceful, like being under water, like being sedated: take it down to the furthest depths it has, then, when you really feel the pull, shift into Fear, and take fear as far as it goes: really get freaked out, really let the willies, the terror, the horror roll, like your body is rotting away, like the whole thing is vanishing to creepy death, like some vipassana disease is filling everything, as far as fear can go, and then notice its vibrational aspects, its shamanic drum-beat aspects, its shifting vipassana aspects as far as you can take them, then, when you feel the pull to Misery... etc.
See how that works? Really explore their depths, as a master, as a safe and competent adventurer who has control in a non-control, no-self kind of way, who can go there and be ok, who can flush all of this stuff out in its width and breadth and all its fascinating variations. Just call those up. Just ask for them to show themselves and do this again and again until you are really, really good at knowing the ñanas cold, as a seasoned expert, as a true technical practitioner. (DhO)
2nd Path
2nd Path is a pretty straight shot. Other than the fact that 2nd Path for many has some more emotional aspects to it, that and the increased ability to appreciate subparts of stages for those inclined to those sorts of things, the cool thing about 2nd is that you can basically do the same sort of things that got you First Path and it should largely work for 2nd. Just learn the same lessons, apply the same advice to the hard stages, avoid the standard traps, investigate the three characteristics, work to learn to navigate the stages, be present to what is happening, incorporate more and more of the senses into the practice along with space, balance the seven factors, that sort of thing. Third path tends to be more complex, but, for most, 2nd is a pretty straight shot. (DhO)
What changed after 2nd Path. For me, after second path, reality was really different, emotions acted differently, I perceived many additional nuances of subcycles and phenomena that I hadn't before, and I was back in a review phase of rapidly increasing Fruition frequency and ease naturally rather than struggling in a progress cycle. There is variability in the degree to which people report experiencing those changes. (DhO)
DN after SE. [Someone asks if the Fear one would experience in the DN post Stream Entry would be more all encompasssing/'deeper' than pre, or if it would be easier to deal with as that's known territory. Daniel answers:] My worst Dark Night ever was the first Review cycle after Stream Entry: totally over the top, lasted a few hours, then dissipated, got a repeat Fruition, and then subsequent cycles still involved the stages, but they were not nearly as bad, and rapidly became a near non-issue, and I even called up the Dark Night stages just by naming the numbers in my head as I got good at them, like going on a roller coaster you bought a tick for just to see what that felt like, and subsequent new Dark Nights were irritating but not as bad, and cycle after cycle they got better and better. (DhO)
What is required to get a new path. Standard theory and many people's experience say that, assuming you already have stream entry, that as the Review phase progresses, and cycling through from 4th-11th ñanas to Fruition gets easier, many will begin to notice subtle layers of mind and experience that seem to not be well perceived, seem to be outside of their current level of mastery, seem to contain unskillful elements that the practitioner had had some respite from in the afterglow of their current realization, seem to be newly noticed, and then there will be a period where there will seem to be a choice: do you focus on the current stages, which by this point generally seem easy, or delve into those things that seem to be beckoning for investigation and clear perception?
There is actually no choice, as there is no self, and reality is causal and happens on its own, but the basic sense of the choice can present anyway. As one becomes less fascinated by the review stages and attention turns more to those patterns of experience (which may initially be subtle, but for most will relatively rapidly grow in predominance in the field of experience), the initial insights that one had for the first path begin to be noticed, by way of the same type of investigation that landed the first path, and so the early stages of Mind and Body, Cause and Effect, etc. arise.
Now, it may be that during this phase Fruitions may still occur, and regression to previous stages may set in. However, as the dharma leads one on, through careful investigation the A&P will again arise, and after the Dark Night hits, one will generally feel more cut off from territory that is familiar and well-mastered, Fruitions may be vague or seemingly inaccessible, and, once the same insights that got one Equanimity are re-obtained for the new territory, Equanimity and potentially the next path arises.
However, it is not always so simple, and some will get caught at the standard places, both pleasant and unpleasant, by failing to have the investigative skills necessary for progress or by fascination by the good and bad aspects, and/or the lack of maturity to handle the new territory, and so fall back or stagnate, and people can get caught in between the paths at times, unable to get back to Review, unable to move forward, and eventually one moves one way or the other, and if that direction is back, then re-mastering Review can strangely help progress, and if one moves forward, then avoiding the standard traps again is of value, but finally, by good, inclusive, clear, standard practices, one attains to the new path.
It is worth knowing that beyond second path, there are some paradigmatic aspects that, if not understood, can block progress, and while standard practices can eventually overcome these, some heads up as to what to look for specifically can be of value, such as the width of 3rd, etc.
From first to second is generally pretty straightforward in comparison to what comes later for most.
I submit this in the narrow context of the early paths and working within that conceptual framework. (DhO)
Comparing Different Traditions
Mixing the Actualism maps with any other maps is not helpful. I got to watch a few years of this on the DhO, and it was basically a clusterfuck of unhelpful crazy. I have never seen it lead to anything good, and it definitely lead to much that was bad. I haven't found good correlates of results, just correlations with a few aspects of technique, such as tuning into sensuous beauty being like focusing on the Awakening Factors of Rapture and Mindfulness, for example, and some things about noticing feelings being echoed in various suttas about following feelings.
Stream entry is useful and transformative regardless of any consideration of technique or tradition. It is a possible upgrade to general human mental physiology and function, not the property of a sect or religious strain. I highly recommend it regardless of any other concerns or issues of dogma, language, or culture.
What Richard describes as enlightenment is clearly phenomenologically different. Comparing "Buddhist" and "Actualist" attainments is less than helpful, in my view.
A PCE is very different from a "taste", at least as I experienced it and I believe as Richard et al define it. It has very unusual emotional, perceptual, and other components that make it seem to be its own thing. Years of attempting to map it to other states were a quagmire of stupidity, IMNHO. It stands on its own, in my view and experience. However, various people use the term PCE to mean various things, so it is entirely possible they are using it to mean something else, such as some powerful A&P or Equanimity or whatever. One must be careful with one's phenomenology here and not use these terms loosely.
… The PCE was a remarkable thing when it would occur, true. From the PCE point of view, which truly feels "perfect", every other altered state seems, well, somehow lesser, or at least it did to me at those times. However, PCEs, like all relative states, don't last. The odd thing is that, after having done this a while, eventually some shifts happened, and then PCEs not only weren't available, there was no way to even get a sense of what "direction" I would "look in" to even try to make one arise, like the entire concept no longer applied or had been a dream. I have no idea what to make of this either, as it appears to be a unique report, so far as I am aware ...
… My summary of the aspects of Actualism in practice that are of some demonstrable value which can easily be incorporated into one's practices and life are given at the end of that article (Link: https://www.integrateddaniel.info/my-experiments-in-actualism), which was very carefully written as a result of a few years of very heated debates and a lot of experimentation on the part of friends and myself, and my opinions are still the same.
I think these discussions are most interesting if framed in terms such as, "I have profound FOMO regarding imagined choices of spiritual outcomes, so what should I do?" I would look at that FOMO.
If you are doing something Actualism-esque, track it back and see if it really is necessary or if you could just be happy now. Notice the sensuous beauty of this moment of being alive.
If you are doing something Vipassana-esque, consider the Sutta The Removal of Distracting Thoughts, and reflect on whether or not those thoughts are helpful and substitute positive mind states for those negative mind states. Be Mindful of the experiences that make up those thoughts and the rest of this moment, and cultivate the Factors of Awakening called Rapture and Tranquility and Equanimity.
Oh, wait, is there any real difference between those two modes? If you can be certain that there is some critical difference, you have discernment beyond what I do.
… As to advocating for Actualism, if you look closely, you will see some aspects of it in MCTB2, albeit in somewhat covert form. Might check out the section on Rapture in the chapter on the seven factors for a start. You will also find some covert warnings regarding the same material, such as in the Emotional Models section. So, it is a mix, as is my final takeaway on the whole strange period. If you look at my website, you will find that essay (Link to Daniel's webpage), which is not covert at all. (DhO)
Is there a short cut? As I read through this thread and think about it from the 20-year internet dharma forum veteran, 30,000 ft viewpoint, it has the basic ring of earlier debates between more narrow, effortful, structured practices (Goenka, Noting, Vipassana in general) and those of Dzogchen/Mahamudra/Just Sitting/etc. It has been noticed again and again that when people move from one that they have been doing for a long time to the other (basically regardless of direction), they suddenly notice something they hadn’t seen before. There are hundreds of reports in this vein found on the DhO, Tao Bums, etc. One can search for Rigpa and read threads from 8 or so years ago and find posts that could be transposed to this discussion almost entirely unedited and seem to be part of the conversation.
It is very common for those, particularly who have done narrow-only focused traditions (breath, whatever), and never been given any instructions to gradually expand out their awareness and finally just rest in what occurs (like what I would call more third and fourth vipassana jhana approaches), then, given that instruction, many will suddenly bloom.
One thing I would add to the dDx (differential diagnosis, aka possible things that people are getting into) is Equanimity, which, for some, particularly those who have done more narrow, structured traditions for a long time, can be an amazing breath of fresh air, and ñ11.j2 as I would call it can be mind-blowingly profound, with vistas of unity, Buddha Nature, the Divine, Luminosity, True Self, and the like becoming extremely powerful.
I also really like Ken McLeod and his work and a specific article: A Light in the Dark (DhO)
Things I liked about Bill Hamilton. Kept his dharma extremely clean and uncorrupted from a financial point of view, asking nothing for his teachings. Didn't seek to tell people his way was the best, just a good one. Referenced and respected lots of other works and teachers that were not his own. He didn't seek widespread fame or admiration, and so died relatively unknown, which, while clearly a loss for people who didn't know him, clearly demonstrated a certain humility that I had great respect for despite my own obvious lack of ability to emulate it. He was reluctant to talk about his own practice, which I sometimes found irritating, but at least he didn't say he was one thing and blatantly turn out to be another. Would talk about the dark side of the path and the downsides of meditation and the Dark Night. Would talk a lot and honestly about shadow sides of meditation practice, traditions, and communities. Admitted his own mistakes and used them as a way to teach others so they could hopefully avoid similar problems. Had powerful depths of meditation and could speak from that place with a great deal of nuance, richness, and sophistication. In short, he seemed to all appearances to walk his talk, to be what he said he was, to meet his own high ideals. (DhO)
Pros and Cons of goal-oriented and non goal-oriented traditions. Paths and traditions vary widely in their relationship to what you might gain and how that motivates practice. Advantages of goal-oriented traditions: they tend to achieve goals. Downsides: competition, future-orientation, emphasis on maps over practice, and the like can all occur, though these can all be mitigated and even overcome if one realizes that to achieve goals in this business requires being right here, right now, as this moment is the basis of practice and everything else, for that matter. Advantage of non-goal-oriented practice: basically that there is much less artificial division that can be created between this moment and one's practice, but the downside is that many will get nowhere at all. It is a paradox, and boils down to individual tastes, goals, proclivities and how well one implements either path.
Going too fast: similar to the thing about goals. Really fast progress is actually possible. In general, the benefits of fast progress are fast progress. The downsides are that it can be hard to integrate, and the risk of strong side-effects is higher, both good and bad. That all said, without insights to integrate in the first place, no integrations occurs, so getting insights is good, in general. I tend to vote for fast progress if you can pull it off, realizing that it can be a rough ride and that is still takes time to let those insights permeate the vast range of our habits and conditioning.
Mixing paths: it is very common these days, and I know few who have stuck strictly to one tradition, though many have spent a good deal of time in one practice to see where it leads. There are definitely some things that mix better than others, but a total ban on mixing paths is not only needless, it is very hard to actually pull off, as our conditioning these days and the concepts we bring to this tend to come from all over the place. (DhO)
Vajrayana and Theravadan perspectives can work nicely together, with some caveats though. I think the Vajrayana and Theravadan perspectives can work nicely together, so long as you can just digest and basically ignore the propaganda you will hear about the "Hinayana" from the Tibetans, who basically know nothing about the modern Theravada as it is in places like Burma, so they are talking about some ancient, somewhat anti-idealized creation of their own historical minds, using it basically as a literary or teaching device, a foil. The Theravadans know nearly nothing about the Vajrayana most of the time, but wouldn't even bother to mention them, as it generally has nothing to do with their worldview at all. In summary, we have the Vajrayana using the Theravada as a whipping boy with inaccurate negative propaganda, and the Theravada basically totally ignoring the Vajrayana. I am not sure which is worse, but neither is particularly helpful.
From the Theravada you will get very good technique in great abundance and an extremely practical, practice-based approach. It will give you the sort of foundation that the Tibetan practitioners often lack, whose world often has so much ritual, ornament, cults-of-personality, political and dogmatic stuff that they generally are not doing what the Theravadans do, meaning just busting it on the cushion hour after hour after hour building the muscles you need to perceive things clearly and stabilize attention.
That said, the Theravada has its shadow sides, and from the Vajrayana you gain a perspective that can work with energies, colors, qualities, the textures of space, emotions, the archetypes, and things like that, in a way that is generally more whole, human, vibrant, and immediate than the Theravada often produces, though on paper it involves working with all of that also, in some relatively dry way that often, due to its particular models and some of its dogma, means subtle or overt denial and asceticism beyond what is needed to get really fluent in your reality as it is.
I would seriously consider starting Theravada, getting stream entry and perhaps second path from the Mahasi kids first and then a good sense of what really strong concentration is from the Pau Auk kids, and then take that into the Vajrayana, and you will already have what you need to visualize really well as well as having established a direct understanding of ultimate bodhichitta, which is essential to that path, and be able to see that the endless fascination with ritual and the rest of the hyper-abundant trappings and politics and personality stuff may, at best, be skillful means, as Attachment to Rites and Rituals will be profoundly lessened if not eliminated, and so you will be able to have the wide, vibrant acceptance that the Vajrayana offers without its obvious initial traps that so confuse most people who get into it before they were really ready for it. Dzogchen and its related perspectives really help with 3rd Path territory. (DhO)
For the vast majority of people, the teachings of the immediate, spontaneous realizers don't do it. Is the Theravadan system the only one that creates steps? Definitely no. The Tibetans have many maps (5 Paths, some number of Bhumis (often 10, but there are other listings)), there is a Dzog Chen tradition I just heard of 2 days ago with 52, apparently, there are numerous Zen masters who describe various stages of their realization (Chi Nul had 3, some other big Zen guy whose name eludes me at the moment had about 17...).
Then we have the people who just seem to have jumped there instantly. We also have the people who trained very hard in some tradition (e.g. Adyashanti), realized whatever (or not, e.g. Andrew Cohen?: just not sure what to make of that guy...), but then advocated that their followers not train the way they did, but just realize they were already enlightened or that there is nothing to do, or whatever (this later group tends to annoy me the most...).
It is hard not to be inspired by some of the heavy spontaneous realizers, such as Nisargadatta, Poonja-ji and Ramana Maharshi. They tend to be very impressive, and their teachings can be very impressive. I have some of the published works on them and by them and found them compelling and insightful. It is very hard for me personally to doubt that they have profound insight and experienced real transformation.
The problem is that not a lot of their students tend to realize the same things that they did, and sometimes none at all that arrive at the same level of realization and impressiveness, or that we know about.
The issue is that, despite the spontaneous realizers realizing something very impressive, clearly, they had no idea how they did it, and they make the same mistake that we all do: as they didn't see any pattern or causal conditions leading to it, they assume that there are none, and from their current point of view, as everything is clear, spontaneous, etc. it doubly makes sense to them that there is nothing to do and nobody to do it.
The problem is that, for the vast majority of people, the teachings of the immediate, spontaneous realizers don't do it, don't create in them the same thing that they seem to find in the teacher.
Thus, the technique and work based traditions fill in the gap for those who, for whatever reason, don't suddenly and completely pop.
If the do-nothing approach to enlightenment were the cat's meow, then the number of people who would be enlightened would be nearly everyone, as the vast majority of people don't ever pursue enlightenment and spent plenty of time doing nothing.
It would only be those poor schmucks who were unfortunate enough to have found a meditative tradition that involved things like paying attention, cultivating kindness, being moral, trying to really understand sensate reality, and studying the carefully time-tested instructions of traditions thousand of years old that would be unenlightened, as they were working for it, and, were the spontaneous non-dual realizers right, this would be basically the only way NOT to get enlightened.
This is obviously not true, as the vast majority of people I know with serious wisdom did train for it, worked hard, spent thousands of hours on the cushion or whatever, and it unfolded gradually and in stages, many of which are quite predictable, though there are clearly some variants found out there in the wild.
In summary, if by doing nothing you get realized: good for you! You saved yourself a whole lot of trouble. If, on the other hand, you want to work for it, well, that option is there also. Which to bet on? Obviously, that decision you have to make for yourself. (DhO)
Direct Pointing work for very few, without years of practice. Essentially all of the Dzogchen and Advaita kids who say that same thing about looking directly at the true nature of mind also practiced for years. If you read the fine print on Dzogchen, they will say again and again that they will target various techniques and approaches to people's levels of ability and understanding, and the direct pointing is something they do all the time, but they will admit that the number of people who get it are very, very few, at least without years of practice.
Downsides and Benefits of a Number of Traditions: Daniel long response to Omega Point. [This is Daniel's response to a 40 page essay, which you can read in this thread or in Scribd: The Art of Nakedness: A look at Buddhist salvation. Enter Daniel Ingram:] Dear Omega Point, Thanks for posting that detailed and excellent essay. I really enjoyed it. It is one of the better comparisons of the various schools I have seen. Here is my reply to Omega Point's many points:
It is really easy, once one has grasped something difficult through years of hard effort, to then imagine that everyone should be able to see it and then teach from that place. This happens all the time. Adyashanti is a great case in point, as are Krishnamurti and lots of others. It is, in my view, a subtle (or not so subtle) arrogance, and I know a lot about arrogance, having lived with it in myself for years. (How funny, to arrogantly claim to be an expert on arrogance, as I have just done). The number to reject the tested path that got them their insights in favor of some untested "direct" path is large: it shows a lack of understanding even in understanding.
I myself point directly at the true nature of the thing in MCTB, as does everyone who uses the term "no-self", or mentions the Three Characteristics, or talks about seeing all things just as they are naturally, or says anything like that. It is stock and standard in introductory classes.
As anyone who has taught those introductory classes will tell you, the number who, having been presented with a direct teaching on the true nature of mind and exhorted to see it now, suddenly jump up with profound wisdom is essentially zero. The same is true in Advaita and Dzogchen circles. Otherwise, when Adyashanti or Tolle or the rest of them taught or when people read their books, wisdom would suddenly bloom forth all over the place. Clearly, this has not occurred, or Oprah would be the Great Vehicle in a way the Mahayana never was or ever could be...
It is still a very good and true point to make, so long as people keep practicing and don't, like countless zillions of slacker, arrogant Dzogchen and Advaita dabblers, rest in the comfortable notion that theirs is the highest teaching when they hardly know their ass from their elbow and couldn't see the true nature of those things for three breaths in a row.
I liked Christopher Titmuss' approach that I got to see day after day on the four retreats I sat with him: Point directly at it again and again and again, and then also give people the structure and practices that support and lay the conditions for making seeing it much more likely. This is the balanced view that embraces both the ideals and the realities in a practical, functional way. I found it effective, anyway, so that means that you should SEE THE TRUE NATURE OF MIND RIGHT NOW! (DhO)
Downsides and Benefits of a Number of Traditions: Daniel long response to Omega Point. [This is Daniel's response to a 40 page essay, which you can read in this thread or in Scribd: The Art of Nakedness: A look at Buddhist salvation. Enter Daniel Ingram:] Dear Omega Point, Thanks for posting that detailed and excellent essay. I really enjoyed it. It is one of the better comparisons of the various schools I have seen. Here is my reply to Omega Point's many points:
First, a bit about my background. I started meditating in the Mahasi tradition but ran into problems mostly beginning in the territory after moving on from what I think of as second path, when suddenly I was seeing the luminosity of phenomena and noticing that all energies, all emotions, all of this fluxing space, all seemed to be luminous, and this seemed really important, but the Theravada didn't talk about it, and the people who were my teachers then didn't talk about it, and they had no idea what I was talking about, and I got frustrated, as I was seeing something they didn't see, so I started looking elsewhere.
Specifically, I started looking at sources like Chögyam Trungpa, as well as books like The Light of Wisdom by Jamgon Kongtrul the Great, as well as things like Tracing Back the Radiance on the teachings of Chi Nul, a Korean Chan monk. I was particularly taken with some very specific things, such as the section on the 5 Buddha Families in Journey Without Goal by Trungpa, which talks about seeing the enlightened aspect of all qualities of being. I was also influenced by Introduction to Tantra, by Lama Yeshe, as well as Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche's book Dharma Paths, and later by books like Secret of the Vajra World, by Reggie Ray, as well as texts such as Liberation on the Palm of Your Hand, by Pabongka Rinpoche. I read a lot of Taoist stuff in odd sources, such as the cartoons of Tsai Chih Chung, examples being things like The Roots of Wisdom (which is not actually strictly Taoist, but it is in the ballpark). I read Moon in a Dewdrop about the teachings of Dogen many times. This is a very incomplete list, but it gives you a sense of the thing. I also played around with Ceremonial Magick, but that is another story for another time.
At some point, I realized that all moments must spontaneously realize emptiness, luminosity, centerlessness, selflessness, undifferentiated suchness, or whatever you wish to call it, and that this must be the all-the-time, walking-around way of being. About 95% of the field knew it, and chasing down the 5% that didn’t became my obsession. So, my practice changed in some ways, but kept basic facets of the Theravada in others.
I played around with vipassanizing (seeing the Three Characteristics of) the 6th subjhana aspect of the 4th jhana (meaning the Boundless Consciousness sub-aspect) of the formed fourth jhana. I played around with noticing all thoughts as colors of space, as textures of space, and practiced really hard to see space in all its aspects as the utterly transient thing that it is, spending time vipassanizing the 5th jhana itself. I sought to bring the light of clear, direct comprehension to layer upon layer upon layer of subtle illusory duality, trying hard to figure out how to get the last subtle layers of duality to untie themselves, to realize their true nature. I got really good at being mindful of all of the sensations of my scalp and face, trying to get so good at seeing all categories of sensations that could make up the illusion of a separate self or Subject that nothing would be left to create this illusion, as the habit of seeing it as it was would be too strong, to automatic. It was a long process that went on for about 6 years of hard work.
I also played around with my own version of what might loosely be termed tantra (which OP warns about, and I can see why, as, were one not to guard the mind really carefully when it gets that strong, that level of practice can really quickly turn to some really screwed up stuff and crazy-land). On a kasina retreat using candle flame, I got so that I could find myself in a totally different realm with remarkably detailed visualizations of luminous, 3D, intelligent and interactive tantric deities (particularly this white male one with white female consort in the classic pose) and then get No-Self Door Fruitions as the light of their awareness collapsed this way into the sense of intelligence on this side. I did this again and again and again on retreat with a high degree of concentration.
This is a short summary of a much longer and more complex process that took years, spanning the time from December or so 1996 to my last retreat in 2003 in April.
Oddly enough, after lots and lots of playing around with things that might be considered relatively fancy, and after getting very frustrated with the whole thing, I actually turned back to some very Theravadan assumptions on my last retreat: do not let any single sensation anywhere in the entire space of experience go by without instantly comprehending its true nature, not a single friggin’ one. After a week of doing that at an extremely high degree of intensity, things flipped over for the first time to the pristine, direct, non-dual, centerless, etc. way of perceiving things, and then that would fade and it would feel like my heart was broken. I would get it back, it would fade again. I went through a week of that, which was basically awful half the time (the half when I was not in the better way of perceiving things), and then finally, a week later, it stayed that way and that was that on that front.
Hopefully that helps clarify the background to my answer, anyway.
Now, to answer Omega Point (in italics):
If one is no longer resonating with the Theravada path and one observes that one’s progress has stagnated, then moving on to either the path of transformation or the path of spontaneous liberation is perfectly reasonable to consider.
(Daniel:) I couldn't agree more. Doing that helped me a lot. In fact, if you read MCTB with an eye for it, you will see lots of Dzogchen in there, it is just not obvious. You will also see the Tantric perspective on emotions, though it is not that obvious.
The contemporary Theravada path, relatively speaking, is still in an “early” experimental phase.
Yes and no. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have trained in Mahasi Centers during the last 60+ years or so. It is a large sample size, larger than the number of people who have probably practiced some of the higher tantras. Are there problems? Yes.
Do people run into problems in other systems (such as the Tibetan systems)? Yes. Are all the kinks worked out of any of those systems? No.
This point is then used to seriously call into question the textual basis of most of 20th century Theravada meditation, no matter how effective.
As a pragmatist, I love the qualifier...
while in fact a small number of texts explain how the critical samatha practice evolves into vipassana.
Such as my favorite Sutta MN 111.
The vipassana-centric or vipassana-only approaches seem to have originated in the colonial era as part of the modernist Buddhism movement as the schools attempted to address the challenges of the modern age. It was a response born of a growing skepticism of samatha, or more precisely, the degeneration of samatha found across many of the theravadas which allowed local folk customs and lore to inform and taint their practice.
Totally true.
Additionally, “access concentration” or “momentary concentration” which are commonly practiced now, are commentarial ideas and so a later interpretation and thus it is argued that interpreting the texts and thus one’s practice through such a lens may indeed amount to a misinterpretation of those very texts and thus of what is designated as proper practice in regards to the supermundane path laid down by the Buddha (regardless of their efficacy).
Scholastically he is spot on, and again, as a pragmatist, I love the qualifier...
it appears that in many instances both a degenerated samatha and an overemphasis on vipassana persists in modern practice.
I totally agree. Hence, I advocate for both and using them skillfully to help augment and balance each other. Years of watching those who try it too “dry” frying themselves here should convince anyone reading that this view makes sense.
For example, there is a tendency to reinterpret the qualities of jhana in some cases totally leaving out listed qualities and having a “good enough” attitude; an over-willingness to bend the descriptions of the qualities in favor of one’s experience, to exaggerate aspects of one’s experiences of samatha/jhana to fit the listed qualities, even if they are but an extremely weak shadow or imitation of the actual quality in question; and thus to iterate, an overall tendency for complacence, a settling for a weak and generally unstable samatha that one self-soothes oneself, in quite a deceptive and gullible fashion, into thinking that it instead is a strong samatha or at least qualifyingly enough.
Omega Point writes truth. I would add that I still argue against those who are in the "only really, really ultra-hard jhana is jhana" camp, as even moderate jhana has real benefits and can be used for lots of useful things, but I also totally agree that people often settle for really weak jhana not knowing that the stronger versions can be much stronger than they imagine.
Lastly, that samatha and vipassana are not two separate baskets, but two sides of something indivisible, very simply put, the vipassana side dealing with discrimination, discernment, understanding and thus the overcoming of cogitative defilements; while samatha deals with peace, bliss, energy, heart qualities and thus the overcoming of non-conceptual (or super-subtle conceptual/perceptual), somatic, and emotional defilements.
I also totally agree, as it is basically impossible to do either pure samatha or vipassana, as there will always be some mix of these, and this gets more and more true as realization progresses, though it is possible to use the artificial dichotomy to provide some useful guidance for those who are getting stuck one way or the other.
There of course are still the looming issues of the original challenges from many of the schools predating Theravada, that of the status of the arhat, the particular emphasis or lack thereof of the Bodhisattva path, and the status of the true nature of mind whether it was originally pure etc.
Actually, there are some Thai Forest schools that place more emphasis on the Bodhisattva path, but they are clearly a small part of the complex thing, and you find the ideal of being a Bodhisattva in the Pali Canon, as the Buddha himself was one for countless lifetimes before becoming a Buddha, so it says. The status of the arahat is a problem, as I go on and on about.
1. Arhats are not truly enlightened and do not truly reach nirvana. Or
2. Arhatship entails an enlightened state and reaches nirvana, however this enlightenment and nirvana is not maximally consolidated. Or
3. Arhats are totally enlightened, reach nirvana, and are very close if not virtually identical to Buddhas.
There are other options, actually... Consider the point of view presented in MCTB: that arahats have dissolved artificial perceptual dualities, stopped habitual subject-fixation, ended the misperception of the true nature of phenomena, eliminated the sense of the split between the internal and external spaces mentioned above, unified the field into an empty, transient, luminous, intrinsically self-revealing flux, and thus accomplished the end of that particular axis of development, while leaving the question of many other axes of development open, those being dependent upon the individual in question. How can there be consolidation of something that is perceived that way? There is nothing at that point to consolidate.
One must then posit the definition of a Buddha. It is relevant, as to compare two things, one must know what we are comparing. Certainly, by the standard Theravadan definition, in which Buddhas have necessarily perfected all sorts of other aspects of development, including having 40 teeth and arms that hang down past their knees, as well as having perfected all samatha jhanas, as well as eliminating all unskillful personality traits, as well as having mastered all the powers, the two are very far apart except along the single axis of direct realization of the truth of things and whatever benefits that specific aspect of perceptual transformation necessarily and always brings with it.
Concerning anicca, dukkha, and anatta, they are deep and profound things, much more deep than most generally give them credit for, and shouldn't be so easily dismissed. It is easy to not take them as far as they can go. While I can see the appeal of the Tibetan versions, I still like those personally.
Concerning 3rd path and energy practices, that was actually the territory in which I found them to be most useful, and actually did some on that same retreat where I got my concentration strong and could see and merge with images of deities and the like. I got so that I could see them all, manipulate them all, just like one would intend to do anything else. It produced some very interesting effects, and how this later lead to anything else, I can only barely speculate. I categorically disagree that ejaculation necessarily impedes spiritual practice, as much as it gets tossed around. I think it helps some at times, may help to balance and chill some things out, may also cause some at times to be sleepier or have less energy, but also can calm restlessness and provide ease and a sense of well-being. I think it is more contextual and individual/situation-specific, at least in my view.
Regarding his commentary on the Theravada necessarily being the path of the strict renunciate, the more modern practice of alternating heavy, intense single-technique retreats with basically no breaks in technique while awake with getting one’s daily life back together and pursuing worldly goals actually works better than he thinks it does, though I agree that being sure to take daily life as path and to work whenever possible to see its true nature as one goes about it really helps, as it helped me make that oscillation between the two extremes work a lot better.
I also categorically disagree that it isn’t possible to understand the true nature of sensations as a householder, though I definitely think that really solid retreats and really solid practice during them with plenty of daily life practice makes things much more likely to happen, something that most don’t do.
It is true that when I was in my most serious practice years (1995-2003), I barely watched TV, didn’t hang out with friends much, read dharma books like crazy (way over 100 during that period, many studied seriously and read again and again, including things like the Middle Length Discourses, the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga, the Long Discourses, and lots of other Pali texts), burned nearly all available vacation time on retreats, and practiced daily-life mindfulness like a person possessed, like my hair was on fire (maybe that is where it went?). I did some sort of formal practice a minimum of at least an hour each day and, for some of the early years (1996-1997) actually sat at least 3 if not 5 hours each day, this while working some part-time jobs and living on very little money.
I totally agree that Westerners are generally slackers/cynics/meditation-in-a-pill-if-possible-types who don’t want to disrupt their life while Easterners are more into the folk/religious aspects and that the transplanted Easterners are cynics and all interfere with practice.
The lack of qualified tutors and the critique of free-for-all freestyle practice with poor direction and guidance is also a totally valid point, just as parts of their critique of ultra-dogmatic, hyper-traditional traditions also makes some very important points.
The urge to purge the religion and strange and uncomfortable cultural trappings from Buddhism is very much my thing, actually. Fire rituals with butter and meat offerings, bone trumpets, fancy hats, human skull bowls, freakishly high levels of binge alcohol consumption, medieval-feudal wars between traditions, virtual peasant slavery, sexual exploitation, sectarian arrogance, patriarchal dominance: not my things, to put it gently. It is easy to forget what Tibet has been like, particularly before the last 70 years or so, and particularly before kids like Jamgon Kongtrul helped to bring the warring sides together into something less preposterously violent and dysfunctional. Stripping all of that crap out sounds like a fantastic idea. I could launch into the problems with modern Zen in Japan, etc. but that would take all day, wouldn’t it? You really want to keep all that?
I also do agree that reducing all the practices to some low-grade mindfulness is equally vile and misguided. Hence, I advocate for keeping the powerful techniques, the maps of high-level practice, the richness of the technical beauty, conceptual sophistication, and empowerment that comes from these things at their best while leaving so much of the insanity that comes along with the traditions to rot on the great trash-heap of the past. Just as I am no fan of lots of aspects of my American culture, just so I am not a fan of lots of aspects of the original cultures these traditions come from, just so you know I try to apply the same standards to all of it. Needlessly huge SUVs being driven by single people guzzling gas from ultra-conservative Saudi royalty-owned production facilities? Not into it. Global imperialistic robber-baron capitalist oligarchy? Not a fan. I could go on and on. What I worry about is when anyone buys so much into something that they will take the bad of it without feeling like they can seriously question its value and function. That happens with the meditative traditions all the time, and to me represents intellectual retardation.
His warning that the take what works approach can lead to a very watered down set of standards is frequently mentioned by others, such as myself, here on this forum and is worth perpetually guarding against, but this phenomenon is not anything new, as plenty of the history of all of the ancient and culturally-embedded traditions also demonstrate with equal obviousness, again consider the travesty of modern Zen in Japan, consider the totally ritualized/lifestyle/prestige-building/political/etc. version of Theravada “practiced” today in most monasteries in Thailand, etc, and I could basically pick on all the others (Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc.) in similar ways. I could also blast 99% of the Western Tibetan practitioners I know for basically saying, “The Mahayana and Vajrayana are so much better than the Hinayana as they have the Bodhisattva Vow!” and then having the learning of that bit of dogma being the farthest their “practice” ever gets.
Wilber… What to say, eh? It is not that he doesn’t make some good and interesting points and draw some fine correlations and the like, as he clearly does. However, while no expert in his stuff, I don’t see him reaching the level he claims to. I could be wrong, as I don’t know him well.
Stephen Batchelor: both times I met him we instantly didn’t get along, to put it gently. I will leave it at that. His wife Martine is a great person and practitioner, though, with that great sense of light and humble humor that marks someone with a mature practice.
As to the global decline in realized beings, I am not sure, as firm numbers are damn hard to come by. I do know that in the Theravadan world until the last 120 years or so there were precious few enlightened beings and this really hit an upswing in numbers during the 20th century, producing some fine practitioners and great teachings. I am less aware of the numbers in Tibet and how they compare from, say, the 19th century to today.
I do know that I personally know a lot more people with strong practices, and I am not sure if this is the effect of some of the few that are out there gathering together to participate in forums like this one, and this thus just being a networking effect that obscures some true decline.
Regarding the problems with reconciling the paths and bhumis and the like, it clearly is problematic for very large numbers of reasons, not the last of which is what I call the “package models” that each entail, meaning that if you have this quality or realization then you will automatically have these other very specific qualities and aspects, favorite examples being that anagamis couldn’t possibly have erections or orgasms as they can’t feel ordinary lust, as well as bodhisattvas of the whatever bhumi definitely manifesting exactly 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, etc. copies of themselves to bring awakening to that many realms and beings at all times. Both barking crazy, if you ask me. OP: do you really believe in and like the full and unedited dogma of the bhumi models? So often we are quick to poke holes in a tradition based on the worst parts of its dogma while making allowances for the worst dogma of our own tradition. I do this myself regularly and am doing it actually right now, but it makes the point that we must all be careful of this pervasive tendency.
That is why I prefer my Simple Model, my many and various axes of development that don’t assume progress on one axis will guarantee progress on another, breaking the models down into their more component parts so that we may begin to address each aspect of them, and the like.
Will it be impossible to create reasonable models and correspondences that can adequately accommodate the wide range of the specific manifestations of individual practitioners and their various progressions along the many and various axes of development while maintaining high standards and strict criteria for essential aspects of the path that serve the basic function of helping to guide and direct and inspire better practice? I personally believe we will be able to do this when the various traditions get over themselves and people can sit down and talk like mature, rational adults and really let their hair down and swap notes and stories and try to line it up in a way that goes beyond the pathetic and infantile term-wars and dogma-spats and finally gets down to business.
Given that it may be hundreds of years before anything that functional happens, if ever (doesn’t seem to have actually ever occurred during the last 2,500 years or so in the way I dream it will) we will probably be waiting a while, but those are the conversations I dream of having in my most optimistic fantasies. Omega Point: interested in something like that? I could spend a whole day talking about these things if you are up for it, and I doubt that would even really be more than a crude beginning. The problem with modern life is that we don’t take the time to do the deep, very long conversations that would help to sort out so many things and so much is wasted in misunderstanding and confusion. This goes doubly for the “internal arts” we concern ourselves with here. The biases between traditions fly so thick and fast, we stumble over words from other traditions we are so sure we understand but don’t, there is the issue of personal quirks of language usage, and the list of barriers to real dogma-transcending dialogue goes on and on and on. You want to talk about rare beings? Those who have realization and would be willing to talk about it honestly and without the armor of their tradition and social role all around them: that’s more rare than a live snow lion.
Regarding Omega Point’s progression from Hinayana to Mahayana to Dzogchen-like/Rigpa-based practices to spontaneous liberation, makes sense to me and sounds like a nice way to go. It seems to have produced good results, which again is what I care about.
As to what OP calls consolidation, I also have noticed various things have helped to integrate some aspects of the thing I call arahatship, untying, centerlessness, non-duality, and other names, as those who have read this forum for a while know, so that progression and deepening makes sense to me also.
Regarding practice being crude at best without some minimum understanding of things, this is still where I think that the Mahasi practices kick ass, as I still don’t know anything that is on average faster for getting people to Stream Entry than a good Mahasi retreat done really well as instructed. As my friend Sean Pritchard (ex monk who taught Mahasi retreats for years) says, if they do the technique, progress is basically guaranteed and is basically mechanical, in that it just steps along in a remarkably predictable way.
What is interesting is that as soon as I got stream entry, all I could think about was how everything was the balanced manifestation of empty compassion, and that this applied to all beings without exception, and I did this with very strict noting technique in a very Theravadan context and set of conceptual frameworks. Suddenly so much Mahayana stuff that had been so obscure suddenly made sense, and I also saw how I had misread plenty of the Theravadan stuff to miss those aspects in it. Thus, one should be careful to not imagine that there is no overlap, that one can’t lead to the other, that they are unrelated, that realization is totally different between traditions.
OP’s commentary about how you should do some very specific energetic and visualizations practices is beyond easy ability to comment on, as I lack the fine points and haven’t done those, so can’t reasonably judge them.
As to the necessity of a guru, here we differ. I had no guru that I am aware of, though I studied with a bunch of people with very strong practices and various degrees of understanding of various things. Does that count? I don’t think so from the Tibetan point of view. Am I so rare as all that? I totally reject the idea, lest it poison the minds of those would devalue their own abilities and shoot for something less than they were capable of as they also had no guru. I know plenty of great practitioners who have and had no guru.
His comments about energy and bodhichitta and the like are beyond me, as those seem very practice and tradition-specific and I didn’t practice in his tradition.
As to the dangers of the path, I agree, can be dangerous, even just doing something simple like noting or following the breath, even more if one is playing around with energy and powers and visualizations, as that side of things is very powerful but also very risky, as psychosis crawls much closer to the surface, and without adequate protections can go horribly awry. (DhO)
A Glossary for Middle & Higher Paths
Direct awareness. A description of something regarding "raw" sense data, or as raw as we have access to, that is. It could also involve anything, but specifically it tends to mean, for example, noticing the sensations in the fingers as being there, in the fingers, and the mental impression of them that typically occurs somewhere in that region or perhaps near the center of the head as just being those mental impressions rather than taking the mental impressions for the physical sensations of the fingers. This is just one of countless examples, as it doesn't imply a specific, just a quality where things directly represent themselves.
Awareness of awareness. A bit of a redundancy, or a pointing back towards some theoretical origin of consciousness, or a focus, or an attempt at a technique, or an experience of some sort of sense of "consciousness", or a meta-cognitive awareness, or possibly other meanings, depending on context. This one would clearly need to be appreciated in its tradition and meaning will depend on usage, and often gets vaguely used so its utility will depend greatly on its application.
Natural State, Non-Dualistic State. While used various ways, and clearly problematic, and clearly somewhat tradition dependent, at its best it points much as the Bahiya of the Bark Cloth Sutta, "In the seeing, just the seen. In the hearing, just the heard. In the felt, just the felt. In the cognized, just the cognized. In the thinking just the thought, etc." In this, things are simply where they are, happening naturally as they do, know where they are by themselves, naturally appreciating their own transience, unsolidified by misperception or habit, ungrasped by misperception or habit, etc. However, some will use it in other ways, and I consider every other usage a problem. Natural state could be used in the highest sense as a synonym of arahatship. However, the Mayahana being generally pretty phenomenologically weak as it is will often use it for many other states that contain some hint of a glimpse of a part of the full thing, even going as low as to say that Mind and Body, some jhanic state, or Equanimity are the Natural State or a glimps of the Natural State. In this, they are partly right, as those do contain parts of the puzzle, but at the same time they shortchange the real thing. Various people will relate to this problem various ways. Some relate to it skillfully, and take the partial glimpses as just those, and others will fixate on some limited state that isn't the complete thing as being the complete thing, but, in this, they err.
Nondualistic state. See Natural State, as the exact same discussion applies.
PCE (Pure Consciousness Experience). A term used various ways by various authors and traditions. If you mean PCE as defined in Actualism, then that refers to a very remarkable state, a state I don't recommend attempting to map to anything else EVER. Sorry for those who really like putting this all together in a neat package, buy I think it is its own thing that needs to be engaged with and defined on its own terms. The PCE defined by Actualism is truly a remarkable experience. It has various qualities, including a sense of sensate "perfection", as well as a preposterous visual sampling rate. When in a PCE, I can be watching a 60Hz television and see the frames, actually can't not see the frames, as the sense of pristine perfection is something you basically can't not see in a PCE. It is also emotionally very unusual, considered by Actualism the learning lab of its project. Some here believe the PCE to be "Buddhist crack" in the very bad sense of "crack", really great feeling, but really dangerous. I don't view it that way having been in a PCE for up to around 3 days at the longest. When in a PCE, ones ordinary emotional reactions generally seem like the foolish stupidity of an ignorant child. Aesthetics are markedly altered, as the wall next to a TV might seem equally as interesting or not as the TV it is next to, for example. There is a sense of generic beauty that applies to everything equally. Your favorite music seems no more nor less interesting than silence. PCEs can be attained to by attending to the sensuous beauty of experience and inclining to immediate perfection, but some will find it much easier than others, and having someone to point you in that "direction" helps, as with so many other things. PCEs have a delight to them which the Actualists will say is a flaw, a subtle corruption, but still as close as one can get to Actualism without attaining to it, they would add. PCEs are compelling. As Actualism is extremely controversial on the DhO, PCEs also are similarly extremely controversial, and discussions of them are at risk of serious flame wars and political badness. You will have to determine for yourself if you are interested in pursuing them further.
Bhavanga. Defined as what the mind turns to when it has no object in the sense of being in deepest sleep or having nothing contacting the senses, also what the mind does between mind moments if nothing else is going on, so sort of a synonym for unconsciousness, but, again, used various ways by various people, so must be taken in context, but, if you really want to attempt to get at what that technical term is meaning, see here. It is also sometimes conceptualized as some sort of factor that provides some quality of continuity to existence, a conceptualization that is extremely problematic and must not be taken as a true continuity of some continuous soul or similar entity. In what context are you finding it used? Essentially, and by definition, you can't be conscious of Bhavanga. It also must be carefully distinguished from Nibbana.
Rigpa. Very much like Nondual State, or Natural State. Again, this is a term that gets used a lot, and various authors lend their various flavors to it and subtle or not so subtle variations in usage. It sometimes refers straightforwardly to experience without the distortion of ignorance, as in the Bahiya of the Bark Cloth Sutta, but sometimes it is unfortunately used to describe some sort of luminous all-ground, which I consider a serious problem, and sometimes used to refer to some exalted, basically mythical state of liberation beyond this ordinary sense world yet somehow of it, a usage that is just useless mind-fuckery, if you ask me.
Luminosity. Variously used by various authors to describe states that, on inspection, seem to be either that phase of Equanimity that I call ñ11.j4.j6, meaning the still formed part of the Equanimity ñana where there is a strong sense of consciousness pervading but there is still form, which is a temporary state, to the experience that begins to show up for some around what I think of as "Third Path", meaning that, in ordinary life and just walking around, phenomena seem to contain their own "light" as it were, and not that they are more illuminated or glowing or anything like that (though in some stages people will feel that everything is glowing more, as can happen in both the A&P and Equanimity), it just means that phenomena are naturally aware where they are, again, as in the Bahiya of the Bark Cloty Sutta, where things slimply represent themselves. Luminosity can also sometimes refer to the state of Boundless Consciousness, the true formless realm, in which ordinary forms such as the body are not perceived, and instead there is just wide-open vastness that all seems present in some bright, conscious way. It can also refer to what I consider to be one of the standard Golden Chain traps that await beings of moderately high but incomplete levels of realization, that sense that there is a Luminous All-Ground, some stable space that seems to Know, a stable light of Awareness that is some True Self, that is some Ground of Being, some Buddha Nature that is undying, stable, always present, still, silent, unchanging. This is an illusion, but an extremely tempting one for some, and I would guess that about half of the Mahayana sutra-writers got stuck there. It is a pretty good place to be stuck, as places to be stuck go, but it is still less than what is possible.
Non-conceptuality. Very much like Natural State, Direct Awareness, Nondual State, and Rigpa when used in that most useful, most accurate, and most straightforward sense, in which, rather than the mental impression or "consciousness" that follows each other sense impression is taken as the awareness of the sense impression that followed it, the sense impression and the mental impression are both taken to simply represent themselves as and where they occur very straightforwardly and literally.
Cittas. A term that really needs its qualifier word to make it make sense in any specific context, often used in the Abhidhamma in a hyper-technical enumeration of various types of mind states or qualities of heart/mind or arisings of some aspect of experience, sometimes used in a micro-phenomenological sense, sometimes used in a more macro-phenomenological sense. Also, Access to Insight is pretty helpful, or at least about as helpful as one can get in this business.
Javanas. A type of citta that is reactive to a previous citta and where kamma is created, a type of "mind moment". This article is helpful.
Jhanas. While these have straightforward definitions in terms of their essential qualities (1st: applied and sustained attention (aiming and rubbing) with rapture and happiness born of seclusion from the hindrances, 2nd: with the dropping of applied and sustained attention/aiming and rubbing there is rapture and happiness born of concentration, 3rd: with the dropping of rapture, there is subtle, cool bliss, equanimity, and mindfulness, 4th: with the dropping of subtle bliss there is equanimity with mindfulness considered perfected due to the equanimity thought it may not be as obvious and with a neutral feeling tone, etc.), they can look radically different depending on how the mind is tuned, what is taken as object, what is intentionally excluded from consciousness, what level of depth the jhana is taken to, what is emphasized, and what is diminished. Learning to identify them is both an art and a science, as are their sub-jhanic aspects and phases of development.
Formless realms/jhanas. Truly, the body is gone. This is a key point. If the body is there, that's something else, something that may have formless aspects perhaps, but not a true formless realm. These are really more "realms", in that they are truly removed from this "realm". They are elsewhere, in another space, mentally created, if you will, not experienced "here". The body may disappear in jhanas before the formless realms, even the first jhana, but it would still have that effortful first jhana quality to it, which the formless realms don't, being long after the dropping of applied and sustained effort/attention as they are. Distinguishing the four formless realms from the lower jhanas that are tuned away from ordinary form is not actually that hard, as the formless realms arise after the fourth jhana is attained, which is usually pretty obvious, and they are not particularly negotiable, being sort of "fixed packages" in the sense that they are always "the same", said in quotes to avoid some sense of fixity in the sense of permanence. Every time you attain to them, there they are, seemingly just like before. Boundless space is just as you would figure. Imagine you are on the deck of a spaceship with a vast panoramic window onto the vastness of interstellar space, then take away the stars, then take away the spaceship, then take away the body that is observing it. Boundless consciousness is just like that, vast, formless, clear, quiet, present, refined, etc. except that the whole thing has a sense of some light to it, but a light that is not reflecting on anything, just present to the boundless space in some way that is clearly different from simple Boundless space, yet also sort of like a recognition of something that was there but you just hadn't noticed it yet. Nothingness is what would happen if you then totally turned the lights out, such that there is just nothing. This is best recognized after the appropriate setup, that of the first two formless realms, and so, by going there again and again and getting a sense of it, one can then learn to differentiate it from other states that don't seem to involve much experience beyond the sense of nothing, which, it turns out, is a distinct experience which is exactly and straightforwardly that in a really literal way. Neither perception nor yet non-perception is best appreciated as what happens when the mind detunes from Nothingness, and one finds one's self in an experience that is essentially indescribable beyond weird terms such as its name. It is best understood by going through the setup in order, namely Boundless Space, Boundless Conscousness, Nothingness, and then NPNYNP. In this way, and through repetition, you learn the quality of each, and their distinct presentations become more obvous. This takes practice, and many will not be able to do this easily or at all. While claims of formless attainments are common, I believe the real thing is substantially less so.
Pure Land Jhanas™. A proprietary term claimed by Kenneth Folk, Inc. as his own property, originally sort of derives from the original description of the 31 Planes of Existence. You see, there five realms described in that table as 23-27 are Pure Abodes, but they have no other descriptions. The association occurred when an undefined set of practitioner(s), whose members will not be named to avoid toxic, narcissistic politics, noticed that, after leaving NPNYNP, they would sometimes soon thereafter find themselves in remarkable states that simply didn't fit the standard descriptions of the ordinary jhanas. These seemed to combine elements of various jhanas in combinations previously undescribed but in ways that were truly delightful, having a true sense of purity to them, and adding in other elements, like powerful gratitude, or cool delight but in some way that was different from lower jhanas and combined with much more pervasive and impressive elements, as well as occurring blatantly out of any ordinary sequence. It was then decided by KF, he says, to call these Pure Land Jhanas, corresponding them with the extremely sparse descriptions found in the list of the 31 realms, and presuming that only anagamis or arahats could access them. However, that is an extremely contentious point, and phenomenologically extremely problematic, owing to the fact of the custom/fusion jhanas...
Custom/fusion jhanas. As those with strong concentration, a bit of talent, and a spirit of exploration have noticed, at some point one can gain the ability to tune the mind in ways that simply defy the ordinary categorization of the typical four jhanas and add in other elements not mentioned in them. Pure Land Jhanas may very well fall into this category, and, as their original criteria are undefined, many believe they have attained to them, and some have used these as their primary criteria for various path attainments despite the known problems with doing this. These problems primarily include the remarkable ability to create jhanas that really are however one wishes them to be once one gets enough concentration. Notice I simply said "enough concentration", and not "enough concentration and insight," as it can be demonstrated that some who clearly don't have high levels of insight can yet, through that odd mix of training, inclination, and talent, get themselves into some extremely remarkable states just by learning to incline their mind that way.
Vipassana jhanas. Refer to the fact that the Three Characteristics can be observed in various modes that clearly correlate with the standard jhanic descriptions and have those various classic jhanic factors present, thus creating experiences that clearly have both an insight and a more samatha feel to them. In fact, it is extremely hard to get into jhanic states that do not have any hint of the Three Characteristics. Also, one finds plenty of textual evidence that jhanas were states that could be investigated and broken down into individual qualities and moments. Thus, the term "vipassana jhanas", basically to distinguish them in terms of both experience and practice emphasis from those jhanas which by way of inclination and experience are a lot smoother, more seemingly stable, less evidencing the Three Characteristics. However, as some have noted, the stronger one's concentration gets, the harder it is to really ignore the moment-to-moment nature of experience. Also, even those doing "pure insight practices", dedicated to tearing down each moment ruthlessly, will often enter into territory where powerful jhanic factors are present, particularly in certain insight stages, such as Mind and Body (1st jhana), The A&P (2nd jhana), Dissolution (3rd jhana), and Equanimity (4th jhana). Also, those who, in a stage such as Review, train well, will notice that it is really easy for some to do lateral work, turning each jhana into its closest ñana and back again, and even move in zig-zag patterns up and down this hypothetical ladder, such as from the 2nd vipassana jhana (A&P) to a more smooth 3rd samatha-esque jhana to a more vibratory/fluxy 4th vipassana jhana/Equanimity, etc. However, it should be noted that, in supramundane jhana, the "noble one" cannot truly ignore or not notice the Three Characteristics, unlike those pre-path, who can actually attain to jhanas that feel a lot more stable than those post-path.
In answer to the question about Bhavanga, it is clearly different from the four formless realms. In deep sleep, or when under general anesthesia and properly sedated, one is unconscious. There is no time, no space, no experience, no anything. One is just out. Boundless space is vastly different from this, a very present, impressive, vast space. Similarly, boundless consciousness is a vast, luminous, conscious space. Similarly, Nothingness is the sense of dedicated presence to the quality of Nothing, almost like tuning into the Platonic ideal of Nothing, but there is still a sense of the passage of time, and there is still definitely experience. In NPNYNP, there is still definitely that quality, which is a very hard quality to explain, but it is definitely different from deep sleep or unconsciousness both in setup, entrance, the thing itself, exit, and after-effects. (DhO)
3rd Path
I agree that many people, having little experience, models, or training in reporting their direct experience, are not that good at it. It is almost like learning a new language or trade lexicon. May we do better at helping to support people in that work and in being forgiving and kind.
I have enjoyed learning Spanish, as I have found that nearly everyone that I have encountered who speaks Spanish is a natural Spanish teacher, and they smile and are gently supportive. May we take inspiration from their example.
Also, I see a lot of people go on their heaviest and longest retreats to get Stream Entry, but then, for a lot of people, the interest and resource-dedication falls off. I understand why this happens, as Stream Entry for a lot of people is very satisfying.
Still, I very rarely have conversations with people who are planning their long retreat(s) the way those gunning for Stream Entry often do, almost never hearing anyone report, "Ok, I have really nailed down Second Path, have repeat Fruitions, can call up the stages and substages, but now want to go off to Asia for a few months of deep retreat to attain Third Path." Can anyone else here recall reading of such a practitioner recently on this forum? I can't, but would be happy to be wrong and have good examples pointed out for the general inspiration of the forum readership. I admit that I don't read every thread and may have missed them.
It is ironic that third is known to be a generally harder path, a vastly more subtle, broad, complex path, a path out where the fractal is getting complex, where the cycles can go on and on, a path that the texts say requires more concentration power than Stream Entry, a path that requires a very different understanding in realtime than Stream Entry or Second Path, a path that requires shifting the focus from Fruition to immediate luminosity or whatever you wish to call it, and then people totally low-ball Third Path, giving it vastly less effort, study, energy, dedication, and retreat time than they gave to Stream Entry instead of more, and what do you expect will happen? Exactly what we see happening. Should this surprise anyone?
While there is rare individual variation, and for whatever strange karmic reasons I found Third Path easier than is generally reported, the average on this is well-known, and it is harder than the first two. That said, I had to pour resources for years into the last path, with it taking vastly more retreat time, cushion time, study, deep inquiry, and maturation than the first three did for me, and the path for me would be classified as fast but difficult. (DhO)
3rd Path as sort of Dark Night. I think of Third Path as sort of the Dark Night of the big cycle of the paths, so watch for that … I can't honestly remember if I wrote about that specifically or not in those words (in MCTB1), but I mention fractals and the 3rd phase of anything is the Dark Night phase, at least in a 4-based fractal mapping system, in general terms.
Yeah, Kenneth and I were just having a long conversation today (Dec/2010) about that and related topics and what wisdom can be gained from realizing we are human and all try to do our best.
I have seen a relatively wide range of what 3rd Path, however defined, does to people, but most seem to find it more challenging than second. It is of a different scope in some ways, wider, more about this right here, and has its own interesting traps: fascination with making emptiness a superspace or some primordial refuge, fascination with high jhanas and powers, fascination with subtle identifications with deep insights, and the like. (DhO)
I have plenty of reports from friends who had some difficulties with various forms of depression for various periods of time in the middle paths. Some were very short, some relatively long. Some very mild, others moderate, a few severe, though those tended to be short-lived. Even the middle paths are not a definite protection against depression. (DhO)
Criteria for 3rd Path. Various teachers use various criteria for third path. While I prefer the Simple Model, if we are going to use four path terminology, then this is how I think of it, in case anyone is interested:
(1) Waking, walking-around reality should be very, very different from how it was before, with specific changes realted to the following:
- Things should mostly seem to be happening on their own: that includes thoughts, actions, perception, intentions, feelings, movements, everything. This should be the dominant waking experience, with portions of experience that are not naturally known as being that way being the minority. The natural causality and self-lessness of action should be clear most of the time and for most things. In short, third path is a set up to fourth path, like a getting close but not quite. As a waking experience, it is most of the way there.
- One's waking experience of awareness should be very different. There are lots of ways to say this, but I tend towards the following descriptions: the basic light/luminosity/awareness/manifestation in phenomena should mostly be known directly as being where the objects are. Said another way, manifest objects and sensations should be largely known to contain their own awareness in them, with them, as them, being the same thing. In short, the sense that this side is perceiving that side should be markedly diminished, and the sense that that side and substantial parts of this side are just stuff that knows itself where it is should predominate, with these exceptions becoming more and more subtle as insight deepens, until exceptions are very hard to find. In short, third path is a set up to fourth, like getting close but not quite. It is most of the way there and should point to what is left to be done and how to do it.
(3) Nirodha Samapatti: as I have stated many times, I think that the overcalling of this is common, or common as things in this small meditative world go, as there are not actually that many that claim to have NS. Most of the time the descriptions I read don't convince me that they were the real thing. It is easy to script this, to get into something moderately formless, to get into the 7th or 8th jhana, to take some lower jhana into something more formless by taking it as object (even the first jhana can cause the body to totally dissappear if the focus is right and concentration strong enough), and then think this was NS. Even a good Fruition might be a solid mimic, but that is a trivial attainment in comparison. Thus, I don't use NS as my primary criteria either, but, if someone really thinks that they get it, that is certainly interesting. However, how this may help if they don't have the points in 1) above, I don't know, as without those they still don't have what I consider the whole point of third path: to have something that points strongly to what fourth path is about, with it just needing to have that same basic insight applied to the nagging remainders and hold-out patterns of experience for which identification and delusion is stronger and which are more sticky and subtle.
My two cents, anyway. Let other teachers call things as they do, that's their right. In this business, finding concensus is very, very difficult, so I am not really expecting much of that. I simply present these points and criteria to clarify things, lest by association people think we are all on the same page, which we aren't. (DhO)
In 3rd Path, why not just ‘continue’ to ‘observe’ exactly what's going on ‘in the present moment’ and see the Three Characteristics? The Three Characteristics are profound, very profound, staggeringly profound, and not easily grasped in their entirety. It seems perfectly reasonable to grasp them in their entirety by observing them, but there is a problem, actually, that last line contains a bunch of problems that are not obvious until you see them clearly.
I will go by the words (of the title) to illustrate the problem.
So, while it is true that deeply comprehending emptiness, non-continuity, non-observation, and even non-present, can occur by just continuously observing this present moment, we must be careful, and sometimes it takes people shifting out of their trench of "good practice" to do something that is out from good practice and instead is just the unfolding empty wisdom dharma. Various people find various methods to make this subtle shift, and one size definitely does not fit all, so best wishes sorting out what will help you work out your salvation with diligence.
One could just say that each transient moment, however it is, naturally understands its ungraspable, discontinuous, ephemeral, non-existent, empty nature, straightforwardly, perfectly. However, one must be careful not to idealize or intellectually reify any of those concepts and qualifiers, and instead this is something that is purely perceptual. It applies to every transient moment, regardless of any other consideration of the specific qualities of that moment.
All that said, I did, as my last push, go back to the Three Characteristics and Six Sense Doors, just those, but at a level of extremely high precision, inclusiveness, and acceptance, and found that effective. Yet, the place I had gotten to that seemed to make it effective was a radical disenchantment and dispassion with everything “I” had attained, everything “I” was, everything “I” could become, everything “I” could experience, and how to arrive at such a place varies a lot by the person. (Link to one of the best ever threads in DhO)
In 3rd Path, why not just ‘continue’ to ‘observe’ exactly what's going on ‘in the present moment’ and see the Three Characteristics? The Three Characteristics are profound, very profound, staggeringly profound, and not easily grasped in their entirety. It seems perfectly reasonable to grasp them in their entirety by observing them, but there is a problem, actually, that last line contains a bunch of problems that are not obvious until you see them clearly.
I will go by the words (of the title) to illustrate the problem.
- "Continue": there is no continuing. There is nothing to continue, no past that could be continued, no future to continue into, and this moment is entirely ungraspable. No sensation could ever actually grasp or continue. Everything is fresh but perfectly ephemeral. The notion of continuing, from a high insight point of view, is a serious problem. Instead, there has to be a deep non-grasping, a perfect and flawless appreciation of non-continuing, a deep never could be a continuing, a deep nothing could ever be continuing, a deep sense of not only discontinuity, but of the utter flowing, vanishing, empty transience of anything that seemed to be able to continue. One must figure out how to go beyond continuing, beyond grasping, beyond that strange mental illusion that such a thing could ever occur or have occurred.
- "Observe": there is no observing. There can be no observing. There is nothing that can observe at all. Everything is just occurring where it is, naturally, straightforwardly. There is no observer. There can't be any observer. There never was any observer. Deeply understanding this is required. There never was any observation. Observation can't finally do it. One must figure out how to shift out of observing to just phenomena occurring.
- The qualifier "in the present moment" is a problem in some way. This almost always involves some subtle or gross pattern of sensations that we refer to mentally when we say "now", or "the present", which are not actually stable, not actually a present, not actually anything but more empty transience, yet we make them seem like a stable present. This is very subtle, deep, profound. Even "the present" doesn't withstand scrutiny, and we must be careful with this sticky concept, as it can itself become a sort of a solidified thing, part of the illusion of continuity, observation, practitioner, etc.
So, while it is true that deeply comprehending emptiness, non-continuity, non-observation, and even non-present, can occur by just continuously observing this present moment, we must be careful, and sometimes it takes people shifting out of their trench of "good practice" to do something that is out from good practice and instead is just the unfolding empty wisdom dharma. Various people find various methods to make this subtle shift, and one size definitely does not fit all, so best wishes sorting out what will help you work out your salvation with diligence.
One could just say that each transient moment, however it is, naturally understands its ungraspable, discontinuous, ephemeral, non-existent, empty nature, straightforwardly, perfectly. However, one must be careful not to idealize or intellectually reify any of those concepts and qualifiers, and instead this is something that is purely perceptual. It applies to every transient moment, regardless of any other consideration of the specific qualities of that moment.
All that said, I did, as my last push, go back to the Three Characteristics and Six Sense Doors, just those, but at a level of extremely high precision, inclusiveness, and acceptance, and found that effective. Yet, the place I had gotten to that seemed to make it effective was a radical disenchantment and dispassion with everything “I” had attained, everything “I” was, everything “I” could become, everything “I” could experience, and how to arrive at such a place varies a lot by the person. (Link to one of the best ever threads in DhO)
3rd Path involves a few things. Third involves a few things, as I see it:
What is meant by Direct Perception. Part of what is meant by direct perception is that:
1) Continuing to practice, and by that I mean directly seeing things arise and vanish on their own over there, however you can do that. Noting is good, direct observation of all the complexity is better, though using noting to ease into difficult patterns of sensations can be useful.
2) Going wide and through: as third is more spacious, more about dissolving a significant chunk of what seems to be observing, doing, controlling, analyzing, and the like, you both have to take on more of the sensations that seem to be all of that, which they aren't, and also see how to dissolve the artificial boundaries that seem to delineate that from everything else, meaning the rest of what happens in what seems to be space. Play on that line: how do you know what the edge between what seems to be you and not you is, viscerally, perceptually, vibrationally, texturally, geographically, volumetrically? Any quality that you notice seems to really feel like it means it is you, see the Three Characteristics of that.
3) Dismiss ideals and the patterns of ideals about what you think this stuff will do as more sensations to observe. If you can do this at the level of fluxing, shifting patterns of suchness, that is easier, but whatever level you find yourself at is the level that you can work with, as it is all the same from that point of view, and knowing that simple fact can help a lot.
4) Really allow the thing to show itself. Really allow luminosity to show itself. Really allow things to just happen as they do. Less control, more direct understanding of that natural unfolding, more noticing how the sense of control occurs at all, what it feels like, how that set of textures and intentions set up a sense that there is a you that is doing anything and how obviously wrong that is. Feel into what seems to be looking, asking, wanting, expecting and vipassanize all of that: not forcefully but skillfully, subtly coaxing those patterns into the light of awareness that sees through their clever tricks, almost like you have to look just slightly to the side of the Pleiades to see them as clearly, almost as if you have to sneak up on them so gently that they don't notice it and can be caught unaware, except that sneaking process is what you are trying to sneak up on.
5) Notice that you can't do anything other than what happens. Try. See how those patterns occur. Try to do something other than what happens. It is preposterous, but when you try it, there are patterns that arise, patterns of illusion, patterns of pretending, patterns that if you start to look at them you will see are ludicrous, laughable, like a kid's fantasies, and yet that is how you believe you are controlling things, so try again and again to do something other than what occurs and watch those patterns of confusion and pretending to be in control that arise and you will learn something. This is an unusually profound point.
6) Really, really keep the Three Characteristics in all their profundity as the Gold Standards for whether or not you are perceiving things clearly, and each moment you aren't, notice why and debunk that right there, and then do it again and again and again, as it always takes more repetitions of that process than people think it should, and so many get psyched out, when it may have not been that many more iterations of the process to have succeeded in locking that in as the way of perceiving things permanently.
7) Feel the going out into new territory with its confusion, tedium, frustration and creepiness as the thing itself: that which wants it to be known, mapped, predictable, safe, familiar is part of the thing that you need to see as it is: see those patterns in the head, chest, stomach, throat, etc. as more shifting, fresh patterns: that freshness keeps you honest, keeps you really paying attention in that slightly violating, slightly personally-taboo way that really helps in the end.
8) If you are familiar with the vipassana jhanas as living, familiar, felt things, then realize that Third has elements of the Third Jhana, wide but somehow there is something creepy about it, as it violates the center in a more full-time way than the earlier paths do. The more you have a tolerance for something in that letting go through-to-the-bone creepiness and can see the good side in that, the width, the spaciousness, the naturalness, the directness, the completeness, the fullness, the now-ness of it, the better you will do. It is a more sophisticated way of perceiving things, more out of control, more brave, more free, requiring more trust, more openness, more acceptance, being more down to earth and also more diffuse at the same time, which is an odd juxtaposition of feelings to get used to, but it is worth it.
9) If you have 5th, or even 4j.5j, meaning the spacious aspect of 4th that is not truly formless but still quite open and wide, that is a really good pointer, just allow it to also go through anything you think is you, working on that seeming boundary line, as above, but allowing it to breathe, to flux, volumetrically, like moving blobs of space with texture all together, all of them just the natural world doing its rich and empty thing. (DhO, another great thread BTW)
What is meant by Direct Perception. Part of what is meant by direct perception is that:
(1) rather than taking mental impressions of other sensations as being the same as the sensation that preceeded it, each thing, meaning the sensation and the mental impression, are known to be discrete phenomena that are interwoven rapidly
(2) that rather than the content of thought being known without much conscious experience of the numerous, complex, discrete sensations that make up that content, those discrete sensations are perceived as clear sensate phenomena
(3) rather than it seeming that some sensations perceive other sensations, the clear and intrinsic comprehension of sensations is known by themselves, where they are, and not by some illusion of certain sensations being privileged with special perceptive powers
it is still true that there is significant pre-processing before the sensations arise, as you point out, but insight practice concerns itself with the realm of sensate experience, so the level you have concerns about is one extrapolated from that sensate level to underlie it. (DhO)
What Luminosity is. Luminosity is both a useful and possibly very misleading term. Here's what it is doesn't mean: that a person will suddenly see things more brightly, that there will be more light in things than the standard amount, or anything like that.
… While it is true that all sorts of "visual upgrades" can occur, increased vividness, increased directness, increased peripheral awareness and panoramicity, etc., those are not actually what Luminosity is talking about, as it applies to all sense doors equally, not just the visual one. It is a fundamental characteristic of all sensate experience, not a retrofitted or upgraded aspect.
… Here's what it points to, said a number of equivalent ways:
- In the seeing, just the seen. In the hearing, just the heard. In cognition, just the cognized. In feeling, just the felt... This standard line from the Bahiya of the Bark Cloth Sutta in the Udana is one of the most profound there is in the whole of the Pali Canon. It means that sensations are just sensations, simply that, with no knower, doer, be-er (not beer, as that is a beverage), or self in them to be found at all.
- Point one, taken in its logical inverse, means that the "light" of awareness is in things where they are, including all of the space between/around/through them equally.
- Said another way, things just are aware/manifest/occurring where they are just as they are, extremely straightforwardly. (DhO)
The simple, first tier, opening, beginner teachings about Anatta, meaning that all of experiential reality is lacking or empty of a self, are actually profound to a degree that is hard to appreciate. (DhO)
What I mean by Emptiness. When I mean empty:
- I also mean without boundary, without inside and outside.
- I also mean the direct immediate experience in its unprocessed or raw form. I also mean the total dissolution of the sense of a perceiver.
- I also mean no active agent.
- I also mean that nothing is stable, including space and time.
- I also mean that all is bare, shifting, empty sensate experience, causal, happening according to the basic laws of the universe, naturally, on its own.
- I also would say that there is no boundary or differentiation between the sense doors as they occur, nor between body and mind, nor between manifestation and awareness, nor between this and that, beyond those ordinarily used for communication and discriminating function, but these are not the essential nature of experience, just part of it as sensations when they occur.
Nor can one find any here that is stable, nor a now that is stable, nor a knower, nor an investigator, nor any practitioner, nor any attainer.
When I talk of an integrated transient, natural, causal, luminous experience field, this sounds to me exactly like your "All collapse into a single sphere of natural presence and spontaneous simplicity."
I see no obvious difference either in theory or in actual practice. (DhO)
Vajrayana, Theravada and Dream Walker’s simple map. [Fellow DhO poster and advanced meditator developed over time an interesting ‘Framework of Awakening’ which is referred in the thread ‘Does Vajrayana contribute 'less' to mass enlightenment vs Theravada?’, whose simplest presentation is: (1) Concentration; (2) Insight practice: 1st Path, 2nd Path and 2.5th Path; (3) Mahamudra: 3rd Path, 4th Path; (4) Dzogchen. Daniel Ingram enters late in the thread, and had some exchange with Dream Walker.]
Daniel Ingram comments: DreamWalker’s simple map mirrors my own general views on the subject in terms of teachings that are likely to make more sense as one progresses along the path, except that, in the end, when seeking arahatship, I personally went back to the most basic, simple, fundamental Theravadan vipassana instructions: Six Sense Doors, Three Characteristics, and found that this simple framework, practiced well and understood well, was as profound as any more elaborate or seemingly refined teachings.
Similarly, while there are elaborate and specific techniques of great interest that have been developed over the years to address various stages of the path, the notion, mentioned above, that the Theravada has no idea what to do past arahatship is not true, as the first two trainings are actually elaborate and deeply transformative if practiced thoroughly. I continue to notice profound teachings in the old Pali and related commentarial texts that I had totally missed the first (and often second and third...) time I read them regarding how to do the relative work of integration and maturation of the implications of awakening. Teachings about karma, rebirth, the Jataka birth stories, magic, the politics of the early Sangha, the Vinaya, the stories of the great disciples of the Buddha, the dealings with beings from other realms of existence: all of this and more, which is often overlooked as we read from our post-post-modern vantage point still wriggling out from under the thumb of scientific materialism, can contribute to a much deeper appreciation of the path and view, so I am noticing again and again.
The typical disparagement of arahatship as leading to some dull low-brow state or whatever is some of the worst Tibetan propaganda, clearly based on some long-ago dogma created by someone who didn’t know any arahats but wanted to promote their own tradition by means of toxic comparison. May this noxious habit vanish immediately from the planet and thus may all beings benefit from increased appreciation of the wisdom traditions.
I agree that nowadays much that was once secret is now available for download and on paper. Looking for profound teachings? I still find the exceedingly pithy book Clarifying the Natural State to be remarkable in its wisdom.
Dream Walker’s clarification: The six sense doors have "walls" between them. This I have seen very clearly just once in a preview that let me see attention moving from door to door with a bouncing motion....so within each door that category has been emptied but the walls between the doors keeps all the emptiness from merging into one continuous field. Clear goal - Remove the walls between sense doors. The three characteristics merge to become emptiness practice. The speed at which you do this is NOT vipassana, that is too slow. This is done at the speed of awareness. Recipe - notice the 6 senses as they arise at the speed of awareness. Notice that they are empty AS they arise. Keep up the speed and what happens is that you will start drilling thru the walls instead of hopping over them. Results - The sense doors merge into one unified field.
Daniel Ingram’s response: When I say that they are practiced well and understood well, by that I mean total comprehension, 100% of sensations, noticed exactly in perfect flawless detail throughout the entire field of sensations without exception and without failing to comprehend the nature of every single one of them from the first hint of their beginning to the last phase of their ending. That is the explicit end-point of vipassana, and, if actually achieved, which is a rarity, is transformative and revealing.
It is true that the "one sense door" frame works well for this, but, really, when going that fast and that completely, notions of sense doors break down, but they are still a good start as one attempts to power up to that level of pristine and comprehensive sensate perceiving perfection.
The notion that vipassana could be "slow" only refers to the beginning stages of beginner practice.
Vipassana at its best is as mentioned in the first part of this post, whose speed is as you mention, at that of manifestation in all of its intricate high-res glory. At that level, vipassana cannot be distinguished from the best of any of the other very direct approaches, including the aspects of Mahamudra and Dzogchen that involve taking on suchness as it is and doing this flawlessly and completely. (DhO)
When it’s time for Vipassana, when it’s time for Dzogchen. Vipassana clearly can get a shadow side of blasting, cutting, destroying, disembodying, depersonalizing in some unskillful way. This is a feature becoming a bug, really. It can become indifference, become aversion, become life-denying, become too future-oriented. It was never meant to do that, but often people take it that way anyway and practice that way.
If one reads something like the Greater Discourse on Mindfulness, one will see that it is very broadly accepting, straightforwardly accepting. One recognizes what is going on as it occurs. One recognizes skillful and unskillful mind states as they are. One walks. One breathes. One sees what is there. One is mindful of it. This, done properly, has a very different feel than poorly done Vipassana.
As to Dzogchen and not-self vs Vipassana and not-self, both emphasize not-self. Both point directly to not-self. One cannot practice Vipassana properly without some skillful view of not-self, as it is one of the Three Characteristics, and perceiving the Three Characteristics of whatever sensations arise is the essence of Vipassana. Dzogchen often emphasizes a wider field of attention than some Vipassana practitioners take. Adopting a wider field of attention is part of the normal progression of attention as we rise up the stages of insight, but some practitioners have this notion they should stay very narrow despite the higher stages of attentional development naturally becoming wider and more inclusive, so instead they force these stages to be something they are not naturally, and thus miss opportunities for insight. Some Vipassana practitioners will stay investigating objects outwardly away from their sense of self, not investing the sensations that seem to be them, but this is an error also. Some Vipassana practitioners will stay very effortful and future-oriented, thus missing the key insight instructions to be mindful of this moment and what arises naturally in this moment, and in this way they may fail to make progress.
For these practitioners who have somehow unfortunately misinterpreted the instructions of Vipassana, or taken very early instructions to be the more advanced instructions, or failed to understand what Mindfulness and Investigation are about, or failed to develop adequate Tranquility and Equanimity, then they may do better when they encounter the Dzogchen teachings, which may counter their misinterpretations and errors. However, often they will fail to realize that the errors were theirs, and attribute their new success with Dzogchen to Dzogchen itself over Vipassana, not recognizing that Vipassana, done properly, ends up looking like Dzogchen, in that it is wide, all-embracing, complete, settled into the moment, clear about not-self.
Thus, it is true that Dzogchen teachings have helped a lot of poorly-instructed or confused Vipassana practitioners. It is also true that Dzogchen has confused a lot of people.
The downsides of Dzogchen are basically the opposite set of shadow sides to those commonly found in poorly done Vipassana, but they can be just as problematic. By taking a wide view, precision is lost, and without precision, many sensations arise and vanish without being clearly perceived or investigated. By settling for this moment being however it is, many will greatly lower their own standards, becoming accepting of a dull, vague, spaced-out mind that lacks the delusion-cutting power and sharp clarity of Vipassana. By taking on the Dzogchen teachings prematurely, before meeting the standard minimum requisites often advocated in the original tradition for rectiving those instructions, many practitioners will simply attempt to leap too high, beyond their abilities, into wide territory that they can't simultaneously be very clear about, and then either get frustrated or begin to rationalize that weak, premature, spacy practice is actually great practice. Basically, they develop too much Tranquility and Equanimity without enough Mindfulness, Energy, and Investigation, and also perhaps without enough Concentration.
So, it is largely a question of identifying imbalances, misinterpretations, and poor practice and then correcting these. Pragmatically, if one goes into another tradition and this accomplishes those goals, all is well. If, on the other hand, one attributes to the new tradition a salvation and efficacy not found in the other tradition, this is really missing something about that tradition and style, as both traditions, performed properly and by the right practitioner at the right phase of practice, can be extremely profound and very liberating. (DhO)
When having great Dzogchen/Rigpa experiences, try to see the same understanding and wisdom for things unwise, unblissful or disconnected. Experiences can feel very Dzogchen, very "Rigpa", very ultimate, very nice, and plenty hint at something that is like the higher levels of understanding, providing pieces of the puzzle, hints, tastes, part of the picture, etc. and those can be of value, pointing to something more. So, if you are having great experiences of something Dzogchen-esque, great. Check them out. See what they are like. Explore them, have fun with them.
The real question comes when you try to see the same understanding and wisdom for things that are not fun, not a good time, and seem like something unwise, unblissful, disconnected, etc. What you are looking for is the same regardless of pleasant or unpleasant or neutral, regardless of the sense of peace and wisdom or irritation and stupidity, the same regardless of emotions, mind-states, qualities, specifics of any kind. In this, everything is just where it is, doing its thing, aware of itself, naturally, effortlessly, simply, completely, causally, and also perfectly transient, perfectly synchronized with itself as it just is itself, with no separate thing doing anything, nothing to take anything away, nothing missing, no sense of a this and a that, nothing that could pick out and choose anything. Keep playing around and see if you can see how the hints apply the same way to everything at all times all the way through. (DhO)
The true essence of Dzogchen and Mahamudra is just paying ordinary attention to experience. It is easy to make this complicated, but the essence is very simple: this immediate moment, properly comprehended, is always it, every single time. Thus, if you want to play various games regarding traditions and teachers and language and all of that, ok, do that until you get bored with it, but at some point you realize, "Wait, there are just these sensations, just this moment, again and again and again, occurring various ways, and this must be both the basis of the path and of realization!" Yay!
So, straightforwardly and directly, take flowing, transient, natural experience however it is as the path and result. Somehow, through various hindrances, it will try to convince you that the moment isn't it, and you will be tempted to spend money, read about some reality that is not right there, right then, and you can pay people thousands of dollars to tell you to focus on that moment as it is, or you can just learn it the cheap way now. Up to you, really.
If you need more reading about how this moment is it, then read if you must, and I would second the recommendations for Clarifying the Natural State and Shift into Freedom, but, if you have hindrances that keep you from realizing these immediate experiences are actually it, then pick up Mindfulness in Plain English, and read its section on the Hindrances, as well as just paying ordinary attention to experience, which is the true essence of Dzogchen and Mahamudra, however fancily dressed.
Also, if you still have any interest in Theravadan tech, consider reading about Equanimity, Formations, and the fourth vipassana jhana in MCTB2 and realizing it is basically Dzogchen/Mahamudra straight up. (DhO)
Toxic Evangelism, Hardcore Dharma and Relationships. Most meditation cultures, and particularly those that are more hardcore, and that includes the culture here, have something like the following assumptions:
- Knowing the Dharma is good.
- Meditation is good.
- Meditation and knowing the Dharma leads to changes in the mind, insights and abilities that are good.
- Once one has changed the mind in this way, things are better in some way than they were before.
- Thus, meditation mastery makes one better than before.
- I have meditated or meditate and achieved whatever, and so I am better than before.
- As you don’t meditate or in my judgement haven’t meditated as well as I have or in the specific way I do, I am better than you.
- You can be great like me also, so long as you follow the path that I do as well as I have done it, which anyone with half a brain obviously would.
- Until then, you are not as good as me, and I’m gonna let you know that in subtle and overt ways until you get with the program.
We, The Great Practitioner, may be so convinced that what they perceive as arrogance is just understandable confidence, and what they perceive as misguided pity is really just natural compassion, but regardless of who is right, the effect is the same.
I know about these things in excruciating detail as I have lived them for years and been caught in these traps many times, so hopefully those reading can benefit from the countless mistakes I have made over the years on these fronts. As is my style, I will tend to describe things in somewhat extreme terms, but realize that they don’t tend to be far off most of the time, which is sad but true.
Those in certain stages are particularly prone to toxic evangelism. The Arising and Passing (A&P), aka the 4th ñana, aka the 2nd Vipassana Jhana, is notorious for making people very excited about practice. They have seen amazing things, have profound insights, and are all excited about practice. It is only natural that they will wish to share that with others, and they have a hard time imagining that everyone won’t naturally share their enthusiasm right then. This tends to lead to reactions like this:
- While we can see you have had some interesting experience, you seem a bit crazy right now and we are concerned.
- We don’t know what to make of your change in behavior and religious zeal.
- You are creeping us out.
Clearly, those observing them from the outside may not be impressed at best and may be really turned off at worst. Most people simply want to have their ordinary life untroubled by the vortices of a Dysfunctional Spiritual Quester, and this leads predictably to the following reasonable reactions to all this on the part of the Significant Other, friend or family member:
- You clearly are doing worse because of the Dharma and are screwing your life up.
- You are a pain in the ass to be around.
- While we may love you, we can’t stand it when you are like this.
- Get your life together and stop ranting about the Dharma.
- Your arrogance and evangelism is simply pissing us off.
- Shut up about it or go away.
Those who have gotten into High Equanimity may have problems related to those who have crossed the A&P, as they have really seen something profound and good, but it rapidly fades, and they tend to fall back into the Dark Night, with the above problems arising again.
Unfortunately, everything is not necessarily better past Stream Entry or whatever you wish to call the first stage of awakening. They REALLY have seen something amazing, suddenly have all sorts of understandings and abilities that they may have a very hard time imagining everyone else wouldn’t suddenly want if they were just encouraged and supported in the right way, and yet the reactions tend to be basically the same as above. This can cause understandable frustration in the Stream Enterer, but if people are not into this stuff, they are not into this stuff, and it is the rarest spouse, girlfriend or boyfriend that makes a good teacher or even tolerable zealot from the point of view of their significant other.
The Stink of Enlightenment that can begin to develop around here and into the middle paths can really up the ante on the whole process. As the practitioner becomes more and more powerful in the dharma, this can have the paradoxical but predictable effect of seeming to crush the life out of the spiritual side of their significant other. This is not always the case, and it does happen sometimes that significant others do find something good in the accomplishments of practitioner, but there is absolutely no guarantee this will occur, and reactions tend to vary with time to these things and be a mixed bag.
This can even occur when both people in the relationship are strong practitioners, as they may progress at different rates, describe and think about their practice differently, and, as they both cycle through A&P events and Dark Night stages and these may have significant effects, instability can still and often does occur.
Even Arahatship, which does a lot to bring things back down to Earth, having ended some aspect of the practitioners spiritual quest and brought some higher degree of realism and normalcy to the life of the practitioner, can still not always free one from these sorts of difficulties, as labels, titles, teaching, and that sort of thing inherently can cause comparison and the related difficulties.
Further, once the “I am better than you” paradigm is locked in, it can be very difficult to undo.
Thus, my advice in these matters is some appropriately applied and adapted version of the following:
- Avoid evangelizing to your family and significant others. If they are not into it, the chances of your saying anything making them into it are low and the chances of causing bad reactions is high.
- If you are having weird or unusual experiences and able to compensate for them, keep your mouth shut or speak in very simple, safe terms if people are not really receptive to these things.
- If you are in territory that you can’t compensate for, keep your descriptions down to Earth and ordinary when speaking to people who are not hardcore practitioners and seek the guidance and support of those who know this territory.
“I am feeling a lot of free-floating anxiety lately. I am sorry if this is affecting our relationship, but I am going to work on this, and help me remember to be kind and functional, as I am trying my best and really want things to work out and for us to be happy. I am so grateful for your support in this and let me know how I can support you.”
Much better than they can handle statements like:
“I am plunging into the Dukkha Ñanas, headed for Stream Entry, and thus we should sit 3 hours every day together doing strict vipassana technique and the rest of the time planning for our long retreat!”
Last, and perhaps most importantly, let others do their thing whenever possible. Everyone doesn’t have to be into the same things you are, and relationships are often more interesting when people aren’t.
I am not saying let them do terrible things or crazy things, but so long as their thing is ok, let them do it and support them in it whenever possible, and do your very best to avoid the dark sides of the Spiritual Quest outlined above. If and when you are successful in your practice, you and everyone around you will appreciate you having done so.
I am not saying that there won’t be times when we need to end relationships that no longer fit. I am also not saying that the above advice can always be perfectly applied and you are bad if you can’t do this, as most of the best practitioners here have probably had some of these difficulties despite their best efforts. However, there is hard-won wisdom in these basic principles and if you are having a hard time in relationships due to your dharma practice, see if something above might help. (DhO)
Non-Duality aligns with things that the Buddha taught. Experiences that might be called "non-dual" vary between people, as some will call very unitive experiences "non-dual", some very peaceful experiences "non-dual", some formless experiences "non-dual", and the like. Thus, for those who are not very careful with their phenomenology, which most practitioners aren't, lots of things can get lumped into that category, many of which are fine and good and useful experiences, but to call them "non-dual" might be stretching things a bit.
As to whether or not the Buddha said "non-dual", I do not find the phrase mentioned in any translation of the Pali Canon texts I have read, which is a lot of them. That might lead people to conclude that it was nothing he was talking about, which is a point worthy of careful discussion, as I think it depends on what you think the phrase means and whether that meaning is what the Buddha was pointing to regardless of whether or not he called it the same thing.
Non-dual, at its best, and IMNHO, points to to the following aspect of things:
- Duality clearly is illusory, but seeing this directly in real-time is very difficult for most. Brief glimpses arise at the Conformity Knowledge level insight just before Fruitions, less than one-second experiences of the thing, which is obviously very captivating but not satisfying. Third Path as I see it gives people a sense of the thing when walking around, but it is incomplete. Finally, at whatever you wish to call it, which I generally use the term Fourth Path for (though plenty of others don't), we have the walking around experience where dualistic perception has fully untangled itself and finally, at some point, locks in and that is it.
- Unitive experiences are also very problematic, as they basically always involve a sense of this side that is now unified with that side, or has a dissolution of boundaries. Such experiences are routinely described in all jhanas, during the A&P, during Equanimity, and in states such as the formed version of Boundless Space and Boundless Consciousness, things I tag as the Boundless Space and Boundless Consciousness sub-jhanas of Equanimity, aka 11.4.5 and 11.4.6 in my own personal shorthand. These generally are transient experiences. This transience is key and brings me to the next point.
- Unitive experiences are too transient, too ephemeral, too causal to hold up. They are great, interesting, sometimes produce lots of insight, but are not the final answer, as they don't hold up, are not substantial, and thus are not a refuge or resting place or final answer. They are not fundamental enough, being created things, not something that has stopped.
- Dualistic experiences are too illusory, too out of alignment with the way things are, and so they too do not provide some final answer.
In this way of experiencing things, we have something that aligns with things that the Buddha taught. We have from the Udana, "In the seeing, just the seen, in the hearing, just the heard, in the thinking, just the thought," etc. In short, there are just the sensations, the transient sensations, and nothing more, no self to be unified with them, no separate thing perceiving them, just transient causality as it is, where it is, just being itself.
There are those who argue that, as the Buddha didn't explicitly use the term Non-Duality to describe this, that he was pointing to something else. However, as the term didn't exist then, it being a much more modern product of philosophical development, you can't say that he either rejected it or accepted it. Thus, we are left trying to figure out if it applies to what he said. I believe I can argue that it does.
When you have phenomena that are just phenomena, sensations that are just sensations, and there is not Duality, a this and a that, a self to control or observe or whatever, and just things doing things on their own, that rejects the Two part, obviously. So far, so good.
And, given that the Unification of Mind that the jhanas produce was clearly found by the Buddha to not be a final answer, as he learned all 8 jhanas and found them very useful and helpful but not a sufficient final endpoint, we can clearly and easily show that the Buddha rejected solution number One, that of Unity.
Thus, how is it that people say that Non-Duality, that quality that rejects both as being some endpoint, doesn't apply?
What definition of Non-Duality are you using that causes you to compare it to the experience of the thing as well as the theory of the thing and reject it?
As to people who have seen through Dualistic answers and Unitive answers and perceive reality that way all the time, yes, it can be done and there are people who have done it and walk around that way today. (DhO)
True non-duality is not state-dependent. Jhanic states, particularly the strong ones, particularly the 4th jhana and the formless realms that arise from it, have fooled people into thinking they were true non-dual experiences since people have been having these experiences and thinking about non-duality.
This is understandable, as duality can get exceedingly subtle during the more impressive of these states, though it is still there.
True non-duality is not state-dependent. It stands up across jhanas and ordinary mind states. It is not dependent on specifics. It is not dependent on the qualities of experience, as these can be anything.
The Buddha, during his period of training with ascetics, found teachers who taught jhanas and he learned them from them, then learned the formless realms, and finally, having learned the 8th jhana, of the profound state of neither-perception nor non-perception, he realized that these states, while impressive, were not true wisdom, did not provide lasing liberation, and all ended. Thus, he sought something that would actually allow him to walk around free, not just have some profound but non-liberating experience while deep in meditation. He finally found that and taught it to others. It can be verified today.
As those who have actually achieved true non-dual perception will tell you, it is something entirely different from jhana. It is the total directness of all experience, whatever it is. It is the total non-clinging to all transient phenomena. It is the end of the perceptual ignorance that previously seemed to create a stable self out of phenomena that were instead discrete, causal, and transient. Non-duality, once realized, applies to everything, jhana and other ordinary mind states, equally, regardless of what they are.
It is common for people to wish to rationalize that some state is non-duality, tempting, compelling, as there are many profound states of consciousness, and one imagines that they must be some pinnacle of wisdom, being so much more impressive than ordinary states of mind. However, these states are called the Golden Chains, chains that, though they sparkle with the glitter of magnificence and profundity, are still chains, still a trap if taken too seriously or clung to, still finally a distraction from the real thing, still mundane, still transient, still not a refuge from the suffering the Buddha was pointing to in his most profound teachings. (DhO)
Beware the seduction of the formless realms, longing for artificial relationships between the ultimate and relative. (circa 2009) Beware the seduction of the formless realms. They are very enticing. It is not that they do not convey something important, it is not that they don't write something very good and useful on the mind, and it is not that they don't provide some hints about things, but in the end they are conditioned. I actually highly recommend them to anagamis who are working on finishing things up, but not because they contain some truth that more ordinary mind states do not, as in the end, one has to find some aspect of things that is present at all times, in the most ordinary places and objects, something that was always true, something unconditioned, and, as all is transient, it ends up being something that is not bound up in the specific qualities.
The anagami is easily lead astray in various directions. They long for various artificial relationships between the ultimate and relative, with some of these being along the lines of:
- they want emptiness to be some transcendent superspace in which they rest untouched by phenomena
- they want emptiness to be something like the transcendence of the formless realms
- they want emptiness to be the complete disappearance of experience that somehow happens in realtime
- they want emptiness to be like some subtle other dimension that gives them a break from reality
- they want to go into Fruition and never come out
- they want emptiness to be some extra light or radiance or quality that gets added onto phenomena that somehow makes them better or more pleasant
These are all subtle or gross forms of aversion, desire, and ignorance. In the end, this is it, but there is some very real, straightforward, untangling of subject-object at its core that reveals why the dreams that the formless realms create and the paradoxical escape dreams that anagamis can fall into are not a realistic refuge, and also reveals something very simple about why the Buddha talked a lot about suffering. (DhO)
Illusions I left behind, cycle after cycle. I went around cycle after cycle, fantasy after fantasy, and watched what happened.
Initially, I was fascinated by Fruitions, and the Ultimate Potential fallacy: that somehow I could be the Ultimate Potential, see the Ultimate Potential, or rest in the Ultimate Potential. However, there was just a gap, a discontinuity, nothing to cling to.
Then I was fascinated by how the mind would assert the sensations and patterns that make up a separate self and wanted those to stop, but they were empty, happened on their own, were causal, not in anyone's control, so that didn't work.
As I progressed, I became fascinated by panoramic perspectives, emptiness in real-time, the intrinsic luminosity of phenomena, and so tried to become that, to become the luminosity, to become some vast super-space of awareness, some emptiness that wasn't touched by bad things but could feel all the good things. This didn't work: all the bad things were just as palpable as the good things, and any subtle patterns of sensations that seemed to be luminosity, emptiness, Awareness, or space were just that, more qualities.
I went around these cycles for years, cycle after cycle, layer after layer, illusion after illusion, with sensations trying to be more than what they were, which was mere empty causality.
Eventually the message and point sunk in, and I went for total perception of the Three Characteristics of Everything, including anything that seemed to be panoramic perspectives, awareness, emptiness, luminosity, perspective itself, and every other high or subtle permanence trap, and finally the thing cracked and attention re-synchronized itself in a way that answered the question in a way that couldn't be argued with.
All qualities, all experiences, all phenomena, all sensations are impermanent, empty, causal, and seeing that for anything and everything without exception is what flipped the last switch. (DhO)
Some gains, cycle after cycle. Some of these changes were gradual, some sudden, but the thing that helped the most was that last fundamental flip-over. The path that made the big difference was the one that totally untangled the last knot of perception. Until then, trouble of all sorts was much more possible.
- Increased compassion: yes, true, actually much more obvious to me after the first opening at stream entry, no idea why. The funny thing about compassion is that sense of the quavering of one's heart in response to the suffering of others: actually less obvious now in some ways due to some other factors, such as more equanimity, but still there, just less painful now than it was when it was first coming on strong.
- Eradicated depression: I haven't generally been that prone to real depression (not eating, not sleeping/much more sleeping, lots of life dysfunction, anhedonia, etc.), so I am not sure. I do know plenty of people who have had serious depressive problems into the middle path territory. There is something about the last untangling that solved something related to things sort of like depression, severe despair, that kind of thing, which are really emotions, not actually depression (which to me is sort of a bigger, longer thing).
- Less sadness: Hmmmm... That is a tricky one. I think the one odd thing about the increased awareness that comes as we go along is that we get more in touch with what is happening, and emotions are part of that, and so it is easier to perceive sadness for me than it was before, so I actually notice much more of it, lots of little blips of sadness happening often, but they are minor parts of a wide field and substantially less trouble than before, sort of like little blue dots on a large pointilist painting. Fear is similar: mammals are almost constantly dealing with little subtle bits of fear that most of the time we don't notice, until you get really, really good at noticing things, and then it is obvious that lots of little bits of fear are part of nearly eveything, even just walking down the street.
- Better decision making: very selectively, yes. It is much easier to decide upon mental modes in realtime than it was before. So, better emotional decision making, better attentional decision making, better restraining of speech, better modification of action, true in general terms, as there is more awareness of these things, which helps to bring more intelligence to them. So, to some degree, yes. Better stock investing? No, I don't think so, at least for me.
- More skillful actions, thoughts, etc: see above.
- Improved morality: This is a really hard one to answer. My personal moral code has generally been pretty strict before and after and that hasn't changed. Is it easier to take into account the feelings of those around me as I am not so caught up in just my own stuff? Yes. Does that improved morality? I think so. Beyond that, it is hard to be certain. It is hard to tell what is just getting older and more mature from what came from dharma practice, as it has been 18 years since I got stream entry, and comparing mid-20's to mid-40's is difficult, as it has been so long and so much has happened. I do think that more awareness helps us to generally live the life we want to live moment-to-moment, to catch and modify impulses before they translate to less-than-ideal behavior.
- Generally speaking better moods, less worrying: yes and no. As Bill Hamilton used to say, "Suffering less, noticing it more." Meaning, there are so many little micro-moods that flit through, and there is awareness of them to a degree that it far beyond what I had before I was really into meditation practice. Thus, as noted above, I am aware of little bits of subtle fear and irritation and the like to a degree that makes them much more obvious, but at the same time they are much more fleeting, much more just a small part of a much larger field of experience, much more just things that happen and vanish, like ripples in space rather than some huge thing that the mind habitually contracts into. Actually, it seems that the sort of mental contraction that cut off huge tracts of experience and shut down basic kindness and intelligence isn't even possible like it used to be, which is definitely a lot better. (DhO)
Hold both views: the layer hypothesis and the true-wisdom-it-a-totally-different-thing hypothesis. The relationship between those sorts of repeated cycles out in the territory of the middle paths and more final, complete wisdom is clearly hotly debated.
On the one hand, there are those who hold the layer hypothesis, that if you do enough cycles for enough layers of mind, eventually there are no more layers of mind for which you need to lock in automatic perception of the true nature of those sensations, as all have been wired for automatic clarity/self-liberation or whatever you wish to call it, and, at that point, the insight process is complete on that axis, anyway.
On the other hand, there are those who hold the true-wisdom-it-a-totally-different-thing hypothesis, that wisdom is entirely unrelated to the cycles of insight, and arises through comprehension of that wisdom itself regardless of anything about learning to see various layers or patterns of sensations clearly.
Practically, there are reasons to hold both views at the same time. Why is this?
If you hold the view that seeing each sensation or layer or whatever in the light of wisdom makes a difference (, it) is empowering, but it does often have a subtle future component and a subtle this-moment rejecting component that are problematic.
If you hold the view that practice and cycling is useless, this at once dodges the future component but might do so when the wiring isn't there yet to really get the immediacy of timeless and unshakable wisdom.
So, if you hold both views, then you can practice building the wiring and also realize that this right here must be it regardless of cycles and work to see that immediacy, that luminosity, that pristine directness that untangles the problem, which itself is good practice.
Koan: what is the difference between the Sutra Mahamudra approach and perfectly knowing the Three Characteristics of the Six Sense Doors? (DhO)
No Dog, Some Dog and The Simplest Thing. [Posted in 2010 but refering back to an older post in Webpaint forum.] There has been a lot of reference to these three in various discussions, so I thought it might be good to have a page dedicated to exploring them. Please feel free to lend your thoughts.
No Dog is a term coined by Kenneth and used to describe a state that we consider trans-jhanic, in that all the other jhanas can move through it. It is a very different perspective on them, and gives the whole thing a very different feel. It is almost like a profoundly skillful dissociation, or another quantum level of equanimity, in that, when one is in No Dog, there is no investment in which jhana or ñana is manifesting, or, as the term implies, you have no dog in that fight. In this way, No Dog imparts a very high level of feeling one has transcended the ordinary fascination with cycles, states, stages, qualities of experience, etc. They cycle through, and we feel largely untouched by their coming and going. We use the term No Dog as it is as good as anything else we could come up with and because we do not see a precise correlate in the standard texts, sort of...
I remember the first time I chanced on to No Dog, and it happened to be just a few seconds after the Fruition that got me arahatship. When the mind flipped into that way of perceiving things, it was for me at that time everything I was looking for. As an anagami, I had become so sick of cycles and cycles and cycles that the transcendence of No Dog was absolutely amazing. Cycles occurred, and the only thing of relevance was staying in No Dog. I associated it with the term Wisdom Eye, and my whole goal at that point was keeping in that state. The only problem was it didn’t last...
No Dog would fade back into a state that we have come to call Some Dog, which is the default state for those who are not in No Dog. In Some Dog, one cares about qualities, even subtle qualities, and cycles, and stages, and states, and the specifics, whereas when one is in No Dog, No Dog is the best game in town and what cycle or stage or whatever happens to be going on within the framework of No Dog is basically irrelevant.
Thus, on that retreat, I would fade back to Some Dog, get frustrated by the cycles, realize this, find No Dog again, which was just a question of looking for it, and for a few hours would be ok, until Some Dog would set in again, and so forth and so on for about a week. The problem with No Dog is that it is conditioned, in that it comes and goes, I only found it after attaining arahatship, and thus, while amazing in its way, was not quite what I was looking for.
Luckily that was not the end of the story. The retreat went on, and then this very strange convergence of things occurred. It was hard to explain, but during it, I realized something very important: Some Dog and No Dog are both of the same nature, both are conditioned, both are empty, both are just variations on the basic theme of perception, or manifestation, or luminosity, or suchness, or whatever you wish to call it...
The Simplest Thing is what it has been called here recently. The Simplest Thing is one way of saying those other things. I like the old line, “In the seeing, just the seen. In the hearing, just the heard,” etc. I think it makes its point very clearly and concisely. It doesn’t get any more simple that that, and that was what I realized on that retreat.
Now at times the mind inclines to No Dog and that is what shows up. At other times it inclines to Some Dog, and that is what shows up. These are conditioned phenomena, and they come and go.
There will likely be debate below about exactly when one can attain to No Dog and exactly when one can attain to The Simplest Thing. I suspect that those with a somewhat more Vedantic perspective will try to argue that The Simplest Thing is always available, which is sort of true. I suspect that there are those who will try to say that No Dog can be attained by those below arahatship, and perhaps it can, though I had not seen anything that had its complete set of qualities before that.
Those things said, I realized the deep truth of The Simplest Thing in all its ordinary glory when I got over my fascination with No Dog and my dislike of Some Dog and found that they are finally not the point. Noticing things as they are is the point, directly, clearly, completely and in a way that is not bound up in specific perspectives that are conditioned was what got me to the thing that has lasted for these nearly 6 years, and so I advocate simply giving No Dog its due, realizing that its true nature is the same as Some Dog, and finding that common ground that all things share.
I spent some time this afternoon checking both out, going back and forth from No Dog to Some Dog, from the transcendent to the immersed, and was pleased to come to the same conclusion: they are different, but both have their points, and neither has a more elevated place from the point of view of The Simplest Thing.
I am going to weigh in on when The Simplest Thing can be attained, and I will claim that really knowing it completely as one’s baseline is synonymous with The Goal, whatever you wish to call it. Thus, while aspects are obviously available at all times, really knowing it is the end of the path of insight.
I have debated the merits of taking No Dog as the path to The Simplest Thing, which has been talked about on the DhO. While fascination with No Dog is probably inevitable, and perhaps should be considered a distinct stage of development, beyond that, I don’t think that it is, in and of itself, the key to The Goal, except for seeing the common elements between it and Some Dog.
I do think that No Dog is a very important attainment, just like I like the Formless Realms, The Pure Land Jhanas and Nirodha Samapatti, and No Dog is even one better, but I think that one must finally come to a place where even that is seen as just one more variation or motif on the basic theme that phenomena manifest in various ways and realization must be found in a way that is not bound up in any specifics, and that includes No Dog.
While initially this may seem somewhat abstract, there are actually a few people here who are running into this stuff or hopefully soon will, so I thought it might be worth hashing out, as I have little doubt there will be some opinions of various sorts. (DhO)
4th Path
Nibbana is used a number of ways in the texts. Nibbana often is used to refer to Arahatship, as in "in the seeing, just the seen", etc., meaning the elimination of the deeply habitual perceptual illusion that somehow in these unstable sensations is truly a stable, continuous, controlling, knowing, separate Self. In this sense, Nibbana might somewhat dramatically be equated to "oblivion", the oblivion of something that didn't actually exist (so that's a weird sort of oblivion to describe). The life of an arahat is a world of rich, non-dual sensate experience free of that pesky illusion of a continous, controlling, doing, perceiving entity at its core. This really doesn't feel like "oblivion" at all in practice, and instead just feels like a whole bunch of naturally occurring, transient, immediate, clear sensations doing their thing just like they always did but just with much enhanced appreciation of this at a core perceptual level.
Nibbana is also used to refer to Fruition, that vanishing of experience that occurs at the end of a cycle of the stages of insight. In this sense, it might be somewhat dramatically termed "oblivion" or something like that, except that experience reappears and sensations continue after the Fruition, so the term "oblivion" doesn't do justice to the thing, which has this nice afterglow and sense of mental reset when experience recurs.
There is also something called Parinibbana, aka Nibbana Without Remainder, which is what occurs on the death of an arahat or buddha (buddhas are also arahats, just an extra-special, deluxe version with additional excellent aspects). However, to call Parinibbana "oblivion" adopts a particular view, one the Buddha would not acknowledge, see particularly MN 63 (https://suttacentral.net/en/mn63) , which is worth reading. To call Parinibbana "oblivion" would imply that one had adopted the view that the Buddha does not exist after death, a view the Buddha himself didn't declare, as per that sutta. (DhO)
Nibbana is also used to refer to Fruition, that vanishing of experience that occurs at the end of a cycle of the stages of insight. In this sense, it might be somewhat dramatically termed "oblivion" or something like that, except that experience reappears and sensations continue after the Fruition, so the term "oblivion" doesn't do justice to the thing, which has this nice afterglow and sense of mental reset when experience recurs.
There is also something called Parinibbana, aka Nibbana Without Remainder, which is what occurs on the death of an arahat or buddha (buddhas are also arahats, just an extra-special, deluxe version with additional excellent aspects). However, to call Parinibbana "oblivion" adopts a particular view, one the Buddha would not acknowledge, see particularly MN 63 (https://suttacentral.net/en/mn63) , which is worth reading. To call Parinibbana "oblivion" would imply that one had adopted the view that the Buddha does not exist after death, a view the Buddha himself didn't declare, as per that sutta. (DhO)
What I mean by 4th path. Let me state here what I mean by 4th path, regardless of what anyone else means by it. It has the following qualities:
The Isolation of Blowing It. The known problems with goal-oriented practice are many, and this experiment in the Dharma Overground community, with open disclosure and a culture of labels, stages, states, levels of attainment, and the like, along with a pretty highly skilled group, has created some really good things. People have aimed high, achieved great things, made remarkable discoveries, learned a lot, grown as people and practitioners, and had a great time.
That said, there are some obvious downsides to goal-oriented, high-achievement communities, some of which have become more obvious recently. Here I am specifically thinking about one of the many possible problems, that being something like the following scenario:
Where the real problem comes is the let down, the embarrassment, the strange role reversals they might find themselves in if that attainment transported them into some sort of teacher or authority role, the personal confusion about what is suddenly happening and why, the disappointment that comes when we worked so hard and things didn't work out as they thought they did.
All of that can cause the worst part of it all: isolation. If we find ourselves unwilling to admit to others that we were wrong, or feeling like we are unable to do so, or that we will be ridiculed, blamed or ostracized if we reveal that what we know know to not have been true, then real damage is done, for it is in those times that we most benefit from friends who can help us put it back together, go back to basics, regroup, re-tool or modify our practice, learn, grow, and move on.
Instead, we may find ourselves feeling like outcasts, failures, victims of our own hubris, afraid of being thought of as liars or fools or both. We may disconnect from our fellow dharma companions, communities, teachers, friends, family members, and wander lost and confused, which is something that very few handle that well in the shadow of some feeling of past glory and achievement. That isolation is where the real damage happens.
As one who has gone through lots of cycles over the years that led to lots of plateaus, many of which were quite impressive for some period of time but later faded or reality-tested at a lower level than first impressions seemed to indicate, I can totally sympathize, as I have been there and done that and very well may do it again. It can be very painful and disorienting.
It should be realized that this sort of thing is not only going to happen, it is actually very normal in this open-disclosure world of states, stages, names of levels, and achievement-oriented culture. If we recognize this as a community and can talk about it, then when it happens, which it has and will again, perhaps often, then the members of the community, who are then dealing with all the complexities that these strange phases can cause, won't have to deal so much with the additional stigma of feeling like people think they are freaks, losers, or unwilling or willing charlatans when they face the expected outcome of sometimes totally blowing it and making some claim that didn't turn out to hold up over time.
Thus, I urge each of you, should you run into someone who has this happening to them, to have similar sympathy, to wish that person well, to realize that, if you are in this rarified business long enough, it will likely happen to you also, and, when it does, think about how you would want to be treated and pass that on ahead of time.
So far, we have generally been pretty good with this, actually, and I hope that trend continues. Lots can be learned from these sorts of mistakes, as I personally know from having made many of them. Hopefully, by recognizing this potential shadow-side of gung-ho meditation culture, we will be more prepared to handle it well. (DhO)
- Utter centerlessness: no watcher, no sense of a watcher, no subtle watcher, no possibility of a watcher. This is immediately obvious just as color is to a man with good eyesight as the old saying goes. Thus, anything and everything simply and obviously manifest just where they are. No phenomena observe any others and never did or could.
- Utter agencylessness: meaning no agency, no sense of doing, no sense of doer, no sense that there could be any agent or doer, no way to find anything that seems to be in control at all. Whatever effort or intent or anything like that that arises does so naturally, causally, inevitably, as it always actually did. This is immediately obvious, though not always the forefront of attention.
- No cycles change or stages or states or anything else like that do anything to this direct comprehension of simple truths at all.
- There is no deepening in it to do. The understanding stands on its own and holds up over cycles, moods, years, etc and doesn't change at all. I have nothing to add to my initial assessment of it from 9 years ago.
- There is nothing subtle about it: anything and everything that arises exhibits these same qualities directly, clearly. When I was third path, particularly late in it, those things that didn't exhibit these qualities were exceedingly subtle, and trying to find the gaps in the thing was exceedingly difficult and took years and many cycles. I had periods from weeks to months where it felt done and then some subtle exception would show up and I would realize I was wrong yet again, so this is natural and understandable, and if someone claims 4th as I define it here and later says they got it wrong, have sympathy for them, as this territory is not easy and can easily fool people, as it did me many, many times over about 5 years or so. However, 4th, as I term it, ended that and 9 years later that same thing holds, which is a very long time in this business.
Now, how there can still be affect (though quite modified in many ways) when there is centerlessness and agencylessness, this is a mystery to the AF kids and to me as well, and that brings me to my next point: there seems to be areas of development depending on what you look for and aim for that may arise independently, and not everything seems to come as a package necessarily. Those things are what I looked for really hard for about 7 years, and that is what I found. Now I find that the interest in the unraveling of what drives that residual affect is arising, and so that investigation happens on its own also.
... By independently, I mean not with the other effects, such as affectlessness, as I clarify in the subsequent clause, meaning not as a package, meaning that that aspect of clear seeing arising without and independently of other aspects of development, meaning that by looking into things happening on their own and understanding that, feelings didn't vanish also, meaning that realizing that things happen on their own occurred without and thus independent of feeling vanishing. I didn't mean anything like not dependent in some way as to apply in some grand scheme or cosmology, such as Dependent Origination, as you perhaps read it, but meaning that one could, by way of example, realize that things happen on their own, without doing whatever causes certain other transformations of the way that causal system functions.
... As to "lack of agency", this is a way of speaking using that specific term that has worked across numerous situations and with psychological academics and practitioners alike for years with no problems in people understanding what I meant by it and no one has raised the particular objection to the term that you have, but try just throwing out that word, as it is clearly not helping at all, and looking at the numerous synonyms and explanations I use for it, and see if that helps. This is no-self at its core, a fundamental concept that applies to all things at all times, all mind states, all emotions, all actions, all happenings, all manifestations, all qualities, all investigations, all interests, all questions, all "personal" qualities, etc. This is a really, really important point.
... That things happen on their own (meaning reality does its complex, interdependent, causal, natural thing), and that includes everything, including investigation, etc., is not just something I made up but is actually the way things happen regardless even of level of understanding, always have. This is actually oddly easy to see for many objects, thoughts, intentions, happenings, just somewhat tricky to see for a few, seemingly closer to home categories, though with time and practice those can be known this way also. (DhO)
Technical/MCTB 4th Path vs a more sophisticated discussion of the goals and promises of practice and what is possible, and how developments may occur in a non-parallel fashion sometimes. I myself have never used the term technical 4th, and I am not sure where it originated. Lots of people, even those in this community, use the terms discussed here in many different ways, and they tend to get loosely applied a lot of the time.
I am currently thinking about the models very differently from the general way presented in MCTB(1), in case anyone is asking, with an increased appreciation of the basic concept, expressed in MCTB, that there are many axes of development, and the assumption that they will all occur simultaneously in a very specified sequence often not reflecting what actually happens in the wild.
That said, the language is still in use, and I use it sometimes also these days, for better or for worse, though I am trying to get away from it more and more, as it causes a lot of trouble, and there seem to be many layers to the thing that often surprise people when they show up unexpectedly when they thought they had something totally nailed, as happened to me many, many times over many years, as noted in MCTB.
Some people use Technical or MCTB 4th to mean the general feeling that they are done, with that feeling of doneness being the primary criteria. Kenneth Folk, the primary proponent of this particular meaning, was just here at Hurricane Ranch working on his book, and we had long discussions about this, with me advocating for this not to be the primary thrust of the term, and him thinking that the feeling of doneness was of primary importance. I argued for the following as being more along the lines of what I considered relevant: an undifferentiated field of selfless causality doing its natural thing with no sense of center-point, doer, controller, perceiver, or agent of any kind. Anyway, experts clearly disagree, and so long as people qualify how they are using the term, I am not sure it matters, or does it? Actually, it probably does, so back to the drawing board...
As posted in an earlier thread, I think a more nuanced model that allows for flexibility and many areas of development and evolution of the practitioner in time is going to be what we end up with, following something like a more medical model of all of this.
For instance, when I am admitting a patient from the emergency department and speak on the phone with my consulting/admitting hospitalist, I don't just say, "Mrs. Jones has pneumonia, admit her."
Instead, I might say, "Mrs. Jones is a 75 year-old female with pneumonia who needs admission. She has mild emphysema, diet-controlled diabetes, hypertension and a previous case of pneumonia 3 years ago. She was just admitted to the hospital 3 weeks ago for a right hip replacement by Dr. Smith. Her primary care doctor is Dr. Brown, for whom you admit. She had been recovering well at home for 3 days after 2 weeks in a rehab facility who presented with shortness of breath, fever to 102.1, a blood pressure of 102/45, a heart rate of 120, and an pulse ox of 89% on room air. She was found to have bilateral patchy infiltrates on chest x-ray, a white count of 17.5 with 92% neuts and 3% bands, platelets are a bit elevated 580, has mild anemia, a glucose of 216, a normal urinalysis, a sodium that was just a bit low at 131, normal potassium, mild dehydration with a BUN of 25 and a Cr of 1.2. She improved after 1L of normal saline IV fluids, with her blood pressure coming up to 110/58, and we gave her levaquin 750mg IV, doripenem 500mg IV, and vancomycin 1g IV, given her low blood pressure, concern for sepsis, and recent extensive health-care exposure raising concern for resistant organisms. Her hip wound is healing well without erythema. Her breathing responded well to one hour of albuterol and atrovent nebulized, and she should probably go to the RCU."
In the same way, of some practitioner I might say, "Mrs. Jones is a 35 year-old female with about 9 months of retreat time total, mostly Goenka, Mahasi, but also a bit of Soto Zen and Dzogchen, who has been practicing for 16 years total with a good daily practice. She also practiced in a mixed Wiccan/Golden Dawn-influenced magickal tradition in the past and still does on occasion. She has 4 jhanas most of the time in daily life and can get real formless jhanas on retreat up to the 8th reliably after a week of practice to warm up and occasionally in the height of Equanimity during new cycles. She has attained to what she thinks is Nirodha Samapatti 4 times with heavy afterglow and proper set up, again on retreat. Her current practice focuses on meditation at all times in daily life, and integrating what she thinks of as ultimate and relative perspectives. By her report she is now walking around mostly in a field that appears mostly without boundaries, but still at points catches glimpses of formed patterns that clearly have some tinge of a sense of identification and separateness to them sometimes, and debunking these are what she considers her cutting edge of practice. She easily attains to Fruitions up to a few per day in daily life when in Review phases, and has gone through what feels like an insight cycle every 2-3 months for the last 3 or so years. When in the A&P phase she has a high degree of talent for out of body travel, something she started practicing as a teenager. She also feels she can at times see auras and subtly manipulate her own and others energetic fields. She has had a few prognosticative dreams of uncanny accuracy, none in the last two years. She just crossed the A&P last about 6 days ago, and is currently struggling a bit in Re-Observation, but bleed-through is minimal, her having easily identified this phase from long familiarity with it, and her job as a physical therapist is going well despite a relatively large amount of daily practice, about 2-3 hours/day of sitting at this point, which at this time is making her feel a bit edgy, though nothing nearly as bad as it used to during this phase, and she is confident she will hit Equanimity any time now. She is planning a retreat of 2 weeks duration at the Forest Refuge in 4 months, with her goal being total field integration. She also practices Bikram yoga in a hot studio 3 times/week and finds it very helpful, something she has done on and off for 5 years. She has noticed a marked increase in her emotional balance and ease after a major shift about 5 months ago that she has no good name for, as it doesn't seem to correlate that well with any standard map. The benefits of that shift have held up well in the face of some recent family stressors, with clear and automatic improvement in the way she processed old triggers by her parents. She does occasionally suffer from insomnia, but uses the time to meditate. She also volunteers occasionally at the local art museum front desk and occasionally paints water colors, and she was actually painting when her last major breakthrough occurred and considers it part of her practice. She has a small local sangha, mostly of mixed practitioners, many of whom are also members of her yoga studio. She teaches informally through Skype on occasion."
Here is a repost of the thread content, as somehow I can't find the original thread:
A large number of recent conversations with relatively talented practitioners revolved around various things that practice had done to everyone, and what the similarities and differences were. These conversations mercifully weren't along the lines of, "Yeah, I'm an MCTB Arahat," or whatever, and instead focused on the phenomenology, which is always more fun and straightforward anyway, and is often less politically charged, it seems.
Basically, the attempts of the conversations were either consciously less so (but the effect was the same) to put the member of the groups discussing this on a virtual grid something like this.
On one axis you have those discussing what they can do and what they have attained.
On the other axis, you have something like this, in no particular order:
- Agency: completely gone, even more completely gone, sometimes completely gone, at times has been completely gone, is somewhat attenuated, is occasionally attenuated, is still quite present.
- Panoramic Perspective: how well does the concept of panoramic perspectives describe your practice and how has this changed?
- Dreams: did you dream before and do you dream now and how are they the same or different? Have you lucid dreamed and how has this changed with practice?
- Traveling: have you ever and can you still travel out of body, with what degree of regularity and control, duration, etc? Can you do it from waking or do you have to start in a lucid dream? Can you come back to body being fully awake or do you have to come back to a dream? etc.
- Sleep: do you need more, less, or what, if anything, is different.
- Visualization ability: same, different, there, not there, or what?
- Cycling: do you cycle through the insight stages or something like them, and did you cycle before, and what it is it like now and how has it changed?
- Fruitions: have you ever attained them, can you attain them now, did you ever have the notion that they had duration of any kind (either experienced or not experienced), how many could you at your best attain/day and how rapidly from inclination to them happening, can you get multiple back to back, etc.?
- Subject/Observer: seems to be localized, seems diffuse, seems gone some of the time, seems utterly and completely gone, or what?
- Affect: do you still have the internal feeling of feelings, and if so is anything different about the way you experience them?
- Similarly: Affect triggers: is there anything different about how stimuli that would have at some point in the past (and perhaps now) have triggered feelings are reacted to and if so, what is different, if anything, and how has this changed?
- External Affect: do people still perceive you to have feeling and, if so, how has this changed as a result of practice, if at all?
- Formed Jhanas: did you ever have and do you still have jhanas, and if so, which ones and how developed (stability, duration, rapidity of access, various objects, etc.)?
- Formless Realms: did you ever have them and do you still have them, and if so, how developed were/are they (with formed/bodily phenomena somewhat present, very present, subtle or gone or what, stability, access, duration, etc.)?
- Brahma Viharas: have you practiced them, and could you stay with the phrases, feel the actual feelings, take them to their ultimate jhanas (3rd or 4th, depending) and how has this changed with time?
- Powers: did you ever have any, do you still have them or can you access them, and if so how often, how easily, what conditions required, etc.? How has your interpretation of those experiences varied with time?
- Energetics: have you ever perceived energetic stuff (vibrations, chakras, energy channels, etc.) and could you ever manipulate them, and can you now and what conditions would be required to do that?
- Nirodha Samapatti: do you think you have ever attained it, which version did you attain (NS Lite: sense of duration/experience still somehow present, or NS Deluxe: experience and everything else utterly gone), can you still attain it, do you have any notion of how long the attainment has been able to last (either by external or internal reference) and what conditions would be required for you to do that?
- Suffering: what is suffering like for you now on any level and how do you describe it? What causes the mind to be disturbed, if anything?
- Memory: has practice changed your memory of events in any way and if so how?
- Visual Field: anything different about it, or any other sense door, for that matter?
- Relationships with others: has practice changed the way you related to others and if so how, assuming the ability to generalize this very complex topic?
- Compassion: do you feel compassion, and, if so, how has practice changed it if at all or your understanding of what compassion is?
- Peace: is your mind more or less peaceful or what and how has this changed with time?
- Ethics: has your practice changed your concept of morality and ethics, and if so, how and how has this evolved with time?
- Task Fatigue: has meditation practice changed your ability to stay on tasks with less fatigue in any way?
- Silence: do you perceive your mind as silent and if so when/how often?
- Thoughts: how has meditation practice changed what thoughts do and how often you perceive them to occur?
- Time: anything interesting about it?
There are probably a bunch more things that could be placed on this grid, but those are some of the more common ones that have been bandied about recently, and these sorts of conversations turn out to be so much more fun than trying to shoehorn people into very narrow concepts such as single path names and the like, as it turns out that there is all sorts of variability in how people respond to those questions even among people who claim the same crudely labeled attainments. [For a slightly different list check this other thread]
While these could end up looking a bit like a character sheet from D&D (for those old enough to remember what that was), the effect is a much more nuanced and productive discussion of exactly what people are experiencing and it also leads nicely to all sorts of fascinating practice discussions, I have found.
This is actually a setup for a more sophisticated discussion of the goal and promises of practice and what is possible and how developments may occur in a non-parallel fashion sometimes, as well as terms such as "enlightenment", which, given that the level of discussion is now at this much more nuanced level, seem paltry by comparison.
... Here is a fragment from MCTB2 in its rough form that I was just working on recently (2013): General Problems with Current Models [that points out 'the linear fallacy', 'the package fallacy', 'the permanence fallacy', 'the descriptive fallacy', 'the perfect self-diagnosis fallacy' and 'the final destination fallacy / pernicious convergence'.] (DhO)
That said, there are some obvious downsides to goal-oriented, high-achievement communities, some of which have become more obvious recently. Here I am specifically thinking about one of the many possible problems, that being something like the following scenario:
- A person is all excited about practice.
- They practice hard and well, aiming for a very specific goal.
- They achieve something that, at that time, really feels like they have done it.
- They are not consciously trying to fool themselves or anyone, just honestly feel they have attained to whatever state, stage, realization or transformation.
- They make the claim that they have done it.
- They receive whatever social benefits and downsides result from having made that claim.
- Time passes.
- Things begin to show up that clearly are not as well seen as they thought they were, not as transformed as they thought they were, and they begin to feel that they were wrong about what they had done.
Where the real problem comes is the let down, the embarrassment, the strange role reversals they might find themselves in if that attainment transported them into some sort of teacher or authority role, the personal confusion about what is suddenly happening and why, the disappointment that comes when we worked so hard and things didn't work out as they thought they did.
All of that can cause the worst part of it all: isolation. If we find ourselves unwilling to admit to others that we were wrong, or feeling like we are unable to do so, or that we will be ridiculed, blamed or ostracized if we reveal that what we know know to not have been true, then real damage is done, for it is in those times that we most benefit from friends who can help us put it back together, go back to basics, regroup, re-tool or modify our practice, learn, grow, and move on.
Instead, we may find ourselves feeling like outcasts, failures, victims of our own hubris, afraid of being thought of as liars or fools or both. We may disconnect from our fellow dharma companions, communities, teachers, friends, family members, and wander lost and confused, which is something that very few handle that well in the shadow of some feeling of past glory and achievement. That isolation is where the real damage happens.
As one who has gone through lots of cycles over the years that led to lots of plateaus, many of which were quite impressive for some period of time but later faded or reality-tested at a lower level than first impressions seemed to indicate, I can totally sympathize, as I have been there and done that and very well may do it again. It can be very painful and disorienting.
It should be realized that this sort of thing is not only going to happen, it is actually very normal in this open-disclosure world of states, stages, names of levels, and achievement-oriented culture. If we recognize this as a community and can talk about it, then when it happens, which it has and will again, perhaps often, then the members of the community, who are then dealing with all the complexities that these strange phases can cause, won't have to deal so much with the additional stigma of feeling like people think they are freaks, losers, or unwilling or willing charlatans when they face the expected outcome of sometimes totally blowing it and making some claim that didn't turn out to hold up over time.
Thus, I urge each of you, should you run into someone who has this happening to them, to have similar sympathy, to wish that person well, to realize that, if you are in this rarified business long enough, it will likely happen to you also, and, when it does, think about how you would want to be treated and pass that on ahead of time.
So far, we have generally been pretty good with this, actually, and I hope that trend continues. Lots can be learned from these sorts of mistakes, as I personally know from having made many of them. Hopefully, by recognizing this potential shadow-side of gung-ho meditation culture, we will be more prepared to handle it well. (DhO)
It is not right to ask 'What is liberated?'. Consciousness is implied by sensations, but really there are just sensations. You could say that they contain "consciousness" in them, or you could say something like, "In the seeing, just the seen," which is a lot cleaner, if you ask me. It is on ignorance that there are volitional formations, and on volitional formations depend consciousness, etc. Thus, with the dissolution of ignorance, sensations are just as they are.
Sensations are utterly transient, so there no substantial thing to awaken in ultimate terms. Instead, a process of identification and delusion stops, such that no longer do empty, transient, simple sensations create a fundamental illusion of a permanent, continuous, separate, perceiving self that could be liberated. So, the question is ill-formed: it is not right to ask, "What is liberated?", and it is better to say, "Liberation occurs when a process of delusion stops," or, "Liberation occurs when clear perception of the way sensations always were occurs."
This is also useful, as it points to method, the method being clear perception of sensations. (DhO)
4th Path and the Whole Thing. I had three dharma exchanges with people in the last 24 hours that all shared one common theme: it has to be about everything in a total way. What do I mean everything?
Space and everything "in" it, or you could say the textures and qualities of space, or just the field of manifestation, or however you want to say it. Don't leave anything out. You awaken that which you bring attention to. Bring attention to everything. Realize the attention in everything. Realize that everything is it, right now. It must be immediate. It must be perfectly inclusive. Thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, sights, sounds, and all the rest. They must be included in this space, this volume, this moment, this practice.
Some perceptual benefits of Full Enlightenment. [The following was not written by Daniel Ingram, it's a transcription of part of an interview performed by MaxAnte to him: check in this YouTube link where this question is asked. Daniel's long answer is the following:]
This kind of painful process that was literally sort of like a ‘low grade headache’ (best way to explain it) stopped. That was just delightful, and in its place there’s a sense of synchrony. Synchrony just feels really nice. Everything synchronizes with itself. Before, everything feels out of phase. There is this that and then my knowing of it. There where this that and then this, and I was here and I was there. There was always this sense of jarring out-of-phaseness, which somehow experientially is just unpleasant. It’s suffering. It’s a fundamental type of suffering.
And when that stopped, the sense of synchrony and naturalness is substantially more delightful, just experientially. And that keeps on being substantially more delightful, moment after moment. It’s like a pleasure you don’t get a tolerance to. It’s a niceness that every moment is just as nice as the moment before, in that specific way.
That doesn’t mean that things can’t be unpleasant, but that quality is also there, even in very unpleasant things. So I’m not meaning to say there’s not the perception of pain or that everything is always nice. It isn’t. There’s still pain, but that quality of synchrony is simply delightful and is always happening. Actually, I’ve come to appreciate it more as time has gone on it. Continues to sort of be like ‘yeah’, almost like there’s like … as it sort of cascades through all other aspects of mind and situations and conditioning.
It’s fascinating to see some memory – I may not have had in 20 years – come up, and now it arises in this totally different space, where identity is nothing like the solid sticky thing it was before. And now it’s just a thought and space. That rewires something in the brain that now that memory – which might have been painful or complicated – is now arising in a space that is so much more clear and open. And in which thought, rather than being contracted into, is literally just this super wispy thing in this big echoey room that is so much nicer … Also, there will be meetings and I’m looking around like I’m the only person in the room full-time. If you’re the person who’s really in the room and everybody else isn’t in the meeting, that’s a real advantage!
(There are real-world advantages,) sure, because people are constantly like “oh, I wasn’t really present for that … I wasn’t really into that”. Well, now the cool thing about being awake is that the holodeck no longer being filtered through the serial line that was constantly getting interrupted, and turning to the imagined holodeck –there was another holodeck– would tune out the sort of consensus holodeck when it’s tuned to its internal holodeck … well, that’s not happening in that way. The default is now the consensus holodeck (as much as anything can be a consensus when we all have our own vantage points).
Speaking in relative terms, but ignoring all the ontological problems – I don’t want to go into that –, basically the room and being in the room (or the space or the field or wherever you are) is the default. Whereas before, tuning out was the default. Being lost in thought was the default. The default mode network being activated to-not-really-be-here was the default. Now the natural default is to be here. And by the way, if I really need to, I can check my calendar and perform a cognitive task so that if I for some reason wouldlike to do that high level function and really kind of need to tune out the room a little bit, that can happen. But then the room is back as soon as that stops. Whereas before, it was the other way around. This is substantially better.
This sounds on re-reading like some of the worst New Age fru-fru, but still, it is what I mean. When every single aspect of experience naturally is it, that's the good stuff. (DhO)
Some perceptual benefits of Full Enlightenment. [The following was not written by Daniel Ingram, it's a transcription of part of an interview performed by MaxAnte to him: check in this YouTube link where this question is asked. Daniel's long answer is the following:]
This kind of painful process that was literally sort of like a ‘low grade headache’ (best way to explain it) stopped. That was just delightful, and in its place there’s a sense of synchrony. Synchrony just feels really nice. Everything synchronizes with itself. Before, everything feels out of phase. There is this that and then my knowing of it. There where this that and then this, and I was here and I was there. There was always this sense of jarring out-of-phaseness, which somehow experientially is just unpleasant. It’s suffering. It’s a fundamental type of suffering.
And when that stopped, the sense of synchrony and naturalness is substantially more delightful, just experientially. And that keeps on being substantially more delightful, moment after moment. It’s like a pleasure you don’t get a tolerance to. It’s a niceness that every moment is just as nice as the moment before, in that specific way.
That doesn’t mean that things can’t be unpleasant, but that quality is also there, even in very unpleasant things. So I’m not meaning to say there’s not the perception of pain or that everything is always nice. It isn’t. There’s still pain, but that quality of synchrony is simply delightful and is always happening. Actually, I’ve come to appreciate it more as time has gone on it. Continues to sort of be like ‘yeah’, almost like there’s like … as it sort of cascades through all other aspects of mind and situations and conditioning.
It’s fascinating to see some memory – I may not have had in 20 years – come up, and now it arises in this totally different space, where identity is nothing like the solid sticky thing it was before. And now it’s just a thought and space. That rewires something in the brain that now that memory – which might have been painful or complicated – is now arising in a space that is so much more clear and open. And in which thought, rather than being contracted into, is literally just this super wispy thing in this big echoey room that is so much nicer … Also, there will be meetings and I’m looking around like I’m the only person in the room full-time. If you’re the person who’s really in the room and everybody else isn’t in the meeting, that’s a real advantage!
(There are real-world advantages,) sure, because people are constantly like “oh, I wasn’t really present for that … I wasn’t really into that”. Well, now the cool thing about being awake is that the holodeck no longer being filtered through the serial line that was constantly getting interrupted, and turning to the imagined holodeck –there was another holodeck– would tune out the sort of consensus holodeck when it’s tuned to its internal holodeck … well, that’s not happening in that way. The default is now the consensus holodeck (as much as anything can be a consensus when we all have our own vantage points).
Speaking in relative terms, but ignoring all the ontological problems – I don’t want to go into that –, basically the room and being in the room (or the space or the field or wherever you are) is the default. Whereas before, tuning out was the default. Being lost in thought was the default. The default mode network being activated to-not-really-be-here was the default. Now the natural default is to be here. And by the way, if I really need to, I can check my calendar and perform a cognitive task so that if I for some reason wouldlike to do that high level function and really kind of need to tune out the room a little bit, that can happen. But then the room is back as soon as that stops. Whereas before, it was the other way around. This is substantially better.
The other thing is the proportionality, which is a hard thing to explain. 99% of this room – even if I’m in pain somewhere – has no pain. And this is the vast experience, so the whole room is the experience evenly in some kind of way. Let’s say I have a pain in my knee: it’s no bigger than it is. In comparison to the volume of the space, it’s still really small. And the mind is also not doing that contracted exaggerating thing it used to do, where it would take the pain and make this big thing out of it and ignore all the areas that were neutral or even pleasant, that it becomes the sort of fixation. Whereas (now) even when I have pain in one place, most other places are neutral and or might even feel nice.
And so, also things that feel nice are much easier to perceive as I’m here. You can’t see me now because this is an audio, but I’m moving my hands around and like the coolness of the air on my fingers, it’s delightful. There’s something about the echo in the room that sounds kind of cool, like even that little click of your fingers, like it has a sort of nice little snap to it. There’s the glistening of the light on your hair, which is just naturally kind of cool when it’s just allowed to be itself, and that sort of childlike wondrous way of people perceiving things when they’re just in it, like you’re watching a beautiful sunset, you forget about the day and you’re just in the beautiful colors …
Well, everything has something of that to it in some way, because there’s the immediate sensate experience and it’s raw – well not raw, because we get everything kind of processed, but as raw as you can get with the human brain that receives everything kind of processed, and so there’s something really nice about that. The proportionality of thought also. So emotions are mostly thoughts and then you get contracted into the thought rather than having it just be this wispy thing in space. And then because when you contract into the thought it then becomes a huge part of your world and then that distorts how much of a reaction you have to it. And then that costs a much greater release of all the stress chemicals if you’re having some unpleasant thought, because the brain is now taking that as a total world or whatever, and you get lost in the anger or whatever and then that creates a whole much bigger stress response and all these chemicals.
Well now it’s not that there aren’t stressors and things, but the thought arises in the room, is proportional, and in terms of experience the thoughts are really small wispy things most of the time. And then the stress chemicals that result from that, even if it’s a really unpleasant thought, are vastly less because the experience of it wasn’t contracted into and the brain didn’t freak out that now this is a total world cut off from most of the room, which again is fine, and in fact pretty nice. So, it’s not that it made all bad emotions go away, but the relationship to it and the physiology of it is really different.
And the envelope of these things thus is a lot different, meaning the sort of attack, sustain and decay – the music synthesizer terms in terms of sound –. The attack is really fast because things are clear, but the release is also really fast because the thought arises and then it disappears. And the maybe some little stress chemical arises and then those bodily sensations hang out for a little bit, and then they disappear. But there’s nothing like the sort of feedback loop in the way that it used to be before, where this hurts and this caught of the thought and this thing and then that causes stress chemicals and they would loop and loop and loop… in this really exaggerated distorted way long after the thing had happened. And you’re just sitting there most of the room is fine, like why is the brain doing that? It’s just torturing itself, it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t benefit from that. And so the default now is to not do that, whereas before the default was to do that. So it’s not like some small sort of short versions of that can’t happen in extreme circumstances, but it’s vastly shorter and it’s vastly milder. So that’s better.
All of those things have been substantial upgrades … like unbelievable upgrades. Like I would give it all the stuff I lost getting this, I would give that again and more … many more times, to get this. This is such a benefit in terms of the actual living feel of it. I can’t even tell you.
Does it perform exactly like the old texts said it would? No. Does it beat the crap out of what I had before? Absolutely yes. And the cool thing is this is reproducible and it’s based on really straight forward assumptions, just sensate clarity about intentions, mental impressions, thoughts in the room, experience, body, mind, Six Sense Doors, and just noticing that clearly. That’s really straight forward and portable. And so that’s one of the supercool things about it. And it actually is reproducible. So people were able to do this, they were able to tell me how to do it and it’s like ‘yeah!’ so I like that. It satisfies the empiricist in me. It’s very egalitarian. Like here you are, here’s your senses, perceive them clearly. This can be yours. (DhO)
There are various modes of perception arising and vanishing, which may highlight various qualities over others, yet the divisionlessness of this full, rich, transient, direct, interdependent, causal field eliminates the subtle sense of some thing that is choosing modes. (Regarding No-Self Mode and Self Mode). At some point there will no longer really be either option, as the thing will just be the thing, the field as the field of sensations, of manifestation, of qualities, textures, colors, and aspects.
Being done… in only one axis of development. It is true that one can investigate the sense doors so clearly and for long enough that eventually perception changes and all sensations are just perceived as they are. This has an endpoint and can become one's baseline. It is highly recommended. It has been verified today. One might reasonably say that one is "done" on that single axis if one has actually achieved this and had it hold up under life's challenges. It is a major, life-changing accomplishment, globally transformative in some way, and worth the effort.
However, that is only one axis of development. There are countless others. There are endless ways we can integrate that insight, to develop other skills and understanding, to grow in all the relative aspects of life. That vast multi-dimensional web of development has no obvious endpoint. Work on all of those fronts is highly recommended also. To say one is "done" on all of those essentially infinite axes of development would be absurd. Even the Buddha clearly continued to develop, learn and grow after his mighty awakening, as evidenced in countless stories of his life. (DhO)
The ‘I’ in Arhatship. When asked if (in Arhatship) the "I" stays or goes, this implies a continuity or a permanence where none can be found. The "I" in question will be found to be an artifact of pattern recognition or association, not anything that can be found anywhere. All patterns of sensations, all qualities of experience, all textures, all bodily sensations, all mental images, all of that are simply where they are, arising and vanishing, such that, seeing this directly and clearly, the field of experience is just the field of experience, open, centerless, with sensations that seemed to imply "I" being just more sensations in the wide-open field of what is happening.
It would be as if the quality of sensation patterns that occur when the eyes look at something were considered special, or the pattern of qualities of sensations that occur when the sensations of the skull arise were considered special, or the patterns of sensations and qualities that occur when intention arises were considered special, with these considerations of specialness arising due to the final lack of clarity about the true nature of these ordinary sensations, which are just sensations in the end, as all the rest was and is. The same insights that got you as far as you have gotten just need to filter through everything that seems to be centerpoint, doer, perceiver, Subject, observer, feeler, actor, knower, achiever, etc. These patterns can be slippery, cut close to things that there can be resistance to examining closely, and difficult to see, as they seem so close to home. See them anyway.
There is an untangling of some eddy in attention that caused that identification, and this is hard to explain. It is as if some last, subtle aspect of subject-object spacial distortion was seen through or righted itself, either way you look at it, suddenly naturally just this and without a reference point.
Falling back on fractal theory here, as 3 is to Dark Night, 4 is to Equanimity, in that the center is then included in the way that makes Fruitions possible. In that way, 3 is to anagami and 4 is to arahat, in that the center is now included in the same insight-mode that anagami does to the periphery and space mostly, arahat does to the whole volume throughout in a very even way. These are analogies, but they have value. (DhO)
Why ‘Arahat’ despite suffering. The Buddha suffered and so did numerous reported arahats, the most extreme one of which killed himself with a knife as the pain he experienced in his old age was too extreme. The Buddha suffered from headaches, among other things, but also frustration with his monks, logistical difficulties, and other complexities.
The Shorter Discourse on Voidness says that even for arahats there still remains that suffering that results from having been born and conditioned by life (MN121).
That pain would still be pain and there would still be conflicts, illness, and the like is to be expected. Even in dependent origination, it is still there as predicted in that profound teaching.
That all said, what I have done is remarkable and very unusual.
All sensations occur totally on their own, are known by themselves, where they are, without any Agent, Subject, Observer, Doer, Controller, or Knower at all, all the way through, evenly, without exception. This was finally locked in 10 years ago by a remarkable series of transformations. In short, the sense of a self in the sense caused by ignorance of the Three Characteristics is totally gone, flipped over, untangled at the core, and extirpated totally at the root. All actions occur totally on their own. The sense of a center-point is totally gone. Everything is just where it is in a totally integrated, totally transient, totally directly manifest field. At the time it happened, there was the profound sense, "Wow! That's it!" and that sense and the direct perceptual evaluation of the path of insight being completed on that front has remained ever since.
What would you call that?
It took me 7 years from Stream Entry (January, 1996), meaning nearly 9 from beginning to end (August, 1994, when I did my first retreat, to April, 2003, when I did my last retreat). Those years involved an extremely high level of engagement with the dharma.
…Eliminating the sense of a center-point, Subject, etc. is the ignorance to be eliminated, and removing that eliminates that strange way of holding the mind where part of it tries to get to or away from parts of reality, but a mammal was born, and it will feel pain, get sick, and die...
… The body and mind are profoundly connected. You release enough adrenalin, the brain really changes its perspective and function. You release enough immune chemicals, leukotriene, prostaglandins, TNF-alpha, and brain function really changes. The notion that the body could be profoundly suffering, with severe injuries or pain and yet the mind not only be totally clear but functioning at some peak and transcendent level is naive. The system in reality simply doesn't work like that. Again, this is not fantasy, this is the gritty reality of being a human, the basic and perhaps advanced physiology of how the system works. Even the far fringe of promise makers, such as Richard of AF, take their pain medications for pain. Why, if it was all bliss and totally suffering free? Why get constipated and waste your time if there was no suffering? …
I still experience worry, stress and anxiety. There are ways in which some aspects of those are very different, particularly related to duration, triggers, lack of contraction into those from a cognitive point of view, something of the sensate vibrancy and fresh directness that I didn't appreciate before, something in the wide perspective that notices the wide space in which they occur, and something in the lack of something in relationship to them is very much better, but they still occur. (DhO)
Arahats and pain. We are a very long way from having pain-free lives, as any day in an emergency department will tell you … People hurt, and they hurt often. It is extremely common. I don't think we will eliminate severe pain being a frequent visitor to many people, particularly as they get old ...
As to the example of the person who was cut into pieces while feeling one with God, it is definitely true that people can get into some very strange mind states that allow a very altered relationship to pain.
For example, I saw a thin teenage female who came in about to deliver her baby and having frequent contractions. She was brought in by her grandmother who didn't know she was pregnant until her water broke. The patient was smiling and laughing the whole time she was delivering, claiming to anyone who would listen that she was not pregnant, had never had sex, and that she was fine. She delivered a 6-pound healthy baby and when it was presented to her said, "This can't be my baby, as I am not pregnant!" while laughing in this somewhat nervous, odd way the whole time. Her vitals stayed stable, she never flinched from a contraction, never broke a sweat, never showed any sign of pain when being injected with lidocaine for the episiotomy I performed, as the baby was stuck and starting to have some heart slowdowns, and, except for the baby she delivered, you would never have known she was in labor. It was her first child. I have seen labor probably 60 times: nobody I had ever seen before looked that totally calm, didn't sweat, didn't have a heart rate increase, didn't scream at some point (one exception to that last one being a 38 year-old delivering her 10th baby who did it on one, calm easy push like the expert she was). In short, she had somehow dissociated from the situation so entirely that she was living in an alternate reality where it wasn't happening. I don't consider that wisdom, and in fact consider it some variant of psychosis, but admit that its implications for what might be possible are ambiguous.
Similarly, I have seen people so high on drugs that they seemed totally impervious to pain at all, as well as psychotic people who seemed to not feel pain in the least. In short, I do know of pathological states where, for short periods of time, pain doesn't seem to get through in any normal way.
While I agree to some degree that emptiness is very important, there is a flip side to that.
I quote from one of my favorite texts, one I have gone back to often, that being The Light of Wisdom, from the last paragraph of the root text:
"The causal vehicle of the paramitas
Is to gradually attain the paths and bhumis.
On the path of fruition, you should still regard
The practice of unified emptiness and compassion as the basis of the path."
I think that this is very profound and helpful. It is easy to go so far into the emptiness end of emphasis in our practice that we begin to dissociate, yearn for extinction, yearn for total transcendence, yearn to be untouched by the troubles of the world, yearn to be totally disconnected from pain, harm, conflict, illness, difficulty and death.
I think that remembering that compassion and emptiness are unified, in that this points to the fact of these bodies, in this world, with this suffering in us all, and the same final outcome of this birth, together, and being realistic about that, honest about that, and really inhabiting this body, this place, this community we find ourselves, this troubled world: all of that requires acknowledging the pain, the suffering, the conflict, the reality of what this moral coil is.
When we are well and don't hurt, we can easily forget all of this. We can imagine that it will all feel ok forever: it won't. Similarly, when we hurt, we can imagine that we can read the dharma as offering a way out of pain totally in this life: I also feel that this is impossible, though clearly we can change numerous aspects of something in the illusory nature of the odd relationship to pain that exists while it seems there is still a center point, doer, controller, feeler in some separate but oddly connected way, and that does help, but it doesn't mitigate all of it, and in some ways makes it worse, as, when that odd defense mechanism is gone, there is this very direct connection, this inherent clarity.
I have notice that this direct, unfiltered connection to the sensate world does a few things.
It is true that it really does help in some way. The silence of the mind in the face of much of what goes on, the spaciousness of perspective, the things just in their own proportion-ness of clear sense perception and panoramic perspectives, in which thoughts are like luminous phantoms as part of a much wider space, in which where is not a split of this and that, is much better. Ordinary sensations that would typically have been missed have this really nice, fresh, pleasing something about them, and there is something really great about that, except that there is a flip side to that:
It becomes no longer possible to dissociate from really bad pain so far as I can tell. This was a surprise.
I remember my first kidney stone. It started while I was playing bass on stage with my band. I thought I had gas cramps or something, as we had eaten Mexican food before the show and I had eaten a bunch of beans, and I didn't really want to fart right there on stage, and some of those cramps were really bad, but I just kept playing, focusing on the music and finally the show ended. For much of the show the pain was there, but I didn't really notice it much, like it was happening in some other space somewhere, meaning that I had managed to dissociate from it. When I got home I noticed that the pain really was bad, and so I ended up in the emergency department after writhing around on the floor like an alligator that had been stabbed in the back with a spear. After waiting for about 3.5 hours to be seen, the pain suddenly ended, just like that, when I passed the stone into my bladder.
Compare that to a stone that hit me this Spring. The odd thing about having a system that is now hardwired into reality is that there is no escape in some way, such that, whereas before there was a way to detune somehow from the pain, now pain that is really terrible is right there and very clear in a way that doesn't seem to be able to be shut out or dissociated from at all.
So here is the odd thing about this from a physiological point of view: I drove to the emergency department sweating and shaking as the pain threatened to make me pass out: totally dangerous: don't do this. I was really nauseated, though I didn't vomit. I show up and stagger to the bed. While this is happening, the staff commented that it was very odd the way that I could calmly recite my medical history and give all the details while my body was sweating and shaking. Odder still, my vitals were totally normal: heart rate about 60-70, blood pressure about 110/60: nothing like what people ordinarily look like when they are in terrible pain, which I definitely was, and I see people with bad pain all the time: few have normal heart rates and blood pressures when really bad pain hits, though we do see it on occasion.
So, while it didn't affect something, to say there was not terrible, really debilitating pain that was immaculately clear for every instant of it would be missing something, as you should have seen how I was walking: it looked like I had been shot in the back or was being beaten in the back with a large stick, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do about that.
A shot of toradol (like fancy ibuprofen) and a few minutes later the stone passed and I was ok. Until that time, there would be no way to say that I was ok, as terrible pain is definitely not ok and it definitely had serious effects, just different in some ways than they would have been before.
Another example: I worked a shift while passing a stone some years back. That stone wasn't as bad but was still pretty strong and impressive pain. I would give that pain a 7/10 as opposed to the 10/10 my last stone caused. Nobody during the shift could tell, as I was calm, friendly, working fast, and appeared normal, but the clarity of the pain second after second was profound, and I certainly wouldn't say that wasn't suffering, as that would be really missing something bad about that experience. That the mind was very clear about the pain, and that the mind wasn't producing reactions that impaired my ability to work or stay calm and professional, that there didn't seem to be anything in the center of the brain that was observing the pain, and all the rest of the benefits of this attainment still don't change the fact that that stone really hurt, and I would have compassion for anyone in a similar state of attainment with a similar stone, as clearly reality would be better without pain like that. That is the compassion part of the emptiness, the unification of the two.
More practically, I think that being careful to watch for the desire to dissociate, to escape, to totally transcend is important for good practice: those are subtle or gross ignorance, aversion to pain and desire for escape that is missing something that is required to untangle the knot, and that is a full and total commitment to this sense sphere however it is, here and now, in this fathom-long body, all the way through. Investigating the sensations that make up those patterns of tendencies is very good practice. (DhO)
Call it True Self. Call it no-self. Regardless, it is happening, as it always has and there are various modes of attention, as there always have been and various modes of perception arising and vanishing, which may highlight various qualities over others, it seems and there is nobody to decide that this full, rich, transient, direct, interdependent, causal field is either but thoughts that it might be one or the other can still arise, as they did before and in that direct perception, the divisionlessness of it eliminates the subtle sense of some thing that is choosing modes. Though the sense of those apparent choices and decisions arising on their own may still occur.
And this lack of a split, this lack of an illusion of some separate, permanent, continuous something that could truly stand outside of all of this and make such choices is seen through as part of the whole of the flickering, shimmering, transient thing.
So look carefully at the patterns that seem to be deciding between those various modes and notice them and just get to know them, such that what is getting to know them and them are both clearly comprehended on their own, by themselves, aware/manifest where they are and all modes will come to be clearer about having that same quality of directness, of where-they-are-ness, in a way that eliminates finally the sense that any of those specific modes is the one true ultimate mode, but all modes are truly the thing itself, as the qualities of fundamental perceptual truth are universal and apply to all states and qualities and modes of perception and attention without exception.
Spend time enjoying the nice ones if you wish, as all modes of attention reveal the universal truths if perceived clearly, so if the nice modes happen, perceive them clearly, and if the modes you don't like as much happen, perceive them clearly, though it is true that the most pleasant and unpleasant ones as well as the least interesting ones are not as easy for some to just see as they are, as our reactions of enjoyment, aversion and boredom may seem to cloud clear perception.
But with clear comprehension from good practice, the fundamental truths reveal themselves, and a fluent clarity and facility in all states of manifestation becomes natural and habituated such that apparent exceptions and finally the sense of fundamental options become finer and more subtle and may eventually vanish.
... The common way of looking at this is that there are zillions of sensations but we can only comprehend a limited number of them.
Except that perspective actually misses a really essential point that is strangely obvious once you think about it and yet also quite slippery, given how we are so used to not seeing things this way, or so we think.
That point is that each sensation already knew itself when it arose. If it arose, then the comprehension was build into it, intrinsic to it, the same as it.
We have this notion that there is some central comprehender, some liner processor of all of that stuff out there, and yet all of the stuff out there already processed itself it as it arose, as that arising was the processing, and what the seeming central processor does is to make some additional secondary impression (that is also just more sensations that are aware where they are and of themselves), but we actually believe that this secondary impression, this echo, this stand-in, is actually the awareness, the comprehension, when it is actually just a secondary effect from the first cause, that being the first sensation that the second sensation follows.
Said another way:
All of the sensations know themselves as and when and where they are, always have, always will, couldn't be any other way. Awareness and phenomena just always are not in a 1:1 ratio, they are actually just the same thing.
When reality seems filtered through this odd secondary central processing habit, it appears that some middleman, some potentially overburdened one-at-a-time system, is perceiving them, when actually it is just making poor copies one at a time of something that is vast and rich and already comprehended itself and never really actually needed any poor copies made to already be known.
So, just let the field in all of its richness speak for itself, including the small, central, limited copying process, and, seen thusly, the knot of perception that doesn't realize that the things already happened and already knew themselves will eventually and perhaps in stages shift to the whole thing knowing itself directly, as it actually always has but just somehow failed to know that at the level that makes the difference.
I, for one, see no reason not to enjoy the state you are able to get into, as, done well, most such things get boring after a time, no matter how amazing, and eventually familiarity with it will, if you are lucky and when the thrill and novelty wear off, lead to better and more clear sensate comprehension, which is the first basis of insight.
Dukkha is a power hog only because it fails to realize that the work was already done, that phenomena already knew themselves naturally, and so it is when that overcompensation stops that the whole thing fully knows that it shines on its own without having to do anything. (DhO)
Being done… in only one axis of development. It is true that one can investigate the sense doors so clearly and for long enough that eventually perception changes and all sensations are just perceived as they are. This has an endpoint and can become one's baseline. It is highly recommended. It has been verified today. One might reasonably say that one is "done" on that single axis if one has actually achieved this and had it hold up under life's challenges. It is a major, life-changing accomplishment, globally transformative in some way, and worth the effort.
However, that is only one axis of development. There are countless others. There are endless ways we can integrate that insight, to develop other skills and understanding, to grow in all the relative aspects of life. That vast multi-dimensional web of development has no obvious endpoint. Work on all of those fronts is highly recommended also. To say one is "done" on all of those essentially infinite axes of development would be absurd. Even the Buddha clearly continued to develop, learn and grow after his mighty awakening, as evidenced in countless stories of his life. (DhO)
The ‘I’ in Arhatship. When asked if (in Arhatship) the "I" stays or goes, this implies a continuity or a permanence where none can be found. The "I" in question will be found to be an artifact of pattern recognition or association, not anything that can be found anywhere. All patterns of sensations, all qualities of experience, all textures, all bodily sensations, all mental images, all of that are simply where they are, arising and vanishing, such that, seeing this directly and clearly, the field of experience is just the field of experience, open, centerless, with sensations that seemed to imply "I" being just more sensations in the wide-open field of what is happening.
It would be as if the quality of sensation patterns that occur when the eyes look at something were considered special, or the pattern of qualities of sensations that occur when the sensations of the skull arise were considered special, or the patterns of sensations and qualities that occur when intention arises were considered special, with these considerations of specialness arising due to the final lack of clarity about the true nature of these ordinary sensations, which are just sensations in the end, as all the rest was and is. The same insights that got you as far as you have gotten just need to filter through everything that seems to be centerpoint, doer, perceiver, Subject, observer, feeler, actor, knower, achiever, etc. These patterns can be slippery, cut close to things that there can be resistance to examining closely, and difficult to see, as they seem so close to home. See them anyway.
There is an untangling of some eddy in attention that caused that identification, and this is hard to explain. It is as if some last, subtle aspect of subject-object spacial distortion was seen through or righted itself, either way you look at it, suddenly naturally just this and without a reference point.
Falling back on fractal theory here, as 3 is to Dark Night, 4 is to Equanimity, in that the center is then included in the way that makes Fruitions possible. In that way, 3 is to anagami and 4 is to arahat, in that the center is now included in the same insight-mode that anagami does to the periphery and space mostly, arahat does to the whole volume throughout in a very even way. These are analogies, but they have value. (DhO)
Why ‘Arahat’ despite suffering. The Buddha suffered and so did numerous reported arahats, the most extreme one of which killed himself with a knife as the pain he experienced in his old age was too extreme. The Buddha suffered from headaches, among other things, but also frustration with his monks, logistical difficulties, and other complexities.
The Shorter Discourse on Voidness says that even for arahats there still remains that suffering that results from having been born and conditioned by life (MN121).
That pain would still be pain and there would still be conflicts, illness, and the like is to be expected. Even in dependent origination, it is still there as predicted in that profound teaching.
That all said, what I have done is remarkable and very unusual.
All sensations occur totally on their own, are known by themselves, where they are, without any Agent, Subject, Observer, Doer, Controller, or Knower at all, all the way through, evenly, without exception. This was finally locked in 10 years ago by a remarkable series of transformations. In short, the sense of a self in the sense caused by ignorance of the Three Characteristics is totally gone, flipped over, untangled at the core, and extirpated totally at the root. All actions occur totally on their own. The sense of a center-point is totally gone. Everything is just where it is in a totally integrated, totally transient, totally directly manifest field. At the time it happened, there was the profound sense, "Wow! That's it!" and that sense and the direct perceptual evaluation of the path of insight being completed on that front has remained ever since.
What would you call that?
It took me 7 years from Stream Entry (January, 1996), meaning nearly 9 from beginning to end (August, 1994, when I did my first retreat, to April, 2003, when I did my last retreat). Those years involved an extremely high level of engagement with the dharma.
…Eliminating the sense of a center-point, Subject, etc. is the ignorance to be eliminated, and removing that eliminates that strange way of holding the mind where part of it tries to get to or away from parts of reality, but a mammal was born, and it will feel pain, get sick, and die...
… The body and mind are profoundly connected. You release enough adrenalin, the brain really changes its perspective and function. You release enough immune chemicals, leukotriene, prostaglandins, TNF-alpha, and brain function really changes. The notion that the body could be profoundly suffering, with severe injuries or pain and yet the mind not only be totally clear but functioning at some peak and transcendent level is naive. The system in reality simply doesn't work like that. Again, this is not fantasy, this is the gritty reality of being a human, the basic and perhaps advanced physiology of how the system works. Even the far fringe of promise makers, such as Richard of AF, take their pain medications for pain. Why, if it was all bliss and totally suffering free? Why get constipated and waste your time if there was no suffering? …
I still experience worry, stress and anxiety. There are ways in which some aspects of those are very different, particularly related to duration, triggers, lack of contraction into those from a cognitive point of view, something of the sensate vibrancy and fresh directness that I didn't appreciate before, something in the wide perspective that notices the wide space in which they occur, and something in the lack of something in relationship to them is very much better, but they still occur. (DhO)
Arahats and pain. We are a very long way from having pain-free lives, as any day in an emergency department will tell you … People hurt, and they hurt often. It is extremely common. I don't think we will eliminate severe pain being a frequent visitor to many people, particularly as they get old ...
As to the example of the person who was cut into pieces while feeling one with God, it is definitely true that people can get into some very strange mind states that allow a very altered relationship to pain.
For example, I saw a thin teenage female who came in about to deliver her baby and having frequent contractions. She was brought in by her grandmother who didn't know she was pregnant until her water broke. The patient was smiling and laughing the whole time she was delivering, claiming to anyone who would listen that she was not pregnant, had never had sex, and that she was fine. She delivered a 6-pound healthy baby and when it was presented to her said, "This can't be my baby, as I am not pregnant!" while laughing in this somewhat nervous, odd way the whole time. Her vitals stayed stable, she never flinched from a contraction, never broke a sweat, never showed any sign of pain when being injected with lidocaine for the episiotomy I performed, as the baby was stuck and starting to have some heart slowdowns, and, except for the baby she delivered, you would never have known she was in labor. It was her first child. I have seen labor probably 60 times: nobody I had ever seen before looked that totally calm, didn't sweat, didn't have a heart rate increase, didn't scream at some point (one exception to that last one being a 38 year-old delivering her 10th baby who did it on one, calm easy push like the expert she was). In short, she had somehow dissociated from the situation so entirely that she was living in an alternate reality where it wasn't happening. I don't consider that wisdom, and in fact consider it some variant of psychosis, but admit that its implications for what might be possible are ambiguous.
Similarly, I have seen people so high on drugs that they seemed totally impervious to pain at all, as well as psychotic people who seemed to not feel pain in the least. In short, I do know of pathological states where, for short periods of time, pain doesn't seem to get through in any normal way.
While I agree to some degree that emptiness is very important, there is a flip side to that.
I quote from one of my favorite texts, one I have gone back to often, that being The Light of Wisdom, from the last paragraph of the root text:
"The causal vehicle of the paramitas
Is to gradually attain the paths and bhumis.
On the path of fruition, you should still regard
The practice of unified emptiness and compassion as the basis of the path."
I think that this is very profound and helpful. It is easy to go so far into the emptiness end of emphasis in our practice that we begin to dissociate, yearn for extinction, yearn for total transcendence, yearn to be untouched by the troubles of the world, yearn to be totally disconnected from pain, harm, conflict, illness, difficulty and death.
I think that remembering that compassion and emptiness are unified, in that this points to the fact of these bodies, in this world, with this suffering in us all, and the same final outcome of this birth, together, and being realistic about that, honest about that, and really inhabiting this body, this place, this community we find ourselves, this troubled world: all of that requires acknowledging the pain, the suffering, the conflict, the reality of what this moral coil is.
When we are well and don't hurt, we can easily forget all of this. We can imagine that it will all feel ok forever: it won't. Similarly, when we hurt, we can imagine that we can read the dharma as offering a way out of pain totally in this life: I also feel that this is impossible, though clearly we can change numerous aspects of something in the illusory nature of the odd relationship to pain that exists while it seems there is still a center point, doer, controller, feeler in some separate but oddly connected way, and that does help, but it doesn't mitigate all of it, and in some ways makes it worse, as, when that odd defense mechanism is gone, there is this very direct connection, this inherent clarity.
I have notice that this direct, unfiltered connection to the sensate world does a few things.
It is true that it really does help in some way. The silence of the mind in the face of much of what goes on, the spaciousness of perspective, the things just in their own proportion-ness of clear sense perception and panoramic perspectives, in which thoughts are like luminous phantoms as part of a much wider space, in which where is not a split of this and that, is much better. Ordinary sensations that would typically have been missed have this really nice, fresh, pleasing something about them, and there is something really great about that, except that there is a flip side to that:
It becomes no longer possible to dissociate from really bad pain so far as I can tell. This was a surprise.
I remember my first kidney stone. It started while I was playing bass on stage with my band. I thought I had gas cramps or something, as we had eaten Mexican food before the show and I had eaten a bunch of beans, and I didn't really want to fart right there on stage, and some of those cramps were really bad, but I just kept playing, focusing on the music and finally the show ended. For much of the show the pain was there, but I didn't really notice it much, like it was happening in some other space somewhere, meaning that I had managed to dissociate from it. When I got home I noticed that the pain really was bad, and so I ended up in the emergency department after writhing around on the floor like an alligator that had been stabbed in the back with a spear. After waiting for about 3.5 hours to be seen, the pain suddenly ended, just like that, when I passed the stone into my bladder.
Compare that to a stone that hit me this Spring. The odd thing about having a system that is now hardwired into reality is that there is no escape in some way, such that, whereas before there was a way to detune somehow from the pain, now pain that is really terrible is right there and very clear in a way that doesn't seem to be able to be shut out or dissociated from at all.
So here is the odd thing about this from a physiological point of view: I drove to the emergency department sweating and shaking as the pain threatened to make me pass out: totally dangerous: don't do this. I was really nauseated, though I didn't vomit. I show up and stagger to the bed. While this is happening, the staff commented that it was very odd the way that I could calmly recite my medical history and give all the details while my body was sweating and shaking. Odder still, my vitals were totally normal: heart rate about 60-70, blood pressure about 110/60: nothing like what people ordinarily look like when they are in terrible pain, which I definitely was, and I see people with bad pain all the time: few have normal heart rates and blood pressures when really bad pain hits, though we do see it on occasion.
So, while it didn't affect something, to say there was not terrible, really debilitating pain that was immaculately clear for every instant of it would be missing something, as you should have seen how I was walking: it looked like I had been shot in the back or was being beaten in the back with a large stick, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do about that.
A shot of toradol (like fancy ibuprofen) and a few minutes later the stone passed and I was ok. Until that time, there would be no way to say that I was ok, as terrible pain is definitely not ok and it definitely had serious effects, just different in some ways than they would have been before.
Another example: I worked a shift while passing a stone some years back. That stone wasn't as bad but was still pretty strong and impressive pain. I would give that pain a 7/10 as opposed to the 10/10 my last stone caused. Nobody during the shift could tell, as I was calm, friendly, working fast, and appeared normal, but the clarity of the pain second after second was profound, and I certainly wouldn't say that wasn't suffering, as that would be really missing something bad about that experience. That the mind was very clear about the pain, and that the mind wasn't producing reactions that impaired my ability to work or stay calm and professional, that there didn't seem to be anything in the center of the brain that was observing the pain, and all the rest of the benefits of this attainment still don't change the fact that that stone really hurt, and I would have compassion for anyone in a similar state of attainment with a similar stone, as clearly reality would be better without pain like that. That is the compassion part of the emptiness, the unification of the two.
More practically, I think that being careful to watch for the desire to dissociate, to escape, to totally transcend is important for good practice: those are subtle or gross ignorance, aversion to pain and desire for escape that is missing something that is required to untangle the knot, and that is a full and total commitment to this sense sphere however it is, here and now, in this fathom-long body, all the way through. Investigating the sensations that make up those patterns of tendencies is very good practice. (DhO)
Arahats and emotions. My emotional life is very human in nearly all practical ways, very as expected, and, while I can't be certain I can compare it to anyone else's internal emotional life with any degree of accuracy, my extrapolation is that most elements would be extremely familiar to most people. I feel all the emotions that I did before. There are, however, some important differences...
Arhats and a modicum of disturbance and non-emptiness. I quote from MN 121, from Access to Insight, of arahants: "He discerns that 'Whatever disturbances that would exist based on the effluent of sensuality... the effluent of becoming... the effluent of ignorance, are not present. And there is only this modicum of disturbance: that connected with the six sensory spheres, dependent on this very body with life as its condition.' He discerns that 'This mode of perception is empty of the effluent of sensuality... becoming... ignorance. And there is just this non-emptiness: that connected with the six sensory spheres, dependent on this very body with life as its condition." (DhO)
1) There are some temporal differences, something that my sound/electronic music background wants to label the "envelope" of the emotions, that being their rate of attack (arising), sustain, and decay (fading away). In general, the arising, sustaining and decaying all happen more rapidly than they did before, such that emotions tend to move through much more quickly, emotional resilience is higher than it was (though it is hard to quantify how much higher), emotional resetting is much more rapid, it seems, and new emotions based on whatever is happening in that moment tend to move in to replace the older ones a lot more quickly, all in general terms and speaking in averages and trends.
2) The way emotions are perceived is really, really different. They are perceived much more clearly, much more immediately, much more vicerally, such that it is a lot easier to know what feeling is there in that instant than it was before. They are also perceived in this totally center-less way, such that the body and the feelings it feels are perceived where they are, not through the odd lens of some strange, imagined, centralized, moving, separate, localized self, perceiver, doer, etc. This also really helps, as they become just part of the full field of experience, and so contraction into them in that way that can cause so much lack of awareness of what else is going on around is basically impossible in the way it occurred before, and also, as a percentage of the field of manifestation, they thus occuply a substantially smaller portion of the total, which seems to proportionally reduce some aspect of their power. Imagine that whatever emotions you were feeling were weighted based on how much of the volume of room you were in that they took up: it is sort of like that, though not a perfect analogy.
3) There are situations that simply don't produce the same reactions that they did before, but trying to describe and categorize that is really hard. It simply doesn't fit into the standard, simplistic models. It also seems unpredictable. Some things that might be expected to produce strong emotional responses might suddenly be felt to shunt down some totally alternate and surprising pathway, whereas some other might just behave much more ordinarily. This all seems very situation and condition-specific and defies easy prediction. The flip side of that is that the emotions seem more accurate, more reflective of the situation, such that, whereas before I might have gotten angry when what I really should have felt was sadness, now I am more likely to feel the sadness. That said, I might now also feel anger more readily whereas before I might have felt fear or frustration, when the more honest emotion that really saw things clearly was anger. Similarly, if nothing is particularly wrong at that moment, there is much less tendency to feel anything other than that the moment is ok. In short, there is more immediacy to the thing.
4) There is a lot of stuff that simply doesn't arise in the way it did as, being as there is no longer any perceived or felt sense of the dualistic split, that of this and that, that of subject and object, the portion of the trouble that was caused by that perceptual distortion has stopped. I really wish I could give you more on that but it is really hard to do. Early on it was not quite as difficult to describe, as the memories available for comparison were much more fresh. Now, over 11 years out from that switch being thrown, I can't get a good bead on exactly what changed, not that it was anything resembling easy even when it had just happened. I do have a moderate amount of moderately good memories of the period when I was flipping between the two modes of perception, and when it went back to the dualistic way from the clear, non-dual way, it felt like my heart was broken from the loss of the clarity, ease, simplicity, elegance, and fundamental rightness of the non-dual way of perceiving things.
5) In some ways my feeling life is actually much stronger, much more full-range. I cry more easily and more often. I cry nearly every time I watch "Glee", for instance. I laugh more easily than I did before, though I have generally been pretty quick to laugh at things. I am more deeply aware of things like fear, anger, and the like, when they arise. As my meditation teacher Sharda Rogell once said to us, "Meditation is not about turning a human being into a stone, it is about turning a stone into a human being." It is sort of like the heart infuses the body, pervades the body, colors the body's portion of space with its its textures, its qualities.
6) The time thing really changes some aspects of stuff, as the pervading noticing that thoughts of present and future occur now transforms plenty of aspects of the function of emotions, as lots of emotional stuff is bound up in past and future, and, as those things are perceived as elements of right now, and proportionally those thoughts make up a really small amount of the field of experiential space, that helps a lot.
7) The grounding in the present moment that these perceptual transformations have produced also changes some important things about empathy. It at once makes it much easier to emphathize, for, as the proportions of feelings in the room or the space are more balanced, more open, more in proportion, and it also makes it more difficult to get unskillfully overwhelmed by empathy by the same basic perceptual proportional mechanism.
8) Then there is what occurred by cycling thousands and thousands of times through the cycles of insight while also maintaining high function regardless while doing things like post-graduate training and a pursuing very demanding career that basically gives no room for malfunction or down-time when you feel you need it except for extreme circumstances, such as major broken bones, funerals of close relatives, and the like. As it became totally normal to have things like Fear arise for no reason at all except that this was the insight stage that was presenting at the time, and for this to happen with basicaly all the other emotions as well, as the stages of insight basically take you on a tour of the whole range of the thing, up and down, round and round, that got me very used to functioning despite what the internal experiences were and also noticing that most of them were just cycle-dependent and most of the time not based on anything going on externally at all. Wait a few minutes, they pass, and something else marches in for no good reason at all: hard to take them as seriously when the system is mostly crying wolf many times a day. This skill-set is an essential one, and practicing it for years hard-wired a high degree of natural grace under pressure and grace under internal complexity, as most of that complexity was just the cycles, and the cycles are just the cycles and nothing more than that. It is like anything you get used to: it becomes much easier. I remember touring a hog-farm and being nearly overwhelmed by the smell. I asked one of the hog-farmers how they handled it, and he said, "I just got used to it. Now it just smells sort of sweet." It is not that all the phases of all cycles just smell sweet, but there was a great deal of habitual tolerance and lack of reactivity that built up as they just trundled through so many, many times.
9) The total flip side of that last point (and that may seem a total contradiction to it) is that the cycles of insight rotate though so rapidly, so often, that they bring up those current issues that are resonating on that emotional band when they do, that it is basically impossible to be particuly repressed when that happens. For example, as Re-Observation rotates through may times per day, sometimes a few times per hour, and that band is basically related to whatever your deepest, most sticky, most important dark stuff is at that time, then, as your key issues arise with that force so clearly, and then you get to see them and then flip to Equanimity shortly therafter on them, that does something really good. It is like some sort of purgative, some sort of cathartic: feel the worst and most compelling of your current crap, make peace with it shortly thereafter, be ok, repeat again and again and again. It has some sort of humanizing and yet cleansing effect. Vomit, feel lighter and better, repeat with the next thing worth vomiting up and out. It is a slightly extreme way to describe the thing, but the analogy has something in it, as it gets at its heart and gut side, its intimately emotional and powerful side, its viceral side. (Anyone reading this who might somehow take that and twist it into a rationalization for bulemia, please don't.)
9) Were you to ask my wife, Carol, how my emotional life is, she certainly wouldn't say anything like me being unperturbed 99.99% of the time, that is for certain, though I do think she would describe me as a happy and resilient person in general terms. It is true that people at work, such as patients and staff, routinely comment on my unusual degree of cheeriness and voluminous positive energy, actually many times per day, though I do have my moments that are very much otherwise at times, as my job in the ER is a particularly stressful and taxing one, which does tend to show the limits of the transformations in a way that most people's lives wouldn't, as I see pain, illness, violence, staggering suffering, blood, vomit, chaos and death. The pressure to tend to all of that at extremely high speed hour after hour and often without food and breaks even to pee is like a great hammer and anvil pounding away at any delusion that there might be emotional sanitation or perfection.
10) That said, it is much easier to shift emotional and affective gears depending on what is happening around me, such that I might go from telling someone that their child just died, and then moments later be playing with some child and showing them how to listen to their heart with my stethoscope, and then dealing with some really anxious teenager who just tried to kill themselves, and then minutes later have to calmly deal with some bleary and beligerant consultant who I woke at 3am and they were not happy about that, and then be suddenly running a trauma which requires rapid, precise and very structured actions that need to happen one after the other, etc. It is a lot easier to do that now than it would have been earlier, I must say, though not always perfectly easy, as biology and neurochemistry do have their own time-tables and those must be taken into account.
11) Finally, in feeling the emotions, there is this weird space thing. It is quite hard to explain. It is like the feelings are there, and space is also there, and the feelings are part of space. This space component really takes out something of the suffering of even the strong emotions we might associate with unpleasantness, such as anger, fear and sadness. For example, space crying is very different from some sense of a limited self crying. Space being afraid is not nearly the same as some small sense of an isolated self being afraid. It is much easier, much better, much more clean in some way, more transparent, and also, oddly, much more clear. It is easy to imagine this as some sort of dissociation, but dissociation lacks the immediate clarity, the viceral richness, the integral intimacy, and instead is the opposite of those.
12) On careful reflection, the emotion that seems the most attenuated and least likely to arise is jealousy. This transformed mind is the thing, the most important thing to me, the thing of most value, the greatest accomplishment I can imagine, and so there is no obvious cause to be jealous of anyone who hasn't done it, as the comparison in terms of improvement is so stark vs how things were the other way, and for anyone who has done it, well, that is awesome, and so, on that one front, there is really something very different. Who would I be jealous of? Why? It is hard to fathom. Select elements of other people's lives, situations, possessions, bodies, etc. do have some appeal, as is only natural, but real jealousy? It is just not much a part of things these days. An important qualifier to that: my life is pretty good at the moment, and I know that we must be careful, as I can imagine situations that might cause stronger jealousy, such as me, say, becoming a quadriplegic with severe phantom pain and being in some ways jealous of everyone who wasn't in that situation, so take my saying this with a large grain of salt, realizing that it might be totally circumstantial, as I currently enjoy health and relative wealth. (DhO)
... (13) [added later: Space and Emotions] You can say that all sensations have a volumetric component, and also that all occur as part of some textured, colored, fluxing volume. It is as if space and the qualities of space are the same thing, parts of the same thing. No sensation can arise without having some spacial aspect to it. The sense of the fluxing and transient volume we call "space" itself seems only actually created by the many flickering, ephemeral sensations that imply it. Taken together, these get at what I am trying to convey.
It is not particularly that space has emotions, or that emotions are the colorations and textures of space, as that would seem to imply two things, when experientially it is something much more integrated than that, intrinsic.
Were one to experience water, one would be hard pressed to separate out its color, wetness, the space it occupies, and temperature from the notion of thing itself? So, while this language would seem to imply artificial divisions, in the experience they do not occur.
I also definitely imply no hyperspace, as it is the artificially created sense of a hyperspace that allows some portion of things to imagine division, duality, an illusory self that is perpetually on "this side" of every act of perception. When the volume is known to be totally integrated, hyperspacial illusions resolve to just what is going on in this space, or as part of the space, or as making up the space, something like that. It is so much simpler that way and resolves many otherwise baffling apparent paradoxes. (DhO)
Arhats and a modicum of disturbance and non-emptiness. I quote from MN 121, from Access to Insight, of arahants: "He discerns that 'Whatever disturbances that would exist based on the effluent of sensuality... the effluent of becoming... the effluent of ignorance, are not present. And there is only this modicum of disturbance: that connected with the six sensory spheres, dependent on this very body with life as its condition.' He discerns that 'This mode of perception is empty of the effluent of sensuality... becoming... ignorance. And there is just this non-emptiness: that connected with the six sensory spheres, dependent on this very body with life as its condition." (DhO)
The ironic thing of being an Arhat. The ironic thing is that the whole thing is about settling into this human body, this human mind, this ordinary life, and seeing it as it is.
To try to answer your question about cultivating happiness and what I could do to optimize happiness: that is the perennial question, and then the question of how my answer might apply to you I can't be certain. Do I believe that non-dual perception really helps? Definitely. Do I think there is lots of standard, generic advice that might generally promote well-being, given many qualifiers? Definitely. A good example: eat a healthy diet, exercise and get enough sleep. There are times when I work too hard and don't exercise enough and don't get enough sleep. Do I believe that if I exercised a bit more and my circadian rhythm wasn't as disrupted by my job as it is that I would be happier? Definitely. More to the point: how will you be happier, which I presume is the essence of your question: that is a moving target, but the fundamentals likely apply.
… I think one of the problems with scales measuring mind states is that as each thing changes you arrive at some new normal and then there is variability within that normal, but we rapidly re-adjust to the new thing and forget the old thing.
Memories of pain and pleasure are not that reliable.
How to compare things accurately? Not easy over large time distances. If I compared, say, my first kiss, which totally blew my mind at the time, to my mind state now as I sit writing this, and could objectively A/B them back and forth and really sample each, what would I think?
Furthermore, if I could take my worst day now and compare it to my worst day from, say, 20 years ago, how much worse would that worst day be from the past in comparison to now and how would you measure that?
What do the ranges look like? Do they overlap somewhat? In whose opinion?
If I took some of the most thrilling and amazing moments of my life from, say, 20 years ago, before I got into meditation and the like, and compared them to my best moments now, how different would they be? Some things would be different, but if one tried to come up with some absolute satisfaction or happiness scale, how much better would things be now? It is a really hard thing to imagine doing, as I am pretty sure my memories of how things were are pretty poor, and there is no way to flip back once certain things are flipped.
I can tell you about a strange period on retreat almost exactly 10 years ago when for a week I flipped back and forth between full non-dual, non-localized, intrinsic, effortless awareness and something that had lots of elements of that but wasn't the totally done thing and did so every 1-3 hours or so. It was one of the heaviest emotional roller coasters of all of my retreat time. The difference was night and day. Each time I would slide back into subtle dualistic perception and caring about things like states and stages and all of that, it was like getting my heart broken, like losing a loved-one, like failing the most important exam of my life, totally crushing, like realizing you just totally forgot the most important appointment of your life, like watching your house with all your most valuable possessions burn before your eyes, like watching your life's work flushed down the toilet.
Each time I would flip back to the better mode of perception, it was like, "Oh, my God, Buffy! That's it! That's the thing! Wow! Amazing! How could I have missed this? It is so obvious! So perfectly perceptually right!" and then it would fade, and my heart was broken again. Imagine dating the hottest woman in the world except that every 2 hours she decides she hates you, and then every 2 hours she loves you again. It was a week of that. Finally, it stayed. That was a huge relief. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the other way of perceiving things: it is just so totally wrong in so many ways and the mind thus flips all over the place like a fish on a line trying to figure out how to get things right again. (DhO)
It is about losing things more than gaining them, although there is some gain, obviously.
It is about being realistic and accepting more than about being grandiose.
It is about giving up ideals and spiritual dreams in favor of coming down to Earth and being right here, as it is, right now.
So odd that it is so hard to tell people this and to convince them that this is what it is about. You can say it again and again and it is like people have some cognitive deficit that makes it nearly impossible to hear. Why it is so hard to do is a very strange thing, isn't it?
Amazing that people will take it and run with it and put people up on some pedestal just to throw things at them, when, in fact, this ordinary back pain, these ordinary human emotions, these things, seen clearly as they are, are the whole point. It is not a fancy thing.
So strange that one of the places on the internet that tries to be the most down-to-earth and realistic, the least bought into the preposterious ideals of awakening that don't hold up to reality testing, the place with the most explicit details about all the problems with the models, and some of the most straightforward and empowering and open set of discussions about how to actually attain to those things that do hold up to reality testing is still plagued by people who just see the whole thing as some absurd popularity and hierarchy contest and just react to that without benefitting from the amazing opportunities that this forum provides. (DhO)
On happiness. Regarding happiness, one must be careful when trying to compare people and some reasonable qualification is helpful, I feel, based on the following points:
- The correlation between how people seem externally to others and how they perceive themselves is clearly not perfect, meaning that there are people who externally may seem happy but are not that happy and those who also don't seem as happy as they actually are. This is due to a mix of subjective and "objective" factors, meaning that how we perceive someone is partially due to them and partially due to how we perceive them. Going from theory to real-world specifics: at all moments would I appear happier than everyone around me? Clearly not. We have some people at work that seem quite happy often, and at times, I would suspect that, if some group of people were asked to evaluate their perception of whether or not I seemed happier than the happiest-seeming person in the emergency department (it is a big place, so we have lots of employees), I am pretty sure that I would not always be voted the most happy-seeming person.
- A perfect A/B and straightforward comparison of mind states in general and happiness in particular is not currently possible that I know of. My thesis that I am happier more of the time than most people I know is not provable. That I am vastly happier than I was is not even easily proven in absolute and final terms, given that I can't be sure I can accurately A/B my mind states across years and decades, as it is all based on memory of pleasant and unpleasant experiences, which itself is known to be faulty. Do I believe that I am vastly better of: definitely. Can I be 100% certain that at all times my current mind states are all superior to the very best mind states I had in the past? No.
- Happiness, being a mind state, is transient, ephemeral, variable, subject to moment-to-moment fluctuations and modifications based on the standard laws of causality. I would not classify myself as being happy all the time, as that would be preposterous. A very wide range of mental qualities manifest and change rapidly.
To try to answer your question about cultivating happiness and what I could do to optimize happiness: that is the perennial question, and then the question of how my answer might apply to you I can't be certain. Do I believe that non-dual perception really helps? Definitely. Do I think there is lots of standard, generic advice that might generally promote well-being, given many qualifiers? Definitely. A good example: eat a healthy diet, exercise and get enough sleep. There are times when I work too hard and don't exercise enough and don't get enough sleep. Do I believe that if I exercised a bit more and my circadian rhythm wasn't as disrupted by my job as it is that I would be happier? Definitely. More to the point: how will you be happier, which I presume is the essence of your question: that is a moving target, but the fundamentals likely apply.
… I think one of the problems with scales measuring mind states is that as each thing changes you arrive at some new normal and then there is variability within that normal, but we rapidly re-adjust to the new thing and forget the old thing.
Memories of pain and pleasure are not that reliable.
How to compare things accurately? Not easy over large time distances. If I compared, say, my first kiss, which totally blew my mind at the time, to my mind state now as I sit writing this, and could objectively A/B them back and forth and really sample each, what would I think?
Furthermore, if I could take my worst day now and compare it to my worst day from, say, 20 years ago, how much worse would that worst day be from the past in comparison to now and how would you measure that?
What do the ranges look like? Do they overlap somewhat? In whose opinion?
If I took some of the most thrilling and amazing moments of my life from, say, 20 years ago, before I got into meditation and the like, and compared them to my best moments now, how different would they be? Some things would be different, but if one tried to come up with some absolute satisfaction or happiness scale, how much better would things be now? It is a really hard thing to imagine doing, as I am pretty sure my memories of how things were are pretty poor, and there is no way to flip back once certain things are flipped.
I can tell you about a strange period on retreat almost exactly 10 years ago when for a week I flipped back and forth between full non-dual, non-localized, intrinsic, effortless awareness and something that had lots of elements of that but wasn't the totally done thing and did so every 1-3 hours or so. It was one of the heaviest emotional roller coasters of all of my retreat time. The difference was night and day. Each time I would slide back into subtle dualistic perception and caring about things like states and stages and all of that, it was like getting my heart broken, like losing a loved-one, like failing the most important exam of my life, totally crushing, like realizing you just totally forgot the most important appointment of your life, like watching your house with all your most valuable possessions burn before your eyes, like watching your life's work flushed down the toilet.
Each time I would flip back to the better mode of perception, it was like, "Oh, my God, Buffy! That's it! That's the thing! Wow! Amazing! How could I have missed this? It is so obvious! So perfectly perceptually right!" and then it would fade, and my heart was broken again. Imagine dating the hottest woman in the world except that every 2 hours she decides she hates you, and then every 2 hours she loves you again. It was a week of that. Finally, it stayed. That was a huge relief. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the other way of perceiving things: it is just so totally wrong in so many ways and the mind thus flips all over the place like a fish on a line trying to figure out how to get things right again. (DhO)
Meditative accomplishment can make people attractive. I do think that there is something about meditative accomplishment that can make people attractive. Many things, in fact:
- Emotional intelligence is refreshing and reassuring to people, like a breath of sanity.
- People who are really present to others, who can really listen and respond to what someone is bringing to an interaction or a conversation, are more compelling.
- Meditative attainment can generate confidence, and that is attractive.
- It can reduce cortisol levels and that makes people seem healthier, and it makes people more lighthearted and people like that.
- It creates pathways of thought and association that people find fascinating.
- It can itself be a status symbol, and some people like those with status.
- It can make the brain function better, which breeds success, and success is attractive, and so and and so forth... (DhO)
Conceit. "Conceit" is a problematic way to think about the Pali word Mana (māna). It is usually translated in emotional terms, that being something like arrogance or pride or unskillful comparison, but consider that something closer would be something in the sense of "I am", as if that truly were true, which it isn't.
The Buddha himself apparently thought quite well of himself, constantly praising his attainments, saying he was better than basically everyone else, including gods and the like, as well as beyond all other arahats and teachers, and yet he also claimed to be free of this.
Contradiction? Is he using the word in a different way from the way it is commonly translated? I vote for the latter.
I think of it as finally untangling the knot of perception that creates the sense of a permanent, continuous, separate part of this reality that is actually an "us". Other translations run into numerous complex problems, the one related to the Buddha being only one of them. (DhO)
There are real saints in this world. I have had the good fortune to meet and work with some of them, both in India and in the US in some of the ER's I have worked in. Truly kind, truly humble, truly dedicated to the service of others and to making this world a better place, word by word, deed by deed, and day by day. They are not always that noticeable, though some definitely are.
I have worked with a few of them for years at my current job, and never seen them be anything but kind and helpful regardless of the degree of adverse circumstances, and we see some pretty adverse circumstances here. We get screamed at, attacked, spit at, vomited on, harassed, and the like on a daily basis. We see death and destruction. We see severe suffering both physical and mental, as well as some terrible reactions to that suffering. The saints I get to work with handle it like superstars, though, again, were you not paying attention, you might miss it, as they don't all stand out.
I also worked with a few true saints at Calcutta Rescue during my 5 months there, as well as in Bodh Gaya and the outlying villages during my 7 months there.
These are the living examples I try to emulate and learn from for my own training in Morality. (DhO)
Pain and Dukkha. Pain exists for nearly all of us, except a few rare people who feel no pain at all due to a genetic variant. I have actually met a child who had this, and their feet, hands, skin and bones in general did very poorly, as they simply couldn’t tell when they had hurt themselves.
So, there is still pain. Pain is still unpleasant, in that unpleasant is hard-wired to some degree in the nature of ordinary mammalian sensory apparatus.
Are the reactions to it different? Yes, but not entirely. The differences are as follows, and in general terms:
- Pain is in proportion spatially, meaning that the volume of experience that has the pain is just that much volume, as the wide-open mind doesn’t contract into the pain in the way it did. That is not the same as nothing being unpleasant, but there is a background of neutral to pleasant in which it sits that the mind doesn’t forget in the way it did before.
- Mental reactions are different, though not entirely transformed. The different part has to do with mental proliferation around the pain, to the rapidity with which any mental proliferation around the pain vanishes as soon as the pain does, and the space that is around the mental proliferations that might arise. So, it is not that the mind might not think, “Oh, fuck, I stubbed my toe hard!”, as it might, but that thought, like all thought, is a small, ephemeral thing in open space, not something contracted into that becomes this huge blinding thing.
- Enough pain can compromise the function of this mammal. For example, I have had somewhere around 13 kidney stones to date, some mild, some moderate, and some that caused a truly amazing amount of pain. Some women I have known who have had bad kidney stones and natural childbirth have told me that they at least are equal in how much pain they can produce, and a few have said that their worst kidney stones were worse than natural childbirth. Having had a few that were basically off the charts quantities of pain, I can believe them. When I am having one of those, I get nauseated, sweat, shake sometimes, want to move all over the place, and, on rare occasions, have felt like I might pass out from the pain simply pouring so much sensation into the poor mammals brain that it began to overload. Past a certain point, cognition becomes difficult, as it feels that all circuits get swamped by the sensations.
- Pain produces some aversion to circumstances in which the pain occurred proportional to how much pain was there. This seems some deep hard-wired mammalian protective response and makes great survival sense. The fact of severe pain causing conditioning to avoid those situations would not surprise the likes of B F Skinner, but it does surprise some idealists who imagine that someone might be able to have no deep, instinctual, mammalian, sympathetic nervous-system mediated, memory-based reactions to pain. Is the perception of those different? Yes, but they still occur. So, do I believe that conditions, such as PTSD, are still possible in the highly awakened? Yes, given sufficiently adverse circumstances.
Long ago, and before I realized it would be such a hard text to find again, I read an account of the Buddha’s last days, in which he was in terrible pain from some intestinal illness (dysentery? mesenteric ischemia?). Anyway, whatever it was, in this account the Buddha said something like, “Though I attain to the highest jhanas I am able, I am not able to find relief from this suffering.” I have been searching for that version of his last days for two decades since I read it in some book on some Buddhist text reading shelf in India somewhere, and, should anyone know where it can be found, the reference would be much appreciated. (DhO)
Pain Threshold. It is definitely true that pain is a really funny thing, in that pain in different contexts of different types viewed different ways and with different purposes can be reacted to very differently by people. The BDSM community is but one dramatic example of this, but there are plenty of others, as walking into any gym or medical residency program will reveal. Clearly, that is an obvious avenue of personal hacking, as plenty of people have discovered.
Illness and the limits of practice. On march 5 (2013) I got wiped out by some horrid viral thing, probably flu b, I would guess, given recent exposures. It was amazing how some little bit of protein and genetic material combined with the totally dysphoric immune chemicals a virus inspires my body to release can basically reduce one's level of physical function to that of an near invalid and fog an otherwise sharp mind to the point that my meditative, jhanic and baseline abilities were about 90% shut down…
… point is, mortality is hard, and it is easy to be confident if one has been some long period of time from something like this, and one might be tempted to say something like such moments are a challenge to our practice, but more accurate would be that practice was basically impossible in any way I might think of practice, and basic survival weakly took over, and even that fails to really capture the arc of the illness, which really was its own thing, like a hurricane to a beach town: just ride out the destruction as best you can.
I have always found the limits of practice interesting, and moments like this one make me reflect on platitudes like "pain plus resistance is suffering" and a recent tweet I saw along the line that if we learn to handle all emotions we can handle anything, and think that they either know something far beyond what I know or they have not recently been sick enough to remember that there are things that can lay us low despite what we might have thought of as powerful practice and lasting transformation.
Did the illusion of duality reassert itself? No.
Did the illusion of agency reassert itself? No.
Did centerless-ness re-distort to a sense of a center point? No.
Did any of those really seem to matter when I was laying there in dazed, bleary, wiped-out pain? Uh, this question would seem more theoretical than practical. I could point out some interesting things I noticed about how the unfound mind retained that uncanny diffuse silence when the IV was being inserted despite me being a total needlephobe, and how the direct pain of that 18g needle was totally unfiltered by the dualistic distortions that plagued the Daniel's of Old, and yet, something in that is missing something of what was going on as the main focus of the experience, and that is not its intrinsic luminosity but the total suckiness of the whole being-sick-like-that thing.
… Interesting aside: when laying there in the hospital bed getting fluids I was on the monitors and I kept trying to get into something jhanic, as I find them healing, and the alarm on the bed kept going off, as my respiratory rate would go below 3/minute at times and generally stayed around 7, and when it went the lowest was when I was able to get something passable as perhaps weak 3rd jhana, and then the O2 sat monitor would go off as my oxygen sat kept dropping to the high 80% range, which correlated well with the better mindstates, so one more question for the scientific journal: is hypoxia and/or hypercarbia part of the jhanic buzz? (DhO)
Slogans like, "No Pain, No Gain," and, "Pain is fear leaving the body," and, "Hurt so good," are classic examples. As noted above, the various ways you can distract people so they don't even feel pain or process it very differently, as pointed out by our resident phlebotomist, are other striking examples of this, as I got to see daily when I worked in various ERs, particularly pediatric ones, where we had specialists who were specifically trained to do that, and they were amazing to watch.
I can think of numerous examples in my own life of situations where pain that most people would probably have found pretty intense and unpleasant were not so to me at the time, with these memories going back to my childhood and long before I thought of myself as a meditation practitioner.
An example I believe I have used before here is of an extremely tough career Army woman whose ankle had an open, 100% displaced (foot hanging off to the side of her lower leg and connected only by tendons and the like with the bones sticking out) ankle fracture, and she asked me to reduce it (put the bones back in the correct alignment until they could be surgically repaired, an extremely painful procedure we generally do under full sedation, meaning with the patient unconscious) without any pain medication or anesthesia, so, right there, with no meds, I put her ankle back in the proper orientation and splinted it, and she watched me calmly with an expression of mild curiosity, not flinching an instant, and said, "That wasn't so bad." It was one of the stranger things I saw during my 19 years in clinical practice and training.
I have also seen highly functional adults crying and screaming over things like tiny splinters and small, barely noticeable bruises.
There is some data to suggest that at least part of our relationship to pain and how we perceive it is genetic, with the far end being people who literally perceive no pain at all, and so the notion that one person's ability to modify their pain response would necessarily be available to everyone else is likely debatable and would make for a fascinating, if ethically complicated, study.
I also have seen people clearly dissociate profoundly in the face of pain, just walling themselves off in some other place where the pain was not, to such a degree that their body stopped responding as if their was pain, meaning no sweating, no increased heartrate or respiratory rate, nothing to indicate that somewhere there was intense pain, at least in theory, as the question then becomes, "If there is pain and you either don't feel it or don't perceive it as pain, is it actually pain?"
Then I have the reports by some mom's that thought their children might have had some lingering bad effects after they underwent painful procedures in the ER (such as having bone reset, large abscesses drained, etc.), during which they were profoundly sedated (but not paralyzed) with no obvious reactions at all to the pain during the procedure, but then afterwards had some memories or dreams or some other PTSD-like reaction regarding the pain, even though at the time of the pain they appeared entirely unconscious and unresponsive. Our brains are complex things.
So, I keep an open mind about the range of how people are able to modify themselves and their attitudes to various experiences.
I also hold very loosely the correlation between perceiving the Three Characteristics and other powers, moral implications, special abilities, concentration abilities, as I have seen too many exceptions to everyone's attempts at rules to believe it is all so simple.
Best wishes for your own practices, and thanks for your reports of what is out there. As a Naturalist and phenomenologist, I very much appreciate people being willing to share their lives and the vast range of what various meditative and other practices might produce. (DhO)
Illness and the limits of practice. On march 5 (2013) I got wiped out by some horrid viral thing, probably flu b, I would guess, given recent exposures. It was amazing how some little bit of protein and genetic material combined with the totally dysphoric immune chemicals a virus inspires my body to release can basically reduce one's level of physical function to that of an near invalid and fog an otherwise sharp mind to the point that my meditative, jhanic and baseline abilities were about 90% shut down…
… point is, mortality is hard, and it is easy to be confident if one has been some long period of time from something like this, and one might be tempted to say something like such moments are a challenge to our practice, but more accurate would be that practice was basically impossible in any way I might think of practice, and basic survival weakly took over, and even that fails to really capture the arc of the illness, which really was its own thing, like a hurricane to a beach town: just ride out the destruction as best you can.
I have always found the limits of practice interesting, and moments like this one make me reflect on platitudes like "pain plus resistance is suffering" and a recent tweet I saw along the line that if we learn to handle all emotions we can handle anything, and think that they either know something far beyond what I know or they have not recently been sick enough to remember that there are things that can lay us low despite what we might have thought of as powerful practice and lasting transformation.
Did the illusion of duality reassert itself? No.
Did the illusion of agency reassert itself? No.
Did centerless-ness re-distort to a sense of a center point? No.
Did any of those really seem to matter when I was laying there in dazed, bleary, wiped-out pain? Uh, this question would seem more theoretical than practical. I could point out some interesting things I noticed about how the unfound mind retained that uncanny diffuse silence when the IV was being inserted despite me being a total needlephobe, and how the direct pain of that 18g needle was totally unfiltered by the dualistic distortions that plagued the Daniel's of Old, and yet, something in that is missing something of what was going on as the main focus of the experience, and that is not its intrinsic luminosity but the total suckiness of the whole being-sick-like-that thing.
… Interesting aside: when laying there in the hospital bed getting fluids I was on the monitors and I kept trying to get into something jhanic, as I find them healing, and the alarm on the bed kept going off, as my respiratory rate would go below 3/minute at times and generally stayed around 7, and when it went the lowest was when I was able to get something passable as perhaps weak 3rd jhana, and then the O2 sat monitor would go off as my oxygen sat kept dropping to the high 80% range, which correlated well with the better mindstates, so one more question for the scientific journal: is hypoxia and/or hypercarbia part of the jhanic buzz? (DhO)
Mindfulness and 4th Path. Mindfulness is a conditioned quality, and, like every other conditioned quality, it comes and goes. Fourth path involves a total lack of split between what one might call the mind and phenomena, so the notion of a mind here noticing those thoughts there and keeping them on track misses something of that basic point.
That said, practice, mindfulness and the like may still occur, being ordinary empty phenomena, and good practice and good mindfulness still help as before, as the mind is an organic thing, and its continued conditioning continues to modify its function for better or for worse.
As to being lost in thoughts, that depends on how you would define that. As before, and using somewhat conventional language for the sake of clarity, attention may tune to this or that, detune from other things, and attend to various objects with more or less emphasis at various times, including thought.
You could also say the same thing at that level by saying that there is no attention beyond bare phenomena, but those bare phenomena may arise differently at different moments, with some moments being made much more of the sensations whose qualities we use to define them as thoughts and other moments being made much more of the sensations we define as physical or auditory or visual sensations, realizing that this divide is not really quite how things are at a very basic sensate level, but functionally is a good way to think of things most of the time. (DhO)
Is non-dual experience an illusion? [A DhOer wrote: "I sometimes doubt whether these experiences are really enlightenment. Because these experiences are strongly similar to the case of Jill Bolte Taylor who underwent CVA, stroke of head. She says everything she saw was just herself, that is, there is nothing to distinguish herself from her environment. And she felt so happy, peaceful, no never-mind. Ken-sho can be a kind of material phenomenon, and its cause can exist at purely physical level. Non-dual experience can be only an illusion caused by brain's hard wiring". Daniel answered:]
Alright, that's one way to look at it. However, as one who does actually perceive reality this way whenever sensations arise, I can say you are missing a few points, at the very least, and they are of relevance.
One can speculate all one wants to at this point about the exact physiological or neurological basis for this experience: I am not sure we are quite there yet with the science, but I suspect it will likely not be that much further down the road that someone will come to some at least basic structural understanding of what has changed.
Everything we perceive, every sensation, thought, intention, conception, and all the rest is clearly due, at a purely physical, biochemical level, to the wiring of the brain, or largely due to it. I don't think mysticism gets us around that, though it can't be proven one way or the other that there is not something else going on, but regardless of those mechanistic explanations, the thing has value.
As one who has integrated the sense field through years of long, hard work and careful training and application, I can tell you that it is the greatest thing I ever did, and I can't imagine doing anything more fundamentally important than that.
It answered and laid to rest large numbers of questions and areas of confusion, such that now I perceive directly what most philosophers, modern physicists, the blindly faithful and the like merely speculate about.
It solved the Dark Night problem that I got into when I first crossed the A&P: this is a gigantic benefit to me, one that I am extremely grateful for.
It opened doors of perception, avenues of experience, and other options that were closed but somehow at some deep level seemed should be available.
I hesitate to go here, but the fact is that it greatly increased my mental, emotional and perceptual clarity in radical and profound ways: those who are familiar with my critique of the models that go there: those specific critiques still hold.
Slice it any way you like, this beats the pants off the way I perceived things before, and everyone who has ever attained to it that I have had the honor to know personally will tell you their own version of the same thing.
If you say this is illusion, you could just as easily say that duality is an illusion, or that perception is an illusion, but given that we live this flesh and blood "illusion", and this way of perceiving reality is so vastly superior to the other, I say: go ahead and get it, and if you don't like it, I am sorry, but you will be the only one who I have ever heard of who had that reaction. (DhO)
Awakening is vastly better than the other ways of perceiving reality. Very briefly:
- The naturally clear mind is much better than the unclear mind, the semi-clear mind and the intermittently clear mind
- The awake mind is much better than the less awake mind
- The timeless mind is much better than the mind caught in the illusion of time
- The mind without any artificial boundary is much better than the artificially bound mind
- The mind that knows there is no mind is much better than the mind that believes there is one
- The directly perceiving mind is much better than the mind that filters things through thought and the sense that there is attention
- The mind that knows there is no perceiver is much better than the mind that believes it is perceiving
- The mind that is stainless is much better than the mind that is stained
- The mind that is the same as bare phenomena much better than the mind that is the same as bare phenomena but doesn't know it
- The mind that is without extraneous noise is better than the noisy mind
- The mind for which all the world arises effortlessly, naturally, lawfully, causally, this is much better than the mind that pretends it is creating effort, creating thought, creating anything
- That fluxing, shimmering field of bare experience that occurs on its own, knows itself directly where it is, as it is, is totally ephemeral, totally fresh, totally natural: this is so much better than the world perceived some other way
- In that mode: there is nothing to want anything
- In that mode: there is nothing to know anything
- In that mode: there is nothing to do anything
- And yet, wanting occurs, as there is an animal that has needs from an ordinary point of view, which is still a valid point of view, but this wanting is just a natural part of the field
- There are preferences, but they are just causality functioning, shimmering, fluxing, doing what it does and always has done
- There is knowledge, but nothing that knows it beyond the shimmering, dancing, flickering little tingling bursts that make up knowledge
Phenomena pretending to be Awareness. When you say "awareness", what do you mean exactly? Something that is the same as phenomena, or something that is different from phenomena. It sounds like a semantic question, but is a good thing to examine, actually a key thing, actually the most fundamental question of all. If awareness is the same as phenomena, is there really awareness, or just phenomena pretending to be it? If this "awareness" is different from sensate phenomena, how can you possibly experience it?
... Try this one on for size: the sensations that have the content "I", the feel of "I", were always as they are, always of the true nature of things also, even if that was not clearly perceived. Once that true nature of those sensate patterns and qualities is clearly perceived, they are known to just be more textures and colors and flavors of transient, ephemeral, intrinsically luminous space, as they always were. (DhO)
This is it. I talk to lots of people about meditation, sometimes up to 15 per week, sometimes as few as 1-2. They talk about memories and plans mostly, hopes and fears, and occasionally sensations going on that moment, but rarely. Almost none of them get that THIS IS IT.
Even the ones that are so impressed with their attainements, the powerful insight cycles, the magical experiences, the deep formless stuff, the very strange experiences that can arise in the far fusions of insight and concentration, nearly all of them fail to appreciate the simple point of these sensations, right now, right here, being it.
By "it", I mean:
1) The only thing going on in experience.
2) Utterly transient.
3) Utterly natural.
4) Utterly ungraspable and unstopable.
5) Utterly without anything that could even attempt to grasp or stop them.
6) Utterly immediate.
7) Utterly just as they are.
8) Utterly the immediate and perfect solution to their insight quest.
Then, every now and then, someone comes along that get it. They say things like:
(i) "The experience of the memories of meditation experiences are themselves the answer to the question of vipassana."
(ii) "The experience of the koan is the answer to the koan."
(iii) "Everything has the same nature all the way through. How utterly obvious this is in all things now. How could this possibly have been missed?"
(iv) "Thought and the things that thought appears to be operating on all satisfy, in that they cannot be grasped, cannot be stopped, cannot occur other than they do: what freedom!"
Those sound like things from a stylized book, but, on rare occasions, people actually do declare that their experience is like that.
When that quality of natural, inevitable, non-negotiable knowing is known to apply to all experiences immediately, automatically, naturally, without any other option, and even when not obviously payed attention to, and that holds up over all states, all stages, all shifts, all highs, all lows, all qualities of experiencce, that's really it.
If you find yourself reflecting on your past or future, and you don't notice that something in those reflections are equally of the same nature as everything else, or you are sure that some specific experience was it or closer to it and some other experiences are farther from it or less it, rather than appreciating those moments themselves as they occur then as simply, straightforwardly, easily, naturally it, however they are, consider tuning to that aspect, and see if it helps. (DhO)
About an Ultimate Reality. Very simply and from a basic, down-to-earth, and simple point of view, these sensations now are aware where they are, and the sensations towards the apparent center that seem to be perceiving those sensations are also just aware where they are. Further, these are all transient, causal, happening on their own, natural, and ordinary.
Perceiving these simple truths directly again and again reveals the completeness of those assertions at the level of natural perception, and thus what was always true becomes obvious.
In this way, this is it. The language of ultimate reality can easily create a seeming divide between the obvious here and now and some ideal of something profound. However, it is actually something very straightforward about what is happening in ordinary, sensate reality that reveals what has been called ultimate reality and other names, and it is true that seeing this ordinary, straightforward thing about our current sensate reality is profound in its way, but one should be careful not to get to far out there with ideals about Reality and ultimate reality, and instead ground down in the simplicity of ordinary investigation of whatever happens, even esoteric things like altered states and visions, etc., all of which are just sensations manifesting now, simple, transient, aware where they are, causal, natural, etc.
In short, as others have said: practice, but practice perceiving this ordinary sensate world with great clarity, precision and inclusiveness so that these simple truths become even more directly obvious than they already are and locked in as your baseline level of perception ...
... I like ByPasser's points (post 1, post 2 also check post 3, post 4) and agree with Yabaxoule. This should not get too complex, and adding in terms such as Awareness and Ultimate Reality and the like can cause complexities. I talk about this in a chapter in MCTB called No-Self vs. True Self. In reality there is no conflict.
Sensations arise. They vanish. This happened on its own. There are many perspectives one can take on this, many lenses, many emphases, but in the end, they all had those qualities, as did the lenses and emphases. One can spin it any way one wants to. One can look at the sensations that seem to make up Subject or Object or both. One can attend to the sensations that seem to imply a permanent Awareness: they all vanish.
Pragmatically, this works well. Those who haven't attained to Stream Entry who look at everything as being solid Awareness tend to get stuck. Those who are working through even the Anagami paths who focus on Awareness being permanent tend to get stuck for some period of time, and the tendency there to wish there to be such a thing can really gum up the seeing through of a very subtle process of creating continuity out of absolute transience.
While there are interesting points to emphasizing True Self teachings, they are more slippery then they appear, and without a good balance of No-self teachings and impermanence and suffering tend to cause difficulties. I hit about as hard as one can on the no-self end of things and it ended up revealing both sides of the equation nicely. Thus, it is hard for me to not advocate something similar. (DhO)
By 'Ultimate' I mean the Three Characteristics. I guess people may use the word "ultimate" in various ways, but for me, it means the Three Characteristics, in that these apply to all sensations at all times, before and after, all the way through, so they are the common denominator of all experience, as well as the basic sensations themselves, as these are the first foundation of all of it.
Actual Freedom (AF) seems to delineate two worlds, one Real, the other Actual, and says they are not the same, as questions of Ultimate should seem to apply to all things (Real and Actual), then to call the Actual world Ultimate would seem to be missing something.
As to whatever I did, how it lines up with anything related to AF I have no idea, but I like that mind mode and would recommend it, regardless of how you label it. (DhO)
An Ultimate Reality: an historical report on the evolution of my understanding on the subject. (circa 2009) I was over at KennethFolkDharma posting about enlightenment, Rigpa, ultimate reality, with my attempt to simplify things in a section called The Controversy and it lead to the standard complexities that arise around this perennially complex and difficult topic.
[Kenneth Folk stated somewhere back then: “There is no consensus in Buddhism about what Ultimate Reality is. Let’s be honest about this from the start and not soft-pedal it. Broadly speaking, there are two competing and mutually exclusive views about what constitutes the "final understanding.” One view is that everything that can be experienced is “dependently arisen” according to conditions. That means that there is no inherently existing Primordial Awareness. Let’s call that the conservative Theravada view. The other view is that there is an inherently existing Primordial Awareness that is uncompounded and unconditioned. It is said to pervade and give rise to all things, and as such is considered “non-dual” or “not-two.” Let’s call this the Mahayana/Vajrayana Buddhist view, although it is also shared by the more progressive elements within Theravada Buddhism such as the Thai Forest Tradition".]
[KFD: "The Controversy"]
As I got nothing like the responses I wanted there, I thought I would post something back on home turf over here that explores some of this from my current point of view and practice, with a bit of history thrown in.
I remember the period in my practice from 1997 to 2003 April when I was a self-declaired anagami, could see emptiness in realtime, could get Nirodha Samapatti (Cessation of Perception and Feeling), had all 8 standard jhanas, chanced into the Pure Land jhanas but didn't know what to call them, and was really, really into dharma practice and my whole dharma trip.
I read book after book, poured through texts both for confirmation of what I was perceiving and also for pointers as to how to finish things up, including particular attention to Mahayana, Vajrayaha, Zen, and Vedantic texts, as well as Ceremonial Magick, Shamanistic texts. Most of the time things seemed pretty straightforward, empty, luminous, effortless, centerless, some very obvious mix of transcendence and intimacy, and I worked more and more to stay in a way of perceiving things that seemed right, clear, straightforward, direct, literal, non-dual, etc. By the end of that period, I would spend weeks thinking I had finished the thing up, very impressed with my insights, only to have a new A&P arise, and the thing would go round again with a new insight cycle, and during the Dark Night period doubts would set in as new, clearly not-that-well-illuminated territory would arise, I would see it the way I had learned to see layer after layer of experience, a new Fruition would arise, I would feel great, clear, like a spiritual superstar, and then around again.
During this period, luminosity was fascinating, emptiness was fascinating, centerlessness was fascinating, my jhanic abilities were fascinating, the whole grand quest, teachings, subtleties, and the like were amazing, so impressive to me, and it was a time of great profundity, arrogance, occasional confusion, rare humility, and lots of very clear, wonderful insights into the direct workings of experience and the mind. I relished my deep and profound understanding of very subtle concepts and teachings. It was during this period that I wrote most of MCTB, and these fascinations, perspectives, abilities and issues show through it clearly. Just so I am clear on this, I am not claiming not to be arrogant now, as that would be really delusional, but there is something about it that is different now, and seeing the last thing had this humbling quality to it in some ways.
I state all of this both to try to figure out what is happening with some of the people I see posting about various topics, as it is my nature to try to figure out where people are and what they may need, as well as to contrast it with what came next and to try to explain my current practice and reality as best I understand it, and explore how such apparently different visions of dharma practice and results can arise in people who have come up on what superficially appear to be so much the same traditions.
What came after April 2003 on that last retreat was something that was very different in most ways from what came before, and marked the largest shift in my practice since stream entry. It has taken years to try to get a sense of the full implications of the thing, but these are the highlights:
1) No longer does there seem to be any interest in the highest teachings, the rare texts, concepts like Rigpa, Maha Ati, True Self, Emptiness, and the like in the same way there is before. Before I was always seeking some concept to help me see something final, to verify something, fill some need, or provide a door to something even more amazing. Now, everything seems really literal, direct, obvious, clear, straightforward, and I can't come up with any ultimate concept that seems more profound than the obvious, basic, often relatively boring sensate world as it does its thing. The drive is gone. To pick up a dharma book and read it has to involve something related to my daily life practice or it has no appeal at all.
2) Before, I really liked the jhanas in a way that was beyond my like for most things. Now I look at them as something that I do to help heal, support and nourish this Daniel, as they do good things, and thus, whereas before they were viewed more like someone would view a pleasurable drug, now I think of them as just another component of healthy living, like nutritious food, the vitamins I take, drinking enough water so I don't get more kidney stones, etc. In this way, something really different has arisen in my relationship to them, and, just like my vitamins, I find myself having to remember to use them for what they do rather than thinking, "First thing when I get home from work: Nirodha Samapatti, Baby!" as I used to do.
3) Before, there seemed to be options. Even at the best of my seeing emptiness and effortlessness in realtime, there seemed to be options. Now reality is this non-negotiable, complete, no-way-out sort of thing that simply does exactly what it does as it likes all the time, and whatever arises is simply it, however it is. This is a very different way of viewing things, and has profound implications, but the experience of the thing has taken years to get used to, and that getting used to it is just part of it, arising in its time and on its own, with this Daniel just being a part of that. Thus, whatever experience, rapture, perspective, state, stage, sense of non-duality, appreciation of emptiness, luminosity, degree of mindfulness, etc that arises is just that moment's thing as it is, nothing more, nothing less. This is something like the way things were before practicing at all, but with Fruitions, States, Stages and a whole host of previously unavailable ways that reality can present itself added to the mix.
4) No-Dog and Some-Dog seem fundamentally the same to me, whereas, for a brief period, No-Dog seemed like The Bomb, The Answer, The Ticket, and Some-Dog seemed so last week.
5) Training in Morality seems to be 90% of the practice at the moment, whereas for most of my dharma practice insight and concentrations seemed to be everything and morality was just something I did to support those most of the time. I say 90% due to the next point:
6) There are these energetic disturbances in the body-mind that arise sometimes and are unpleasant in varying degrees. Sometimes they are very short-lived, other times some aspect of the pattern morphs and changes and lingers for days to weeks. They are usually in the stomach, chest, neck or head, or some mix of these, and their frequencies, qualities, specifics, locations, and other aspects vary also. Sometimes they are clearly related to some issue or life-challenge, sometimes they seem completely random. These seem only superficially related to any sort of insight cycle and much more about something I have come to think of as an integrated psychological-emotional-energetic-body-mind field thing. The solution to these in general seems to involve patience, time, living well, honesty with myself in a relative way, healthy living, and mindfulness of the qualities of the thing as they arise and change. Most of my reading, practice, and interest these days has to do with these aspects of things, but as they seem to encompass my life in a broad way, this is a broad practice that is inherently integrated with daily life. In general, as they move through, I feel something good has happened and something has been learned or worked out. This seems to be my cutting edge of practice at the moment and it has been for years now, sort of a fusion various aspects of human growth and development. It is a very intuitive thing most of the time, and talking about it in more specifics is like talking about the qualities of light on water or the flight of a swarm of insects. I find most of my time going into things like work, building a straw-bale house, working on my relationships with people, helping my family, playing music, cooking food, thinking about how to help people coming up in this stuff, and some going to these energetic body-mind-emotional-psychology things. This is radically different emphasis from my practice before, where technical dharma practice came first, and the rest was seen as swirling around that for better or for worse.
I say all this as I see a number of people, most of whom have moved to KennethFolkDharma.org, who are fascinated with attaining to Rigpa, emptiness, joyful states, high concepts and rare teachings, plunging, debating, fascinated with all this, and it reminds me so much of my practice for those anagami years, and I so much want to try to tell them a skillful way to frame all this that at once brings it all back home and yet doesn't deny the beauty of all of that, and I am finding it really, really difficult to land this well with any of them, leading me to the conclusion that they will have to find it out for themselves.
There are lots of ways to interpret all this, and I am willing to play Devil's Advocate with myself as I make this list:
1) I have attained something that those who are still at what I call anagami haven't realized yet, with some of them calling "arahatship" what I called "anagram". As pointed out before by others including Kenneth, the irony of the title anagami being used in a pejorative way is clear and humorous and enviable. However, this clearly explains why they seem to be going through what I went through and have the same fascinations and difficulties that I did during that period I call "anagami" and yet can't seem to understand what I am saying as they are not there yet, just as I couldn't have understood what I am talking about now when I was in that territory either. This also explains why they have such strong reactions to Tarin and Trent, both of whom claim arahatship and describe things very much like what I describe, and when the three of us talk about this stuff, we are on similar pages much more than those over at KennethFolkDharma are. I am not sure how much of this rift is cultural, social or conceptual and how much is about divergent or disparate practice and attainments, but the effect is clear and real and worthy of serious consideration.
2) I have no idea what they are talking about. Haquan assumes that one must have had Rigpa pointed out in some specific way for one to find it. Kenneth, who says Rigpa and arahatship are two different phenomena, seems to think that with arahatship, one has the best platform to stabilize Rigpa, whereas I claim that arahatship is Rigpa, stabilized and done without other options. Either I have no idea what the Rigpa they are talking about is, having not run into it in 6.5 years since what I call arahatship, or they are thinking the emptiness and luminosity thing I saw on and off and worked to stabilize during my anagami period is Rigpa and they simply can't or don't want to understand my descriptions of that territory and make the connection.
3) We simply are both describing the same thing and using words really badly to do so, so we can't understand each other, but as the descriptions diverge so widely, and the attitudes and relationships to the thing are so different, it is hard to imagine this option.
4) There are parallel or divergent tracks of awakening. I loathe this argument with the whole of my being, but admit the possibility and my possible inability to see it.
5) Some other explanation I can't imagine at this point.
Some over there define Rigpa as precluding or excluding dualistic thought. I claim that Rigpa does not and cannot, with thoughts or any other experiences being just more things that arise in the clear light of wisdom, as thoughts clearly arose before the understanding of Rigpa, so how could something that is one definition of ultimate reality exclude any aspects of reality that could arise?
I put his out there realizing that I will probably be really frustrated with what follows, as this topic hits so close to people's senses of identities in multiple ways and aspects, and that tends to produce strong reactions, but perhaps something good will come out of the continued attempt to make sense of this apparently faction-producing and controversial issue and how our practice and good communication can help clarify these things. (DhO)
Arahatship is not quite full awakening, Buddhahood is. I don't know anyone here who actually uses the term "full enlightenment" to describe their practice or claims that. Various people here claim various things that are in some ways seemingly definite to them, some have claimed things they feel are somewhat terminal (of which plenty have later changed their minds). I personally still meditate: I think it is good for the brain and body to do so and it just seems a natural, skillful thing to do, as well as it also being basically unavoidable past a certain point.
If you like the technical dogma: arahatship is not quite full awakening: Buddhahood is. Even the Theravada is very clear on this. I personally see so many avenues or axes of development that the term "full awakening" sort of misses some basic point about human growth and progression on various fronts.
... Consider MN 1 The Root of All Things, where the Buddha says that arahats understand something, but Buddhas (the Tathagata, as he often referred to himself) understand it "to the end". Consider MN 4 Fear and Dread, where he goes on and on about all the stuff he accomplished. Actually, the number of places where Buddhas are distinguished as arahats-plus-lots-more is extensive, from their past-life training and purification (Buddhas going through many, many lives to get the necessary learning and purification to become a Buddha), to the fact that Buddhas are supreme teachers of gods and humans beyond just being arahats, as well as having all the powers, having purified all behavioral traits, etc. etc.
... Certainly not everyone is adding stages and models every 5 minutes, though there are those who are revising what they previously thought due to having access to new and better information. Science does that also. The problem with revising models based on new and better data is?
It should be noted, as one who has spent a whole lot of time over about 18 years thinking really, really hard about the models and talking with a lot of people about them as well as living them: it is not easy to model these things. What is found in the world of meditators, the jungle if you will, is extremely diverse, and various people develop all sorts of interesting and transformative abilities, perceptual changes, and understandings in various sequences that don't all line up, don't all come in the neat packages people think they will, don't all conform to ancient maps and yet may be truly remarkable and produce profound benefits. The diversity of this continues to surprise me, but, given the complexity of the mind and the many, many innovations in meditation and large numbers of combinations that are happening these days, it is not really that strange, and probably should have been expected. (DhO)
Post 4th Path Practices. My formal practice has been all over the place, everything from samatha to magick to Brahma Viharas to AF-inspired stuff to very Dzogchen-inspired stuff to lots of things that are really hard to describe, as I don't see a lot of people talking about that territory, such as what to do with the waves of subtle unrightness that can slowly move through the body (did have a brief conversation with Chuck Kasmire about that years ago), and things like energy work, cognitive restructuring, and things that are very vipassana: noticing very fine points of subtle parts of feelings and the like, as well as dream-work, things that are very zazen (practice-enlightenment, which, from a certain point of view encompasses all of this), and on and on...
More specifically, and to paraphrase Chi Nul, just because the Sun is shining brightly, that doesn't mean all the snow will melt at once, and the implications of the field integrating this understanding into all sorts of brain regions, patterns, feelings, old habits, constructs, and things has been totally fascinating. That has been the most remarkable thing, as the fundamental insight runs into parts of the brain that might not have been used for years, feelings that might not have been felt since decades ago, ways of thinking about the world that are clearly out-dated and yet didn't get reworked until some very specific situation brought them to light in some way, and all of that, now being perceived in this totally different way, can transform itself into something better
That basically goes along with my very brief blurb on integration in MCTB, which says basically: get the insight, and reality will integrate itself.
Overall, it has been fascinating to explore old things in a new light, as well as get into new things in that same new light, and so the key really is the new light. (DhO)
Actualism-inspired practices
Actual Freedom, a quick summary. If you stick to reasonable first principles, such as paying gentle, kind attention to what you are feeling and wondering why (being mindful and inquisitive regarding of feelings and mind states), paying attention to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive (mindfulness and investigation of your immediate sensate world), paying attention to something pleasant about experience (cultivating rapture), and the like, then it is hard to go far wrong, and many who do these have noticed benefits.
If you begin to chase emotional elimination, then it is definitely true that people here and other places have reported some mild to severe problems as a result of that fixation and focus, as denial and repression are sticky and tempting traps to be ensnared by. (DhO)
If you begin to chase emotional elimination, then it is definitely true that people here and other places have reported some mild to severe problems as a result of that fixation and focus, as denial and repression are sticky and tempting traps to be ensnared by. (DhO)
My Experiment in Actualism-Influenced Practice. As I get asked about this so often, I finally wrote down a summary of the thing and then answered some questions about it afterwards based on two emails I received. Perhaps something in this will help clarify something for someone. (DhO)
Somewhere in early 2009 or so some dharma friends of mine got very interested in the teachings of a guy named Richard and his teachings of Acutalism, by which he had claimed to have eliminated all emotional affect and was living in a fairy-tale-like world of perfect benevolence. The basic message was to follow a sort of mix of the path of feelings and attentiveness to feelings and their useful and non-useful aspects, tuning into the sensuous beauty of the sensate world and the body, and attaining something called a PCE (Pure Consciousness Experience) and using that as a guideline for how to incline ones efforts and practice. In particular, my friend Tarin, who had been on retreat with me twice at my house, really wanted to check out what it had to offer, so he ended up going to visit Richard in Australia somewhere around early 2010.
When he got back to Los Angeles in February of 2010, he said he had done it, meaning totally eliminated all emotions entirely as felt experiences, and also said that some other remarkable transformations of himself had taken place, including a markedly reduced need for sleep (somewhere around 4-5 hours was plenty, he said), and that a remarkable sense of the wondrous nature of the sensate world pervaded his waking life. I knew Tarin to be a serious practitioner and knew what his practice had been like, so this was truly a remarkable claim. At about this same time, a friend named Trent also made the same claim, though he had worked in his little apartment in the Dallas area using a technique that sort of fused the standard jhanas of Buddhism with his own interpretation of the teachings of Actualism, something that would end up really annoying Richard, but I will try to leave off most of the politics, of which there was a lot, in favor of the practice itself as it came to me through four people in somewhat modified form (the modifications of which would endlessly annoy some Actual Freedom Trust (AFT) people, but that is neither here nor there, really).
Trent had a day job, but Tarin was free to wander around, so I flew Tarin out to my house in Alabama for a few days to see what this was all about and what it looked like. I have to say I was impressed. He seemed quite different from the Tarin I had known just a few months before, and also seemed to be able to point very clearly at something that I was pretty sure I wasn't seeing, or at least not yet.
Revising my impression of the Emotional Limitation Models, something I was pretty convinced of, was not easy. However, I had the distinct impression that something worthwhile was to be found by doing so, and thus, inspired by my friends and their claims, I began to practice very differently from how I had been.
The first thing I did was adopt a much higher level of every-second when possible daily mindfulness, as I was working somewhere between 17-20 shifts per months, and these were a mix of 10-12 hour shifts that often became 11-14 hours shift, with 1.5 hours of commute time each way, so practice in daily life was basically the only option. Actualism billed itself as a daily life practice anyway, so that all worked out just fine. Basic attentiveness had always served me well in the past, and seemed an unassailable first principle that could be counted on again.
Second, I began to try to figure out what was being pointed to regarding PCEs. Before long, I began having various experiences that seemed to fit the bill. Now, it must be mentioned that at this point in my meditative career I had already gotten to the point in playing around with various jhanic abilities that I could create all sorts of unusual, customized experiences, compound and fusion jhanas, and the like. The power of scripting and customization of something fitting my thoughts of what a PCE must be like almost certainly came into play here.
That said, it was not that long before I was having some experiences that were very impressive, wondrous, in which everything was just totally fascinating and amazing, all experiences seemed to delight the sense doors, and the only obvious feeling was one of strong wonder, at least initially, until that would give way to fear that the experience would end, which they all did after some minutes or occasionally hours. On the slightly lighter side, I began to feel that I was able to get into a second mode of experiencing reality, something sort of like a muted version of a full PCE, something I thought of as the PCE-mode, and, if I could get into that, the whole rest of my day would be much more enjoyable and easy, timeless in some way, lighter, and clearly better.
Nearly every morning that mode of attention would be gone again, but pretty soon I got pretty good at finding it, such that within some minutes or hours of waking I would be back in it and really doing everything I could to try to use it to increase the enjoyment of the ordinary, the simple, the direct sensate world of this body and mind.
Something else that I was doing, though I didn't have good words for it at the time, was working on something that I would later think of as total commitment to the volume and alternately describe as full-field sensate integration. This was related to things I had seen before and had some pretty good walking-around experience of, but I began to get the sense that there was still something not quite done about all that, not quite totally taken as far as it could go. What I mean by those terms is that I was really seeing all thoughts and sensations as part of one totally integrated space, exactly where they were, with this where component becoming really important, as it was through the where part that some things began to become clear that were not quite as clear before.
There also began to be this tension around something else I started referring to as the Attention Wave, meaning some part of the fluxing field that interfered with other experiences and did so totally unnecessarily. It was also sensate but, on careful inspection, actually didn't seem to add any mental functionality and instead seemed to dull experience. In some modes of attention it barely seemed to operate, and these modes were clearly better than those in which it did and nothing seemed to be lost by its being nearly absent.
Thus, there began to be a natural inclination even more to have the volume speak for itself rather than being manipulated or in any way tarnished by anything resembling anything having to do with attention at all. You see, before this, all things attentional, all the structures of attention, those involved in aiming, moving, comprehending, etc. had all been seen to be just part of the field, totally empty, natural processes, which they were. This was now something different: those processes seemed to not just be useless, but actually causing distortion of perception of the other specifics. Thus, the mind began to tend more and more to letting the field be untarnished by any of that, with tarnished being a strange word to use, but it somehow fit.
That meant that suddenly anything related to jhanas, which were clearly a manipulation of the field, seemed like something headachy, artificial, and needlessly contrived, when the field itself, when in the mode that seemed untrammeled by any manipulative components (however empty and natural they might have been), was so pristine, so satisfying, so wondrous. During that period, not only did I have no interest in them anymore, but occasional attempts to make them happen seemed like something poisonous, toxic, and just plain wrong. That was very strange, as they had always been something totally opposite to that. How odd it is to re-work the way the brain is functioning in real-time and see how totally different our perceptions and relationships to things can become.
Because of this, I went through what I think of as a largely ajhanic period, which was quite a departure from my relatively ritualistic rising from 1st-8th and coming out and then getting a Fruition, some Pure Land Jhanas, or whatever every night when I laid to down to sleep and plenty of mornings when first waking up. However, the thing now was the field itself, and the field itself became more and more compelling, for a while at least.
In August of 2011, Tarin came out to visit again and he talked more about various aspects of his practice, the world of experience he was living in, and related topics. I flew out to the Dallas, Texas area that Thanksgiving for a weekend of hanging out with Trent and Tarin that year also, and then in December, Tarin, Trent and Jill (a long-time meditator and old friend of Tarin who also claimed to have eliminated all affective feelings) came out to my house in Alabama to stay for a little while. I also had one or two conversations with a similar practitioner who they all knew and named Stef, a social science professor at a university who knew Tarin and Trent, but I never met her in person. Each of them had something truly impressive and inspiring about them, something that I felt I could learn from.
It seemed like there was this totally different axis of development that paying much more attention to feelings would help develop. It was a topic that, as you can guess from reading MCTB1, I hadn't given really that much attention to, at least in comparison to lots of other things, such as technical meditation mastery. I had few problems with emotional stuff in my formal practice most of the time, with reality easily dissolving into fine and then flowing, wide, inclusive vibrations or formless realms or whatever, and the sense of subject being totally gone from the field of experience beyond some of the qualities that used to imply that there truly was such a thing. However, something called to me, something that said that there was more to be gained.
I felt very lucky, in that I had plenty of up-close-and-personal exposure to people who claimed to have eliminated all affect. That said, there were some creepy aspects to all of this. Tarin, Trent and Jill had all gotten into a mode of being that was probably best described by the word "zombie", like you could just set them down on the floor and they would just sit there unmoving and undisturbed for some long period of time. It was definitely odd. Stef, on the other hand, seemed not affected in this way at all.
Also, somehow the topic of Actualism and things related to emotions had totally blown up on the Dharma Overground, with people's reactions to something that to me seemed to have value often being quite negative, hostile, incredulous, angry, territorial, and dogmatic. Many wished the site to be one purely about Buddhism, and very specific strains of Buddhism, and when other things got all mixed in that clearly seemed to directly contract some of the things they believed, people freaked out and a bunch left, leading to what I call the First Great Schism of the DhO, which is a somewhat dramatic way to put it, but, when that is your sangha, it seems like a big deal.
Then there was everything related to things back in Australia and that old guy called Richard, the Genitor of Actualism, Discoverer of The HAIETMOBA (How Am I Experiencing This Method of Being Alive) Method, something he claimed was unique on this Earth, never before known or experienced before he experienced it. It must be noted here by way of reasonable disclaimer, I have never met or spoken with Richard. We did have one brief exchange on a Yahoo forum dedicated to Actualism regarding sleep and dream effects of Actualism that was straightforward enough. That said, numerous creepy rumors of unknown accuracy related to him just kept surfacing, things that again and again just didn't seem to add up totally with what he had claimed. There were hints that reminded me of things that Bill Hamilton had warned about in his one book, Saints and Psychopaths. Others had more extreme views on him, considering him to be a totally insane, delusional, narcissistic psychopathic cult leader to be avoided at all costs. It created large tensions between me and some of my dharma friends who saw all of this Actualism stuff as being a totally terrible idea created by a terrible person.
Luckily for me, I didn't have to address those questions related to Richard directly, as I had my friends, and my friends were available to me easily and freely gave plenty of their time to answer questions and provide pointers. All of those pointers, namely really high levels of appreciating the field of sensate experience at all times when awake, trying to figure out how the PCE pointed to something important and clear, and really investigating the world of feelings honestly and simply, seeing how they arose, what conditions lead to their continuation, what value they had and didn't have, and the like, all seemed perfectly sound advice that was leading to good things.
These assumptions, practices and emphases seemed to violate no obvious first principles I held dear, no money was involved, no exploitation was occurring that I could see, there were no major power plays related to Richard that had anything to do with me personally, so all seemed ok on this end. In fact, to me they seemed basically totally Buddhist, and, as you can tell, I am a big fan of many of the practical aspects of Buddhism. That Richard disagreed that they had anything to do with Buddhism concerned me not at all.
Then I entered a period I think of as the Dark Night of my Actualism Phase in the Fall and Winter of 2011. The PCE mode began to seem far away. Things got dry, tense, like something was off. It was hard to explain then and still is. It was like I was out in some no-man's-land where nothing applied well any more. Finally, by late December, PCEs were gone, jhanas were gone, sensuous appreciation seemed pointless, and yet, somehow, based on the memory of those things, I kept going, kept just trying to see how everything was beautiful, clear, direct and wonderful, as I had had glimpses of before. It seemed contrived, artificial, and finally basically unworkable. I began to notice tensions I hadn't before, fears that were not previously obvious, and a level of restlessness began to creep in that seemed totally new and bleak.
Further, my memory was really starting to get affected by this. I didn't feel cues in the body the way I typically would when I was supposed to do something. I was having to make long to-do lists to remember things that ordinarily I would have easy access to a complete list of in my mind. It was concerning.
Finally, on the afternoon of January 18th, 2012, I was trying to get sleep between two night shifts in the same room where Tarin had gotten stream entry while on retreat with me, a windowless attic room over my wife's art studio. Being very circadian rhythm-disrupted from flipping from day shifts to nights too rapidly, as was par for the course with that job at the time, my sleep was restless and sporadic. So, being awake and having nothing better to do, I began again as I had many, many times recently, relaxing things, checking out the body, finding the tensions, and gently bringing slow, easy mindfulness to them, with that careful attention easing things gradually, and then something remarkable happened.
It felt like some part of things directly related to time and some perception of time synchronized in some way that I found totally surprising. The analogy that always comes most readily to mind is that of an engine with its timing belt off one notch: it will run, but it will shake just a bit, or perhaps a lot, depending on the engine. Yet, strangely, this was a shaking I never really noticed until suddenly it was as if the timing belt of the mind jumped back into the right alignment and suddenly the subtle shaking stopped. The entrance to this was not during a Fruition, making this the first of two major shifts that would involve some seemingly somewhat permanent (who though who knows, really) transition into an alternate and better way of perceiving reality that didn't involve that entrance into it.
After that, time pressure was suddenly really different and seemed nearly totally eliminated. Further, the perception of time itself was totally different. Whereas before I could clearly see that time was constructed of thoughts of past and future happening now, and that was something that I could notice when attention turned that way it had taken that sort of attention to that specific aspect of things to receive that benefit of seeing through time creation itself. Now it seemed that those benefits were now hard-wired into my baseline way of being, and those benefits were immediately obvious.
I felt better, clearer, more easy. The Dark Night of my Actualism phase seemed to have vanished. Suddenly I felt that I had gotten what I was looking for, that some new window had been opened, that something was now activated and working through old structures again, a feeling I hadn't had since April, 2003. What was interesting is that this was not at all what my friends were talking about, though they had mentioned things about time effects that were similar, and yet it seemed to be where those practices lead for me. I must assume that some aspect of this is idiosyncratic, though I have a few friends who have described the elimination of time pressure also, just at a totally different phase of their practice and by slightly different methods.
So, for the next 6 months it felt like that basic thing moved through this mind and body, touched things, changed something for the better in the way this system functioned, clarified things, made things bright, easier, more straightforward. It was during that time that the clarity of the field itself was everything, a path that naturally lead onward into itself, reinforcing itself. It was very nice. It rested on its own self-evident assumptions, which were just the sensate world being more and more fascinated by itself, like it was caught in the gravity of some large star and just getting more and more filled with light as it got closer.
Then, on July 27th, 2012 (which is also the same day of the year that I got second path in 1996, interestingly enough), I was driving home at 2am or so after a brief late-night post-work workout at a little 24-hour gym on my way home, and, just after I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the rural highway, it suddenly felt like this veil that I had never noticed was pulled off of my head, and suddenly the full field of experience shown in all its unbridled, direct glory, the glory I had seen in the best of the PCEs, but this time with no obvious going back, at least so far, with this being written in September of 2013. Remember how there was that thing I called the Attention Wave? It seemed totally gone, so far as I could tell. Remember the pristine clarity of field that had so called to me? It shone in everything and still does.
What is also interesting is it still seems to have been a totally different axis of development from my previous meditative work, operating on some other set of parameters and structures of consciousness and perception. It definitely broadened my appreciation for various cool things you can do to your mind and how different practices and emphases really can work on totally different pathways and levels, something that should have been obvious but wasn't as clear as it is now.
Another effect of this that I noticed as a result of this were that the body image, meaning the internal image of the body, seemed totally, well, integrated, which is an odd way to put it. It is not that it is not there, as there is still some functioning mechanism by which intention and coordination monitor where the body is and come up with the plan for how things will move and all of that, but now there is something much more subtle about it that feels much better somehow.
So too ended my interest in anything related to Actualism. It felt like whatever it was going to do it had done. The field clarity shone and still shines. It is really, really nice. Here is the other thing, that really, really nice-ness also did something good to my emotional life. Being as most ordinary sensations are now so generally satisfying, this itself really takes a lot of pressure off of everything else and makes so many things so much more fun and enjoyable. It is not that there aren't hard periods and difficulties, as there are. It certainly didn't eliminate affect, which still seems to be there and capable of a full range of affective feelings, but it did make some large difference, and I would recommend it, as, for me, it is clearly a vast improvement on numerous fronts.
There are some other things it didn't do, such as markedly reduce my need for sleep, which is sort of too bad, but in other ways not, as sleep has dreams, and I very much like dreaming, as they were what got me into all of this stuff in the first place and still seem very relevant, recreationally interesting and important as a tool for exploration of various aspects of this many-faceted life.
However, it did do something totally remarkable, and that was create the ability to sit totally at rest, totally at peace, just like that, and I don't mean in some stage or state, not in some jhana, just by the field being nice to itself. That simple thing was well worth the work it took to get it. It doesn't sound as fancy or as flashy as all the other stuff I have done, but it is more valuable than them all. Another interesting effect is that to get a PCE that would or could be different from this now seems absurd, and there is no draw to it or sense that it could be something that could occur, though I can't be certain of this.
It has also been interesting to have the vagaries of reality performance test it and see what it did and what it didn't do. Two recent examples: my 11th or so kidney stone showed up about 9 months later and it was the worst one so far in terms of sheer crazy totally over-the-top pain, pain the likes of which threatened to make me pass out. That I managed to drive the 40 minutes or so to the emergency department I worked in without killing myself or anyone else is remarkable. It luckily passed less than 2 hours after it hit, but during that time all I could think of was getting a shot of Toradol (sort of like a strong IV version of ibuprofen) or passing out so the pain would stop.
What was also interesting is that when I showed up at the emergency department the pain was still through the roof, and yet my heart rate was about 75, my blood pressure about 110-120/70 or so, as it usually is, and this despite me sweating and shaking from the pain and feeling like at any moment it would be so strong as to make me vomit. How this related to whatever happened in my practice I have no idea, but they are interesting data points that I was surprised by, as I would have expected my heart rate to be much higher and my blood pressure up as well, as it felt like my sympathetic drive was on full throttle.
Next, a month or two after that, I got something that I think was influenza. I was basically totally incapacitated by it and astounded as how much a simple virus could totally strip away the appreciation that was seemingly such a natural part of the field of experience. Whatever inflammatory cytokines my body produced to fight it coupled with whatever the virus does was sufficient to really knock me down to a level that felt totally ordinary, like anyone else who was sick, with the exception of the center-lessness, panoramicity, etc. that had been clear since April, 2003, but all of those being basically totally irrelevant against the fact of the body being very much laid low and aching all over. It stripped nearly everything away except just basic, exhausted survival, with any attainments seemingly being of nearly no value in the face of it. In a very reluctant way I was totally impressed by it and its lessons of morbidity and mortality. Luckily it resolved without complications, but it viscerally reinforced a lesson I learn daily in the emergency department, that this body will get sick and die.
Those exceptional qualifiers aside, when not laid out by mind-blowing pain or some horrid illness, I am very much happier than I was. When I was asked about my practice recently, the analogy that came to mind was of someone sitting in an old abandoned train station on a beautiful day with the windows and doors of the place all open. No trains are coming or going. Nobody else is there. Nothing much is going on. Flowers are starting to grow on the tracks. A gentle breeze is blowing. There is an easy silence about the place. Just that. It is nice, I must say. Will it get boring at some point? Who knows? I have continued to be surprised at the various additional avenues that present themselves and the strange things that can call one to begin again, so there is no telling what further compelling something will drag this practitioner off on some other practice adventure.
So, what happened to everybody? Tarin, Jill and Stef all renounced their claims to have eliminated all emotional and affective qualities on the Dharma Overground forum, and all said in one context or another that they didn't think the people they were around who also had claimed to have eliminated all feelings had actually done it totally either. There were others who were rumored to have renounced their claims as well, but I didn't know them, so they don't really bear much on this except as second-hand additional data points.
As to Trent, his story is his own, and I will let him tell it if he wishes. So, whereas before I had 4 friends who all said they had done it, had eliminated all feelings entirely, now I have at least 3 who said they now think that they haven't done it. Then were all the weird reports and rumors of other strange things happening in the inner circles of the Australian Actual Freedom Trust contingent, and large amounts of other complex politics related to all of that that raised the question of self-delusion and shadow-sides to all of this, though the veracity of these reports and rumors are unknown to me, and they actually matter little, except to point out that all of this is a very human endeavor. Regardless, the relevance of these rumors to me and my practice was actually quite minimal, as I haven't met any of them.
Regardless, for me the whole thing sort of dissipated, and now there is just this simple, direct, straightforward niceness. Cycles still occur. Fruitions still occur. Jhanic things show up sometimes but without the headachy quality, and they are nice things when they do, but the draw to them is currently very minimal. Just the inclination to jhana is so nice that it need not even go into jhana to be good. There is something nice about the whole thing, with the exceptions of pain and the like, which are still negative consequences of this body being what it is and this life being what it is, but again, the old question of what can be mitigated or transformed by meditative and perceptual development and what is just the baseline level what difficulties there will be continues to be explored in real-time, and I find no answer that, based on previous totally unexpected improvements, I can be certain is the definitive one.
I would definitely recommend taking some time to really see how ordinary sensations, colors, textures, smells, tastes and all of that can be simply delightful on their own, as well as take the time to investigate carefully and honestly how feeling arise and vanish and how they are in this body, as well as attending mindfully to the whole wide field of experience doing its own thing, on its on, all the way through in an integrated way that embodies the sentiment of committing totally to this field of experience as an integrated volume here and now, as it all did me good and seems to rest on sound principles of basic practice, regardless of who has attempted to brand these things or claim them as proprietary and unique technology, as they all seem to me to be well within the ordinary teachings of Buddhism and just make good sense on their own. How much of these specific effects that I noticed due to these practices over about 2.5 years are due to the idiosyncratic mix of my basic wiring, my previous practice, and the specific way that I implemented the basic instructions of Actualism, as translated through my friends, is unknown to me, and, if you want to answer the question of what these things will do for you, you must do the experiment yourself. (Daniel's Blog)
Trying to map AF/PCE to anything else is beyond not helpful. Having lived through the toxic crazy that accompanied the first major round of discussing AF/PCE/Rigpa/Arhatship/etc. on the DhO, and spent countless hours having this debate with people in person and watching the forums burn with this stuff, I am of the opinion that trying to map AF/PCE to anything else is beyond not helpful and into the realm of highly radioactive poison, like DhO kryptonite.
I reject Richard's opinion that AF is 180 degrees from awakening in the same way that I reject attempts to definitively correlate it with any other framework I have come across. I personally am and have been friends with many of the major players back in the day, and keep in touch with some of them still, and have had many hours of intimate, honest, open conversations with them about how they were practicing and what they were experiencing, so have an unusually solid base of knowledge accumulated over nearly ten years on which to base this opinion. No, I am not going to connect you with any of them or discuss anything about what they said beyond what I wrote in that article, just in case you were going to ask.
Practically, and looking through a larger lens, I saw nearly nothing good come from such discussions and a ton that was bad, socially toxic, and based on wanton speculation, tribal spasmodic reactions, and ignorance.
Even from those who, rather than armchair-quarterbacking the whole thing, really did the work and tried the experiment in some mature, open-minded way, like a true Naturalist explorer, I found no discussion of the phenomenology of what they actually experienced that seemed to map well to pre-existing frameworks as I understood them, nor did I come to any good correlations when I did the experiment myself.
Imagine if the British Naturalists back in the day found three bugs in a jungle, one yellow one with four red dots on its back, one red one with two green dots on its head, and one blue one with three purple stripes on its underside, and they then spent years yelling at each other like pathologically mood-dysregulated children and freaking out about whether the blue one with the purple stripes really was the same as the yellow one with four red dots or the red one with the two green dots: that's my impression of how mind-bogglingly painful and foolish most of the debates on the DhO were around the results of AF-related practice and other maps.
I remain staunchly agnostic in my assessment of the deeper meanings of all of those mapping attempts, so, instead, simply reported the phenomenology that I experienced without fancy terms, and left it at that. It is honest, avoids a ton of social/political/spiritual/tribal/culty bullshit (which resulted in the first Great Schism of the DhO, by the way), and attempts no awkward shoehorning of experiences into maps that never seemed to be a perfect fit, at least to my eye.
Thus, my strong summary advice is:
- If you wish to know for yourself, do the experiment honestly in sufficiently high dose over a long enough timeframe and see what happens.
- Report the phenomenology of you own true experiences straightforwardly without attempting to line them up or compare it to anything else. Real results should stand on their own regardless of any conceptualization or system, and should withstand the test of time, so keep a long time horizon and an open mind.
- Avoid like the plague any scripting and denial based on expected results.
- Stick to sane, reasonable first principles.
- Keep your wits about you.
- Avoid arguing about Actualism and practices inspired by it with those who just hate it, as you won't change their mind.
- Avoid fawning echo chambers that retain no critical eye on it either.
- Avoid the politics around Richard, as it can be a massive distraction and time-suck.
- Do not pay large corporate fees for proprietarily rebranded information that is already freely available and open-source.
- If you don't really care to the degree that inspires properly repeating the experiment and seeing for yourself, then let it go and move on to something else.
AF emphasis as an opportunity to counterbalance some of the residual effects of a narrow practice. As to AF, there are so many axes of development, so many things to spend time paying attention to, so many neural channels to strengthen in various ways, so many interesting ways we can continue tweak the mind. People make it out as if there is just this one thing and if we get that then that is all we need or could ever wish to accomplish or explore: it is a extremely naive notion, one that I hope becomes less pervasive as the world of meditation gets more mature and sophisticated and ancient models that promote very simplistic and hyper-reductionist views of development fade in favor of those with much more range, nuance, bredth, and realism, and that Package Models, those that say that if you develop this very specific axis of development that you will always automatically acquire these other things, will fade in favor of models that are not so rigid and out of touch with the wide range of what can happen to individual practitioners.
I personally spent a long time hitting one very specific set of emphases, that of the Three Characteristics, very hard. I also had a talent for not getting all caught in my psychological and emotional stuff and just taking reality and the illusion of duality apart layer upon layer regardless of the other costs of doing so. It was in some ways a very narrow practice aimed at one very specific target, and in that it was successful. I saw in the emphasis of AF, emphasis you can also find elsewhere, BTW, an opportunity to counterbalance some of the residual side effects of the way I had gone about things and the things I hadn't paid that much attention to at all. This is a normal thing to do.
Beware ever adopting some model that due to pride, labels, dogma, theory, or abstract concept deprives you of the benefits of pursuing other areas of development and emphases that might help to round things out. Realize that by expressing disappointment for people exploring areas that from your limited vantage point are not appealing, you will help to create a subtle or overt culture which will dissude people from doing similarly. I am relatively comfortable mixing things up, drawing from lots of sources, being open about the good and bad in my practice, and the like, but plenty aren't.
Now, if someone said here, "I am now exploring smoking crack and embalming fluid as my primary path," I could understand your skepticism.
However, if someone was really bugged by a seasoned practitioner who has evaluated their own practice and said, "I am really carefully exploring the delights of the sensate world and this is counterbalancing the residual effects of my years of relentless focus on the subtle points of fundamental suffering, as well as exploring more of my feeling life because I neglected aspects of that for years to help focus on other trainings," that being bugged is harder to understand and would seem a misplaced worry. What about those specific things bugs you at this point and what does that say about your models and practice? Help me understand that comment better. I am really glad that my criteria for exploring various reasonable emphasis in practice do not include your stamp of approval, or anyone's stamp of approval, actually, except my own.
It is so interesting the things people hook onto and get upset about. Why did you not get upset at other things I have done that might produce skepticism in a fervent Buddhist, such as drinking Ayahuasca in Peru or pursuing Ceremonial Magick, or going to medical school rather than becoming a monk (not worried I might have died on April 27th, 2002 after attaining to arahatship on April 20th, 2003, as the dogma says?), or being married, or playing music, or dancing, or all sorts of other things that a very traditional Buddhist might look down their nose at? I really hope those things don't bug you also, as, were I to keep listing, the things you might be bugged about in my life would probably be very long.
Further, those reading the fine print rather than the advertising will realize that "the state of desirelessness" (if that is what you personally wish to use as your primary label for the elimination of the perceptual illusion of duality, stability, will, observer, etc.) involves things like pain, frustration, hunger, sleepiness, sickness, and the like, as any careful reading of things like the lives of the Buddha and his skilled retenue will reveal quite easily, actually. It is really too bad that the Vinaya is not more readily available in electronic format, as it contains lots of fun reading about problems in the Sangha and in their personal lives, but in the readily available sections of the Pali Canon you can find all sorts of great stories that clearly illustrate that there are zillions of other things to work on and take care of even if the perceptual illusion of duality is gone.
One could easily extrapolate from assumptions such as the notion of the relentless bliss of desirelessness and then ask preposterous questions like why you would feed yourself, or why you would bother to bathe, or why you would pay your bills, or why you would to all sorts of other reasonable things that help promote relative happiness and well-being in the face of that theoretical torrent of bliss. Life is more complex than that, and happiness has many aspects, both ultimate and relative. It is amazing how many times you have to reiterate the basics, but here goes again:
There are Three Trainings, Morality, Concentration and Wisdom, these being the divisions of the Noble Eightfold Path. Each is designed to support the others, true, but each is also designed to eliminate various forms of suffering.
Training in Morality, meaning skillful living in all its forms, is designed to eliminate those forms of suffering that come from unskillful living, and they are many, and to promote the happiness that comes from skillful living, which is so vast a topic as to be essentially uncircumscribable. It is a field of work that has many aspects that no amount of skill in the other two trainings will compensate for a lack of work on Morality, such as feeding yourself, unless you believe in breathairians, in which case you would still have to breathe... ;)
Training in Concentration, meaning the jhanas, is designed to eliminate those forms of suffering that come from not having that refuge as an option, as well as to promote the happiness that comes from jhana. To get all traditional about it, the Buddha praised those who were "Liberated Both Ways," meaning that they had eliminated duality and also had access to the jhanas and Nirodha Samapatti. Why would he bother to praise them if simply landing the end of fundamental ignorance was enough? Why would the Buddha himself bother with jhana? Oh, yes, he got really bad headaches, really bad back pain, and also apparently liked them.
Training in Wisdom, that of right view and right understanding, is designed to eliminate that very specific yet generic form of suffering that comes from the illusion of a continuous, permanent formed self and the numerous complex perceptual, emotional and paradigmatic problems it creates and to produce that happiness that comes from understanding. However, that happiness doesn't negate the need for the other forms of happiness.
You should check out my book, MCTB, where I talk about that very early on in Part I in precise detail. Or, you can try reading the Pali Canon, as you will find the same thing there, or try just practicing the various practices available in the Three Trainings, or some similar formulation from some other mature and broad tradition to see how this all fits together and how working on various aspects of our life and mind can improve our lives. (DhO)
Chasing limited emotional range model dreams. I know a very large number of people who have run into trouble chasing limited emotional range model dreams, of which a few of them are here, but plenty are up at IMS or were sitting there, were in various places I have practiced over the last 20 years, etc.
The amount of shadow sides, guilt, repression, and the like that can result from that is simply massive, both in teachers and students, as countless reports over the decades show all too well.
As to Jill, Tarin, Trent and Stef, I also know things about them from speaking to them as people beyond what they have posted here. I will allow them to say more if they wish to and leave my commentary to the words of the essay. I sent that essay on my experiments in Actualism to Tarin and Trent for approval before I published it online, and they didn't have problems with it as written. They have requested a degree of privacy about further details, so I will respect that.
Interpretations about what they were experiencing seem to be an ongoing source of debate, even for some of them. I will leave that to them also if they wish, as my last attempt to clarify this lead to indefinite conclusions from some.
Manifesting emotions from time to time is normal, and I never ever meant to imply that I would consider that horrible. I consider it normal, which is why I warn against imagining that it is likely to not happen, as that can create all sorts of problems. Thus, there is no contradiction at all between my stating that it is normal to revoke claims and that there is danger in following high and life-denying ideals about human emotions.
Jill herself specifically told me that due to her following a model about eliminating emotions she was actually ignoring more of what was happening than being clear about what was happening, so she went back to vipassana to undo some of that conditioning.
I will leave the others to tell their own stories if they have any interest in doing that.
Even Gary Weber clearly manifests what appear to be emotions even if he is totally unaware of them. On deeper questioning, he actually will admit to certain things that are emotion-like. I talked with him at Buddhist Geeks briefly about this topic and heard him discuss it with some other people also. How much of this reframing is related to models and denial is a frequent source of debate here and elsewhere not likely resolved soon.
I totally disagree that being skeptical of limited emotional range models is anything like the models that say doing nothing is better and that seeking to develop oneself spiritually through training, scholarship, practice, and the like. How do you come up with that comparison? I may have missed something or presumed something about what your argument might be.
In short, I still totally believe that the models that say that progress involves eliminating emotions causes problems and that paying attention to what is going on honestly and fully helps more than that. It is not that conscious restraint and redirection of clearly acknowledged emotional impulses isn't skillful, as it clearly is, but the denial and guilt and confusion that comes from unconscious repression is perennially destructive, as is endlessly demonstrated in spiritual communities.
... I know Tarin as a person and a friend and I know that he has definitely renounced his claim to freedom from emotions.
Jill has had very little affect for years, and this from before Actualism practice. I have had her out at my house and talked with her about this and still come to the same conclusions: see post above.
It definitely is the case that all 4 renounced their claims of having no emotions. I have additional data not presented here. Remember, we know each other as people beyond forum posts.
I actually went out of my way to spread none of the complex specific rumors that swirl around Actualism, but to not in some way mention that, which was actually a huge part of the whole thing and significantly colored the whole set of interactions and the way I (and many others here that were going along on the journey with me) viewed the ride, would be to be really dishonest. I think that that single paragraph shows a huge degree of restraint and decorum, and it also mentions nothing specific at all, meaning it spreads no rumors. As it is basically impossible to cruise around the internet and look up Actualism without running into a ton of this stuff, giving people a head's up about that is totally reasonable, I find. My attempts to sort out what was going with Actualism involved the Yahoo forum on that, and Richard and I actually had a brief exchange there about sleep and dreams and AF, but that forum is also like something beyond the wildest soap opera you have ever heard of, so if you want to get a taste of that, check it out, assuming it is still online: I haven't look at it for about 2 years so don't know. It was part of the journey, I mentioned it and minimized it, and if there is anything wrong with the article, it is the degree to which I downplayed that aspect, not that I mentioned it very briefly.
I haven't misrepresented the data on people that used Actualism in any way that I know of. I know them as people. I have heard their personal reports. I have talked with them as friends. I know more about them than you will find here on the DhO. I am sorry if I didn't make that clear in the article, but I though I mentioned that we all knew each other and they were personal friends. I don't know Stef as well as the other three, having only talked with her briefly, but while she did report a change in her emotions, she did renounce her claim to having eliminated them all.
It is not strange that doing emotionally-focused work will bring clarity and benefit to the emotional life. It is actually totally normal and expected. What we bring the clarity of our minds to we can transform in positive ways: that is the basis of the path. My emotions have been transformed in various ways as well, though not in any way that clearly fits with any of the standard models or any model that I have been able to come up with. Thus, I still warn against them as I did before.
Find me the confirmed example of someone who can be known in person who has achieved what the limited emotional models purport and actually holds up to the scrutiny that long exposure as close and honest friends across years and in adverse circumstances can provide. Until then, this is pragmatic and reasonable, I feel.
So far, I have been lucky enough to have spent time running in some pretty amazing circles of practitioners for about 20 years and have failed to fine one person who meets the ideals that the Theravadan models in this regard, and yet I do know a few who appear to know non-duality to the end: none are emotion-free in practice.
Explain how those who believe otherwise explain this.
The standard explanation is that there are none living beyond second path, or perhaps a few who have made it to third path. This explanation is very problematic. It either means that the practices and tradition are ineffective or that the goal is so far out of reach as to be inaccessible to people in this time, even if it was somehow accessible in some perhaps mythical past. It is a load of trash, in my view.
I realize there is always the argument made by Gary Weber et al. that one may externally look for all the world to have emotions and yet internally have none, but there is something about this argument that seems, well, how do I put it: The high ideals that most people put out there would have a perfect parity, a one-to-one correspondence with internal experience and external manifestation: if you are willing to throw that out the window and allow all sorts of what seems to be emotive behavior with yet no internal experience of emotion at all, they you will have eliminated a major personal stumbling block to buying the party line. I myself haven't managed to make that leap yet: perhaps this is my own failing. (DhO)
[There's an earlier thread Eliminating Emotional Affect that also addresses the same topic.]
I did benefit from giving emotional patterns more bare investigative attention. [Check this great thread, which started by Nikolai pointing some similarities between Goenka's method and AF, but then evolved as many seasoned meditators chimed in, including TJ Broccoli and Tarin Greco, by then still related to AF].
I personally still hold that bare sensate investigation is key, though I did benefit from giving emotional patterns more bare investigative attention.
(By bare sensate investigation, I mean) Direct comprehension, the sensations speaking for themselves, as they are, where they are, on their own is what I personally meant, but each person must figure out what works for them in that moment.
There is so much data coming in all the time, sensations of the scalp, the nose, the face, the visual field, various points in the body: neck, chest, back, arms, hands, fingers, legs, toes. There are so many sounds, so many subtle and not-so-subtle smells, the air on our skin, the feel of our tongue in our mouths. There are so many mental images, subtle impulses, mental impressions, subtle feelings, stories going on, various subtle pains, tensions, subtly pleasant sensations, neutral sensations. So many things happening on their own, where they are, in this wide open, boundary-less field of textures, qualities, aspects.
If all of those just show themselves in all their natural, rich detail directly as and where they are: that is great practice on its own.
If paying attention to them helps using some technique, that is good also.
Figure out what helps with the direct experiences showing themselves everywhere and all throughout all the time in some way that the whole field integrates into this fluxing, ephemeral, luminous, just-as-it-s, just-where-it-is, just-on-its-own, known-by-itself sea of direct manifestation, including as part of that anything pretending to do something and anything pretending to know something else, as really everything is just where it is, doing its fluxing, fading, flashing dance. (DhO)
By not promising total emotional sanitization, people will hopefully practice with a model that is less about denial, suppression and imitating some imagined emotionally perfected state, and instead go for something that is much more about clarity, honesty and recognition of basic sensate truths. I, for one, totally agree that there are many significant emotional benefits to be had from the various practices, Buddhist, Buddha's, or whatever: most of them if not all of them are likely to produce various benefits regarding emotions, some of which are mentioned in MCTB, if you read it carefully, and include:
(1) Temporary surpression of the emotions in the concentration states, with a nice, lingering afterglow even once they end that can cause the mind to be much more clear, quiet, peaceful, etc.
(2) A great increase in the ability to see thoughts as thoughts, pains as pains, and to see things in their proper perspective both in terms of intensity and the amount of the wide field of reality that they actually occupy and for how long, leading to an increased ability for the mind to keep its keel straight and true while sailing those waters rather than capsizing at the lightest zephyr, as is so common in the untrained and unclear mind.
(3) A great increase in meta-cognitive abilities, meaning those that recognize mind states and emotions and the like as being what they are as they arise, such that even when they do, there can be more and more of the mental faculty that is not caught up in them, leading to further chances of things going much better.
(4) A true re-routing of some of the hardwiring of consciousness and the way emotions work, such that, when some stimuli arise that might in the past have gone down one channel that was unskillfully emotive, they now simply, harmlessly and automatically dive down another, which can be just like grounding out a lightening bolt: just drops to earth and is gone. This is one of the most fun things to feel as a result of dharma practice, I think, and there are a whole lot of fun things to feel in the world of dharma practice.
(5) An appreciation of something that might be termed a certain sweetness or wondrousness even in unpleasant aspects of reality, such that, while they might be unpleasant and even very strong, there is yet something that is not bad about them. The limits of this may vary in regards to how heavy-duty a set of sensations it can handle, but nonetheless, the effect can be real past a certain point, and it helps a lot.
(6) Even the standard training in Morality, in which we cultivate wholesome states of mind consciously and wholesome actions, this itself, both before and beyond things related to meditative attainments, can really help change the mind's conditioning and increase psychological and emotional well-being, as well as personal and interpersonal outcomes.
... You are right in some ways about the tactic that is behind that chapter (The Psychological Models in MCTB), it being to counterbalance some strains of "Buddhism" that are so heavily influenced and basically dedicated to Western Pop Psychology rather than careful sensate investigation and traditional attainments.
Practically, so many people practice with aversion to their emotions rather than simple, brave, careful, inquisitive investigation of those processes as sensate processes, noticing their causes, effects, impersonality, transience, suffering, and the like. Thus, by not promising total emotional sanitization, people hopefully will practice with a model that is less about denial, suppression and imitating some imagined emotionally perfected state, and instead go for something that is much more about clarity, honesty and recognition of basic sensate truths, as it is those that lead to some of the best emotional outcomes from the above list. (DhO)
Actualism-Inspired Practice Basic Instructions. (Short version) Regardless of issues of proprietary terminology, wars over who discovered what, accusations of various kinds, possible personality disorders, psychopathy and/or other forms of mental illness, cults of personality, politics, who is in what club or clique, and all the rest of that sort of human muck, there is clearly nothing wrong with the following things:
- Paying attention to the beauty of the sensate world.
- Paying attention to this moment as it is.
- Paying attention to feelings.
- Paying attention to things happening on their own.
- Cultivating peace and clarity.
- Aspiring to one's vision of a mind well-trained in freedom from suffering and dwelling in happiness.
- Attending to what leads to what, specifically what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering.
- Enjoying enjoyable and clear mind states.
- Noticing the difference between superficial feelings and core drives.
- Examining the structure of the process of identity creation.
- Sorting out what mundane aspects of social interaction with various people are conducive to good practice and which aren't for one's self.
- Engaging with the advice of those of those with long and deep experience in these things and taking what is good and leaving what is not.
- Doing the experiment for one's self and relying upon that as the first basis of certainty and keeping an open mind that balances skepticism and empowerment, not that these are necessarily opposites.
- Avoiding entangling relationships with people with Cluster B personality disorders or the strong possibility of those: not pointing any fingers here, just making a good generic point. (DhO)
... (Long Version) Realize this is AFT-related stuff translated through Tarin, Trent, Stef and Jill and then modified to suit my own inclinations and leanings and filtered through my own way of seeing the world and background, just so there is full disclosure of the path this all came through.
- Really pay attention all day long to just what its going on, particularly in the wide visual field and in the body. This sounds like the typical mindfulness advice and is, but that sort of attention forms the basis of so much that is good that it is very worth repeating.
- Notice the beauty and niceness in ordinary and beautiful things, sounds, tastes, textures, feelings, the body, visuals, smells and the like. Really take time to smell the proverbial roses of the ordinary sensate world you find yourself in. Appreciate the feel of air on your skin, of the fingers hitting the keys, of characters showing up on computer screens, of your car going down the road, of the legs moving in space and balance shifting as you walk, of the taste of the food you eat, of the sound of your footfalls echoing off of the walls, of the quality of the light in the room, etc. It is very cliche advice again, but really do it all day long for a year or two and see what it is does to you: taken to that dose and degree of dedication, you would be surprised at what can occur.
- Pay attention to feelings, meaning what you actually are feeling, whenever you notice you are feeling something. It is easy, given the AFT rhetoric, to do this in a somewhat aversive way: avoid that mentality like the plague. Instead, take a real honest approach to noticing feelings in the body, right here, and notice how they arise (causality), what thoughts go along with them, and what the stories in those thoughts are. Try to gently, honestly, humanly and kindly tease apart the stories and assumptions of those feelings, and notice when they change and what they change into as time progresses. If you go into this with the mentality that these practices will be designed to totally eliminate your emotions, it is nearly impossible to really be honest about them. Tarin, Trent, Stef and Jill all finally and in their own ways warned against this, so avoid denial and avoid scripting yourself into some zombie-state: it is a trap. Instead, just be honestly human, ordinary, and feel what you feel: not in some exaggerated way, and not in some reactive way, just straightforwardly and clearly. This doesn't need to translate to any particular action or non-action, and regarding morality, that is yours to decide and experiment with and live with the consequences of, but internally you can at least get used to really being clear about the feelings that drive it all and get more naturally fluent in that through practice and repeated attention.
- Try to remember anything that might meet the description of a PCE and try to incline to that way of perceiving things: a flash onto a truly remarkably wondrous way of feeling, seeing, hearing, etc. in which the beauty of the world suddenly comes shining through in a very direct way. The cliche's are that you might have noticed this mind state when watching a sunset or light on water or a beautiful rainbow, or some great music performance, or whatever: remember that, as you almost certainly have had some moment like that at some time in your life. Once you have found something like that, remember it and see how that way of seeing things applies to your ordinary consciousness when it returns, and try to incline back that way. You may find your own set of triggers to get into that mindset that are unique to you: work with those. Honestly assess for yourself the value of those experiences and try to see what they might be telling you about what is possible. I realize that the term "PCE" is politically loaded, but it is not unique to the ATF kids, and I am sorry that has some branding element to it, but using it will allow you to interact with the rest of what you find written about it, so it may have value in that regard. Don't worry if your PCE is the same as anyone else's PCE, just appreciate them if and when they do arise. If you can't get PCEs to arise or this makes no sense to you: totally don't worry about it, and just proceed with the others.
- Settle into this moment. Gently relax into it when laying down, when just sitting. Learn the basic, simple art of just being able to be at ease. It is more profound and not necessarily as easy as it sounds. Notice how there are tensions in the joints and muscles that seem to be bracing against life itself even when there is no threat: gently feel into those tensions, allowing gentle mindful attention and gentle reassurance to slowly relax them such that you learn to sit at ease, just here, appreciating this moment in a very ordinary, quiet, easy, simple, straightforward way. It is probably one of the most useful skills you could learn and practice. If you do formal sitting practice, try eyes open and eyes closed and get good at both. For this stuff, I generally prefer eyes open, but for doing this when reclining before sleep or before getting up in the morning, I like eyes closed. See what works for you.
- Commit totally to this sense field, this rich and vibrant and colorful volume of human experience, as a volume with thoughts and body and memory and all of that as qualities of this integrated space, and really be with that all day long whenever you can remember to. Be obsessive about this but in a light-hearted, adventurous way rather than a drudgery sort of way. Drudgery won't help at all. Inspiration and anything you can do to be inspired helps. I listened to my favorite music on fantastic headphones, ate my favorite foods and relished them, really payed attention when watching my favorite movies (particularly to how they made me feel and how cool the visuals were), really enjoyed the feel of driving down the road with my hand on the wheel, my foot on the gas, and the wind in my rapidly vanishing hair, really listened to myself when I played guitar, really listened to people and looked at them when they talked, really listened to the sound of my own voice when I spoke, really felt what it felt to just be a feeling Daniel in this body. Recommit again and again and again and again and again. Make it a way of life. It is your life, so you might as well be here for it. In the face of terrible pain, such as kidney stones, all bets were off for me, and I did whatever I had to to get through it, but for ordinary life that doesn't totally suck, really be with it.
- I mean these next points in the most lighthearted and jovial of ways: Screw anything to do with all of the complexities of AFT politics and bullshit. Enjoy this moment instead. Screw anything to do with the various AFT-related cults of personality. Enjoy being where you are and who you are instead and value the truth of this moment for its own sake. Screw the fanaticism of the die-hard Actualism-is-the-only-true-way converts. Enjoy the empowerment, experiences and insights that come from just experimenting with being present and tuning in to this wondrous world instead. Screw what any of these practices have to do (or not do) with anything else, including "Buddhism" and "Actualism". Screw anyone who says these basic practices are a bad idea, as points 1) to 6) above all make perfect sense and are based on sound meditative principles, and it is your journey, your life and your attention to it that finally will make the difference.
All of that except #7 simply rings totally cheese-puff and fluffy to me as I re-read it, and yet that is what finally really did something good, though it took a few years of doing it. I also have no idea how this will effect someone not coming from my practice background, which is unusual, so you will have to do the experiment yourself and let us all know, if you wish, as data on this is woefully lacking, and it would be good to know what everyone learns and discovers as they do these sorts of things. (Daniel's Blog)
Trent's advice. I had a conversation with Trent recently about AF practice that I found quite helpful, particularly as it drew on some things I was familiar with and tied them into AF in a way that seemed to make a lot of sense, so I would pass it on. This my possibly incorrect interpretation of what he said, nothing verbatim, so take it for what it is worth and see for yourself if it helps or not. I have found these pointers have really made things interesting.
We discussed a lot of things, but my quick summary here of some of the more interesting points for me is as follows:
1) As to how to work with the twin arms of sensuousness and attentiveness, take sensuousness as the wide open, panoramic, diffuse field of everything in space that presents itself and attentiveness as the investigation into what part of that field seems to hold affective something, using sensuousness as the complete stage in which investigation occurs, so they work together simultaneously to come to an integrated, apperceptive field.
2) Even if you find nothing particularly affective going on in the field of experience, if anything stands out, any sensations at all, that is probably where something affective is.
3) When eyes are open, it is easier to be wide and sensuous and not as easy to investigate and be attentive, so give a little more attention to attentiveness, and vice versa when the eyes are closed.
4) Drawing on the qualities of eyes-open versions of the formless realms can help. He listed specifics of how each countered some contraction on each of the aggregates (traditional Buddhist aggregates), but I find that just that instruction alone is gold, having spent a lot of time looking at those eyes closed and open. He said they mimic in some ways the qualities of the Actual, so are pointers to a diffuse, non-affective, apperceptive, undifferentiated field.
5) In each moment when you feel something, meaning an affective feeling, there is the choice to keep feeling it or not, and if you can figure out a way to resolve or dissolve or stop that tension or affective twang, do so then. If you can do that every 1/2 to 2 seconds, even better. In this way, there are little mini-PCE's where affect is interrupted and then re-establishes itself or seems to, and by really watching carefully for the non-affective (or nearly so) moments just after affect stops, you can really get a working sense of the difference between the two, which helps you make better choices as to how to incline and what to aim for.
6) By seeing through the attention wave: that wave that seems to make things flutter, shift, phase in and out, etc. any way you can, which can just forcing the issue of a nearly-attention wave free field, or just following it and seeing it is just qualities and so not actually an attention wave, or by feeling the useless tension in it, or seeing it as impersonal, causal phenomena in a wide open space, or however you do it, you can flash on to PCE or PCE-like periods, and these may be very short or of longer duration, but regardless, that does something good, and each time you do it, something feels closer or more complete, if only just a little bit, and you can do it second after second as in 5) above if they don't seem to last long. (Personal practice not: I had done a lot of this early on, but then went back and did some Peter/Vineeto-style tracking down feelings, roles, identities, in a more contemplative and less formally meditative way, but finally hit what seemed to be a dead end and now am putting more emphasis on this way of working with it, and, having done that Peter/Vineeto-style work, find it wholly different and more clean-feeling or complete or something like that, probably something idiosyncratic, I would guess...).
7) Physical sensations of affective qualities can only occur in the space occupied by the physical body, but thoughts that relate to those affective physical sensations can occur anywhere in the field, so look for those in the wider space of the field of experience also if they seem to be elsewhere, and particularly look for any sense of the field contracting on any thought, as that is a sign of something to be attentive to in the open field of sensuousness. (DhO)
Daniel's notes. [Notes taken by Daniel Ingram while Hanging Out with Trent and Tarin near Dallas, Texas over Thanksgiving 2010, which are Daniel’s interpretations, summaries and notes about what they said and not necessarily what they actually said or meant, though they did help with a small bit of editing and approved these notes. They are only somewhat in some sort of order.]
Regarding emotions: just feel them, don’t go for volume, don’t express them, don’t push them away, don’t repress them, just go for investigation and resonance and tell yourself the story behind them and find something plausible to you about why they arise and tell it and follow along, as the content itself isn't significant as long as you sincerely wish to resolve the stress the story refers to.
As everything is now, worry makes no sense as there is only now, and desire makes no sense as it is only now.
Be intimate with emotions and naive. Be willing to be wrong, as there is no reason to feel ashamed or foolish, and feel slightly excited at the prospect of being able to be foolish.
PCE: useful for getting an outside perspective on an issue you are investigating. Do dialectical inquiry in the PCE and see how there is no recoil, and because of this you can think about whatever issue clearly without emotional compounding. Thus, you can arrive at the answer, as you have no fear, and so can see what you were afraid of and were blocking out.
Practicing for AF is seeing causes and conditions.
Experience perceptual clarity in any form. This doesn’t necessarily mean detailed, minimalist or intense, but just means clear. Remember this at the PCE level when possible.
What you are ultimately going for is not the PCE: that is like concentration, where as investigation is insight and is part of what may be necessary for attaining AF.
Figure out your social identity if it is still intact, and this involves feelings. After that, figure out basic drives and instinctual passions: they are aggression and fear, desire and nurture: see AF website for definitions: they help. Then just be here now and let it happen and accept being here, by then it will make more sense, and you will be able to apply a more direct approach.
Regarding the question of whether one should tune into peace and sensuousness vs. investigating feeling itself: it is best to not know what to do and just immerse yourself in the moment and realize that it is not possible to make a bad choice between the two and you may change that choice at any moment, as there is no you making a choice anyway.
You can’t really know what is best to do: this is part of naivete.
Part of naivete is not trying to solve the problem, as you don’t address the situation as if it is a problem that needs to be solved, and if you make it a diagnostic session you are playing a game and it is good to realize that and stop playing it when that is appropriate.
Falling silent is the stillness, which Tarin later explained as meaning: when you are not feeling stirred in your heart and soul, then that is when you can begin experiencing stillness. When there is clarity and transparency through your being, then you can begin to experience the stillness, and falling silent is the cessation of the feeling-stirring, as in the commotion stops.
Learn to aim towards the PCE with all of one’s affective energy, which is to say with all of the affective energy one is, and realize that some part of oneself is trapped off from the PCE which is why the PCE breaks down and so one needs to have liberation for all parts of oneself, meaning all parts being into the PCE, realizing that one won’t attain AF until all parts of oneself are into the PCE.
Don’t go too fast, and instead just go at a lively pace but not so fast that you miss the delicateness of the experiences, as that would be a way to objectify or dissociate from them.
It is helpful to go into your stuff to the degree that you are not avoiding it, and beyond that it is ‘by ear” and there is no necessity either way.
When asked about distractions/movies/books, etc. Tarin said, “The energy it must be done with, either while distracting yourself or monking-out, must be engaged and enjoyable and refreshing, and that could be either solitude and silence or stimulating things, and it is good to have those in combination.”
Tarin said: knowing that chasing your own tail is not helpful is only good as a support to being the stillness and being “the break”, a term I personally still find somewhat mysterious but assume that practice will help clarify.
Tarin advised taking out the business and need to do stuff when possible: try not catching up with friends, not catching up on the DhO, and try going for walks with my wife, lay on the porch, not know what to do with your day, pet the cats, and settle down and these will be rich fulfilling days, and even if that is uneasy and uncomfortable as it is not what I am used to, it will be good. This was obviously personally-directed advice but may contain more broadly applicable aspects.
Take that lay on the couch feeling with you when doing other things.
Fulfillment is relaxing into the break and deepening in that.
Startle response is normal, but affect then arises dependent on being scared of the startle response.
It is nice to enjoy what one is doing.
Have confidence in the universe, and not in the whims and whimsies of petulant, fickle human beings.
Talking from where feeling are makes people feel more relaxed.
Fear and paranoia are just imagination: bizarre, random and nonsensical.
Fear or "someone else’s" fear is only ever a demonstration of one’s own.
Relationships happen when one splits into two parts, so whatever you have a feeling about is something you have a relationship with, you must exist in relationship to it to have feeling about it.
When wondering about whether there are contradictions or questions that can be answered by asking, more interesting to inhabit the not knowing itself.
You don’t actually have an agenda for what happens, as you don’t know what you are looking for, so whatever happens, that is not the problem, and if you look at things to give you a clue, that can help, but don’t look at things with expectations for what they should do, as you don’t know.
You need to follow where the desire and fear go, to find the end of their iteration, their “sink”. That said, desire and fear don’t go anywhere: they are just here now.
When in the PCE: the compulsion to stay in it is the thing that is pulling you out, so the fear and the desire are basically the same thing.
Find Tarin’s diagrams and memorize them: essential point: enjoy this moment, find perfection here and now, if not, realize that nothing you think is better than that is worth it and find a way back to enjoying now and then have that be forever.
Trent’s advice: use the PCE as a golden pass to see things you can’t ordinarily see clearly, so sometimes it is better to investigate it rather than dwelling in it so as to get insight into those things you can’t easily gain insight into in normal attention mode and take that knowledge back with you.
Regarding issues: the fastest and most direct way is to sincerely say to yourself, “I am truly done with that and need not look at it again,” but for those things that insist you look at them again, meaning that this approach doesn’t work, they must be investigated and seen clearly enough to be able to do that.
Concentration is holding the vine or undergrowth in the forest still so that insight can cut that vine, and so one proceeds in the jungle this way, realizing that the nature of the Self is to create more and more stuff to get emotional about, constantly growing new vines and things to tangle you up, such that all available energy and attention must go towards this, as otherwise they will just grow up over you, and doing this well enough results in being free from all that. You need not find every dormant issue, just enough of them now to be free now. You just need sufficient clarity and energy to make the flip.
If you can’t find words to tag to your feelings: just make a story up: make it convincingly enough to believe it and the feeling adapts to the story, or you will then see how to adopt the story to the feeling, and thus, being of one mind again, you can find your way back to being happy, and people do this all the time in their daily life and it works. People reverse engineer what actually happen to fit their current emotions all the time, and while they are fundamentally besotted with delusion, you can do this and use it as a conscious strategy to realize that you can’t take stories seriously anymore, as because this works, then you can take your stories less seriously, because at a basic level they are all there just to try to do this and all delusional.
Assume that your emotions are going to do all sorts of irrational things and don’t feel ashamed of that, or, if you do, just notice that the shame itself is irrational, as feeling irrational things is what the feeling of being does.
The body image-feeling is shimmery and fluxing when not in a PCE, particularly when eyes closed, but the fact that this is different from the PCE image-feeling of the body which is much more stable and clean and clear is not a problem, as this is just an association, so don’t make a problem out of that. (DhO)
The Attention Wave. The attention wave is illusory and can be seen through (which is one of my most interesting ways of getting a PCE or EE), and yet, when functioning, to use paradoxical language, it is the thing that allows ñanas to be different, for different widths of perspective to be present during certain insight stages or jhanas (samaths or vipassana jhanas), allows for the occurrence of such things as the formless realms, allows different frequencies of attention and perception to arise at different stages, and allows the sense of practicing at all to occur. Thus, without the attention wave: no jhanas, no ñanas, no stages, no states, none of that, as well as no practice, as practicing would inherently involve it. (DhO)
The Veil. On January 18th (2012) just after working out and on the drive home, this sense of a grayish veil over perception that I didn't even know was there felt like it ripped through the back of my head and vanished, never to return, or at least not so far, and it left the visual and other perceptual fields very much like they are in a PCE, but with less WOW factor than the PCE, though still quite interesting and with more of a natural freshness than ordinary pre-veil dropping experience.
There are still occasional affective bodily twinges at times, though fewer and far between, so affect is not gone.
However, the visual and auditory clarity is markedly better, as well as bodily clarity. If feels like a permanent baseline shift of some sort, and I would be surprised if I got fMRI'd again if something wasn't different on it. It feels like some oscillation of interpretation and the physical senses shifted markedly towards the physical and away from the mental, though plenty of mental stuff still occurs, and visualization and the like can still occur.
This occurred after what I think of as my "peppermint phase", where this winter the sense of cold suddenly changed to the sense one gets when one puts peppermint oil on their skin and blows on it: much more defined and somehow clear and crisp. I don't remember hearing anyone describe this. It also followed a phase where it felt like I could perceive my stomach acid: may have just been GERD... ;)
It also occurred after a lot of hyper-relentless attention to the directness of visual experience in a wide yet inclusive and detailed way.
Dreams continue to get more elaborate, longer, and are more detailed and memorable, which is the reverse of what AF-ers tend to report.
The most interesting thing about this shift is the ability to sit still and feel like nothing is going on at all but in a very good way, like nothing going on done right, like things are just still, and this without any shift into anything jhanic or the like, not that jhanas aren't still available, and in fact seem more available and interesting than they have in a while, like they are right there just waiting for attention to shift to them, so close to the surface, which is also against the AF direction generally reported.
This has also altered the way I interact with others in a way that most shifts have not, and I find that I choose my words and gestures and facial expressions and where I put my eye attention and the like with much more automatic care and attention to each little bit of it, and this has actually made a real positive difference and I recommend it.
One more thing that is interesting relates to the way the mind imagines the inside of the head, neck, and trunk, what I will call the "inner space": there is simply much less imagined visual component to this than there was before, though it is not gone entirely, just substantially reduced.
Anyway, I don't think this is AF, as some affective things still occur sometimes, a few deep triggers clearly remain, nor does it match with any other clear map thing that I know of, just reporting it for the sake of putting it out there to see if it rings true with anyone else. One way or the other, it is better than what came before and has made things even more interesting.
... One more interesting thing: for about a week now, when eating foods, particularly rich foods, the foods fail to do something they did before in my brain, like they no longer stimulate some reward pathway or create some small neuro-chemical buzz like they did before. I noticed this most strongly about 5 days ago when eating a large vanilla-caramel ice-cream sunday.
I was struck by the fact that nothing happened, and it was a strong sense of nothing happening, as something was definitely expected and it just totally didn't happen. What is interesting is that previously I wouldn't have noticed so much what the ice-cream did particularly except that it was nice, but, take away that somewhat subtle effect, and the lack was quite palpable, sort of like giving someone a few alcohol free beers and them expecting a buzz off of them and nothing happening at all.
I continue to notice the effect as it continue to occur, or not occur to put it more properly, but it is waning relatively rapidly in terms of how different it feels, not because the effect or lack thereof is diminishing so far as I can tell, but I think because the contrast is less stark as I get used to it.
What is also interesting is that it has revealed that there is at least one more somewhat subtle and seemingly buzz-free reward pathway, and how that one operates is not entirely clear, as something is satisfied when I eat, and I think that pathway is the same as it was before, just that the first pathway I described feels like it has been locked out or cut off or perhaps diverted.
I realize that I am using somewhat scientific neuro-chemical theories to describe what is purely subjective experience, but that is my current best interpretation at this moment. (DhO)
PCE mode and Cycling mode. (circa 2010) This is a tentative reply to some topics that have been raised on various threads recently. As I am sort of in and out of two modes of perceiving reality and it is not always easy to tell exactly when the one has faded and the other returns, I will post with hesitancy and an inability to draw definite conclusions, but a few of my many possibly transient impressions at this point having experimented with what Tarin and Trent and Ricky are talking about are:
(1) There is something to what they are saying.
(2) I seem to find two modes that are quite different:
- PCE mode is remarkable in its simplicity, poise, richness, directness. When in it, anything else seems like an absurdity, coarse, crude, distorted, while the PCE mode seems full and complete in itself. Words like dignity and completion come to mind. It seems free of cycles and stages and stages, but as it fades at this point for me, exactly how true that is is hard to be sure of, as the tendency is to explore it in a way that causes it to regress to Cycle Mode.
- Cycle mode is the other mode, and it involves ñanas, jhanas, changing perspectives, highs, lows, emotions of some seemingly-empty-yet-still-happening sort and an attention wave of some sort that causes a perceptible distortion, however empty, subtle and centerless. Now, some of those cycles and stages and states are quite good, Pure Land jhanas are still great, NS is amazing, and there are other interesting and compelling phenomena, but the downside is that things that are not good can also at times arise in some way that is different before I was at this level of practice but not clean like PCE mode is. In short, cycle mode possesses an inherent quality of vulnerability that arises dependent on that quality of perceiving things.
(3) When in PCE mode, nearly everything Trent, Tarin and Richard say makes perfect sense. The corollary of this is that when in Cycle mode I think in terms of maps, stages and what memories there are of the PCE are a frustrating reminder of the defects in this way of perceiving things and yet seem unreal or, at worst, like some delusional pipe dream, as it seems to many here, and when in that mode it is very easy to understand that point of view, as it strikes me that way as well.
(4) Oscillating some number of times/day or week between these is very disorienting, and talking to me in one mode or the other would seem like talking to two completely different practitioners, as my mode of relating to reality and the underlying paradigms are so dependent on which mode I am in that the difference is amazing even to me who has seen it change so many times between the two. This makes commentary difficult, as depending on which mode I am in I might say very different things. As I write this I am probably in cycle mode, in case anyone is wondering.
5) I have identified a few ways at this point that seem to cause the chance of getting in PCE mode to go up, described here in a mix of AF and vipassana-esque terms. None are guarantees at this point.
- Notice the attention wave itself and how looking at anything distorts the thing itself. Notice how attention itself filters out substantial portions of the field of what manifests. Doing this long and well enough at a high level taking it to the level of seeming like a spacial distortion eventually can cause PCE mode to arise. This is the least pleasant but the most revealing and has resulted in the longest duration of PCE-like mode when I can pull it off.
- Go through the cycles of insight at the level of an arahat and after a Fruition reflect on a memory of previous PCE modes, which will sometimes cause PCE mode to arise shortly thereafter in a sudden flash that tends to fade as the attention wave sets in again.
- Turn into the sensuous nature of this moment, "tripping" on the textures and qualities of the visual field, the auditory field, the contact of anything with the skin, in an open, really engaged way that attempts to lose one's self in the beauty and perfection and satisfying simplicity of just this in the most profound and yet direct way. This really is the advice to stop and smell the roses taken to the highest degree one is capable of. This is the most pleasant of the ways in. It is much easier with the eyes open than eyes closed, so far, though this is getting easier eyes closed.
I have spent a lot of time when not in PCE mode reflecting on its vipassana correlations, but none really work as they are different. Vipassana stages and stages are the result of the attention wave causing the various phase aspects and selective focusing and tuning that results from an attention wave. PCE mode, having either no or a very subtle attention wave in that way, seems free of the cycles and stages and states and tuning in that regard, which is remarkable in and of itself and seems at this point to point to something very important and useful.
As I am still in the middle, trying to get PCE mode to stick and stay, I am probably not in the best place to draw firm conclusions, but I submit this as some notes from the path such that perhaps people later will draw something useful from them or reject aspects of them as being idiosyncratic or confused and thus help my own practice.
I would be interested in Tarin and Trent commenting on how they progressed through their transition and what strategies and advice they found most helpful along the way from the one to the other.
... Cycle Daniel, being able only to draw on memory and also yet being more keenly aware with each passing trip back to Cycle Mode of how much better PCE mode seems on retrospect, is generally quite keen to get back to PCE mode, as there is this amazing gravity to the PCE, it being exceedingly compelling at this point. However, from Cycle Mode, it seems either unattainable, preposterous, a distortion, a trap, the rantings of madmen, or that it must correlate with something that Cycle Daniel knows, such as Pureland Jhanas, or some other such attainment, all of which I can assert at this point are false so far as I can tell. I can't walk around in full-on Pureland Jhanas, but I have managed to work whole shifts in something which seems to be the PCE mode, which, when I can do it, is simply remarkable in its ease, clarity and freedom from the usual stresses of work, and is even more remarkable considering the work I do. For instance, it kicked in for no apparent reason about half way through the shift I worked tonight and it still seems to be happening, much to my delight.
PCE Daniel does everything it can to try to figure out how to stay in PCE Mode, which is part of the problem, as this sort of trying done wrong causes Cycle Mode to recur, though as time passes and the temptations as I will call them arise, the thing is getting better and better at staying in PCE mode, though there is still instability. I currently feel that I am in PCE mode, as there is this fantastic alertness, a complete lack of fatigue despite having just gotten off work and driven home after a long shift at the end of a long run of shifts, and I feel this tingling through the back of my neck and skull that seems to be one of the PCE's hallmarks as best I can tell. At least, I have come to strongly associate the two.
Cycle Daniel is having a harder and harder time coming up with anything good to say to the PCE that holds any weight at all with the Dual Daniels. In fact, were Cycle Daniel and the jhanas and ñanas and cycles and all that never to arise again, so much the better. This is quite a claim from someone who has spent so much time cultivating and mastering those things, and even writing it I find it somewhat surprising, but this is my current opinion as I write this, perhaps subject to change at a later time. PCE Daniel need merely respond to Cycle Daniel with the PCE itself, which is all the argument that is needed at this point. I am not sure this is an unbiased description, but it is an accurate appraisal of what is happening with me at the moment as best I can describe it.
... This is tricky territory here and something that the fully AF kids might to better with. Here we get into the correlation between the PCE and AF. Given that I can't ever be sure that when the PCE arrises that it is AF or not, as I don't know if it will end, and given that I can't be sure exactly how the PCE correlates with AF, or whether AF is something somewhat beyond just the PCE, as I believe is hinted at in various places, I should just go with what I seem to experience in the PCE.
This is complicated by an annoying fact: that the transition into PCE is dramatic, clear, obvious, profound in its simplicity and directness. The same definitely cannot be said for the fade back to Cycle Mode, and here I run into difficulty that I have been struggling with for 4 months and is part of the reason I have refrained from much comment before I had been in PCE mode many times.
As I can't field test the thing completely and in a bomb-proof way, as so far every PCE has faded back, I cannot tell exactly where the one ends and the other begins, and so when, say, nervousness or fear or some other such thing arises at some point, is that by definition Cycle Mode, or are there such things in the PCE? At this point, I will tentatively say this: it seems that the PCE performs largely as described, and is remarkable is its freedom from the affective feelings that AF dogma goes to such lengths to revile, but the limitations above apply, and I can't really be sure I am correct in my interpretations without more experimentation and probably AF itself. That is the best I can do at the moment.
... Just the thought of making Cycle Mode return makes this PCE-enjoying Daniel cringe, in all honesty, as getting into PCE mode is such a strange thing, and the fear is that it will not arise again, despite its doing so somewhat regularly at this point and sometimes with surprising duration, at least until I sleep. Strangely, I never wake up in PCE mode, only Cycle Mode, not sure why, and I have to reattain it at some point during the day.
In terms of how it is done: this is easy: turn to emotions, nervousness, unhappiness, desire, fear, cycles, fantasies, jhanas, ñanas, any of that and the like, and the PCE vanishes instantly like a mirage.
... The arguments for the emotive life seem to make so much sense to Cycling Daniel, except that PCE Daniel now knows that he can function just fine and in fact much better when the emotions and drives either very subtle or seem to be not happening at all. This is definitely one of those things that Cycling Daniel can't understand worth a darn except by memory and theory, and is truly a case of paradigms and perspectives being profoundly influenced by the quality of perception itself. As I have started to get used to being at work in my very high-volume, high-intensity emergency department physician job where I have to be extremely clear and on-target in my interactions with people, my processing of extremely complex information and my ability to be with what is happening, I can now attest that doing this in PCE mode is way better than Cycle Mode, which can be problematic at times, even at the arahat level.
I have worked probably a total of 5-10 shifts worth of work now in PCE mode and so have a pretty solid basis for comparison, and there is simply no argument at this point for Cycle Mode at all in that very high-stakes and demanding situation from my current point of view. It did take a little while to get used to the fact that the cues to do things are different and the thing functions differently (an example being that in Cycle Mode I might remember to order a chest x-ray after putting in a central line because there was this weird nagging ache in my stomach that I would look at and try to figure out and then would emerge the realization that I forgot to do that as compared to just the body remembering and doing that, which is so much more clean and less fatigue-producing and more pleasant all around), but the adjustment has been relatively easy in comparison to all sorts of other things I have had to adjust to, such as functioning in the Dark Night. (DhO)
Ways to get into a PCE. (circa 2010) Ways to get into a PCE:
- Simply incline the mind that way by memory or desire, forget about it, and see what happens. Sometimes this is enough.
- Ground awareness in the physical realm solidly, openly, clearly to the exclusion of anything else as object. This also sometimes works. The phrase "flesh and blood body" so often used in AF dogma is exactly what I mean.
- Tune into the sense of tingling up the base of the neck and into the skull in a way that is yet wide open, similar to Equanimity in focus but more directly physical, even if the tingling is not there. I used to get this feeling just briefly after completing a new path cycle sometimes, but now can feel it for hours during a PCE or something like one.
- Should any hint of any emotive feeling at all arise, use vipassana-like technique with a wide-open physical-sphere-oriented awareness to track down the offending trigger ruthlessly in this physical sense sphere to its end again and again. I have found this more reliable for figuring out how to avoid the PCE ending than for getting into one, sort of like work done for future reference of what not to do, but it is good work to do at times, I think.
There was a post by C Marti over at KFD about why I might be into this seemingly strange pursuit, as I guess it would seem quite strange to someone who hasn't seen the PCE Mode often or identified what it is and how it is not Cycle Mode and the differences between them, and he speculated as to whether or not I was dabbling, doing it on a bet, trying to please my friends, experimenting just to explore, or some such things. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am doing this because the PCE Mode is so exceedingly compelling and vindicating that all the rest seems like some odd nightmare by comparison, and I mean that literally as well as metaphorically. I would be surprised if I were mistaken, given that the longer the PCE Mode lasts and the more frequently it arises, the more absolutely I am convinced that this is all exactly the right thing to be doing. However, when Cycle Daniel returns, if he does, he might have some doubts mingled in with his frantic attempts to get back to this mode, which is tragic, as from this point of view it is so obviously right here and so clear.
I should add that I am very happy that I trained the way I did, that I mastered what I mastered from an insight and concentration point of view, as I don't think that I personally could have seen what the PCE is or gotten into it as often as I have or for as long or as clearly or perceived just what the value of the PCE is or the comparison with other options had I not done all that work, but at this point I can say that the sooner the PCE stays forever the sooner I will have gotten the final thing I was looking for, regardless of whatever anyone wants to call it or any correlations with other traditions or anything else.
I am completely unconcerned at this point with whether or not some dead Zen dude or whoever did this in some past eon, whether or not Richard is psychopath, or any of the other petty and strangely irrelevant concerns I have seen voiced in various places. I simply want the PCE to stay, which, given how long I have been able to stay in it at times seems completely doable at this point, just like Stream Entry seemed doable on my 4th retreat, and it was, just like arahatship seemed doable from the periods of walking around in wide-open empty luminosity that I was afforded as a late anagami. I am thankful for the advice and links posted above if they help make the PCE stick around and happen more often.
To the question above about what is the "awareness wave" as I call it: well, this is tricky. I would say that the thing is most noticeable in its lack when there is the PCE mode, but this may not seem fair, so back into vipassana and cycling terminology, as there are ample clues there:
The awareness wave is what makes possible jhanas, ñanas and the like. This is a huge clue. Pay attention to that strange quality by which parts of what would seem to be the world and reality get filtered to strangely out of phase vibrations, curiously altered states that exclude ordinary reality in remarkable ways, or add and seemingly enhance reality with various qualities, such as bliss or rapture or energetic phenomena or visions or any of that. That quality of mind or filtering or tuning or whatever you wish to call it is what I am labeling the attention wave. For those who don't think they have had a PCE or are not sure, a crude vipassana correlation is to compare the 3rd vipassana jhana with the 4th: it should be clear that one is relatively phase-distorted in comparison to the other. Ok, now take the assumption that any mode that is not the PCE Mode is a victim of this same phase-distortion problem, however nice, profound, blissful, formless, or whatever in that same sort of way, just on a basically completely different axis, the axis of attention wave, as I call it, or no attention wave at all. Should you take this on, I highly recommend eyes open practice, as I have found eyes closed practice to be vastly harder, as least for me.
As mentioned above, this is devilishly tricky when not in PCE mode, as anything seems like the wrong direction, just as the mind grasped for a Fruition pre Stream Entry but couldn't figure out what direction to look that was the right one. In just that way, so too go experiments trying to figure out what is the attention wave, as until you are in PCE mode, you are stuck with it as the operating principle that is looking for itself while distorting the very field it is trying to investigate. Bummer, that.
Figuring out what is the PCE mode and how to get into it, my best advice at this point:
- Fake it until you make it. This is actually really important. Take your best guess about times that things were great, really clear, just fine, and you really appreciated something. Kenneth and I used to call this "grooving" back in the day. Maybe it was a Mind and Body thing, maybe it was the afterglow of the A&P, maybe it was Equanimity, maybe it was the feeling just after a Path, maybe it was looking at a great sunset or just noticing the fantastic color of a blue LED or whatever nice moment of clarity and remember it and try to do that now with anything, a fridge magnet, the play of light through a glass of water, the dots of newsprint on a magazine, where you just groove on the fact of the presentation of things until you start to re-create that feeling of really being here and enjoying it just as it is.
- Ignore frustration with this pursuit and get back to enjoying now in a precise, clear, sensate way. Open the ears to hear what is around you, avoid rushing anywhere unless you stay in your body when you do it and enjoy the feeling of driving or running or rushing, and the like. When emotions arise, simply stay open and try to ignore them except to maybe give them just the investigative attention needed to see the physical and imagined triggers in a way that allows them to simply fade and be seen as just parts of this fantastic world.
- Once you have practiced this a while with diligence, you may begin to have PCE's. They may be really short lived and you may wonder if they were some vipassana attainment: ignore those thoughts and vipassana attainments in general, particularly the cycles. If they arise, which they will in anyone who has some solid footing in the vipassana world, realize that they are going to fade with further practice at some point but may get stronger initially as you apply the level of every-moment awake mindfulness that really makes all this possible on either front.
- Pay attention to how they fade and how to just gently incline back to PCE mode without falling into the trap of re-invigorating the attention wave. This is difficult, or at least I have found it to be so, but after some months I can say I am generally better at than I was before. All this stuff takes practice, so don't get discouraged.
- Detail reality. This is something I learned along the way for getting into Lucid Dreams and for preparing for Traveling out of body, but it also works really well for AF practice, paradoxically. Really be here at all times, tuning into the spacial aspects, textural aspects, lighting aspects, sonic aspects, and contact with your skin and the world. However, ignore internal reality except as needed, as there is already plenty of that, and this serves to level the playing field, so to speak. Notice the subtle touch of air on your skin, the delight in the richness of colors and shapes, and just give into that. This is so refreshing done well that this sort of thing really helps reinforce the practice as being something nice to incline to, and when it results in PCEs, so much stronger is the pull. (DhO)
The Three Characteristics and PCE. (circa 2010) I think the topic probably deserves more than I am about to give it, but I'll jot down a few thoughts as they come to me:
- Impermanence: it is true, obviously, on many levels, and looking into it brings insights both relative and ultimate from a vipassana point of view. Further, looking into impermanence of things like the sensations that make up emotions and feelings, as anyone who has done this knows, even the pre-path psychologically-obsessed mainstream Buddhists, can give clarity into their transience and help give the mind the ability to be less caught in them and more able to see them as they are, transient, changing, ephemeral, huge dramas built out of what are mostly relatively benign bodily sensations and fleeting phantoms of the imagination. Thus, when pursuing the paths this quality is golden, when pursuing basic psychological work it is similar, and when pursuing the sort of "chase down the origin of emotions" practices of AF is similarly helpful. There is more, however. Looking into impermanence at the level that I have often done, dissolving reality into flickering abstract patterns of stuff and form and color is at once path-producing if done well and also distorting. I found that level of practice to be unhelpful for AF-related pursuits, as it is perpetuating the basic problem, as ñanas and the like arise from there being an attention wave, as I call it, and thus, while helpful to have gotten me to arahatship, simply seems to be a problem now, as least pragmatically. It is not that things don't change, as they do, but tuning into that now just seems to cause a regression to Cycle Mode, whereas just letting reality show itself has impermanence as one aspect of many without any special need to make it the be-all and end-all that I used when getting paths.
- Suffering: looking into the fact of there being an attention wave or affective feeling as a cause of suffering is powerful practice, but this is a slippery slope, as there is a way to look at it that just keeps Cycle Mode going and causes progression along the paths and a way to look at it that inclines to the PCE, as outlined somewhere above in my methods to get into a PCE. Looking into the simple fact of suffering can have various aspects, and is in some ways the same as looking into how the attention wave distorts the perceptual field and in other ways is not. Here we come to the complex topic of what the AF kids call "Pure Intent", which I would label as just inclination to a particular way of perceiving things with resolutions to that effect. Just as one can rise through the jhanas in a particular way with a specific inclination to get Nirodha Samapatti, just so one can look into suffering in various aspects and with various inclinations, and looking to see how the attention wave or emotive feelings are the problem inherently is one of those various ways. However, as we will see below, tuning into the delight of the textures and sounds and sights of the material, sensate world has it merits...
- No-self: this one is really hard, as again there are various aspects to the thing. For a long time I inclined to see all as a play of luminous, empty, causal, transient form and color and qualities, and having done that well, I found that perspective to be completely true within itself and internally consistent and helpful and I glad I did. It made a gigantic difference in my life and so had merit. I can hardly fault those who incline that way, as it is compelling, revealing, empowering and freeing on many levels. Further, as the track record of accomplished insight practitioners ripping up some serious AF practice is impressive, this seems a good way to go. Then we come to this thing I am doing now, where the inclination is different. Now I find myself inclining to the material, the physical, the sensate, the spacial, the auditory, which would seem very much the same as before, but this time it is the delight in the specifics that captures the interest now, which is a very, very different way of working and is producing different perspectives and effects. Questions of self, no-self and the like are good ones and relevant, but somehow, despite the AF dogma making a big deal about these, I find that it can be made more simple than that, really, and they seem philosophical side tracks that take away from the practice itself. There is PCE mode, and, once identified and cultivated, that is simply the compelling thing. Regardless of how one describes it, it speaks for itself, and thus finding it and figuring out how to re-find it are basically the whole thing. It is hard to argue about being satisfied right now, right here, with just this, clearly, precisely, openly, plainly, delightfully, easily. So much complexity in the world arises from the lack of this way of being, obviously. It may be residual Buddhist conditioning or materialist, scientific conditioning, but I don't particularly like it when AF uses the term "soul" and it just rings oddly to my ear, and I somehow don't really like the endless debates about self and Self and all that, as it seems to be missing some point. I find Richard's writings pretty painful, having slogged through most of Richard's Journal over the last few months. I don't like a lot of his terminology, find him irritatingly repetitive and low yield, mostly, as he will say the same points endlessly about how great AF is with maybe 1% of the thing or less being dedicated to the methodology and phenomenology of the thing, which is what I find interesting. (DhO)
Questioning the PCE and the feeling of being. [This exchange between Daniel and Trent happend before their gathering in Thanksgiving in 2010. Check the full thread clicking the link at the end of the entry.] Practice keeps changing, and recently a few questions have emerged I thought I would put out there to get some help with.
1) As I look more carefully at the PCE, I begin to wonder how long it lasts in what I would call its "pure form", and I currently think that it must be less than a second before subtle feelings of being arise. Again, exactly where it ends is tricky, when it transitions to an EE or fades entirely is hard to determine until some clearly coarse feeling arises, but I am wondering if what I have previously though of as PCE's were substantially more tainted than I previously thought. While this at once feels like a sign of progress, it also feeling like falling back, as previously it would seem that PCE's could last for some longer period of time, and now they seem subtly flawed in some way even from the near beginning.
2) Seeing that has raised an interest in delving more into exactly what is the "feeling of being" so often mentioned, as I currently believe I am missing more on this front than I suspected. Sorting this out is very slippery, it seems. It is easier to see the results of the feeling of being than itself, the results being nervousness and the like, but sorting out exactly what it is, a physical sensation, mental images, some complex pattern of these, and how this is exactly different from just this flesh and blood body is vexing, and at one level probably illusory, yet, with the vexation itself obviously arising from the feeling of being, and likely the drive to investigate it arising from the feeling of being, and perhaps the investigation itself arising from the feeling of being, which makes me wonder if there is some common element of all those that can be known as it happens and clearly distinguished from just physical, actual reality. Strangely enough, last night I preferred eyes closed practice to just try to track down what the thing was and to watch it in the body second after second, blip after blip, which feels again like insight practice, except I was looking for something different, that feeling itself if it can be found, and whether or not I am just falling back to old habits is unclear, or whether I am just subtly panicking and frustrated, as I suspect, is perhaps more clear, but the assumption that clear seeing must be at the heart of the thing keeps returning, and so it goes.
3) Related to this is the fact that the mind is a fantastic mimic and capable of producing images and sensations that themselves are clearly designed to be mimics of every positive concept and hint regarding AF and can do so with lightening speed. Distinguishing this from the ordinary discriminating faculty of mind itself is again bedeviling at a microscopic and macroscopic level in a way that I didn't notice before. It seems that following each instant of anything and everything direct is the imagination grabbing and manufacturing some imitation of it, almost seeming like an attempt to perpetuate the problem for reasons unknown, habit? fascination?, I have no idea. Obviously the bedevilment is part of the problem also, as the PCE shows that this is all just illusory conflict, and yet, as the PCE itself seems to be less of what I thought it was, the whole thing comes into question again. While PCE's, however long they actually last, are still great, at this point it seems only AF will do, and it must be substantially different in some ways.
4) On the flip side of this, there is substantially less emotional difficulty in general and substantially more immediate satisfaction and happiness and appreciation of the rich textures of life, and yet, the flaws and gaps in it are more apparent. I have noticed this sort of paradoxical progress before in insight practice and assume similar things must apply to AF.
5) One last thing regarding felicitous feelings: often in the PCE there will be this subtle thrill of hairs rising on my arms or of a similarly charged though sometimes subtle sensual enjoyment: how much of this is just natural and how much is part of the problem? If it is a problem: what to do with it beyond just see the process that creates it?
Any thoughts from anyone who has navigated through this successfully (or anyone else who might see things about this I currently don't) are more than welcome. I feel like a person in Equanimity who just can't land stream entry all over again. Well, there it is. Time and time again when some insight strikes regarding this stuff and the mind shifts to whatever is the sense, "Ah, that must have been it!" and then seconds later is the realization, "Nope, not yet..." which itself is obviously illusion and yet, as that illusion still holds sway, is reality, using the word in its specific AF meaning. (DhO)
AF and Arahatship: a heated debate. [Arguably the most heated debate on AF and Buddhism to be found in DhO. Though most of the topics were soberly addressed years later by Daniel in the earlier entries of this section, the thread of 2010 is most interesting for historical reasons. Please click the DhO link at the end of the entry, so as to have a first hand look of Trent's and Tarin's (and others) postures on the subject back then.] I'm going to chime in with just a few things. First we need to get some terms straight. Just a few issues:
1) Arahatship is defined various ways in various places in the Pali texts, in MCTB, here, and by various other sources. Not all the definitions align, even in the old texts.
Thus, when debating how AF relates to Arahatship, we need to stay clear about which definitions we are using, and to try to keep those explicit and clear, not just the source, but the particular characteristic.
For instance, one may define arahatship as one who perceives "in the seeing, just the seen" which is very different from the arahat who can't have erections or the arahat who would die in 7 days if they didn't ordain in the Theravadan monastic order or the arahat who had no conceit (however defined).
There are some inconsistencies in the AF descriptions.
For instance, Trent says no jhanas, no Nirodha Samapattai, and I presume no Fruitions.
Tarin said he had a few Fruitions early on in the weeks after he got AF.
In the old texts and MCTB and every other source I know of, Arahats should be able to enter jhanas, experience ñanas, etc. and the Buddha clearly could also, and often traveled out of body, etc.
In that sort of vein, I am going to put a few technical questions to Trent and Tarin just to see what they say on the matter, just so we are all trying to get on the same terminological page and technically define AF in a clear way with an eye to contrasting and comparing it with various definitions of arahatship, and thus allow further exploration to happen with more clarity. In asking if these are possible, I am not asking if they would want to or if they would find it a bad idea to, but those can be commented on after the things about possibilities:
1) Is it possible for AF people to have Fruitions?
2) Is it possible for AF people to attain to jhanas?
3) Is it possible for AF people to cycle through ñanas?
4) Is it possible for AF people to dream? To have out of body experiences/lucid dreams?
5) Is it possible for AF people to experience Pure Land Jhanas?
6) Is it possible for AF people to attain to Nirodha Samapatti?
7) Is it possible for AF people to master kasinas such that they saw red disks, saw red everywhere, etc. as one does when practicing those well?
8) There is something referred to here as the No-Dog, that state of things wherein that is the object, that is the thing that is interesting, and all the cycles and jhanas and ñanas may be happening, but they seem irrelevant in that trans-jhanic state, which itself seems clean, present and yet unaffected by the cycles and stuff that happened before. How does this relate to AF?
Further:
8) How does physical illness, fatigue, exhaustion, hunger, and pain due to adverse physical circumstances impact an AF person or the way an AF person may seem to others, with the difference between those being key?
9) Some distinction between the internal experience of an AF person regarding their lack of emotions and the fact that when they write or speak they can seem for all the world to have the same emotions that everyone else has is probably worthy of comment.
10) I recall that Tarin was smoking more after having gotten AF, and apparently all the AF kids in Australia smoke. Significant? Cultural quirk? Does AF make it so that standard health advice is trumped by the pleasure principle? Is that really harmless?
11) What do you make of Richard's 18-36 month period of irritating vibrations and existential side-effects of his having gotten what he called AF, with any details of relevance for what these may have been, what people may expect, and the individual variation that people have experienced in this regard, as I believe not all of those claiming AF have had this happen?
That's plenty to chew on for the moment.
For those who have noted that I have been relatively absent from these discussions, I am taking my time to carefully check out the dogma and practice aspects of AF as well as the results before commenting further, just as I did before I wrote MCTB, and so will leave it to those who are confident they know exactly what they are talking about to help define the debate further, as I think there is much worthy of careful and open discussion, and I am happy that this is all able to occur here at the DhO and that we have such a wide and interesting range of talent and inquisitive minds here to participate. (DhO)
Magick
We do magick all the time. We do magick all the time, with every action, every intention, every emotion, every word, every dream, every thought. All is causal. The question is not the ritual or non-ritual nature of it, the questions are the intentions, methods and effects. The Buddha was reported to do magick all the time, so did plenty of other realized practitioners back then. Today there is plenty of magick in modern Buddhism. Rituals are routinely performed for healing and crops and the like in plenty of Buddhist countries. (DhO)
How can you not practice magic? [A DhO poster Fitter Stoke states: "Why would you go through all these ritualistic practices when you can just note your way through the thing?". Daniel Ingram answers:] Well, my question is: how can you not practice magic? I am still a fan of noting, obviously, but really, we are essentially magical creatures in many ways. Intention, motivation, emotion, concentration, energy, these flux, converge, focus, move, permeate, resonate, and interdepend. Even if you are not doing formal ritual, it is what is going on anyway.
In fact, it would be easy to include vipassana/noting/etc in the general category of magic, being just one of many things you can do in that much larger framework, in this case casting a "get really good at noticing what is going on and noticing its essential characteristics spell".
Lots of magickal rituals are actually very, very profound, and, if done really well, will produce profound effects. Take the Middle Pillar Ritual:
In fact, it would be easy to include vipassana/noting/etc in the general category of magic, being just one of many things you can do in that much larger framework, in this case casting a "get really good at noticing what is going on and noticing its essential characteristics spell".
Lots of magickal rituals are actually very, very profound, and, if done really well, will produce profound effects. Take the Middle Pillar Ritual:
- "Stand in the Temple (or other location) facing West. (This is because you are taken to be standing in the East, source of the Light of the Golden Dawn as it manifests on the Earth plane.) Arms are stretched out straight to both sides. On your right (the North) is the Black Pillar of Severity; on your left (the South) is the White Pillar of Mercy. You stand in between as the Middle Pillar of Balance.
- A blindingly brilliant white light, the Light of the Infinite Self (Ain Soph Aur) originates far above your head, coming from the Crown. (Saharshra).
- The light descends to the top of your forehead, forming a sphere the size of your head. Vibrate, strongly: EH-EI-EH ("I AM")
- When this is felt strongly, allow the light to descend to the Daath center (throat chakkra).) Vibrate: YHVH ELOHIM (I Am the Mighty One of God.)
- Allow the Light to descend further to the heart center (Tiphareth/Anahatta chakra). Vibrate: YHVH ELOAH VE-DAATH. (I Am the Lord of Knowledge.)
- Allow the Light to descend through the Solar Plexus, down to the Svadisthana Chakra (generational center) at Yesod. Vibrate: SHADDAI EL-CHAI (Lord of Life.)
- Allow the Light to descend further, through the Muladhara Chakra (root center) and all the way down to the earth, gaining density as it progresses. Vibrate: ADNI HA-ARETZ (Lord of the Earth.)
- The Light of the Golden Dawn now surrounds the whole body of the Initiate.
- Allow it to ascend back up to center it in the Heart, where it becomes established in fullness.
- From this Center the Light may be channelled as a healing energy, through the palm of the right hand, as a white ray of force aimed at an object. The Light may also be established in the Heart and utilized as a catalyst for meditative states and visions, if it is meant to be so".
Magick 101.
(A) Really dig into exactly what you want, but realize that exactly what you want is probably something more fundamental than winning the lottery, something more generic, basic, personal, deep, heartfelt, close, simple, human, resonant.
(B) For each answer ask if there was some other way that thing could be fulfilled, and if so, if there is some other thing that could do it, you haven't reduced it to its fundamental note, its root cause.
(C) This is a really bodily thing in some ways, a personal story thing in others, but more than that, it is an emotional/fundamental drive thing. Thus, if you are still at the level of some specific object, reach deeper inside to find that deeper thing that is driving the looking, the quest, the desire for a magickal result.
(D) When you find the thing, the deep, base note, root thing, then imagine you have the thing and feel out the causality of how you got it and the causal implications for yourself and others now that you, in your imagination, have it. Be encouraged to go into uncomfortable places with this. Imagine yourself with the results as clearly as you can.
(E) When you are satisfied that you have clearly identified the object of your passion and desire and are fearless about the implications of how you would get it and how it would affect your world and the world around you without reservation or guilt or hesitation, then proceed:
(F) Attain to the most exalted state you are capable of by whatever safe means you have at your disposal. The 4th jhana is the standard recommended state, but actually if you can get to the 8th, that is better. Taking some time to really work to there, say some number of hours or even a whole day of whatever gets you there, meditation, ecstatic dancing, power lifting, skydiving, or whatever it is (Magicians chuckle, nod and wink here...), can be of real benefit, with your goal and object in your mind as clearly as you can make it, feeling deeply into the core of your being the fundamental rightful place of that desired thing in your life and know that all will work out.
(G) Emerge from that ecstatic state, and immediately thereafter, in the most careful yet utterly fearless way, let fly the fundamental quality of your passion into the universe to resonate with Fate itself in the perfect way. If you use phrasing to do this, which can be helpful, be absolutely sure the language really is what you want and really works, being mindful of the curious loopholes that the Magickal world can find in your specific intention or phrasing that might really surprise you. Picture ancient and clever imps with law degrees reviewing your poorly worded request, cackling at your folly, and pulling levers of causality, that is, should your intention err from the pure and most fundamental thing you could wish for, which is why steps A-E are so utterly critical. If you feel some nagging suspicion when you emerge from the ecstatic state, a generic request for something beneficial and not harmful to all involved is far superior to a poorly conceived plan for something specific that wasn't really the key thing you wanted after all!
That done, let it go and forget about it. You have done your part. Live your life as best you can and see what happens. Recording methods, specific result asked for and exactly how and the actual results in some sort of diary is standard advice.
Then there are always the stages of awakening, the joys of watching a sunset, sitting around with good friends sharing a well-made meal, etc... (DhO)
A First Essay on Magick. Here is an essay I wrote (though it is clearly unfinished) some years ago that I thought I would post here just to see what someone might think. I may include it somewhere in MCTB as a continued shout out to my Magickal friends:
Strange Temporal Karma Magick. One of the strange things I got into during my last retreat at the beach for the first 17 days in February (2017) was karma magick.
I had had some conversations about karma with a guy named Logan who is big into resolving karmic complexity, have been studying Chaos magick over the years in general, then listened to The Intention Experiment, which described a study that randomized sick patients to two groups, one of which was prayed for and one of which wasn't, with the twist that the sick patients had been sick some years in the past, and they still found a statistically significant difference in outcomes between those prayed for and those not. Anyway, make of that what you will. Then, I had a discussion about Lazaris (the modern spiritual teacher, not Lazarus the guy from the Bible), who conceived of the Future creating the Present against a backdrop of the Past.
Then, while contemplating karma during my meditation retreat, which had heavy magickal influences and overtones, I suddenly decided to do some very strange temporal magick, except that it would be temporal magick that asked for the current outcome, thus dodging the thorny problem of creating some divergence in the time-stream.
Specifically, I started with the fact that this life has so far ended up going very well, at least at this point, knock on wood...
Given that, as some past life experiences I had in 2003, it would seem that this life presented a remarkable opportunity to generate good karma by service and meditation practice to counterbalance what happened in some of those lives, particularly the past one. In this very magickal way of conceiving of karma and causality, I sent a pulse of magickal energy back to the moment of my death in the last life to direct the rebirth to this one.
Even more magickally strange, and drawing on the multiple worlds theory, and presuming that there must be some quantum entanglement between each of the divergent possible lives that could have resulted from that bardo junction point, it is easy to imagine the collective resulting lives joining together to perceive the most optimal of all the possible outcomes, judging this life to be it, and so choosing this one as the one that would be represented in this consciousness.
So, this turns the typical sense of regret or disappointment that many might have for their lives on its head, making this life the chosen life by magickal means having reviewed all possibilities and determining that this was the best possible rebirth and lifestream to go down. This makes regret feel instead like a great relief that all the worse outcomes didn't occur, thus causing a great surge of relief and gratitude.
Further, by choosing a life that involved the opportunity for generating good karma and then using that good karma to retroactively and magically make that chosen life the one that occurred, it is hard to find the sort of paradoxes that arise in temporal magick, as I asked for exactly what occurred.
In that same vein, my current vantage point is vastly more sane, stable, emotionally balanced, and clear than most previous versions of me, particularly if I reach back to my childhood. I was lucky in my childhood in numerous ways, but, like nearly all childhoods, it was not all roses and puppies. It was a childhood that had the potential to go horribly wrong at a few critical junction points but somehow didn't.
On this retreat, after deciding to choose this rebirth, I decided to go back to some earlier points of difficulty and send strength, wisdom, fortitude, good judgement, endurance, perseverance and luck to some of the more key critical junction points that lead to this current outcome, thus making situations that at the time seemed like partial tragedies and trials into options that were vastly better than they might have been as a result of the magick sent back from this future time.
It is hard to explain the beneficial psychological effects of having done this. It feels like something was profoundly cleared out, lightened, eased, and made a source of joy rather than pain, like numerous bullets were doged, like numerous traps were avoided, like numerous pivotal junctures were guided in the right direction, that direction that lead to right now, and a now whose capabilities allowed those good outcomes to occur.
Anyway, might be worth playing with this sort of strange magick that asks for things to have gone exactly as they went and to end up precisely as they are and to delight in that outcome and ongoing causal stream. (DhO)
Insight through Magick. The LBRP (Lesser Banishing Ritual Pentagram) and Middle Pillar ritual are profound, and more so when taken to the level where you can see what you are visualizing: that, for nearly everyone, requires a very high degree of concentration. That degree of concentration, if actually cultivated, opens doors to a great number of amazing things, including real insight.
The first principles of magick that I want to make explicit are as follows:
Whatever language one uses to describe these potentials that are within people and the wide web of causality, one will run into problems when dealing with anyone who is not very well-versed in the terminology, very broad minded, and very experienced in these things.
For example, if you call it science, you alienate both the religious as well as those who are scientists who would not lump unusual effects into science. If you call it magick, then you alienate the hyper-rational or merely concrete and conventional. At some points you will see a breakdown in communication with anyone, but those with real knowledge and real understanding will not have a hard time getting back on track. The trick is to work with people where they are. This is a fundamental theme of this work.
Consciousness plus intention produces magick. Anything that was produced by these two, even if present in the smallest way, is a magickal act or product.
This broad definition of magick, while more correct than less inclusive ones, can be limiting, so I will define two subsets of magick for the sake of discussion:
Ordinary Magick: that which most people wouldn’t call magick, and involves what the ordinary person generally believes to be simple intentions leading to actions, like lifting a spoon or composing a symphony. For the sake of clarity, I will call ordinary magickal effects simply ordinary effects.
Extraordinary Magick: includes the levels of causal effects that are beyond what most people consider the ordinary world of cause and effect, i.e. the realm that science, with the occasional exception of particle physics, considers mythical. In short, what most people would call magick, regardless of whether or not they believe in it, would fall into this realm, including magickal effects from “ordinary actions,” that is effects beyond what ordinary people imagine come from what they misperceive to be simple, non-magickal acts. For the sake of clarity, I will call extraordinary magickal effects simply magickal effects, realizing that this may cause confusion in those not understanding the full implications of the broad definition of magick.
The more we increase our ability to concentrate and to perceive reality clearly, the more we will begin to perceive the extraordinary magickal aspects of reality.
Magick can be looked at from two points of view:
(1) from the ultimate, in which all that occurs is the natural unfolding of the lawful pattern of causality,
(2) and from the relative, in which each individual has the power to influence their field of experience/universe/life.
The combination of understanding of ordinary magickal effects and relative reality is something I will call conventional reality.
These definitions of magick and the ultimate and relative points of view help define various groups of people:
In general, people may be defined by the degree to which they directly perceive the magickal aspects of reality, both the ordinary and the special.
They may be further classified into the degree to which they perceive the ultimate aspects of reality.
To the degree that the relative perspective is valid, it must be noted that where our experience field overlaps someone else’s experience field, there is an interplay of forces shaping that junction, specifically the consciousness and intent of each of those perceiving that junction. In this case, the difference between belief, intent and force is an arbitrary one.
The corollary of this is that the less obvious the junction of experience fields, the less obvious the interplay. This has important implications for those who practice magick when we examine the next few points.
Clearly, different effects may occur if the interplay/overlap is more or less overt, particularly if the beings involved have differing paradigms of what is possible. That is, if some of the beings involved think that some things are impossible and other beings involved think that those same things are possible, there is a set up for very deep conflict.
Our expectations, beliefs, previous experiences, and paradigms color what we perceive, which is to say, they have a direct effect on our field of experience and life. This effect is actually a very powerful one.
Most people don’t have a well-developed understanding of the vast and complex terrain of the magickal world.
This simple fact is an extraordinarily powerful magickal force, something I will generically label “The Field of Disbelief.” While not nearly as static or simple an entity as this name would imply, the general nature of its effects can be commented upon in crude terms. The Field of Disbelief is actually a field of beliefs about how things are.
The Fields of Disbelief may vary radically between people. For example, one person may consider a lucky rabbit’s foot to be very powerful, whereas another may have occasional premonitory dreams but think that the rabbit’s foot is pure superstition. One person may think that traveling out of body is not that unusual but may think that telekinesis is completely impossible. Some believe in angels, devils, spirits, fairies, pixies, trolls, and/or ghosts. Some think it possible to speak with the dead, heal by laying-on hands, read other people’s thoughts, or divine the past or the future. These are but a few examples of common magickal beliefs in modern times.
In general, the more people’s fields of experience you have overlapping, and the more obviously they overlap, the more Fields of Belief or Disbelief you have to deal with. In these circumstances, overt magickal acts that do not fit with the paradigms of these fields become more difficult. Ways to deal with this include:
Giving up and not attempting magick. I call this Dodging the Issue, or Settling for the Lowest Common Denominator. Magick is happening regardless of whether or not you wish to acknowledge it, and past a certain point this option is not really possible.
Attempting magick in private, with the thrust of the work being to cause effects that will have minimal if any obvious overlap with anyone else’s field of experience. I call this Private Magick. It is clearly the easiest of the lot.
Attempting magick that does overlap with other’s fields of experience but does so in ways that all of the effects appear to either be ordinary, or are at least not noticed to be magickal. I call this Stealth Magick, as one gets in under the radar of the Field of Disbelief.
Example: you are in a conference in a small, poorly ventilated room with a guy waving around a dry-erase marker with the cap off. The solvent smell is completely annoying. After careful consideration of the ethics involved, you will him to put the cap back on the marker when he is not writing with it. This is done with no obvious external signs that you are doing this. He puts the cap back on the marker and doesn’t notice at all. The act was clearly magickal but didn’t run into anyone’s Field of Disbelief.
This example brings up another sub-point of great profundity: it is impossible to distinguish between spell casting and prognostication. It is purely a matter of convention. One could just as easily say that your internal experience of willing him to do something was actually just clues about what was going to happen anyway. Causality doesn’t care one way or the other.
Attempting to work with the specific holes in a person’s or a select group of people’s Field of Disbelief, thus working specifically in ways that they truly believe are possible, so that you do not overtly run into the blocks in their Field of Disbelief. I call this Targeted Public Magick or Consensual Magick, as there was a consensus as to what was possible. Obvious examples include such things as faith healing and fortune telling. As people are bound to talk, this almost always enters the next category:
Attempting to work in public ways that directly contradict a person or group’s Field of Disbelief. This can be done, but the backlash tends to be impressive and often much more harmful to the practitioner than to those whose paradigms were challenged. I call this Public Non-Consensual Magick. Important points about this are:
It can be astounding how dense people can be in the face of things that might challenge their paradigms. The connections people can miss and experiences they can simply seem to forget happened or compartmentalize away can be amazing. While this can be very useful for the magickal practitioner, it is not an effect that one wants to count on to happen in the face of repetition, nor even count on the first time.
People often react negatively towards those whose paradigms diverge too radically from their own. This is instinctual and while these reactions can be clothed in the accepted institutions, laws and decorum of the times, nonetheless they can be extremely detrimental to the magickal practitioner.
We can look to myth and legend for illumination on this point. Consider a medieval setting and the reaction that various non-magickal people or groups might have towards various magickal ones. Note the common elements of denial, fear, anger, bargaining and manipulation.
The local ruler might size up the old wizard in the lone tower in the hill and either believe that he was just an old wacko, or if he believed he had some power would want to know how to keep him on his side and his chances of doing so. Could he be bought, seduced, or coerced through threat or otherwise manipulated?
The local townspeople might know of a witch out in the forest. Many would fear her. Some would seek her out for help with love, illness, or quarrels. Others might think she was just an old madwoman. Religious people might think she was in league with Satan and burn her at the stake.
Reactions like these take place in modern times all over the world and in “civilized” societies. The more your basic paradigms diverge from those around you and the more obvious you are about this, the stronger the reactions you will encounter. Consider gays being killed just for being gay, or people of one religion or political party killing another.
Attempting to alter the paradigms and expectations of a person or group before performing Public Magick, thus changing it into Targeted Public Magick. Skeptics would call this suggestion. I would call it education.
Another extremely important point about having magickal experiences is that your paradigms will begin to diverge from those around you who don’t or haven’t yet. There is no way around this. The more times you see visions, travel out of body, do energy work, trace glowing pentagrams in the air, speak with spirits, shift into altered states of consciousness, manipulate the world in various extraordinary ways or understand aspects of ultimate reality, the more you will be out of alignment with “Conventional Reality,” not that you could get two people to agree exactly what that was. Real practical wisdom involves working with this to everyone’s benefit or at least not to anyone’s detriment if you can help it.
There is a difference between one’s inner world diverging from “the non-magickal norm” and one’s outer world diverging from it.
This has to do with external marks of being “different”, such as unusual clothes, tattoos, hairstyles, props (such as wands, daggers, pentacles, etc.), special languages, symbols on one’s belongings, etc. While having cool and unusual props can be great fun, giving one a sense of there being something special and symbolic in what one does or just getting attention or both, they can also cause adverse effects on one’s jobs and public relationships. These props and trappings may also attract people of like mind, and so are, like everything, a mixed blessing.
While props have their advantages, there are reasons to get used to working without them, as if you are going to do Stealth Magick it is much easier if you are prop and trapping free.
The counterpoint to this is that props can alter people’s Fields of Disbelief based upon their own internal paradigm conflicts. A person who claims to not believe in magickal things may still react strongly to something like a provocative Tantric idol or an incense-filled room decorated with curtains with a magick circle and its associated symbols drawn on the floor, creating the possibility of doing more Consensual Magick or Semi-Consensual Magick. (DhO)
Strange Temporal Karma Magick. One of the strange things I got into during my last retreat at the beach for the first 17 days in February (2017) was karma magick.
I had had some conversations about karma with a guy named Logan who is big into resolving karmic complexity, have been studying Chaos magick over the years in general, then listened to The Intention Experiment, which described a study that randomized sick patients to two groups, one of which was prayed for and one of which wasn't, with the twist that the sick patients had been sick some years in the past, and they still found a statistically significant difference in outcomes between those prayed for and those not. Anyway, make of that what you will. Then, I had a discussion about Lazaris (the modern spiritual teacher, not Lazarus the guy from the Bible), who conceived of the Future creating the Present against a backdrop of the Past.
Then, while contemplating karma during my meditation retreat, which had heavy magickal influences and overtones, I suddenly decided to do some very strange temporal magick, except that it would be temporal magick that asked for the current outcome, thus dodging the thorny problem of creating some divergence in the time-stream.
Specifically, I started with the fact that this life has so far ended up going very well, at least at this point, knock on wood...
Given that, as some past life experiences I had in 2003, it would seem that this life presented a remarkable opportunity to generate good karma by service and meditation practice to counterbalance what happened in some of those lives, particularly the past one. In this very magickal way of conceiving of karma and causality, I sent a pulse of magickal energy back to the moment of my death in the last life to direct the rebirth to this one.
Even more magickally strange, and drawing on the multiple worlds theory, and presuming that there must be some quantum entanglement between each of the divergent possible lives that could have resulted from that bardo junction point, it is easy to imagine the collective resulting lives joining together to perceive the most optimal of all the possible outcomes, judging this life to be it, and so choosing this one as the one that would be represented in this consciousness.
So, this turns the typical sense of regret or disappointment that many might have for their lives on its head, making this life the chosen life by magickal means having reviewed all possibilities and determining that this was the best possible rebirth and lifestream to go down. This makes regret feel instead like a great relief that all the worse outcomes didn't occur, thus causing a great surge of relief and gratitude.
Further, by choosing a life that involved the opportunity for generating good karma and then using that good karma to retroactively and magically make that chosen life the one that occurred, it is hard to find the sort of paradoxes that arise in temporal magick, as I asked for exactly what occurred.
In that same vein, my current vantage point is vastly more sane, stable, emotionally balanced, and clear than most previous versions of me, particularly if I reach back to my childhood. I was lucky in my childhood in numerous ways, but, like nearly all childhoods, it was not all roses and puppies. It was a childhood that had the potential to go horribly wrong at a few critical junction points but somehow didn't.
On this retreat, after deciding to choose this rebirth, I decided to go back to some earlier points of difficulty and send strength, wisdom, fortitude, good judgement, endurance, perseverance and luck to some of the more key critical junction points that lead to this current outcome, thus making situations that at the time seemed like partial tragedies and trials into options that were vastly better than they might have been as a result of the magick sent back from this future time.
It is hard to explain the beneficial psychological effects of having done this. It feels like something was profoundly cleared out, lightened, eased, and made a source of joy rather than pain, like numerous bullets were doged, like numerous traps were avoided, like numerous pivotal junctures were guided in the right direction, that direction that lead to right now, and a now whose capabilities allowed those good outcomes to occur.
Anyway, might be worth playing with this sort of strange magick that asks for things to have gone exactly as they went and to end up precisely as they are and to delight in that outcome and ongoing causal stream. (DhO)
Insight through Magick. The LBRP (Lesser Banishing Ritual Pentagram) and Middle Pillar ritual are profound, and more so when taken to the level where you can see what you are visualizing: that, for nearly everyone, requires a very high degree of concentration. That degree of concentration, if actually cultivated, opens doors to a great number of amazing things, including real insight.
Where most people go wrong in practicing magick is that they don't get their concentration that strong. Might check out an example of three to four of us here who did a retreat exploring high-concentration and magick. [ Check https://firekasina.org/diaries/ but there are many more in the main page: https://firekasina.org/ ]
Plenty of the exercises in various magickal traditions, if actually taken to the level they state, will very likely produce insight along the way. Magickal practice combined with the insight maps found around places like this one can help one navigate in that remarkably interesting territory. I am currently helping someone on a home retreat do candle flame practice, and, now with them about a week into it (probably about 70-85 hours) the magickal effects and visualization are starting to getting to the level that most would consider unlikely and very unusual, as well as profoundly enjoyable, and within a week I would suspect that the stranger stuff that definitely falls squarely in the realm of the magickal will be happening, if past experience is any guide. That is not all that long. They do have strong natural and well-cultivated concentration skills, but plenty of less talented and less trained people will still notice powerful effects if they practice that much.
Another example: check out Liber MMM (http://paranormal.se/article/Liber_MMM.pdf): it stresses high degrees of concentration and visualization. It is rather short and to the point. The work done to get into those realms, if tuned properly and often just accidentally, is prone to producing insight along the way.
It should be noted that things can also get really, really strange. You are highly advised to have at least one sane, reasonable, non-exploitive, non-power-trippy friend who knows this territory well and has practiced in that strange way of viewing reality for years if you are going to do into this with the degree of concentration power that it takes, for, as the warnings hopefully tell you, people can get really wiggy and freak out if they don't know what they are doing, when to back off, and how to keep the experiences that these sorts of high-concentration practices can bring up in reasonable proportion, relation, and perspective. (DhO)
Magick as something integral to experience. Viewing magick as "real", it becomes workable and even possible in ways that viewing it as "unreal" or worse, hallucination or psychosis, simply doesn't seem to allow in the same way. So, the view, being a part of the functional machinery of the thing, modifies the functionality.
I personally view magick as being something integral to my experience and the functioning of my experiential world. It allows all sorts of things to be embraced and played with in creative ways that I think viewing them as some variant of insanity simply wouldn't.
What is interesting is that I get to see genuine, function-reducing mental illness when working in emergency departments, and I can tell you that it looks nothing like what the powers do in the functionally sane. None of the people hearing voices or having hallucinations seem to get anything good out of it or be able to do cool and useful things with them. The entire vibe and effect is different.
Example: I threw my back out swinging a heavy duffle back up into a moving van after spending a few hours moving heavy boxes and packing. I could barely stand up straight, the left side of my back was totally knotted up, and the pain was moderate to bad, depending on what I tried to do. Two days working with it didn't help. I tried yoga, a professional massage, and other basic tricks, still couldn't stand up straight. I had to drive 6 hours home and then drive 3 hours and work a shift the day after that, so something had to happen. Being as I had no other obvious resources to turn to and I wouldn't be able to see my chiropractor for a week due to scheduling problems, I turned to magick.
I spent about 3.5 hours mixing the following things while driving down the interstate, something I don't necessarily recommended:
- strong resolutions to have my back unlock
- meticulous careful investigation of the energy channels in my body and any blockages I found in them
- visualization of the symmetry of my body being restored
… I wouldn't recommend playing with powers to the actively psychotic, just as I don't recommend that they do a lot of things, such as drive, operate heavy equipment, fly airplanes, practice medicine, purchase firearms, sit in the US congress, and the like, things that the non-psychotic often do just fine.
That they are the same thing is not entirely clear to me. That the experiences have similar qualities in some ways: definitely. That they probably share some similar brain center activation as a working hypothesis: probably. That you can simply lump them into the same thing and have it work out: I actually don't think so. It would be like saying that dreams and the waking world are exactly the same just because they both involve experiences of the sense doors (hearing, seeing, feeling, thinking, etc.): ok, you can make the argument, but it is missing a ton about the differing functionality, as is the case here.
Here's another example:
I have some family members that require pretty large amounts of support, support that can be taxing. I spent a few months very consciously doing explicit magickal work to help bring something good to the situation. I would visualize all aspects of the people, the situation, the history, the resources available, the possible resolutions and outcomes, the likely limitations to the situation, my internal reactions, the energetics of it, the ethics of it, and similar things, feeling out into space for some way to move something or push something or release something that would help. This went on basically every day for some period of times for a few months, and then, one day while doing this, 3 golden pulses of light shot out of my heart center, like wave-fronts out into space, the most immediate effect of which was some very large release of tension and unease around the situation, an effect that has persisted, and it made a real positive functional difference in the whole way I relate to the situation. What other effects it will have it still unknown and can't be fully determined any, given how large the system is and the many factors influencing it, but the effect on this end was huge.
You could call it self-created psychotherapy with hallucinations or whatever, but the effect is the same, and an effect that I will bet that someone who wasn't willing to work in that paradigm would be unlikely to be able to pull off in the same way.
I don't see any of my mental health patients describing anything therapeutic at all about anything they experience in the realm of psychosis, nor do they bring that sort of consciousness and intent to the thing. In fact, I have a running joke with a number of the psychotic patients who we see often about how the voices never say nice things like, "Wow, you are doing great! You are such a good person! Go back to school and finish your degree and remember to brush your teeth!" and the visions are never of nice things like fairies and butterflies, but nearly always of demons, shadows, phantoms, dead people, mobsters out to get them, and the like. None of them would go seeking hallucinations, none of them like the voices, and none of them ever seem to figure out how to get anything good out of them and they can't shut it off when they wish.
It is like comparing a smallpox vaccine to smallpox just because both are live viruses that can leave a scar and induce a fever, yet their effect is really, really different: one rid the world of a disease, and the other was the disease, one is a choice created by brilliant minds to make the world a better place, the other an affliction, one extremely effective and health-promoting, the other killed about 1/3 of the native population of the Americas, so I have heard estimated. So it is with magick and psychosis: you can come up with all sorts of similarities and parallels, but this misses tons of functional differences that aren't that obvious to those who haven't gotten some experience with the good that working on a powers-level can accomplish.
Just because vaccines sometimes cause side effects is not a reason to lump them into the category of diseases that cause those same side effects. Just as the medicines I use in the emergency department can sometimes cause side-effects, I don't classify them as poisons. Imagine if I said to the patient, "Ok, I am going to give you some poison," how they would react: they obviously wouldn't want it! That is what classifying the powers as psychosis is doing: it is really making a huge error in cognition that will make people less likely to think about using them skillfully and healthfully. Just like with medicines: give the right dose to the right patient for the right thing.
For those not properly trained in giving those medications, real trouble could result. You wouldn't want some guy off the street determining what medicine you got and how much in the emergency department. That doesn't mean the medicines are poison. Just as people not trained to drive getting behind the wheel of a car could cause trouble, that doesn't mean that cars are just accident machines. You wouldn't herd cattle into a Google server room. You wouldn't give a loaded firearm to a 2 year-old, or even let them into the bottles under the kitchen sink, bottles you use all the time without problems.
The powers are like all those ordinary things that respond well to training, knowledge, experience and common sense and don't go as well without it. It is true that occasionally something does go wrong, as with basically everything we do, including just getting out of bed in the morning (I can't tell you how dangerous this gets to be as people get older and more frail: they fall and break hips doing this all the time). People slip in the tub all the time, but I don't classify tubs as death traps. Same with the powers: calling them psychosis just because the untrained often don't do that well with them, or relating them to psychosis just because they share some common elements: this is just simple ignorance.
I believe that these things make me mentally and physically better off and have numerous examples to show it. Someone depriving themselves of that just because of some theoretical ontology they can't possibly definitely prove is an example of needless self-deprivation, a waste of available options, a senseless austerity, a self-imposed disempowerment, like a person refusing to open there eyes because someone told them color was an illusion created in the brain with lots of pre-processing in the retina and only a mere false representation of frequencies and quanta of energy that weren't the direct experience of the "real thing". Yet, illusion or otherwise, it is really useful to be able to see. Same with the powers. You could call the act of seeing "biochemistry and neurobiology" or "magick" or "hallucinations" or "sensations" or "extremely helpful": which makes more sense to you?
… (The Powers) are not for the mentally unstable, and things can go wrong, as with many things, and psychosis can also arise in totally ordinary people doing nothing resembling magickal practices, and, in fact, this is the vast majority.
Again, as I said, far better to have some training and conceptual frameworks around when getting into those, as with basically anything else.
For instance, many here have taken drugs, drugs that caused them to be altered. Most took them with a large amount of knowledge of their effects, their doses, the expected side effects, the duration of those effects, the risks, the benefits, and the appropriate setting and company to be in when they took them, as well as some things about how to manage what might happen.
The problem with the powers is that many don't go into them with this sort of background, so, oddly enough, the drug-users are generally vastly better prepared for the experiences that may result, as they are coming up in a culture where drugs are very common, where their parents very well may have done drugs, where drugs are in the media all the time (however oddly represented at points) and their peers will have some working knowledge of them. This is the closest parallel that I can come up with, though it is a flawed one, and I suspect that someone is going to jump all over this and take it the wrong way. There are all sorts of legal issues, quality control issues, addiction issues, moral issues, and other dangerous health issues and the like around this analogy that I hope people will not dwell on, as I am extremely aware of them, but the basics of the analogy still hold.
Same thing with strong concentration effects, with visions, with energetic things: most people are not coming up around people with strong magickal abilities, weren't raised by parents who had good magickal training, didn't come up in a peer group where discussions about magickal effects were common, didn't have a good theoretical background for going into them, didn't see anything like the real stuff represented in any movie or book that they read. It is a problem, to be sure.
Still, done well with good support and good frameworks and perspectives (meaning much better ones than "all powers are psychosis" or "none of this is real"), the problems that the uninformed can run into are much less likely, and the risks get much, much lower and the benefits much, much higher. I give those warnings because some people playing with the powers are like people given a random bag of drugs: god knows what might happen if they just start taking them and have no idea about dosing or their effects. It would be like putting a 5-year-old (or even plenty of adults) behind the wheel of a car: totally bad idea, and yet we don't demonize cars, just have a healthy respect for their uses and dangers and who should be operating them and how they should be trained and what rules of the road they should follow. (DhO)
Magick reproducibility. The argument about reproducibility is an interesting one. Consider the problem with this relate do the number of factors you have to consistently control to do the sort of reproducible science you seem to be asking for related to this.
Consider the system: the brain, the body, the external world, our internal mental states, our psychological states, our relationship to external objects and ourselves. Moment to moment very large aspects of all of those change radically. The system is extremely complex and unstable.
Consider one of the foundations of modern physics, the Schrödinger Equation. It would seem straightforward enough, and given really simple systems and really simple boundary conditions, you can solve it. Want to predict the shape of the orbit of an electron probability cloud around a hydrogen atom in a vacuum and without external electromagnetic influence? Easy. One proton, one electron, clearly defined forces, all just a walk in the park. Try do to that for, say, sodium. Not that big an atom, really, not that many particles, and straightforward forces, so you would think it would be easy. Not! Nearly impossible. The largest computers struggle against the task. Schrodinger Equation for larger atoms (Link: http://electron6.phys.utk.edu/phys250/modules/module%203/Multi-electron%20atoms.htm )
Ok, consider a much larger system: the brain, a trillion neurons, connections beyond number, varying neurotransmitter levels, varying glucose and blood pressure levels, varying configurations even minutes apart, as the plastic structure of the brain constantly remodels itself, and then add in psychology, whatever that is, and the "external" world in all its staggering complexity.
Those who demand the level of reproducibility of, say, simple Newtonian physics, whatever that is, for a system with that degree of complexity: it is hard to even begin to come up with polite enough terms to address that level of naiveté.
Even Newtonian physics works only under really simple conditions, and then things begin to break down. Consider a simple case: take a weight, put it on a flat surface, and gently increase the angle of the surface until the weight begins to move, and record the rate at which the weight moves and accelerates until it reaches the end of the surface. Straightforward, right? Except that, if you do this again and again and measure carefully, you won't always get the same angle at which the downward forces overcome the static friction and the thing begins to move, and you won't always get uniform acceleration between experiments or even during the same experiment, as kinetic friction is an average, and moment to moment will vary depending on small variations in the surface. To try to get really good reproducibility you would have to really craft the weight and the surface with extreme precision and control all sorts of other conditions (temperature, air movement, etc.) to get really consistent results.
Did any of these people who talk about science take physics? Did any of them try this sort of thing in the lab? It is really surprising how variable a really seemingly simple system can be. I suspect they have never really done any science.
Take something pretty simple: a 4-cylinder, 4 stroke engine. The computer power required to model that even remotely well under various conditions is simply staggering, and even then, only real-world testing will really tell you how that system with all of its fluid mechanics and varying friction and turbulence and the like change as the temperature and metal properties and air density and volatility of the fuel and the like change under varying conditions and with time. That is not a zillionth the complexity of how the brain interacts with the body and the world, with zillionth obviously being a really scientific word.
Try predicting the orbits of the planets around the sun and their positions in, say, 10 years, taking into account all their gravitational pulls on each other as well as the force of the solar wind and the like: staggeringly complex, even if you have all the basic physics down. That is a really, really simple system in comparison to the mind, and simple by orders of magnitude that are best describe with large exponents that themselves have large exponents. Anyone looked at chaos theory? It is, well, chaotic.
Consider studies in medicine, which is now getting to the level of system complexity that we are having to deal with. I have all the coursework in study design that a PhD epidemiologist would take, so this is something I know something about.
We would sit there in class and tear down study after study, ripping apart the methods and conclusions, pointing out the huge flaws in top-funded studies that appeared in the very best journals there are, JAMA, Lancet, NEJM, ripping them to pieces, and doing so easily. The number of naive assumptions made about how statistics would work in those settings was staggering, the number of confounding variables huge, the ability to really control key variables really weak most of the time, and the numbers to try to get meaningful effects of a scale that very few researchers will ever be able to afford to do. Those are peer-reviewed studies, peer reviewed by some of the best researchers out there, and most of them have real problems with them. The best cardiac drugs, like Lipitor and the like, show effects so small that it takes thousands of patients to try to show they do something and years of carefully collected, albeit often really flawed, data.
Where is the perfect science these people postulate? It is a fiction, a fantasy, a pie in the sky, particularly about a system the likes of which we are talking about. I am not saying we shouldn't try, as plenty of good comes out of science that is not that great, as well as lots of problems, like Vioxx.
Look up the outrageously expensive debacles around Natrecor and Xigris. They will blow your mind. All the rage when I was in residency, extremely expensive, based on basically junk science, and now you really never see them used at all.
Try to do something on that level we are talking about consistently, such as consistently induce the exact same feeling and thoughts in a person two days in a row at the same time for a few seconds. Nearly impossible. Try to do it yourself! Good luck. Why do you expect this for the powers when you can't even do it for ordinary thoughts and emotions even for one person two times in a row? Have the people critiquing this stuff really thought about what they are asking and if they would ask it of other similar questions and systems?
Look up the science of what we should be eating! There are hints, fads, trends that reverse all the time, and tons of studies that get thrown out a few years later based on other studies that will get thrown out a few years later. You would think that, given how important the question is, we would have really good science on this. It is all simple biochemistry, right? Not!
Vitamin D: in, out, in, out, maybe in again?
Fish Oil: maybe, maybe not! Does it cause prostate cancer? Does it help inflammatory conditions or heart disease? Let me know when you find out.
Carbs: in, out, in, out, etc.
Tell me definitely if gluten is bad for you. Best of luck!
Are saturated fats bad for you? Look up the science on butter. In, out, in, out, maybe in again.
Look up the science on cholesterol: we lowered it as much as possible, now we think that excessively lowering it is a bad idea, and that will probably change soon enough.
There has been a ton more research on diet and its effects on health with zillions of more dollars and scientists working on this than the powers, and the definitive conclusions you can draw are so flighty and wishy washy as to make you throw up your hands entirely.
Vitamin E: in, out, in, really out.
Vitamin C: Nobel prize! Yeah, and then maybe it doesn't do much, or does it?
Should you cook with olive oil? Coconut oil? Canola oil? Let me know when you are certain.
Science! What an amazing thing! What a total joke! It is both of these and more. Worship it like the definitive guide to how to live, and you will be dancing around like a puppet being played by someone with a seizure disorder.
Should you exercise to lose weight? In, out, in, not sure now. Those who exercise to lose weight might, on average, eat an additional 100 calories per day more than than they burn in exercise! Or, perhaps not! Tell me definitely, clearly and for all time what the answer is! Best of luck with that.
Eggs: eaten daily by hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions. You would think we would know something about their health effects. They go in and out and in and out. There was just a study that showed that perhaps moderate consumption has no effect on heart disease, whereas for decades they were thought to be killing people due to their high cholesterol content. Some now think they are probably good for you. I am going to eat some shortly...
Is obesity all caused by clever gut bacteria manipulating neurotransmitters, whereas for years we thought these people were just pathological eaters or had some endocrine disorder? We don't know.
Let's take the most simple cases from the examples I provided above.
Take the back pain one: this is probably the most straightforward. I might be able to reproduce that, but I will have to wait for my back to go out again. Hopefully we will be waiting a while. I can just imagine the scientific paper I would try to create from that and trying to submit that to a journal. It would be an n of 2 (two times on one person, so basically two data points), and the subject would be a highly idiosyncratically trained meditator whose generalizability to any other population would be what?
To reproduce that on a larger scale, who would be your subjects, and how would you control the conditions? Would you have them follow the same training path I did over nearly two decades and then try to throw their backs out and then see if they could straighten them up again? What other variables would you control for? Who would you choose to train for that long? What would be your controlled entrance criteria: Gen X musician geeks from academic backgrounds with what might be a relatively unusual natural talent for technical meditation? Who is going to fund that study? It is all absurd.
Take the family situation example with the three golden pulses yielding a resolution of lots of the tension around that after a few months of totally home-brewed internal magickal work: How do you reproduce it? I can't even imagine how I could internally reproduce it, as that tension has gone, the system has changed, and so how do you go back and do it again? I can't even remember all the things I did internally, all the pathways I explored, and how this would relate to all the other stuff that was going on at the time. Again, absurd.
Imagine if you could try to reproduce that and you got a different result, like an angel whispering that it would all be ok coupled with the image of a flower blooming in the heart, and then some different but still positive shift in the situation. How would you interpret that result? Is that reproducibility? What's your p-value on that? Have you thought all this through?
Does that mean that people can't play with this stuff and these paradigms and perhaps some up with useful effects on their own? Definitely not. I am sure that someone probably will. However, imagine submitting those study projects to some institutional review board or to a peer-reviewed journal: It makes me laugh out-loud just thinking about it.
Any of you submitted papers for publication to peer-reviewed journals? I have a number of times. Anyone been through an Institutional Review Board? I have a number of times. Considering the IRB that would approve that research stretches my imagination into the realm of true comic fantasy.
Ah, those eggs were tasty! And gluten! And cheese! Was it bad for me? Science has no friggin' idea! How do you quantify the health effects of that much enjoyment? They have no friggin' idea. If you can't do that, how are you going to do science on the stuff I am talking about and into? I have no friggin' idea, and neither do they. (DhO)
Not all powers-related falling into the psychedelic category. I am not sure that is true about the utility of everything powers-related falling into the psychedelic category either. I think that some aspects of them can resemble the effect of psychedelic drugs in some ways, true. That said, here is why I think the difference is really important.
When was the last time you heard one of your entheogen-doing friends say something like: after taking the psychedelic drug, I could see energy channels and manipulate them and it caused my back spasm to go away, and say this while experiencing no other side effects or distortions of perception of significance and be in a state of mind you would consider normal otherwise?
It is a crude lumping of something that can be much more skillful, much more sensible, much more controlled, much more reasonable and functional than the vast majority of what happens during hallucinogen-induced episodes. Just saying that they are all "psychedelic" "at worst... only" is still needless derogatory, missing much about how these things can happen, and their uses and side-effect profiles.
My example of the three golden waves that pulsed out of my heart-area and left me much more emotionally clear and clean about the situation: that shouldn't fall into the realm of the psychedelic just because it involved the visuals. It is really mixing up two things that both just happened to involve visuals.
Area all dreams "psychedelic"?
Are all your thoughts "psychedelic", as nearly every one of them involves some subtle visual aspect, even if you don't notice that?
When you imagine something, is that "psychedelic"?
When you intend to move your arm and your brain maps out a visual path of how the arm is going to go, is that "psychedelic"? It seems to be using a word that has heavy and somewhat negative 60's-70's overtones and lumping lots of things into it, in the same way that was going on a few posts ago with "psychosis". I think you are just asking for cognitive trouble and inconsistency thinking of these things in this way.
I agree with one basic point: that the notion of functionality needs to be kept in the criteria for whether or not things are going well and perhaps could be a part of how to classify these things, but it needs some additional terms and clarifiers that help put the necessary nuances on the thing, and I don't think that 'psychedelic" is a reasonable candidate.
Just as cars driven poorly, in bad conditions and/or when not maintained properly can cause people to wreck, and yet I don't classify all car driving as "wrecking" the car, just so calling all powers "psychosis" or "psychedelic" is missing something about how they can be used functionally.
Just because people may sometimes see things in the "ordinary world" that leave them temporarily or permanently emotionally scarred and traumatized, such as happens in war, for instance, or feel physical sensations that may leave them emotionally impaired, such as rape or severe pain, I don't classify all "seeing" and "feeling" itself as something bad or use some basically pejorative and culturally-loaded words to describe them just because somewhere in the far range of things related to them bad things can happen.
Bad things can happen in any realm of human endeavor and related to anything that we do or experience. I don't classify experience itself using broadly pejorative language just because of that. It is the "all life is suffering" mentality that the Buddha gets bashed for, when clearly he meant nothing like that at all, though he clearly did acknowledge the potential for great suffering, but he still used the tools he had available to make life better, and he used the powers all the time in that regard (albeit with appropriate warnings, as with anything powerful), if the texts are any indication.
Why that persistent linguistic habit? What is underlying that? If there is discomfort with this stuff, address that aspect of what is going in yourself, rather than attempting to project it out onto the world with broad classification schemes filled with negatively-loaded terms. (DhO)
Astral triangles or the magickal implications of everything I do. I went on a retreat with some friends for about 11 days in early April in France at a rented castle called Chateau du Buffalo in the countryside of Normandy, France, and we did the fire kasina.
Towards the very end, when my concentration was getting moderately strong but not as strong as it had gotten on some other retreats, I was out on the lawn at the dark end of twilight drawing symbols in the air, mostly triangles, as that seemed to be the theme of the retreat for me.
I could see the ghostly light trail off my fire wand like luminous syrup onto the air in front of me as I drew the triangles. Then, for reasons unknown, I closed my eyes, and there, in a black space, I saw this brilliantly clear vision, like perfect CGI, not the shaky, pixilated stuff that had comprised most of the images I saw on that retreat.
There was a perfect golden pyramid about 10cm wide at the base rotating slowly in space as if dangling from an invisible string at about arms length. In front of it, forming something like a loose tunnel, were three stable golden triangles open made of what appeared to be brass or gold with a few small symbols on them. These pyramids had sides about 1.5cm wide, open middles, and appeared to be about 5mm thick from front to back. The first was about framing the pyramid but coming towards me, so that the triangle closest to the pyramid was the smallest triangle and was about 15cm tall, the next about 20cm tall, and the closest one to me was about 25cm tall and mere inches from my face.
I watched the pyramid rotate for perhaps less than a minute, and then opened my eyes, and, when I closed them again, the image was gone.
The though struck me, “Wow, if drawing that relatively weakly glowing triangle with my wand created some much more elaborate, stylized, perfected, clear, complex triangle-like arrangement on some other plane of experience that I am not normally aware of, what is all the rest of what I do doing on that plane and perhaps on many other planes of experience? I must admit that I had no idea that was happening, and thus must admit that my knowledge of the magickal implications of everything I do must encompass only a very small portion of what is actually going on.”
I found this oddly humbling and perspective modifying. It added yet another layer of awe regarding the vast and intricate thing which is Karma.
While this might seem either a very obvious or very trivial insight, I keep reflecting on it many times per day with other simple actions, pondering what in the world they look like and are doing on the plane of experience on which I saw the golden triangles and pyramid. (DhO)
Siddhis in daily life. Siddhis in daily life is a complex topic. For most, they will be very hit or miss, hard to access, unpredictable, if they happen at all. For a rare few, they have them on tap at baseline and were just born that way. I know a very small number of these types. Then there are those in the middle, for whom greater concentration, more practice in general, and more practice and inclination on the siddhis specifically makes them more likely, but they are still likely to be unpredictable and hit-or-miss.
Still, it sort of depends on where you want to draw the line between siddhi and non-siddhi. From a certain point of view, the fact of thought, movement, memory, dreaming, feeling, and so many things are pretty magickal. Some will appreciate this more than others.
Regarding the more impressive, unusual, seemingly magical siddhis, generally the more removed from ordinary experience, the harder they are to cultivate. Still, more emphasis, interest, study, and practice can make things that seem far away suddenly accessible, though for most people in daily life this will be in sporadic flashes rather than sustained ability.
Then there is the fact that the majority of people who chance into the siddhis don't want to live there, don't want to live in a magical world, don't want to deal with the implications of that, the strange things you find in that world, the additional considerations that come into play, the additional entities you have to deal with, the additional paradigms you have to bring to bear to make sense of it all, the additional moral hassle of having to worry that some subtle intention will produce some unskillful magical effect.
Most people get out of magic not because it doesn't work but because it does. The magical world is a seriously acquired taste and not to most people's liking once one realizes what is involves.
Most of us likely didn't come up learning how to deal with that world, so the learning curve can be steep. Theories and advice as to how to handle even basic things, such as how to handle some entity that shows up, how best to use energy, and what the implications of thought and emotion are for magic, opinions about what to do and how to properly think about these topics vary widely between dogmatists.
Then there is the problem of things we don't want to be real getting real, having real-world effects, impacting our lives, showing up when we don't want them to, and then we can start manifesting effects at the mere subtle whim and due to forces and parts of ourselves and subconscious that we really wish weren't there or could somehow be unplugged from the controls, but that is not always so easy.
Anyway, and despite all this, there are those of us who feel called for whatever strange reasons to go farther into the realms of the powers. If this is your karma, do it sanely, safely, and be careful. Keep experienced people in the loop. Cultivate friends who are also on the path of the powers if at all possible.
As my friend Lisa recently said to me, "Don't summon anything you can't banish." The general principle applies to all of the realms of the powers. Just as a car's most important system is the brakes, just so with the powers. (DhO)
Things could be vastly different than the way we were brought up to believe. A fellow DhOer posted: "Daniel has written about his personal experience of the powers in some detail. Along with the other statements in his post it seemed pretty clear to me his intended meaning - another line of evidence in support of a claim that the powers are "real" (i.e. something beyond just misattributions of causality, delusional and confused thinking, hallucinations and so on)".
Much more interesting than the question of ‘what is real’ is the question of ‘what is causal’. "Whether or not these are “real” is a question that I am happy to avoid, though these experiences can be so extremely vivid that they can seem more “real” than the “real world.” Much more interesting than the question of what is real is the question of what is causal, i.e. what leads to what. For example, we might decide that our dreams are not “real”, but we must admit that there are real world consequences of having dreams. All this can be a slippery business, and the “psychic powers” generally don’t turn out to be quite what they seem. As one of my friends once said, “Yeah, I can fly, but just not in this realm!” Buyer beware, or proceed with care."
Said another way:
There is the caveat to this that simply labeling them all "hallucinations", as is common, can be paradoxically comforting for some people. I think that is what people are generally trying to get to with terms like "unreal". In that framework, they are merely psychotic.
Why they would find the notion that they are psychotic so comforting is unclear to me, but clearly many people do, given the tenacity to which people cling to that conceptual framework for these things, and, if that helps them somehow, as a pragmatist it does cause me internal conflict to criticize them in something they find useful, though I do find myself compelled to try offering alternatives that I think can accomplish the goals that the label "hallucinations" seems to accomplish, (namely comfort and not taking them too seriously) with frameworks that can accomplish similar goals and provide increased workability simultaneously without the nagging downsides of the sense of psychosis, which itself makes certain experiences that could be healing, revealing and workable into experiences that it is going to be harder to get something out of in the same way.
Now, it can clearly be claimed that for those who are really psychotic in the dysfunction, screw-up-your-life, you-really-should-take-your-meds sense, having an option for labeling these experiences as something other than "hallucinations" and "psychosis" can give them an anchor into that destructive territory that they can use to rationalize not getting treatment, and it is a fair point, but there are ways to differentiate these things without pathologizing all of those experiences, some of which can be quite helpful in a way that good old schizophrenia, depression with psychotic features and psychotic mania basically always aren't. (DhO)
"But it struck me as an odd thing to say, in that nobody doubts that people have experiences to which they attribute paranormal explanations. Further, it is hard to doubt that those experiences and the use of those explanations are more likely the stronger your belief in the paranormal and your tendency to attribute those explanations. Furthermore, certain practices make those experiences more likely. And this indicates what? People who seek to attribute paranormal explanations to their experiences and have a strong desire to have those experiences have experiences to which they attribute paranormal explanations".
"Just because people report experiences of past lives doesn't make it true that reincarnation exists. Just because people report experiences of being abducted by aliens it doesn't make it true that aliens have visited the earth and abducted humans. Just because people report experiences of talking to God doesn't make it true that God exists".
Daniel's answer: It's extremely comforting to think that way, and many people do to good effect. I would actually recommend it to most people most of the time, and it apparently is very comforting and helpful for you also, so my doing anything to change it would seem premature and unhelpful.
That said, there are sets of experiences that it is very, very hard for even a skeptical scientist/engineer/doctor type, such as myself, to honestly dismiss in that sort of way and have it make any sense at all.
That said, sense is not always what is most important to people, with a seemingly rational/mechanical/materialistic/scientistic universe being preferred by many to one that is, well, more complex than that.
Said another way, it is viscerally disquieting for many to embrace the possibility that things could be vastly different than the way they were brought up to believe they were, and extremely compelling to habitually and conveniently rationalize all sorts of things as just coincidence, hallucination, false-association, and the like.
There are aspects of my own memories that tempt me to contract, forget, and rationalize in similar ways, a temptation I resist, as, unlike you, who feels that the height of sanity is to stay on the what might be termed the straight and narrow, I have slowly and reluctantly come to the opposite conclusion, meaning that I feel that the way to real understanding is to be willing to stretch in ways that are not always so neat, tidy, and reassuring when overwhelming data accumulated across decades points that way.
As Brother Bayes said, enough good data will always swamp bad prior assumptions. (DhO)
Much more interesting than the question of ‘what is real’ is the question of ‘what is causal’. "Whether or not these are “real” is a question that I am happy to avoid, though these experiences can be so extremely vivid that they can seem more “real” than the “real world.” Much more interesting than the question of what is real is the question of what is causal, i.e. what leads to what. For example, we might decide that our dreams are not “real”, but we must admit that there are real world consequences of having dreams. All this can be a slippery business, and the “psychic powers” generally don’t turn out to be quite what they seem. As one of my friends once said, “Yeah, I can fly, but just not in this realm!” Buyer beware, or proceed with care."
Said another way:
- Do people have these experiences? Yes.
- Are these experiences causal, meaning: did something cause them and do these experiences lead to other effects? Yes.
- Are these experiences extremely compelling sometimes? Yes.
- Is there scientific evidence for the measurable effects of the powers? Yes.
- Can these experiences be healing? Yes.
- Can these experiences be totally awesome and really fascinating? Yes.
- Can these experiences cause people to pursue really deep concentration, a sort of carrot approach? Yes.
- Can these experiences sometimes cause people to cross into territory that is clearly pathological? Yes.
- Does that mean they are "real"? That totally depends on how you define "real", and I will claim that defining "real" is not easy and that you have to be extremely careful with your philosophy and conceptual frameworks when you do that, particularly if you are coming up with a definition of "real" that includes calling plenty of things that occur and have consequences, however interpreted, "not real".
There is the caveat to this that simply labeling them all "hallucinations", as is common, can be paradoxically comforting for some people. I think that is what people are generally trying to get to with terms like "unreal". In that framework, they are merely psychotic.
Why they would find the notion that they are psychotic so comforting is unclear to me, but clearly many people do, given the tenacity to which people cling to that conceptual framework for these things, and, if that helps them somehow, as a pragmatist it does cause me internal conflict to criticize them in something they find useful, though I do find myself compelled to try offering alternatives that I think can accomplish the goals that the label "hallucinations" seems to accomplish, (namely comfort and not taking them too seriously) with frameworks that can accomplish similar goals and provide increased workability simultaneously without the nagging downsides of the sense of psychosis, which itself makes certain experiences that could be healing, revealing and workable into experiences that it is going to be harder to get something out of in the same way.
Now, it can clearly be claimed that for those who are really psychotic in the dysfunction, screw-up-your-life, you-really-should-take-your-meds sense, having an option for labeling these experiences as something other than "hallucinations" and "psychosis" can give them an anchor into that destructive territory that they can use to rationalize not getting treatment, and it is a fair point, but there are ways to differentiate these things without pathologizing all of those experiences, some of which can be quite helpful in a way that good old schizophrenia, depression with psychotic features and psychotic mania basically always aren't. (DhO)
How we relate to things that seem to be powers and what we do with them. Acting on them in ways that violate ordinary morality codes you would have in place for any other information or ability can meet with the same problems as ordinary information and abilities, so it is just more things to apply the same basic considerations to. As we get older and develop as people we gain all sorts of additional knowledge and abilities, some of which may seem extraordinary, but the same ground rules apply.
As you have noticed, resolutions to make them go away can help if they bug us but some may show up anyway. Similarly, resolutions to have them show up can make them more likely, but not always. Resolutions to modify aspects of them you find disconcerting can also help: consider which parts of them you don't like and see if you can modify them in this way: might help.
As to psychosis: it is a complex issue in this territory. As Siggie said, that which interferes with love and work may qualify as mental illness, and that which doesn't may just be weird meditation side effects or however you want to think of them. If people around you start to tell you you are acting strangely or need help, that probably needs consideration.
The more we get into the powers, the further we diverge in our paradigms, experiences and behaviors from the safe end of what might loosely be called "conventional reality". It is not that this divergence is always inherently bad, or that "conventional reality" is always good (as it obviously isn't), but realize that there are points to this "conventional reality" and that the further you diverge from it, the weirder things can get, and the more you are likely to run into strange reactions to the things you say and do.
It is only in very special and unusual social and situational contexts that much of the territory that we can get into when we spend some time going way out there might be acceptable, and even that gets dicey past a certain point. Strong consideration for the threat you can create to other's paradigms is of value.
Ayahuasca is some crazy stuff. I have no idea what effects it might have on these things. Personally, I found it like drinking massively vertigo-inducing technicolor brain poison mixed with the grinding space-blender from hell with long periods of vomiting and diarrhea tacked on later for good measure. Others have had different experiences. Best of luck to you in that. (DhO)
Powers are fascinating and fun, but are not without cost. So, I am dancing, and pretty into it, as I am a pretty intense dancer, and suddenly this other space becomes available, and the mind, either by habit, attraction, or whatever, takes it as object, and there suddenly is a radical shift, and the bodily space becomes very black, and green flaming energy pours off my hands that I can both see and feel trailing out into space perhaps a few feet before it diffuses into that space, and the sense of truly awesome POWER! that generally accompanies those sorts of things really kicks in, and this lasts maybe a minute or so, and afterwards I feel wholly deflated, like the worst post-siddhi hangover I have had in quite a while, and the effect lasts for perhaps 2 days or so, just lifted this evening. Those who have actually managed to draw blue flaming pentagrams in space will likely draw close parallels...
It convinced me, rightly or wrongly, of the following things:
(1) While the powers are fascinating and they can be lots of fun, they are not without cost. I have learned this before countless times and this was just a refresher.
(2) For reasons that I suspect related to going into that Titan-like territory (this being Buddhist 5th of 6-Realms terminology for those not familiar with those things), my dreams, which continue to be extremely vivid and detailed and lengthy, have gone back to a mode I am very familiar with, and it involves massive struggles involving graphic violence, life-or-death struggles and the heavy application of powers of various sorts. I am not a fan of this mode as interesting as some aspects can be, and hope it returns to more recent forms, which seemed more gently allegorical.
(3) While both Tarin and Trent have encouraged me to do jhanic stuff fused with the Practice Formally Known as Prince Actualism on the DhO, I actually don't think it fits for what is going on for me at all at this particularly time (subject to change, obviously...) as it just feels like the wrong direction in some way, like having what I will loosely refer to as inner space vanishing is more the current trend, and any jhana seems to be doing something that one way or the other involves some inner space in some way, however refined or subtle, at least it seems to me: I suspect EIS, if he reads this, will consider commenting here, and I still think he and I should talk for a while sometime, such as Wednesday...
(4) There is something to be said for working in a particular paradigm for a while and adopting the worldview of that paradigm while doing so, and kudos to my Chaos Magician phase for that useful perspective, and a similar point was reiterated by Tarin in a recent conversation, in this I read his meaning as feeling like he was trying to fuse the Actualism and more Buddhistic paradigms to some to something useful, and he seemed to be having some further reflections on the various successes and failures of that, but perhaps he will comment, as I easily could have misinterpreted what he said to some subtle or gross degree even with my quite vague rendering of that here, and acknowledging the trend among Actualists and former-Actualists to detail their thoughts in with a degree of hyper-meticulous precision that would make contract lawyers gawk in wide-eyed wonder and admiration and makes simple doctors like myself glaze in seconds, but I digress... (DhO)
On Manipulation and Ethics. [A guy posted: I did 27 rolls with 60 dice each: 1620 rolls. There were 304 fours out of 1620. You'd expect around 270, so 34 datapoints were shifted. Odds of fluke (calculated at http://www.stattrek.org/online-calculator/binomial.aspx) are just 1.5%. That's pretty strong evidence of psychic functioning, gathered for free, in less than 10 minutes. Daniel then posted:]
If true, as in there was "something going on": is that prognostication or manipulation and how could you tell the difference, or is the difference of more than intellectual importance?
Further, look at your core interest, the thing that gets the emotions going, the thing that really hits home, and think about how you might want the results to come out, truly.
Would you want a perfect 270? That would seem strange, wouldn't it, perhaps too perfect? What would that make you believe about things? Would it be safer to have no "effect"? If in your heart of hearts, you found the world and your sense of identity to be safer without an effect, but you actually had the power to create effects, in this case the effect you wanted, which was no effect, how can you tell no effect from the effect of creating something that looks just like no effect?
Wouldn't it be more comfortable to live in a world where impossible action at a distance was just as advertised, meaning impossible? Or, would you want to live in a world where that sort of power and causality operated but just not know it or stay content with hints of it and so create a result that gave you that conclusion?
Would you really want to live in and believe in a world where the impossible was possible, the power of the mind was that great, and that all the things like the sense of responsibility, possibility and also of fear that might come along with that?
Would you want, say, 580, or some other number that gave you an odds of it happening "by chance alone", whatever that is, of some astronomically small number?
Same questions as above: What if you thought your mind was that powerful, with this confirmed, certified, a zillion to one against it?
How would it be living in a world like that? What level of mental interest might create an effect on outcomes, on other people, on other situations? What if just casual interest did it? What if subconscious interest did it? What if the primal forces of dreams did it? (Ever seen Forbidden Planet?) What level of mental control, maturity, ethics, wisdom, causal understanding, and the like would be required to handle a mind in a world like that responsibly? If those are not within your ability to achieve, what would be the right thing to do then?
Or, would you want a number like 285, just off enough not to cause too much concern? Would that be easier, safer, less paradigm challenging, and so how could you tell if you created the response you wanted to get at some core level from just that happening "by chance"?
Or, would you want, say, a number that was just far enough different from 270 but not so far as, say, 580, like you got, such that you had the tingling possibility of something going on, just enough to be safe, but also enough to be excited about it, kinda' like a roller coaster: thrilling, but not dangerous, at least most of the time.
Which would actually create the most "juice" in you? Which would you truly want to be true?
How can you tell the difference between creating the effect you think you want and the effect you might really want at the deepest paradigmatic, identity and comfort levels?
What if other people had the same power you did? What if they had more, say much more? What would be the safe range you would be willing to believe in for that sort of power that people might actually possess?
What if they didn't have the morality, the ethics, the control, the wisdom you did? What if they were truly dangerous people, angry people, confused people, greedy people, far more dangerous than you ever thought, creating action at a distance in seemingly impossible ways by all their desires and intentions, their forces of will? What if there was a vast psychic tug-of-war with countless zillions of beings pulling in a zillion directions at the very fabric of causality all the time they were conscious (and possibly unconscious) whose rules you likely would never be able to even be able to start to grasp? What if that was the inherent fabric of the universe itself? Would you create a result that could lead you to conclusions like that?
Why is it that magickal training nearly always begins with defensive rituals and techniques, LBRP, that sort of thing? Why is Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defense still a classic? What are the implications of living with that sort of paradigm? Are fear and power inherently bound together? These are hard questions.
I have already done my own experiments and found the results initially very exciting, until I began to really think about the implications, and then I found them totally terrifying. Nothing like really thinking about this stuff to inspire one to try to be moral, work on one's stuff, and have fantastic powers of direct comprehension of what is going on in one's heart, mind and body at all times. (DhO)
Dealing with ghosts and spirits. I like Mario and Hermetically Sealed's advice. While some spiritualists would disagree (as they are prone to calling up whatever spirits happened to be hanging around, which, from my point of view, is totally crazy), I would say that the only things you want to call up are as clean, benevolent and wise as you can possibly imagine.
- Consider Tibetan Tantra: pick the safest, highest Bodhisattvas you can, a Green Tara, a 1000-armed white Chenrezig, or something like that.
- Consider deep contemplative Christianity: call up Angels, Mary, Jesus or God.
- Consider Hinduism: call up Vishnu, Indra, or Brahma.
- Consider some deep nature religion: the spirit of an ancient oak, of the Earth Mother herself.
These things should be done by sane people, in a sane context, with good sane people around you who you talk with about what is happening and what you are experiencing. Realize that living in a world where those things present attunes you to a reality where those things are real, and the more time you spend there, the more real they become, and real things are causal and can be powerful. Realize that their agendas may not be anything like your own.
Keep your wits and morality strong.
"Highest and Best," as my friend Tylila used to say.
...
I exercised a tech demon from Tarin in a pretty typical Ceremonial Magick-style banishing. It was done as he felt he had a demon that was creating havoc with any electronic devices he encountered. He said the results and improvements were immediate. Interestingly, while he was getting a clear picture of the demon in his mind, he noticed another one whose function he wasn't sure about. We just banished the one in question. I thought little of it afterwards.
Two months later, while doing some electrical wiring, the wide spade bit on powerful 1/2 inch drill I was using hit a nail and spun around and broke my right 4th metacarpal (a bone in my hand), and, quite surprisingly, at that instant an image of Tarin's demon that we had very rudely and relatively harshly exercised flashed into my mind with a clear message, "This is payback!"
My hand was fixed with two minor surgeries and is fine now.
Still, it made me ponder the question carefully, the question of exactly what we had done, what the meaning of the images and message that it seemed I had received the moment my hand was broken, and the like. My conclusions:
- Should you find yourself in a mindset and paradigm where it makes sense to exercise demons, it is reasonable to assume that traditional methods are likely effective. In our case, it was a very basic setup: he stood in a pentagram with candles at the corners, the demon was bound in the pentagram by stating intentions and visualization, he stepped into an adjoining circle while leaving the demon in the pentagram, and the demon was sent elsewhere, instructed not to bother him again.
- However, something in the ethics of this rings oddly to me now, like some wrong was done. I would advocate for trying some more compassionate approach that considers the full balance of things, the point of view of the purported demon, and tries to find a reasonable solution that doesn't involve harsh commands and banishment so much as some totally different paradigm or point of view based on loving-kindness, resonating at some totally different frequency of perspective, and the like.
Obviously, that whole way of thinking of the world is a problematic one in multiple ways, but should you find that is the way you are thinking of things, hopefully something in the above advice will be useful. (DhO)
What to do when facing demons. Demons are a very strange topic. Your belief system is about as important as anything when dealing with them, so modifying it to a paradigm in which you are ok and your practice will be ok is a good initial defense. Dedicating your practice to the benefit and awakening of all beings formally at the beginning of each practice period will serve as solid defense against many bad things.
If you eventually run into entities in a 5 days retreat, try the following:
If you really start getting into whacky demonic stuff, and somehow those above things are not working and you are starting to get nervous or worse, immediately stop practicing, hang out around sane people, and let a more advanced practitioner who knows this territory well know what is going on. This is not "We are the ONLY ones who can save you", this is just getting sensible help from friends who can help. It is very unlikely that you will have to use this advice, but it is worth mentioning anyway, for, as the occasional emails testify, people can get into weird territory that benefits from the advice of sane friends and occasionally mental health workers skilled in crisis stabilization. (DhO)
If you eventually run into entities in a 5 days retreat, try the following:
- Metta Practice: this was traditionally recommended by the Buddha and first taught by him when some demons were harassing some monks who were meditating in a forest. Start with metta practice for yourself, then turn it to the demon. It will very likely either go away or transform into something benevolent. When dreaming and I encounter malevolent entities, I am sometimes able to remember to do this, and they cannot touch me, sliding through me like ghosts, as the metta energy and their anti-metta energy are on different spiritual planes, it seems.
- A simple, universally-recognized, potent, well-established, certified, magickal banishing ritual that anyone can perform and many have already practiced to a level of competence: Give them the finger. Tell them to fuck off. Go back to your practice. Establishing reasonable boundaries with entities is considered healthy in this business, and this establishes reasonable boundaries in unambiguous terms that demons will understand.
- Blast them to pieces with extremely rapid-fire investigation and noting. A story in the Udana tells of a mighty monk who was whomped hard on the head by a passing demon, but, as the monk was a potent practitioner, he felt only a slight headache, and the demon felt his hand burning horribly. This is called protection through good practice. So, practice well: strong concentration is a torch that can bring light or cut: once your concentration is strong, keep it on track, and it will protect you.
- Ignore them and tune to something else.
If you really start getting into whacky demonic stuff, and somehow those above things are not working and you are starting to get nervous or worse, immediately stop practicing, hang out around sane people, and let a more advanced practitioner who knows this territory well know what is going on. This is not "We are the ONLY ones who can save you", this is just getting sensible help from friends who can help. It is very unlikely that you will have to use this advice, but it is worth mentioning anyway, for, as the occasional emails testify, people can get into weird territory that benefits from the advice of sane friends and occasionally mental health workers skilled in crisis stabilization. (DhO)
How to have visions. As Tarin says: you get what you optimize for. Thus, when walking around, pay attention to color and detail the colors and visuals of your experience, like you were trying to remember how to paint it later. Also, as suggested: candle flame is good, and the black obsidian ball should work also: basically any kasina-type object. When eyes are closed, if you can see any colors or shapes or even vague static, really pay attention to it, try to manipulate it if you can, and slowly develop out those colors and forms to more complex shapes.
I first traveled out of body at about 14-15 years old, around the time of my A&P event then, and have done it a reasonable number of times since. I last traveled out of body on my last retreat in February during a sit: briefly found myself sitting in the waves in about 3 feet of water at the beach, lasted a few seconds, then snapped rapidly back into my body: good times. I also did it on my retreat in 2015 in Scotland: briefly found myself sitting in the wood stove that we used to heat our meditation room, like I was part of the wood stove, and the fire was burning just in front of my stomach, and I seemed to be a part of the wood stove, then snapped back, again, lasting just a few seconds. I have had more sustained travels, some lasting minutes. Some involve more control than others. Some have been pretty ordinary, just floating up out of my body and through a wall. Others have been very bizarre, such as one in which I became rainbow light beams streaming out across sun-dappled clouds. I have traveled out into space, to various geographic locations, to very weird dark spaces inhabited by strange alien-like creatues, and many other odd experiences. Few of these left me with any sense that I learned anything specifically useful or significant, but many were quite entertaining and fun to ponder anyway.
Astral travel isn't called that in the Buddhist texts, but when they talk about traveling to other realms, flying, stroking the sun and moon so mighty, traveling through the ground or walking on water, that is what they are talking about.
There is relative language and there is ultimate language. One who has traveled will find likely something compelling about the notion that we are some spirit body that most of the time inhabits a human body but doesn't have to, as that is exactly what the experience feels like. To extrapolate that to a perfect ontology, meaning a definitive description of reality in some perfectly true sense, is not necessarily accurate, nor can it easily be disproven either.
As to "no-self", all phenomena, regardless of what they are, are too transient, too causal, and too interconnected to constitute a self, but that doesn't prevent the system from creating all sorts of fascinating experiences, all of which are empty yet still function. That includes our ordinary bodily experience of our lives and everything else. It is interesting you didn't ask: "I really seem to be this body, but how does that fit with no-self?" The sense that we are our body can be just as compelling an experience as traveling, yet just as empty and in the exact same way. (DhO)
Much can be learned about mainstream science. Philosophy is useful to scientists and sometimes interesting in its own right. It is hard to argue against many of the basic Empiricist points made by Hume about experience, for example. Further, much can be learned about mainstream science by remembering what mainstream science says.
In this way, we find that the sum total of our experience has no material equivalents. This is what science tells us most clearly and explicitly.
All these colors, sounds, textures, smells, etc: they all exist in a brain somewhere, so science tells us. That brain is the real mind, the real matter, the real reality. However, these things we experience in this seemingly 3D world are not that. They are in a brain somewhere that puts a bunch of brain centers together to create this illusory 3D space in which all these non-existent, non-material illusions occur. So says the standard model of the brain.
Here's the kicker: what is the spacial relationship between this 3D illusory, non-material, brain-created world and the actual brain? The head we experience can't be the actual thing, so says materialism. It isn't actually here. It is in a brain somewhere, but where? Are the spaces the same? Are the spaces different? Where do you think that brain is relative to all of this.
You might think it was out there somewhere: like the outside shell of a holodeck. You might try to say that the brain we think is in this head is the actual brain: that is the exact opposite of the standard materialist model.
As this entire sensate, experienced world is created non-material illusions in a brain somewhere else, anything the brain can create from an experiential point of view can occur anywhere in this brain, as it is just non-material stuff. Ironically, materialism leads directly to its profound opposite: that all this that we experience is totally non-material and brain-made. So, anything you can imagine a brain creating, which is pretty wide, particularly if you have dreamed, can occur in this field of non-materiality. Why do you have a problem with that, when materalism tells us this is so?
However, given that everything we experience is totally non-material and brain-made illusion, why not learn to mold and modify this reality to our tastes, as can be learned to some degree in meditation?
Amazing how few materialists know much of anything of the obvious and straightforward conclusions of materlism. (DhO)
Scientific Materialism is a fascinating set of contradictions. Scientific materialism (SM) is a fascinating set of contradictions. Check this out:
- SM says that the real world is material, made of atoms, subatomic particles, probability waves squared, probably has 7-11 or so dimensions, and that we can't know it directly. It is inferred from the senses, deduced by careful measurement by machines, and correlates freakishly with mathematics.
- SM notices that there are no true colors, only the mental images of them that correlate with but are not photons. There are no true tastes, only the mental images of them that correlate with some atomic interactions with taste and smell receptors. There are no true sounds, only the mental images that correlate with various frequencies of vibrations.
Thus, SM posits that this whole world we experience is not the world, it is merely an image that hints at what the real world is, a world we can't know, can't see, as all we know are sounds, sights, textures, tastes and all of that, none of which is real, all of which is a correlate with some reality.
SM posits that this is all happening in a brain somewhere, a material brain. Aside from the obvious "Hard Problem" that there is no material basis for consciousness that has been clearly established and no material correlate of consciousness, as all of this is mere atoms and particles and probability densities, none of which are conscious, there is the serious problem of the spatial relationship between this visual, auditory, tactile space and the "real space", the "material space", the "real world" of atoms, particles and all of that which this visual, auditory, tactile, etc. representation represents.
So, where is this set of false images in relation to that brain? Clearly, that brain isn't here, as this "here" is a construct in various lobes of that brain, frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital, etc. Those combine various sense modalities to produce a set of hyper-processed, ultra-filtered images that somehow correlate with the real material world but clearly are not the real material world, as there is no "red", there is no "sweet", those are not real things to SM, only false images.
So, in SM, our whole sensate world, particularly including thoughts, are not real, and instead only images, impressions, imitations in a brain somewhere, highly processed, extremely representational but not actual, and they are taking place in some created space with no way to conceptually resolve the spatial relationship between that created image space and the "real material space".
This model has many profound implications and is generally poorly understood by scientific materialists, as they tend to believe that parts of what we experience are really "real", which SM flatly disagrees with. We tend to believe that the hands are our real hands, our eyes are our real eyes, colors really are photons, textures really are matter, but clearly none of these are true, and instead the model says that nerves and a brain somewhere (not here) create this functional illusion so the real material "us" somewhere can function.
As Buddhism concerns itself with experience, and, for vipassana purposes, says that sensations, colors, tastes, sounds, textures, thoughts and all of that are the stuff that is relevant as a basis for awakening, this directly contracts the assumptions of SM.
Were a scientific materialist to posit something like "waking up to the truth", they would mean waking to the real world of particles and forces, not sensations, as the sensations are not the real, material world by definition in SM.
Further, when the SM kids say things like, "Psychic powers are impossible!" they are forgetting that this world is a highly processed, highly removed, highly symbolic sensate representation of their purported "real material world", and so it makes no sense to bind this world of experience and sensations to the laws that they say bind matter, as they are two different if theoretically related things.
Remember, everything about the "material world" is totally extrapolated from sensations, and, while such logic has opened technological doors that are truly amazing, the correlation of imagined laws and math to sensate phenomena doesn't mean that ontologically the "material world" that we are totally unable to experience directly is actually true, and how one would ever prove it was or wasn't is unknown.
That there are no material correlates of consciousness in the SM worldview and they vaguely hand-wave and say crazy things like "emergent property" to try to explain how experience arises and what it is represents such a glaring hole in their entire worldview and puts such a distance between the world that people experience and the totally different world of inanimate particles and forces that they postulate as to be laughable.
Is SM useful for certain problems? Definitely, as shown in countless technological marvels and results.
Does is form a complete theory of human experience and life sufficient to satisfy one who likes theories that explain things we can experience and thus form a basis of awakening? It would be madness and staggering delusion to imagine that SM does in its current form, as it explicitly denies that experience is what is really going on, as experience can't be material by definition, and so, as all of the "material" we experience is thus mental, and it explicitly is not a Scientific Mentalism theory, and as sensate experience forms the basis of awakening, they are explicitly two totally separate domains.
… It is also true that one of the sets of concepts that bridged the gap for me from my largely scientific materialist upbringing and Buddhism was books like The Dancing Wu Li Masters and its exploration of the strange apparent interactions of consciousness and quantum mechanics, but even Newtonian Mechanics was enough to convince me that there clearly couldn't be a separate agent. So, yes, SM can facilitate some aspects of Buddhist understanding, such as causality and a lack of a separate self that exists as a stable entity separate from the rest of causality somehow.
Still, to go deeper requires working at the level of sensations, which SM would consider entirely unreal and merely representational of an unexperienceable true material reality, and this requires a different set of assumptions than SM offers, as, were one to entirely believe SM, one could easily dismiss this world of sensations as being an invalid basis of investigation in comparison to things like mathematical extrapolation and physical experiments in hyper-controlled, ultra-specialized situations that attempt to approach the clean ideal circumstances in which the math works perfectly. This dismissal has caused profound paradigmatic tensions between realms such as modern physics and the sciences that have more to do with the human condition and experience, as we all know well and has been mentioned above. (DhO)
Current Physics is going to be like the illusion of Duality. Viewing things one way, a wrong way, one can often come up with all sorts of explanations for things that are consistent enough except when pushed to their limits.
Duality is an example of this. Science tells that duality must be an illusion, given the standard laws of physics and biochemistry. It is absurd that we are continuous, that we are separate, and yet we persistently perceive it otherwise, and most people function pretty well totally misperceiving reality through this odd logic, and coming up with cognitive strategies to deal with the inconsistencies and gloss over them, which, when one starts to do really careful investigation of experience, are revealed to be so ridiculous and patently absurd that it is amazing that we were able to craft such an elaborate worldview of stability and continuity based on something that is so totally causal, transient, and integrated.
Most scientists themselves will never ever come to that point of insight, an insight that some young children on an insight retreat can have with great clarity.
Thus, this is a fundamental example of how we can construct a model of the world that seems relatively internally consistent and yet is totally delusional.
I have this intuition that something like this is going to happen in the world of modern physics, and I am not alone in this.
Current models of the basic structure of reality lead to absurd paradoxes and often contradict one another. Infinities abound in equations that they make no sense in. Models that try do resolve them do preposterous things, or seemingly preposterous things, like going to 10+ dimensions, folded dimensions, and even weirder systems of alternative logic and mathematics that would make your head spin and seem totally at odds with anything that could possibly make sense.
It is all pointing to some deep, fundamental misunderstanding, something being woefully incomplete at the heart of it all.
I think that current physics is going to be like the illusion of duality, and we are awaiting that cognitive breakthrough, that paradigmatic shift, that will make sense of something that, at the moment and past a certain point, is deeply non-sensical.
I have followed the attempts for physicists to resolve these issues for about 30 years or so, since I was first introduced to them in 8th grade. I have taken courses in Advanced Modern Physics and regularly pour through the latest and greatest attempts to make sense of it all that appear in journals such as Scientific American, which is about the level that I can grasp these days, and the overall conclusion is that they don't know how it all works, don't know why the paradoxes are there, and totally fail to explain many aspects of what we see happening at a mechanistic level, though their theories do a remarkable job of predicting all sorts of very amazing things under extremely controlled and hyper-exotic conditions, such as in particle accelerators and near-zero degree Bose-Einstein condensates and the like.
Thus, those waving around the scientific worldview as if it is air-tight and logical and straightforward and lacking in wiggle room are totally missing the condition of the state of the art.
We have no idea how quantum effects resolve to the things they become. The power of quantum effects to influence the macroscopic continues to amaze us, with more examples coming all the time, and coming at the level where they could influence cellular machinery, which is the level that you need to have they influence experience and the function of organisms, and the connections between things that the world of quantum probability and entangling hints at is staggering in its implications, and we still have no idea how that all plays out at the macro scale, but we suspect it is vastly more than we currently think it is. (DhO)
My Dream of a New Scientific Journal. This was from an email I just sent off to some of my science/meditator/geek friends and I thought I would share it here also. I added just a few more titles to this version:
You know what I think the world needs? A scientific, peer-reviewed journal in which we could totally meditation geek out instead of having to tip toe around things: a journal that would meet us at the level where things already are rather than, well, how to put it nicely? Imagine the Visuddhimagga meets Nature, that sort of thing, a place where the terminology and lingo were alright and yet science could proceed and describe things with the technical meditation jargon that people already use in high level practice. Imagine the titles:
A few more titles while they are in my brain:
This is from his Wilber One phase, his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness. In it, he made the point that humans have a range of paradigms to draw from and routinely draw from many of them simultaneously, each having some different resonance with some different part of our being, each tapping into some capacity within us, and each seemingly being somewhat or even totally contradictory in some way to the others.
As you read my descriptions, the apparent hierarchy is obvious. The problem is that our brains have structures that resonate with all of those levels to various degrees, and our own personal manifestation of this spectrum will vary depending upon circumstances and conditioning, so if we don't have some basic awareness brought to each level, some comfort navigating in each one, then we will encounter situations in which we have inadequate personal understanding and fluency with the way our own humanity can manifest, leading to increased shadow sides and difficulties.
Paraphrasing and grossly simplifying that somewhat complex work and filtering it through about 25 years of thinking about it, we have the following:
The way we think about reality happens on a spectrum of paradigms and modes of perception, being really almost meta-paradigms, large baskets in which we can consider how we view the world. They vary by the degree of integration or division within them. Each also has its obvious shadow sides and can combine with the others to produce very complex effects.
Basically, at one end of the spectrum, and originating out of early childhood, we have the Magic and Mythic levels, in which the world is split variously into either God and his retinue, meaning angels, perhaps fairies etc., and then in the middle is us, and below us is the Devil and his retinue, meaning devils, demons, trolls, and whatever else, or, the more simplified and somewhat more integrated version, which condenses some of the cast into their essential elements, that being just God, Us and the Devil. Some basic version of this paradigm is very commonly found across cultures and is actually probably the dominant culture right now in the US, if statistics about politics and the like are any indication. It explains a lot of our foreign policy and that of the world. It is the Light fighting the Darkness, or, in the more fractured and complex form, The Powers of Good and the Powers of Evil. As there is a church on about every corner where I live, to not understand this worldview somewhat and how it plays out in peoples' hearts and minds would be to miss much about understanding the human experience.
Rising above that we have the Egoic level, that of the internalized super-parent of the Super-Ego, the Ego, and the primal drives of the Id. It is all very Freudian. The seemingly external factors have integrated somewhat and become semi-internalized but are still seemingly separate entities at some level. It is the world that most people live in most of the time: they have obligations, they have desires, they have rules, they have the desire to break those rules, and they struggle to work all that out. We seem caught in the middle of powerful forces that we must somehow tame and work with. Most of what people who go on retreat are dealing with is this Egoic level, they have the schedule but their back hurts, they know they are supposed to be practicing but they really want to space out. It is where most people struggle most of the hours of the day. The boss wants more work, we want more play, and so it goes.
Above that we have the Existential, in which there is just slightly more integration and along slightly different lines, and which part integrated which way I will leave open to debate, but basically we now have as the primary operating principle or division the Mind and the Body, or the Mind and the entirety of the Physical. This is the level in which the intellect rules supreme. Thought is the ultimate arbiter of reality. Cold, hard logic rules the day. It is the Existential Hot Seat, the black beret in a café with a stiff cup of espresso and a dog-eared copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness, the Scientist's Lab.
Meaninglessness takes on new meaning, Non-existence attains to new Reality, and the apparent paradoxes of quantum mechanics can become the basis of a whole personal philosophy. It is at once exceedingly powerful, sharp like a pit of razors, able to slice and dice reality across the continuum of the Arbitrary Nature of the Sign, and use that to justify basically any repressed and poorly sublimated shadow urges and reasoning that the lower structures of the Egoic and the Magic and Mythic have subtly bubbled up from the depths, but in new Hyper-rationalized, and oh-so-airtight form. It is the paradigm that allowed the Third Reich to allow the killing of millions of innocent people in the name of Efficiency and Purity, the world-view that produced brilliant scientists that created the Atom Bomb, and, on its own, is capable of frightening and also amazing things.
Beyond that we have that of the Yogi or Centaur, in which the Mind and Body have become integrated and the primary split is between us, the Unified Brain-Body, and the World. This is the level of Vision Logic, of Meta-Logic, of Heart-Mind. It is the level on which much of what we have been discussing here operates. It is at once the level of true placebo-based cures and also the level of the most flighty aspects of the New Age. It can have a certain More-Integrated-Than-Thou narcissism. It also allows for a deeper heart-based reasoning that helps us understand Why perhaps an Atom Bomb is problematic beyond just the level that we don't want one pointed at Us and do want one pointed at Them. It is the level of deeper ethics, secular humanism, and the like.
Beyond that we have the level he called the Sage. Gone is the duality of Heart-Mind and World, and now the paradigm is more integrated. The primary split is between the Ultimate and the Relative. This is the level of Deep Ecology, Gaia-based philosophies, real concern for the problems caused by National Pride and the Tribalism that humans are so prone to at so many levels. It is a level of deep paradigmatic and perceptual integration. It is a level that comes from a deep appreciation of Interdependence, a direct experience of Causality and its ripples through the world. Combined with the Existential, it can come up with things like what Einstein was onto, and I believe his appreciation of it was part of his genius.
Beyond that we have the level he called the Saint. In this one, the split between the Ultimate and the Relative is gone. It is what is hinted at by God in All Things when combined with the paradigm of the Mythic, or Buddha Nature when combined with the same paradigm. It is the true This is It. It is clearly in some ways the most desirable of the paradigms to have perceived and understood well, except that it is so totally generic, so totally found in all of it, so totally the same regardless of what is happening, as it is all Ultimate, that it lacks the basis to form a more coherent philosophy beyond that, and requires the more work-a-day and practical paradigms to help it congeal to a more workable paradigm.
In my own practice, I initially recognized that value of appreciating the whole spectrum, but for me the answer clearly lay at the top, that of the Sage and Saint, and so I put the full power of my Existential force at the time into that quest, the quest to perceptually align my waking, walking-aroud life with what Newtonian Physics and Particle Physics pointed to: that all was truly mechanical, all was truly just causal, truly and totally Empty of any separate entity. After some years of hard work, I succeeded.
That work being done, there is clearly much more to totally figure out, with "totally" obviously being an absurd goal, more of a direction, a vector to extend, or really a set of vectors, and those vectors relate to the other bands of the spectrum, which I consider really important to have a deep, experiential fluency in, to bring the Light of Awareness to.
Along the way, I did notice a lot that might generally fall into the category of the Yogic or Centaur stage, and I think that is where much that was useful really came from. It can be deeply healing to really get that.
Finally, when I felt I had my trip more together, I started back down, down into the basement of the lower structures of myself, and that trip is still ongoing and not easy. In fact, I consider it to have been way easier to have gone up than to go down, and by down I mean into the realms that the Existential totally loathes and dispises, those of the Mythic and Magic, as has been playing out here.
If one is primarily living in the Existential band and giving that a supremacy over the others, then all of this stuff is going to seem totally like the ravings of a madman, a fool, a dupe, an adult child, one living in fantasy-land. I totally understand that paradigm, as I have lived there for most of my life and it is still in some ways my refuge when things get tough. It may be a good refuge for you also, and you perhaps recognize that at some level, and more power to you. It is not perfect, but it is very functional in some ways and a lot of mileage can come out of the Existential as long as you don't look at it too closely, as if you do, it will reveal the problems that cause it to fail, as happened to me when I went plunging into the deep logical insanity that modern physics appears to be viewed from that paradigm, and that lead me out to the other things.
However, I have found that, while for many things the Existential has a lot of value, there are lots of things I have found it doesn't do well and lots of shadow sides that it creates, as somewhere deep down on our being, the heart does respond to the messages, paradigms, and stories of the Mythic and the Magic, as any trip to a play or movie theater, any visit to a church, any fantasy novel, any night on the news will reveal, and the deep and profound popularity of these things shows us that this way of being is powerful, very, very powerful, and shapes much of what the higher structures of the brain do and create, even if those higher structures try to pretend that this is not what is going on, that they have truly escaped from all of that childish nonsense, all of that magickal bullshit, all of those damn fairies.
But they haven't, and I actually believe they can't.
Thus, to step out of the comfort of the hard logic of the Existential is something that I do both very unwillingly, as it does seem totally insane and childish from that point of view, but also with great excitement on the other hand, as that stuff, those levels, really do resonate, really do call, really do make some deep and extremely powerful emotional sense to this human, and to fail to recognize that is to be walking around in total denial, I have found, and to fail to make time to understand what is down there, or out there, if one wants to get more fractured about it, more angels and demons and fairies and ghosts about it, is to be bitten and burned by things that one can try to hyper-rationalize away, but they are still operating regardless.
I prefer to see what they are. I prefer to go there. I prefer to really try to understand those aspects of myself and this very human world we are in, a world where those paradigms run rampant with little wisdom, little light shed on them.
The Existentialists, by totally rejecting those world views, sit in a Mythical Ivory Tower and watch in dismay as those paradigms cause staggering good and also staggering destruction, a world they consider basically insane, not realizing that they have to begin to embrace some of that insanity to even talk with all those crazy people running around and to really understand why they are doing it. Consider the number of very intellectually sharp people whose lack of understanding of their own Id totally derailed their lives. I don't want to be one of those people.
Thus, if you want to really work with something, you have to understand it. I choose to try to understand it, and aspects of it are really fun. Other aspects are clearly dangerously crazy. I put faith in the other bands of the spectrum that I spent so many years developing to help keep those in check and allow that deep exploration of stuff that is really freaky from most points of view, but not from its point of view, and to really understand it, you have to step to some degree into that paradigm and see what happens. From its point of view it has its own logic, its own emotional sense, and its own real power, and I hope that by understanding it that my understanding of myself and my world will be more complete, more universally fluent, more integrated, more workable, less shadow-filled, and more fully awakened.
That paradigm articulated so nicely by the Naturalists in the post above is a very sane, very workable take by the Yogi/Centaur and Existential levels on the Magic and Mythic. It likely will make for a relatively balanced logically much more palatable version of spirituality for many who resonate on those bands and are comfortable there. Does it likely have all the power and deep emotive glory of the straight-up Magic and Mythic? Obviously not. Would rituals performed using that paradigm at once feel much more safe and also feel vastly less deep? I think so.
Can we truly get down into the fantasy-land stuff and really get it if we are only dipping our toe into that water with most of our body clutching desperately to the Existential Guard Rail? I don't think so, but then that is not everyone's goal, and that is just fine, as that goal is not an easy one to pursue, and I don't find it easy most of the time either, and take swims there and then scramble back up on the shore. I have no desire to live there, but I do like the ability to go there when that aspect of things arises and then come back, and it has helped me understand aspects of myself that I don't think I otherwise would have.
This is the Existential, Psychological take on the thing, crafted to make sense on that band, at that level. Were I talking with, say, a Christian Mystic, I would say it totally differently.
Anyway, hopefully this framework will allow some more nuanced discussion of this topic and give you a better sense of how I think about these things, where I am coming from paradigmatically, what my goals are, and why I find this stuff compelling and useful.
… Have any of you ever done psychotherapy? It hits at levels that are very Mythic, very Magical, and to have a breakthrough, you actually have to go there, and going there requires stepping out of the rational comfort zone in a deep and real way, not a hyper-rationalized, safe way. The deep spasmodic crying that brings the releases where previously held pains and traumas seem to vanish and dissolve comes from embracing those parts of us that are really not rational, that are holding onto things that really are dysfunctional, and those who cling to the Existential aren't very likely to get there on that paradigm.
Same with the magickal. It has power to change things. Going there works at levels that the intellect won't. Observe the insanely complex systems that the Golden Dawn came up with, like they were clinging for dear life to a rational paradigm in the face of attempting to go into a world that intuition, heart, and very odd ways of working that are not very rational do so much more easily. Notice how dry and hard and arrogant those practitioners often become, now harsh, how totally missing something, things that a good intuitive healer would have in spades by comparison, and the comparison of the feeling of those two is part of what I am getting at.
My best massage therapists are extremely intuitive, can feel what they experience as energy, can move it around, and you can feel that even if they don't say it. They can find points and feel into things that are really surprising. None of my doctor colleagues could do anything like that. To say that one is better or worse, one is right or wrong, as the Existential tries so linearly and logically and rationally to do, to compare them, is missing something. This world needs both, and both can learn, hopefully, from the other's perspectives.
Compare the best big-hearted meditation teachers and the feel of going into the room with them, of being in their presence, to the most hyper-rational of the bunch, the cold, dry, analytical, the technique-heavy. Both have their place, both really important, and the question is, which do we resonate with most easily, and which do we resonate with least easily, and can we figure out why and try to expand our comfort zone out a bit to learn from both of those perspectives?
Notice the best of the Tibetans: very comfortable in the world of the hyper-rational. Read some of their best texts: extremely bright people, extremely intellectually sophisticated, but notice how many of those Spectrum lines they resonate on, notice how they can flit seemingly effortlessly from the depths of the Mythic and Magical to the heights of the Saintly, the Non-Dual. Notice how comfortable they are with Tantra, that hits deep, that hits at deep archetypes, deep heart and gut and groin structures, deep energy channels, deep emotional-body stuff, and also can come out and be very rational and functional, at least the best of them can, and the best is what I aim for.
Compare this to the cold, hard, linear, logical of the Burmese, which can be dry as a bone, very sanitized, very technique-heavy at times, though the best teachers often do actually have a big heart-presence that they can let out at times, but still, it lives at two levels mostly, the Existential and the Saintly, which is why it resonated with me early in my practice and I still have a lot of respect for it, obviously.
I am not sure that that paradigm totally prepares one to be a complete, fully flushed-out human being. I am not sure that paradigm necessarily leads to a big heart, a depth of understanding of the full range, and the full range is what I find interesting.
What other options than peyote come to mind? While for some it might seem to take that to short-circuit the hyper-rational that clings to the straightforward material/intellectual, there are lots of ways to do this that don't involve that, such as the stuff I am talking about again and again and again, and the stuff that just comes from intending to go there, doing it on your own power, stepping out from intellectual-safety just a bit, and learning to concentrate well and explore on those levels.
As to misunderstanding quantum physics, it was finding ways that took the meta-lessons from the paradoxes of modern physics that actually helped me a lot, not anything about buying each apparent paradox leg and misunderstanding something, just FYI.
… If you get deep enough into the Theravada you will run into the powers, or the experiences that get labeled that way, same as you will in many traditions, which is why they talk about them.
You can label and conceptualize them any way you like, but I will assert that exposure to multiple frameworks and options will give people more good options to choose from, rather than the terminologically and conceptually limited view that some theoretical group of atheists might be offended by talking about the pros and cons of the various options and how they performance test in real people.
In short, believe what you wish, and see how that helps or hinders you in your goals for your own practice and life. (DhO)
Fear of Death. Regarding the fear of death, I know something about it, having practiced emergency medicine for a while, and it is very easy to have an impression of how you might react to it until you actually get there, I believe. You might keep an open mind and see how your ideas about it work out.
I also know of numerous reports from well-respected senior meditation teachers who were dying and said it surprised them with how difficult it could be, something they didn't anticipate until they were up against it. I have also personally seen patients that I could barely have imagined going to their death with a very high degree of equanimity and acceptance do so easily. Obviously, deaths come in many flavors, so I hope yours, however it happens, is one of the more palatable ones.
I have unfortunately gotten to witness some very ugly, extremely painful, terrifying deaths, and few to none handle those well when they occur. May you avoid such a death, but, if one comes to you, may your insight prove up to the task. (DhO)
Rebirth. Rebirth is a paradox created by an illusion of there being a stable, continuous, coherent, independent self, as well as the illusion of there actually being a future and a past, as well as the illusion of there being any truly existing thing or even realm to be born into. There are levels of insight that see through this illusion to various degrees.
From an insight point of view, this moment is totally transient, the past is gone and not stored somewhere, not a stable thing, never was a stable thing, and the future hasn't yet arisen, and, when it does, will also be utterly transient, totally ephemeral, and will not "be", but instead will very briefly occur.
This is straightforward in experience, but yet, due to the way the mind believes thoughts of "past" and "future" that occur now, we can believe that there is still a past that exists, still a future that will exist, and still a present that also exists. The word "exist" is used rather than "occurs" to point out the pernicious nature of our sense of permanence, as "exist" implies permanence, whereas "occur" doesn't in the same way.
I do believe that the dinosaurs occurred, I don't believe they or anything else ever stably "existed" from an insight point of view, and the philosophical frame of that quote is in that sense, in the insight practice sense. This may seem to be splitting hairs terminologically, but it is done as it points to something incredibly important experientially that can be realized by insight practices and those practices that support them.
When one trains such that the experiential truth of this moment becomes realized, woken up to, fully appreciated, and all thoughts of "past" just occur transiently now, and all thoughts of a "future" just occur transiently now, and this moment is also utterly transient now and doesn't withstand scrutiny for an instant, then one realizes something directly, right here, right now, for one's self that cuts through a lot of the problems with questions around rebirth, as well as providing the other immediate, powerful, direct benefits that occur with this level of insight.
That said, one may also, now shifting to a very relative frame and away from the strict insight frame, have experiences of past lives, and even prognostications of future lives, and learn something very powerful about karma and the workings of karma by doing so. Such experiences are also of value psychologically, philosophically, ethically, paradigmatically, and in other ways that are hard to explain.
I have found such experiences to have a feel that I will describe as "very validating". One can still feel this validation deeply and gain useful insights into karma even if one doesn't fixate on a firm ontology such as, "Past lives truly exist! Future lives truly exist!", and, in fact, not fixating that way is highly recommended.
One can adopt an open, broad attitude that allows these initially seemingly contradictory paradigms to both be valid within their scopes, to learn from both types of experiences, and to grow thereby.
Those who try to pit these two valuable paradigms against each other just shoot themselves and potentially others in their metaphorical feet.
Those who train well and learn both will know their value directly for themselves and can then share this with others. (DhO)
My past life experiences. As to world-cycles or the like, my past life experiences line up along the following lines, if you believe in such experiences having validity:
[A previous report]... On the retreat in 2003 at MBMC where I finished those things up, when my concentration was really strong about 2.5 weeks into that 3 wk retreat, I had the following experience:
I was doing walking meditation and a thought said: "Hey, watch this!" and there was this trail of thought bubbles off to the left, 6 of them, each of which instantly imparted a relatively large amount of information for the very short period of time they existed.
The first was a scene of a small rodent-like creature, probably a skunk, being eaten by a wolf-like thing or dog. The second and third were of bats, one of which was somehow crushed on the floor of a cave. The fourth I don't remember well.
The fifth was of a very large, dangerous-looking skeletal thing I can only assume was some sort of Jealous God-realm sort of entity, and it had armor, a very large sword, and there was the sense that it had run across the universe through space for many hundreds of thousands of years fighting nearly constantly without tiring at all, as it was a creature of great strength and boundless endurance, and it died in the fire of some very large dragon-like thing.
The last had the feeling of immense age and was by far the most alien and least comprehensible, being some sort of giant, gelatinous, pseudopod covered creature in a very dark place.
Somehow there was a deep sense of both memory and emotional resonance with them, and it was very hard not to come to the conclusion that this was what people would call past-life experiences.
I merely report the sensations and impressions these experiences conveyed, but beyond that I do not add any sense of the absolute validity of them being past lives, as who can know? I have had so many weird visions, strange and compelling experiences, and the like, but in the end the only question is what makes a difference here and now, and so I don't really see how calling those experiences past lives or powers or visions or just hallucinations or delusions actually makes any difference at all, so I choose to just keep them as memories of something that felt like memories, but I can't confirm that they really were. (DhO)
All of this, coupled with pre-programming (read something about visualization exercises from whatever tradition), along with resolutions, are the standard methods.
Visions are interesting, generally take some sort of solid concentration, which has its own merits, and while many would counsel to the straight and narrow, one can often gain surprising things by following one's fascinations and interests to see where they lead.
Also, lucid dream work also is the sort of work that makes them more likely: read extensively, practice nightly, keep a journal, work on various jumping-out techniques, that sort of thing: fun, entertaining, sometimes profound or disturbing or both, and produces useful skills and perspectives at times, or at least the realization: wow, there is some serious stuff out there, and the mind is way more tunable and malleable than I though it was. (DhO)
OBEs are quite different from Lucid Dreams. Saying that all OBEs are just lucid dreams is missing something about them. They feel just as real as this, as vivid as this, and oft-times more vivid, more hyper-real, like the ultra-defined version of this. For me, the experience is quite different, with OBEs being an entirely different level from just lucid dreams. Their compelling sense that they are absolutely as real as what we standardly think of as being awake to this ordinary life never fails to amaze me.
Why be restrained after thinking you finished a path? Well, some people care about such things, about the various criteria, and may have all sorts of expectations about all of that, and you also may be wrong. Further, after finishing some new cycle, it is common to be all excited about whatever new thing you just understood, and thus to not have the sense to realize that basically nobody else will, as mentioned on many other threads. Bad reactions are probably 50:1 over good reactions, at least in my experience.
I am not saying that OBEs are or aren't of this world, I am saying something much more complex than that:
Concensus reality isn't. It is a convenient fiction we tell ourselves to gloss over the staggering differences in perspective on what we theorize with only circumstantial evidence is the "Same thing" in some abstract and totally unprovable way. Experiences arise, and we can classify them how we like, realizing that various classification schemes will have various consequences.
If you think of OBEs as not "real" and the "real world" as real, go ahead, ok with me. If you think of your perspective on your theoretical "this concensus world" as some sort of standard for what "this concensus world" really is, well, that's one way to look at it.
I have had OBEs that were so exceedingly compelling and vivid and real-seeming that, on coming back to this relatively dull one, I had the distinct sense that I had been dooped and now had come back to some pale imitation of the real reality.
I am saying that this entire experiential field can be extensively modified beyond what most people think is possible, at least without massive doses of heavy drugs, and that those experiences occur, and how you interpret them will have various consequences, realizing that this is just simply an interpretation and not the same thing as the experience. All experiences are "real" in some pragmatic sense, in that they are causal, as everything we experience has some effect somehow, so to dismiss various experiences as "unreal" or whatever is not as helpful as trying to figure out what causes what.
I am saying that the whole thing, everywhere in space that you can perceive, is totally fair game once you get your concentration strong, and what that means for anyone else's experience is somewhat of a crap shoot and not totally predictable, but, after all, this is your life, your experience, and that you experienced whatever is obviously really personally relevant, and that personal relevance is the relevant thing, really.
... Freaking out when traveling and snapping back rapidly is reported as very common and also very common in my practice as well. I would say that about 80% of my travels were less than 10 seconds (and a good number less than 5 seconds) due to this phenomenon. Then there are the other 20%, which, for reasons I have never figured out, didn't have that happen and stability was achieved for substantially longer periods, with the longest full-on travel being maybe 5-10 minutes, which is a damn long time to be out, as the intensity level is so high, at least for me.
... When reading things, particularly numbers, while traveling, the problem is that they don't stay stable, or at least for me. They morph, twist, change, reorganize, and become other things. Further, while the world you are traveling in may seem like this one, it always has some differences, such as you being able to float through walls for one... (DhO)
Astral Projection. Astral projection has been highly variable in terms of occurrence and ease of access over the years. My first travel was around age 14-15 or so, pretty classic and typical: floated up out of my body, looked down, saw myself there, floated through the wall, snapped back suddenly.
Since then, I have had many, some when about to go to sleep or wake up, some out of lucid dreams, a few during formal meditation off the cushion, one where I stepped about half-way out while actually doing walking meditation on a retreat where concentration was strong. Some have lasted mere seconds, others have lasted up to maybe 5-7 minutes, but those are more rare for me.
Most have occurred spontaneously. A few happened due to conscious attempts to make them happen and practice, as I have gone through phases where I gave those experiences more attention.
If you want more success with this, you can hardly beat Traveling: An accidental expert's guide... by Alan Guiden, available where fine books are sold, and curiously just happens to be published by Aeon, my publisher, though I found his work long ago when it was first on the web for free. Keep practicing, follow the exercises, and the chances of traveling go up dramatically. (DhO)
Since then, I have had many, some when about to go to sleep or wake up, some out of lucid dreams, a few during formal meditation off the cushion, one where I stepped about half-way out while actually doing walking meditation on a retreat where concentration was strong. Some have lasted mere seconds, others have lasted up to maybe 5-7 minutes, but those are more rare for me.
Most have occurred spontaneously. A few happened due to conscious attempts to make them happen and practice, as I have gone through phases where I gave those experiences more attention.
If you want more success with this, you can hardly beat Traveling: An accidental expert's guide... by Alan Guiden, available where fine books are sold, and curiously just happens to be published by Aeon, my publisher, though I found his work long ago when it was first on the web for free. Keep practicing, follow the exercises, and the chances of traveling go up dramatically. (DhO)
I have Lucid Dreamed often and Traveled a moderate amount. Lucid Dreams can turn into Travels and vice versa. Travels can happen out of the waking state, and they usually return to it, though on rare occasions you can return to a dream from them. There are many tricks for how to get out in the (broken) link above. The stage of the A&P is definitely the most conducive to this. Strong concentration skills help a lot. A strong inclination and repeated practice helps. I have usually jumped out when laying down, but on rare occasions have jumped out off the cushion: it is much trickier for me anyway. (DhO)
I first traveled out of body at about 14-15 years old, around the time of my A&P event then, and have done it a reasonable number of times since. I last traveled out of body on my last retreat in February during a sit: briefly found myself sitting in the waves in about 3 feet of water at the beach, lasted a few seconds, then snapped rapidly back into my body: good times. I also did it on my retreat in 2015 in Scotland: briefly found myself sitting in the wood stove that we used to heat our meditation room, like I was part of the wood stove, and the fire was burning just in front of my stomach, and I seemed to be a part of the wood stove, then snapped back, again, lasting just a few seconds. I have had more sustained travels, some lasting minutes. Some involve more control than others. Some have been pretty ordinary, just floating up out of my body and through a wall. Others have been very bizarre, such as one in which I became rainbow light beams streaming out across sun-dappled clouds. I have traveled out into space, to various geographic locations, to very weird dark spaces inhabited by strange alien-like creatues, and many other odd experiences. Few of these left me with any sense that I learned anything specifically useful or significant, but many were quite entertaining and fun to ponder anyway.
Astral travel isn't called that in the Buddhist texts, but when they talk about traveling to other realms, flying, stroking the sun and moon so mighty, traveling through the ground or walking on water, that is what they are talking about.
There is relative language and there is ultimate language. One who has traveled will find likely something compelling about the notion that we are some spirit body that most of the time inhabits a human body but doesn't have to, as that is exactly what the experience feels like. To extrapolate that to a perfect ontology, meaning a definitive description of reality in some perfectly true sense, is not necessarily accurate, nor can it easily be disproven either.
As to "no-self", all phenomena, regardless of what they are, are too transient, too causal, and too interconnected to constitute a self, but that doesn't prevent the system from creating all sorts of fascinating experiences, all of which are empty yet still function. That includes our ordinary bodily experience of our lives and everything else. It is interesting you didn't ask: "I really seem to be this body, but how does that fit with no-self?" The sense that we are our body can be just as compelling an experience as traveling, yet just as empty and in the exact same way. (DhO)
Strong concentration on candle flame: the most wild, crazy, repeatable, seriously stuff I ever got into. With a few notable exceptions, the most wild, crazy, repeatable, seriously out there stuff I ever got into was after getting my concentration really strong on candle flame stuff.
When in the old texts is says "a mind made malleable", get your concentration strong enough and basically everything and anything you ever heard of doing with strong concentration is suddenly right there, just waiting for you to ask for it, like getting into a true sports car, the power is just there on demand with a tap of the pedal and it is a question of what you are up for way more than it is anything about the limits of the car...
Do a few days of it, all day long for as long as you can possibly stand to.
Get a really comfortable seating position and follow the MCTB instructions.
Stare at the flame, feel a shift, close eyes, see the afterimage, stabilize on that, turn it into the red dot, stabilize and perfect that, see the spinning star in it, shift to the black disk eventually, see the out of phase stuff around that, expand that out wide, really wide, then figure out how to shift to the 4th jhana stuff, which is anything you want it to be if you get this good.
Whenever you lose it entirely, re-open your eyes and stare at the flame and repeat and go as high as you can.
Do this again and again and again.
When you simply have to get up and move, do good mindful walking practice just until you feel you can sit down again, and when you sit, keep at it until you simply have to move.
Use no clock. Go all day long with the shortest breaks you can take. Go from morning to as late at night as you can do it. Eat when you finally have to. Make sure to stay hydrated, however.
No computer, no phone, no conversation. Nothing but practice on its own in its own rhythm.
The colors are everything: give them all the attention you possibly can.
Sleep just until you wake up and do it again.
A few days of that and most people will be into some seriously powerful concentration territory.
A week or two of that and if you have any concentration skills at all you will be able to get into really wild stuff, and if your skills are strong, anything you turn your mind to at that point it will just do, like the old books say. It is truly, truly amazing to take concentration to that level, as worlds of stuff open up that are just there for the asking, and when you get there, you really can play in amazing ways: jump out of body straight off the cushion, duplicate yourself, hear things far away, see whatever you wish, feel and see the energy channels, see "past lives" (in quotes as the validity of those in some absolute sense is unknown, but the experiences sure can feel like that), true formless realms, feel metta flowing through you like a firehose, whatever: it will all be there if you get it strong enough, just like that, full blown, more real than "real", with that vibrant hyper-intensity that only that level of territory has.
Have you seen Chronicle? It is just like the kid who really gets it and things just happen when he wishes it. Strong concentration, really strong, is just like that, at least in that way of effortless and natural control and responsiveness.
Then turn it on insight: see attraction and aversion just as they are, see ignorance just as it is, see suffering and its causes, see everything just as pure natural effortless sensations, see what is utterly unrelated to cycles or stages or anything.
This is a really great way to play the game. Find your imagination limiting: just ask it for a surprise and see what happens! No need to even know what you want! (DhO)
The true rationalists here are who again? If you are interested in the powers and want to see for yourself, really see for yourself, as a proper scientific empiricist, meaning one who really wants to see what this is about, then go on a samatha retreat, such as a Pa Auk retreat, get your concentration really strong, probably would take a month or two if you really commit to it, then learn to visualize something well (a kasina, etc.), such that you can, on command, create that image in your mind as brightly and clearly and vividly as anything in reality. From that point, pick your favorite power or set of powers, rise to a decently high jhana, such as the 4th or 8th, come out, and let the intent to have that power manifest fly. See what happens. How you interpret that is up to you. Might take a few tries or even a few days, but if you do this well you will see what the rest of people who have done the experiment see: something that requires a somewhat augmented set of concepts to make any good sense of if you are a total materialist.
Interesting book I am currently reading you might like: The End of Materialism, by Charles Tart. It goes into the real science and data of related to some of the powers and it might surprise you, since you seem to have a religiously materialistic or scientistic view about things, which is hardly scientific, is it?
If you are interested in insight and stream entry, then go on a Mahasi Sayadaw retreat of 2-3 months duration. It is not that long a period of time and is way less time than we humans spend doing all sorts of things much less fundamentally beneficial to our happiness, clarity, and well-being. Further, you seem to at least have some small interest in these things. Plenty of centers are very affordable. The fundamental assumption that really learning to pay attention to what you are feeling and thinking, as well as what is happening on the other sense-door fronts, is a good idea is hard to argue against even from a total cynic's point of view. Follow the technique as prescribed all day long. Watch the stages of insight progress in a nearly mechanical fashion in order. Get stream entry and see what you think of it. Better yet, get at least third path-level territory: that is when things get really interesting. Plenty have done it. You very likely can also.
Otherwise, it is all just talk and more bullshit, as you like to term things. At some point people have to grow up, dive into the deep end, and learn to swim. Either become a proper empiricist or stop asking the question, as armchair quarterbacking the thing isn't anything like being on the field, just as reading abstracts of scientific papers is nothing like conducting your own research in the dark kitchen of the lab, just like reading accounts of people walking on the moon is nothing like actually doing it.
If you count yourself a sane rationalist and one who believes deeply in science, consider the disconnect between what science says about reality (such as total causality, total interdependence, no place for a separate, independent, continuous self in any of that, it being totally impossible from any physics, biology, chemistry, social science, etc. point of view), and your own perception that you exist, you have continuity, you are controlling anything, you exist separate from anything, you are observing anything, etc.: all totally at odds with the best science has to offer. I personally came from a deeply materialistic, scientific background, but studying science deeply, particularly things like particle physics, electro-magnetics, biology, and differential equations, convinced me I was totally living in a completely confused perceptual illusion. Funny that you haven't come to the same conclusion: must not know much about science.
Thus, while you seem to be standing on some pedestal of judgement casting aspersions about people who would claim that by paying attention carefully to reality you can follow a set of experiments that reproducibly cause a set sequence of extremely predictable and mappable insights that finally align your baseline perception of reality with what multiple scientific branches all teach, in doing so you actually seem the one who needs to look carefully at why you would doubt that enlightenment is possible, when science from numerous fronts comes to the exact same conclusions that the meditators do, as has been commented on by numerous very accomplished scientists. Pick up a good book like The Dancing Wu Li Masters and see what you think: that was the book that really started me in this direction and I am quite grateful for it.
Had you been at the Contemplative Development Mapping Project, in which numerous accomplished scientists from major universities (Yale, Brown, etc.) with major degrees (MDs, PhDs, MD PhDs, etc.), and been able to hear these real practitioner scientists, real empiricists with really smart, rational minds talk about these topics, you would conclude that the seemingly weird stuff that gets discussed in MCTB would seem like dry toast by comparison.
The notion of a separate, continuous, independent self, meaning the way the unenlightened perceive reality, is obviously totally deluded and totally irrational to boot. It makes no sense whatsoever for countless obvious reasons. Why not realign your perception of things with the scientific point of view you so admire by following the standard methods of doing so that have been time-tested by literally 10's of thousands of practitioners? Why not follow the scientific method you so admire? Why not try to reproduce the experiment yourself to try to verify the claims of those who have done the experiment before? That is what science is about. That is what scientists actually do.
Remember, I have taken all the study design and analysis courses of a PhD epidemiologist (which got me a Masters of Science in Public Health in Epidemiology from one of the top tier epi methods schools in the US), as well as having an MD, as well as most of a degree in electrical engineering, and was taking particle physics and astrophysics with calculus in high-school (at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics), so the scientific method and science are things I feel pretty comfortable talking about.
Your scientific training and background is what again? Your review of the literature of the things you are talking about included what references, what journal articles, what texts? What actual personal experiments you tried to confirm or deny these claims? In short, anything real or practical to what you are talking about at all? Your rigorous scientific pursuit of the truth of these things has involved what again?
I personally did way over 10,000 hours of meditation practice in addition to extensive reading of 10's of thousands of pages about this stuff in addition to getting to hear literally hundreds of personal care reports of various peoples' experiences in these things.
You have done what again to feel you can legitimately critique these things in the way that you do?
You are the one who just claimed to have experiences (your post about standard A&P, well-mapped, predictable A&P to Dark Night experiences) that, were you to present to a regular, non-meditatively trained doctor would likely get you a psych consult, possibly anti-psychotics, perhaps an EEG and a CT of your head (i.e. a few thousand dollars blown and a solid dose of radiation), all due them now knowing much about meditation. The true rationalists here are who again? (DhO)
Much can be learned about mainstream science. Philosophy is useful to scientists and sometimes interesting in its own right. It is hard to argue against many of the basic Empiricist points made by Hume about experience, for example. Further, much can be learned about mainstream science by remembering what mainstream science says.
- There are no colors. There are wavelenghts. However, we experience colors. Colors have no true existence. They can't be found in the lists of the components of matter, not in the elements, not in the particles. While there is color theory in quantum physics, it has nothing to do with actual colors. Thus, if you experience colors, you experience something you believe doesn't exist, if you subscribe to scientific materialism, that is.
- There are no smells. There are compounds and elements. However, we experience smells. Smells have no true existence. They can't be found in the list of the standard components of matter. Thus, if you experience smells, you experience something that doesn't exist from a materialist perspective. Sulfur doesn't smell like sulfur. Nor is it yellow for that matter. Those things are created in a mind somewhere, so says the standard scientific model.
- There is no pain or pleasure. There are nerves somewhere, nerves that create signals. Those signals do something, but they don't actually represent pain. There don't even actually seem to be pleasure receptors, and yet we experience pleasure and pain. There are no material equivalents of pain and pleasure. If you experience those, you experience something that doesn't exist from a materialist point of view, as it has no material equivalent. Similarly, there are no textures.
- There are no sounds. When you hear a sound, that is an illusion. There are oscillating pressure gradients in the air, in bone, in skin, in tissues. These have no actual tone, no sound. There is no material equivalent of sound, just materials oscillating. Thus, if you hear sound, you hear something that is illusory from a materialist point of view.
- There are no thoughts. When you think a thought, that is illusion, so says materialism. There are no material equivalents of thoughts, no elements that make up thoughts, no atoms that make up thoughts, no particles that make up thoughts. Thus, if you think you think, that is a problem to a materlist, if they are a strict materalist.
In this way, we find that the sum total of our experience has no material equivalents. This is what science tells us most clearly and explicitly.
All these colors, sounds, textures, smells, etc: they all exist in a brain somewhere, so science tells us. That brain is the real mind, the real matter, the real reality. However, these things we experience in this seemingly 3D world are not that. They are in a brain somewhere that puts a bunch of brain centers together to create this illusory 3D space in which all these non-existent, non-material illusions occur. So says the standard model of the brain.
Here's the kicker: what is the spacial relationship between this 3D illusory, non-material, brain-created world and the actual brain? The head we experience can't be the actual thing, so says materialism. It isn't actually here. It is in a brain somewhere, but where? Are the spaces the same? Are the spaces different? Where do you think that brain is relative to all of this.
You might think it was out there somewhere: like the outside shell of a holodeck. You might try to say that the brain we think is in this head is the actual brain: that is the exact opposite of the standard materialist model.
As this entire sensate, experienced world is created non-material illusions in a brain somewhere else, anything the brain can create from an experiential point of view can occur anywhere in this brain, as it is just non-material stuff. Ironically, materialism leads directly to its profound opposite: that all this that we experience is totally non-material and brain-made. So, anything you can imagine a brain creating, which is pretty wide, particularly if you have dreamed, can occur in this field of non-materiality. Why do you have a problem with that, when materalism tells us this is so?
However, given that everything we experience is totally non-material and brain-made illusion, why not learn to mold and modify this reality to our tastes, as can be learned to some degree in meditation?
Amazing how few materialists know much of anything of the obvious and straightforward conclusions of materlism. (DhO)
Scientific Materialism is a fascinating set of contradictions. Scientific materialism (SM) is a fascinating set of contradictions. Check this out:
- SM says that the real world is material, made of atoms, subatomic particles, probability waves squared, probably has 7-11 or so dimensions, and that we can't know it directly. It is inferred from the senses, deduced by careful measurement by machines, and correlates freakishly with mathematics.
- SM notices that there are no true colors, only the mental images of them that correlate with but are not photons. There are no true tastes, only the mental images of them that correlate with some atomic interactions with taste and smell receptors. There are no true sounds, only the mental images that correlate with various frequencies of vibrations.
Thus, SM posits that this whole world we experience is not the world, it is merely an image that hints at what the real world is, a world we can't know, can't see, as all we know are sounds, sights, textures, tastes and all of that, none of which is real, all of which is a correlate with some reality.
SM posits that this is all happening in a brain somewhere, a material brain. Aside from the obvious "Hard Problem" that there is no material basis for consciousness that has been clearly established and no material correlate of consciousness, as all of this is mere atoms and particles and probability densities, none of which are conscious, there is the serious problem of the spatial relationship between this visual, auditory, tactile space and the "real space", the "material space", the "real world" of atoms, particles and all of that which this visual, auditory, tactile, etc. representation represents.
So, where is this set of false images in relation to that brain? Clearly, that brain isn't here, as this "here" is a construct in various lobes of that brain, frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital, etc. Those combine various sense modalities to produce a set of hyper-processed, ultra-filtered images that somehow correlate with the real material world but clearly are not the real material world, as there is no "red", there is no "sweet", those are not real things to SM, only false images.
So, in SM, our whole sensate world, particularly including thoughts, are not real, and instead only images, impressions, imitations in a brain somewhere, highly processed, extremely representational but not actual, and they are taking place in some created space with no way to conceptually resolve the spatial relationship between that created image space and the "real material space".
This model has many profound implications and is generally poorly understood by scientific materialists, as they tend to believe that parts of what we experience are really "real", which SM flatly disagrees with. We tend to believe that the hands are our real hands, our eyes are our real eyes, colors really are photons, textures really are matter, but clearly none of these are true, and instead the model says that nerves and a brain somewhere (not here) create this functional illusion so the real material "us" somewhere can function.
As Buddhism concerns itself with experience, and, for vipassana purposes, says that sensations, colors, tastes, sounds, textures, thoughts and all of that are the stuff that is relevant as a basis for awakening, this directly contracts the assumptions of SM.
Were a scientific materialist to posit something like "waking up to the truth", they would mean waking to the real world of particles and forces, not sensations, as the sensations are not the real, material world by definition in SM.
Further, when the SM kids say things like, "Psychic powers are impossible!" they are forgetting that this world is a highly processed, highly removed, highly symbolic sensate representation of their purported "real material world", and so it makes no sense to bind this world of experience and sensations to the laws that they say bind matter, as they are two different if theoretically related things.
Remember, everything about the "material world" is totally extrapolated from sensations, and, while such logic has opened technological doors that are truly amazing, the correlation of imagined laws and math to sensate phenomena doesn't mean that ontologically the "material world" that we are totally unable to experience directly is actually true, and how one would ever prove it was or wasn't is unknown.
That there are no material correlates of consciousness in the SM worldview and they vaguely hand-wave and say crazy things like "emergent property" to try to explain how experience arises and what it is represents such a glaring hole in their entire worldview and puts such a distance between the world that people experience and the totally different world of inanimate particles and forces that they postulate as to be laughable.
Is SM useful for certain problems? Definitely, as shown in countless technological marvels and results.
Does is form a complete theory of human experience and life sufficient to satisfy one who likes theories that explain things we can experience and thus form a basis of awakening? It would be madness and staggering delusion to imagine that SM does in its current form, as it explicitly denies that experience is what is really going on, as experience can't be material by definition, and so, as all of the "material" we experience is thus mental, and it explicitly is not a Scientific Mentalism theory, and as sensate experience forms the basis of awakening, they are explicitly two totally separate domains.
… It is also true that one of the sets of concepts that bridged the gap for me from my largely scientific materialist upbringing and Buddhism was books like The Dancing Wu Li Masters and its exploration of the strange apparent interactions of consciousness and quantum mechanics, but even Newtonian Mechanics was enough to convince me that there clearly couldn't be a separate agent. So, yes, SM can facilitate some aspects of Buddhist understanding, such as causality and a lack of a separate self that exists as a stable entity separate from the rest of causality somehow.
Still, to go deeper requires working at the level of sensations, which SM would consider entirely unreal and merely representational of an unexperienceable true material reality, and this requires a different set of assumptions than SM offers, as, were one to entirely believe SM, one could easily dismiss this world of sensations as being an invalid basis of investigation in comparison to things like mathematical extrapolation and physical experiments in hyper-controlled, ultra-specialized situations that attempt to approach the clean ideal circumstances in which the math works perfectly. This dismissal has caused profound paradigmatic tensions between realms such as modern physics and the sciences that have more to do with the human condition and experience, as we all know well and has been mentioned above. (DhO)
Current Physics is going to be like the illusion of Duality. Viewing things one way, a wrong way, one can often come up with all sorts of explanations for things that are consistent enough except when pushed to their limits.
Duality is an example of this. Science tells that duality must be an illusion, given the standard laws of physics and biochemistry. It is absurd that we are continuous, that we are separate, and yet we persistently perceive it otherwise, and most people function pretty well totally misperceiving reality through this odd logic, and coming up with cognitive strategies to deal with the inconsistencies and gloss over them, which, when one starts to do really careful investigation of experience, are revealed to be so ridiculous and patently absurd that it is amazing that we were able to craft such an elaborate worldview of stability and continuity based on something that is so totally causal, transient, and integrated.
Most scientists themselves will never ever come to that point of insight, an insight that some young children on an insight retreat can have with great clarity.
Thus, this is a fundamental example of how we can construct a model of the world that seems relatively internally consistent and yet is totally delusional.
I have this intuition that something like this is going to happen in the world of modern physics, and I am not alone in this.
Current models of the basic structure of reality lead to absurd paradoxes and often contradict one another. Infinities abound in equations that they make no sense in. Models that try do resolve them do preposterous things, or seemingly preposterous things, like going to 10+ dimensions, folded dimensions, and even weirder systems of alternative logic and mathematics that would make your head spin and seem totally at odds with anything that could possibly make sense.
It is all pointing to some deep, fundamental misunderstanding, something being woefully incomplete at the heart of it all.
I think that current physics is going to be like the illusion of duality, and we are awaiting that cognitive breakthrough, that paradigmatic shift, that will make sense of something that, at the moment and past a certain point, is deeply non-sensical.
I have followed the attempts for physicists to resolve these issues for about 30 years or so, since I was first introduced to them in 8th grade. I have taken courses in Advanced Modern Physics and regularly pour through the latest and greatest attempts to make sense of it all that appear in journals such as Scientific American, which is about the level that I can grasp these days, and the overall conclusion is that they don't know how it all works, don't know why the paradoxes are there, and totally fail to explain many aspects of what we see happening at a mechanistic level, though their theories do a remarkable job of predicting all sorts of very amazing things under extremely controlled and hyper-exotic conditions, such as in particle accelerators and near-zero degree Bose-Einstein condensates and the like.
Thus, those waving around the scientific worldview as if it is air-tight and logical and straightforward and lacking in wiggle room are totally missing the condition of the state of the art.
We have no idea how quantum effects resolve to the things they become. The power of quantum effects to influence the macroscopic continues to amaze us, with more examples coming all the time, and coming at the level where they could influence cellular machinery, which is the level that you need to have they influence experience and the function of organisms, and the connections between things that the world of quantum probability and entangling hints at is staggering in its implications, and we still have no idea how that all plays out at the macro scale, but we suspect it is vastly more than we currently think it is. (DhO)
My Dream of a New Scientific Journal. This was from an email I just sent off to some of my science/meditator/geek friends and I thought I would share it here also. I added just a few more titles to this version:
You know what I think the world needs? A scientific, peer-reviewed journal in which we could totally meditation geek out instead of having to tip toe around things: a journal that would meet us at the level where things already are rather than, well, how to put it nicely? Imagine the Visuddhimagga meets Nature, that sort of thing, a place where the terminology and lingo were alright and yet science could proceed and describe things with the technical meditation jargon that people already use in high level practice. Imagine the titles:
- "The Effects of Deep 4th Samatha Jhana on Cortisol Levels, CRPs and Sed Rates"
- "Electrophysiology of the A&P Event Measured At Last"
- "SSRI's and the Dukkha Ñanas: do they help or harm?"
- "Panoramic Perspectives of the Higher Paths and Emotional Resilience: how strong is the correlation?"
- "ADHD Medications During the A&P: is there an increased risk of manic episodes?"
- "Five Techniques for Navigating the Dark Night on Retreat Face Off: a randomized, controlled trial."
- "EEG findings in Nirodha Samapatti"
- "Candle Flame Kasina Meditation in Epileptics: A Bad Idea?"
- "Can Neuroimaging Techniques Distinguish Between Fruitions and Other Unknowing Events?"
- "Do Mood Stabilizers Alter Post-Path Cycling?"
- "Custom-Tailored Techniques and Teachings Based on the Meyers-Briggs vs Standard Techniques and Teachings: Do They Make Better Progress?"
- "Re-Observation-Induced Psychosis Treatment: 4 Modalities Compared"
- "REM Sleep and Meditation Stages: The Sleep Lab Moves to a Retreat Center"
- "Do Increased Serum Ketones from Skipping Dinner Improve Concentration? A Randomized Controlled Trial"
- "Spasmotic Torticollis in Non-Meditators Presenting to a Community Emergency Department: does the A&P follow? A Longitudinal Study."
- "The Genetic Basis of Natural Jhanic Ability"
- "Does a Family History of Schizophrenia Correlate with Meditative Ability? A Case-Control Study"
- "Do OBEs Cause Transient Cognitive Deficits?"
- "Hatha Yoga, Tai Chi, and 3rd Ñana: Which Helps it More?"
- "The Perception of Physical Pain in the Three Characteristics vs the A&P, A Study of Substance-P and Endorphin Levels"
- "Caffeine Intake and The Progress of Insight: Does It Make a Difference?"
- "What Percentage of Non-Meditators with Depression can Identify a Clear A&P Event?"
- "Do Non-Meditators with Depression who can Identify a Spontaneous A&P Event Respond to Vipassana-based Interventions?"
A few more titles while they are in my brain:
- "Re-Observation Restlessness and Restless Leg Syndrome: A Final Common Pathway?"
- "Ropinirole (Requip) as a therapy for Re-Observation Induced Restlessness, A Randomized Controlled Trail"
- "Pathways of Cogwheel Tremor in Parkinson's and Cause and Effect Compared: The Substantia Nigra and The Dopamine Connection"
- "Altered Dopaminergic Receptor Response in the Third Ñana"
- "The Dark Night and Endorphin Withdrawal"
- "A Comparison of the A&P Events of those on and off Entheogens and Implications for Practice"
- "Entheogen Induced A&P Events: Does it Matter if it Happened While High? A Long-term Longitudinal Study"
- "Benzodiazepines in the Dark Night: Do they Help or Harm?" (similar to one of those above)
- "Do Self-Induced Orgasms on Retreat Interfere with Progress? A Randomized, Controlled Trial" (DhO)
This is from his Wilber One phase, his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness. In it, he made the point that humans have a range of paradigms to draw from and routinely draw from many of them simultaneously, each having some different resonance with some different part of our being, each tapping into some capacity within us, and each seemingly being somewhat or even totally contradictory in some way to the others.
As you read my descriptions, the apparent hierarchy is obvious. The problem is that our brains have structures that resonate with all of those levels to various degrees, and our own personal manifestation of this spectrum will vary depending upon circumstances and conditioning, so if we don't have some basic awareness brought to each level, some comfort navigating in each one, then we will encounter situations in which we have inadequate personal understanding and fluency with the way our own humanity can manifest, leading to increased shadow sides and difficulties.
Paraphrasing and grossly simplifying that somewhat complex work and filtering it through about 25 years of thinking about it, we have the following:
The way we think about reality happens on a spectrum of paradigms and modes of perception, being really almost meta-paradigms, large baskets in which we can consider how we view the world. They vary by the degree of integration or division within them. Each also has its obvious shadow sides and can combine with the others to produce very complex effects.
Basically, at one end of the spectrum, and originating out of early childhood, we have the Magic and Mythic levels, in which the world is split variously into either God and his retinue, meaning angels, perhaps fairies etc., and then in the middle is us, and below us is the Devil and his retinue, meaning devils, demons, trolls, and whatever else, or, the more simplified and somewhat more integrated version, which condenses some of the cast into their essential elements, that being just God, Us and the Devil. Some basic version of this paradigm is very commonly found across cultures and is actually probably the dominant culture right now in the US, if statistics about politics and the like are any indication. It explains a lot of our foreign policy and that of the world. It is the Light fighting the Darkness, or, in the more fractured and complex form, The Powers of Good and the Powers of Evil. As there is a church on about every corner where I live, to not understand this worldview somewhat and how it plays out in peoples' hearts and minds would be to miss much about understanding the human experience.
Rising above that we have the Egoic level, that of the internalized super-parent of the Super-Ego, the Ego, and the primal drives of the Id. It is all very Freudian. The seemingly external factors have integrated somewhat and become semi-internalized but are still seemingly separate entities at some level. It is the world that most people live in most of the time: they have obligations, they have desires, they have rules, they have the desire to break those rules, and they struggle to work all that out. We seem caught in the middle of powerful forces that we must somehow tame and work with. Most of what people who go on retreat are dealing with is this Egoic level, they have the schedule but their back hurts, they know they are supposed to be practicing but they really want to space out. It is where most people struggle most of the hours of the day. The boss wants more work, we want more play, and so it goes.
Above that we have the Existential, in which there is just slightly more integration and along slightly different lines, and which part integrated which way I will leave open to debate, but basically we now have as the primary operating principle or division the Mind and the Body, or the Mind and the entirety of the Physical. This is the level in which the intellect rules supreme. Thought is the ultimate arbiter of reality. Cold, hard logic rules the day. It is the Existential Hot Seat, the black beret in a café with a stiff cup of espresso and a dog-eared copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness, the Scientist's Lab.
Meaninglessness takes on new meaning, Non-existence attains to new Reality, and the apparent paradoxes of quantum mechanics can become the basis of a whole personal philosophy. It is at once exceedingly powerful, sharp like a pit of razors, able to slice and dice reality across the continuum of the Arbitrary Nature of the Sign, and use that to justify basically any repressed and poorly sublimated shadow urges and reasoning that the lower structures of the Egoic and the Magic and Mythic have subtly bubbled up from the depths, but in new Hyper-rationalized, and oh-so-airtight form. It is the paradigm that allowed the Third Reich to allow the killing of millions of innocent people in the name of Efficiency and Purity, the world-view that produced brilliant scientists that created the Atom Bomb, and, on its own, is capable of frightening and also amazing things.
Beyond that we have that of the Yogi or Centaur, in which the Mind and Body have become integrated and the primary split is between us, the Unified Brain-Body, and the World. This is the level of Vision Logic, of Meta-Logic, of Heart-Mind. It is the level on which much of what we have been discussing here operates. It is at once the level of true placebo-based cures and also the level of the most flighty aspects of the New Age. It can have a certain More-Integrated-Than-Thou narcissism. It also allows for a deeper heart-based reasoning that helps us understand Why perhaps an Atom Bomb is problematic beyond just the level that we don't want one pointed at Us and do want one pointed at Them. It is the level of deeper ethics, secular humanism, and the like.
Beyond that we have the level he called the Sage. Gone is the duality of Heart-Mind and World, and now the paradigm is more integrated. The primary split is between the Ultimate and the Relative. This is the level of Deep Ecology, Gaia-based philosophies, real concern for the problems caused by National Pride and the Tribalism that humans are so prone to at so many levels. It is a level of deep paradigmatic and perceptual integration. It is a level that comes from a deep appreciation of Interdependence, a direct experience of Causality and its ripples through the world. Combined with the Existential, it can come up with things like what Einstein was onto, and I believe his appreciation of it was part of his genius.
Beyond that we have the level he called the Saint. In this one, the split between the Ultimate and the Relative is gone. It is what is hinted at by God in All Things when combined with the paradigm of the Mythic, or Buddha Nature when combined with the same paradigm. It is the true This is It. It is clearly in some ways the most desirable of the paradigms to have perceived and understood well, except that it is so totally generic, so totally found in all of it, so totally the same regardless of what is happening, as it is all Ultimate, that it lacks the basis to form a more coherent philosophy beyond that, and requires the more work-a-day and practical paradigms to help it congeal to a more workable paradigm.
In my own practice, I initially recognized that value of appreciating the whole spectrum, but for me the answer clearly lay at the top, that of the Sage and Saint, and so I put the full power of my Existential force at the time into that quest, the quest to perceptually align my waking, walking-aroud life with what Newtonian Physics and Particle Physics pointed to: that all was truly mechanical, all was truly just causal, truly and totally Empty of any separate entity. After some years of hard work, I succeeded.
That work being done, there is clearly much more to totally figure out, with "totally" obviously being an absurd goal, more of a direction, a vector to extend, or really a set of vectors, and those vectors relate to the other bands of the spectrum, which I consider really important to have a deep, experiential fluency in, to bring the Light of Awareness to.
Along the way, I did notice a lot that might generally fall into the category of the Yogic or Centaur stage, and I think that is where much that was useful really came from. It can be deeply healing to really get that.
Finally, when I felt I had my trip more together, I started back down, down into the basement of the lower structures of myself, and that trip is still ongoing and not easy. In fact, I consider it to have been way easier to have gone up than to go down, and by down I mean into the realms that the Existential totally loathes and dispises, those of the Mythic and Magic, as has been playing out here.
If one is primarily living in the Existential band and giving that a supremacy over the others, then all of this stuff is going to seem totally like the ravings of a madman, a fool, a dupe, an adult child, one living in fantasy-land. I totally understand that paradigm, as I have lived there for most of my life and it is still in some ways my refuge when things get tough. It may be a good refuge for you also, and you perhaps recognize that at some level, and more power to you. It is not perfect, but it is very functional in some ways and a lot of mileage can come out of the Existential as long as you don't look at it too closely, as if you do, it will reveal the problems that cause it to fail, as happened to me when I went plunging into the deep logical insanity that modern physics appears to be viewed from that paradigm, and that lead me out to the other things.
However, I have found that, while for many things the Existential has a lot of value, there are lots of things I have found it doesn't do well and lots of shadow sides that it creates, as somewhere deep down on our being, the heart does respond to the messages, paradigms, and stories of the Mythic and the Magic, as any trip to a play or movie theater, any visit to a church, any fantasy novel, any night on the news will reveal, and the deep and profound popularity of these things shows us that this way of being is powerful, very, very powerful, and shapes much of what the higher structures of the brain do and create, even if those higher structures try to pretend that this is not what is going on, that they have truly escaped from all of that childish nonsense, all of that magickal bullshit, all of those damn fairies.
But they haven't, and I actually believe they can't.
Thus, to step out of the comfort of the hard logic of the Existential is something that I do both very unwillingly, as it does seem totally insane and childish from that point of view, but also with great excitement on the other hand, as that stuff, those levels, really do resonate, really do call, really do make some deep and extremely powerful emotional sense to this human, and to fail to recognize that is to be walking around in total denial, I have found, and to fail to make time to understand what is down there, or out there, if one wants to get more fractured about it, more angels and demons and fairies and ghosts about it, is to be bitten and burned by things that one can try to hyper-rationalize away, but they are still operating regardless.
I prefer to see what they are. I prefer to go there. I prefer to really try to understand those aspects of myself and this very human world we are in, a world where those paradigms run rampant with little wisdom, little light shed on them.
The Existentialists, by totally rejecting those world views, sit in a Mythical Ivory Tower and watch in dismay as those paradigms cause staggering good and also staggering destruction, a world they consider basically insane, not realizing that they have to begin to embrace some of that insanity to even talk with all those crazy people running around and to really understand why they are doing it. Consider the number of very intellectually sharp people whose lack of understanding of their own Id totally derailed their lives. I don't want to be one of those people.
Thus, if you want to really work with something, you have to understand it. I choose to try to understand it, and aspects of it are really fun. Other aspects are clearly dangerously crazy. I put faith in the other bands of the spectrum that I spent so many years developing to help keep those in check and allow that deep exploration of stuff that is really freaky from most points of view, but not from its point of view, and to really understand it, you have to step to some degree into that paradigm and see what happens. From its point of view it has its own logic, its own emotional sense, and its own real power, and I hope that by understanding it that my understanding of myself and my world will be more complete, more universally fluent, more integrated, more workable, less shadow-filled, and more fully awakened.
That paradigm articulated so nicely by the Naturalists in the post above is a very sane, very workable take by the Yogi/Centaur and Existential levels on the Magic and Mythic. It likely will make for a relatively balanced logically much more palatable version of spirituality for many who resonate on those bands and are comfortable there. Does it likely have all the power and deep emotive glory of the straight-up Magic and Mythic? Obviously not. Would rituals performed using that paradigm at once feel much more safe and also feel vastly less deep? I think so.
Can we truly get down into the fantasy-land stuff and really get it if we are only dipping our toe into that water with most of our body clutching desperately to the Existential Guard Rail? I don't think so, but then that is not everyone's goal, and that is just fine, as that goal is not an easy one to pursue, and I don't find it easy most of the time either, and take swims there and then scramble back up on the shore. I have no desire to live there, but I do like the ability to go there when that aspect of things arises and then come back, and it has helped me understand aspects of myself that I don't think I otherwise would have.
This is the Existential, Psychological take on the thing, crafted to make sense on that band, at that level. Were I talking with, say, a Christian Mystic, I would say it totally differently.
Anyway, hopefully this framework will allow some more nuanced discussion of this topic and give you a better sense of how I think about these things, where I am coming from paradigmatically, what my goals are, and why I find this stuff compelling and useful.
… Have any of you ever done psychotherapy? It hits at levels that are very Mythic, very Magical, and to have a breakthrough, you actually have to go there, and going there requires stepping out of the rational comfort zone in a deep and real way, not a hyper-rationalized, safe way. The deep spasmodic crying that brings the releases where previously held pains and traumas seem to vanish and dissolve comes from embracing those parts of us that are really not rational, that are holding onto things that really are dysfunctional, and those who cling to the Existential aren't very likely to get there on that paradigm.
Same with the magickal. It has power to change things. Going there works at levels that the intellect won't. Observe the insanely complex systems that the Golden Dawn came up with, like they were clinging for dear life to a rational paradigm in the face of attempting to go into a world that intuition, heart, and very odd ways of working that are not very rational do so much more easily. Notice how dry and hard and arrogant those practitioners often become, now harsh, how totally missing something, things that a good intuitive healer would have in spades by comparison, and the comparison of the feeling of those two is part of what I am getting at.
My best massage therapists are extremely intuitive, can feel what they experience as energy, can move it around, and you can feel that even if they don't say it. They can find points and feel into things that are really surprising. None of my doctor colleagues could do anything like that. To say that one is better or worse, one is right or wrong, as the Existential tries so linearly and logically and rationally to do, to compare them, is missing something. This world needs both, and both can learn, hopefully, from the other's perspectives.
Compare the best big-hearted meditation teachers and the feel of going into the room with them, of being in their presence, to the most hyper-rational of the bunch, the cold, dry, analytical, the technique-heavy. Both have their place, both really important, and the question is, which do we resonate with most easily, and which do we resonate with least easily, and can we figure out why and try to expand our comfort zone out a bit to learn from both of those perspectives?
Notice the best of the Tibetans: very comfortable in the world of the hyper-rational. Read some of their best texts: extremely bright people, extremely intellectually sophisticated, but notice how many of those Spectrum lines they resonate on, notice how they can flit seemingly effortlessly from the depths of the Mythic and Magical to the heights of the Saintly, the Non-Dual. Notice how comfortable they are with Tantra, that hits deep, that hits at deep archetypes, deep heart and gut and groin structures, deep energy channels, deep emotional-body stuff, and also can come out and be very rational and functional, at least the best of them can, and the best is what I aim for.
Compare this to the cold, hard, linear, logical of the Burmese, which can be dry as a bone, very sanitized, very technique-heavy at times, though the best teachers often do actually have a big heart-presence that they can let out at times, but still, it lives at two levels mostly, the Existential and the Saintly, which is why it resonated with me early in my practice and I still have a lot of respect for it, obviously.
I am not sure that that paradigm totally prepares one to be a complete, fully flushed-out human being. I am not sure that paradigm necessarily leads to a big heart, a depth of understanding of the full range, and the full range is what I find interesting.
What other options than peyote come to mind? While for some it might seem to take that to short-circuit the hyper-rational that clings to the straightforward material/intellectual, there are lots of ways to do this that don't involve that, such as the stuff I am talking about again and again and again, and the stuff that just comes from intending to go there, doing it on your own power, stepping out from intellectual-safety just a bit, and learning to concentrate well and explore on those levels.
As to misunderstanding quantum physics, it was finding ways that took the meta-lessons from the paradoxes of modern physics that actually helped me a lot, not anything about buying each apparent paradox leg and misunderstanding something, just FYI.
… If you get deep enough into the Theravada you will run into the powers, or the experiences that get labeled that way, same as you will in many traditions, which is why they talk about them.
You can label and conceptualize them any way you like, but I will assert that exposure to multiple frameworks and options will give people more good options to choose from, rather than the terminologically and conceptually limited view that some theoretical group of atheists might be offended by talking about the pros and cons of the various options and how they performance test in real people.
In short, believe what you wish, and see how that helps or hinders you in your goals for your own practice and life. (DhO)
Fear of Death. Regarding the fear of death, I know something about it, having practiced emergency medicine for a while, and it is very easy to have an impression of how you might react to it until you actually get there, I believe. You might keep an open mind and see how your ideas about it work out.
I also know of numerous reports from well-respected senior meditation teachers who were dying and said it surprised them with how difficult it could be, something they didn't anticipate until they were up against it. I have also personally seen patients that I could barely have imagined going to their death with a very high degree of equanimity and acceptance do so easily. Obviously, deaths come in many flavors, so I hope yours, however it happens, is one of the more palatable ones.
I have unfortunately gotten to witness some very ugly, extremely painful, terrifying deaths, and few to none handle those well when they occur. May you avoid such a death, but, if one comes to you, may your insight prove up to the task. (DhO)
Rebirth. Rebirth is a paradox created by an illusion of there being a stable, continuous, coherent, independent self, as well as the illusion of there actually being a future and a past, as well as the illusion of there being any truly existing thing or even realm to be born into. There are levels of insight that see through this illusion to various degrees.
From an insight point of view, this moment is totally transient, the past is gone and not stored somewhere, not a stable thing, never was a stable thing, and the future hasn't yet arisen, and, when it does, will also be utterly transient, totally ephemeral, and will not "be", but instead will very briefly occur.
This is straightforward in experience, but yet, due to the way the mind believes thoughts of "past" and "future" that occur now, we can believe that there is still a past that exists, still a future that will exist, and still a present that also exists. The word "exist" is used rather than "occurs" to point out the pernicious nature of our sense of permanence, as "exist" implies permanence, whereas "occur" doesn't in the same way.
I do believe that the dinosaurs occurred, I don't believe they or anything else ever stably "existed" from an insight point of view, and the philosophical frame of that quote is in that sense, in the insight practice sense. This may seem to be splitting hairs terminologically, but it is done as it points to something incredibly important experientially that can be realized by insight practices and those practices that support them.
When one trains such that the experiential truth of this moment becomes realized, woken up to, fully appreciated, and all thoughts of "past" just occur transiently now, and all thoughts of a "future" just occur transiently now, and this moment is also utterly transient now and doesn't withstand scrutiny for an instant, then one realizes something directly, right here, right now, for one's self that cuts through a lot of the problems with questions around rebirth, as well as providing the other immediate, powerful, direct benefits that occur with this level of insight.
That said, one may also, now shifting to a very relative frame and away from the strict insight frame, have experiences of past lives, and even prognostications of future lives, and learn something very powerful about karma and the workings of karma by doing so. Such experiences are also of value psychologically, philosophically, ethically, paradigmatically, and in other ways that are hard to explain.
I have found such experiences to have a feel that I will describe as "very validating". One can still feel this validation deeply and gain useful insights into karma even if one doesn't fixate on a firm ontology such as, "Past lives truly exist! Future lives truly exist!", and, in fact, not fixating that way is highly recommended.
One can adopt an open, broad attitude that allows these initially seemingly contradictory paradigms to both be valid within their scopes, to learn from both types of experiences, and to grow thereby.
Those who try to pit these two valuable paradigms against each other just shoot themselves and potentially others in their metaphorical feet.
Those who train well and learn both will know their value directly for themselves and can then share this with others. (DhO)
My past life experiences. As to world-cycles or the like, my past life experiences line up along the following lines, if you believe in such experiences having validity:
- This life human.
- Last life some sort of moderately powerful, clearly somewhat debauched male jealous god/sorcerer of some kind that was stabbed in the back with a dagger by a woman who he had wronged in some way, I think.
- Some sort of mother skunk-like animal that was eaten by a large black dog or wolf.
- Some sort of mother bat that was killed when the rock it was clinging to at the top of the cave fell to the floor.
- Some sort of grim, gigantic, armored skeletal titan-like thing that ran tirelessly through space swinging a gigantic sword and doing battle nearly continuously without sleep for hundreds of thousands of years that was killed by something like a dragon.
- Some gigantic, gelatinous, multi-tentacled, very alien being living in a very dark place for a very long time, probably under water, I think.
[A previous report]... On the retreat in 2003 at MBMC where I finished those things up, when my concentration was really strong about 2.5 weeks into that 3 wk retreat, I had the following experience:
I was doing walking meditation and a thought said: "Hey, watch this!" and there was this trail of thought bubbles off to the left, 6 of them, each of which instantly imparted a relatively large amount of information for the very short period of time they existed.
The first was a scene of a small rodent-like creature, probably a skunk, being eaten by a wolf-like thing or dog. The second and third were of bats, one of which was somehow crushed on the floor of a cave. The fourth I don't remember well.
The fifth was of a very large, dangerous-looking skeletal thing I can only assume was some sort of Jealous God-realm sort of entity, and it had armor, a very large sword, and there was the sense that it had run across the universe through space for many hundreds of thousands of years fighting nearly constantly without tiring at all, as it was a creature of great strength and boundless endurance, and it died in the fire of some very large dragon-like thing.
The last had the feeling of immense age and was by far the most alien and least comprehensible, being some sort of giant, gelatinous, pseudopod covered creature in a very dark place.
Somehow there was a deep sense of both memory and emotional resonance with them, and it was very hard not to come to the conclusion that this was what people would call past-life experiences.
I merely report the sensations and impressions these experiences conveyed, but beyond that I do not add any sense of the absolute validity of them being past lives, as who can know? I have had so many weird visions, strange and compelling experiences, and the like, but in the end the only question is what makes a difference here and now, and so I don't really see how calling those experiences past lives or powers or visions or just hallucinations or delusions actually makes any difference at all, so I choose to just keep them as memories of something that felt like memories, but I can't confirm that they really were. (DhO)
Physical & Mental Health
I think part of the trick on meditation retreats is that, at least on all the vipassana retreats I have been on, there is an approximately equal amount of walking and sitting, such that one gets in about 8 hours of sitting and also 8 hours of walking, alternating 45 minutes sitting, 45 minutes walking, or 1 hour sitting, 1 hour walking, which is really quite a lot of walking, as, were you to walk at a slow pace, say 1 mile/hour, you would walk 8 miles, which is definitely something, and were you to walk at a good clip like I do, say 3 miles/hour, you end up walking 24 miles/day, which would be vastly more DVT prophylaxis than you find in, say, an ortho rehab floor, and doesn't give the very long time in bed or in an airplane or car seat that is well-known to cause DVTs and PEs (lung blood clots, for those not medical, very bad things, in other words).
The most I ever sat in a row was 4 hours one time, and that was during the A&P, and I noticed no ill effects and strangely little pain at the time (one of those stage-dependent things). (DhO)
Heartbeat as an object, not recommended. I would caution against using the heartbeat as an object based on a few small data points:
- The end of the out-breath is when all things related to state shifts happen, and so using the breath as object somehow helps shift into new and interesting territory.
- The breath, unlike the heartbeat, falls at the boundary of conscious and unconscious "control" in a way that few other things do, and so makes an unusually good concentration object.
- The breath, unlike the heartbeat, can be felt in a large number of places, so if one doesn't work, you can try another one.
- I know a few people who had strange negative effects when they took the heartbeat as object: one with heart rate issues as described above, one with very strange heart-area pains that persisted for a while after meditating.
- No meditation tradition I am aware of recommends it as an object.
All those things being said, all sensations demonstrate the Three Characteristics, so technically any of them could be good objects, but that said, clearly there are better objects and worse objects, and, based on my limited data, the heartbeat is not a good one. (DhO)
Use of Earplugs. I think that for more concentration-related practices they are really great if you are in a noisy place and want to go deep.
I think for insight practices that it really depends on how you practice, what stage you are in, and how well you react to sounds, as if sounds really throw you and get you in some emotive sidetrack, then they could be really useful, but if you are going for more integrated, whatever-arises is practice mode, then obviously they are not likely to be of as high value, or if on the other end, if you are going for really fine micro-phenomenology abhidhamma-level mind-moment technical investigation of something other than sound (which can be a very interesting object), then they are probably useful if it is a noisy environment.
There are many retreats on which I do wish I had thought to bring some earplugs...
I am lucky in that I currently live in a very quiet place and have a few dedicated cave-like rooms to practice in where there is basically no sound beyond my own breathing and the occasional quite hum of an air-conditioner/heater, but I just got an apartment in Tupelo, Mississississississippi, where I will be working some at my new job, and it is downtown and really loud at times, owing to local bars that are very close, so I may have to reconsider getting some good noise-cancelling head phones, as I was interested in playing around with concentration states a bit more. (DhO)
Jhanas may have some psychological addiction component. Not addictive like opiates, benzos, or alcohol, etc. are addictive, in that there aren't withdrawals in any physical way, but there are definitely some people that really like jhanas and will cultivate them again and again, sometimes causing some of them to be less interested in the world, but insight practices can cause that sort of thing as well, just by different mechanisms.
So, yes, for some the jhanas can have some psychological addiction component, but it is true that they do cultivate positive mental qualities, and so, as addictions go, they beat most (perhaps all) standard addictions in terms of benefit to harm ratio.
The point about some getting stuck in them and not doing insight practice or seeing their true nature is clearly a real phenomenon, as well as imagining them being more than they are, as those effects are routinely noticed.
Still, they are a very valid path and, properly used and related to, are a hell of a lot easier than dry insight, though dry insight is the path I took most of the time, at least initially. Later, I came to appreciate the benefits of jhana, but that was after stream entry, and before stream entry the risks are higher. After, not quite so much, though they do still exist. (DhO)
Meditation and Psychotherapy: have both options and learn when to apply them. I agree … about the Western meditation world being pretty hyper-psychologized, and walking that line and knowing when to step to which side (either Meditation or Psychotherapy) is clearly part of the art of the practice.
Clearly, the Buddha advocated for mental health, the removal of distracting thoughts, in cultivating skillful mind-states, in investigating the causes of both skillful and unskillful thoughts, mental patterns, and actions to come up with something much better and to craft a mind and life that was to be praised by the wise and that reduces suffering. His frameworks were in some ways very different from those of Western psychology, but the emphasis clearly is there.
Simultaneously, there is clearly the point of view that one simply observe and investigate what arises, be it skillful, not skillful, neutral, or otherwise, as demonstrated in the Greater Discourse on Mindfulness, as well as suttas such as One by One as They Occurred, and numerous other places.
Clearly, the trick is to have both options and learn when to apply both of these skillful options, with there likely being more disagreement about when to apply each than whether or not either is as good idea, as both clearly are. (DhO)
Vipassana’s shadow side. Vipassana clearly can get a shadow side of blasting, cutting, destroying, disembodying, depersonalizing in some unskillful way. This is a feature becoming a bug, really. It can become indifference, become aversion, become life-denying, become too future-oriented. It was never meant to do that, but often people take it that way anyway and practice that way.
If one reads something like the Greater Discourse on Mindfulness, one will see that it is very broadly accepting, straightforwardly accepting. One recognizes what is going on as it occurs. One recognizes skillful and unskillful mind states as they are. One walks. One breathes. One sees what is there. One is mindful of it. This, done properly, has a very different feel than poorly done Vipassana. (DhO)
Depersonalization, Dissociation and Derealization. Depersonalization, Dissociation, and Derealization are like the flip side of insight, the other dark side of the coin. Insight is about them, strangely, but sometimes, when they hit, it is not good, not good at all, and, sometimes, can be very bad. They are a piece of the puzzle, but key pieces are missing from them that would make them more balanced, more complete, more functional, more enjoyable, more freeing, more what all of this was shooting for.
While this is not always true, they frequently arise in those with some trauma histories. There is a great book on this called Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness, by David Treleaven with Willoughby Britton which talks about how these can masquerade as deeper insights than they are. It is not that they might not have a profundity to them, as they can, and it is not that they might not have some wisdom in them, as they might, but they should not be mistaken for higher attainments.
How to address the 3 D's is complicated, but might reasonably begin by asking questions. Do you have a trauma history? Anything like this happen before, even for brief moments? How is the rest of your life going? How are you in relationships? How is your career or whatever you aspire to do with your life? What do those around you say about how you have been these last 4 years, particularly in comparison to before? Have you talked with any counselors or similar people with a mental health background about any of this, and, if so, what did they say? Have you talked with any competent meditators with sufficient skill to help you, and, if so, what did they say? What are your primary coping mechanisms for stress? What stressors are you under? Do you have adequate social support? (DhO)
The point about some getting stuck in them and not doing insight practice or seeing their true nature is clearly a real phenomenon, as well as imagining them being more than they are, as those effects are routinely noticed.
Still, they are a very valid path and, properly used and related to, are a hell of a lot easier than dry insight, though dry insight is the path I took most of the time, at least initially. Later, I came to appreciate the benefits of jhana, but that was after stream entry, and before stream entry the risks are higher. After, not quite so much, though they do still exist. (DhO)
Meditation and Psychotherapy: have both options and learn when to apply them. I agree … about the Western meditation world being pretty hyper-psychologized, and walking that line and knowing when to step to which side (either Meditation or Psychotherapy) is clearly part of the art of the practice.
Clearly, the Buddha advocated for mental health, the removal of distracting thoughts, in cultivating skillful mind-states, in investigating the causes of both skillful and unskillful thoughts, mental patterns, and actions to come up with something much better and to craft a mind and life that was to be praised by the wise and that reduces suffering. His frameworks were in some ways very different from those of Western psychology, but the emphasis clearly is there.
Simultaneously, there is clearly the point of view that one simply observe and investigate what arises, be it skillful, not skillful, neutral, or otherwise, as demonstrated in the Greater Discourse on Mindfulness, as well as suttas such as One by One as They Occurred, and numerous other places.
Clearly, the trick is to have both options and learn when to apply both of these skillful options, with there likely being more disagreement about when to apply each than whether or not either is as good idea, as both clearly are. (DhO)
Vipassana’s shadow side. Vipassana clearly can get a shadow side of blasting, cutting, destroying, disembodying, depersonalizing in some unskillful way. This is a feature becoming a bug, really. It can become indifference, become aversion, become life-denying, become too future-oriented. It was never meant to do that, but often people take it that way anyway and practice that way.
If one reads something like the Greater Discourse on Mindfulness, one will see that it is very broadly accepting, straightforwardly accepting. One recognizes what is going on as it occurs. One recognizes skillful and unskillful mind states as they are. One walks. One breathes. One sees what is there. One is mindful of it. This, done properly, has a very different feel than poorly done Vipassana. (DhO)
Depersonalization, Dissociation and Derealization. Depersonalization, Dissociation, and Derealization are like the flip side of insight, the other dark side of the coin. Insight is about them, strangely, but sometimes, when they hit, it is not good, not good at all, and, sometimes, can be very bad. They are a piece of the puzzle, but key pieces are missing from them that would make them more balanced, more complete, more functional, more enjoyable, more freeing, more what all of this was shooting for.
While this is not always true, they frequently arise in those with some trauma histories. There is a great book on this called Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness, by David Treleaven with Willoughby Britton which talks about how these can masquerade as deeper insights than they are. It is not that they might not have a profundity to them, as they can, and it is not that they might not have some wisdom in them, as they might, but they should not be mistaken for higher attainments.
How to address the 3 D's is complicated, but might reasonably begin by asking questions. Do you have a trauma history? Anything like this happen before, even for brief moments? How is the rest of your life going? How are you in relationships? How is your career or whatever you aspire to do with your life? What do those around you say about how you have been these last 4 years, particularly in comparison to before? Have you talked with any counselors or similar people with a mental health background about any of this, and, if so, what did they say? Have you talked with any competent meditators with sufficient skill to help you, and, if so, what did they say? What are your primary coping mechanisms for stress? What stressors are you under? Do you have adequate social support? (DhO)
Bipolar Disorder and The Cycles of Insight. I got an email asking about Bipolar Disorder (AKA Manic-Depressive Disorder) and how it related to the traditional maps of the Progress of Insight. As one who advocates for truth in advertising and frank disclosure of what can happen when people get into insight practice, both good and bad, here is my response in slightly edited form. I hope that it provokes some thoughtful discussion of this complex topic.
You are obviously not the first to notice the similarity between A&P events and Manic Episodes and The Dark Night (Dukkha Ñanas, Insight stages 5-10) and Depressive Episodes. The parallels are many and striking. Here's a short list:
People in the A&P tend to generally function well, where as people with Manic Episodes, as classically defined, tend to need to be institutionalized or medicated to avoid really destroying their lives, spending all their money, ruining their relationships, getting into fights, being arrested, gambling away all their money, having sex with lots of people, thinking they are the King/Queen of the Universe, etc. In short, this is a difference between functional hypomania and true psychotic mania.
People in the Dark Night tend to be somewhat less functional in terms of relationships and the like. In contrast, people with classic Depressive swings tend to be much more dysfunctional, suicidal, and may have psychotic features, like voices telling them to kill themselves, or delusions that they are very sick and will die soon, or everyone is out to get them, etc.
However, while I make the line clear cut by way of rhetoric, in truth it is not so straightforward. Case in point: I remember getting a call some time ago from someone who may actually be somewhere in the middle paths. They were suicidal at the time and quite afraid. A few days later they left Re-Observation and got in Equanimity and suddenly were fine, but it just goes to show that it is not always easy straightening this out, mapping it in real-time, or compensating even when you know the maps very well and are a skilled insight practitioner.
Another friend was in the middle paths and was formally diagnosed (rightly or wrongly) as having Bipolar II Rapid Cycling and put on meds for it, which helped somewhat. When they attained to a higher path they were suddenly alright and didn't need meds at all. Was their diagnosis simply the struggling of a Western therapist to put the cycles of insight into their only related box, or was this actually a correct diagnosis that was in fact cured by more insight? These terminological questions are not just semantics and have real implications for mental health and insight practice and handling both skillfully. I wish I had firm answers to them, but I don't.
Regarding your question on whether or not the traditional sources help: I know of no Buddhist writings that address this. Nowhere have I found anything that describes these things in a way that fits with a Western psychological perspective. The traditional maps were written for monks, who in theory were pretty high functioning people, in a culture that had nothing like our current concepts of mental illness.
More interesting parallels: those who keep crossing the A&P and getting into Dark Night territory and then fall back due to not getting stream entry and then crossing the A&P again and getting into the Dark Night, etc., tend to get more reactive with each pass, just as people with Bipolar do: as they get older and have more manic episodes, they get worse.
If you are only having these experiences on retreat, they are probably related to the cycles of insight. Good practice and clear investigation with awareness of the maps and a willingness to compensate and keep your mouth shut except when around people who can help you navigate the territory is generally recommended. On the other hand, those who have these things in daily life with the features that seem more ominous of more classic Bipolar disorder should seek help quickly, as Bipolar disorder can really screw up your life. I have had a few close friends over the years who were Bipolar and I have seen what happens when it is not managed well and it is not pretty.
Where one might be tempted to argue that people with Bipolar Disorder are merely the far extreme of what can happen in the cycles of insight, I don't have sufficient evidence to support that and would need further confirmation, such as sufficient numbers of clearly Bipolar people gaining sufficient paths and suddenly being cured to make definitive conclusions. At this time, so far as I know, there is simply not enough data. However, as you point out, there certainly are so many parallels that it is hard to simply write them off as being unrelated phenomena.
It is not accidental that I sometimes refer to those who have crossed the A&P at least once as having "Insight Disease".
I think that discussing the dark side of practice is important, and here is a page dedicated to one of these dark sides. Please feel free to lend your thoughts, experiences and wisdom.
… The Western Psychological models really do need something more sophisticated regarding insight territory and concentration territory, and I have always wondered why there are so many psychotherapists and psychiatrists and mental health workers on insight retreats in the West and yet apparently so little trickle down of that into the standard cultural and conceptual paradigms of its standard practice. Perhaps the likes of Jack Kornfield and the like who are cross-trained in both are doing more behind the scenes than it appears, but whatever is happening, it is clearly too little. (DhO)
Some ways to relieve suffering. Service to others, some volunteer thing, something where you are clearly helping relieve suffering even in some very small way, is almost always reported to help most people who do it to get out of their little world a bit and find deeper satisfaction, connection and perspective.
While I would avoid vipassana except perhaps the very light side of it, you might check out the latest interview with Shinzen Young called "Enlightenment's Evil Twin" on the Deconstructing Yourself Podcast for his tips on dealing with some of that darkness. If you haven't run into the work of Jay Michaelson, definitely find it. He has some good perspectives on this stuff. (DhO)
Tell Me What You Say Yes to, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are. Liked this article (Link) on what you say "yes" and "no" to. Seemed relevant to a number of discussions here in DhO.
“Warren Buffett: ‘The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything’. According to Aristotle, ‘We are what we repeatedly do’. More directly, we are what we say yes to. Every second of every day, you’re saying yes to something. Every time you do something, you say yes to that thing. Every time you hop on Facebook and begin scrolling, you’re saying yes. Every piece of food you put in your body, you’re saying yes. Right now, as you read this article, you’re saying yes. When you say yes to anything, you say no to almost everything else. Every choice has embedded opportunity cost. Every choice is very costly. Saying yes isn’t free”.
“Self-Signaling: The Science of Identity. According to research by Dr. Ronit Bodner and Dr. Drazen Prelec, ‘Actions provide a signal to ourselves, that is, actions are self-signaling’. In other words, your actions provide a signal to you of the type of person you are. If you wake up early and go running, you’ll think to yourself, I’m the kind of person that wakes up early and goes running. Whatever decisions you’ve made, you’ll conclude that I’m the type of person that does X, Y, or Z. (Luckily, as will be shown in a moment, your past is actually highly fluid, and can be changed by future actions.)”
“In the recent book, Skin in the Game, Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains that what you do is the purest definition of your value system. In Start with Why, Simon Sinek said the same thing. Your actions demonstrate what you really believe. Gandhi said, ‘Action expresses priorities’. He also said, ‘To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest’, which is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance— the state of internal conflict. You can’t be confident if you don’t trust yourself. Confidence is a by-product of congruent and successful behavior. Confidence is the emotional state of someone whose prior action was intentional and accurate of the person they planned on being”. (DhO)
Bliss-iconize your own list of traumatic life events. I was on a retreat in France at the Chateau du Buffalo with some friends this April using the fire kasina as object, this occurring just a few days from the time I retired from emergency medicine.
Emergency medicine makes for great stories and terrible dreams, and I was having multiple dreams per night that were basically the ER equivalent of the classic college dreams in which you are late for an exam and can't find your pencil and didn't study and can't find the room and all of that, except that this is the bloody-people-are-dying-gory-agony-and-carnage version, based on the hundreds of really bad things I saw and dealt with over my medical career.
Me and my ER colleagues would sometimes talk amongst ourselves about "micro-PTSD", a sort of cumulative pile on of hundreds of bad situations that collectively add up to something significant, written deep into the brain by high doses of adrenalin and cortisol, and pressure to make everything alright, often in situations where everything is not going to be alright. We all have our list of the worst moments, sights, sounds, smells, and experiences. Those experiences were coming up heavily in my dreams, as if retiring somehow let my guard down and this huge backlog of partially processed experiences came flooding in. My dreams have often had qualities that most people would consider pretty nightmarish since I was a child, so I am used to them and handle them well, but still, they are not pleasant.
After about a week of this on retreat happening night after night, I sat down one morning for the first sit of the day, and the moment I sat down this extremely powerful, thick, steady bliss rapidly established itself and just stayed there. Additionally, and here's some woo woo stuff, I could suddenly see my aura, and it looked like the field you would see around a bar magnet, like a toroid, but this time in primary blue and very stable. Space turned whitish, but the blue aura was still very clear. I sat there a while with not much else going on, maybe for 5 minutes or so, just hanging out.
Then, in that very odd space, one of the standard canon of bad images from my medical career arose, except that it arose like an iphone app icon, flat, about 1 cm wide, with rounded edges, and the image was like a little cute stylized logo rather than the full 3D gory image it typically would be when it would come up, and it just sort of rotated a bit in space and vanished, not disturbing the bliss in the slightest, which was relatively steady and impressively strong (I'd give it an 8/10 on the bliss scale, with 10 being the strongest bliss I have ever experienced), and the thought arose, "Hey, I wonder if it would do that to the rest of the standard list of bad experiences?"
So, I started bringing up the images, one by one, initially all of them from my medical career: horrible images, bad situations, dead kids, legs torn off, maggots crawling out of rotting limbs, skulls smashed in, people screaming as they died in puddles of blood, you know, the usual ER stuff. One by one, they all became cute little icons like the first one did, rotated a bit, and vanished. None touched the bliss at all, which remained heavy and strong. The aura stayed blue and like a perfectly regular toroid. Space stayed whitish. Soon enough, I ran out of troubling ER images, which is saying something, as there were a lot of them, as the time from calling each one up to it iconizing and vanishing only took a few seconds per image, and finally, nothing else came to mind from my medical career and training, and I sat there a few moments. That whole process took only a few minutes.
I started on other traumas, bad situations, car accidents I had been in, traumatic breakups, bad childhood stuff, physical injuries, broken bones, surgeries, illnesses, and other unfortunate incidents that happened along the way, and one by one, they all turned into little flat, stylized icons like the others had and vanished, and the bliss stayed totally unperturbed, and the aura held steady, and space stayed white. After only a few minutes, I had exhausted even the standard canon of images from my life's major and even some minor traumas, all rapidly turning into little, pretty, flat icons, all vanishing, all not impinging on the bliss in the slightest. It was like the ultimate version of the IOB (Identify, Objectify, and Banish), except much cuter than this is typically described and a lot more pleasant.
With nothing left to bliss-iconize, and wondering how breakfast was coming along, after sitting on the cushion for only about 10 minutes, this process seemed complete, so I got up to go to the kitchen. My body had that loose, slightly weak, a bit shuddery feeling that I have when I have swum a mile or two fast and then get back on land, but felt very light at the same time as if I had had a very hard cry, yet I hadn't cried at all, it just felt like I had afterwards.
The gory ER dreams ended immediately, and I have felt vastly lighter since that brief meditation period, like it cleared out a massive amount of old stuff in some seemingly definitive way.
I have no idea if this is something that other people could intentionally do, but, if it was, it would be extremely helpful. So, should heavy, seemingly inviolable bliss arise, and if you have your own list of traumatic life events to bliss-iconize, might give this a shot and see how it goes. (DhO)
Psychiatric Medications and Insight. It’s a very complex topic. Is emergency medication-based psychiatric stabilization sometimes very valuable and life-saving? Definitely. Can psychiatric medications cause all sorts of side-effects that can adversely affect mental function and physiology? Definitely. Are modern medications way better than the meds of old? Definitely. Does it often take a lot of trial and error and guesswork and dose-tweaking to come up with a medication or combination of medications that really work for someone? Definitely.
Do we really know what medications are optimal for any particular person ahead of time? Not necessarily. Do we have sufficient well-done science on exactly how medications alter meditation across populations and in specific individuals? Not even close.
Are medications often reported to help anyway? Yes. Are psychiatry and medication-tweaking and selections sometimes as much art as science? Definitely. Do practitioners here on this forum who have personal experience with meditations and medications report a very wide range of positive and negative experiences and opinions on the pros and cons of mixing them? Definitely.
Is it easy to come to definitive conclusions based on these reports beyond the meta-conclusion that people have widely varying experiences? No. Are there any known scientific studies on psych meds in meditators that use the sort of sophisticated meditation map terminology and technology found here? None that I have ever heard of. (DhO)
The Icarus Project. There is a community called The Icarus Project found here. They are a meditation community that deals specifically with mental illness.
As to a retreat center, I don't know of any that are set up to possibly provide psychiatric stabilization, nor do I know one that is likely to accept someone with a history of psychosis. Still, if anyone would know, it would likely be Spirit Rock, as there are a number of mental health practitioners that run the place, so you might ask them.
As to good guidance, again, you need someone with dual training in meditation and psych. People to look up that might be interesting to talk with are Nina La Rosa and Sean Pritchard. You might also talk with the people at Cheetah House. Lock Kelly also might be interesting to talk with: easy to find on the internet. (DhO)
You are obviously not the first to notice the similarity between A&P events and Manic Episodes and The Dark Night (Dukkha Ñanas, Insight stages 5-10) and Depressive Episodes. The parallels are many and striking. Here's a short list:
- Age of Onset: most people who cross the A&P spontaneously do so in their teenage years to 20's. Most people who are Bipolar will have their first Manic Episode then as well.
- Sequence: The Dark Night follows the A&P like thunder follows lightening. Same for Depression following Manic Episodes.
- Timing: The A&P tends to last some number of days to maybe a week or two tops: so do manic episodes. The Dark Nights that follows A&P Events tend to last for months: so do the depressive episodes that follow manic episodes.
- Sleep: People tend to sleep very little during the A&P and be more tired during the Dark Night. Same for the corresponding bipolar states.
- Energy: People tend to have all kinds of energy to put into grand projects, schemes, relationships, sex and the like during the A&P and have much less for those same things, including work, school and relationships during the Dark Night. Same goes for their bipolar equivalents.
- Mood: People tend to be high as kites during the A&P and dark and depressed during the Dark Night. Same applies to bipolar states.
- Powers: People in the A&P may feel they have special powers, common ones being things like seeing through their eye lids, seeing bright lights, reading other people's minds, traveling out of body, seeing past lives, hearing and seeing entities, and many others. Ditto for Manic Episodes.
People in the A&P tend to generally function well, where as people with Manic Episodes, as classically defined, tend to need to be institutionalized or medicated to avoid really destroying their lives, spending all their money, ruining their relationships, getting into fights, being arrested, gambling away all their money, having sex with lots of people, thinking they are the King/Queen of the Universe, etc. In short, this is a difference between functional hypomania and true psychotic mania.
People in the Dark Night tend to be somewhat less functional in terms of relationships and the like. In contrast, people with classic Depressive swings tend to be much more dysfunctional, suicidal, and may have psychotic features, like voices telling them to kill themselves, or delusions that they are very sick and will die soon, or everyone is out to get them, etc.
However, while I make the line clear cut by way of rhetoric, in truth it is not so straightforward. Case in point: I remember getting a call some time ago from someone who may actually be somewhere in the middle paths. They were suicidal at the time and quite afraid. A few days later they left Re-Observation and got in Equanimity and suddenly were fine, but it just goes to show that it is not always easy straightening this out, mapping it in real-time, or compensating even when you know the maps very well and are a skilled insight practitioner.
Another friend was in the middle paths and was formally diagnosed (rightly or wrongly) as having Bipolar II Rapid Cycling and put on meds for it, which helped somewhat. When they attained to a higher path they were suddenly alright and didn't need meds at all. Was their diagnosis simply the struggling of a Western therapist to put the cycles of insight into their only related box, or was this actually a correct diagnosis that was in fact cured by more insight? These terminological questions are not just semantics and have real implications for mental health and insight practice and handling both skillfully. I wish I had firm answers to them, but I don't.
Regarding your question on whether or not the traditional sources help: I know of no Buddhist writings that address this. Nowhere have I found anything that describes these things in a way that fits with a Western psychological perspective. The traditional maps were written for monks, who in theory were pretty high functioning people, in a culture that had nothing like our current concepts of mental illness.
More interesting parallels: those who keep crossing the A&P and getting into Dark Night territory and then fall back due to not getting stream entry and then crossing the A&P again and getting into the Dark Night, etc., tend to get more reactive with each pass, just as people with Bipolar do: as they get older and have more manic episodes, they get worse.
If you are only having these experiences on retreat, they are probably related to the cycles of insight. Good practice and clear investigation with awareness of the maps and a willingness to compensate and keep your mouth shut except when around people who can help you navigate the territory is generally recommended. On the other hand, those who have these things in daily life with the features that seem more ominous of more classic Bipolar disorder should seek help quickly, as Bipolar disorder can really screw up your life. I have had a few close friends over the years who were Bipolar and I have seen what happens when it is not managed well and it is not pretty.
Where one might be tempted to argue that people with Bipolar Disorder are merely the far extreme of what can happen in the cycles of insight, I don't have sufficient evidence to support that and would need further confirmation, such as sufficient numbers of clearly Bipolar people gaining sufficient paths and suddenly being cured to make definitive conclusions. At this time, so far as I know, there is simply not enough data. However, as you point out, there certainly are so many parallels that it is hard to simply write them off as being unrelated phenomena.
It is not accidental that I sometimes refer to those who have crossed the A&P at least once as having "Insight Disease".
I think that discussing the dark side of practice is important, and here is a page dedicated to one of these dark sides. Please feel free to lend your thoughts, experiences and wisdom.
… The Western Psychological models really do need something more sophisticated regarding insight territory and concentration territory, and I have always wondered why there are so many psychotherapists and psychiatrists and mental health workers on insight retreats in the West and yet apparently so little trickle down of that into the standard cultural and conceptual paradigms of its standard practice. Perhaps the likes of Jack Kornfield and the like who are cross-trained in both are doing more behind the scenes than it appears, but whatever is happening, it is clearly too little. (DhO)
Some ways to relieve suffering. Service to others, some volunteer thing, something where you are clearly helping relieve suffering even in some very small way, is almost always reported to help most people who do it to get out of their little world a bit and find deeper satisfaction, connection and perspective.
While I would avoid vipassana except perhaps the very light side of it, you might check out the latest interview with Shinzen Young called "Enlightenment's Evil Twin" on the Deconstructing Yourself Podcast for his tips on dealing with some of that darkness. If you haven't run into the work of Jay Michaelson, definitely find it. He has some good perspectives on this stuff. (DhO)
Tell Me What You Say Yes to, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are. Liked this article (Link) on what you say "yes" and "no" to. Seemed relevant to a number of discussions here in DhO.
“Warren Buffett: ‘The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything’. According to Aristotle, ‘We are what we repeatedly do’. More directly, we are what we say yes to. Every second of every day, you’re saying yes to something. Every time you do something, you say yes to that thing. Every time you hop on Facebook and begin scrolling, you’re saying yes. Every piece of food you put in your body, you’re saying yes. Right now, as you read this article, you’re saying yes. When you say yes to anything, you say no to almost everything else. Every choice has embedded opportunity cost. Every choice is very costly. Saying yes isn’t free”.
“Self-Signaling: The Science of Identity. According to research by Dr. Ronit Bodner and Dr. Drazen Prelec, ‘Actions provide a signal to ourselves, that is, actions are self-signaling’. In other words, your actions provide a signal to you of the type of person you are. If you wake up early and go running, you’ll think to yourself, I’m the kind of person that wakes up early and goes running. Whatever decisions you’ve made, you’ll conclude that I’m the type of person that does X, Y, or Z. (Luckily, as will be shown in a moment, your past is actually highly fluid, and can be changed by future actions.)”
“In the recent book, Skin in the Game, Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains that what you do is the purest definition of your value system. In Start with Why, Simon Sinek said the same thing. Your actions demonstrate what you really believe. Gandhi said, ‘Action expresses priorities’. He also said, ‘To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest’, which is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance— the state of internal conflict. You can’t be confident if you don’t trust yourself. Confidence is a by-product of congruent and successful behavior. Confidence is the emotional state of someone whose prior action was intentional and accurate of the person they planned on being”. (DhO)
Bliss-iconize your own list of traumatic life events. I was on a retreat in France at the Chateau du Buffalo with some friends this April using the fire kasina as object, this occurring just a few days from the time I retired from emergency medicine.
Emergency medicine makes for great stories and terrible dreams, and I was having multiple dreams per night that were basically the ER equivalent of the classic college dreams in which you are late for an exam and can't find your pencil and didn't study and can't find the room and all of that, except that this is the bloody-people-are-dying-gory-agony-and-carnage version, based on the hundreds of really bad things I saw and dealt with over my medical career.
Me and my ER colleagues would sometimes talk amongst ourselves about "micro-PTSD", a sort of cumulative pile on of hundreds of bad situations that collectively add up to something significant, written deep into the brain by high doses of adrenalin and cortisol, and pressure to make everything alright, often in situations where everything is not going to be alright. We all have our list of the worst moments, sights, sounds, smells, and experiences. Those experiences were coming up heavily in my dreams, as if retiring somehow let my guard down and this huge backlog of partially processed experiences came flooding in. My dreams have often had qualities that most people would consider pretty nightmarish since I was a child, so I am used to them and handle them well, but still, they are not pleasant.
After about a week of this on retreat happening night after night, I sat down one morning for the first sit of the day, and the moment I sat down this extremely powerful, thick, steady bliss rapidly established itself and just stayed there. Additionally, and here's some woo woo stuff, I could suddenly see my aura, and it looked like the field you would see around a bar magnet, like a toroid, but this time in primary blue and very stable. Space turned whitish, but the blue aura was still very clear. I sat there a while with not much else going on, maybe for 5 minutes or so, just hanging out.
Then, in that very odd space, one of the standard canon of bad images from my medical career arose, except that it arose like an iphone app icon, flat, about 1 cm wide, with rounded edges, and the image was like a little cute stylized logo rather than the full 3D gory image it typically would be when it would come up, and it just sort of rotated a bit in space and vanished, not disturbing the bliss in the slightest, which was relatively steady and impressively strong (I'd give it an 8/10 on the bliss scale, with 10 being the strongest bliss I have ever experienced), and the thought arose, "Hey, I wonder if it would do that to the rest of the standard list of bad experiences?"
So, I started bringing up the images, one by one, initially all of them from my medical career: horrible images, bad situations, dead kids, legs torn off, maggots crawling out of rotting limbs, skulls smashed in, people screaming as they died in puddles of blood, you know, the usual ER stuff. One by one, they all became cute little icons like the first one did, rotated a bit, and vanished. None touched the bliss at all, which remained heavy and strong. The aura stayed blue and like a perfectly regular toroid. Space stayed whitish. Soon enough, I ran out of troubling ER images, which is saying something, as there were a lot of them, as the time from calling each one up to it iconizing and vanishing only took a few seconds per image, and finally, nothing else came to mind from my medical career and training, and I sat there a few moments. That whole process took only a few minutes.
I started on other traumas, bad situations, car accidents I had been in, traumatic breakups, bad childhood stuff, physical injuries, broken bones, surgeries, illnesses, and other unfortunate incidents that happened along the way, and one by one, they all turned into little flat, stylized icons like the others had and vanished, and the bliss stayed totally unperturbed, and the aura held steady, and space stayed white. After only a few minutes, I had exhausted even the standard canon of images from my life's major and even some minor traumas, all rapidly turning into little, pretty, flat icons, all vanishing, all not impinging on the bliss in the slightest. It was like the ultimate version of the IOB (Identify, Objectify, and Banish), except much cuter than this is typically described and a lot more pleasant.
With nothing left to bliss-iconize, and wondering how breakfast was coming along, after sitting on the cushion for only about 10 minutes, this process seemed complete, so I got up to go to the kitchen. My body had that loose, slightly weak, a bit shuddery feeling that I have when I have swum a mile or two fast and then get back on land, but felt very light at the same time as if I had had a very hard cry, yet I hadn't cried at all, it just felt like I had afterwards.
The gory ER dreams ended immediately, and I have felt vastly lighter since that brief meditation period, like it cleared out a massive amount of old stuff in some seemingly definitive way.
I have no idea if this is something that other people could intentionally do, but, if it was, it would be extremely helpful. So, should heavy, seemingly inviolable bliss arise, and if you have your own list of traumatic life events to bliss-iconize, might give this a shot and see how it goes. (DhO)
Psychiatric Medications and Insight. It’s a very complex topic. Is emergency medication-based psychiatric stabilization sometimes very valuable and life-saving? Definitely. Can psychiatric medications cause all sorts of side-effects that can adversely affect mental function and physiology? Definitely. Are modern medications way better than the meds of old? Definitely. Does it often take a lot of trial and error and guesswork and dose-tweaking to come up with a medication or combination of medications that really work for someone? Definitely.
Do we really know what medications are optimal for any particular person ahead of time? Not necessarily. Do we have sufficient well-done science on exactly how medications alter meditation across populations and in specific individuals? Not even close.
Are medications often reported to help anyway? Yes. Are psychiatry and medication-tweaking and selections sometimes as much art as science? Definitely. Do practitioners here on this forum who have personal experience with meditations and medications report a very wide range of positive and negative experiences and opinions on the pros and cons of mixing them? Definitely.
Is it easy to come to definitive conclusions based on these reports beyond the meta-conclusion that people have widely varying experiences? No. Are there any known scientific studies on psych meds in meditators that use the sort of sophisticated meditation map terminology and technology found here? None that I have ever heard of. (DhO)
The Icarus Project. There is a community called The Icarus Project found here. They are a meditation community that deals specifically with mental illness.
As to a retreat center, I don't know of any that are set up to possibly provide psychiatric stabilization, nor do I know one that is likely to accept someone with a history of psychosis. Still, if anyone would know, it would likely be Spirit Rock, as there are a number of mental health practitioners that run the place, so you might ask them.
As to good guidance, again, you need someone with dual training in meditation and psych. People to look up that might be interesting to talk with are Nina La Rosa and Sean Pritchard. You might also talk with the people at Cheetah House. Lock Kelly also might be interesting to talk with: easy to find on the internet. (DhO)
Clinical Mindfulness and Hardcore Dharma. (circa 2011) I have recently had a lot of exposure to the world of Clinical Mindfulness (CM), which generally and stereotypically involves PhD/MS/MD-types who have very little experience in meditation, lots of exposure to the world of clinical mindfulness research (which generally ignores or discounts what we here would call basic attainments, not to mention high attainments) and movements such as the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction traditions, but they are teaching meditation practices to lots of people/patients, some of which will actually get into interesting territory, with the big trouble generally starting if and when some cross the A&P, and now find themselves in territory the PhD/MS/MD-type doesn't recognize, as they have never been there.
This has caused a whole ton of thoughts about how to bridge the gap between "them" and the technology, skill sets, paradigms, and expertise of "us", the Hardcore Dharma (HD) people, realizing that some may fall into both camps (you have my sympathy), or, failing that, at least offer some service or support or something to those who have been thus affected.
The problems are vast, and a short list here being:
(1) massive ignorance on both sides: we have no idea what the CM people are doing, what they are teaching, that there are so many of them teaching so many people, what language, techniques and concepts they use, and the CM people have little to no idea that what they are doing seems like kindergarden to us, and dangerous kindergarden, as it can lead to the A&P and the rest without guidance or, worse, with bad guidance. They have no idea what we know and do and consider normal and expected, and this ignorance is massive, deep and nearly reflexive. Simultaneously it is hard for some of us on this side to not automatically dismiss the CM world as being like the worst stripped down mush regardless of the fact that they really do help some people.
(2) massive egos: they are quite certain they are doing the latest and greatest, they have degrees, training, certifications, and are paid well. We have massive direct experience and amazing abilities, ancient techniques, deep lineages, and the like. Our badges are unrecognizable to the other side, and theirs seem meaningless to us.
(3) massive terminological barriers: we tend to use obscure dharmic terms based on ancient Indian languages, and they tend to use obscure medical terms based on ancient Mediterranean languages. Theirs seem superficial and woefully inadequate for "real practice" to us, and ours seem like some New Ager's pipe dream babble to them.
(4) massive paradigm barriers of various sorts: they don't believe the stuff we do is possible, and we don't generally realize that the doses they use, which we would generally think of as microscopic, can actually do useful things for some people. They like fMRI's and p-values, and we can just go: "Yeah! That was this (insert "weird" term for attainment here)!" and we feel comfortable with that and think it is normal.
How to bridge these things?
I can imagine a group of people writing the Hardcore Dharma Manual for Clinical Mindfulness People, using their terms and making up Greco-Latin equivalents to the Sanskrit and Pali terms we throw around so easily, with DSM-style diagnostic criteria, as well as recommended therapies based on presenting symptoms.
I can imagine referral services, groups of accomplished HD practitioners who have somehow established themselves as resources that practicing CM clinicians could send their patients to if they met certain defined criteria based on having certain key experiences, such as rapturous vortex-like energetic phenomena followed by profound panic, etc, which they would be likely to misdiagnose and not handle as well as someone who knew that territory would (my unscientific biases being obvious here), sort of like a more refined version of the Spiritual Emergency Network that I believe is now defunct but functioned for some period. How would one get certified to be one of these referral services in a way that people who are used to PhD's and other letters could make sense of? Could you bill insurance companies for it? Liability coverage? Covering Board? Standards of Care? Diagnostic Criteria? Agreed on methods of treatment? Treatment clinics/retreat centers? JHACO certification? ;)
Just as in emergency medicine there are little urgent cares and little community emergency departments all over, and there are a few large University/Community Level-One Trauma Centers/Heart/Stroke/Tertiary Care Centers, just so there are a lot of clinical mindfulness teachers and only a few people with great depths of meditation competence. In this way, it would make sense if the little CM centers could realize that there were times to refer people to the specialized HD groups for those patients who got into what to them would be the really weird/complex stuff and for us would be the bread and butter of what we do every day. If we could provide clear criteria when referral would make sense and a way to identify the places/persons to refer them to in some way that became accepted as normal, that would be amazing.
When my mind goes down that thought-track and tries to imagine how this could actually manifest in the world, what paradigms, institutions, regulations, structures, committees, boards, business models, and the like would actually happen and what they might look like, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the challenges, but that doesn't mean it can't be done, it would just take a strong and capable group and a lot of time.
I thought I would throw this out there to see what people might think of all of this. I think that the stuff we do here has the capacity to help people if it could be packaged right, and by right I mean a way that translates it while maintaining the depths of its power and scope as it currently stands at the very least.
The day when the A&P has an ICD9/10 code, we will have arrived. Imagine all the things that would have to change for that to happen! Daunting and yet, it is hard not to dream of things like this, as they seem so obvious and normal from this vantage point.
I think that this, done well, could have massive practice implications for a very large number of people, and actually would be hard to have it done worse than it currently is. (DhO)
Psychedelics & Entheogens
Smoking pot and meditative concentration. First off: disclaimer: The DhO cannot endorse the use of illegal drugs or breaking the law in any way. Beyond that, I think clearly people have mixed experiences with these things as Tarin says.
The apathy from pot is clearly real and frequently reported, as are the reductions in dreams and some other experiences. Schizophrenia and pot use continue to be linked in numerous studies, though correlation and causality are not the same thing.
I know a number of people who had very profound openings (mostly A&P) on various hallucinogens, including a few of my hippy and boomer teachers, but most decided that they needed to be able to get insights on their own power and tended to trend to less drug use, though there are exceptions.
One way or the other, I would advocate seeing what you can do on your own power and go for clarity and wisdom using standard methods, as if you can do it unaltered, you know it is yours and not just some side effect. (DhO)
Psychedelics and Meditation Progress. Psychedelics are a wild card. Reports here on this forum are all over the place, as are plenty of other reports I have heard from people who have contacted me. The following conclusions are all from reliable field reports of the effects of psychedelics:
Is it true that psychedelics can break people loose from mental restrictions and launch them into insights and enhanced perspectives? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can break people's brains and cause serious long-lasting problems? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics often just lead to a trip that doesn't break anything or provide obvious positive benefits? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can sometimes lead to some really adverse behaviors with long-term consequences? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics can often be handled well in good contexts without adverse behaviors? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics are illegal in most countries and can get people landed in jail with adverse criminal records and high fines? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics are often used by people in countries where they are illegal without running afoul of the law? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics can cause people to cross the A&P sometimes? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can cause people to suddenly plunge in to the Dark Night stages sometimes in dramatically altered and very destabilizing forms that can cause long-term psychological trauma which can take years to sort out and recover from? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics have been taken hundreds of times by some people without any obvious insights at all to show for it? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics have been taken hundreds of times by some people without any adverse effects to show for it? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can land people in emergency departments with very high medical bills and embarrassing and adverse job consequences if their employer finds out? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics can offer people a taste of something that people later decide to find on their own power by meditating? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can tempt people that believe them to be an easy way to get the benefits of meditation without actually having to do the work, thus providing a side-track that derails the meditation practice of the person who took them? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics can get some people into jhana-like states, particularly if they learn to guide them in that direction? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics have caused reliable reports of people getting stream-entry or higher paths by taking them? Not so far that I have heard. (DhO)
Psychedelics are complicated. I know plenty of good and bad stories from those who have taken them. I have close friends who have taken literally hundreds of hits of high-quality acid and have no obvious insight at all or obvious lingering effects, as well as people who took single doses of various things and had profoundly life-changing experiences both amazing (one instantly cured of cocaine addiction, one has had some persistent mild sense of transcendence of mortality that has lingered some 40 year later) and horrible (one friend who did LSD killed a guy he caught having sex with his girlfriend during a hippy party back in the day and did 25 year hard time in prison, one friend in junior high school dropped his first hit of LSD and came down 3 months later during which time he was in the state mental hospital and he was never the same after and not in a good way). The problem is that the current state of the art has no way to predict which will happen. (The same could be said of meditation, as endless stories here attest.) A non-trivial portion of my early teachers and current co-adventurers have taken them or still take them, and again, stories both good and bad abound. I remember a friend cowering under a table a week after doing some mushrooms that apparely deeply re-arranged his notion of the world, the major problem being that he was supposed to be hosting a large and important social gathering at that same time.
I am most skeptical of there being reproducible long-lasting changes the way there are with good old meditation with good teachers in moderately high to high dose, but that obviously takes a lot more time and money, but it is at least legal and has a generally better safety profile, I think.
Definitely stay away from 25i: saw a guy in the ED on that and it was truly horrible to watch: very lucky he didn't die by cop, and when they were holding him down he seemed not to notice that his violent thrashing on the concrete was doing terrible things to his hands, face, elbows, knees and feet. (DhO)
Entheogenic Experiences and the need of flexible maps. Correlating what happens on entheogens and what happens through insight practice or other transformative experiences that arise based on other conditions is a long debate and not easy.
Clearly, some cross the A&P on entheogens, with it leading predictably to what comes next. However, what comes next varies radically between people, and the degree to which the Dark Night kicks peoples' asses vs the degree to which it provides valuable insight into letting go and renunciation of suffering is quite variable.
Clearly, some integrate entheogenic experiences better than others. I get reports from all across the spectrum.
Recent emails and a conversation from a nice guy who had some horrendous entheogenic experiences and was still putting his shattered mind, heart and life back together with difficulty some years later.
Contrast that with other recent reports from a close friend and mature, seasoned psychonaut who recently had amazing heart openings, clear and obvious positive personal transformations, and a sudden, new, profound, and enthusiastic sense of wanting to go on long, traditional, high-intensity vipassana meditaiton retreats after doing a variety of ultra-potent entheogens (toad, ayahuasca, mushrooms, peyote) in a short space of time in a great setting with some good guides and, by description and phenomenology, is likely somewhere high up in Equanimity. However, as they said strongly afterwards: definitely not something most people should do if they are not ready for that sort of thing, and most likely aren't.
As we all know if we hang out in the world of meditation and spirit medicine (or whatever you want to call it), people are all over the map, so to speak.
Are all of these entheogenic experiences perfectly mappable to insight stages? The jury is still out. Clearly, there are often parallels. Many who take these things and know the insight stages or later learn about them feel strongly that they correlate well and sometimes perfectly. Others feel that they are undergoing transformations best mapped by other systems. I will bet that what ends up working best is some mix of the shamanic maps and the insight maps and phenomenology, drawing on the strengths of both to come up with something that works for this territory better than either on their own.
We also have to be flexible in our mapping and realize that some stages that are pleasant for some, such as the A&P, are frightening and unpleasant for others, and that the Dark Night stages, which are often difficult, for others involve a lot of skillful letting go of old unskillful patterns and attachments and a rapid progression to the nice end of Equanimity, and everything in between. We still don't have great predictors of this beyond handwaving, speculation, and vague statements like, "It must be karma!" (DhO)
Is it true that psychedelics can break people loose from mental restrictions and launch them into insights and enhanced perspectives? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can break people's brains and cause serious long-lasting problems? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics often just lead to a trip that doesn't break anything or provide obvious positive benefits? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can sometimes lead to some really adverse behaviors with long-term consequences? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics can often be handled well in good contexts without adverse behaviors? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics are illegal in most countries and can get people landed in jail with adverse criminal records and high fines? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics are often used by people in countries where they are illegal without running afoul of the law? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics can cause people to cross the A&P sometimes? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can cause people to suddenly plunge in to the Dark Night stages sometimes in dramatically altered and very destabilizing forms that can cause long-term psychological trauma which can take years to sort out and recover from? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics have been taken hundreds of times by some people without any obvious insights at all to show for it? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics have been taken hundreds of times by some people without any adverse effects to show for it? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can land people in emergency departments with very high medical bills and embarrassing and adverse job consequences if their employer finds out? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics can offer people a taste of something that people later decide to find on their own power by meditating? Definitely. Is it true that psychedelics can tempt people that believe them to be an easy way to get the benefits of meditation without actually having to do the work, thus providing a side-track that derails the meditation practice of the person who took them? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics can get some people into jhana-like states, particularly if they learn to guide them in that direction? Definitely.
Is it true that psychedelics have caused reliable reports of people getting stream-entry or higher paths by taking them? Not so far that I have heard. (DhO)
Psychedelics are complicated. I know plenty of good and bad stories from those who have taken them. I have close friends who have taken literally hundreds of hits of high-quality acid and have no obvious insight at all or obvious lingering effects, as well as people who took single doses of various things and had profoundly life-changing experiences both amazing (one instantly cured of cocaine addiction, one has had some persistent mild sense of transcendence of mortality that has lingered some 40 year later) and horrible (one friend who did LSD killed a guy he caught having sex with his girlfriend during a hippy party back in the day and did 25 year hard time in prison, one friend in junior high school dropped his first hit of LSD and came down 3 months later during which time he was in the state mental hospital and he was never the same after and not in a good way). The problem is that the current state of the art has no way to predict which will happen. (The same could be said of meditation, as endless stories here attest.) A non-trivial portion of my early teachers and current co-adventurers have taken them or still take them, and again, stories both good and bad abound. I remember a friend cowering under a table a week after doing some mushrooms that apparely deeply re-arranged his notion of the world, the major problem being that he was supposed to be hosting a large and important social gathering at that same time.
I am most skeptical of there being reproducible long-lasting changes the way there are with good old meditation with good teachers in moderately high to high dose, but that obviously takes a lot more time and money, but it is at least legal and has a generally better safety profile, I think.
Definitely stay away from 25i: saw a guy in the ED on that and it was truly horrible to watch: very lucky he didn't die by cop, and when they were holding him down he seemed not to notice that his violent thrashing on the concrete was doing terrible things to his hands, face, elbows, knees and feet. (DhO)
Entheogenic Experiences and the need of flexible maps. Correlating what happens on entheogens and what happens through insight practice or other transformative experiences that arise based on other conditions is a long debate and not easy.
Clearly, some cross the A&P on entheogens, with it leading predictably to what comes next. However, what comes next varies radically between people, and the degree to which the Dark Night kicks peoples' asses vs the degree to which it provides valuable insight into letting go and renunciation of suffering is quite variable.
Clearly, some integrate entheogenic experiences better than others. I get reports from all across the spectrum.
Recent emails and a conversation from a nice guy who had some horrendous entheogenic experiences and was still putting his shattered mind, heart and life back together with difficulty some years later.
Contrast that with other recent reports from a close friend and mature, seasoned psychonaut who recently had amazing heart openings, clear and obvious positive personal transformations, and a sudden, new, profound, and enthusiastic sense of wanting to go on long, traditional, high-intensity vipassana meditaiton retreats after doing a variety of ultra-potent entheogens (toad, ayahuasca, mushrooms, peyote) in a short space of time in a great setting with some good guides and, by description and phenomenology, is likely somewhere high up in Equanimity. However, as they said strongly afterwards: definitely not something most people should do if they are not ready for that sort of thing, and most likely aren't.
As we all know if we hang out in the world of meditation and spirit medicine (or whatever you want to call it), people are all over the map, so to speak.
Are all of these entheogenic experiences perfectly mappable to insight stages? The jury is still out. Clearly, there are often parallels. Many who take these things and know the insight stages or later learn about them feel strongly that they correlate well and sometimes perfectly. Others feel that they are undergoing transformations best mapped by other systems. I will bet that what ends up working best is some mix of the shamanic maps and the insight maps and phenomenology, drawing on the strengths of both to come up with something that works for this territory better than either on their own.
We also have to be flexible in our mapping and realize that some stages that are pleasant for some, such as the A&P, are frightening and unpleasant for others, and that the Dark Night stages, which are often difficult, for others involve a lot of skillful letting go of old unskillful patterns and attachments and a rapid progression to the nice end of Equanimity, and everything in between. We still don't have great predictors of this beyond handwaving, speculation, and vague statements like, "It must be karma!" (DhO)
Energy Issues
Energy Imbalance. If you are restless, irritable, headed too far out, having unstable energetic phenomena, anxious, edgy, having bizarre kundalini phenomena, getting paranoid, getting a bit psychotic, pushing your dharma practice too hard, and having a hard time grounding down, then eating a meal, particularly a heavy one, along with physical exercise and lots of other possible actions designed to stabilize practice, can be very helpful to bring imbalanced energy back into balance. (DhO)
How to move down unpleasant energy flow. If energy is rising, lay down and gently move it down. It may take time. Find where the energy is and then gently put the attention just below it and hold it there a while, maybe minutes, maybe 10s of minutes, feeling the energy slowly moving down into wherever awareness is, and then find the lower edge of the energy, put the attention there and then just slightly lower, and hold the attention there gently, moving the energy down. In this way, stepwise and slowly and deliberately, the energy will follow attention and move gradually down. Learning this is a skill like anything else. Do not rush this, as it is not as likely to work. Take your time, be deliberate and steady.
It can sometimes take a while to do this, like an hour, but if you are patient and gentle but steadily attentive, it will likely respond to your persistent and consistent intentions. Stop when it gets down just a few finger-breadths below the navel and hold it there a while, enjoying what the energy can feel like when it gets down there. (DhO)
I found that if I just slowly brought the energy down by gently and slowly working with attention, that over 90 minutes or so of reclining practice where I just worked on the lower edge of where the buzzing and tension was, I could gradually move it down my face, down my neck, through my chest, down my abdomen, and into my pelvis. It was a slow process that required patience, but it was worth it.
At some point, the energy would finally ground down in the pelvis (some Chi Gong person is likely to say this is the Dan Tien or something), the irritation and pain would go away, and I was ok. Maybe, if you are patient and try this, you may have some success.
... (Also try) walking meditation, is an excellent one. Yeah, walking meditation! So underrated! So powerful. (DhO)
Pineal Gland. Meditation stages won't make your pineal gland or any other gland just vanish or burn up, so let go of those stories, as they are just stories. That said, by far the most common stage when people start getting interested in Kundalini phenomena, theory, energy, Taoism, and all of that sort of stuff is a stage called the A&P, aka the Arising and Passing Away, 4th ñana, 2nd vipassana jhana, etc. It is followed by some dark stages for many, so it is common to believe that the Kundalini process has gone wrong or hurt something, when, instead, it is just how the stages of insight typically unfold with stories added onto that. Best to learn about the stages of insight, the normal progression, and apply standard balanced meditation advice gently and with caring for yourself. (DhO)
How to move down unpleasant energy flow. If energy is rising, lay down and gently move it down. It may take time. Find where the energy is and then gently put the attention just below it and hold it there a while, maybe minutes, maybe 10s of minutes, feeling the energy slowly moving down into wherever awareness is, and then find the lower edge of the energy, put the attention there and then just slightly lower, and hold the attention there gently, moving the energy down. In this way, stepwise and slowly and deliberately, the energy will follow attention and move gradually down. Learning this is a skill like anything else. Do not rush this, as it is not as likely to work. Take your time, be deliberate and steady.
It can sometimes take a while to do this, like an hour, but if you are patient and gentle but steadily attentive, it will likely respond to your persistent and consistent intentions. Stop when it gets down just a few finger-breadths below the navel and hold it there a while, enjoying what the energy can feel like when it gets down there. (DhO)
I found that if I just slowly brought the energy down by gently and slowly working with attention, that over 90 minutes or so of reclining practice where I just worked on the lower edge of where the buzzing and tension was, I could gradually move it down my face, down my neck, through my chest, down my abdomen, and into my pelvis. It was a slow process that required patience, but it was worth it.
At some point, the energy would finally ground down in the pelvis (some Chi Gong person is likely to say this is the Dan Tien or something), the irritation and pain would go away, and I was ok. Maybe, if you are patient and try this, you may have some success.
... (Also try) walking meditation, is an excellent one. Yeah, walking meditation! So underrated! So powerful. (DhO)
Pineal Gland. Meditation stages won't make your pineal gland or any other gland just vanish or burn up, so let go of those stories, as they are just stories. That said, by far the most common stage when people start getting interested in Kundalini phenomena, theory, energy, Taoism, and all of that sort of stuff is a stage called the A&P, aka the Arising and Passing Away, 4th ñana, 2nd vipassana jhana, etc. It is followed by some dark stages for many, so it is common to believe that the Kundalini process has gone wrong or hurt something, when, instead, it is just how the stages of insight typically unfold with stories added onto that. Best to learn about the stages of insight, the normal progression, and apply standard balanced meditation advice gently and with caring for yourself. (DhO)
Teachers & Retreats
Immortality Spells and Vanity Projects, the source of my disappointment regarding how Dharma is taught. I was just in Cairo visiting the Great Pyramids of Giza here in Egypt, along with numerous other grand temples and tombs, which rank among the most elaborate and costly immortality spells and vanity projects of all time. They likely also have one of the highest body counts other than wars fought for similar aims of glory and legacy. They got me thinking about the extraordinary lengths some people will go to in order to preserve their life and legacy, and that got me thinking about impermanence, and of course that got me thinking about the Dharma.
The anticipated longevity of the Buddha Dharma is an important topic for Buddhism, with the old texts saying the Buddha discussed how long the teachings would last, and one could see the Cullavagga (Chapter 10), the second book of the Khandhaka, which is the second book of the Vinaya Pitaka. Later texts such as the Lotus Sutra also discuss various ages, predicting that by now we are in a Degenerate Age of corrupted dharma.
This trip to Egypt to see these elaborate immortality and vanity projects comes after a few months of me pondering the projects of some of my aging Dharma friends and colleagues to establish their particular teachings and systems widely and for long periods of time, what might, in some way, be considered their own immortality and vanity projects. I will try to be as sensitive as I can to the understandable wish for things of value to practitioners to continue for as long as there are practitioners who might benefit from their systems and teachings. However, as with the Great Pyramids of Giza and other elaborate tombs and temples, not every consequence of attempting to have one’s works and legacy live on forever is necessarily skillful.
Methods to create the desired longevity and breadth of dissemination may include books, websites, organizations, corporate structures, venture-capital backed technologies, apps, and subscription services to courses and materials, sometimes at surprisingly high cost.
I recall a recent friend who works in the Goenka organization telling me that S. N. Goenka predicted that, if his system is maintained exactly as it is, it will last for 500 years, but I am not sure we have 500 years, a point I will get to in a bit.
Some aging teachers have also created teacher training programs in which disseminators of their systems and teachings are selected, trained, and certified as official teachers. These programs often allow in those who wouldn’t have met the criteria for certified teachers that those creating these systems valued earlier in their own lives. These teacher training programs often involve significant monetary fees, which stands in contrast to the lives of the teachers creating these training programs, who generally were taught for free and certainly didn’t pay fees to be certified to teach. Curiously, the training these newly certified teachers undergo often bear little resemblance to the trainings that produced the original teacher of the system being taught. It is not surprising that the capabilities of the new certified teachers being produced by these programs rarely equal those of their founding teacher.
I quote from a fascinating article about Terror Management Theory (TMT, see Wikipedia entry) in the Atlantic Monthly, May, 2012 (How the unrelenting threat of death shapes our bevavior), “And so when death is close to mind -- after watching an action flick, hearing about a celebrity death, reading about an act of terrorism online, noting a weird spot or new wrinkle, driving past a cemetery -- people become more adamant in their beliefs and get extra-motivated to distance themselves from their physicality and to assert their symbolic value -- their intellect, achievements, and so forth. They increase prejudice and aggression against others who are different. They reject the physical aspects of sex, avoid bodily activities, and use euphemisms for them. They show off their skills, smarts, fitness, and generosity. And indeed research has shown all of these things.”
In the last few months, I have been witness to each of those reactions to mortality and more, sometimes in exaggerated, tragicomic form.
While all these immortality projects are predictable and even expected as we face the fact of mortality in our complex psychological ways, that doesn’t make some aspects of these reactions any less disappointing, at least to me. In order to be disappointed, there must be ideals to disappoint, so I present them here. I admit that holding each of these ideals may simply cause suffering, as they are clearly contrary to reality, and yet, to be without ideals and standards would similarly seem to be going too far in the other direction.
The traditional ideals I hold which are the source of my disappointment are as follows:
- That the Dharma of the Buddha and for-profit corporatization should stay as far apart from each other as possible. This is not to say that the ethics of the Dharma shouldn’t be used to inform the actions of corporations and those within them, nor that the meditation teachings of the Dharma can’t or shouldn’t benefit those in corporations, nor that we shouldn’t figure out ways to distribute beneficial spiritual technologies that help promote wisdom in our contemporary context, but that, when doing these, we should endeavor to stay true to the deeper wisdom of the Dharma and its teachings around being cautious regarding money and the temptations of the world that would corrupt the Dharma.
- That teaching people for money, particularly in hurried, superficial contexts that involve certification of the one paying being at some level of attainment or some sort of teacher, are predisposed to corruption and artificial elevation of a student before they are ready, as well as numerous other problems.
- That one should have reasonably high standards for what one considers a dharma teacher, though clearly one can debate what “reasonably high standards” might mean in practice. It seems we must exercise particular care as we get older that we don’t lower our standards for teachers in the service of spreading our own personal brand of the dharma far and wide.
- As with other types of teachers, if one truly feels that for some reason one must certify dharma teachers, one should specify that they are felt to be qualified to teach at a certain level, such as those who teach grade school vs those who teach graduate school, perhaps with some explicit explanation of what competencies and qualifications should be expected at each level and why.
- That, in general, one should try to compensate for the compromises that the fear of death and fear of one’s legacy fading away often create, being as mindful as one can of those powerful and perennial forces as they work in our lives.
That same Atlantic Monthly article ends with the following profound quote, “Personally, I also hope that the understanding of human beings this research supports -- that we're all vulnerable creatures clinging to fragile beliefs to handle the existential predicament inherent in being human -- has helped me become a better, more compassionate person. It's helped me realize that, no matter how absurd someone else's beliefs seem to me, mine are likely no less absurd. And if such beliefs are helping that person function with equanimity and not leading him to harm others, I should respect them.”
I will do my best to remember these points, and do my best to be sensitive as I evaluate the immortality and vanity projects of my fellow dharma colleagues, realizing that it is entirely possible that I will one day do something very similar, as the threat of my immanent demise overwhelms my own previous ideals. Should you find me doing so somewhere down the line, please don’t hesitate to remind me of this article and lend your wisdom to the conversation.
Some other part of me wonders if all of this discussion is perhaps seriously misplaced, and perhaps I should be directing my full attention and resources to more practical matters related to reversing the global trend towards abject fascism and working to slow and reverse climate change. Walking around crumbling ancient monuments, lonely dunes covered in broken pottery shards, and the plundered tombs of great queens and kings certainly frames things differently for me, as do the museums here that document the rise and fall of whole civilizations and empires based on changing weather patterns and the caprices of psychopathic and narcissistic rulers.
Is this little window of historical time when we have the luxury of idle debates such as these on this thread rapidly closing; or, will the dharma and our discussions of it have real, lasting, significant impact on enough people, despite whatever is coming historically, to have made it worth our precious time? These are the questions I ask myself these days. Obviously, that I am spending my time posting here seems to be a functional answer to the question, if not necessarily a definitive one.
May our intentions to help be skillful and lead to skillful action with beneficial consequences.
… Regarding the money thing, I have heard all the arguments, know lots of people who charge for the dharma, and still, after dealing with these issues for over 20 years, still am pretty fundamentalist on that front, and, with more stories of what happens out there that accumulate over time, I am getting more fundamentalist and perhaps idealistic, not less.
… Regarding the Degenerate Age Dharma Meme, I realize that my cynicism about much of that sort of thing (and plenty of other things) in the Mahayana literature is something I just take for granted, and realize that cynicism didn't convey in text form clearly. This is a remarkable age for the dharma, and the last 100 years have seen a massive flowering of the dharma on a scale that might never have been seen before. That said, that flowering is coming at a price, and it is a high one, I think, so we just need to keep an eye on both sides of that complex equation. (DhO)
Teachers: on monetary compensation, enlightenment credentials and teaching ability. The money thing is a tough one. The advantage of teachers who don't teach for money, or teach just for donations, is that they raise less questions about motivation. That doesn't mean that teaching for money is necessarily bad if they teach good dharma, are straightforward about what the arrangement is, and you can afford it. It can make people more accessible as they don't have to have other ways to support themselves that take away from their dharma teaching time. I personally do have some questions about some of those that do teach for donations, as to live on donations often requires a relatively high degree of popularity, and the quest for popularity can have variable effects on one's dharma teaching. In general, money can be a corrupting influence for some to varying degrees, and exactly how much that effects any individual teacher at each moment is really hard to get a handle on most of the time: as they said: sort it out for yourself. On the other hand, there is something really straightforward about someone saying: "I teach for $X per hour. That's the deal." That allows you to not have to play the how-much-to-donate game, gives you a feeling of assurance that for that hour (an amount of time you are very unlikely to get from the donation-based teachers most of the time) they are yours, and that all obligations on both sides are in some ways nicely wrapped up at the end.
As to whether or not they have reached "enlightenment": it is worth knowing that the range of how "enlightenment" is defined out there is quite wide. Credentialing services have risen and fallen, but the general advice to stick with major, well-known teachers from major centers that have been doing this a long time is pretty good, if not fool-proof, advice. The meaning of lineage varies by the lineage, so you can try asking. My favorite teachers were those who had lineage transmission, had been doing it a long time, and taught at major, recognized centers, with the exception of Bill Hamilton, who was a rogue out in a trailer.
Teaching ability is also a nebulous thing: one person might be a good teacher for one person and not another. It is in many ways a question of fit. Teaching styles vary widely, as do learning styles. This just takes experimentation, as you won't really know how it feels to be with them until you are there and hear what they have to say to you and see how their instructions perform. It is definitely possible to get a sense of people's styles and strengths and weaknesses by reading their stuff, talking to people who have sat with them, etc., but some part of it is just going to have to be reality tested for yourself. I had a few teachers who didn't road test as they were advertised, and I couldn't have known that before hand easily. It also depends on what you want to know, as skill sets vary widely between teachers: this also can be surprising.
People who practice well are, in general, a real help to practice, though they might be dharma friends, teachers, or just people you know and talk to on occasion. Online fora like this also can be good, but I would try to fine someone to actually talk with. Books and the like are also useful, but there really is something to hanging out with people who do this stuff well. (DhO)
Charging fees to teach. This is a free country, sort of, and I think that people have the right to charge what they want to and people have the right to pay that or not, or even to haggle if they wish to. There are so many models of how to do this, and they each have their pros and cons.
I personally charge nothing for the dharma, nothing for the free on-line version of my book, nothing for the time I spent teaching retreatants, nothing for the time I spend writing emails, Skyping with people, talking on the phone, etc. The little bit of money my print version of MCTB makes me just about covers the cost of the DhO. However, the price I pay is that I work a job that requires a lot of time, so the amount of time I have to spend teaching dharma is quite limited.
The people I know who teach dharma for a fee generally do have a lot of work, and generally spend way more time teaching than I do, and thus get to reach a lot more people than I do in person, and person-to-person time with those who know what they are talking about is of great value, and how much of that greatness you want to translate into actual cash is a matter of personal taste and judgement.
I also know a few people who teach for just donations, but they make up for this by teaching very large numbers of people on retreats and generally living on the road, which is disruptive to families and sanghas, means that the total time they have to give any specific person is generally very limited, and so this is clearly an imperfect model also.
Strangely, the first person who gave me authorization to teach, Christopher Titmuss, when I asked him for his advice on teaching, said, "Charge a little something. If you give a talk and charge nothing, you will get less people and they will take you less seriously than if you charge a little bit. This is sad but true." This from a guy who lives on the road on donations and was a monk for years in Asia.
As to Vince Horn, I can't fault him for wanting to get paid relatively well to teach something he is good at and has spent a lot of time practicing and working on over many years, and the basic fact is that to pay the rent in LA it is going to take that kind of money, and that is where his dharma scene is and where he choses to live, and that city as much as anywhere else sure could use some more dharma, and so I wouldn't give him too hard a time about it, as at least he will be getting his stuff out there somehow. Just my two cents anyway, as it were...
... Thanks for posting that great article of Thanissaro Bhikkhu: "No Strings Attached, The Buddha's Culture of Generosity" (DhO)
Retreat in Asia vs in the West. The basic and progressive stage theory and instruction in Practical Insight Meditation is one of the most profound and helpful things I found in my early meditation quest and I am profoundly grateful for it. Once I found that, I literally followed it paragraph by paragraph to Stream Entry, finding it uncannily helpful, efficacious, and accurate. Luckily, being as it contains not that many paragraphs, it was quick trip. ;) Thus, when someone says they gave that instruction, I find this a plus rather than a minus.
However, it is true that many Westerners (and some Western-influenced Easterners) want to have this very conversational, relaxed, philosophical, psychologically-supportive, familiar, personal, intricate relationship to their teachers, covering a wide and free-roving range of topics to satisfy a myriad of Western needs, but, for those lucky few who can just ignore all that and instead just practice and focus on actually doing the technique as prescribed, meaning that they have already dealt with their doubts, fascination with their intellect, traumas, psychological issues, cultural baggage, and all of that, rapid progress often awaits. That is obviously a small minority of practitioners, so, if you are not one of those and require more in-depth engagement, processing, and psychological support, many of the Asian settings are not going to be able to provide for all your needs.
Once you determine which type of practitioner you are, you can choose settings with instructors and cultures that will get you what you want. It is worth being honest about this, as too often practitioners who are of one sort end up with teachers and in centers of the other sort, and, while they might intellectually wish to believe they are a type they are not, soon enough on retreat they become the people they truly are regardless of their ideals. (DhO)
How traditional retreats are. The schedule is intense, up early, breakfast and lunch provided, no dinner, hours of sitting and walking alternate all day long. One is expected to note every single thing one does and experiences at least once per second from the moment you get up to the moment you fall asleep.
There is little to no psychologizing, unpacking of issues, philosophizing, or touchy feely anything, they may not be your friends, and basically it is just about doing the technique of grounding you in exactly what is going on moment to moment in extremely high dose. This produces powerful effects, many of which are surprising. Reading the Progress of Insight in my book, Chapter 30, would be of great value. Not everyone can handle that sort of intense environment dedicated to one thing and one thing only, and it clearly is not for everyone.
They won’t tolerate map terminology or complex dharma theory at all, so, when meeting with a teacher, just describe things very simply and straightforwardly that result from following their instructions exactly, and never use any fancy map terms, such as the stages of insight.
If one can go and just follow instructions exactly, keep things simple and immediate, and deal with the intense effects that come from staying that grounded, all is well. If one wants a social worker, a place to process issues, a mommy or daddy, a religion to think much about, or anything like that, they won’t find it there, and this results in conflict.
Never mention my name, the DhO, “pragmatic dharma”, MCTB, or anything like that ever unless directly asked about it, and then be truthful, as lying is bad karma. There is politics, and you want to avoid politics at all costs, as it just exacerbates yogi-mind. If asked why you wish to go there, the only reasonable answer is, “To learn and gain the benefits of Mahasi-style vipassana practice and follow the instructions of a competent teacher,” as that is basically all they are offering.
Avoid projection. Avoid basically anything but doing the technique and reporting results simply. That can include things like “fear”, “sadness”, “frustration”, "analysis", or whatever, but one would be expected to simply note and notice the sensations that make those up, one by one as they occur in experience.
Many get into real trouble when they push hard for some future goal rather than just noting what is going on right then. Read A Clear Goal in MCTB about 10 times, and note "mapping", "striving", "comparing" and the like simply when they arise as sensate experiences that just come and go.
That should give you a flavor of the practice. It is in one sense extremely simple, very dry, and unreligious (except perhaps for bowing to Buddha statues, perhaps a bit of Pali chanting, and a few other small bits of ritual being about it religion-wise), and yet, by doing it, all these powerful experiences may arise and deep insights may occur that are transformative in some who do the technique well as instructed.
Definitely know Practical Insight Meditation VERY well, particularly the part where it talks about when to transition from noting to noticing when things get faster and more clear, and when to go back to noting if one needs to. (DhO)
However, it is true that many Westerners (and some Western-influenced Easterners) want to have this very conversational, relaxed, philosophical, psychologically-supportive, familiar, personal, intricate relationship to their teachers, covering a wide and free-roving range of topics to satisfy a myriad of Western needs, but, for those lucky few who can just ignore all that and instead just practice and focus on actually doing the technique as prescribed, meaning that they have already dealt with their doubts, fascination with their intellect, traumas, psychological issues, cultural baggage, and all of that, rapid progress often awaits. That is obviously a small minority of practitioners, so, if you are not one of those and require more in-depth engagement, processing, and psychological support, many of the Asian settings are not going to be able to provide for all your needs.
Once you determine which type of practitioner you are, you can choose settings with instructors and cultures that will get you what you want. It is worth being honest about this, as too often practitioners who are of one sort end up with teachers and in centers of the other sort, and, while they might intellectually wish to believe they are a type they are not, soon enough on retreat they become the people they truly are regardless of their ideals. (DhO)
How traditional retreats are. The schedule is intense, up early, breakfast and lunch provided, no dinner, hours of sitting and walking alternate all day long. One is expected to note every single thing one does and experiences at least once per second from the moment you get up to the moment you fall asleep.
There is little to no psychologizing, unpacking of issues, philosophizing, or touchy feely anything, they may not be your friends, and basically it is just about doing the technique of grounding you in exactly what is going on moment to moment in extremely high dose. This produces powerful effects, many of which are surprising. Reading the Progress of Insight in my book, Chapter 30, would be of great value. Not everyone can handle that sort of intense environment dedicated to one thing and one thing only, and it clearly is not for everyone.
They won’t tolerate map terminology or complex dharma theory at all, so, when meeting with a teacher, just describe things very simply and straightforwardly that result from following their instructions exactly, and never use any fancy map terms, such as the stages of insight.
If one can go and just follow instructions exactly, keep things simple and immediate, and deal with the intense effects that come from staying that grounded, all is well. If one wants a social worker, a place to process issues, a mommy or daddy, a religion to think much about, or anything like that, they won’t find it there, and this results in conflict.
Never mention my name, the DhO, “pragmatic dharma”, MCTB, or anything like that ever unless directly asked about it, and then be truthful, as lying is bad karma. There is politics, and you want to avoid politics at all costs, as it just exacerbates yogi-mind. If asked why you wish to go there, the only reasonable answer is, “To learn and gain the benefits of Mahasi-style vipassana practice and follow the instructions of a competent teacher,” as that is basically all they are offering.
Avoid projection. Avoid basically anything but doing the technique and reporting results simply. That can include things like “fear”, “sadness”, “frustration”, "analysis", or whatever, but one would be expected to simply note and notice the sensations that make those up, one by one as they occur in experience.
Many get into real trouble when they push hard for some future goal rather than just noting what is going on right then. Read A Clear Goal in MCTB about 10 times, and note "mapping", "striving", "comparing" and the like simply when they arise as sensate experiences that just come and go.
That should give you a flavor of the practice. It is in one sense extremely simple, very dry, and unreligious (except perhaps for bowing to Buddha statues, perhaps a bit of Pali chanting, and a few other small bits of ritual being about it religion-wise), and yet, by doing it, all these powerful experiences may arise and deep insights may occur that are transformative in some who do the technique well as instructed.
Definitely know Practical Insight Meditation VERY well, particularly the part where it talks about when to transition from noting to noticing when things get faster and more clear, and when to go back to noting if one needs to. (DhO)
On eastern monks. Most monks don't practice much. Some don't ever practice. A few practice a moderate amount. Fewer still practice a lot. Of those, some are good at it. This is a broad set of generalizations. It can vary widely by the monastery and tradition. (DhO)
Teachers/Retreats with similar style to D. Ingram's teaching. I think most important is owning your own practice, realizing that you will not find your ideal teacher, making 95% of your emphasis on what you do and 5% on what anyone else says, learning and practicing the basics well (as they truly are the key), and projecting out as little as possible.
Christopher Titmuss is political: Has been for a very, very long time. He was hyperpolitical when I was on retreat with him in the mid-90's. He does like discussion. Still, I very much appreciated him as a teacher. He is Thai Forest, which is pretty non-mappy, and, while he knows the maps, he isn't likely to go there. Still, his emphasis on immediate experience is a golden antidote to the shadow sides of the maps. However, if he isn't a good fit, then there it is.
Seriously, for most people these days, I recommend Bhante Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English, which, while simple, is the sort of simple thing that, if you could get people to actually practice it well, would make things go very well. Combine that with his The Path of Serenity and Insight, and you have something very useful that also is very old-school textual and scholarly. Add in a bit of Nyanatiloka's The Buddha's Path to Deliverance, and you have even more teachings that are as "authentic" as you are going to get these days. Add in Practical Insight Meditation to get the Mahasi component. If you can't practice well from the information found in those sources, there is something deeper going on, and you need to figure out what that is.
Also, look at what you really want from a teacher, and most of it will be about confirmation of what you will have already read, friendship, validation, social connection, and the like. I get that the serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin we get from interactions feel good and are motivating. However, a very good teacher is a very expensive way to get those things, sort of like paying a neurosurgeon to be your friend. See if you can cultivate other dharma friendships, as good ones can be of more value than many teachers.
Yes, good teachers can help, but pay careful attention to the subtle ways you wish to stay in some intermediate zone of competence, some long-term spiritual adolescence, and ask yourself why.
And if you just want to train in something that will produce powerful results, and just want to follow instructions respectfully and not argue with the teachers, talk map theory, or have them be your friends, just go on a Mahasi retreat at some good center (MCMB, Panditarama, Panditarama Lumbini, Tathagata, one of the Thai Mahasi Centers, etc.) and do the practice as prescribed all day long and simply report the results of your practice without any dharma terms at all or maps and don't piss them off. (DhO)
Teachers/Retreats with similar style to D. Ingram's teaching. I think most important is owning your own practice, realizing that you will not find your ideal teacher, making 95% of your emphasis on what you do and 5% on what anyone else says, learning and practicing the basics well (as they truly are the key), and projecting out as little as possible.
Christopher Titmuss is political: Has been for a very, very long time. He was hyperpolitical when I was on retreat with him in the mid-90's. He does like discussion. Still, I very much appreciated him as a teacher. He is Thai Forest, which is pretty non-mappy, and, while he knows the maps, he isn't likely to go there. Still, his emphasis on immediate experience is a golden antidote to the shadow sides of the maps. However, if he isn't a good fit, then there it is.
Seriously, for most people these days, I recommend Bhante Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English, which, while simple, is the sort of simple thing that, if you could get people to actually practice it well, would make things go very well. Combine that with his The Path of Serenity and Insight, and you have something very useful that also is very old-school textual and scholarly. Add in a bit of Nyanatiloka's The Buddha's Path to Deliverance, and you have even more teachings that are as "authentic" as you are going to get these days. Add in Practical Insight Meditation to get the Mahasi component. If you can't practice well from the information found in those sources, there is something deeper going on, and you need to figure out what that is.
Also, look at what you really want from a teacher, and most of it will be about confirmation of what you will have already read, friendship, validation, social connection, and the like. I get that the serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin we get from interactions feel good and are motivating. However, a very good teacher is a very expensive way to get those things, sort of like paying a neurosurgeon to be your friend. See if you can cultivate other dharma friendships, as good ones can be of more value than many teachers.
Yes, good teachers can help, but pay careful attention to the subtle ways you wish to stay in some intermediate zone of competence, some long-term spiritual adolescence, and ask yourself why.
And if you just want to train in something that will produce powerful results, and just want to follow instructions respectfully and not argue with the teachers, talk map theory, or have them be your friends, just go on a Mahasi retreat at some good center (MCMB, Panditarama, Panditarama Lumbini, Tathagata, one of the Thai Mahasi Centers, etc.) and do the practice as prescribed all day long and simply report the results of your practice without any dharma terms at all or maps and don't piss them off. (DhO)
Christopher Titmuss. I am extremely familiar with both Christopher Titmuss, having sat over 50 days on retreat with him total (two 9-days, one 17-day, one 27-day (during which I got stream entry) and also conversed with him at length about teaching when I was on retreat at Gaia House (and during which time he gave me permission to teach), and so I will briefly say this:
IMS's not-talk-about-it culture inspired MCTB. (circa 2009) IMS basically is a freakish paradox: a beautiful center and setting with fantastic food and an alright price which at once got me my start and really helped me and many people who trained me, and yet is in the same breath a weird bastion of exactly the problems you all describe: nobody does it, psychological, bullshit Buddhism at its gutless, neurotic worst. I have a lot of both first hand and second hand experience with the place, and while you will find enlightened teachers there sometimes, and you will find people with good models on occasion, and you will find dedicated, competent practitioners interspersed with all the Buddhist Kindergardeners and hyper-psychologized adult-children, and you will find a good place to practice if you know what you are doing, you will also find a ton of the exact culture that Nathan28 so rightly takes aim at. It is light and darkness containing one another from a Taoist point of view, or just a place in need of regime change from my point of view, but perhaps I am just another Buddhist neo-con: just kidding!
He is a study in contradictions, at once rebel and traditionalist, at once very into the Pali Canon and also totally in some other direction, at once powerful and realized dharma teacher and also guy who has gotten in trouble again and again for his fondness for young, pretty female retreatans. I am familiar with all of those points he makes on his website, as he made them in person during Dharma talks and more.
He will say things like, "This Christopher is NOT suffering!", and then write books of poetry such as Fire Dance and Other Poems (good book), some of which is unabashedly sensual and sexual in nature.
In short, using him as an example of supporting Buddhist traditionalism is a double-edged sword.
I got a ton out of sitting with Christopher and highly recommend him, with the qualifier that, if you are a pretty woman, best to keep your wits about you if you start to receive undue attention and make good decisions that you will be happy with years later. I presume you are all adults and can make adult choices. He is getting older now, but whether or not that has slowed him down I have no idea.
His no-bullshit approach to Buddhism and meditation in general lent me a lot of license and support to also call it like I see it, and sites like the Dharma Overground and my book are influenced by his basic spirit to a high degree.
Still, he is very much a non-map guy, which is quite Thai of him, as his training was as a Thai monastic, which is fine, but to negate the verifiable truths of parts of the Abhidhamma and the Visuddhimagga, neither of which I totally buy either, would be foolish, as you actually can verify much of what you find there. (DhO)
A dialogue between Titmuss and a student. Regarding feelings of low motivation, confusion, angst, depression, etc. I remember this fantastic exchange with Christopher Titmuss (C) and a meditator (M) on retreat with him, and I wish I could duplicate their heavy English accents in text form, as somehow it makes it more Monty Python-esque to me, but anyway, here goes my best attempt at recalling the conversation:
M: Christopher, I am so confused! My mind is a mess. I feel like I have no idea what is going on.
C: You're certain?
M: Absolutely! It is total chaos. My mind is all over the place. I just feel like I am going nowhere.
C: You are clear about this?
M: Oh, yes, definitely. These thoughts are just out of control. I can't make sense of any of it.
C: Quite sure?
M: Quite! ...
And so on like that for what felt like 5 minutes but was probably only 2. It made quite an impression on me and was an exchange that I replayed in my mind again and again and again to remind myself of its essential message. Hopefully you get what Christopher was pointing to: there was the clarity about the chaos. The clarity is what he was pointing to. It is there in and intrinsic to the depression, the lack of motivation, the existential questions, the whole thing. Notice that again and again and again.
People reject their own clarity, their own direct experience, as they don't like it. It is understandable enough, but it really doesn't work on the path of insight. (DhO)
One way or anyother, I hope the place finally crawls out of its own disempowerment trip and gets its head right. In the meantime it is still a good place to go if you are augmented with a better attitude about achievement than you will typically find there and with better meditation techology and maps than is often taught there. I know a number who have tied to buck the trend in public and been shot down hard, so if you want to spread a little hard-core dharma there, my suggestion is to be selective in your audience unless you have a big tolerance for such metaphorical things as packs of hungry hyenas. (DhO)
... (circa 2017) A few years ago (so already out of date and things may have changed), I saw Joey G (I think he does well with a rapper name) discussing emotions and models with an accomplished Vajrayana practitioner/neuroscience researcher during a conference at BCBS on maps and neuroscience. It was about an hour-long discussion and went into depth, the sort of depth that is helpful for sorting out questions like this, though by no means definitive.
The Vajyrayana practitioner kept sitting there calmly and knowingly describing and explaining the luminosity of empty emotional energies of a wide range. He appeared comfortable in his realization, embodied in it, patient, and steady. I assessed that he was at least third path in my way of viewing the paths based on that, albeit limited, data. Clearly, there would be more I would have asked him if I wanted a clearer read, but that was the conclusion I came to at that time.
Joey G, by comparison, asked numerous doctrinal questions about the 10 fetters, if they might actually apply to daily life, with a look of genuine confusion and frustration on his face, like he was hoping someone would finally tell him. (It was the same look of confusion and pain that I saw on his face when he said during a dharma talk some years ago, "Hey, if there are any arahats in the room, you can have this place!" referring to IMS, with a look that I interpreted to mean he was weary of something in being up there running it.)
During the discussion at BCBS, the Vajrayana guy next to him was explicitly telling him the answers to Joey G's questions, smiling as he told him, and Joey G, for whatever reason, clearly couldn't hear it. I must say, the feeling of watching that was painful for me, like I kept hoping suddenly the ears and eyes would switch on, the insight would kick in, but it didn't happen at that time that I could tell.
Curiously, that was the same look of confusion I saw when I asked Joey G a series of questions about those same models and maps during an hour-long interview he was kind enough to grant me in 1998 at his house next to IMS, and he referred me elsewhere for further guidance. I concluded then that he had maybe second path. I concluded the same during that discussion Joey G had with the Vajrayana practitioner a few years ago.
I don't know enough about his current practice to say anything now, as it has been a while since I got to see him in person discussing these topics, and anything can change. I have learned in this business, that, despite the mind being quick to categorize, it is not always easy or accurate when it does so, and it takes a lot of good data to do it well, a sharing of terminological meanings, clear and well-defined language, and often a reasonable amount of personal contact to make it more accurate.
In short, buyer beware of my impressions, as they are just impressions, based on limited data, and could be wildly inaccurate. Further, there is some history there, as I am clearly not a fan of Joey G's attempts to impose a culture that has very limited discussions of attainments, so again, read my interpretations as the flawed work that they are.
Still, I must admit great gratitude, as without Joey G's work, however flawed, I would not likely have anything like the understanding of the dharma that I do, as Bill came up at IMS, which Joey helped found, and my first reatreat was there as well, which started the whole thing rolling, and Kenneth got his start there also, and Vince likely wouldn't be as into this stuff if those things hadn't happened and we probably wouldn't know each other, and then the DhO wouldn't likely exist, as Vince helped me found it, so, again, gratitude to Joey G for the foundational work of the DhO, which is weird irony, when you think about it, but causality is some strange stuff.
Also, I wrote MCTB in a response to IMS's not-talk-about-it culture, so thanks to Joey G for inspiring MCTB as well! (DhO)
Mahasi tradition and noting 'authenticity'. As has been stated many times by others, I find dogmatic things about "authenticity" somewhat tiresome. Other's really find it important for their sense of practice or identity or whatever, and I get that also. It is mostly a personality thing much more than it has anything to do with the Buddha, I personally feel.
... Noting is sort of like learning to write the letters of the alphabet with those kindergarden workbooks that have lots of lines and pictures of how to draw letters with each part of the letter having a number by each stroke with arrows to tell you which order to draw them in and in what direction. They work, in that you can rapidly learn to draw letters and then write words using those simple workbooks, as millions of schoolchildren have learned for themselves.
As you will notice in Practical Insight Meditation, noting isn't fast enough to keep up with reality and is dropped in early stages.
As to what you might learn in a Mahasi Center if your practice goes deep: it is vastly beyond noting, and may include jhanas (the Pali Canon samatha ones with peace and bliss and all of that), things like Nirodha Samapatti (Bill Hamilton was big into going to Panditarama to play around with that), and powers and all sorts of other stuff. They just don't talk about that stuff much at the front door. They are fine talking about zero to stream entry, as they consider that on the trivial and straightforward end of things.
Thus, you can tell who here has trained deeply in Mahasi Center that discussed things in this thread: not many that I could identify, but I might be wrong. Want to actually learn something about Mahasi? Go train with some Mahasi-trained people and practice well enough to get to the good stuff.
Reading this discussion and then comparing it to actually training with the Mahasi monks and those that they trained is sort of like reading Rousseau talking in extremely simplistic and absurdly idealized terms about primitive tribespeople, namely laughably naive.
So, is noting "authentic"? It is sort of like debating whether or not those workbooks from kindergarden that taught you how to write letters were used by the original people that invented the Roman alphabet: basically a ridiculous discussion. Those workbooks taught me to write. My writing is ok most of the time. Now computers form the letters for me. Are computer-generated Roman letters "authentic"? Is typing "authentic"? You get the picture.
Is the Mahasi tradition authentic? Uh, I guess it depends on whether or not you consider things like jhanas authentic, as the Mahasi tradition as actually practiced today is vast and deep.
It is true that Mahasi is insight first, samatha later in a lot of ways. That is one of many possible ways to go. I have some fine and awakened friends, including plenty here, who were samatha first, and that is fine. I care about results, myself.
... Practical Insight Meditaiton is one of the most basic and introductory of Mahasi's works. It was written to be exactly that. I refer people to it due to its high degree of practicality, efficacy and accessibility, as well as being very short and easy to read if you are not a Pali-glot. However, it is a tip of the gigantic Mahasi iceberg, both in terms of literature and practice depth. The problem is that a lot of his material is not that easy to find. I got my collection at MCMB in Penang, mostly. Some of it I got ordered online. Plenty of his stuff is still in Burmese only. If you want the real deal, you still need to study with those who have trained in the primary centers.
You could also check out the writings of those he trained to see what the real deal looks like: U Janakabhivamsa, U Kundalabhivamsa, U Pandita, all giants of meditation. Still, even most of their writings don't do the tradition justice. (DhO)
The Vajyrayana practitioner kept sitting there calmly and knowingly describing and explaining the luminosity of empty emotional energies of a wide range. He appeared comfortable in his realization, embodied in it, patient, and steady. I assessed that he was at least third path in my way of viewing the paths based on that, albeit limited, data. Clearly, there would be more I would have asked him if I wanted a clearer read, but that was the conclusion I came to at that time.
Joey G, by comparison, asked numerous doctrinal questions about the 10 fetters, if they might actually apply to daily life, with a look of genuine confusion and frustration on his face, like he was hoping someone would finally tell him. (It was the same look of confusion and pain that I saw on his face when he said during a dharma talk some years ago, "Hey, if there are any arahats in the room, you can have this place!" referring to IMS, with a look that I interpreted to mean he was weary of something in being up there running it.)
During the discussion at BCBS, the Vajrayana guy next to him was explicitly telling him the answers to Joey G's questions, smiling as he told him, and Joey G, for whatever reason, clearly couldn't hear it. I must say, the feeling of watching that was painful for me, like I kept hoping suddenly the ears and eyes would switch on, the insight would kick in, but it didn't happen at that time that I could tell.
Curiously, that was the same look of confusion I saw when I asked Joey G a series of questions about those same models and maps during an hour-long interview he was kind enough to grant me in 1998 at his house next to IMS, and he referred me elsewhere for further guidance. I concluded then that he had maybe second path. I concluded the same during that discussion Joey G had with the Vajrayana practitioner a few years ago.
I don't know enough about his current practice to say anything now, as it has been a while since I got to see him in person discussing these topics, and anything can change. I have learned in this business, that, despite the mind being quick to categorize, it is not always easy or accurate when it does so, and it takes a lot of good data to do it well, a sharing of terminological meanings, clear and well-defined language, and often a reasonable amount of personal contact to make it more accurate.
In short, buyer beware of my impressions, as they are just impressions, based on limited data, and could be wildly inaccurate. Further, there is some history there, as I am clearly not a fan of Joey G's attempts to impose a culture that has very limited discussions of attainments, so again, read my interpretations as the flawed work that they are.
Still, I must admit great gratitude, as without Joey G's work, however flawed, I would not likely have anything like the understanding of the dharma that I do, as Bill came up at IMS, which Joey helped found, and my first reatreat was there as well, which started the whole thing rolling, and Kenneth got his start there also, and Vince likely wouldn't be as into this stuff if those things hadn't happened and we probably wouldn't know each other, and then the DhO wouldn't likely exist, as Vince helped me found it, so, again, gratitude to Joey G for the foundational work of the DhO, which is weird irony, when you think about it, but causality is some strange stuff.
Also, I wrote MCTB in a response to IMS's not-talk-about-it culture, so thanks to Joey G for inspiring MCTB as well! (DhO)
Mahasi tradition and noting 'authenticity'. As has been stated many times by others, I find dogmatic things about "authenticity" somewhat tiresome. Other's really find it important for their sense of practice or identity or whatever, and I get that also. It is mostly a personality thing much more than it has anything to do with the Buddha, I personally feel.
... Noting is sort of like learning to write the letters of the alphabet with those kindergarden workbooks that have lots of lines and pictures of how to draw letters with each part of the letter having a number by each stroke with arrows to tell you which order to draw them in and in what direction. They work, in that you can rapidly learn to draw letters and then write words using those simple workbooks, as millions of schoolchildren have learned for themselves.
As you will notice in Practical Insight Meditation, noting isn't fast enough to keep up with reality and is dropped in early stages.
As to what you might learn in a Mahasi Center if your practice goes deep: it is vastly beyond noting, and may include jhanas (the Pali Canon samatha ones with peace and bliss and all of that), things like Nirodha Samapatti (Bill Hamilton was big into going to Panditarama to play around with that), and powers and all sorts of other stuff. They just don't talk about that stuff much at the front door. They are fine talking about zero to stream entry, as they consider that on the trivial and straightforward end of things.
Thus, you can tell who here has trained deeply in Mahasi Center that discussed things in this thread: not many that I could identify, but I might be wrong. Want to actually learn something about Mahasi? Go train with some Mahasi-trained people and practice well enough to get to the good stuff.
Reading this discussion and then comparing it to actually training with the Mahasi monks and those that they trained is sort of like reading Rousseau talking in extremely simplistic and absurdly idealized terms about primitive tribespeople, namely laughably naive.
So, is noting "authentic"? It is sort of like debating whether or not those workbooks from kindergarden that taught you how to write letters were used by the original people that invented the Roman alphabet: basically a ridiculous discussion. Those workbooks taught me to write. My writing is ok most of the time. Now computers form the letters for me. Are computer-generated Roman letters "authentic"? Is typing "authentic"? You get the picture.
Is the Mahasi tradition authentic? Uh, I guess it depends on whether or not you consider things like jhanas authentic, as the Mahasi tradition as actually practiced today is vast and deep.
It is true that Mahasi is insight first, samatha later in a lot of ways. That is one of many possible ways to go. I have some fine and awakened friends, including plenty here, who were samatha first, and that is fine. I care about results, myself.
... Practical Insight Meditaiton is one of the most basic and introductory of Mahasi's works. It was written to be exactly that. I refer people to it due to its high degree of practicality, efficacy and accessibility, as well as being very short and easy to read if you are not a Pali-glot. However, it is a tip of the gigantic Mahasi iceberg, both in terms of literature and practice depth. The problem is that a lot of his material is not that easy to find. I got my collection at MCMB in Penang, mostly. Some of it I got ordered online. Plenty of his stuff is still in Burmese only. If you want the real deal, you still need to study with those who have trained in the primary centers.
You could also check out the writings of those he trained to see what the real deal looks like: U Janakabhivamsa, U Kundalabhivamsa, U Pandita, all giants of meditation. Still, even most of their writings don't do the tradition justice. (DhO)
Shinzen Young might be looked at as a secularized and simplified Mahasi, but Mahasi was already pretty secularized and simplified. If you read Practical Insight Meditation carefully, you will notice that, while it is does anchor in feet and breath, it progresses to open aspects as attention develops and then widens and becomes more inclusive. Read the descriptions of the insights it produces and you will see that it moves from the feet and breath to rapid phenomena too fast to note to very inclusive awareness that encompasses everything.
It is definitely true that Shinzen might be looked at as a secularized and simplified Mahasi, but Mahasi was already pretty secularized and simplified. You may appreciate various techniques and emphases as your practice progresses, and I think that both systems enhance rather than compete with each other.
Even more important than the system is the basic premise of all the insight systems: Six Sense Doors happening now revealing the Three Characteristics again and again and again. Keep that as the core basis of your practice and see how various systems and emphases help you understand that fundamental teaching of the Buddha. (DhO)
Goenka Centers are a mixed bag. Please don't misunderstand me, it is not that I do not recommend Goenka centers, as I know a good number of people who have gotten some real benefit from them, the price is clearly right, they are pretty on the up end as centers and traditions go, I know numerous people who have crossed the Arising and Passing Away during their courses, and thus, there is much to be said for them.
I do have some critiques, however, about a few things. I do know that during the first 3 month retreat at IMS where they used the Mahasi method over body-scanning that they got many more stream enterers and others with deep insights and they basically never looked back. I know that many who have gotten into interesting territory on Goenka retreats have not had teachers there who could tell them what was happening, what to do next, how it might affect their daily life, etc., all of which I consider suboptimal and unfortunate. The tradition is a bit sectarian without necessarily the track record to justify this, though again, as a widespread, dana-based insight movement, the world is clearly a better place for it, and many do get their start there. In short, a mixed bag, but that is not the same as me not recommending them.
… While I haven't been on a Goenka retreat, what I hear of them doesn't sound hardcore enough for me, not enough emphasis on every sensation, every second technique from the moment of waking to the moment of sleeping, not enough emphasis on progress, no maps, low expectations on people getting stream entry and beyond, low quality discussion of technical aspects, etc.
… Walking Meditation is great: I had some really important breakthroughs while walking. It shouldn't be underestimated. It keeps the energy up, provides durable concentration, and helps us integrate practice into the more motion-oriented, open-eyed world of daily life. (DhO)
What’s wrong with Goenka’s tradition. My wishes that the Goenka tradition would upgrade itself in various ways are long-standing and oft-stated here and other places. There is a lot to be said that is good about Goenka, but their failure to properly acknowledge and normalize the dark side of things, the lack of individualized support, the lack of appreciation of the maps (both high and low, A&P and DN), and the fact that so many people cross the A&P on their technique (which is really good for that) and then fail to handle the DN well (particularly as a 10-day retreat is so good for getting people above the A&P just in time for them to return home to their lives and then crash later shortly thereafter), etc. are all well-known. A reasonable number also crash towards the end of the retreat in various ways, as is well-attested to here on the DhO. In fact, in my more cynical moments, I speculate that the DhO gets half of its membership and lurkers from people who had some variant of this happen to them on Goenka retreats and went looking for explanation and support that they couldn’t find through that organization. Truly, this is not how or why I wish the DhO to be as popular and long-lived as it is.
Unfortunately, the structure of the organization is entirely designed for stasis rather than innovation and reform. This at once provides it an institutional grade of stability yet prevents it from realizing important structural problems and fixing them appropriately. Every tradition has its problems and shadows, and this is one of the key ones of the Goenka tradition. It is ironic that one of the key structural components that has made Goenka such an institution paradoxically has helped to make the DhO one as well, but not for reasons that anyone would wish. May this change in ways that are skillful and of benefit to practitioners. (DhO)
Mental-health problems in Goenka’s ten days retreats. There are a sizeable number of people who got a lot that is good out of the Goenka tradition who have posted such on this forum, just as there are probably hundreds of reports of people who did a 10-day or a number of 10-days in Goenka, crossed the A&P, didn't have it contextualized, and then either had lots of problems with the A&P kundalini stuff or the Dark Night that followed, lacked proper support, frameworks, and normalization, went on to make a mess of their lives, and finally found the maps, frameworks, and support and started putting things back together.
I tweeted that article out a few days ago after Willoughby sent it to me (Megan Vogt, who committed suicide after her first ten-day Goenka retreat). Truly tragic.
Those of us who talk about the dark side of meditation get a lot of emails from people who are struggling in various ways due to the dharma and the strange effects it can produce. I personally get maybe 3-10 emails per week, most not nearly that bad, but perhaps every 2-3 months I hear from someone who is really having a hard time, and I try to give them what information that I can and then refer them to the very limited support network I have of those who have dual training in mental health and meditation difficulties. As an ED physician, I have a moderate mental health background, as we deal with a lot of psychiatric issues in the ED, but that is no substitute for specialists who are trained much more extensively than I am who can provide local support, but most of those people in most locations are woefully unprepared for the side-effects of intense dharma practice, or even sometimes light dharma practice, which can sometimes also produce profound difficulties.
Basically, until the mental health and medical world gets a clue about the vast range of what is possible from meditation and it becomes incorporated into standard medical and psychological/psychiatric/social-work curriculae, the good, the bad, and the life-threatening, there will not be nearly enough of the level of quality of local, on-the-ground support for meditators who run into these problems.
That said, local psych support is vastly better than what people often get at their surprisingly ignorant local meditation centers.
While it is true that mental health screening may be of real value for meditation retreats, this presumes that it requires previously identified mental health problems to have problems on retreat once one gets into the potentially challenging stages, and this is clearly not true.
As numerous real-world reports indicate, plenty of people who have had no significant identifiable mental health problems, including plenty of people who were previously hyper-functional, PhDs, MDs, and other seriously accomplished, smart, capable, diligent, stable, sane people can have profound challenges when the stages of insight arise. Were it ethical for me to post such things on this forum, I could drown this forum in emails I have received over my 20+ years of talking about this stuff online that prove this.
Thus, I reject the "just screen people well and, if they are honest, and you only take the previously very sane ones, everything will be ok" hypothesis, as it is simply bullshit. In fact, one can find hundreds of similar reports already on this forum and its sister fora, as this has been one of the gathering places for the casualties of this dangerous view.
Again, that the Goenka tradition, which has had the stages of insight pointed out to them again and again, simply refuses to incorporate this validating and instructive meditation technology that comes straight out of the Theravada (upon which their tradition is based) into their curriculum and training is extremely vexing to those of us who wish to see them be able to do what they do but in a safer way.
In other topics, Buddhism is not about destroying a self, it is about seeing that the notion of such a thing was illusory to begin with and never actually was anything but a bunch of poorly perceived patterns of sensations. Still, the basic point that it can feel like a self is being destroyed, violated, destabilized, uprooted, shaken to the core and all of that clearly occurs, and that is what vipassana is designed explicitly to do, as mentioned. I agree completely that this should be posted in large signs at the gate along with the warnings.
Someone above mentioned that the pharmaceutical industry has no problem mentioning side effects and the like, but nothing could be further from the truth: they were forced to by the governments against their will, they fight this tooth and nail with powerful lobbies every single day, and even their advertisements, which write dangerous side-effects in the smallest fonts they are legally allowed to and have puppies and flowers and happy family scenes in their TV adds over someone reading the dangerous side-effects at nearly incomprehensibly fast speeds over these discordant images shows that they really hate being asked to say anything bad about their products. This should not be surprising, given that the purpose of corporations is to maximize sales, minimize costs, and provide all the value they can extract from their enterprises in the form of monetary profits to their shareholders.
The parallels here should be obvious, but the meditation world has no governing body forcing it to do anything, at least in the US.
I might suggest that it is a just matter of time before some government regulatory agency gets a whiff of this (such as through NIH grants that fund research into the dark side of meditation, as well as journal articles and case reports that are starting to occur with greater frequency), and finally steps in with Buddha only knows what sorts of onerous and misguided regulations and restrictions, as is their fervent habit. Given my exposure to how this has gone in medicine, it is not likely to make anyone happy except lawyers.
That the meditative traditions generally appear to have neither the ethics nor sense to use their own technologies to provide effective warnings and disclosures of what can go wrong and how badly, as well as to use modern methods to study the incidences and odds of these well-reported side-effects happening and publish that data, shows that they suck just as badly as the pharmaceutical industry in this particular regard. Profit motives, dogmatic faith, ignorance (both willful and the regular variety), and cultural inertia all clearly trump morality and decency in this case.
Not to be needlessly paranoid, but imagine for a moment some fascist or similarly autocratic government, enamored of the state-sponsored religion, wary of other religions, interested in "purity of faith" and the centralization of power this provides, eager for excuses to repress other spiritual movements, eager to be shown to be "protecting the people from harm", zealous to appeal to their base of political and religious support, and intolerant of dissent and heterodoxy. Imagine what they would do with the information we are discussing here. Realize that this sort of governmental regulation and control of religion has been the norm over the vast majority of human history and still occurs in numerous contemporary countries. It is easy for those of us who are so blessed as to live in areas of the world where this is not currently occurring to imagine that the fight has been won and that these conditions will persist and spread, but history is not on our side, nor are current world trends. The total proportion of people across history that have lived with freedom of religion and spiritual practice is statistically miniscule, so simple Baysenian analysis would suggest that this will continue to be true in general terms. I believe we should be appropriately wary and act responsibly so that we provide no excuses to those who are just begging for excuses. (DhO)
Body repair after a retreat. I personally am a big fan of deep tissue massage. As to strenghtening those things, yoga can definitely help, as can just sitting more consistently in daily life, but it is also possible that you should modify your sitting posture and/or rotate sitting postures, as it is possible to simply damage yourself by sitting in some way your particularly body doesn't like for too long.
On some retreats, I have rotated between Burmese Friendly position, benches, chairs, sitting kneeling on a cushion or two, half-lotus, full-lotus (I am lucky in that I am very flexible, likely due to having a connective tissue disorder, such as Ehlers-Danlos hypermobility type, I am beginning to speculate), and found that this sort of rotation helped my body weather the long sitting hours a lot better. (DhO)
Meditation goes wrong for some: 7 ironies. So this article came out in Vice on the 15th: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/vbaedd/meditation-is-a-powerful-mental-tool-and-for-some-it-goes-terribly-wrong , and it mentions MCTB in the first example of being a book that inspired the meditation in someone that went horribly wrong after they also picked up TMI. While I am delighted they are talking about the Dark Night in more real-world terms than what it typically gets, I must admit I felt more than a bit slighted, and noted numerous bits of irony that I found irksome.
Irony #1: being mentioned in the same sentence as The Mind Illuminated, which, while a great textbook on meditation fundamentals, is also frankly and irresponsibly dismissive IMHO of the Dark Night stages, giving them only cursory treatment, claiming to be able to often bypass them by just adding in some more samatha with the vipassana, a claim that doesn’t even often work out in students working with the man himself, as I noted during my month co-teaching with Culadasa at his own meditation center Dharma Treasure this September.
Irony #2: Speaking of which, not any mention is made of the fact that I go farther out of my way in MCTB2 to mention the Dark Night stages in excruciating detail and provide more warnings and helpful and normalizing tech for dealing with them than any book I know of on meditation, and yet I seem to being lumped into the camp of those who don’t mention them, something that for years earned me no end of flack from numerous major “don’t talk about it” types.
Irony #3: the fact that no mention is made of the fact that I have run and paid for a free online community of over 6,000 people for over a decade that is largely populated by people who have run into these stages.
Irony #4: that Shinzen is quoted as mentioning the Dark Night stages, when he is one of the ones who is moderately dismissive of how frequently and sometimes how intensely they occur, as evidenced by his recent podcast with Michael Taft on Deconstructing yourself. (Just so I am clear, I am generally a big fan of Shinzen, but diverge from him radically on this particular point).
Irony #5: the fact that I spend numerous hours every single week answering emails and skype calls and the like for free largely helping to handle people who have run into the Dark Night stages and are struggling with them.
Irony #6: I have also influenced and promoted scientific articles that mention the Dark Night stages, including the work of Drs Willoughby Britton and Jared Lindahl, as well as through my editing work for a meditation journal, and the influence I had on Duncan’s article about the Dark Night stages that went out in the journal that goes to every mental health practitioner in the UK.
Irony #7: that I have been on numerous podcasts and even interviewed by the BBC and other mainstream media sources regarding the Dark Night stages for my work in trying to bring awareness to them. If anyone has any idea how to get in touch with the author of that article, let me know.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my somewhat self-indulgent rant about a pretty ironically distorted article from my point of view. (DhO)
It is definitely true that Shinzen might be looked at as a secularized and simplified Mahasi, but Mahasi was already pretty secularized and simplified. You may appreciate various techniques and emphases as your practice progresses, and I think that both systems enhance rather than compete with each other.
Even more important than the system is the basic premise of all the insight systems: Six Sense Doors happening now revealing the Three Characteristics again and again and again. Keep that as the core basis of your practice and see how various systems and emphases help you understand that fundamental teaching of the Buddha. (DhO)
Goenka Centers are a mixed bag. Please don't misunderstand me, it is not that I do not recommend Goenka centers, as I know a good number of people who have gotten some real benefit from them, the price is clearly right, they are pretty on the up end as centers and traditions go, I know numerous people who have crossed the Arising and Passing Away during their courses, and thus, there is much to be said for them.
I do have some critiques, however, about a few things. I do know that during the first 3 month retreat at IMS where they used the Mahasi method over body-scanning that they got many more stream enterers and others with deep insights and they basically never looked back. I know that many who have gotten into interesting territory on Goenka retreats have not had teachers there who could tell them what was happening, what to do next, how it might affect their daily life, etc., all of which I consider suboptimal and unfortunate. The tradition is a bit sectarian without necessarily the track record to justify this, though again, as a widespread, dana-based insight movement, the world is clearly a better place for it, and many do get their start there. In short, a mixed bag, but that is not the same as me not recommending them.
… While I haven't been on a Goenka retreat, what I hear of them doesn't sound hardcore enough for me, not enough emphasis on every sensation, every second technique from the moment of waking to the moment of sleeping, not enough emphasis on progress, no maps, low expectations on people getting stream entry and beyond, low quality discussion of technical aspects, etc.
… Walking Meditation is great: I had some really important breakthroughs while walking. It shouldn't be underestimated. It keeps the energy up, provides durable concentration, and helps us integrate practice into the more motion-oriented, open-eyed world of daily life. (DhO)
What’s wrong with Goenka’s tradition. My wishes that the Goenka tradition would upgrade itself in various ways are long-standing and oft-stated here and other places. There is a lot to be said that is good about Goenka, but their failure to properly acknowledge and normalize the dark side of things, the lack of individualized support, the lack of appreciation of the maps (both high and low, A&P and DN), and the fact that so many people cross the A&P on their technique (which is really good for that) and then fail to handle the DN well (particularly as a 10-day retreat is so good for getting people above the A&P just in time for them to return home to their lives and then crash later shortly thereafter), etc. are all well-known. A reasonable number also crash towards the end of the retreat in various ways, as is well-attested to here on the DhO. In fact, in my more cynical moments, I speculate that the DhO gets half of its membership and lurkers from people who had some variant of this happen to them on Goenka retreats and went looking for explanation and support that they couldn’t find through that organization. Truly, this is not how or why I wish the DhO to be as popular and long-lived as it is.
Unfortunately, the structure of the organization is entirely designed for stasis rather than innovation and reform. This at once provides it an institutional grade of stability yet prevents it from realizing important structural problems and fixing them appropriately. Every tradition has its problems and shadows, and this is one of the key ones of the Goenka tradition. It is ironic that one of the key structural components that has made Goenka such an institution paradoxically has helped to make the DhO one as well, but not for reasons that anyone would wish. May this change in ways that are skillful and of benefit to practitioners. (DhO)
Mental-health problems in Goenka’s ten days retreats. There are a sizeable number of people who got a lot that is good out of the Goenka tradition who have posted such on this forum, just as there are probably hundreds of reports of people who did a 10-day or a number of 10-days in Goenka, crossed the A&P, didn't have it contextualized, and then either had lots of problems with the A&P kundalini stuff or the Dark Night that followed, lacked proper support, frameworks, and normalization, went on to make a mess of their lives, and finally found the maps, frameworks, and support and started putting things back together.
I tweeted that article out a few days ago after Willoughby sent it to me (Megan Vogt, who committed suicide after her first ten-day Goenka retreat). Truly tragic.
Those of us who talk about the dark side of meditation get a lot of emails from people who are struggling in various ways due to the dharma and the strange effects it can produce. I personally get maybe 3-10 emails per week, most not nearly that bad, but perhaps every 2-3 months I hear from someone who is really having a hard time, and I try to give them what information that I can and then refer them to the very limited support network I have of those who have dual training in mental health and meditation difficulties. As an ED physician, I have a moderate mental health background, as we deal with a lot of psychiatric issues in the ED, but that is no substitute for specialists who are trained much more extensively than I am who can provide local support, but most of those people in most locations are woefully unprepared for the side-effects of intense dharma practice, or even sometimes light dharma practice, which can sometimes also produce profound difficulties.
Basically, until the mental health and medical world gets a clue about the vast range of what is possible from meditation and it becomes incorporated into standard medical and psychological/psychiatric/social-work curriculae, the good, the bad, and the life-threatening, there will not be nearly enough of the level of quality of local, on-the-ground support for meditators who run into these problems.
That said, local psych support is vastly better than what people often get at their surprisingly ignorant local meditation centers.
While it is true that mental health screening may be of real value for meditation retreats, this presumes that it requires previously identified mental health problems to have problems on retreat once one gets into the potentially challenging stages, and this is clearly not true.
As numerous real-world reports indicate, plenty of people who have had no significant identifiable mental health problems, including plenty of people who were previously hyper-functional, PhDs, MDs, and other seriously accomplished, smart, capable, diligent, stable, sane people can have profound challenges when the stages of insight arise. Were it ethical for me to post such things on this forum, I could drown this forum in emails I have received over my 20+ years of talking about this stuff online that prove this.
Thus, I reject the "just screen people well and, if they are honest, and you only take the previously very sane ones, everything will be ok" hypothesis, as it is simply bullshit. In fact, one can find hundreds of similar reports already on this forum and its sister fora, as this has been one of the gathering places for the casualties of this dangerous view.
Again, that the Goenka tradition, which has had the stages of insight pointed out to them again and again, simply refuses to incorporate this validating and instructive meditation technology that comes straight out of the Theravada (upon which their tradition is based) into their curriculum and training is extremely vexing to those of us who wish to see them be able to do what they do but in a safer way.
In other topics, Buddhism is not about destroying a self, it is about seeing that the notion of such a thing was illusory to begin with and never actually was anything but a bunch of poorly perceived patterns of sensations. Still, the basic point that it can feel like a self is being destroyed, violated, destabilized, uprooted, shaken to the core and all of that clearly occurs, and that is what vipassana is designed explicitly to do, as mentioned. I agree completely that this should be posted in large signs at the gate along with the warnings.
Someone above mentioned that the pharmaceutical industry has no problem mentioning side effects and the like, but nothing could be further from the truth: they were forced to by the governments against their will, they fight this tooth and nail with powerful lobbies every single day, and even their advertisements, which write dangerous side-effects in the smallest fonts they are legally allowed to and have puppies and flowers and happy family scenes in their TV adds over someone reading the dangerous side-effects at nearly incomprehensibly fast speeds over these discordant images shows that they really hate being asked to say anything bad about their products. This should not be surprising, given that the purpose of corporations is to maximize sales, minimize costs, and provide all the value they can extract from their enterprises in the form of monetary profits to their shareholders.
The parallels here should be obvious, but the meditation world has no governing body forcing it to do anything, at least in the US.
I might suggest that it is a just matter of time before some government regulatory agency gets a whiff of this (such as through NIH grants that fund research into the dark side of meditation, as well as journal articles and case reports that are starting to occur with greater frequency), and finally steps in with Buddha only knows what sorts of onerous and misguided regulations and restrictions, as is their fervent habit. Given my exposure to how this has gone in medicine, it is not likely to make anyone happy except lawyers.
That the meditative traditions generally appear to have neither the ethics nor sense to use their own technologies to provide effective warnings and disclosures of what can go wrong and how badly, as well as to use modern methods to study the incidences and odds of these well-reported side-effects happening and publish that data, shows that they suck just as badly as the pharmaceutical industry in this particular regard. Profit motives, dogmatic faith, ignorance (both willful and the regular variety), and cultural inertia all clearly trump morality and decency in this case.
Not to be needlessly paranoid, but imagine for a moment some fascist or similarly autocratic government, enamored of the state-sponsored religion, wary of other religions, interested in "purity of faith" and the centralization of power this provides, eager for excuses to repress other spiritual movements, eager to be shown to be "protecting the people from harm", zealous to appeal to their base of political and religious support, and intolerant of dissent and heterodoxy. Imagine what they would do with the information we are discussing here. Realize that this sort of governmental regulation and control of religion has been the norm over the vast majority of human history and still occurs in numerous contemporary countries. It is easy for those of us who are so blessed as to live in areas of the world where this is not currently occurring to imagine that the fight has been won and that these conditions will persist and spread, but history is not on our side, nor are current world trends. The total proportion of people across history that have lived with freedom of religion and spiritual practice is statistically miniscule, so simple Baysenian analysis would suggest that this will continue to be true in general terms. I believe we should be appropriately wary and act responsibly so that we provide no excuses to those who are just begging for excuses. (DhO)
Body repair after a retreat. I personally am a big fan of deep tissue massage. As to strenghtening those things, yoga can definitely help, as can just sitting more consistently in daily life, but it is also possible that you should modify your sitting posture and/or rotate sitting postures, as it is possible to simply damage yourself by sitting in some way your particularly body doesn't like for too long.
On some retreats, I have rotated between Burmese Friendly position, benches, chairs, sitting kneeling on a cushion or two, half-lotus, full-lotus (I am lucky in that I am very flexible, likely due to having a connective tissue disorder, such as Ehlers-Danlos hypermobility type, I am beginning to speculate), and found that this sort of rotation helped my body weather the long sitting hours a lot better. (DhO)
Meditation goes wrong for some: 7 ironies. So this article came out in Vice on the 15th: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/vbaedd/meditation-is-a-powerful-mental-tool-and-for-some-it-goes-terribly-wrong , and it mentions MCTB in the first example of being a book that inspired the meditation in someone that went horribly wrong after they also picked up TMI. While I am delighted they are talking about the Dark Night in more real-world terms than what it typically gets, I must admit I felt more than a bit slighted, and noted numerous bits of irony that I found irksome.
Irony #1: being mentioned in the same sentence as The Mind Illuminated, which, while a great textbook on meditation fundamentals, is also frankly and irresponsibly dismissive IMHO of the Dark Night stages, giving them only cursory treatment, claiming to be able to often bypass them by just adding in some more samatha with the vipassana, a claim that doesn’t even often work out in students working with the man himself, as I noted during my month co-teaching with Culadasa at his own meditation center Dharma Treasure this September.
Irony #2: Speaking of which, not any mention is made of the fact that I go farther out of my way in MCTB2 to mention the Dark Night stages in excruciating detail and provide more warnings and helpful and normalizing tech for dealing with them than any book I know of on meditation, and yet I seem to being lumped into the camp of those who don’t mention them, something that for years earned me no end of flack from numerous major “don’t talk about it” types.
Irony #3: the fact that no mention is made of the fact that I have run and paid for a free online community of over 6,000 people for over a decade that is largely populated by people who have run into these stages.
Irony #4: that Shinzen is quoted as mentioning the Dark Night stages, when he is one of the ones who is moderately dismissive of how frequently and sometimes how intensely they occur, as evidenced by his recent podcast with Michael Taft on Deconstructing yourself. (Just so I am clear, I am generally a big fan of Shinzen, but diverge from him radically on this particular point).
Irony #5: the fact that I spend numerous hours every single week answering emails and skype calls and the like for free largely helping to handle people who have run into the Dark Night stages and are struggling with them.
Irony #6: I have also influenced and promoted scientific articles that mention the Dark Night stages, including the work of Drs Willoughby Britton and Jared Lindahl, as well as through my editing work for a meditation journal, and the influence I had on Duncan’s article about the Dark Night stages that went out in the journal that goes to every mental health practitioner in the UK.
Irony #7: that I have been on numerous podcasts and even interviewed by the BBC and other mainstream media sources regarding the Dark Night stages for my work in trying to bring awareness to them. If anyone has any idea how to get in touch with the author of that article, let me know.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my somewhat self-indulgent rant about a pretty ironically distorted article from my point of view. (DhO)
On the alleged arrogance and dismissal of people's inhability to follow simple instructions on retreat. I am not trying to be dismissive or arrogant or make needless judgements, but I am trying to delineate insight practice from other things, such as psychotherapy, and MCTB goes to great lengths to make this point.
List of conditions you should consider when trying to diagnose something. These should generally be considered in this order of likehood for feeling of “done”:
If the instructions of insight practice were something like, "Make a mental note about each category of sensations as they arise, such as feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, etc.", and something took that to mean, "Spend your time on the cushion worried about your girlfriend", then there is something to be said for helping people try to see how those instructions are different. Do you see the difference?
It is reasonable to try to get people to follow the instructions and to understand them. Further, that perhaps 80-90% of Westerners on most "insight" meditation retreats actually can't hear and follow instructions as simple as, "Notice the sensations that make up experience arise and vanish regardless of what they are," or, "Make a quiet, simple mental note about sensations as they arise", would seem to warrant something compensatory for such a truly extraordinary situation, particularly that these are people who often had managed to follow other simple instructions in order to get the jobs that got them their Priuses and organic vegetables.
The fear and shame are also unique aspects of Western culture, things that MCTB goes out of its way to try to counter, such as by saying not to beat yourself up about things, not to be hard on yourself, but instead try to follow basic instructions and make it fun and very interesting.
I make no apologies at all for trying to clarify these essential practice points.
As someone mentioned in the analogy about learning math which also appears in MCTB:
- how well would this fly in any other type of class? Imagine if I was studying guitar and the teacher told me to practice a C Major scale and instead I said that I spent the time worrying about my girlfriend,
- or if I was studying automechanics and the teacher said to disassemble the front end of the car and instead I spent the time worrying about my girlfriend,
- or if I was trying to learn how to do karate and instead of doing my kata I spent the time standing there in the dojo worrying about my girlfriend,
- or if I was trying to learn how to sail a boat and instead spent the time sitting on the shore worrying about my girlfriend
in each case, you would be forced to come to the conclusion that I had something pretty wrong with me, in that I either couldn't follow simple instructions, or I didn't care about the topic and only came there to worry about my girlfriend, or some combination of both, but regardless you might consider me to be a pretty terrible student and profoundly distracted and, in fact, nearly incapacitated by my worrying about my girlfriend.
This is the same.
By pointing out that people spend entire retreats not following very simple instructions and being basically incapacitated by their neurotic preoccupations, I am not doing anything stranger than that.
This is a skill. There are very simple instructions. You practice by following those caveman-simple instructions. If you are so wrapped up in something else that you can't do that, you probably should seek some sort of help for your degree of dysfunction. It is that simple.
That we as a culture have so many people who are so profoundly preoccupied with our neurotic crap that we can't follow the very basic instructions of insight practices is really sad and scary, but that doesn't change the basic points made above.
Why would you try to rationalize that people who come to a class and don't even follow the basic instructions aren't doing something wrong? It is a strange thing to think. Would you think it about any other situation, such as those above?
Imagine if every day you told your teachers in school, "I am sorry, I can't pay any attention to anything you say, can't do the lessons you assign to me, can't answer questions about the lesson plan, can't do my homework, and can't be expected to take the tests, as I am so worried about my girlfriend." Do you see how totally dysfunctional that is? It is the same with vipassana practice, just like all those other totally ordinary learning situations.
This is not arrogance. This is simple common sense, common sense that applies to basically any other class you would take to learn any other teachable skill. (DhO)
Teachers & Claims. The Buddha was pretty into himself. It is hard to tell that from bragging. I am pretty into the Buddha, so I think he was just stating things mostly as they are and I am willing to forgive those aspects I consider a bit of hyperbole, but realize that this judgement is coming from my side, as your judgement would from your side, so any teacher or claimer or whatever you would be judging would be your perception, as whether or not they had attained to what they claimed is sometimes hard to tell, and it could be just an accurate assessment or bullshit or a mix of both, and so it is worth realizing that.
In my perfect world, teachers would tell you what they had realized and mastered and be right and be willing to teach you that. This is the best scenario. I feel the Buddha generally falls into this category.
Other scenarios exist also, such as teachers who won't tell you what they had realized and mastered but have actually mastered things and are willing to teach you how to master them, but this is a strange thing, as how can you tell what the teacher knows and doesn't know? It is pretty gamey in my view.
Other scenarios you clearly wish to avoid: they claim something but don't know it and are willing to teach you: obviously a big problem.
Only slightly better: they claim nothing, have realized something, but won't teach you or you can't find them, as they make no claims to anything, the effect being the same: you can't learn from this person who has real insight. What a waste, if you ask me. (DhO)
Teachers overdiagnosing early, beneficial, positive insights as being much more than they are. Part of the problem from a phenomenological point of view is that plenty of stages of insight as well as low-level jhanic states have some degree of mental upgrade to them, and some of these are pretty easy to access and learn to tap into on a regular basis, and plenty demonstrate some aspect of increased spaciousness, increased sense of no-self, increased sense of freedom from psychological issues or a changed relationship to them, etc.
For example, the very first insight, that of Mind and Body, is very easy for most people to get into, but for some, who have never been there, it can be very profound. Thoughts are observable. We are not our thoughts. Some have literally never noticed this before, and so, to them, it is a huge deal, and rightly so in some ways. This is the insight that the MBSR kids take and run with and do massive horizontal psychological work with. MCBT also leverages this for all it is worth. To see our feelings as objects, our issues as objects, this provides a degree of spaciousness, a degree of freedom, and is a serious mental upgrade, though a very low-level insight from an insight map point of view. For some people, this sense of mental space around thoughts can be very powerful and transformative, and some will even say they feel a sense of oneness when this stage hits, as they notice something about the space in which thoughts occur. To teach people to access this is a true gift, though to make it out to be more than it is is a true curse, as well as very weak phenomenology, just as with overcalling and overdiagnosing all the attainments.
The next insight, Cause and Effect, that processes are happening very much on their own, provides similar insights, but adds this sense of depth to it. Intentions arise on their own. Impressions arise on their own. These fundamental insights show something profound about no-self, something profound about agencylessness, something profound about causality. They are the building blocks of further insights. For those who really understand what is going on with them, they reveal profound truths. However, these again are very low-level insights. If we milk them for all they are worth experientially, we might build a great foundation to use for deeper exploration. If we simply grossly overcall what these are and make them out to be much more than what they are, we have engaged in goal-post moving marketing and perhaps self-promotion of the brand.
This goes on and on with the higher stages.
The A&P is not that hard to access for most with good techniques, and again, those made to access it will generally have a pronounced appreciation, reverence, etc. for whomever or whatever produced it. It can produce extremely powerful feelings of well-being, oneness, equanimity, rapture, devotion, awe, and the like. It shows people a partial, temporary taste of something amazing. It is not called "pseudo-nirvana" for nothing, yet it is no more than that and doesn't last, though it does permamently change those who cross it. Many gurus, faith healers, and meditative traditions have used this to great advantage to generate a group of devoted followers who were "shown the light" by whomever managed to get them there. Also, it is very tempting for many, particularly with prompting, to associate this stage with awakening, as it can be powerful, profound, and deeply and permanently transformative. However, to associate it with the deeper levels of insight, and particularly awakening, is considered a nearly capital crime in the tradition I come from, yet to do so is so tempting for both teachers and students. This occurs in many traditions by teachers and students with weak phenomenology and some incentive to overcall attainments, a pressure found in many traditions, including some in the Pragmatic Dharma and associated worlds. I consider this a gross exploitation of naive, gullible practitioners, just so my views on this are clear, and to not adopt high criteria that carefully and with a long time horizon tease out what is the A&P from higher attainments, such as Equanimity and particularly stream entry, is reprehensible, in my view, and cheats those who are misdiagnosed in numerous ways.
Similarly for even Dissolution, which can be pleasant and peaceful. Ten times more for Equanimity ñana, which again is very profound, spacious, and transformative for some but still temporary and close but not quite.
Bill Hamilton warned again and again about the terrible and corrosive power to script people into rationalizing that whatever they have attained is something much higher. He himself fell victim to this by one of his toxic gurus as he got promoted higher and higher into the inner circle, so he knew for himself. He also finally found the real thing, real awakening, real deep, lasting much more profound realization, and so knew the difference.
I have seen similar problems arise with Dzogchen and Mahamudra teachers with weak phenomenology who take each of these insights that provide some space, some relief, some middling degree of insight, and take it as "non-duality", a taste of the "non-dual", and so make each of these specific stages into one great phenomenologically indistinct generalization that they use for promoting their tradition and giving high praise and lots of little merit badges along the way to those who gain these insights. While I can see how this could be popular, and the field evidence and the rise of certain traditions clearly is validating how successful a marketing strategy this is, I feel that it severely short-changes practitioners and promotes models that often don't hold up to reality testing. (DhO)
List of conditions you should consider when trying to diagnose something. These should generally be considered in this order of likehood for feeling of “done”:
- Slacker
- Crazy
- A&P to Dissolution
- Equanimity
- Some jhana
- Stream Entry
- A&P to Dissolution after Stream Entry
- Equanimity before Second Path
- Second Path
- Any number of endless repetitions of this basic pattern out in the nebulous cycles in middle paths territory
- Lots of other things
- Arahatship (DhO)
MCTB & Morality
Putting "The Arahat" in MCTB2's cover. The arahat thing is a point that has been made many times, both for and against. Being a pragmatist, I hope to achieve certain ends, and must balance causes and effects. Regarding putting "The Arahat" on the cover...
Pros:
- Some find it intriguing
- Some find it impressive
- Some find it compelling
- Some find it inspiring
- Some find it reassuring
- Some find it the straightforward statement it is
- Some find it humerous
- A very few will appreciate the reference (Vimuttimagga, my second favorite dharma book), which is by The Arahat Upatissa
- Some find it grandiose
- Some find it preposterous
- Some find it offputting
- Some find it offensive
- Some have no idea what the word means and so find it confusing
- Some find it just bizzare
- Some find it heresy
- Some will not read the book because of that word on the cover
A previous version (circa 2012):
Cons: really, really, really gets into peoples visions of perfection, competitiveness, taboos, projection, transference, and the like to a huge degree. The flack that flies from this is endless. The number of people who I personally know who won't even read my book as that word is on the cover is large.
Pros: is opens the debate up, it gets people's attention, it inspires some to really try for it on their own, it creates a lot of investigation and conversation about what this actually means here today in this body and time, and those have been hugely interesting to be a part of. (DhO)
Overcoming attraction and aversion through insight. [A fellow member asks Daniel: "How can insight make an end to suffering if it doesn't erase attraction and aversion, which MCTB says it doesn't? This makes me confused about the 4 noble truths..." Daniel answers:]
Where does MCTB say that? It actually says the opposite. No sense of this side being somehow special, independent or stable means no split in perception at all, and no split means no sense of a this side that is trying to get to that side for nice sensations, trying to get away from that side for unpleasant sensations, and tuning out for the dull ones. Instead, everything is just where it is, doing what it does.
Thus, those tensions both towards and away from vanish. That is really nice and vastly better than the initial way of perceiving things.
It doesn't fix everything about life. It doesn't eliminate all emotions or even just the "bad ones", but is does transform something in them, though this is hard to quantify. Perceptually, it is extremely satisfying in its straightworward "answer-ness". (DhO)
Delusional ideals, MCTB and the MMA analogy. Daniel wrote in MCTB: "That the enlightened lineage holders of the modern Theravada and their ex-monk and ex-nun Western counterparts don’t have the guts to stand up and say, 'We are deeply sorry that for 2,500 years, many of our predecessors perpetuated this craziness to put food in their bowls and fool ignorant peasants so that they might be supported in their other useful work, and we vow to do better!' is a crying shame". When someone critized that, Daniel replied:
Consider first the angle of the author who wrote it, a scientist, a clinician, something of a non-idealistic rebel who yet has practiced a lot, gotten to know a lot of very deep practitioners up close and personal, gotten to hear a lot and see a lot about how the ideals performance test, and gotten to think a lot about the neural pathways that might be involved, pondered religion and its survival strategies, the history of Buddhism in lots of places, the local Dharma Scandals, and the like.
After all of that, I find that statement generous for the following reasons:
- It presumes that they all have enough wisdom to even be able to sort this out, meaning what I would call "arahantship", whereas most of them actually don't.
- That, even if they had it, they might be able to be brutally honest about what it did and didn't actually do with themselves and how that compared to their religious ideals and the dogmas they had been raised on. I know arahants that, apparently out of habit or market forces, said things they knew in their hearts weren't true: very disappointing to witness.
The Buddha clearly talked on a lot of levels depending on the audience, clearly was playing to an audience that had various expectations, such as very long earlobes and 40 teeth and a penis in a sheath and all of that, and, it appears, basically had to say certain things to fit with the culture that was already in place. This closely parallels the history of the Jesus-like figures during Jesus' time who played to the standard canon of things you had to do and say you had done then to be considered a messiah, such as raising the dead and performing certain other miracles.
When I read the Canon, particularly the lives of the great disciples (see the book of the same name, Great Disciples of the Buddha, highly recommended), it is wild to watch the conceptual hoops they clearly as those without any attachment grieve their friends, those without suffering kill themselves due to pain, etc. In short, they were human to a degree that they hardly own conceptually. The more I see of the world today of idealistic Buddhism colliding with actual humanity, the more I become convinced of my readings of the ancient texts.
Further, as a scientist and physician, it is nearly impossible to imagine any neurological pathways by which merely perceiving impermanence clearly might make one suddenly impotent, incapable of speaking certain very specific words or performing certain very specific actions or not feeling or manifesting certain very specific emotions.
You will also notice that the quote you quote comes after this quote, which I still stand by: "And yet, its maps of enlightenment still contain a hefty helping of scary market-driven propaganda and so much garbage that is life-denying, dangerously out of touch with what happens, and an impediment to practice for millions of people."
I am not the first nor will I be the last to point out some of the life and emotion-deying aspects of the Theravada doctrine as presented in certain texts and by certain teachers, and the massive traditions of the Mahayana and Vajrayana grew up due to that, among other things.
I will not be the first nor last to point out that idealism about not having bad emotions simply fucks up a lot of people as they try to practice and practice by shutting down and ignoring their emotions that don't fit with their ideals.
I will not be the last to notice that some teachers who by their own explicit and implicit claims to attainments yet throw rocks at dogs for no reason and yell meanly at their students, and it gets worse than that, as we all know.
It is not that everyone who has a different interpretation from me is a charlatan, it is that people who have ridiculous interpretations that they keep pedaling once they have deep realization are charlatans, and I have known a few who did this and knew they were doing it, and they are the tip of a very large iceberg.
Once one is willing to break out of the notion that this is all socially constructed, rejecting the illusion that whatever a group socially constructs is ok and equally as true as anything else, then one can start thinking and paying attention again.
It is a bit like MMA: in their native settings, judo and karate and jujitsu and mui thai and the like all thought they were the best, and all that was taken basically as religious doctrine until they got in the ring with trained MMA fighters who had blended the best of a few major styles, boxing, kicking, grappling, etc., and the original, domatic, delusional traditions got their constructed ideals deconstructed by the MMA fighter's actual, non-constructed fist to their physically deconstructed faces.
In the same way, a reasonable portion of the ideals of the Theravada are delusional, not in accordance with reality, not in accordance with any plausable neurobiological pathways, not sensible, not withstanding reality testing. The same applies to nearly all the ideals from nearly all the traditions, unfortunately, so it really isn't fair to pick on the Theravada, when Zen and the Tibetans and the Vedanta kids and all of them have basically as many delusional ideals as well that nobody has really tested in hundreds of years in the way that MMA did to the fighting religions, but that's what's happening here, and I stand by my claims.
Here's my best advice:
- Practice well without life-deying ideals, or, if you have them, watch them carefully, and avoid denial.
- See for yourself through rigorous real-world performance testing.
- Don't step into a full-contact ring with an MMA fighter unless you have trained in MMA, as you will just get hurt and possibly killed. (DhO)
In some ways it is like complaining that children's books have little cute pictures, as, from a Mindfulness point of view, most consumers of this stuff are basically, as Christopher Titmuss would have put it, "thumb-sucking kids on the spiritual path", and so I can at once see that getting this stuff out there, even in preposterously watered-down, exploited, bastardized, pathetically-infantile, hyper-commercialized style is better than nothing, and yet it is truly vile from another equally valid point of view. Can we be Mindful as we hold those two points of view in ourselves and vomit while we relish the joy of them spreading the "dharma" in that form to those who probably can't handle anything more than that?
In this, am I needlessly and profoundly dismissive of the actual capabilities of these fine consumers? Perhaps, and, if so, hopefully things like that magazine and similarly watered-down magazines (into which category I unfortunately throw Tricycle and Shambhala, though I haven't read them in years owing to similar reactions in the past) will encourage those who want more to look deeper into these things.
May all beings find the dharma they are capable of handling skillfully.
... (As to that 'Mindfulness based stress reduction is fast becoming an intrinsic part of clinical psychology these days but without the dharma for minds not so enclined', Daniel answers:) There is clearly data that basic MBSR stuff helps some people to moderate degrees sometimes in various ways, and I am tempted to say something as a follow up, such as, "just like knowing your ABC's helps you read," but that might not be fair, as for some it does become more than that.
Still, it is pretty early-education level most of the time, and the part about it not just missing the deeper stuff but somehow cultivating this weird arrogant dismissal of the deeper stuff, as if it was somehow the end all and be all of insight meditation, is a strange but oft observed side effect of teaching PhDs and MDs and the like the MBSR material, which is a tragic loss and odd glass-ceiling producing effect, in that plenty will then stop there, when they might have really liked to know about the deeper stuff and might even have been able to reach it, had they been part of a program that considered things beyond its reach. (DhO)
MCTB and cycles: I still cycle, but it's really different from how it was before. I have read that review at Amazon (see 'Historian enjoy, practitioner beware', 2 stars). It is interesting to see how people read things and interpret them, with that obviously being a really negative way to look at it all. What conditioning on their side prompted that, I have no idea, so it is hard to second-guess them or psychoanalyze them, but I can tell you about this end, which looks very different from how they think it does.
It is true that I cycle, but the cycles are really, really different now from how they were, and the transformation is really, really better than how things were before.
It is definitely not just accepting that my life is worse due to my practice and becoming ok with that. My life and mind and clarity are vastly improved, vastly better.
Let's look at the Three Trainings discussed in the book.
Morality really helps. Kindness really helps. Compassion really helps. Sympathetic Joy really helps. Lessening anger, cultivating balance: these basic things help a lot. They change the way the whole body feels, the way the mind feels, the way reactions go, and all sorts of other good stuff. They make a difference, as those who have trained hard in them will tell you.
Concentration: Deep jhana is wonderful. Even light jhana is nice. They are profound states of consciousness, healing, restful, amazing, and quite profound. Learning them does not increase suffering, it reduces it. Being able to access them writes great things on the mind and opens lots of doors to more interesting things.
Wisdom: Eliminating false dualistic perception through clear seeing of the basic nature of bare sensate experience is a fundamental game-changer. It is the sanest thing I ever did or imagine I ever could do. It rights something that was wrong at the core. Dualistic misperception, the sense of an "I", of a doer, of a controller, of some split-off
Subject: this illusion creates needless pain and all sorts of strange reactions to try to get that pain to go away, but no amount of tinkering with anything else solves it like just seeing through it by clear bare perception of the truth of one's own experience. This markedly reduces suffering rather than increasing it.
Whoever wrote that review clearly has no idea what they are talking about. These things I advocate are ancient, time-tested, worthy of implementing, skillful and obviously so, based on excellent premises, perform well in reality, are straightforward, and are not the dark and wrong path the reviewer makes them out to be.
If for some reason you don't like the presentation style in MCTB: find them elsewhere. I like Thich Nhat Hahn and Pema Chodron for training in Morality, Bhante Gunaratana and The Visuddhimagga for training in Concentration, and Mahasi Sayadaw and U Pandita for training in Wisdom, but there are lots of other good sources available from many skillful traditions.
MCTB is available for free on this website and numerous other places, so you can read it and decide for yourself what you think of it. You could also try the practices and see what they lead to and decide for yourself. You can also check the references and see where those practices come from and go back to the original source material and get it there. (DhO)
Sutta Heads. From the Daniel Ingram Unabridged Dictionary I Just Made Up:
"Sutta-head: n. 1) One who thumps on the suttas as the true, righteous, holy, perfect, one true authority for meditative practice. 2) One who bashes on the commentaries regardless of any pragmatic value in them. 3) One who bashes on other effective techniques and sources based on similar beliefs. 4) One who is intolerant and disparaging of sources of wisdom beyond the Pali Canon despite any evidence of its efficacy."
... How in the world did you take what I said as a critique of sutta-based approaches? Mahasi practice is a sutta-based approach. The vast majority of the practice I did and still do was and is based on the suttas to various degrees.
I am purely critiquing their intolerance of the commentaries, of things post, say, 100BC or so, of things not strictly in accordance with their very narrow way of considering what is authentic, right, proper, holy, correct, doctrinal, etc. and not for one skinny instant saying or implying anything about there being problems with practicing from the sutras.
... I myself poured through many thousands of pages of the suttas. I own thousands of pages of suttas. I recommend people to the suttas routinely. The commentaries that I so appreciate: many parts of them are themselves mostly based on the suttas. I spent countless hours learning techniques from the suttas, contemplating the suttas, delving into what practical wisdom I could find there. A huge portion of the dharma terminology I use comes from the suttas. In short, I am a fan of what pragmatic wisdom can be found there, as I am for any other source. I have also drawn from a great deal of non-suttic sources. (DhO)
... As to those who think that Buddhaghosa, presumed author of the Visuddhimagga, came up with the stages of insight on his own, it should be noted that they can be found in the Vimuttimagga, whose origins are in India, we think, and presumed to have been written by the Arahat Upatissa a few hundred years earlier, and it is very unlikely that they were made up by him either, but instead likely reflect something in the living tradition of Buddhism from before that time. One gets the sense that these authors meant to convey things they found useful, to describe what wisdom their traditions had to offer, and that they cared deeply about their own tradition. Consider the staggering expense of producing such monumental works back them: the paper (or leaves or whatever), the copy time, the ink, the safe storage. These were labors of love, not the work of cunning deceivers, and they were preserved for many centuries by the same labors of love by those many, many Buddhist monks who knew how extremely valuable and useful they were, representing basically the pinnacle of achievement of Buddhist scholarship at the time. What sad and stupid paranoia there is around this stuff.
I presume that those commentarial bashers never bothered to read the commentaries they critique, and certainly never bothered to verify what they talked about, but just got some edgy buzz of arrogant foolishness off the caustic smoke of some lie some other ignorant and dogmatic sutta-head unfortunately blew up their aging nostrils, somehow wiping out the part of their brain that can pattern recognize what countless people here have reported and go, "Wait a second? Is it that all these people just made this stuff up, or is it that there really is something to these stages that I was raised to think were blasphemy in the church I grew up in? Huh, maybe I am totally missing something here..." Duh!
Further, the stages of insight are so uncannily predictable, so freakishly reproducible, so amazingly useful, as anyone who has gone on a good insight retreat or taught one knows like they know that the sun rises in the morning, that criticizing the stages of insight is sort of like criticizing some early anatomist that noticed that we humans generally have 7 cervical, 12 thoracic and 5 lumbar vertebrae. You could say it was not the authentic teaching of some ancient anatomist who never mentioned them, but who cares, as it just happens to be right in the vast majority of cases (there is rare mild anatomic variability here).
Imagine if in practicing medicine I had to rely on textbooks from thousands of years ago that arbitrarily cut off at a certain period regardless of whether or not there was valuable, accurate, useful, curative, diagnostic or otherwise pragmatic information found in them? Who in their right mind would go to that doctor? I think the same of the sutta-heads.
It is like arguing with fundamentalist Christians who think the earth is 6,000 years old: why bother? They have a fixed cognitive deficit that can't accept new information despite evidence, and I would even assert that this is very old information, and very authentic, very useful information, information that can be verified for one's self, information that has been verified again and again by hundreds of my friends and countless thousands on retreats.
For them, their arbitrarily limited tradition trumps truth, trumps pragmatism, trumps even historical fact, and leaves them so dazed as to be unable to comprehend the functional, well-established technical language that has allowed me and so many others to do such amazing work and navigate such interesting territory to great ends, as were they to give even an inch, they would have to step outside their hyper-defended comfort zones of sacred writ, and gosh, what would happen to them then? What if their heads exploded? What if they had to admit they spent years being totally fucking wrong? Ouch! Wouldn't want pain on this path, Dark Night or otherwise. Got to be all wrapped up pretty in a nice suttic wrapper, all sweet and jhanic, all perfect and black and white. Sutta good. Commentaries bad. It is such childish bullshit!
What a bunch of ignorant, confused, narrow-minded, artificially-limited, tradition-worshiping, dogma-bound, stuck-up blow-hards. I so wish I could just take them on a retreat, prescribe specific practices, and have them practice and see what happened and have them write it down, and, at the end, compare the pattern to the maps, and also those descriptions of their colleagues on that same retreat, and then they, like basically everyone else who has done the experiment well, would know that they were simply totally full of crap.
... Imagine an evangelical cleric of the High Church of the Holy Ford Model-T walked into a modern high-performance custom car shop and started spouting off about how the Original, the One True Car, was the Model-T. Not only is this obviously historical nonsense, it is just barking crazy.
Imagine if said zealot started ranting to the boys in the blue shirts with their air-wrenches and cutting torches about how they couldn't use engines that were not original Model-T engines in their hot rods, couldn't use tools that weren't described or used by Henry Ford himself, were not authentic car mechanics as they weren't fixing Ford Model-T's, using only terms used in the days of the Model-T, and that terms such as "supercharger", "traction control", and "roll-bar" were improper terms to use and improper parts to install, being Unauthentic, Blasphemous terms and parts from the Unauthentic Present, a time that is clearly inferior to the great days of the Model-T, that being specifically 1908 to 1927, with no other years of auto-engineering being valid years for any True and Holy Auto-mechanic to honor as being possibly contributing to the car industry.
The zealot clearly feels a dear and true love of the Model-T, and something about that True Conviction Feeling, that Feeling of Original Authentic Rightness clearly really gets their blood going.
That said, how do you think the guys building the hot-rods are going to take it? They are pragmatists, performance-junkies, lovers of speed, control, precision, innovation, beauty however old or new from Lister to Lamborghini, from Pontiac to Porsche, relishing anything old or new that works with their aesthetic of making things that work and work really, really well to perform at levels that the vast majority of car drivers can barely dream of. Bring them a new, custom-built innovative faster engine with more torque that runs smoother and longer and put it on their dynamo, and if it measures up, you can bet that if they can afford it they will use it. That is the spirit that I have always practiced the dharma in, and I have always envisioned the DhO as having much more of that feel than some place to have a High Church of Ancient, Immutable Dogma.
So, true believers, Model-T-heads, sutta-thumpers, commentary-bashers: any interest in stepping into the 21st century? Or even the 2nd? How odd that my appreciating some of the information in some really good ~1800-1500 year-old texts is considered too modern! It is not that the commentaries don't have their less-than-pragmatic or useful aspects, they do. I don't mean to erect a High Church of the Commentaries either! However, they do have some really good stuff in them, and throwing it out just because you can't verify their "authenticity" the same way you can verify the Pali Canon's perfect "authenticity"... I mean.... Uh, never mind...
... Consider the Tibetans or Shingon Tantric Buddhists who consider simple suttic practices to be just the primitive foundations of their traditions...
Consider the energy-based practices that have helped quite a number here: totally unmentioned in the suttas...
Consider the rapid drop-off in the rate of people getting enlightened in the later half of the Buddha's teaching when the Vinaya was laid down: can you be absolutely certain that without some additional tips, tricks and meditative technologies some of them couldn't have gotten farther than they did?
(On the rapid drop-off) I am pretty sure it is in the Vinaya, and in it there is this trouble-maker monk who is giving the Buddha grief, saying basically, "When there were no rules and we just wandered around, back in the early days, lots of people got enlightened, but now there are all these rules and not nearly as many people get enlightened," to which the Buddha replies something like, "Yeah, the rules are a result of all the low-quality students I have to try to teach, and because of them being low-quality, they are not getting enlightened." (DhO)
Abandoning Conventional Wisdom. When I speak of "abandoning conventional wisdom" in MCTB, you will note that it is not in relation to the powers nor in relationship to anything related to a scientific materialist worldview, but instead what I had in mind was numerous people who I witnessed believing things that are basically not obviously helpful when instead their "old" beliefs might have suited various situations much more nicely.
I was actually thinking of very down-to-earth things, such as people suddenly believing things like:
- making money was inherently bad
- that one must become a monastic to make progress in meditation
- that one couldn't be in a relationship and pursue meditation
- that one couldn't have sex and pursue meditation
- that one had to give up things that were fun to pursue meditation
- that one had to be very strict and hard on one's self to pursue the life of meditation
- that meditation would solve all their problems
- that one had to be very religious and into spiritual trappings to pursue meditation
- that one had to eat some very special diet to pursue meditation
- that being really harsh to other people who were not as spiritual as they had suddenly become was a good idea
- that one must suddenly convert everyone one knew to Buddhism or whatever
- that one must not hang out with one's non-Buddhist friends in order to be good people, etc.
In short, I saw lots and lots of people really messing up their lives based on strange, erroneous "spiritual" ideals when good-old common sense and moderation in radical beliefs would have done them a lot better most of the time.
I actually think that, for certain pursuits, scientific materialism is a fine and functional worldview. For other pursuits more unusual points of view may be useful.
Consider even small deviations from the "scientific materialist worldview" that occur in numerous relatively ordinary contexts, such as basically all the social sciences, regarding which the application of, say, a strict Newtonian or Quantum-mechanical framework might be totally inappropriate from any pragmatic point of view. (DhO)
MCTB was designed to counter a culture where Morality and relative psychological work and skillful living was nearly everything and the rest was largely ignored, so I can see how that message may come through, despite numerous places it works to try to say that Morality is key. I myself strive mostly in Morality in my life as the core training that takes up the vast majority of my time. (DhO)
MCTB1 has evolved in a specific cultural context and reacting to very specific cultural factors, those being specifically the profound focus on psychology rather than careful sensate investigation you find advocated by plenty of Western insight teachers, particularly at places like IMS, as well as what happens when plenty of hyper-psychologized Westerners try to make sense of techniques taught in Asia and related places.
Thus, it makes its case as a counterbalancing force to a culture whose focus purely on psychological development is so pervasive that plenty of people in it literally can't hear anything that it says about bare sensate investigation and the Three Characteristics. Just a month ago, I had a conversation with a neuroscientist who had practiced for years and who teaches meditation at a major center for training people in mindfulness techniques, and he literaly couldn't hear or understand one word I said about rapid sensate investigation, as the whole of his practice was about noticing areas of psychological clinging and trying not to do that. It is not that such work can't be useful, as it obviously can, but he had a cognitive deficit against hearing about the world of sensate investigation and the methods and results of all of that which was so strong that I might as well have been speaking in Swahili.
When training in Morality, which I highly advocate, I think that psychological work and reflection on psychological, feeling and emotional aspects is a great idea, as I state many places. I also spend most of my waking day dealing with these things at a relative level, as is standard practice.
However, when doing insight practices and trying to really understand the core of what things like the Abhidhamma are talking about, it really pays to be able to shut that down to the degree that allows one to drop to the level of the rapid back and forth oscilliation of mental and physical processes that creates the illusion of a self, observer, controller, etc. and to be able to see things like very little flicker of intention arise causally before each little flicker of action, and to see each little flicker of mental impression arise causally interspersed with other sensate impressions.
It should be noted that, if you go on an insight retreat, nearly everyone in the small group meetings or the interviews with their teachers is dealing nearly 100% with psychological issues and things like back and knee pain and nearly nobody is doing the rapid, careful, steady, concentrated, clear, precise investigation that finally cuts through the core of ignorance. It is against this staggeringly unfortunate trend that MCTB fights.
I truly recommend incorporating feelings, mind states, and all the rest into practice, both relative (Morality, meaning skillful reflection and contemplation of feelings and their consequences as such), and also ultimate, meaning the raw sense data in all forms, be those mental or physical, as failure to do either is obviously a serious problem, as you point out. (DhO)
On Morality: three interrelated debates. Debate #1: Mage vs Sage. In the Mage vs Sage debate, the question is basically, "Should one engage with the world of politics, of cabbages and kings?" The hypothetical Sage says, "No, one should not engage with the world of politics. There will always be greedy kings and wars. There will always be the poor. The world is a quagmire, full of conflict and stupidity. Best to withdraw, to practice alone, to wander lonely as a rhinocerous, to avoid all of that. It is agitating to the mind, unresolvable, endless, a thorny thicket of views and difficulty. Best to enjoy one's wisdom in solitude." Lao Tsu exemplified this well, and many other great Sages have also. We find the ideal of the Pratyekabuddha as one valid option. The Buddha practiced this way for years, and advocated his monastics generally do the same, said that right speech for monastics avoided gossip about wars and kings, though there were exceptions. The Buddha however, after reaching enlightenment and being tempted to be a Sage by Mara, himself switched to the other path, that of the Mage.
One on the path of the hypothetical Mage answers the question differently, saying, "This world is integral to what we are. We are a part of this world. There can be no reduction of suffering without reducing the suffering that is in the world, as they are all interdependent, all a part of the whole. We who have wisdom should go forth, care, act, and use what we have learned to make the world better. Yes, there will be difficulties. Yes, there will be unforeseen consequences. Yet, to know and not act is to shirk responsibility, as if we don't, who will?" This is the path of the Bodhisattva, of the Buddha after his renunciate phase, of numerous Saints and other advocates for wise service. While it is pretty much guaranteed that not all Mages would agree on the right things to do, they would agree that engagement is warranted.
I don't believe that there is a right, one-size-fits-all answer to the question of whether each individual at any moment should be more Sage or Mage. In reality, we all walk up and down this spectrum all the time. At night, when we retire from doing whatever we do in the world and sleep, we are going more Sage. When we get up and start acting in the world, we go a bit more Mage. It is really a spectrum between extremes, and, in each instant, we may be going more one way or the other, So, the debate is really more about how far should one lean in either direction as a matter of of moving average.
I personally have had significant Sage and Mage periods, and think they have helped contribute to each other. I still vacillate moment to moment.
There are days when I think, "Being a public figure is a pain in the ass. Dealing with psychotic people threatenening me and my family is too much to deal with. Debating other puffed up alpha-teachers is a pointless chore that just entrenches views and causes further fortification of camps. Let this mad world crash along as it does. It is unsavable. The forces working to destroy through greed, hatred, and delusion are so vaster than me that my actions are mere dust blowing in the wind, all absurd vanity and pathetic noise, all doomed to failure. My resources are limited, and I should not waste them on such stupidity. I should save them for myself and the few who are very close to me. I will follow the advice in Candide and cultivate my own garden with a few friends far from the insanity, meditate, and enjoy what is left of this short life in the company of a few like-minded people, as anything else would be at best a farce."
Other days I think, "No, truly this world can be helped, and to not help would be a true abdication of responsibility. There are little things you can do, and doing those little things is worthwhile, even if it is all possibly doomed to cataclysmic failure. To hoard your resources would be miserly. To keep silent would be selfish. The risks and costs, while real, are still worth it, etc."
So, I totally understand about those who, at this moment, or perhaps go long term, are more Mage or Sage. I don't think that anyone should try to force anyone to be more Mage or Sage, though others do think that others should hold to their side of the debate. However, that brings us to the next question:
Debate #2: Should a community be aligned around one pole of this Mage vs Sage debate, or even any debate, and, if not, should such discord be discussed?
Some people like their communities and tribes a lot more consistent than others. Some people clearly don't like the sense that their views on this debate (or any other significant or even insignificant debate) might be in conflict with others in their community, as they prefer the feel of a much more coherent tribe whose views are much more aligned with theirs, and feel something is lost or even threatened when their views are not mirrored by those around them. This is understandable. Clearly, it feels better to be around those who agree with us. Clearly, it feels more uncomfortable to be around those who challenge our views. This might manifest here along the lines of, "We should all hold the same views on the Mage vs Sage debate and other debates, and to raise other views is to challenge the coherence of the community, so it should not be done."
Others may be much more focused, with a higher degree of tolerance for a wide range of views as long as a few core views are sufficient to create some cohesion in the community that is aligned around a specific, more narrow topic. They might think, "Ah, a community that appreciates debate and discussion is a healthy one, so let us all bring our views and best wisdom to topics to help us explore them and draw on the range of perspectives here so as to enrichen us all."
Others might feel that, while they might be more tolerant of a range of views, a community that is aligned around a more narrow topic should not introduce or discuss topics that might cause decoherence and threaten the community, as they realize that many who might be in that community, or in this case on a specific forum, might have less tolerance for divergent views that are not on the core topic of the community and so that, by discussing views that they might tolerate, still see danger to the community, as in, "Don't mix politics and the dharma on a forum, as, while I can tolerate it, others might not be so tolerant or appreciative."
Debate #3: If we agree that we can discuss the path of the Mage, and if we agree that the community can tolerate debate about topics other than those in a narrow range, such as politics, then how does the Dharma possibly inform politics?
This is obviously already excluding a good bunch of people, as some clearly feel that the path of the Mage shouldn't be discussed, and that possibly divisive topics that are not focused more narrowly on very specific subjects and dedicated to very specific ends shouldn't be discussed, and that topics that might split the community along political lines shouldn't be discussed, as to discuss these risks community coherence, and risks some feeling that they have to hold certain views to be a part of the community, and that particularly those who have some sort of leadership role or persona shouldn't post their individual views on politics, as that might alienate those who relate to them in some sort of more parental way rather than them just being some other person with their own views, etc.
So, once we get past all of those other debates, we get to the question of various political views, of which just one is the leftist vs rightist debate. In fact, political debates can break down along a number of axes.
I am going to guess that a reasonable proportion of people on this forum would advocate for rights like free speech and religious freedom, as without those this forum couldn't exist, at least without the state that was limiting religious speech and freedom being in some way aligned with a pretty unusual range of religious views for a police state. Thus, posting on a forum like this could be viewed as a political act. In fact, I have wondered if I could even gain entrance to various countries if they knew I ran a forum like this one, as religious tolerance and free speech tolerance are nothing resembling universal. I routinely wonder if one day I will have to leave the US if the fascists ever take over and realize that my view are not aligned with theirs. Such things are more the norm in the world and in history than the exception.
I am going to guess that a reasonable proportion of people on this forum would advocate for kindness over cruelty, peace over violence, helping people over harming them, etc., but exactly how they would advocate for helping people, being kind, and bringing about peace might vary widely, and that's ok, and part of the interesting discussion to be had by those who like such things, I believe.
Still, when it comes to more specific policy debates, such as wealth redistribution, taxes, the role of government in the economy, the role of government in individual rights, and the like, it is likely that a wide diversity of views exists, and that, again, is where I find the conversations interesting, but clearly not everyone is comfortable with this. If you are not comfortable with it, I also agree that you should feel welcome to express those views, but this is a forum with open debate as its purpose, so, past a certain point, views that advocate for not debating certain topics will run up against the forum's explicit purpose, which is to be able to discuss topics related to wisdom and the reduction of suffering through various means. Should some of these debates make you nervous or uncomfortable, consider sticking to threads that are more focused on topics you enjoy and are comfortable with.
As a curious synchronicity, just this moment while I was typing this post my wife just showed me a picture of a restaurant menu from her journey in Laos, an explicitly communist country. Below the sections on Main Dishes, Steaks, and Desserts, there is Food for Thought section, which says, "Cultivating a non-discriminating mind provides the serenity for practitioners to let go of afflictions, wandering thoughts and attachments. It is difficult for us to let go due to the injusticies we feel we have suffered and the grudges we thus hold. However, feeling this way only puts us at more of a disadvantage because then we suffer the consequences of our grudges. Inequalities exist in this world because of our discriminating mind. -Venerable Master Chin Kung." Then below it is the quote, "Go Along with Conditions. Do Not Seek Them. There is Nothing to Seek, for All is Unreal, Merely Illusion."
While one could clearly use this quote to gain peace, to accept circumstances, to cultivate Equanimity, detachment, and possibly wisdom, one could also use this quote to rationalize accepting horrible circumstances, injustices, and indignities that one did not have to accept, to go along passively with the powers that be, and to abdicate responsibility for what occurs. In that same way go the debates of Mage vs Sage, of whether or not topics of cabbages and kings should be discussed, etc. That I personally am at this moment in more of a leftist, Mage, discussion-positive phase shouldn't be taken to be anything more than what it is, and, should you be thrown by that, then follow your own advice, and cultivate a non-discriminating mind that lets go of the world to provide serenity and wisdom for yourself. (DhO)
Ascetic vs hedonistic approach. The essence of vipassana is to comprehend what arises moment to moment, on its own, and find whatever dualistic tension is therein. All other considerations arise from some other aesthetic.
Thus, the question of pleasure or guilt or movement or tension or fear or desire is irrelevant from a very pure vipassana point of view: those are made of sensations that arise and vanish.
To the degree that you understand this, you will make progress. To the degree that you don't, you will stagnate or perhaps develop some other skill or other mental track of whatever quality.
Endless discussions spin out around the religion and ritual and rules of this and that, of cultures, of aesthetics, of identity trips around being this or that sort of person, of following this or that sort of ethic or code or whatever. None of this is fundamental, though may have other value in some other context or within some other frame of reference.
In short, if you can notice the sensations that arise and vanish when doing whatever, including such things as those discussed here, that is the path of insight, and those who say otherwise are coming at it with some other agenda. On the other hand, as it were, if you can't notice those sensations arise and vanish clearly, then this is a period of lost momentum, and those quickly erase whole hours of hard-won velocity towards your goal. This you must decide for yourself based on your own wisdom and perhaps experimentation.
Clearly, at least in males, sexual release reduces energy, but also brings tranquility and peace, at least for some period of time, but also may facilitate addictive behaviors, obsession with those behaviors, and other patterns of sensations. These are simply practical considerations, but not deal breakers.
In females, effects seem more variable, at least regarding the level of energy, but some basic similar issues remain. Again, simply practical considerations, not deal breakers.
In short, the discriminating mind can resolve both the true nature of whatever sensations and the relative practical consequences of larger aggregated patterns of action, and both types of discrimination will help directly answer the relevant questions.
Plenty of people have made great progress in insight using everything from the ascetic to the hedonistic approach and everything in-between, though people flounder using those approaches also, as each has its downsides. You must learn directly for yourself which leads to greater clarity, wisdom, comprehension, etc. and no one else is going to be able to tell you exactly what would have been optimal in each moment except for clear comprehension, which is of perennial value. (DhO)
Killing. I remember being on a work retreat at Gaia House for a summer in 1999 before medical school. I had taken the 5 precepts.
My 8-year trial of Vegetarianism: Health, Dharma and Karma. One thing I find tricky about even vegetarianism that I will put out to the vegans and vegetarians in the group for practical solutions, and that is protein. I have spent a ton of time studying various diets, nutrition, recent nutritional studies, and thoughts on proper carb to fat to protein ratios for optimal health, and I still conclude that is it is pretty tricky to be vegan and get enough protein with getting a lot carbs in the mix.
Yes, one can eat mostly nuts, but, as one who gets kidney stones, I am moderately wary of the oxylates in those same nuts, as kidney stones suck.
My 8-year trial of vegetarianism lead me to the conclusion that if I didn't eat about a pound of tofu a day, I got these serious protein/meat cravings and found that driving by steak houses and smelling the burning flesh made my whole body cry out "Eat some friggin' cow, dude!" Those didn't get any better as the years of vegetarianism went on, but eating the tofu screwed up my thyroid gland, as I have already mentioned.
I personally find that the more fat, protein and vegetables I eat in comparison to carbs, the better I feel, and there is some good science to back up that point of view relating to insulin sensitivity and all of that.
While, with my wife's dietary issues, we often just makes beans and rice with some greens or the like for lunch and dinner, which we ate today, along with some hummus and romaine, I can tell the energy levels rise and crash as one would expect with that high carb load, and it feels viscerally like something bad to be doing. My wife avoids gluten, so that makes a lot of the typical wheat-containing protein products impractical. I avoid soy almost entirely due to what happened with me.
I get that one can try to live on cashews, avocados, and salads to try to balance more in the direction of proteins and fats. Still, the oxalate load is heavy, leading to questions of what to do with those, and, if I try to bind it with citrates, such as lemon, it tears my mouth up, so I often bind them with the calcium found in yogurt or cheese, which also are used to bind the phytic acids in foods like oatmeal, which I eat for the fiber and other cardiac benefits.
I don't believe the arguments that it is animal protein that causes a lot of kidney stones, as I ate very little animal protein at all for years and still had them. I drink a whole lot of water to try to prevent them, which helps moderately but isn't totally perfect. Yes, I avoid almost entirely high-oxalate foods such as almonds and spinach, as experiments have found that eating those basically guarantees kidney stones.
So, practical tips for a person who analyzes everything I eat and concludes that there is some dietary school that hates every single thing I put in my mouth except for greens?
Seriously, the Against the Grain people would hate many vegetarian and vegan diets and they are not entirely without their points. The Paleo people do have some reasonable arguments against the glycemic loading and lack of ketone production that occurs with many diets that are higher in carbs. I could go on and on with this sort of thing. Yet, clearly, as has been stated here, it is pretty hard to argue against many of the basic ethical points made by vegetarians and vegans.
Anyway, the protein to carb and the oxalate problems, anyone? These are on my mind daily as I ponder what to eat and why.
I have watched my sister, brother-in-law and niece gain too much weight on their vegan diet, and my sister is one who takes veganism extremely seriously. (My mom does better weight-wise than they do, but she is basically raw vegan and lives on a lot of elaborately crafted juices and sprouts and the like, which take her a lot of time.) Except for my mom, they clearly fail to get the carbs down to reasonable levels, which is part of what is killing people in these modern times, as one day in the emergency department shows all too clearly. Were we all doing hard manual labor all day and burning the carbs up as fast as we ate them, no problem. However, that is not what we generally spend out time doing as a society.
… I also eat a lot of beans, lentils and chick peas, but, again, my body always seems to tell me, "Hey, dude, too many carbs!" Do you find it is easy to maintain a healthy slim waistline while eating all of those? Yes, peanut butter is rich and satisfying, true.
… I, for one, have checked out those guys and books, The China Study, and loads of literature on the subject of diet, Andrew Weil's stuff, various diets, lots of perspectives, many videos including a bunch of Gregers, have Eat to Live, have How Not to Die, have watched Forks over Knives, Fat Sick and Nearly Dead, etc. as well as carefully following the medical studies that continue to come out on saturated fats (maybe better than we thought they were), carb to protein to fat ratios, supplements, omega-3s, and the like, and think that we know that we do not know the perfectly optimal diet for everyone, but eating a lot of fruits, nuts, and vegetables of lots of different colors is clearly a good idea, in general terms, that eating lots of fried/processed nutritionally empty calories is clearly bad, and this general advice must modified based on what is going on with you and your particular medical situation and body.
The ethics mostly align with those results as well. Still, as the monk above (in the DhO thread) rightly pointed out, our carbon and environmental footprints as humans in industrialized societies tend to be huge, our impact on the rest of the planet just by driving and flying and buying things that were manufactured and shipped and all of that is gigantic, even if we eat a vegan diet, and so, for those into such things, which some of the hippies from the 70's who raised me often were, an approach to treading lightly on this earth should reasonable encompass a vast range of consumer choices towards sustainability far beyond just our diets, some of which are pretty inconvenient and some very expensive still, though getting cheaper (such as solar and electric cars). I dream of a life where I can walk or bike most of the places I need to go, live in a house that is ultra-energy efficient, and reduce dramatically the waste I produce, and am working in my own small ways towards that dream from my hippy-influenced upbringing, though I admit my efforts are paltry in comparison to what might be done and what likely needs to be done for us to avoid radically screwing the planet's climate.
… My wife has a real allergy to the sugar alpha-galactose (often called "alpha-gal") which is found in the tissues of all non-primate mammals, so even gelatin capsules give her trouble, and much more so dairy and much more so mammal meat. So, yes, she could theoretically eat people or old world monkeys in a pinch (as somewehere along the way we lost whatever biological pathway leads to this sugar being present in our tissues) though obviously she doesn't.
She got this allergy from the bite of a Lone Star tick (!). The story of how they sorted all this out medically makes for fascinating reading if you like medical mystery stories, but my point here is that she obviously avoids all of those things largely entirely except when they end up in her food from some restaurant that wasn't careful or didn't believe her. As she has gotten pretty tired of chicken and fish, means that we eat a largely vegetarian diet at home.
Thinking very magickally, I had pondered that perhaps the ticks were a ploy by nature to save mammals from consumption and were one small part of a much larger back-pushing against human behavior that included hurricanes, floods, mosquitos and mosquito-borne diseases, wildfires, jellyfish swarms, and all of that to try to get us to change our behavior to something more sustainable and much less massively destructive.
… I again am reminded of the countless thousands of worms, ants, beetles, grubs, slugs and other ground-dwelling lifeforms that I slaughtered daily as I cultivated the organic gardens at Gaia House for the vegetarian meals we had there that summer in 1999 when I did a work retreat there. We participate in the murder of beings on an unimaginably vast scale for even the simplest of foods. Not saying don't go vegan, just realize that just to ship the foods you eat in a truck involves mowing down countless insects as they splatter on its windscreen in the summertime. We are killers, us humans. It is how we live. Blood is on our forks, spoons and knives. Add in bacteria we kill, and my life on this planet has likely resulted in the death of billions of living things if not trillions and will continue to kill them at an incalculable rate. I leave death and destruction in my wake, truly. Such is our karma.
… I feel bad about each butterfly that dies on the windshield of my car. It is easy to imagine that humans, being the hyper-dominant killing machines we are, are a plague upon the earth and that justifying being alive at all involves remarkable mental gymnastics, but then promoting suicide clealry must be unethical in at least most cases, yes?
While also a slippery slope argument, it is understandable to hold the view that killing bacteria is not at all the same as killing beings we believe to be more sentient, realizing that we have no idea how sentience arises, what it is, how to measure it, and now to prove that bacteria aren't particularly sentient except by secondary evidence filtered through our own biases based on our form of sentience and life.
Clearly, for the health of the planet, breeding less animals for food makes things more sustainable, unless you are looking at the planet from the point of view of some species that likes the atmosphere hot and the oceans acidic, such as jellyfish, which apparently can be turned into a nutritive meal, I mean deserve respect and shouldn't be eaten, I mean should be eaten as they are breeding out of control in some ecosystems and interfering with fish populations that appear more sentient to us than jellyfish and so should be preferentially protected, I mean...
Clearly, taking into account the feelings as we understand them of the animals means that breeding them for slaughter involves a painful death and sometimes a very painful life. Some might counter that providing more animal lives in which reincarnating beings are more likely to earn good karma by doing things like caring for their young, etc. than, say, if they were born as hungry ghost, hell being, or some jealous waring deva, is meritorious. In an optimal world, we might ask the animals themselves if they prefered to live for a while or never have lived at all, but we can't do that, so we have to take our best guess.
Clearly, there is good evidence to support some of the health-promoting benefits of veganism and vegetarianism.
Jellyfish seem pretty grotty to me to eat but yet might be sort of like tofu, meaning able to absorb the flavor of whatever you cook them in. Speaking of tofu: overconsumption of tofu for my 8 years of vegetarianism gave me a goiter and caused me thyroid problems that persist to this day some 15 years later. That said, for dinner I had beans, rice, kale and squash, and I sometimes go days without eating meat, unlike most omnivores.
Anyway, I totally get the ethics, aesthetic, and spirit of those who are vegan and vegetarian and might be that way again myself some day.
… A few, small, practical victories for the vegan/vegetarian side, and bringing it down to simple acts inspired by this thread:
1) I need to replace my main daily pair of shoes, which have been Eccos which are made of leather, and, while they have held up well for 8 years, finally have blown out their heels to a degree that makes them need replacing. So, I am considering these in hemp cloth and partly of recycled plastic.
2) Again, I ate no meat today, though I did have some cheese and yogurt, which, while grass-fed, organic and ethically farmed and all of that, still could be said to be exploiting cows which produce methane and thus are damaging the planet, though again, one could ask the cows if they prefer life in a safe pasture free from attacks by predators with guarantees of enough food while having their milk taken to either not living or living wild and being attacked by predators and see what they moo. Still, it is something.
Anyway, the debate is influencing my actions in what are likely positive ways, which I presume was part of the intent, so thanks for that. (DhO)
As part of my work duties, I worked in their organic garden. They were very proud of their good, vegetarian food.
Unfortunately, their tomato bed in their greenhouse got a fungal blight, and they informed me that the only way to fix it was to dig out the entire bed a foot deep, transport all the soil outside the greenhouse, and replace it with fresh soil from elsewhere.
This I did, using a shovel and wheelbarrow. It took me two days, as it was a lot of dirt to move in and out.
The dirt was really good dirt, the process of lots of composting, and it contained an extremely large number of earthworms, grubs, beetles, ants and other similar creatues. I killed them by the thousands in the process of moving that dirt.
I crushed insects. I cut earthworms in half. I tore up grubs, slugs, even a small garden snake. I destroyed ant colonies. Such staggering killing for some organic tomatoes.
During the small group meeting, the teacher (who will remain anonymous) asked my how my day was going and what I had been up to. I mentioned that I had spent the day working in the garden moving dirt and killing thousands of beings for the organic, vegetarian tomatos and he immediately shushed me to silence, saying, "We don't talk about that here!" I was shocked, but that was the end of the interview. They moved on to the next person, with everyone there looking very nervous about the topic.
So, if you think you aren't killing all the time, realize that you are. Driving down the road at night in the South in any season except winter kills hundreds of insects on the front of your car. Everything you eat involved the killing of many, many beings. Everything you buy involved it also in some way. We kill constantly for our survival one way or the other. You can't walk on the lawn without killing things. You can't walk in a forest without killing things. Just today I breathed in a bug into my nostrils and it died when I went to remove it. It is sad but true.
I agree, it is really moving to consider the suffering of an individual creature, and I myself go out of my way to move the red wasps that sometimes get into my house outside without harming them, but still, I recognize that, as a top-of-the-food-chain predator, killing is our lot. We can contemplate it deeply, try to avoid it in those circumstances when we can, and yet it is going to happen anyway.
... Just remember, it is basically impossible to grow and harvest and transport even grains and vegetables without killing zillions of beings. Death and life are part of the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, etc. This is inescapable.
... My first wife and I got Dengue coming out of Cambodia into Thailand: it friggin' sucked. Had I the knowledge of what that mosquito was about to do to us and the opportunity, I would have killed it with only minor regret that it found itself in such a position that it must make people sick when just performing its natural functions. (DhO)
Leaving your kids. I know nothing about (Ajaan) Lee (a Thailand monk), but the general principle that people might be skilled in one area and not at all skillful in others is worth remembering in general terms.
Morality is the hardest to develop, not to make excuses for anyone, as I also think that leaving your kids is really ethically dodgy at best and more likely just a totally cowardly and exceedingly irresponsible move, though I must admit I don't know the fine points of his situation at all.
I personally know and have known a reasonably large number of people whose concentration and insight skills I consider reasonably solid and/or even quite advanced who I also wouldn't consider paragons of morality by any means and would never look to as examples for how to live my life.
Have I benefitted from some of their wisdom regarding other aspects of practice? At times, definitely.
In short, take what is good, leave what is bad, and don't imagine that skill in one thing will necessarily translate to skill in something else. It is one of the most pervasive and destructive myths in spiritual practice. You don't have to buy anyone's complete package, and, in fact, doing so is generally a pretty bad idea, but, if they have some useful dharma thing to add to your own personal puzzle, don't discard that just because they might have screwed other things up big-time. (DhO)
Dharma and romantic relationships. I think that early on dharma stuff can lead to a lot of melodharmas, in which cycles, stages, openings, new paradigms, spiritual quests, the introspective time required, giving up vacations for retreats and the like, all can be hard on the vast majority of relationships.
I think that later on success in practice with time for it to mature and settle and deepen makes things a whole lot easier, at least if people aren't so stupid as to talk about it in terms that tend to totally alienate other people, such as "I am beyond love..." or whatever, which just causes confusion mostly, even if some aspect of it is true in some way or even in a large way. (DhO)
Volunteering at homeless shelters is not necessary to get enlightened, but it is an interesting thing to do. Definitions of enlightenment vary around this place, as do concepts of compassion. I'll give you my take on this, but I will bet we come up with a diversity of opinion. First, as to compassion:
When you say you are not compassionate, do you mean to yourself or others?
Do you wish to suffer, or are you indifferent to your own suffering? That you ask the question would seem to imply that you wish for your own suffering to end: this is compassion, in its Buddhist definition. That is enough compassion to get enlightened at least to some degree. Plenty got very far simply on that: not wishing to suffer, regardless of considerations of anyone or anything else's suffering.
There are plenty of enlightened beings who ate meat and who got enlightened eating meat. The Tibetans eat meat, as what else is there up on the high desert but Yaks anyway, and they get enlightened, for example.
As to giving all your stuff to the poor to get enlightened, all you really have to do is to very clearly perceive reality. Having more or less stuff may or may not interfere with that, as having various levels of stuff come with their own problems, and I personally, who have variously had moderate amounts of stuff, very, very little stuff, and a whole crap-load of stuff, can say for certain that how this effects practice had much more to do with me and generally much less to do with the level of stuff. I did happened to get stream entry at a time when I had very, very little, but I also personally know people who have gotten stream entry who have 10's of millions of dollars, some just recently, so it clearly doesn't seem to matter much, by way of reality testing.
Volunteering at homeless shelters is not necessary to get enlightened, but it is an interesting thing to do, and I have done it myself on occasion, and would actually recommend it, as you learn interesting things, but how it relates to clearly perceiving the direct and universal truths of the sensations that make up your sensate sphere are anyone's guess, and I would bet more on the person who did good insight practices in sufficient dose and with minimal psychological baggage than a homeless shelter volunteer who didn't practice well.
Clear, direct comprehension of the true nature of your whole experience field simultaneously: that is the key. Many techniques can help with that: pick a good one and practice it in sufficient dose as instructed. (DhO)
Yes, one can eat mostly nuts, but, as one who gets kidney stones, I am moderately wary of the oxylates in those same nuts, as kidney stones suck.
My 8-year trial of vegetarianism lead me to the conclusion that if I didn't eat about a pound of tofu a day, I got these serious protein/meat cravings and found that driving by steak houses and smelling the burning flesh made my whole body cry out "Eat some friggin' cow, dude!" Those didn't get any better as the years of vegetarianism went on, but eating the tofu screwed up my thyroid gland, as I have already mentioned.
I personally find that the more fat, protein and vegetables I eat in comparison to carbs, the better I feel, and there is some good science to back up that point of view relating to insulin sensitivity and all of that.
While, with my wife's dietary issues, we often just makes beans and rice with some greens or the like for lunch and dinner, which we ate today, along with some hummus and romaine, I can tell the energy levels rise and crash as one would expect with that high carb load, and it feels viscerally like something bad to be doing. My wife avoids gluten, so that makes a lot of the typical wheat-containing protein products impractical. I avoid soy almost entirely due to what happened with me.
I get that one can try to live on cashews, avocados, and salads to try to balance more in the direction of proteins and fats. Still, the oxalate load is heavy, leading to questions of what to do with those, and, if I try to bind it with citrates, such as lemon, it tears my mouth up, so I often bind them with the calcium found in yogurt or cheese, which also are used to bind the phytic acids in foods like oatmeal, which I eat for the fiber and other cardiac benefits.
I don't believe the arguments that it is animal protein that causes a lot of kidney stones, as I ate very little animal protein at all for years and still had them. I drink a whole lot of water to try to prevent them, which helps moderately but isn't totally perfect. Yes, I avoid almost entirely high-oxalate foods such as almonds and spinach, as experiments have found that eating those basically guarantees kidney stones.
So, practical tips for a person who analyzes everything I eat and concludes that there is some dietary school that hates every single thing I put in my mouth except for greens?
Seriously, the Against the Grain people would hate many vegetarian and vegan diets and they are not entirely without their points. The Paleo people do have some reasonable arguments against the glycemic loading and lack of ketone production that occurs with many diets that are higher in carbs. I could go on and on with this sort of thing. Yet, clearly, as has been stated here, it is pretty hard to argue against many of the basic ethical points made by vegetarians and vegans.
Anyway, the protein to carb and the oxalate problems, anyone? These are on my mind daily as I ponder what to eat and why.
I have watched my sister, brother-in-law and niece gain too much weight on their vegan diet, and my sister is one who takes veganism extremely seriously. (My mom does better weight-wise than they do, but she is basically raw vegan and lives on a lot of elaborately crafted juices and sprouts and the like, which take her a lot of time.) Except for my mom, they clearly fail to get the carbs down to reasonable levels, which is part of what is killing people in these modern times, as one day in the emergency department shows all too clearly. Were we all doing hard manual labor all day and burning the carbs up as fast as we ate them, no problem. However, that is not what we generally spend out time doing as a society.
… I also eat a lot of beans, lentils and chick peas, but, again, my body always seems to tell me, "Hey, dude, too many carbs!" Do you find it is easy to maintain a healthy slim waistline while eating all of those? Yes, peanut butter is rich and satisfying, true.
… I, for one, have checked out those guys and books, The China Study, and loads of literature on the subject of diet, Andrew Weil's stuff, various diets, lots of perspectives, many videos including a bunch of Gregers, have Eat to Live, have How Not to Die, have watched Forks over Knives, Fat Sick and Nearly Dead, etc. as well as carefully following the medical studies that continue to come out on saturated fats (maybe better than we thought they were), carb to protein to fat ratios, supplements, omega-3s, and the like, and think that we know that we do not know the perfectly optimal diet for everyone, but eating a lot of fruits, nuts, and vegetables of lots of different colors is clearly a good idea, in general terms, that eating lots of fried/processed nutritionally empty calories is clearly bad, and this general advice must modified based on what is going on with you and your particular medical situation and body.
The ethics mostly align with those results as well. Still, as the monk above (in the DhO thread) rightly pointed out, our carbon and environmental footprints as humans in industrialized societies tend to be huge, our impact on the rest of the planet just by driving and flying and buying things that were manufactured and shipped and all of that is gigantic, even if we eat a vegan diet, and so, for those into such things, which some of the hippies from the 70's who raised me often were, an approach to treading lightly on this earth should reasonable encompass a vast range of consumer choices towards sustainability far beyond just our diets, some of which are pretty inconvenient and some very expensive still, though getting cheaper (such as solar and electric cars). I dream of a life where I can walk or bike most of the places I need to go, live in a house that is ultra-energy efficient, and reduce dramatically the waste I produce, and am working in my own small ways towards that dream from my hippy-influenced upbringing, though I admit my efforts are paltry in comparison to what might be done and what likely needs to be done for us to avoid radically screwing the planet's climate.
… My wife has a real allergy to the sugar alpha-galactose (often called "alpha-gal") which is found in the tissues of all non-primate mammals, so even gelatin capsules give her trouble, and much more so dairy and much more so mammal meat. So, yes, she could theoretically eat people or old world monkeys in a pinch (as somewehere along the way we lost whatever biological pathway leads to this sugar being present in our tissues) though obviously she doesn't.
She got this allergy from the bite of a Lone Star tick (!). The story of how they sorted all this out medically makes for fascinating reading if you like medical mystery stories, but my point here is that she obviously avoids all of those things largely entirely except when they end up in her food from some restaurant that wasn't careful or didn't believe her. As she has gotten pretty tired of chicken and fish, means that we eat a largely vegetarian diet at home.
Thinking very magickally, I had pondered that perhaps the ticks were a ploy by nature to save mammals from consumption and were one small part of a much larger back-pushing against human behavior that included hurricanes, floods, mosquitos and mosquito-borne diseases, wildfires, jellyfish swarms, and all of that to try to get us to change our behavior to something more sustainable and much less massively destructive.
… I again am reminded of the countless thousands of worms, ants, beetles, grubs, slugs and other ground-dwelling lifeforms that I slaughtered daily as I cultivated the organic gardens at Gaia House for the vegetarian meals we had there that summer in 1999 when I did a work retreat there. We participate in the murder of beings on an unimaginably vast scale for even the simplest of foods. Not saying don't go vegan, just realize that just to ship the foods you eat in a truck involves mowing down countless insects as they splatter on its windscreen in the summertime. We are killers, us humans. It is how we live. Blood is on our forks, spoons and knives. Add in bacteria we kill, and my life on this planet has likely resulted in the death of billions of living things if not trillions and will continue to kill them at an incalculable rate. I leave death and destruction in my wake, truly. Such is our karma.
… I feel bad about each butterfly that dies on the windshield of my car. It is easy to imagine that humans, being the hyper-dominant killing machines we are, are a plague upon the earth and that justifying being alive at all involves remarkable mental gymnastics, but then promoting suicide clealry must be unethical in at least most cases, yes?
While also a slippery slope argument, it is understandable to hold the view that killing bacteria is not at all the same as killing beings we believe to be more sentient, realizing that we have no idea how sentience arises, what it is, how to measure it, and now to prove that bacteria aren't particularly sentient except by secondary evidence filtered through our own biases based on our form of sentience and life.
Clearly, for the health of the planet, breeding less animals for food makes things more sustainable, unless you are looking at the planet from the point of view of some species that likes the atmosphere hot and the oceans acidic, such as jellyfish, which apparently can be turned into a nutritive meal, I mean deserve respect and shouldn't be eaten, I mean should be eaten as they are breeding out of control in some ecosystems and interfering with fish populations that appear more sentient to us than jellyfish and so should be preferentially protected, I mean...
Clearly, taking into account the feelings as we understand them of the animals means that breeding them for slaughter involves a painful death and sometimes a very painful life. Some might counter that providing more animal lives in which reincarnating beings are more likely to earn good karma by doing things like caring for their young, etc. than, say, if they were born as hungry ghost, hell being, or some jealous waring deva, is meritorious. In an optimal world, we might ask the animals themselves if they prefered to live for a while or never have lived at all, but we can't do that, so we have to take our best guess.
Clearly, there is good evidence to support some of the health-promoting benefits of veganism and vegetarianism.
Jellyfish seem pretty grotty to me to eat but yet might be sort of like tofu, meaning able to absorb the flavor of whatever you cook them in. Speaking of tofu: overconsumption of tofu for my 8 years of vegetarianism gave me a goiter and caused me thyroid problems that persist to this day some 15 years later. That said, for dinner I had beans, rice, kale and squash, and I sometimes go days without eating meat, unlike most omnivores.
Anyway, I totally get the ethics, aesthetic, and spirit of those who are vegan and vegetarian and might be that way again myself some day.
… A few, small, practical victories for the vegan/vegetarian side, and bringing it down to simple acts inspired by this thread:
1) I need to replace my main daily pair of shoes, which have been Eccos which are made of leather, and, while they have held up well for 8 years, finally have blown out their heels to a degree that makes them need replacing. So, I am considering these in hemp cloth and partly of recycled plastic.
2) Again, I ate no meat today, though I did have some cheese and yogurt, which, while grass-fed, organic and ethically farmed and all of that, still could be said to be exploiting cows which produce methane and thus are damaging the planet, though again, one could ask the cows if they prefer life in a safe pasture free from attacks by predators with guarantees of enough food while having their milk taken to either not living or living wild and being attacked by predators and see what they moo. Still, it is something.
Anyway, the debate is influencing my actions in what are likely positive ways, which I presume was part of the intent, so thanks for that. (DhO)
DharmaOverground Community
My vision of DhO (circa 2010). As the founder and owner of this site, let me make clear the following things:
- The DhO is about the support of hardcore meditation practice, real attainments, and dedicated adventurers exploring the limits of what is possible in this life in terms of clarity, wisdom, concentration, investigation, personal empowerment, and the vast range of experiences that come from those pursuits of benefit to their personal goals and dreams for their own practice and the elimination of what suffering can be eliminated by whatever healthful means and the promotion of what happiness, freedom and other extended and unusual capabilities are possible by whatever healthful means.
- A wide range of traditions and variations and versions and personal innovations are welcome here, basically any that advance the first points noted above. Obviously, those meditative and other technologies that people here have experience with and find of value are the ones that will be the most discussed and promoted at whatever time, as this is only natural.
- The first two points being established, there will naturally be changes, phases of exploration, pulses of interest in various methods and traditions, experiments, failures, successes, orthodoxies that establish themselves, cults of personality, counter-orthodoxies and counter-cults that rebel against those, reformations, factions, fads, and fashions, confusion regarding message, messenger and mode of presentation, role reversals, miscommunications, misinterpretations, syntheses of previously disparate philosophies and theories, re-syntheses based on new information of variable quality, absorptions, incorporations, revisions, fusions, fractures, disruptions, setbacks, advancements, and all the other muck and genius that is simply par for the course in these most rarified, deep, profound, subtle, difficult and human endeavors.
- People perennially want things to cling to: traditions, friends, communities, dogmas, fears, feelings, rivalries, cliques, religions, fantasies, dreams, boundaries, limitations, rules, taboos, and much, much more. When those change or shift, which is inevitable, this can cause contraction, bitterness, resentment, lashing out, bargaining, coercion, and a whole host of other reactions as they adjust to new circumstances and attempt to get their needs, however real or imagined, met by the external world.
- Hopefully, in general terms, those things that really are of value will prevail, those distortions and divisions that are unhelpful will fall away, and people will derive great benefit and enjoyment from the whole messy and amazing process of this Grand Experiment, keeping in mind that this is what it is.
- All is not known, optimal methods can't be perfectly determined in all cases, nor will they be ever for each person at each time in each circumstance, as the factors and forces are too vast, and personal goals and visions of what would be optimal and of what is possible for themselves and others vary widely among people and also change with time, but innovations and improvements continue to occur and re-discovery of perennial wisdom occurs also, and for those who can handle the fluxes and complexities, there is clearly much that is simply amazing and of immeasurable value to be gained.
- I hope that all will keep these essential points in mind and try to keep their eye on whatever they see the prize as being rather than all the more superficial aspects, which, while of some importance, are not the key, and much is lost by people getting sidetracked by reflections on the ripples on surface of the water and so don't plunge deep.
- In this spirit, I hope that the DhO will continue to provide people a place to support each other in the many practices they find interesting and relevant to their own lives and pursuits, and that respectful and productive dialogue with all the intelligence and wisdom that can be brought to those will continue to make this place all it can be, and that when it dies, which it will, as do all things, that something even better will take its place.
Enjoy it while it lasts and make the most of it. (DhO)
Dharma Underground, the prequel. A brief history lesson, for those who are too young. It was a relatively few years ago (this written in 2013) that the world of online forums for discussing hardcore meditation practice didn't exist at all.
The best those of us who were into it had to choose from were essentially totally hostile to the notion that anything in the world of enlightenment and even the jhanas could be achieved by mere mortals in this lifetime, with the rare and possible exceptions of some of the most famous of the world's spiritual superstars, none of whom posted there.
Attempts to post on these forums would be met with about 95% flames, about 4% confusion, and about 1% interest, but that 1% interest was a sign, a hint, a fleeting glimpse that there were a few others out there that would appreciate something more. Most of us were very isolated, even when we went on long retreats, even when we showed up for local dharma groups, even when we talked with people who claimed to be meditations teachers, most of whom didn't know nearly as much dharma as we did.
So, based on those few glimmers of hope, Vince Horn and myself founded the Dharma Underground. It rapidly attracted a group of about 40 extremely strong practitioners, the type that you almost never saw posting on any online forum anywhere before that, and in a degree of concentration that I had never seen before and honestly haven't seen since.
Still, in that protected, members-only, hidden space, most didn't use their real names, as despite being extremely strong adults with very deep practices, the public reactions to disclosure of the details of practice was so near-universally toxic, and that conditioning took time to undo.
So far as I know, I was one of the very few that had been "out" on the internet, having had a website since 1999 or so that discussed meditation openly. It was a lonely place to be.
After some period of time, this amazing group got braver, and having found each other and having had time to normalize discussing these things amongst ourselves, finally the decision was made to create a public forum for some of these discussions for those who would brave public attention. In this way, the Dharma Overground was born.
For a while, there were two forums, the Dharma Underground, for those who were still very closeted and still often under a fake name even there, and the Dharma Overground, for those who were public. Some made the transition, some basically didn't.
Finally, the Dharma Underground traffic basically dried up and nearly everyone transitioned to the Dharma Overground, albeit with many still not using their real names, which should tell you something about what it takes to get out there and discuss these intimate, personal, usually-kept-private, taboo and sensitive topics. Notice this place both in modern times and previous times with just the first names that come to mind: Dream Walker, ByPasser, Tom Tom, BCDEFG, End in Sight, etc. Lots of good practitioners, very few real names among them. Notice the number of people who are here who are too scared to even use their real names who aren't even talking much about anything to do with the expressed purpose of this forum: sawfoot comes to mind.
Those who have been around a little while longer will remember those who are not here now and not posting anywhere or rarely posting anything about their own deep and impressive practices. The reasons for people basically vanishing back into the closet are many, but part of it is still definitely the reactions to people's strong practices, most of which are bad.
Notice the other private forums that have shown up to meet that need for privacy, such as the Dharma Refugees Forum, which is still private and only accessed by approval by its diligent guardians and contains many ex-DhO people and ex-KFD members.
Notice also the ratio of posts about seriously deep meditation practice to basically everything else. I would guess it is somewhere in the rough ballpark of 1:100 more just based on a cursory inspection of various threads, and even at that around 1% range, this place is routinely recognized among the best of the best in terms of places to discuss real practice. That shows a deep need for the real deal. It is a need that I, its founder, also share. (DhO)
The First Great DhO Schism. [This and the next three entries are related to the First Schism] The community split in the First Great DhO Schism when a number of those who founded it needed more space to do their own thing, combined with a number of other traditions coming in, Actualism being only one of them, and this, combined with the rapid influx of chaos that happened after my Buddhist Geeks interview about this place, all together split the DhO.
It is actually more complicated than that, and there is much backstory that I don't want to get into ...
When the sister forums were founded, nearly all of the chaos vanished, and the whole community has been vastly healthier for it, I feel. There is still the occasional small thing, but nothing like what happened then. (DhO)
The Governance of the DhO, or Anarchy vs Monarchy. (circa 2010) There has been raised the issue of the governance of this place and whether or not this needs more formal structure.
The situation in reality as it currently stands is this: it was founded by Daniel Ingram (me) with the help of Vince Horn for technical support, with Hokai joining in very early to help as well, and then we were joined by a number of friends, some of whom we made moderators who rarely have to use that power, and so the website goes along pretty much by itself with little need for much except posting and the very rare deletion of a thread, post or member. Most decisions of practical importance are made by me and Vince with help from others in the community, and these were few until we began researching a new platform on which to host this thing so that we could have a stronger and more functional wiki of terms, concepts and practices to help people get up to speed on lingo, etc.
As we work on transitioning to a more structured website, DhO 2.0, the question has been raised by some more seasoned members about whether or not we need a more formal structure of governance, which involves a whole host if of issues, what that government would look like, who would vote or decide who was on whatever governing body we came up with, etc.
If anyone has complaints, issues, problems, thoughts, ideas, or contributions to how we can make this place better and bring more clarity, fairness, and the like to the process of how decisions are made here and who has what little bits of power there are to be had here, this is a place to discuss them openly.
... I agree with Kenneth that I have no stomach for becoming some sort of religious leader, but I don't think there is any danger of my ideas going unchallenged, as history has shown, and I think that is a really good thing, and while it is true that MCTB has provided some conventions that help, the material that this wide array of very knowledgeable people draws on is vast, rich and diverse, and that shows in the discussions, and the open format of this place by its nature allows the posting of and linking to a great treasure trove of perspectives.
The nice thing is that, so far, there has been little need to do much aside from some technical decisions about hosting sites and the like, most of which have been made or aided by the broad array of computer talent we have here, and as to the rest, there is really not much to do and not really a lot of power that is present here or needs to be used for much at this point, so it is not like we are debating something particularly large or complex, and it is not like the decision making power isn't diffused, as I simply don't know enough to have made many of the technical decisions about how things have and are being implemented, and so far this place has pretty much run itself and taken on a life of its own, as consistent with the tenets of holacracy, vague though they may sometimes be. From my point of view, please feel free to add your voice at any time to whatever problems or complexities arise, and I suspect that group consensus as it is will guide what happens along the way.
I am in this because I like having a place in which and a community with whom to share the dharma and just wanted a place to talk about the dharma the way I know it can be at its best, which from my point of view is open, as egalitarian as is realistically possible, down to earth, empowering to those who come here, fun and practical, and so long as that's what this place is, I am happy.
It is also true that not everyone here is going to finally agree on how things should be, and that is also fine.
One thing that is great is that Wetpaint sites like this one can be set up with a few clicks of a mouse, as this one was, and they are free so long as you don't mind the ads, and so my wife and I were joking last night that perhaps I should found a site called "The Dharma Overlords" to be a spin off from this site for those who for whatever reason like more formal hierarchy, rules, regulations, roles, titles, procedures, and feel that this place is too lax, disorganized, rough and arbitrary.
That obviously would be the start of the Great DharmaOverground Schism, which is probably inevitable, as there are some strong voices here, many visions of how the dharma should be shared and what meaning this place has for their lives and sense of themselves and how they fit into the world, and that is natural and a fine thing, and I would hate for people to somehow feel that the wide open world of the web and other venues was somehow limited to this place and it needed to become some sort of battle ground for power or control.
I am also not quite sure what the focus on me here is all about, as there are quite a few who post more than I do, many who give all sorts of great and well-respected advice all the time, and plenty who provide support media for this place way beyond MCTB.
Those things said, I do have my particular vision how the dharma is the most fun and useful, and it is clear that this colors the place, which is only natural, as the vision statement at the front door reflects my vision, and thus I believe pre-selects for those who share it and see its value. I hope this place stays as true as possible to its original founding tenets, as I think they beat the heck out of what happens most other places and in most other times in history.
In that same vein, as the web is so open and communities so easily set up and this place is only attended to because people wish to be here, essentially all power rests in the hands of the community, as without them nothing happens, no conversations occur, and, as censorship of opinion and post is so rare here so far, basically this place is running itself, and as membership is voluntary, this place will only flourish if it is offering something people resonate with, and from my point of view, it will only be fun for me if it continues along something like its current path, which has been amazing.
While it is true that I have requested that Vince keep DhO 2.0 (the one with the wiki) closed while we build some core structures and work out some bugs and kinks, that is only reasonable, and once it is up and running, we plan to make it as open as possible, in the spirit of this place. As I currently fund that site out of my pocket, as that server time and platform cost, I hope no one minds that I make a few decisions about it early on to make it happen well and be an improvement on what we currently have here, with thanks for the invaluable support of the tech sector here.
... Kenneth and I did have a good conversation, and it reinforced a few things. As the founder of the site and the one who carved out a little place on the web where I can have the kinds of conversations that I couldn't have anywhere else on the web, I do feel that there is some reason for me to use what influence I do have to keep this place the way I like it, and how I like it is stated on the front page and many places elsewhere, meaning: pragmatism over dogmatism, personal experience over blind faith, the spirit of mutually supportive adventurers rather than formal student-teacher relationships, and the notion that these things can be done and are being done, as well as realistic models of the stages of the path and good, open, down-to-earth conversations about whatever we wish to talk about that is useful.
Kenneth pointed out that it was ironic that I, a site administrator and founder, would advocate for not changing much about what power structure there may be, and he has a point. You can expect that I will try to stick as closely as possible to my original vision of how the dharma can be shared, though everything changes, and if things need to morph, so be it.
I am pretty open to whatever goes on here, and it seems that people like things largely the way they are, so for the moment we seem okay, and I have faith that the community process and wisdom and openness will be able to solve problems as they arise.
In all honesty I am not that concerned with how the community looks from without, as most of the dharma discussions and communities I found out there seemed to have a very different set of priorities and paradigms from what happens here, as is routinely pointed out by members here who find nothing like this elsewhere.
I agree we may need more moderators, though I only remember a few deletions of anything in the last year, so in all honesty so far it is not hard work: interested? Let me know. [Check Closing Discussions interesting thread, where Chris Marti states some issues about forum moderation.]
As to a committee making decisions, the reality of what happens behind the scenes has been this: I tend to advocate for making things happen and try to do so, often based on suggestions from the group, and usually with the support of people like Vince Horn and other tech people here. It is a relatively small to medium amount of work, and I wouldn't mind having some help with a few things: let me know if you wish.
Kenneth and I talk often enough and debate things. Lee Moore will probably take over tech stuff from Vince, when he gets off his retreat in Malaysia June 1st, assuming he is willing to, and if he doesn't have the time, I'll find others to help keep things working on that front.
These are the mysteries of the behind the scenes revealed.
... The proposal by Hokai and Vince to adopt a holacracy-influenced structure to help us scale up a bit will be discussed sometime this month. People interested in doing something more formal: being a moderator, helping with tech support in LifeRay, being a go-to person for whatever, helping with the donation section to fund LifeRay, which does cost a little, etc. would be welcome, so let me know.
If people are interested in being part of the more formal conversation about implementing a few things, that should happen in the next few weeks, let me know.
Until then, all is basically the same. (DhO)
Assessing attainments, peer-reviews and cross-fires. (circa 2010) [Please read Kenneth's OP first] For those wishing to see Kenneth and Trent battle it out, there are already literally hundreds of posts along that line that can be found various places. You can find plenty more with Tarin and Kenneth battling it out, and if you read between the lines you can find literally hundreds of posts of Kenneth and me battling it out, all over the same question: is Kenneth a fit judge of other's enlightenment, with his own asserted attainments as the standard. In fact, if we look at the history here behind this that you all may not know about, we find that Kenneth and I have gone at it like bickering children on the same front for more than a decade, with the vast majority being very poorly done and damaging rather than helpful, as Kenneth will also admit. In fact, just a few days ago Kenneth was at me again with more emails in which he was asserting his over mine, so it continues full-tilt behind the scenes.
However, when we get to the question of peer review, let's consider what that should actually look like. In this case, the word "peer review" means debating each other's attainments. Let's think about how to do this well and accurately at a practical level. The assumption that reading someone's forum posts and interpreting them through whatever filter and coming up with the right conclusion with such certainty is peer review well done also needs to be questioned. What is interesting is that everyone jumped on my apparent heavy-handedness, and no one commented on my statements for what I feel is good peer review, or enlightenment judging. This is unfortunate, as I believe they had some merit. The notion that theoretically decades-advanced practitioners modeling really poor examples of how good peer review should be done is somehow of such value is questionable, and I questioned it, in the spirit here.
First, I will assert, as I did earlier, that so far my earlier points stand, that Trent and Kenneth are not communicating well, and that the careful, thoughtful, long conversations necessary to sort this out are not happening here. Modeling peer review behaviors that are reactive, superficial, and I believe likely wildly inaccurate are also reasons to question things and call for a higher standard.
Here's what I think good peer review takes at the level in question:
(1) Lots of accurate information that is of high quality, not only about experiences, but about how people talk, think, express themselves, describe experiences, practice, conceive of practice, and their models, conceptual background, intellectual capabilities, and what they looked like before and after at many levels, much of which is gestalt-esque. This usually requires hours of conversations and often time in person with each other over significant periods of time to get it right, and I am not the first to have stated this.
(2) Clarity about what everyone means when they use certain terms. An example: Kenneth and I struggled for about 2 years recently until we realized that he uses the words "No Dog" and "The I AM" synonymously and I was not. You can't imaging the difficulties that caused, as neither of us realized it, and so we spun in circles blindly crashing around over a simple terminological point without realizing that was all it was. We are currently stumbling around in the dark crashing into each other over the word "Rigpa" in exactly the same fashion, and we know each other like brothers and have for 20 years and came up in the dharma together. What a stupid waste of time. Instead, had we taken the time to really hash out our terms and assumptions first, we would have much better off. Nothing good came from our miscommunications that I can see at all. We simply succeeded during all those hours of conflict in pissing each other off.
(3) Open minds. I have been on the ass-end of Kenneth evaluations for long periods of time and still am, and the vast majority of the time they were simply wrong, and not just at little wrong, but wildly wrong. He considered me to be a Dark Night Yogi below first path for about 7 years, when in fact I was an anagami, a step ahead of him (he was second path or so then), and able to get Nirodha Samapatti way before he could. He couldn't hear this at all, and we even lived together for about 6 months during this period, which is way more contact than Kenneth and Trent currently have had. His filters were so dense that his usually very intelligent brain simply locked on a conclusion, and in this case the wrong conclusion. It nearly cost us our friendship time and time again. There was not careful listening, careful questioning of assumptions, careful attention to nuance of description, thoughtful, intelligent conversation that everyone learns something from. I also had done it on way less retreat time and while much younger. I see the same patterns here and I feel that questioning them is a good idea. If everyone simply wants low-level, poorly done, Jerry Springer-style dharma combat to have the day regardless of anything else, I will have an open mind about it, and I apologize if I have been needlessly heavy handed.
A month or two ago I called up Trent and talked to him for a long time about his experiences and was impressed. He is still relatively new to all this, true, but I had the sort of conversations with him that I expect to have with anagamis, and while that is not definitive proof, as he could just be really smart and have unusual synthesis abilities, most people can't fake that with anything resembling ease, so I am keeping an open mind to see how things go, what he says, how he develops, and what wisdom comes from his posts, which I think is a more healthy attitude, and, over the long haul, more likely to lead to something good.
(4) However, for those who want something better, let's attempt good peer review, respectful, thoughtful, careful, well-done, accurate peer review, and model that for the "newbies" who seem to have such an appreciation for the other, and if we can do that, I think they will come to see what the good stuff looks like and have some appreciation for my vehement reactions to what I consider to be really poor quality work by people who by this point should know better. Given the history of Kenneth and myself, there are also deeper and more personal issues here, but I believe the general points still hold.
... You are correct (Kenneth) on the points about me thinking I was done and not being, as I write about in my book, which you should read sometime, just so you have some more background on the discussion. The actual count was actually about 27, as I point out in MCTB. However, the difference in count can be explained by remembering you weren't there for all of that, as we were not talking much for a few years there while we licked our wounds from the unskillful battles that had happened before.
While reminiscing may be fun and healthy, the actual thing was anything but, as I am sure you remember also, and trying to play up the whole strange process with such a lighthearted tone smacks of something conveniently reworked.
I still find no reaction to my comments on wanting to up the standard of how "peer review" is done and I think that point continues to be lost in the politics and still has value.
Regarding anger, I hope no one here thinks that I am holding back on that front in any dysfunctional way, and if I have seemed insufficiently angry or needlessly repressed, let me know. I have had a lot of criticism leveled at me, but that is a new one. I am quite certain I am not anything resembling free of shadow sides and I also think they should be addressed, hence the posts here and the site itself.
Anger for the sake of anger is not that interesting, but the point remains that if we can figure out why our seemingly well-meaning attempts at something that should be so good called "peer review" are instead just pissing people off, that would obviously be of value. The notion that what is happening between Kenneth and Trent specifically and the process we use for that in general is healthy or productive still needs careful examination, and that continues to not happen despite my calls for it. Once Kenneth and I finally get done with our issues, perhaps we can do that useful work.
... Regarding Kenneth's comment that: "Here we spiral back toward the original intent of this thread. Your "vehement reactions," namely the issuing of an ultimatum as though from a position of dominance or authority are the issue. Seeking to justify your actions does nothing to repair the damage. The job now is to step up and acknowledge the mistake," I believe I have already apologized as noted above for being needlessly heavy-handed, though explaining my reasoning is not justifying it, merely explaining it, which I did in the original post in question, whose valid points continue to be ignored. Please read my posts before responding to them.
Once more, Kenneth, lets have a conversation about how to do peer review in a way that is skillful, helpful and accurate, as it is clearly a difficult topic and one worth of discussion, as that was the root issue that started all this long before we got lost in our crap. If we are going to do it, let's figure out how to do it well. (DhO)
Where did Vince, Hokai and Kenneth go? (circa 2010) I can't speak for Vince or Hokai, but I know a few things. Vince got frustrated with some issues of management, me, and the transition to something larger, as well has having many other commitments.
Hokai I believe was very frustrated by the lack of rigor, respect, formality and order of presentation of material, was somewhat uncomfortable with aspects of claims to attainments, and a wide range of other concerns, and, while he does still seem to post on occasion, seems to have largely moved on to other things. Kenneth is doing his non-dual immediate thing at his site but still here, but there are plenty of other good people around who have good knowledge and attitudes so hopefully, while much has been lost, other things have been gained, and perhaps this place will try to grow in ways that get it back on track somewhat.
I basically got sick of the perseveration about the DhO itself, the absurdity of much of what was happening here, the lack of pragmatism, the whining, and so largely retreated to a little corner of it, Daniel's practice hut, as most attempts at moderation lead to howls of protest despite my fervent pleas for something back to the original goals and vision of this place. I am considering strongly taking the advice of veteran website administrators and really stepping up the level at which I just stop the noise and make no apologies for it.
I have also been exceedingly busy working a more than full-time professional job, being architect/building manager/project coordinator on two house building projects here on my land, one of which is very non-traditional construction (straw bales, earthen floor, cedar round-pole, earth bags, etc.), and then trying to have things like a marriage, food, and sleep, but hopefully a little time is freeing up now: we'll see how long that lasts, as well as spending some time on DhO 2.0, which is proving more complex than originally anticipated. But yes, I am still here.
... Regarding everyone else's appreciation, it is very much appreciated, and I will do my best to help keep this place useful, fun, and good, if I can.
Tomorrow Tarin and I discuss the DhO 2.0 transition, and hopefully it won't be that long. I think the wiki will add a whole new dimension.
... I don't want any criticism free cult either, as I hope I have made clear. That's pretty much my idea of hell. Respect is due to everyone, attainment or otherwise, but respectful people can disagree, and that's healthy. So long as we can keep it practical, about actual practice, about actually how to do it, about what living people really have done and know is possible, and how this interfaces with our interpretations of the original ideals at utilitarian level, that's fine with me.
... Triplethink has a very strong interest in the traditional interpretation of the models of awakening and how they relate to reality, my models, other developmental models, and what is possible in practice, and I think that's great.
Realize that there are conflicts on this front, conflicts of ideals, practicality, and many other aspects, and that's probably going to continue, as this is one of the things I have run into again and again, not just with him, but with the wider community, and have since I started putting my stuff out there, and given the weight of tradition behind the original ideals and maps, and the seeming newness of my point of view — which isn't really that new, and I can find lots of examples of why this is the case, even in the original material, and more strongly in some of the attempts at reform in the Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese traditions—.
But regardless, I think that imagining we can easily dodge this one, issues of respect or treatment of those who claim whatever aside is — for better or for worse — naive. I think the debate should continue, as the relationship between understanding fundamental aspects of sensate reality and how they affect the psychological/emotional aspects of our being is really not so straightforward as basically anyone makes it out to be. This is very interesting territory and worthy of careful exploration by a wide group of adventurers. (DhO)
Dharma Overground, 10 years later. Daniel’s response on a series of critiques to overall DhO state, around 10 years after it emerged.
(1) ‘Most advanced practitioners have mostly abandoned’: I note that there is still a great and unusual collection of very accomplished practitioners here, but at this fleeting moment it is mostly a group that is content to offer skillful advice without much drama, to display great wisdom without labeling themselves as having some particular attainment, and to avoid drawing much attention to themselves. May this wonderful trend continue! It is essential to remember this is a volunary site. I would hate to see an "Awakened Beings Most Post on the DhO Model" of awakening: see point #4 below.
(2) ‘Morality teaching is forgotten’: Much morality is on display here even if it is not explicitly called that. We help each other here, give to each other here, share with each other, and display compassion by doing so. This site is about morality, and part of that morality is generous giving of advice and support to those practicing various paths. Curiously, I see the vast majority of posts as displays of dana, compassion, and sangha. What additional specific moral aspects would help you? What is going on with you right now that is asking for more discussion of morality?
(3) ‘The one-and-a-half-fold path’: There are numerous discussions from across a wide range of aspects of the Noble Eightfold Path here, as well as other paths. Curiously, I often miss more focus on the two aspects that you say dominate this place, but to each their own. ;)
(4) ‘The four Theravadan paths framework for evaluation purposes’: Debates about the maps are very old in Buddhism. Evidence for their being distorted so as to drum up business, one-up other traditions, enforce control, win favor with the court of the ruler, and the like are there in the original Suttas and not likely to go away anytime soon. The maps and the ideals have split Buddhism into numerous small factions and this began during the time of the Buddha and rapidly expanded afterwards. I see no way to make the DhO free of this, but hopefully people will learn and grow by watching the debates and by practicing to see for themselves what holds up on its own.
(5) ‘Many advanced practitioners on this forum cultivate a strong identity view around their skillful practice’: The phenomenon of cultivating both relative and ultimate identities around spiritual accomplishments is much older than Buddhism and continues to this day. Like point #4 above, I have no idea how to keep the DhO free from this. As the last of the armies of Mara is related to these issues, I believe it is a standard part of the path. I feel we should allow space for people being tempted by these armies so that they can at least do so in a supportive environment, as there is a maturation process and learning curve that accompanies spiritual attainments, as we all get to see and learn from here.
(6) ‘Many advanced practitioners on the Dharma Overground do not believe they have anything to learn from students’: I can definitely report that all of us learn from interacting with this community if we are here long enough regardless of whether we directly report that or not. The lessons we learn are not always the ones we wanted to learn, but learning definitely occurs. To me, this is a vast repository of data points of experience and perspective that has greatly enhanced my appreciation of the range of what is out there and a continuous stream of challenges regarding figuring out how best to taylor responses to people that are useful for something.
(7) ‘Everything else is fine. Daniel Ingram seems to be a brilliant scholar and meditator, and has made an enormous contribution to so many people … Many advanced and intermediate practitioners on the forum have helped me and others enormously’: Thanks! Still a work in progress... (DhO)
What have we been doing here since day one. If you are interested in pragmatic meditation practice, exploration of what is possible, reporting experiences, getting hopefully useful feedback, supporting others in similar endeavors, trying to figure out what is possible in this lifetime, being willing to try approaches that seem to offer something useful, explaining what you think happened as a result of that, and the usual business of the DhO, debating and discussing best practices and options for reducing suffering, gaining wisdom, living a good and useful life, exploring the depths of concentration and mental modification by various techniques, that is what we are still doing here and have been since it started. (DhO)
They showed up on time, worked hard all day, seemed to enjoy their work, doing technically precise things with efficiency, demonstrating competent craftwork born of years of experience, measuring carefully, placing carefully, getting along. They have been professional teams.
I also have enjoyed seeing the place improve as I upgrade lights, shelving, plumbing, the electrical system, cable, as well as sweep, take out trash and construction debris, clean out the garage, arrange boxes, get the internet hooked up, etc. I have found it extremely satisfying, grounding, non-heady, straightforward, earthy, and fun.
The workers around me have listened to Rush Limbaugh, told off-color jokes, laughed a lot, seemed to be having a good time. They made the house a lot better for their hard work. While I don’t know much about their minds or personal lives, they clearly are highly functional at their jobs, with good attitudes and justified pride in their work.
This is the spirit I really appreciate in the meditation world also, and I have been thinking about how best to encourage that sort of spirit, one of competence, technical craft, professionalism, that gritty hardiness that the construction workers around me have been modeling so well, just related to the work of upgrading and renovating our hearts, minds, and bodies rather than a house.
I have been reviewing my feelings towards the range that is seen, say, on the DhO, which is built to help a wide range of practitioners, from those struggling in the very hard end of what can go wrong to those rejoicing in what can go so right and everything in between. It has raised the question, “How to inject a bit more of the spirit of these construction workers into people’s meditation practice so their own internal upgrades are achieved with something like the same technical competence, steady progress, and skillful pride in a job well-done that has made this house so much better?” (DhO)
What we are doing in DhO is basically what they did back in the early Buddhist Sangha. When reading the Pali Canon and the old stories of the Buddha, his life, and the early Buddhist Sangha, as well as the general spiritual community of the time around them, as well as stories about places such as Nalanda, I get the sense that what we are doing here is not only nothing new, it is basically what they did back in the day in many ways.
People debated actively what the best practices were, what lead to what, what was useful and not useful, what worked and what didn't. They were open about attainments. They shop-talked actively about techniques, tricks, trials, tribulations, successes, failures, phenomenology, and the like, as that was what they were into.
It is hard to imagine the Abhidhamma, the commentaries, and even much of the Pali Canon arising in a situation that had an attitude that was anything other than that. This also applies to the massive cross-pollination and convergence of various traditions that lead to the innovations that arose in Indian Buddhism in the Nalanda period and later spread to regions such as and including Tibet and formed the basis of much of Tibetan Buddhism.
Further, this sort of practicality just seems normal to me in any endeavor where there are goals, various schools of thought, various teachers, various texts, various techniques, all of which are now available and which logically must be compared, contrasted, texted, experimented with, explored, synthesized, and refined, as well as rediscovered.
Seriously, what are the obvious alternatives and why would anyone prefer those to this if people actually cared about progress in spiritual development and growth? Does anyone really think that monolithic adherence to one tradition in a secretive and proprietary fashion without discussion or questioning is really going to produce the best results for the most people?
I don't think of our take on this as modern or post-modern, but just straightforwardly like most pragmatic tasks are approached and have been for millennia. (DhO)
Mushroom-Culture and Pragmatic Dharma: both true, both imperfect. Clearly, as we have done the reverse of the experiment that they [Salzburg-Goldstein-Kornfield] did, and largely made this all about states, stages, progress, criteria, (with exceptions, and not meaning to categorize the whole of the DhO, AN, KFD, etc. community in these terms), we have learned that they were right: it does clearly lead to alpha-male, alpha-female, etc. one-upsmanship, competition, over-calling attainments, obsession with goals over being here in the present, and all of the suffering, bullshit, petty politics and chaos that comes with being open about these things.
This has been demonstrated countless times in spades, so I have to give it to them on that one: they totalled nailed what would happen, at least in that regard. Gold star to them.
We have also seen numerous people bloom, blossom, flower, shine, dig deep, plunge, soar, explore, grow, progress, and attain in ways and in quantities that are far beyond what is typical in the broader community that is exposed to mushroom-culture dharma, this being a statement of averages and not about individuals. Gold star to us.
Both are true.
Thus, one is then faced with somewhat different questions:
- What is optimal for ourselves?
- What is optimal for whole communities?
- What is the greater good and how is it done?
- Is it that the mushroom people are right, and, despite the benefits of open dharma, should we avoid the alpha-person stuff and also let people largely flounder in lesser stages?
- Is it that the open, pragmatic dharma people are right and we should avoid the mushy psychologized dharma of the mushroom people and deal with the alpha-bullshit of those who attain to real progress?
- How do we keep the open culture and reduce the clear negative side-effects?
- Should everyone be allowed to decide for themselves?
- Can everyone decide for themselves, as, once the open, pragmatic stuff is out there, you can't really put it back in?
Thus, both cause disharmony. Both are imperfect. Both cause problems and benefits.
Still, for me, given a choice, I will take my attainments regardless of the costs so far. I will take my community regardless of the costs so far.
Do I wish every day that there was less unhealthy competition, less bullshit politics, less posturing, less alpha-crap? Yes, every single day. It has destroyed friendships, threatened others, caused staggering amounts of pain.
Thus, I urge us all to strive for the ideal: great practice, great progress, great maps, great camaraderie, great cooperative, great mutual support, and to avoid unhealthy competition and the rest like the plague, as it is dharma poison, truly, as I know only too well. One need merely look to my longest and deepest dharma friendship to realize how much totally toxic poison it can be. (DhO)
Traditions predominance in DhO. Dharma Overground has its current concentrations of practitioners, but various strains have come to more or less predominance over the years.
True, more Theravadan themes have often had more representation for both historical and practical reasons, as some of the less pragmatic traditions with more nebulous or more fanciful criteria for attainments have often not translated well to an, “I can do this, this is what I have done, this is what I am doing, this is the results, this is how this compares to the stated criteria for success, and this is what I am going to try to do next,” sort of model, which has typically been the basic structural underpinnings of a pragmatic approach to doable dharma. It is often trickier to apply that sort of spirit and ethos to much of how the Tibetan traditions have been translated to non-native settings, and typically very difficult to apply that to Zen, whose aesthetics often stubbornly resist and even openly rebel at that sort of spirit, at least as I typically see them represented today, though clearly both traditions have had some more pragmatic elements in their histories and even in some st(r)ains of translation today.
However, there have at times been some strong and engaged practitioners from a wide range of traditions dedicated to real open conversations and real mastery that have come through, and, if you examine the practice histories of even some of the longest-lasting and most stable and contributory members of this site, you will fine a great range of diverse influences.
It is true that aligning goals and terminology without devolving into less savory and less productive forms of communication is unfortunately common, as those on both sides typically harbor some sort of “my use of this term and my interpretation of this teaching is best” attitude, but there are those here that appreciate the careful and sometimes tedious work of trying to sort through the essence of teachings, terms, and practices to get to what is actually reproducible here and now, what actually works here and now. (DhO)
A few things that most of us would agree on. I think there are a few things that most of us would agree on ... :
- The sensations that make up our reality are the only basis for practice we have.
- Noticing things about that sensate experience is likely to cause some increased knowledge of our sensate reality.
- The more concentrated we are in this, meaning the more consistently we can do this, the more likely we will gain some insights into reality.
- Samatha jhanas are concentrated states in which the mind is steady.
- Sensations are impermanent and causal.
- Some people like to notice impermanence first and learn samatha jhanas later.
- Some people like to learn samatha jhanas first and notice that all things are impermanent later.
- Some people mix these together and learn both along the way.
- Some people like totally different traditions, such as AF, Taoism, and the like, and may mix those with some of the above or just totally do something else.
- The sense of things being "authentic" is really helpful for some people's practice.
- The sense of things being effective is really helpful for some people's practice.
- Given that internal states and "awakenings" can't yet be definitely known externally (say by some fMRI or whatever), we have only people's reports of their experiences and any potential transformations as well as observations of their behaviors and words from which to extrapolate these things.
- Given point twelve, definitive debates about who has achieved what and how that compares to someone else's practice and results are dubious though inevitable.
- Practice for yourself is finally the only thing that will help clarify these points.
- Balancing the need for sleep, to help patients and running a forum, among other things, is not always easy or optimal.
How to keep reasonably high standards in DhO. As one of the mixed blessings of the DhO is a staggering lack of anyone going around certifying anything or declaring anyone else as having definitely done anything, that lack of rigorous quality control, which was lambasted by the likes of Hokai (and contributed to his leaving in disgust, if memory serves), allows people to create a culture where they just throw really high terms around quite loosely and don't realize that there is actually something to them, something lost when they are abused, and something damaged when it creates the same slack foolishness in those exposed to those who do this. I still think that the whole certification process, quality control by an authoritative body, etc. trip is not one I want, but I am at a loss as to how to prevent people from really trashing out concepts like NS en masse without something to counterbalance the prevailing trend of seriously watered down dharma, which I generally loathe.
As mentioned above, other concepts I see the same problems with:
- "MCTB arahat"
- "formless realms"
- "MCTB anagami"
- "MCTB jhana"
Anyone got any ideas about how to keep reasonably high standards in a website dedicated to high standards without going around saying, "You are fooling yourself and full of it, stop using those terms now by the Authority Vested in Me!" which obviously would be really ugly and not helpful, but what alternatives are there that will help reclaim the weight and rigor that those things should have when the prevailing trend is so far in the other direction?
As Tarin once pointed out, and I am paraphrasing, there is a difference between giving people empowerment and giving them license, and I think that a lot of license is being taken to no good benefit and this could really cause people to miss trying for something way beyond what they currently are doing, meaning that license to really loosely use profound terms could actually detract from personal empowerment, something I very much wish to avoid.
I am not saying that everyone is necessarily using NS inaccurately, but I simply don't see any descriptions that really make me think, "Yeah! That's it! Nicely done! Go (insert meditator's name here)!" Things that I routinely see missing:
- Set up description.
- Entrance and Exit Description.
- Truly everything being utterly gone: this "eyes open NS" and "NS with sensations" stuff is simply junk IM-NotAtAll-HO.
- The truly profound and very long-lasting heavy duty afterglow.
- The very profound shift in perspectives that can come from having attained this particular attainment.
- The unusual reverence that it should cause in people who attain it: I just don't see that being described at all.
It stands out in a way that nothing else at that end of the spectrum does.
I didn't attain it for a few years as I simply couldn't spare the time to deal with the hyper-heavy long-tailed afterglow, as my life was too busy to risk having to navigate in a complex life in that headspace, which is so ultra-chill and so heavy-stimulation averse for so many hours afterwards. I see nothing like this being described at all by anyone here, a silence I find telling.
Please, I ask those posting here and practicing here to try to fight this particular trend and use terms as they were intended and with the respect they deserve so as to avoid short changing yourselves in your own practice and encouraging the same in everyone around you.
... I suggest we start each section or thread with the experience described in straightforward, simple, phenomenological terms, then add the possible corollaries from the standard world of terms that it brings to mind, create a list of the distinguishing characteristics of that specific attainment, phase, stage, state, or whatever it is, discuss how how to create a term for that that we can all agree on, and then go from there discussing the pros and cons of calling something whatever, such as to eventually arrive at a list of terms that are as nuanced, unambiguous, well-defined and helpful as we can. I suspect that for much of this we will actually have to use somewhat elaborate phrases, as hinted at in my Advanced Jhana Classification thread, but that is way better than trying to throw all sorts of things into one catchall category that really shouldn't be, as often happens now.
I think that we need to do some of that work here before mindtrainingterms gets off the ground, which I envision as a collaboration outside of this little community of practitioners, and if we have our stuff together before we try for something more mainstream like that, then those involved who aren't practitioners but are scholars, researchers, academics, will hopefully be less thrown by our own internal debates. (DhO)
A call for a discussion of a much more nuanced, rich, complex, precise set of terms and phrases to help describe this amazing work we are engaged in. In the beginning, there where apparently the 8 jhanas, as the Buddha supposedly was trained in those by his teachers.
Then he attained the 4 paths and Arahatship, and now we had 13 terms with which to describe nearly everything except the powers.
Then there were the Suttas, and in them we find suttas such as "The Fruits of the Homeless Life" (DN 2) and "One by One as They Occurred" (MN 111), between which we have the powers, and two very different apparent approaches to meditation, as well as some other tests that outline such things as the 40 objects of concentration and some of those practices, such as the Brahmaviharas, the Kasina meditations, Reflections on Death, etc., as well as MN 44, which talks about Nirodha Samapatti.
So that is a little better, but try to describe all the stuff that people do and experience here with just those, and you constantly find yourself having to cram a ton of disparate stuff into very narrow and limited boxes, like an artist who can only use the terms "red, green, and blue" to describe the colors they use, rather than having the whole spectrum of Pantone and beyond, like a programmer who could only use machine language to program: you can get there, but your fingers will bleed and you will have grey hair long before you could ever code a web browser.
Then come the commentaries, such as the Visuddhimagga and the Vimuttimagga, the most significant ones for this discussion, and in them we find a whole lot more about technique and the stages of insight, as well as more about the powers and more about NS and more about all sorts of things that are really useful. This was a significant expansion and elaboration on the original, but, in all honesty, still woefully inadequate to describe the wide range of the thing, not even close, in fact.
Imagine trying to limit yourself just to terms and concepts found even in the commentaries, it would be like trying to practice medicine using only terms and concepts that existed 100 years ago: was better than trying to do it using terms before they knew about things like microbes, say 600 years ago, but nowhere close to what you can do today.
(I am going to skip over what happened in Tibet, with a massive explosion of techniques and literature into a whole host of wild and wonderful and very complicated and often really out there stuff, as well as what happened in Zen, where they basically went back to the Stone Age in terms of meditation terminology and still refuse to budge from that point of view.)
Then fast forward some 1500 years to about 60 years ago and Mahasi Sayadaw, as well as U Pandita, and then add Bill Hamilton...
These guys, through diligent practice, realized the connections between the stages of insight and the concentration territory, and they added a huge and important step, and then Bill added the concept of subjhanas, as well as subñanas, and the like, and this really made good description a lot easier.
However, what is described here is still far more complicated than even those things, and yet we still use a very limited set of terms, and basically no one here even uses subjhana or subñana terminology, which is so useful, and beyond that, adds technique, focus, emphasis, set up, duration, depth, etc. to really flush out what they are getting into, and then add on the Actualism stuff, and energetic stuff, and powers-related stuff, and candle flame, and mantras, and visualization, and deep emotional investigation, and all of that, and we have a real need for a true technical language that can handle all of this, and we don't have it, and we constantly stumble because that need is not recognized and realized here.
There are those who look at all of that and try to go backwards, back to the days of an exceedingly poorly developed and extremely limited lexicon of meditation terms from thousands of years ago, but the answer simply doesn't lie there, not that there aren't good foundations to build on there, but we are already way beyond that and still it isn't enough to avoid constant ambiguity, miscommunication, and failed attempts to really convey the fine points of what we are getting into here, and those fine points can be really, practically important.
Thus, again I call for a discussion of a much more nuanced, rich, complex, precise set of terms and phrases to help describe this amazing work we are engaged in. I realized that, as with any specialty or profession, once you get to the level of having a very complex set of terms to describe what you do and how to do it, many people won't be able to go there, as the language barrier gets too high, but there are ways around that, and for the deep work, I still think that we need to take things to a much more detailed and sophisticated level, and, given how generally smart this crowd is here, I think we are the people to do it, as no one else seems to be. (DhO)
Morality and Pragmatic Dharma. The notion that Morality and Pragmatic Dharma (meaning the broad group of people who emphasize function and results over tradition and dogma, which is a pretty large and diverse group) do not in some broad way (assuming you could easily categorize this group) emphasize or get explicit about Morality is preposterous.
A few moral qualities:
- Honesty: this site and its sister communities value honest, open, non-dogmatic, straightforward, human descriptions of practice. Honesty in speech is a moral virtue, one that is practiced here in ways rarely seen in other similar communities. In this, the DhO and its sister communities excel in honesty.
- Dana: the gift of the dharma is the highest gift, according to the Buddha. This site and its sister sites are all free, freely participated in, advice and time freely given to help others to learn and practice the dharma. By its nature, that is the goal of this community. Thus, this community and its sister sites exemplify the highest ideal of Buddhist giving explicitly by their very function.
- Service: many people here serve the community and other communities in various ways, specifically supporting each other as a sangha to be well, practice well, function well, and help others well. Numerous people give freely of their time and resources to support this site and keep it functioning and free. Further, I know many of the people here as people, and in their own lives they give to their families, communities and world in numerous generous ways. In this, this community and its sister communities excel in service.
- Speech: this site and its siter sites, while having their moments as do all online communities, strive to talk about these deep, sensitive topics in ways that are skillful and supportive. In this, this community, while not always meeting the highest ideals of speech, clearly strives for right speech in serving others. In this, the ideals for speech are high and the struggle to maintain skillful speech is ongoing and diligent.
- Livelihood: I know many of the members of this community, and I personally know of none that earn their living through a wrong form of livelihood.
- Thought: this community has a bredth of thought about the dharma that is rare in this world, and it strives constantly, post after post, thread after thread, to think wisely about the dharma. In this, the standards for the community are very high, and they are met here to a degree that I rarely see elsewhere. In this, the community excels in right thought and the aspiration to right thought by its very function and mission.
We could spend a lot of time talking about how moral we are as a community, or we could just be moral and do our good work without stating, "Ah, we are soooooo Moral!" That we very rarely pat ourselves on the back for our extensive good deeds and service is a sign of humility, another moral virtue.
I prefer the actions to the words, but, if someone has somehow missed the deeply moral nature of this community, perhaps a reminder is necessary to thwart the false view that this community is not moral, doesn't emphasize morality, doesn't speak of morality, and doesn't highly value morality. Even among those who emphasize deep meditation in their posts, you will find that there is a great deal of moral emphasis in their lives. (DhO)
The Critiques of Pragmatic Dharma. I think that the critiques of Pragmatic Dharma as a movement are narrow, as what this movement represents is broad, variable, complex, and very individualistic ... . From a Pragmatic Dharma point of view, if Fountainhead dialetics [or any] produce personal benefit and utility, then they would fall within that umbrella. There is not strictly speaking something called Pragmatic Dharma Vipassana, just lots of various techniques that people who value efficacy might emply to various ends.
As to Meaning and Pragmatic Dharma, the notion that meaning, thought, analysis, stories, and the like are not meaningful to some straw man Pragmatic Dharma is obviously absurd. I spend 95% of my life focused on the specifics and meaning, and about 5% focused on ultimate aspects. This is likely similar to the lives of most Pragmatic Dharma practitioners except when pursuing various specific utilitarian insight practices in retreat settings. Meaning is obviously very important, as are the relative causes of our delusional thought patterns and maladaptive coping strategies. (DhO)
Debates and monitoring in DhO. Is this forum perfectly monitored and run? It is unlikely that anyone would think that, including myself. Is it easy to craft a set of optimal parameters and enforce them uniformly in a forum that doesn't have full-time, dedicated monitors? No, as years of experimentation have shown. I try to find a balance in my life, and sometimes various aspects get short changed, and this is one of the many that this happens to.
Still, how to make this place better is a continued experiment and I welcome your specific and implementable feedback, realizing that anyone who provides feedback likely has a specific set of needs and vision for this forum that might not necessarily be in line with anyone else's or possible given limited resources. We likely need more monitors, and I will try to work on that later today.
... The "Overlord" designation is at once tongue-in-cheek, being a preposterous title, and also somewhat true, as this is my site on my server with my domain name and paid for entirely by me, being owner and administrator. It just seemed to make funny sense to me that the person who ran the Dharma Overground should be the Overlord, given the Over in both words. It shouldn't be taken to be more than it is, and I am sorry if this has caused some sort of undue concern, sense of dread or paranoia or whatever.
... you can't hold me responsible for everything that people post here when I am not available, particularly when I am caught in unusually heavy runs of work, which I was. That is not dramatic, it is just the way things are. I am not complaining, as I signed up for my job and specifically ask to work that much. Still, those heavy runs are much beyond what most people normally work, and there are only so many hours in the week, as we all know, and I do have the rest of my life to tend to as well.
I try to keep this place high-level, adult and reasonable, and yet the world of internet forums somehow brings out levels of, well, there is no nice way to put it, and this in people who would hopefully never talk that way at work to a colleague or their clients or other people of value in their lives. The more people on a forum, the more the bell curve of internet decorum and sense will create that tail of extremes, and on the bad end of that, it obviously can be bad.
Regarding people leaving, some left, some have come back at points (Kenneth Folk comes to mind) each trying to meet their own changing needs in a vast digital world with lots of options, options that simply didn't exist then. I am very happy that good solid options, such as Awake Network, exist. I do not aspire to provide a place that will keep everyone who shows up here here. This place does what it does. If people need that at points, it is here. In that, at least, it is the longest running pragmatic meditation forum and I hope it will continue to last long into the future so long as there is some need for what it is.
Imagine if all 4000+ members of the DhO plus all of the lurkers posted here regularly. I frankly am very glad that is not happening, as it would be overwhelming for everyone concerned. It is not that I wish to discourage participation, but there is some middle ground. Still, good participation is something I do wish to create a place that works when people need the place for whatever question or crisis or fun social meet up or whatever, and how to balance all of that with the open format of membership and a culture that encourages people to ask hard questions and have real discussions and arguments about important and complicated points is not clear to me.
Regarding lots of people posting about the Mahasi tradition who know very little about it, my comment that many of those comments are laughably naive stands, as it is true. For example, I don't claim to critique the inner workings of Shingon as I know almost nothing about it. People should hold a similar reasonable degree of skepticism about their own knowledge of traditions they haven't spent a lot of time reading about and training in. (DhO)
Debates on how to enhance DhO. I have numerous times asked for people to help fill in the Wiki and basically every single time the response is a total flat nothing.
We used to have a Blog here and I asked for Blog Authors to come forth, and it totally died due to nobody wanting to write anything.
Early on I offered to give individual teachers who were thinking about going solo their whole own spaces for free with their own control of what went on there: total disinterest.
It is the work of a few clicks for me to create a Blog Page, to create a Blog Author, to create a Wiki Author, to create a Community: but interest time and time again is nearly nothing.
I have plenty of times asked if people wanted space to post things and it just came to zilch.
There were 6 specialty communities originally for things like Immediate Non-Dual Practices, Magick, Energetic Stuff, etc., each with their own Blog, Forum, and the like, and all totally didn't get used and so they finally got deleted.
... You might be surprised at the attainments, insights and abilities, regardless of labels, of plenty of people who post responses quite often. I see plenty of insight and good quality stuff here, and the more serious and high-level questions that require the depth you get from people with more experience tends to get them interested, so it seems to me. Most questions here don't really require that level of depth, but some do, and then I tend to notice the relative heavy-hitters stepping up to the plate, but perhaps my perspective is a skewed one and I fail to see the depth of need that is not being met.
... Very early on in the DhO, there was the concept of Elder. It was proposed by Kenneth Folk, fitting with his vision of a modified hierarchy at the time, in which the DhO would in some way sanction experts and approved teachers, and so included as a roles in the list of roles here by his request. In fact, the role still exists as a legacy from that early period, but the category was never really used for anything and so that is why you haven't heard of it, as it creeped me out just a bit.
I don't personally have any interest in doing anything with it, as I also prefer a style in which people's claims are their own, not a part of the DhO structure at all, and you get to know people based on their posts and come to trust them or not based on the merit of their words rather than anything sanctioned or codified into formal roles by this platform.
Those who have been here long enough will be very aware that claims to attainments shift all the time, people routinely revoke claiming to have attained to whatever even at high levels, and I think that is all really healthy and anything that interferes with that would be a loss and a potential detriment to progress, I feel, as it can be very confusing to those who don't know that re-evaluating one's practice in the light of new experiences or new information is a very good idea, but those who have come to think of a person as being of whatever defined rank can react badly to that at times. There is enough of this already without adding more to it. (DhO)
Transactional analysis and DhO. While I am not generally known for psychological theory or particularly psychologized practice, the recent trend for my wife to ask me, "What's up on the Drama Overground," got me thinking more about this and some of the useful psychological things I have learned along the way, of which I still find Transactional Analysis, that seemingly forgotten bit of reaction to and addition to Freudianism, of great, practical, explanatory value.
DhO gender imbalance. In my experience on retreats, about 70% of the retreatants were female on basically all the retreats I went on, that includes IMS, Gaia House, The Thai Monastery in Bodh Gaya, Bhavana Society, and MBMC (where I did the most intense practice of my life). I personally would very much like to figure out how to balance things more on places like the DhO, as has been discussed here numerous times over the years. I am not sure exactly what the female to male ratio is here, but it is definitely skewed far in the direction of males, so far as I can tell, though plenty of people post anonymously, and plenty of posters don't clearly identify their gender, still, I think the consensus is that it is far to the male side of imbalance. (DhO)
Oddly enough, though I recommend the book TA Today in my book, I have been amazed that nobody has ever mentioned to me that they read it, which is really unfortunate, as I expected plenty of people to read it and go, "Wow, how did we forget that important work and why is more of it not incorporated into current understanding of human interaction more directly and consciously?", and then recommend it to all of their friends.
So, here are some basics of TA theory that just might prove useful to someone, as I see much recently that can very easily be illuminated by these points, which is not surprising, as they illuminate a huge swath of human behavior in general with great simplicity and ease. I don't mean to come off as "Wow, this is the theory of all human behavior that explains everything!", but I do wish to encourage people to take a serious look at these very simple, straightforward concepts to see how they might practically apply to their own lives and, in this case, on-line interactions.
TA basic theory link. (The original link is broken, so the nearest similar in that webpage is that link. Here is a PDF TA 101 COURSE HANDBOOK from Manchester Institute of Psychotherapy.)
I think that the concepts of Scrips and Drivers, as well as the Drama Triangle and Game theory, are very worth knowing well so that you can see how they unfold in daily life and thus be more aware of what is going on and less caught up in it. (DhO)
DhO gender imbalance. In my experience on retreats, about 70% of the retreatants were female on basically all the retreats I went on, that includes IMS, Gaia House, The Thai Monastery in Bodh Gaya, Bhavana Society, and MBMC (where I did the most intense practice of my life). I personally would very much like to figure out how to balance things more on places like the DhO, as has been discussed here numerous times over the years. I am not sure exactly what the female to male ratio is here, but it is definitely skewed far in the direction of males, so far as I can tell, though plenty of people post anonymously, and plenty of posters don't clearly identify their gender, still, I think the consensus is that it is far to the male side of imbalance. (DhO)
Types of DhO'ers. [This funny thread is a collective composition, where Daniel (**) contributed too.] So here are the types of people you encounter on this wonderful forum:
- The bright eyed A&Per. Their defining moment will revolve around some kind of crazy experience they had. Usually it doesn't involve drugs. They might use phrases like "surfing the bliss wave," "sat there for like 25 minutes" or something similar ... Can often be found writing ridiculously long wall-of-text posts detailing every single one of their even slightly out-of-the-ordinary meditation experiences since they started meditating a few years ago.
- The "steady as she goes," always gunning for stream entery'er. They provide helpful, somewhat anonymous advice to nearly all types on the website. They have grounded, somewhat normal home lives that keep them from that ever elusive retreat which will "tip them over eq"
- The Stream Enterer. The least/most common denominator here at the Dho. They like to use words like blip, ease, and waiting. Don't look for any other similarities between these people, because you won't find any beyond this.
- The meticulous and boring folks. They use big words like AF and write posts that nobody has the time or patience to read, much less intelligence.
- The random tidbit types. They provide a variety of seasoning from posting links, to sharing half baked ideas, to dropping one liners.
- The lurker.
- The Chronic Dark-Nighters (**): they have been in it some very long period of time and very well may be in it for some very long period of time. They are moderately tortured in their life but somehow generally hold at least the essential parts of it sort of together and burn most of their free time going on retreats when their semi-dysfunctional lives can afford it. Their capacity to keep at it despite the punishment which that lifestyle and mentality inflicts upon them provides inspiration for us all.
- The Perpetual Anagamis (**): they seem to be endlessly hovering around 4th path, however they think of it, but can't quite seem to get there and make it stick.
- The Pali True Believers (**): Those who feel that the last word on dharma was written in the Pali Canon and that the commentaries are revisionist apocrypha. The phrase "vipassana jhana" makes their skin crawl.
- The High Idealists (**): Those who believe that enlightened beings will really live up to every and all high ideals they hold and that anyone who doesn't believe what they do is clearly deluded and wandering lost. They fear that any variation from their beautiful vision of what enlightened people should be will somehow cause permanent damage to the dharma.
- The Old Guard (**): They have been on the DhO since the beginning, have a smugness of confidence that is at once inspiring and also at times very irritating, and make sure to carefully ride the dark currents of power and politics to maintain what they feel is their rightful place at the top while cleverly avoiding direct conflict with other similar DhO denizens that could result in another dreaded "Clash of the Titans", the occurrence of which can cause splits in the community and so a smaller audience of admirers.
- The Dharma Overground Overlord (**): having spent plenty of time being nearly all of the above categories of dharma-quester at points, including all of those listed in this post, and, as he has such a specialized interest in such a totally obscure topic as goal-oriented, technical dharma, feels every little slight quiver, minor battle, major battle, failure to communicate, and flame war in the manor that one feels chaos within one's own small family.
- The eternal skeptic: Someone who may have followed instructions but never got any tangible results and renounced his futile efforts. He continually roams the alleys of DhO to challenge and disdain every single poster with his lack of experience and over abundance of intellect.
- The miserable newbie: Someone who has used a lot of drugs and feel that they have crossed A&P on one of their marijuana/beer binges or while candy flipping lsd, or possibly both. They feel they are in Reobservation Territory and the only way through is to gun for stream entry with a retreat or lots of shrooms, or possibly both.
- The excited newbie: Someone, possibly a new ager who feels instant affiliation with DhO'ers and presents them with his/her entire biography and a list of possible psychic powers.
- The hide and seeker: Someone who come, asks for help regarding the territory they are in, and then disappear altogether until they return asking for help in an unrelated territory.
- The self entitled spiritual guide for one and all: Someone who has chosen spiritual counselling as their profession and are themselves in need of spiritual guidance.
- The eccentric yogi: Someone who has spent the better part of their lives reading mystical instructions and dissecting eccentric teachings. They openly share these teachings and welcome all to follow their lead. Sometimes they may be so touchy about maintaining the originality of the teachings that almost all their posts are copy/pasted from their favorite books.
- The illuminated one post poster: Someone who creates an account just to write one post bragging about their attainment and disdaining everything else.
- The enlightened being tracker: Someone who travels across the oceans to faraway mountains and valleys chasing rumors of highly evolved spiritual beings. Finally writes about their meeting with them and the teaching acquired thereby. Some days later starts a thread about starting an AF practice instead.
- The college student rinpoche: Someone who feel they have followed and reached the logical conclusion of the Mahayana path whilst also juggling their exams and bf/gf. There is now nothing else left to do in the spiritual department other than to log on to DhO and and show others how easy it is to transcend the 40 or so levels of attainment.
- The scientist: Someone who starts threads comparing latest scientific/mathematical findings/theories or conclusions by renowned intellectuals with spiritual teachings/findings/doctrines.
- The Babbler: Someone who babbles. (DhO)
Having a partner in the path. My first wife was a meditator, though initially got into it from pressure from me, but later went on a number of retreats totally on her own after she crossed the A&P in her efforts to get Stream Entry and best the Dark Night. It was a pretty wild ride having us both cycling up and down and crashing around through various phases. I don't miss it at all, nor would I necessarily recommend it.
My current wife is not really a formal or technical meditator, though she does definitely meditate in her own style. She is also very intuitive, naturalist, shamanistic, and magical, not following any specific path or doctrine, and very much her own thinker and adventurer outside of any obvious tradition. She also has a very hair-trigger bullshit detector. She also crosses the A&P not infrequently through just being alive, which does make things interesting at times. She does tend to have some appreciation for what I do and am into, and through long exposure to me and my dharma world does understand a lot of the technical lingo and terminology, but we don't share meditation or our paths particularly, and she doesn't use much of the terminology herself, and that is just fine and feels healthier than the previous marriage in which things were somewhat entangled related to meditation and other things. We support each other doing each other's own thing, and that feels good.
Overall, there are really mixed blessings and curses to be had either way, and it is just one of the many things in the mix that you will have to figure out for yourself with whoever you are in the relationship with, realizing that it will likely be a moving target for both of you, just as this stuff is a moving target for each of us here in our own practice.
I think that having a partner who was openly hostile or intolerant of these things would obviously be hard if you are way into them, though people do manage to make progress and do stealth-practice in such settings, but barring open hatred of meditation, I think that there is no obvious fixed optimal arrangement. Fixation on how central making progress in meditation is can shift as one actually does make progress in meditation, and so at some point it is just one more thing, and not the big self-defining deal it once was, so realize that you want someone kind, respectful, fun, sane, ethical, honest, mature, with a good sense of humor and the like much more than you do some perfect idealized meditation partner, as it is those things that will make things more likely to be enjoyable and enduring in a relationship more than some spiritual quest.
I have a friend who was just recently bemoaning that when he and his girlfriend both got stream entry that it didn't instantly fix the other structural problems in their relationship or resolve their personal psychological issues, so realize that it is definitely not the be-all-and-end-all of essential relationship qualities. (DhO)
Hurricane Ranch Dialogue I: Daniel Ingram, Hokai Sobol, Kenneth Folk, Tarin Greco, Vince Horn. In February of 2009, I invited several people to my house in Alabama, aka Hurricane Ranch, for a long weekend of discussion, sharing, and practice. Included in this group were several members of the Dharma Overground, as well as some older dharma buddies. Fortunately, while we were having tons of great dharma discussions we recorded one of them and it is available here for download. In this discussion we covered several different topics, but the main theme of the talk was ‘Getting it Done versus Doing It.’ Participating in this conversation were Hokai Sobol, Kenneth Folk, Vince Horn, Tarin Greco, and myself.
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DI = Daniel Ingram
HS = Hokai Sobol
KF = Kenneth Folk
TG = Tarin Greco
VH = Vince Horn
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HS: Getting it done or simply doing it. You know?
DI: What do you mean when you say that? Getting it done versus doing it?
HS: You know, doing it is what most Buddhists do.
DI: Huh.
HS: They’re doing it.
DI: Yeah.
HS: But they’re not getting it done.
DI: Right.
HS: Right? You know, you can’t say they’re not doing it.
DI: Right.
HS: Because they’re doing it.
DI: Yeah. They’re doing something.
HS: They’re doing something … … and some of it is good.
DI: Yeah.
HS: And some of it is not good. And some of it is, like, empty.
DI: Yeah.
HS: Lacking substance. Kind of going through the motions, you know?
DI: Yeah.
HS: But what are the essential points of, through which doing it becomes getting it done?
DI: You mean finishing the damn thing. Really finishing it?
HS: Not necessarily finishing it. You know, getting it going.
DI: Yeah.
VH: Escape velocity.
HS: Yeah.
DI: Yeah. That’s it. It could be Arising & Passing Away. It could be Stream-Entry. It could be Arhat. It could be Siddha. It could be whatever.
HS: Whatever.
DI: Yeah. Sure. But a really crankin’ thing. Yeah. It would be interesting to even hear what the Shingon take on that was, because I’m guessing we would say different things given that quest. Because even Shingon—
HS: We have a—well, we should start this.
VH: We started.
HS: We started. Well then… [rings bell] … … This is Round One!
KF: I had something to say about this. Okay, I have something to say about this. From a very mechanistic point of view of settin’ em up and knockin’ em down …
HS: Alright … alright …
KF: Alright. Settin’ em up and knockin’ em down. There are two things that have to be done. You have to access a finite number of strata of mind and penetrate each of those strata of mind. And the way I know how to do this is via the vipassana technique. So you have to – you can think of this thinking of a chakra model, chakras being these nexes of energy. So you put the mind at the level of one of these nexes of energy, and you deconstruct it by finding what about that experience when the mind is aligned at that frequency—what changes? And if you can see the change, you’ve knocked it down, and you will very naturally go on to the next strata of mind, which you can see through. And if you do this enough times—settin’ em up and knockin’ em down—the thing is done.
DI: Which would be the progressive, essentially a progressive, work-based, stage-based, model-based—
KF: Exactly. The developmental model.
DI: The developmental model. Right. As opposed to the whatever. Which is interesting to hear you dub the developmental model. You know what I mean.
KF: It’s very easy to talk about the developmental model.
DI: That’s a plain fact. Yes.
KF: I could talk about realization, but there wouldn’t really be very much to say about it. So for the time being, let’s talk about the developmental model.
DI: Yeah, or, what I would say, go through the ñanas, which are essentially part of the jhanas. Seeing the three characteristics, which would be one way. But the Shingon way is going to look entirely different, right? Essentially you’re going to do whatever sets of practices—right? You would do a specific set of things probably in a specific order without expecting much results and just do those until you could either see or visualize or perceive or achieve whatever the instruction was. And then at some point, essentially, by doing that, something would finally pop. Is that right? I mean, essentially it’s going to be something like that, right?
HS: I don’t know. What you’re presenting is more like a koan, right?
DI: Meaning?
HS: Like pumping the koan.
DI: Even if you were doing something more esoteric, taking some letter or visualizing it at some chakra, and then adding something to it and doing it … to some degree of mastery where you actually have that experience as described. Isn’t that…
HS: Whatever the detail of the actual technique, the basic idea in Shingon is to take what you do—meaning some physical action or non-action—
DI: Mahamudra.
HS: Physical. Just mudra. That’s what you do. And then taking what you say and taking what you mean—
DI: Which would be mantra and view or visualization…
HS: —Or visualization. So that would be like mudra, mantra, and visualization, meaning what you do, what you say, and what you mean should be aligned.—
DI: Right.
HS: —To a degree where it becomes impossible to discern one from the other. Alright? That’s the definition of concentration in Shingon.
DI: Interesting.
HS: That’s the basic definition of concentration.
DI: That sounds like a good, solid standard.
HS: That’s concentration. So basically you have certain—it’s not about the position of your fingers. It’s about the felt thing. So it’s not—if you take the fist, it’s not about doing the fist, it’s about feeling the fistness in the fist. That, those sensations, and saying for example “ah”, that voice and thinking for example “this” for example – those three should be done and attended to as one and fused to a point of non-discernment.
DI: Which is essentially 4th jhana from my point of view. That’s 4th jhana. You get 4th jhana, those are aligned in one field as a coherent entity.
HS: As one. As one.
DI: Yeah.
HS: You can still analyze, but you don’t fall into that temptation.
DI: Right. Sure.
HS: You stay before analyzing them. And that’s the starting point. From there you go into a receptive mode. Okay? And the actual instruction is to receive these three activities as if they were done by a larger entity. Okay. Which traditionally is called the Buddha, which Japanese understand as everything. So it’s an action of everything which you are receiving through the only medium you have to receive—that’s your body, your voice, and your mind. But once you are in a state of concentration, you go into the mode of grace.
VH: Would you say that’s the shift between samatha and vipassana?
HS: Uhh, that’s the edge between samatha and vipassana. The grace is the edge. You have less samatha, but it’s not yet vipassana. There is a mid-period between the two. So first you have—we talk about three powers: the virtue of my own effort, the grace of the Buddha’s, and the power of the universe or reality. The power of reality is the vipassana mode. Reality itself.
DI: Yeah. Obviously.
HS: So first you put in the effort to develop the concentration, which is the unity of the three. Then you go into the receptive mode. You let go of the effort. Of course you continue, but you let go of the idea of the meditator. You allow the grace—
DI: You allow the field to do what it does.
HS: —And then the third dimension comes into being. And that’s the reality itself starts to show up.
DI: Right.
HS: As you fuse the effort and receptivity—
DI: Ahhh, there you go. Now those are becoming two of the same things, so that once subject is becoming part of the field—
HS: First you push, then you come back by receiving, and then you fuse those two.
DI: That’s very good.
HS: And then you stop. Sort of. And that’s when the thing becomes clear. That’s when what was the background becomes the foreground.
DI: Sure.
HS: What is always the background of whatever happens in your personal experience suddenly becomes the foreground of your experience.
DI: Yeah.
KF: Okay. By background, this is the knowing mind?
HS: Actually, I’ve never said this before, I realize now.
KF: So background is the aspect of knowing?
HS: Yeah. Yeah. We would define it as gñāna which in Pali is ñana. Yeah. We would define it as wisdom, as primordial wisdom.
KF: It sounds like what I call the No Dog.
HS: Yeah?
KF: Yeah. Which I also think of as the trans-jhanic state. So if you put that in the foreground, and knowing knows itself—so one good thing to say about this is “it knows itself”, it’s not Hokai that knows it—
HS: No.
KF: —But something else could be going on in the background—
HS: Because Hokai is known through that, simultaneously.
KF: —And this knowing has no stake in what happens or does not happen to Hokai. Hokai could live or die, but this knowing has no stake in that.
HS: Exactly.
KF: And that’s the No Dog. It has no dog in this fight.
HS: Yeah.
DI: That’s interesting.
KF: And at that point — so this is now the foreground. So what’s going on in the background is whatever is going on. In other words, at that point, you might choose to notice the conversation going around you, or you might choose to notice what’s naturally, what your body and mind are naturally doing in the background.
HS: Yeah, but in the context of Shingon practice, a setting is provided—
KF: Yes.
HS: —as the foreground.
DI: A specific setting.
HS: A very specific setting which is intentionally constructed in a way to provide the vehicle for the No Dog.
DI: And almost a pre-programming, it sounds like.
HS: Sort of.
DI: Because there is pre-programming.
HS: It’s structured in such a way to provide a ready-made situation which enables you to bring the background again into the foreground and to merge the two.
DI: Yeah. So that’s when it’s trying to sync. Now, do they ever talk about three characteristics, or it’s just a practice, and you never emphasize impermanence, or no-self, or—
HS: Three characteristics are presented in Japanese as netsu which means fire.
DI: Huh.
HS: Like the experience of … I think the Indians say tapas?
DI: Mm hm. Heat.
HS: Heat. So three characteristics are presented in the context of heat.
DI: Like energy.
HS: No, like intensity.
DI: Oh.
HS: Like when practice generates intensity, that’s when the three characteristics show up. Naturally. They become self-apparent in a way. The obstacles drop. That’s the measure of heat.
VH: Which seems to line up with how being in the three characteristics actually feels, heat being—
HS: Like burning away.
VH: I mean, that’s more of the ñana, the third and fourth—
TG: That’s the definition of jhana. Not just absorption but also burning. Burning away. It comes from India. Where he’s talking about vipassana jhana here.
HS: Like burning the defilements?
TG: Burning the hindrances.
HS: Burning the hindrances. Yeah.
TG: The “hindrances”, in quotation marks, gone. Perception of three characteristics, right there.
HS: Clear.
TG: Of its own accord.
HS: Of its own accord.
VH: I’m just gonna say, in the Shambala practice, which is the Trongyam Trungpa thing, they had a really weird vipassana practice. You just kind of contemplate, you just say to yourself after each samatha, “impermanence”. And that’s pretty much it. You don’t really do anything. It’s not an active thing. You kind of just drop in a thought about impermanence.
DI: Maybe they do some serious samatha. If you’re got your samatha stuff really together—
HS: Just a gentle push in this direction—
DI: And if you can really get the right direction and let go of the samatha. Because the problem is, you can be in the trap, because the samatha is so nice, the spaciousness of mind is so good, or the bliss or the quietness or the whatever cool jhanic quality you’ve just contemplated is so good, that you get people stuck there and they won’t let go of it. But if you could somehow convince these people with the very concentrated mind to just let the thing ring or let go of it and turn toward wisdom or whatever, I mean, that is traditional instructions. It’s not like that can’t be powerful. You know, because if you really get your 4th jhana trip together, you can go where you want. Know what I mean? The mind will go where you want it to go if you really want to go there. It is wieldy and made malleable. The vipassana people always think of that as the high stakes way to play the game. You’re building up something that’s very impressive but very hard to let go of. Know what I mean? So vipassana always looks at the way more samatha-y traditions and goes [sharp air intake] yeah but. And then the down side of that is friggin’ busting it out in harsh vibrations and just hard technique without all the props and comfort and early perks of samatha is HARD. So in terms of a more dry technique—
KF: Dry technique meaning…?
DI: Like straight noting practice, straight three characteristics. Or even if you get into real heavy sort of what I might call jhanic states but they’re vipassana so they’re really edgy and vibratory usually until you get to 4th. Because 3rd is so hard, and 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 are so hard…
KF: Okay. So “dry” because you don’t have the juice, you don’t have the lubrication of—
DI: — the sweet stuff—
KF: —the lubrication of the concentrated state which frankly makes it much more pleasant.
DI: Well even if you’re concentrated, I mean, you can be concentrated on harsh vibrations with astounding precision and yet still have it suck. You know what I mean? Because even though it’s ridiculously concentrated [makes vibration sounds].
KF: Khanika-samadhi. Momentary concentration.
HS: Yeah.
DI: Right.
KF: Okay, so, khanika-samadhi is to be concentrated on those changing phenomena. For example, you could be concentrating on a vibration—
DI: Right.
KF: —as it changes, and you can be very one-pointed on that, but this is not samatha. So you’re not getting the benefit of the juice.
DI: Right.
KF: So it’s interesting that, as you say, high-stakes practice is using jhana as a vehicle and then first accessing via the samatha technique and then seeing through it via the vipassana technique — you could as easily say that the dry technique is a high-stakes practice.
DI: Because people run. Because it’s too hard, too easy, too disconcerting. Yeah. That’s the paradox. And there’s always this debate. The Theravada world is constantly debating this. If you see the Sri Lankans versus the Burmese, the Sri Lankans are all about jhana first: mastering the jhanas and then going on to vipassana. And then, you know, you end up with all these people who are really good jhana masters, and they just kinda space out, or they just cultivate colors, and they can’t let go of it, or they do, whatever, but they’ve got impressive jhana skills, but they can’t land insight, because they’re too attached to that. It’s too nice, it’s too cool, it’s too fun. They can’t shake, because then that violates or disrupts or does something to their nice jhana trip.
KF: We keep returning to this thing that there are two things necessary: you have to access the stratum of mind—
HS: Okay.
KF: —or the frequency—
HS: Okay.
KF: —and you have to penetrate it.
HS: Right.
KF: If either of those things isn’t present, then no progress is made on the vertical axis of this linear model we’re looking to make progress through insight levels. Both of these things have to be present. You can err in either direction. You can do vipassana very well, but if you don’t access the strata of mind, it does you no good. You make no progress.
DI: You get edgy.
KF: And, you can access the strata of mind, but if you don’t penetrate them, nothing happens. These things have to be in balance.
DI: So you’re essentially going samatha first from the Theravada model point of view. It’s essentially something like samatha first and then allowing that to ring to see the true nature of that state without the holding tight to the objects. Something like that. Is that about… no … is that fair?
HS: Yeah. Though it’s never—
DI: It’s not presented that way.
HS: —It’s never presented apart.
KF: The technique you’re doing, Hokai, the Shingon technique ensures the object will be penetrated. Is that correct?
HS: Yes.
KF: Aha. Just make it clear: what aspect of this practice ensures that this penetration of the object occurs?
HS: This is a tricky question.
DI: It’s a great question.
HS: Not a trick question, a tricky question, because you have to be careful. Once you set the proper conditions for realizing a certain concentrative state, which is defined as bringing the three together as one—
DI: —which I would term 4th jhana—
HS: —Right. Once that happens, you are invited to … so, you are one with that state then. That’s the definition of a jhanic state. You are not observing it.
KF: Good.
HS: You are it.
KF: This is samatha. Okay.
HS: That’s the distinction. You are it. You are then encouraged to be observed in that state. It is not said by what. That’s the grace moment. You invite another observing point there.
DI: Mmm. That’s heavy.
HS: You invite another observing point. The way this is done, specifically, is a devotional shift. Not devotional in an emotional sense, but devotional in a perspectival sense. Once you feel you are completely aligned … and how do you know you’re aligned? There is no comment to what you are doing. Because you either comment your speech with your body, or you comment your body and your speech with your mind, or you comment your mind and your body with your speech. Right? That’s what we do anyway. So, once there’s no comment, and the three things are going on, and there’s no commenting between them, they are aligned, then you are encouraged or reminded specifically, because if you follow certain Saddana texts, you come to a point where the text reminds you to include a vaster observer—
DI: Nice.
HS: —on the achieved state.
DI: That’s good.
HS: So that ensures somehow letting go of the state with which you are one while remaining immersed in it, continuing this alignment, maintaining the alignment, but inviting a vaster observer to observe the prevailing state. So that would be a shift from samatha, but not yet vipassana. And then—
DI: Yeah, that’s almost like adding formless realms or something. Infinite consciousness.
HS: And then you are invited to give up the distinction between the state which you are and the observer observing it … And that would be vipassana.
DI: Yeah.
HS: Because you are neither the state nor the separate observer remaining which can observe the state. And that would be penetrating the state.
KF: And can you give an example of what the object looks like at that point? In other words, is the object, does it appear solid, or is it a vibratory phenomenon at that point?
DI: Or 3-D luminous, or all-encompassing, or…
HS: The total object, or the field of experience, reveals three features or three characteristics. These three characteristics are: one, the object is spacious, meaning unimpeding—
KF: Unimpeded?
HS: —Not unimpeded, unimpeding. Anything arising does not impede or impose on anything else arising. So everything is spacious. The second characteristic coincides with luminous, because everything is aware.
DI: 4th jhana.
HS: Where it is. Everything is aware. And the third characteristic is, there are waves between these first two. There are waves between spaciousness of everything arising and awareness of everything arising.
DI: That’s beautiful.
KF: And these waves are perceived as waves?
HS: These waves are perceived as resonance between space and awareness.
DI: Which I would call “formations”. That would be my technical word for that level of seeing things.
HS: The total perception of these three would be that space, which is often equated with emptiness, and awareness, which is often equated with wisdom recognizing emptiness, are not fixed. This is going beyond emptiness first and then going beyond perception of emptiness. That’s why you have to perceive the wave-like nature of both.
KF: And is this related to the traditional teaching of impermanence?
HS: Yes. It is the more profound meaning of impermanence.
DI: It’s the 4th jhana meaning. Because at that point, it’s the same thing when I was talking about feeling the vibrations of this, this, and that as the sort of awareness and form trying to synchronize, and feeling those waves, you know, coming through. It’s very heavy no-self characteristic and impermanence characteristic. It doesn’t have suffering in there, but in the 4th jhana, that high level, if you’ve really got that strong, there’s really not that much suffering, so that might always be like … it would almost be a little trickier. So it’s really got the two characteristics—
HS: —On a barely, on a religious level, a person would sit down and go through the motions of the ritual and repeat to himself, I am doing these things with a sense of gratitude, with a sense of devotion, with a sense of determination, and the Buddhas are witnessing my sincere effort, and the grace of their kind gaze shines upon my feeble attempts—
HS: —to realize awareness. Therefore, having done that, and having been seen doing that, reality dawns upon me. Everything IS just as it is. Something like that would be pronounced.
DI: That’s nice.
HS: Again and again and again. As I said, encouraging you to first put the effort, bring your actions together, enter a state of stable concentration, renounce remaining in that state, and allowing that state to be observed from an unfirm vantage point, slightly expanding. Is that the movement? I think that’s how it feels. Slightly expanding from the state. And then letting the expansion and the previous state simply drop. Stopping it. You would call it penetrating the state. Stopping the conservationist movement of maintaining the state, and yet not destroying it, not messing it up.
KF: But you’re seeing through the apparent solidity of it.
HS: Yes, yes. Renouncing the solidity.
VH: I have a question.
HS: Please.
VH: I’m wondering how this relates to what you were describing—
TG: Is this the entrance, then, to fruition?
HS: Well, that’s it!
DI: If you could do that that way, you would be teetering on the brink of stream-entry. [all talking at once] It’s really high equanimity by the time he’s talking about that kind of stuff.
VH: So given that, my question is, in that practice, they’re going straight there in the jhanic sense, and then they’re switching to vipassana and bypassing the more vibratory qualities of the earlier jhanas by having gone through them in a samatha way.
KF: What you’re describing, as I understand it—
HS: You are doing it with whatever jhanic degree you have. You are not—
VH: So you don’t just keep doing the samatha until it’s—
HS: No, no.
VH: Every time you sit, you go through those phases.
HS: For someone, a weak jhanic state will probably be sufficient. For someone else, a stronger, harder jhanic state will be necessary.
KF: So what he’s describing is the integrated package of both accessing and penetrating the object at any stratum of mind, and as he does that, the meditator will continue to progress through the strata of mind until they’re all penetrated. And it’s important to note that this is a finite process. It’s not infinite regress. There are a finite number of strata of mind. When they’re all accessed and all penetrated, this physio-energetic process as I think of it has been completed. It creates a circuit. It closes a circuit. And when a circuit is closed, it can’t be any more closed than closed. That part of your development is done. So the development up the vertical access, up through the ñanas, has been completed. Now, there is an infinite amount of development yet to be done on the horizontal access. Which is to say that—
HS: —Mastering, mastering—
KF: —that any stratum of mind, there is infinite possibility of exploration and mastery. So to say that someone has completed the physio-energetic process isn’t to say that they are perfected human beings or that they’re done. It’s to say they have a very good platform to continue their further work.
DI: Which is interesting, and it almost makes me wonder if you couldn’t have something sort of in between, like what I may call a more top-down or start-to-finish in one sit hinted-at vipassana approach. Or a jhana approach, even if they couldn’t do it. Let’s say you have them focus their attention and notice in a narrow way and then notice that and then notice thoughts being thoughts and then notice — and then just tune into those aspects of mind, even if they sucked at it, and then notice 3rd jhana aspects, things around them, you know what I mean, and build it up, and have them do that every sit, and then notice 4th jhana, and then have them tune into boundless space, even if they couldn’t do it, and then boundless consciousness, or whatever, notice those flux, and then notice mind vanish and then reappear, even in a ritualized way, even if they couldn’t do the thing. It almost makes me want to try. It would be interesting to try a top-down, like, start to finish in one sit, even if you can’t do it, vipassana for jhana 16 ñana kind of way of looking at it which would be kind of the same thing where you would have them pay attention to each of those aspects you know from that model point of view during every hour sit or every time you did it. It sounds like you do, where you have them start out, begin, and assume they were already there at the high level powering and you’re invited too at the end of the — you know what I mean? It’s a completely different way of looking at the thing that I never even thought of, because we mucked it out and the natural progression happens and you rise and the natural way it’s not like you’re even asked to attempt to look at things from a 4th jhana 11th ñana high equanimity point of view until you’re there. You know we deal with each stage and this is how to get to the next one kind of. You know what I mean? As you go, it’s very… You know what I mean?
KF: Theoretically what you say makes sense, but it sounds like in practice, it still takes years to achieve that level of mastery. You can imagine the highest level all you want to, and 20 years later you will probably actually manifest the highest level.
HS: Well traditionally it was conceived that it should be done in 100 days.
DI :That’s about right.
HS: Once one has laid out the basic groundwork, one has learned the techniques, one has acquired the necessary conceptual knowledges, one has acquired a view: intense work is ideally done in 100 days.
DI: How many hours a day, under what kind of conditions?
HS: From 10-16 hours/day.
DI: That’s about right.
HS: In complete isolation.
DI: Oh, interesting. Now do you meet with a teacher at all, or are you just doing it?
HS: You’re just doing it. Everything you need to know has been done, and the teacher is the textbook itself.
DI: Oh, so there’s a manual.
HS: There is a ritual manual. You keep referring to it. And the wording is really, really pointed.
DI: Nice. So it’s well worked out.
KF: How much time would you be expected to spend laying the groundwork?
HS: Several years, at least.
DI: Several years of an hour a day or something?
HS: Yeah. Five or six years if you’re talented, probably ten years if you’re thick.
DI: Huh.
KF: Which would be considered very fast from a vipassana point of view or a samatha point of view. So if somebody could go 10 years, start to finish, that would be exceptionally fast in our tradition, in the Burmese-Mahasi tradition.
DI: Are you talking stream-entry or—
KF: I’m talking arhatship.
DI: To arhatship, that’s cookin’. Yeah.
HS: I’m talking about an ideal scenario which obviously doesn’t work most of the time because of a variety of reasons.
DI: Life.
HS: Life and religion. Religion being the main obstacle.
DI: Even in Shingon you mean the religion.
HS: The Ferrari and the Armani approach to everything. The silk and the brocade.
DI: The scene.
VH: Kind of similar, I heard one of the Zen teachers I was taking a class with in Naropa say something like, to get, it should take 4-5 years of intensive practice to get kensho-satori stream-entry. And then maybe 10 years after that to finish it up. And I thought that was interesting.
HS: It’s a similar time-frame. Well basically it’s doable.
DI and KF: Yeah.
HS: The idea remains, it’s doable.
KF: That’s really important. And really that’s what we’re trying to do here and normalize this, and say this isn’t some crazy—
HS: It’s not a myth.
KF: And it’s not a particularly big deal. It’s something doable for very ordinary people who are interested and willing to apply themselves. And maybe the reason it doesn’t happen more often is because practitioners don’t have access to someone who will look them in the eye and say, this is possible, and I know that in my own experience. Because to have someone who will look you in the eye and say that is so powerful and so empowering.
HS: Yeah. That’s the shattering thing. That’s the break in the shell of the egg. Someone has to come from the outside, right? You know the thing with the eggs, when the little chicks, the first one that gets out, the strongest one goes breaking the other eggs, because the other ones are not strong enough to break. But once the egg is broken from the outside, the weak chicks can come out.
DI: Yeah. Like I remember, I was on the road with Ken, he was this, you know, rocker dude, you know, who lived in my house with me, and was smart and a good guy and all these things, but not some unusual, immortal superstar, you know. And when he did it, I was like, oh. “Kenneth.” I apologize. My error. And when he had done this, it was like, god, like, he’s smart, but he’s not, like, an immortal being. It was profound.
VH: He wasn’t yet.
DI: He wasn’t yet! That’s funny. But what’s weird is, you know, like, what’s sort of strange, though, is like, because that’s better than when I think, like, when you meet someone who’s already done it, and you meet them in the context of having already done it, it makes it weird. You know what I mean? It’s hard to think of them as a normal person. Whereas I met you when you were just some hairsprayed rocker dude, you know, and it was a little, like, you know, who was living in my house at my same level essentially, so that was really normalized.
KF: It’s really hard to project a lot of nonsense or hero-worship on to somebody you—
DI: You’ve been on the road with.
KF: Just another guy.
DI: Yeah.
KF: And that works both ways. It’s really hard not to project your mythical nonsense on someone that was introduced as—
HS: Who has it already done.
KF: Yes.
DI: That’s a real problem.
KF: Whatever. Grand High Mucky Muck.
DI: Right. You know what I mean? Yeah, it’s true.
VH: It makes sense. It wasn’t so true for me when I picked up Daniel’s work, because he was so clearly advertising that he was a Mucky Muck. You were like, “I am a Mucky Muck!”
DI: Yeah.
VH: “And I just happened to figure this stuff out.”
DI: Actually, I just happened to follow instructions. I mean, I did what nobody else did. Like, why is it that all these psychologized, adult children at IMS — you know, which is what they are — you know, these highly regressed, whiny, sad, pathetic, scared, you know, creepy little people — why the hell have they not done it? They just didn’t bother to follow the friggin’ instructions. You know, for an hour they didn’t, much less a day or two or a week or two. You know what I mean? It’s true. You know, I remember when I was at MBMC, you know, the instructions were noting. You know, they were very simple. They said, you know, you note it like this, and you do that. And I remember, yeah, I was noting it, but I was thinking, and I was philosophizing, I was being a typical intellectual, psychologized Westerner. And then I remember I was sitting outside the room, and these little Malaysian peasants, who had gotten there about the same time I did, you know, she couldn’t have been more than 20, a little simple peasant who was describing her meditation practice or whatever and I was like, wait a second, she is clearly—
HS: Noting it.
DI: She is seeing stuff I clearly am not. And the teacher was like, “That woman! She sees cause and effect! ‘Cause she is noting!”
HS: She’s not just noting; she’s noticing!
DI: Yeah. She’s noticing, yeah, right, exactly. And I had been LAPPED! You know, nothing like that to rattle some arrogant, competitive urge. She’s following instructions, so maybe I should follow instructions. God, it’s so crazy, it just might work. You know, it was really profound to have this little experience. To have it normalized. You know, wait, she’s actually seeing stages. I mean, she’s actually achieving something.
KF: So the people on these retreats actually aren’t doing the insight practice. They’re not succeeding to the extent that they’re not doing the practice. I want to tell a Daniel story.
HS: It’s not that they’re doing it and it’s not working. They’re not doing it.
DI: Right.
HS: It’s not that they’re not doing it properly. They’re not doing it.
DI: Yeah.
KF: One of my favorite stories that Daniel tells is, he was on retreat, and they were having their group interview, and people were doing … the Western practitioners were doing what they often do, which is talk about their job and their boyfriend and their girlfriend—
DI: And their back pain.
KF: —Everything other than the phenomena they’re ostensibly there to observe. So this goes on for some time, and Daniel shouts out, “THE BREATH?? DID ANYONE NOTICE THE BREATH??”
Unknown: In your interview?
DI: Yeah.
KF: And of course they all looked around, and there’s a little bit of a moment of recognition, and then they immediately went back to talking about—
DI: Yeah.
KF: —boyfriend and their back pain.
DI: It’s exasperating.
HS: Now remind us what Mullah said.
KF: This is a Mullah Nasreddin story, the famous Sufi wiseman-fool teaching figure. The Mullah goes to the marketplace one morning, and he says to the crowd assembled there, “Do you know what I’ve come here to tell you?” And they say, “No.” And he says, “Well, there’s no point in my telling you that,” and he goes home. The next day he comes back, and he says, “Do you know what I’ve come here to tell you?” and they think, well, yesterday we said no, but we really want to hear what he has to say, so we’ll tell him something else, and they said, “Yes.” And he says, “Well if you know, there’s no point in my telling you!”, and he went home. Third day he came back, and he said, “Do you know what I’ve come here to tell you?” and some of them were very clever and they said, “Half of us know, and half of us don’t know.” And the Mullah said, “Let those of you who know tell those of you who do not know.” And he went home.
VH: But you know, it’s interesting…
HS: This is great.
VH: There is the Western, psychologized person. There’s a strand in Western culture of scientists and science, and they definitely know how to follow instructions.
DI: Until they go on retreat! I saw people with PhD’s. And these people know how to hoop-jump with the best of them. I mean, if you have a fucking PhD … you know what I mean?
VH: Except recently I talked to Joseph Goldstein, and I asked about this scientist retreat, and he said something interesting. He said, it was really weird, these scientists, because I gave them the instructions, and then they actually went and did it.
DI: It was so strange! It had been 20 years, and no one had done it before! That’s the creepiest thing! Mind-boggling! If you’ve ever been to IMS — and I don’t mean to rag on the place, I got a lot out of sitting at IMS — but, I mean, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
VH: And some people go and do the practice, and it’s clear. A lot of others don’t.
DI: It’s 3-5 out of 100.
VH: Unless it’s a longer retreat, like the three-month retreat.
DI: Yeah, the three month, you’ve got more, yeah, obviously. But even there, you’re talking about a 100 day retreat, right? In the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition, where we come from, they assume, in a three-month retreat, in Burma, about 50% stream-enterers.
HS: Yeah. That’s the recipe. That’s 100 days.
DI: Yeah. 50% will get it. Which is, you know…
HS: You should get fruition in those 100 days.
DI: Yeah. And at IMS, they assume maybe, barely 10% if they’re lucky. Which is way better than it was when they were doing some other things. But anyway.
KF: And when you say stream-entry, is that talking about enlightenment? What does that mean?
DI: Yeah. So when I say “stream-entry”, meaning first stage of enlightenment, at least. Having cracked the thing, having entered the thing.
KF: The first of how many stages?
DI: Well, it depends on how you want to count them.
KF: In the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition.
DI: It would be four and then Buddhahood if you want, but they don’t assume that, so four.
HS: Stream-entry guarantees that the person knows the difference between doing it and getting it done.
DI: Yes.
VH: Going back to the original question.
HS: From that point on…
DI: Yeah. From that point on, they sort of know, and they sort of don’t. Because there are still a few big shifts. I mean, stream-entry is good, because now people cycle. Progress will continue now in a way it did not before. They are in the stream of the thing, and if they wish to continue — and perhaps even if they don’t — cycles and new insights will show up for them, even if they don’t even practice. They can walk away from the thing, but something is going to keep happening. Because they’ve thrown the ON switch. Now they’re on the conveyor belt. The conveyor belt may move at different speeds or whatever, but they are on the ride. You know what I mean? They’re in. They’ve started the engine in a way that it was not before. But there are still a few big shifts that they may not necessarily understand well. So the next big shift is how to leave the familiar territory of the strata or layers of mind they’ve understood the true nature of and get to the next stratum of mind which we’d call getting to second path, which is essentially learning to do a new cycle. And then the next hurdle, which may not be particularly obvious necessarily — I mean, the big shift is really to third path. I mean, that’s a big shift, because to Anagami, from a vipassana/Theravada point of view — because by that point, particularly if you know the maps and models, then you know your cycles, you know your pattern you go through, you know fruition, you know all these things, but still applying it — something they obviously emphasize more in Shingon it sounds like, when you describe that this is, you know, universe nature or this is just it, or this is luminous and aware, self-aware, or sensations-where-they-are-ness, which is the big shift at Anagami, which is different even from walking around understanding really pragmatically as somebody who’s first or second path. They don’t really see that much really when they’re walking around in that same way, and they may not know that that’s the next thing to look for, the broad, inclusive even I’d call it mind evenness though it’s not evenness but you know what I’m talking about.
KF: Question: So third path is a completely different animal than either first or second path.
DI: In a number of ways it is. I mean, yes, more cycles will sort of get you there, but in terms of really understanding it, it is really worth having a more Dzogchen-like — I mean, one of the flaws of Theravada is that it doesn’t really give a Dzogchen-like point of view and emphasis like it should. Because they sort of assume the same instructions will get you all the way, which they kind of will, but it’s not quite the same.
HS: So are you saying that each path has its own logic of answering the question, “What does getting it done mean?”
DI: Yes, it does, definitely. Yes. They are different. So for a stream-enterer, doing it—
HS: It’s like a dialectic.
DI: —Yes. It is. It’s very much. But for a stream-enterer, the focus of their practice, generally, at least in Theravada, is fruitions, completed/getting through cycles, getting through the Reobservation or Dark Night part of a cycle with relative ease, getting their hit, coming out, maybe mastering some formless jhanas, doing some samatha practice or something. You know, that’s the life of a stream-enterer. It’s pretty linear/circular in a pretty defined circle. It’s pretty straightforward. Whereas second path, there’s all these sort of fractals, and there’s complexity, and they’re kind of in their old territory versus new territory, there’s levels of mind showing up that they don’t understand that well, they may cross an extra Arising & Passing Away, and they can’t get a fruition, they feel confused and out of place, am I enlightened, I don’t know what I’m doing, or how do I get back, or how do I go forward. So it’s not like they can’t have difficulties. So but getting it done for them is getting the next path, going through the cycle again, learning how to get a fruition. Whereas for an Anagami, getting it done is beginning to see this is it in real time. You know, the sensations of this hand are just the sensations of this hand, and the cycles in terms of getting a fruition or thinking of the cycles as something that will get it done begins to fade. That it’s about the cycles or completing more cycles or somehow that begins to fade and they realize more and more, no, I have to see it here, I have to see it now. This space, this mind in all circumstances, in all phases of the practice, has to be it, or else what have I got? What the hell good is that? Second path starts to look not that great from the point of view of, wait a second, walking around, I better, my baseline, you know, regardless of what’s happening, better be at the level of where I think my understanding should be. You know what I mean? Like, often it isn’t for some people at second path. And realizing that this is it, sort of inhabiting this reality-ness, in a broad, more inclusive way, is obviously, that’s what Getting It Done or doing it is more like. And then, yeah...
KF: So let’s look at this difference between the first two paths and third path in the mechanical way. What are the mechanics of it? We talked about moving through these nexes of energy. This is the chakra model. In the first two paths, this is a very linear process. You could say you’re moving upward through the chakras, if you’re looking at your own body. You’re accessing and penetrating these chakras.
HS: Pushing through.
KF: Yes. And all of the sub-chakras that are involved here. At third path, something fundamentally different has to happen. Now, the third eye chakra - from the level of the third eye chakra - the entire package of nexes of energy that have been penetrated so far, must be integrated from that level. So it’s a very big job. Every nexus of energy has to tie to every other nexus of energy. This has to happen yet again in order to complete the circuit at the 4th path level. All of those nexes of energy have to be integrated from the level of the crown chakra. At that point, the energy flows freely through the body, comes out the top of the head, curves back around, comes to rest at the heart chakra.
HS: At the heart center.
KF: Yes, at the heart center. Completing the circuit permanently. And that’s what’s calling the Arhat. So contrary to myth, Arhat is not a perfect person, a sanitized being who will never have a negative emotion. It’s someone who has simply completed that circuit. The behavioral implications of that … are a question that would deserve another one of these sessions. But generally speaking, whatever we heard would happen is wrong. Who knows what would happen? The fundamental characteristic, I would say, of the Arhat: he knows he’s done. He’s off this ride, this pull that has been torturing this person for, lo, these many years goes away. This is why, traditionally speaking, the Arhats walk up to the Buddha on the day of their enlightenment, and they say, “Done is what needed to be done.”
HS: The search is over.
KF: The search is over! There’s no more becoming in this or any future life. Because that’s what it feels like! You know you’re off of that ride, and what a relief.
DI: Yeah. I mean, from a sort of cynical point of view, I talk about this as Insight Disease. You catch Insight Disease essentially when you cross the Arising & Passing Away. I mean, that’s when you’re really inoculated with the virus. You know what I mean? And when you get stream-entry, you’re really screwed. Know what I mean? The only thing that cures that and really cures that in that particular way and that particular disease is doing THAT. So from the end point of view, getting Arhatship or Siddha or whatever — THAT is what cures the Insight Disease that started all those many years ago when some poor sonuvabitch crossed the Arising & Passing Away. You know, second vipassana jhana, the point of no return.
HS: Not knowing what he’s getting into.
DI: Exactly. This poor idiot. This poor, unsuspecting...
HS: Moron.
DI: Yeah, moron.
KF: And it’s such a joke, because he doesn’t know what he wants. He thinks that he wants to become a sanitized being, but what he really wants and what he’s really going to find out—
HS: It’s what he’s after.
KF: —What he really is going to find out on the day that he finds it out is that what he wanted was to be done with it.
DI: Yeah.
KF: He wanted to be rid of Insight Disease.
DI: Yeah.
KF: And that can happen. And that is a very realistic goal.
HS: Amen. Yeah.
DI: Yeah. So doing it and getting it done, from that point of view, is finally seeing through the last knot of perception. The last subtle distortion of dualistic misinterpretation or missynchronization of thought processes. I mean, I really think of it like a missynchronization. It’s almost like something is out of phase in a habitual way. It just keeps it slightly out of the purview of comprehending awareness. Like, it’s like a phase issue.
HS: One half of experience keeps self-referencing.
DI: Yes. Yeah. But it’s shifting. I mean, the problem is, it’s so unbelievably malleable. It can shift to an astounding range of patterns. But yeah, it’s almost like there’s a missynchronization of the thing. Something is running slightly out of phase in a slightly jarring way that yet is very compelling until you finally are able to just see things in a complete and penetrating way.
VH: So just to bring up a question around that, which is that you were talking about the Anagami at third path needing to see that they’re not gonna find this in the cycles.
DI: Which is not entirely true. Because it’s not like more cycles don’t help. Somehow they do. Going up and down those cycles do do something. But in the end, they do actually become tired of that. Because those don’t stop doing for them what they did before and become so frustrating at least from the, you know, it’s sort of a Theravada insight of, I don’t know if the Shingon people quite experience it, but to have cycled so many times and yet still feel as though there’s something to do, to have gone up and down those territories so many times and go, what the frak, why in the world do I—
VH: What the fractal?
DI: What the fractal, exactly. Seriously, it’s like that. And, you know, so that last thing, to finally go, no, I need something that is not bound up in these cycles. I need something that is not bound up in anything. I need something that is as fundamental, the simplest thing as you call it, and yet, you know, the most fundamental thing, I have to be able to understand that in a way that is there regardless of essentially what’s happening. It’s something that was always true. If you see what I mean.
KF: So at that point—
DI: That’s getting it done. From that level.
KF: So at the point of Anagami or third path, it’s possible to be the eye of the hurricane, where all of this tail-chasing nonsense is going on around. That isn’t you. All of these cycles that are going on around are not you. That’s the hurricane. And somehow there’s this perspective from the eye.
VH: And what’s striking me now, perhaps because I have to deal with this territory—
DI: Right.
VH: I can’t help but think of it in terms of cycles. Maybe it’s my geeky nature. Maybe, as you’ve pointed out, it’s part of the, it’s basically—
DI: That’s part of the phase. So that second to third path transition territory, and even somewhat at, particularly early-to-mid-third path, it is really hard to not think in terms of cycles, because that’s what worked before.
KF: That’s your reality.
DI: That’s also your reality, and that’s where you are. And that’s what worked. It worked before, so why won’t it work some more? It’s not like it’s that hard to cycle. You know how to cycle. That’s comfortable. You can figure out how to shift from old territory to new territory. You can do all that. So that’s what you know. And that’s what’s worked. So it only makes sense from that point of view to keep doing it and continue to do it more.
VH: Yes. And I can’t help but notice that the description of the first cycle and the experience of the first cycle seems to hint at — it’s like a microscopic description of the whole path.
DI: Yes.
VH: And somehow there’s something profound in that, in that the same lessons get learned again at larger levels.
DI: Yes. And wider and wider.
KF: But it’s not an exact match, and it would be misleading to think too much about that.
DI: That’s true.
KF: That pattern is apparent. But I don’t know what the implications are. I wouldn’t...
VH: I guess for me the implication right now is that, because I’ve seen and gone through these patterns on so many levels, I can trust if the larger thing is an impersonal pattern, that I can trust the process. I guess that’s kind of the significance I put in. This process is trustworthy, and I can give myself to it, and it will take care of itself.
KF: You’re on to it. Because in the third path, what is necessary is to let it happen. It’s not so much about doing it as it is about allowing it in the third jhana and the third path.
DI: Because there’s this weird connection between the jhanas and the paths. There’s no question. Because you could only be the eye of the hurricane if there was a hurricane. And that’s the third jhana problem.
KF: The third vipassana jhana.
DI: Third vipassana jhana or the dark night stage. Where there’s this chaotic stuff around, the periphery, you know, which is the width, it’s similar to the, you’ve got the periphery, which is what’s so interesting about third path. You’ve sort of got the periphery, but it hasn’t hit all the way through to the center yet.
KF: You’re a donut.
DI: Yeah, you’re a donut.
VH: Yeah, and here’s the question, because in the third vipassana jhana, it’s like, you have to kind of intentionally expand the tension and try to hold the complexity of it, and I feel that way with perceiving emptiness. It’s kind of a similar thing. It takes attention to try to tune in to this quality of reality.
DI: Right.
VH: And that’s why it feels funky. Because it’s like, why does it take attention to see this? And am I, like, somehow, am I attention?
DI: Right.
VH: Like, what’s happening such that, like, this field of attention narrows and expands, and who’s doing that, and why does it feel like something has to happen before I can see this?
DI: Except what’s interesting is that the more the center point patterns, the subject patterns, which are not subject patterns but seem to be subject patterns, that are through the core, through the back of your head, through the side of your neck, through your eye sensations, through the sensations of intention, through the memories, through consciousness echoes, the little mental impressions of things — the more these central patterns get seen as they are, the more the emptiness of this is obvious. That’s the paradox. So people think, oh, I’ll look at this, and I’ll see emptiness. It’s not that that’s wrong, but emptiness becomes more obvious the more—
VH: So you’re saying the head is more like the center of the donut?
DI: Right. The head is the center of the donut, and you have to see through the center. You have to see all the sensations in the center the same way you see the periphery. And so that’s the trick. Because the central pattern, these core patterns — expectation, anticipation, mapping, wondering, doubting, fearing, gaming the system, all the stuff that was a hard thing to crack in High Equanimity, you know, to get from High Equanimity to stream-entry — it’s similar to that, except it’s even slightly more … more. Still, that basic concept of seeing these central patterns through the back, through the spine, through the neck, through the head, through this, what appears to be this observing, doing, central apparatus, you know, literally you can almost take it on at that kind of cave, stupid level and get something out of it. I’m not saying it’s the whole thing, but it’s not bad advice. Because the more you see that as being empty, the more the emptiness of this is obvious, because when this happens and when that happens, and that’s seen in the same way, all of a sudden the playing field is level, and it’s not a question of empty or not empty, it’s just is-ness. Do you see what I mean?
KF: You seem to be suggesting that when you’re the donut, through an act of will, you’d be able to see the center of the donut. I don’t think that’s what you’re suggesting, and I don’t think that’s a productive approach. If you can’t see it, you can’t see it. So straining to find it isn’t going to accomplish anything. Trusting in the process, on the other hand, is going to be the whole game. You have a tremendous amount of momentum, and it could be argued that all that’s needed at that point is to concentrate. Because you’re essentially a master of vipassana if you’ve gotten that far. You’re going to do vipassana at whatever level of mind you can access. Since we know there are two things necessary — we have to access the stratum of mind, and you have to penetrate it — if you’re not penetrating it at that high level, you’re probably not accessing it. So you could make the argument that what you really need to do is to concentrate your behind off. You might want to concentrate on samatha practice, kasina practice where you stare at a disc and become very concentrated and trust that you will penetrate that object. I don’t know this, because we don’t have a large enough sample size. We don’t have the data. But it’s not credible to me that a person working toward third path could get lost in jhana. I can’t believe that you could access jhana without penetrating it.
VH: Third path or fourth path?
KF: Working toward third path. Either way.
TG: Is there a topic here? I walked in in the middle of this. Is there a … topic?
HS: Yeah. We started by framing the whole thing, what could be the difference between doing it and getting it done. That was the initial ground question. Because obviously many people are doing it, but not many are getting it done, you know? So what would be the crucial point or the vital point of, which makes the distinction…
TG: I’ve got a couple points.
HS: Sincerely doing it and actually getting it done. Just to brief you: as we were going along, we found out after exploring several explanations of getting it done, there are actually four logics of answering this question, also known as four paths. And at each path is an answer to this question in a slightly different but significantly different way. And that’s where we were returning, to the third path, the Anagami, and having some specific sub-questions and going into the details.
TG: I actually want to add a couple points in there, in reverse order.
HS: Sure.
TG: The most recent one, Vince, is that, while sitting in that chair a couple hours ago, I got my first taste of intentionally entering the formless jhanas. And it was reproducible. I came out of them and did them again in order, and when I was laying in bed just now, I did them again. So yeah, Kenneth was telling me afterward about the factors of mastery of them. I haven’t quite been working on that yet. I’m just working on going in and coming out. I just want to agree with these guys over here that there’s no risk of getting lost in them.
VH: Yeah, my concern is not risk of getting lost.
DI: Kenneth, Vince and I had a conversation recently where he said, yeah, he was going to play with that on his next retreat or something.
KF: For the sake of the recording: you’re talking about doing pure samatha practice. Maybe a kasina object.
VH: Whatever object seems useful.
DI: Because you were going to talk to Jack.
VH: Yeah, I was gonna say, Jack, I want to mess around with samatha on this retreat. I think it would be useful.
HS: “I want to pump up that skill.”
VH: And he’s suggested it before.
HS: Sure. It’s a useful skill.
VH: Yeah, so, it seems valuable. I messed with samatha quite a bit prior to stream-entry, and part of the reason was because I was in the dark night, and it was so unpleasant.
KF: You wanted the juice.
VH: Yeah. And I could drop into the fourth jhana, just hang out there. And I was kinda spacing out though, tired. But it was still much more pleasant than the crazy, wacky, vibratory—
KF: But there’s nothing wrong with having a pleasant experience while you’re doing this process. There is some bizarre semblance of Protestant guilt within Burmese/Mahasi vipassana, where they seem to be encouraging us to feel guilty about having a good time while you do it. And that really has nothing to do with it. Whether you have a good time or a bad time, if you access the stratum of mind and penetrate, you’ve done the job. So you may as well have the lubrication of jhana while you’re doing it.
VH: That makes sense.
TG: Okay, so, point number two. Going in reverse order. Seeing the sensations that make up the central core processes and how you can’t really see the blind middle of the donut. Yeah. I don’t know, man. My experience—which is bare—shows me that it doesn’t really matter what I do, as long as I’m doing something. I’m gonna get from the donut to clear-all-around.
VH: Yeah. I’m talking about it … I think I’m talking about it at a different …
TG: (inaudible)
VH: Well that’s what I’m saying. They’re microcosm and macrocosm.
DI: He’s talking about Anagami and then Arhat.
VH: Yeah.
DI: It’s related to the jhanas, but there are some differences. I mean, it’s not, because, from a stream-enterer point of view, it looks very linear. It looks relatively linear. It does get more complicated. And it’s simple from a certain point of view, but it does get more complex. These fractals get vast. The subtleties and the strata of mind get subtle and complicated. It is an organic process. It does take time to unfold. And there are a lot of layers. I mean, it’s not like there aren’t a lot of layers. And so, you know, again, it’s not like there’s necessarily a perfect correlation between how to get from, you know, third vipassana jhana to fourth vipassana jhana in stream-entry terms, versus how to get to Anagami and then to Arhatship in, you know, big path terms. Because there are correlations, but it is more complicated than that when you’re going through it, because there is, again and again and again and again, lots of different things—
HS: Comparing to this level of things becoming quite complex. The founder of the Shingon school in Japan, Kukai, wrote, the world of yoga is immeasurable and vast, done with all the images, done with all achievements, let emptiness be your true home. I think that refers to the simplicity of the next stage. But how do you get there actually?
DI: You mean Arhatship.
HS: Yeah. How do you really get there? That’s not Arhatship. That’s the path of Arhatship.
DI: How do you get that’s what you’re looking for?
HS: No no. How do you get done with the vast, fractal nature of the Anagami stage.
DI: Eventually … well, I can give you some theory. Theory number one is that the fractal is not infinite.
HS: Okay.
DI: Okay, so even if you assume fractal, and you assume that it gets more complex as you get there, and there are more stages, and strata, and subtle things—
HS: But you could complexify forever.
DI: No. Okay, so the limited fractal theory says that, eventually, the fractal will end, and you will see it. Eventually the fractal ends. The process will complete itself. Which is the limited — there are only so many strata of mind you can see. There are only so many cycles you can go through, and eventually you will see the last set of patterns that are causing subject-object duality delusion that are confusing the mind in that way, that are being misinterpreted in that way. Eventually, you will see all the levels. How many cycles exactly to do that, it’s not easy to map. Because from the mapping, cyclical, progressive, you know, ñana/jhana, how many paths, how many sub-cycles, how many sub-sub-cycles — it’s a mess. So I can’t give you a number. But I can definitely say there is a limited fractal theory. It’s complicated, but it’s not infinite. So that’s the first thing. You know what I mean? There are only so many strata. If you see the strata, you will see the thing. You know what I mean? So then the next sort of core point that is more basic than the limited fractal model, which is still pretty complicated, would be, you just have to see sensate reality clearly enough, and that is just a question of seeing reality clearly enough. And that sounds stupid, but that is it. You know, and that’s sort of a basic standard which is an easy standard, because it means, if you’re not seeing reality clearly enough, then you simply know you have to see it more clearly. Because from that point of view, you have a clear standard, your task, and that actually is just a question of dedicating oneself to that task. Which is sort of, when we went back to motivation, it can be done, and then it can be done by following instructions … guidelines. The Anagami has a simple task. They simply have to see it clearly enough to get the flip. And then if they’re not seeing it clearly enough, they need to see it more completely and more conclusively and more as it actually is. But you know, it’s sort of moronically stupid, but it’s practical, because it, you know …
KF: Daniel, I’d like to tie in what you just said, the second theory, which can be seen as a method — tie that in with something Hokai said earlier. It had to do with, in my words, knowing “it knows itself”, what I call the No Dog. Consciousness takes consciousness as objects. And I think of one of the ten labors of Hercules, where he was, his task was to clean the muck from the Aegean Stables. So the horses were depositing the muck in the stables faster than he could shovel it.
HS: In enormous quantities.
DI: I’ve been corrected on this, by the way. It turns out it was cows, not horses, Someone got picky about this, by the way. But never mind.
DI: Apparently it was cows.
KF: Because cows deposit more muck—
DI: Right.
KF: —than horses. And even being Hercules, the strongest man, he couldn’t get it out fast enough. So he went about it in a different way. He diverted a stream through the stables, and the muck was continuously cleaned out, even as fast as the cows could dump it. So rather than think of this — we’ve been talking about this linear model: settin’ em up and knockin’ em down. Every single stratum and sub-stratum of mind in this very complex, linear model, had to be accessed and penetrated. There are too many. We can’t do that. So we have to divert the stream through the stable. Consciousness takes consciousness as object, and this thing takes care of it. I think you used those very words. This thing takes care of itself. And this is very explicit in what Hokai described earlier.
DI: But it’s not like the basic meditation skills of samatha and vipassana, of accessing layers and perceiving them clearly, don’t still apply. You know. They still apply. Which, if you’re not seeing it clearly enough, you just simply need to up the stakes. What’s most interesting, to me, about the notion of the dharma was that I could fearlessly pour my strength into the thing, and the worst thing that was going to happen, as long as I was looking at things as they were, or doing something very skillful — the worst thing that was going to happen was that it was gonna work. You know? What’s interesting is, I’m not quite sure, somewhere in that process between MBMC and talking to you in the desert, Kenneth, I was essentially given license to just go for it. Which is an interesting point of view. To just, like you were talking about, you have to have all your intention, Tarin. I remember, you were talking about, you have to have all your goal and intention stuff lined up on that. You know what I mean? And know that that’s okay and that’s what it takes. Know what I mean? When your goal and intention stuff lines up on that as target, that’s powerful. As we all know here, that’s powerful. And when you feel like, yeah, it’s okay, reality can take it if I look at it really hard, or if I really do the practice clearly, or if I really fine-tune the thing, we all have more power than we think we do. We can all access more insight and concentration and understanding power than we think we have. A lot more. You know what I mean? So in terms of doing it or getting it done, one of those big things is that sense of, not only can I do this, but it’s okay for me to do this, and I am fully justified in mobilizing the force of my mind on that task to follow all that instruction — yeah! I think that makes a big difference between doing it and getting it done, is that sort of galvanized, balls-to-the-wall — ARRRG!
HS: The mobilization.
DI: Yeah. Of resources.
HS: The mobilization.
KF: Yeah.
DI: You wanted to say something…
TG: And this ties into my third point, in reverse order, which is that, despite my own map fascination and cycle fascination, I’ve never been fully convinced that what I was looking for would be found in the cycles at any point, and I’m much less convinced by that now. In fact, what I was looking for before I knew anything about the maps or cycles is much closer to what I’m looking for now. And that has a lot more to do with what Kenneth is calling No Dog and with his metaphor of clearing out the stables than any sense of linear progression. And while I have a personal appreciation of the kind of power that finishing the path can bring, or going through whatever training vipassana/samatha — my interest is not really in developing that at this point. It’s in regardless of what path I am or am not on, is just doing what it seems needs to be directly in immediately as in now done on the insight front.
KF: Yes. And, Tarin, I think, again, we don’t have enough data to come to definitive conclusions, but I think it’s reasonable to believe, based on what I’ve seen, and based on what I’ve read from other people who had done this, that, at any point after the first Arising & Passing Away, which is the first opening, the first spiritual opening — at any point after that, if you can access the No Dog, if consciousness can take itself as object, or as they say in Dzogchen, “turn the light around,” that this light of awareness that is always looking out at phenomena, whatever they may be, even if it’s the changing phenomena of mind and body, that light’s looking out. When that light turns around and takes itself as object, the gig is up. There’s no more foolin’. There aren’t two things. It sees it, consciousness sees itself, takes itself as object, and as J. Krishnamurti said, the observer and the observed are one. Now, this is not the simplest thing. This is the second to the simplest thing. But that’s okay. This is, as Ramana said, the stick that stirs the fire and is eventually consumed by it — you can’t go wrong with this practice. Once the light of awareness turns around and takes itself as object, that’s all you have to do. You can do just that, and the rest of it takes care of itself.
TS: On the insight front, this is the obvious thing.
KF: It’s never too early to do that.
TS: Yeah. Agreed.
VH: Is that agreed? I dunno. I’ve heard some contention around this point, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
DI: It’s hard to fault the directness of that pointing. ‘Cause it’s very direct, and direct is good. I like direct. The counterargument would be that you’re talking to some people who, for better or for worse, did go through the linear progression, did understand that, having gone through the linear progression, and can talk about it because they went through the linear progression. So the question is: Is it just that we thought we were supposed to go through a linear progression, we were looking for linear things, we didn’t have a more immediate practice or focus, we weren’t really quite trained in that way, in that specific way, it’s not that it wasn’t said, but it wasn’t emphasized or put in quite that way, and consequently we sort of wandered all over the place and did all these things and went through all these fancy stages and then by the way we got something we could have done long before, or is it, again, we have a limited data set, as Kenneth well points out? Is it that certain strata of mind only come into being in that way once you’ve done the work? You know, and can you short-circuit the thing and go straight to that and really go straight to that in the way we’re talking about it in that full-on way without having gone through the other stuff? Or, would the attempt to short circuit it also bring up the other stuff, perhaps with a slightly different feel or perhaps personal understanding of what was going on?
KF: That last point I think is particularly relevant, because I suspect that’s the case. I suspect that if you divert the stream through the stables, this other thing does happen. That all the strata of mind are accessed and penetrated even if you’re not consciously aware that’s going on.
TG: I think that’s a possibility. I think I came looking for stream-entry because I thought I needed the power. I just needed the horsepower.
DI: You also needed to get out of the first dark night.
TG: Yeah.
DI: I mean, duh. It’s important. It helps.
TG: The first dark night faded somewhat after my last retreat, prior to this last one, to the point where I was more-or-less okay if I never got out.
KF: That’s the Equanimity ñana.
DI: That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t slide back.
TG: Yeah, yeah. But … my friend Jill, for example, is pretty okay even if she never gets out, and that’s a constant thing. She’s worn down that hill enough.
DI: Yeah, there ya go.
TG: I wanted to get out of the dark night, but I also had my eye set on better things. I wanted the horsepower. I had a sense, and from reading your book, your description of how your concentration just really went up—
DI: Which is true.
TG: —Which is true. Whether it’s the process, like whether it’s the sub-stratum change/mechanical process that completing the cycle — whether it’s that that frees up the power, or whether it’s that sense of license you were talking about—
DI: No, it switched on things that were not switched on before. I really think so.
TG: But here’s the thing. For me, that license didn’t fully come until after I finished this retreat. So, you know, it could be argued that finishing the retreat is what switched the license on. Regardless—
DI: That’s what I’d say.
KF: For the purposes of the tape, “finishing the retreat” is Tarin’s euphemism for having attained first path.
DI: Stream-entry, yeah.
VH: Which, going back to the escape velocity, that’s how I always defined escape velocity.
DI: Yeah.
VH: As stream-entry.
DI: Yeah.
VH: And the way you always—Daniel—described it to me in that the thing is going to do itself at that point.
DI: Yeah.
HS: I was just thinking that, coming back to the metaphor of an ordinary, conditioned, confused state being a state in which more than 90% of resources of awareness and noticing and recognizing and remembering are being allocated to ignore what’s happening.
DI: Yeah.
HS: We could say that with each cycle, 25% can never be allocated again to ignoring.
DI: Bill’s model. That’s exactly what Bill said.
KF: Bill Hamilton, my mentor and—
HS: So we could say that, with two cycles, 50% is gone. The balance is dropped on the—
VH: Which is sometimes why I call the second path what you’re calling—
HS: Yeah.
VH: —Anagami.
HS: With the second path — if we would stretch it linearly, I’m sure it doesn’t work that way in every case.
KF: Well, it’s simplistic but it’s a nice—
HS: —It’s a nice picture, you know? With the second path, and with the second fruition, you’re into the 51%.
DI: Yeah.
HS: Sort of.
DI: Yeah, although Anagami is a big shift. Anagami is a BIG shift. To really be seeing it and walking around in it with that—yeah, you think you’re it, and you think you’re not it, and yeah there’s that subtle center stuff, that’s a big one. I could—
[Daniel and Kenneth talking at same time]
HS: Are you talking about transcending Anagami?
DI: No. How would we allocate the percentages? Stream-entry is maybe like, I dunno, 10-15%. It’s way better than 0%. But it’s like, you know, maybe it’s, and I would say second path is not a huge amount more, you know, 10% or something, maybe 15%, I dunno, something more. I mean, I didn’t notice a big difference walking around. I didn’t notice, I mean, some changes, some things got dropped, my mind wasn’t doing certain things, some things were perceived, yeah, there were some changes, but it wasn’t like … When I really saw Anagami, and I really saw Anagami well, that was a HUGE shift. You know, that got me another 60%. And when I got to really late Anagami, where I kept thinking I saw it, you know, I was 95% there. I was close.
VH: So Anagami territory really takes up a pretty large—
DI: It takes up a big swath. I think Kenneth would agree. I think it’s a big step, at least in the Theravada model.
KF: It’s a quantum leap—
DI: It is.
KF: —from second path.
DI: It’s a whole different order.
TG: How much consciousness taking itself were you doing?
DI: Well, it depends what you mean by “consciousness”. So if by “consciousness” you mean phenomena.
KF: Or consciousness taking itself as object.
DI: Yeah. So was I doing that? Well, it depends what you mean. I did an extremely systematic look through the center. I did an extremely systematic — because I had this basic assumption, you know, it’s very sorta of a Theravada, ñana, cave stupid, simple approach, you know, but that was my model, so that’s what I had to work with, where I just decided to go and debunk every pattern of sensation there was and become fluent in seeing it as it was in terms of three characteristics, in terms of, but one of those important characteristics is emptiness or no-self, that it’s, you know, in the seeing is just the seen, and that was one of those phrases that I really liked, in the seeing just the seen, in the hearing just the heard, in the thinking just the thought, not something separate. That was just the thing. I mean, that was one of my core phrases I kept going back to and going that is deep and profound. That is glorious. I have to learn how to see that. And I really took as a conscious study, like, an application of energy, the intention, memory, and I would take those things systematically during my years as an Anagami in medical school, you know, when I would practice, I would just take those things on and just look through the center and look through the center and look at the patterns that seem to be subject, look at the patterns that seem to be awareness, looked at the patterns that seemed to be me, which is sort of a very low-brow, Theravada-y kinda way of turning consciousness to itself.
TG: When you have the high enough concentration, it’s the same thing.
DI: YES! Right. So on that last retreat, when I went for perfect, 360, inclusive concentration, because when you turn consciousness to itself, there are two ways to think about that. You can think about sort of not-existent subject or light of awareness or something, you can think about some of what I’ll call an abstracted center point, or a pure center point, or a nothingness center point, which is almost like what Hokai was talking about, or an infinitely small center point in the center of the chest that is the flipside of boundless space. There’s two ways to think of subject turning to itself, if you’ll allow me to perhaps slightly alter your metaphor or instruction and I apologize if I’m doing so, Kenneth. But you can think of it in two ways. You can think of, if this is awareness, in the same way that all this is awareness, in the same way that head is awareness, eyes are awareness, thought is awareness, consciousness is awareness, consciousness turning to itself, light of awareness turning to itself — if this is the light in the same way that this is the light, then taking on all phenomena as object evenly and completely is the same as consciousness turning to itself at that level. And that was the level I was interested in. So you could say, yes, if you take universe as the same as manifest awareness, simply as the same.
HS: Very good.
DI: If you take that as the same, then that’s the same thing, but, you know, I was trying to debunk the localization of consciousness in a point or an area or a center or a something in a very strategic, very focused way by allowing no sensation to arise that wasn’t perceived as it was, on its own terms, in a complete way. And so that’s the level of perfection of awareness and concentration that simultaneous access of strata and penetration fused to the point of, I kept remembering Bill Hamilton’s obsession with Trongyam Trungpa’s vadra samadhi, you know, the diamond-like samadhi that cuts to the truth of things. I remember he used to be obsessed by that at the end, you know, some of the last times I talked to him, you know, we would talk about vadra samadhi, and I was like, okay, let’s see how close I can get. You know, so, from that point of view, yes, I took on, I turned attention to consciousness itself, but I wasn’t turning it to, I wasn’t conceiving it as small, I was conceiving it as the universe.
KF: I have to completely endorse that.
DI: Yeah.
KF: That makes perfect sense to me. Although that’s not the practice that I do now, as it happens, that is the practice I was doing in 2004 when I was walking under the pepper tree in New Mexico and completed the circuit.
DI: Yeah.
KF: And completed the circuit for the final time. That’s the practice I was doing.
TG: To me that’s the same one. It just happens to be which one happens to be more appropriate at this very moment. Whether it’s, you know, seeing, like, who is this that is asking? Who is this that is knowing? Or it’s going through each and every sensation that comes up, whether out there or in here, whether periphery or core.
DI: It’s the same, sure. Those are the same.
TG: It’s a different sort of beginning. It’s a different emphasis. It’s a different way of turning. But I don’t have a particular prejudice for or against one or the other. Because I recognize them both to be doing the same thing.
DI: I was essentially going for a technique-less technique. I mean, I wasn’t looking for three characteristics. Go ahead.
HS: It seems that the key is the totality of one’s application.
All: Yes.
DI: I was going for total application. 100% application.
HS: For example, in the Shingon approach, we would approach awareness by giving it a symbolic form. We would visualize a deity who is the embodiment of awareness. Alright? So you are watching, and you are being watched. Of course, the visualized deity is your own awareness. So basically your awareness is watching your awareness. And that’s the first stage, corresponding roughly to samatha. Okay? Once you stabilize the visualized form, you can dissolve it. And what do you do next? Every sound you hear is the voice of the deity, the manifestation of your awareness. Every form you see is the body of the deity, a gesture of the deity, a manifestation of your awareness. Every thought that comes along is the thinking of the deity—
DI: Totality. Perfect.
HS: —the manifestation of your awareness, which again guides you into paying attention to everything.
DI: It’s the same thing.
HS: As if you were paying attention to your own awareness.
DI: Right. Just with a Vajrayana twist.
HS: Yeah.
KF: So to say it again, the common denominator between these various things we’ve described is the totality.
HS: The totality of application.
KF: Shortly before, I was just talking about walking under the pepper tree in New Mexico. Several days before this, I had been reading a book about Bankei, the Japanese Zen master, and I was very struck by something I read there. He advised his students to—I believe he said “dwell in Buddha mind”. He said, try dwelling in Buddha mind for thirty days. “I believe you will find after thirty days that you can scarcely live without it.”
DI: (inaudible)
VH: That’s kind of like…
HS: It’s like eating at McDonald’s for thirty days.
DI: That’s hilarious! Super Size Me! Super Buddha Me!
KF: It really struck me! And I thought, you know, I’m pretty sure I know what he means by dwelling in Buddha mind. So I did that, and on about the fifth day, that whole thing unraveled. This problem I had … you called it …
DI: Insight Disease.
KF: Insight Disease. It went away that day and has not returned. This is now 2009.
HS: Coming back to how the Japanese understand Buddha, to mean everything, it’s the Everything Mind.
KF: Yes.
TG: Though I’m pretty sure I understand what that means, I heavily endorse this. Heavily. Heavily. That’s how I got path, for example. That sort of license to just go with what you know and just go with it.
HS: To go for it.
TG: Just go for it. That’s why I wanna sort of talk away from the cycle model a little bit. Because, you know, I’m a lowly stream-enterer. You know. Okay? I know what I’m going for. I don’t have to do more paths in order to get this done. If the paths happen along the way, they happen. If they don’t, then we’ve got new data.
KF: Very nice. I support it.
DI: Just to clarify, when say “get this done”, I assume you’re talking about Richard’s Actual Freedom model.
TG: No. I’m talking about your Insight Disease.
DI: Oh. You mean to be done with Insight Disease.
TG: Yeah.
DI: Yeah. To be done with Insight Disease, yeah, I mean, you know, there’s definitely lots of ways to conceptualize and thus frame one’s practice and thus direct one’s attention and intention, which is powerful. I mean, to simply be done and to think of oneself as being done now and manifesting being done now does have a, if that’s what you’re talking about, or to manifest the doneness of this simply now does, if you’re conceiving of something like that, does have a beautifully aesthetically pleasing and philosophically pleasing immediacy to it. The only question that might arise would be (a) is that going to be done by ignoring such things as those strata of mind that may not be penetrated giving some validity to the many strata of mind model? And (b) would it be done at the level of delusional sort of scripting oneself into being done for the sake of being done and assuming you’re done because you feel I should be done now and this is it kind of model and thus settling for the chips and salsa rather than eating the big burrito. You know.
KF: Daniel, I would suggest that it would be a moot point. If the Dharma Disease, if the Insight Disease goes away, it goes away. And how you conceive of that is really irrelevant.
TG: Yeah. Agreed. With regard to penetrating the sub-strata, I think any approach that we’ve mentioned so far does its job of doing that, whether you’re looking at, you know, the foreground, or you’re asking “Who am I?” which sort of—
DI: That’s a good traditional question.
TG: —uproots the background.
VH: That’s got a no-self—
DI: It’s no-self.
VH: —inquiry that’s straight to the point.
TG: And regarding the Actual Freedom stuff, yeah, I’ll do that along the way, or I’ll do that afterwards. I dunno. That, essentially, that’s not the insight problem. That’s taking care of, you know, this body and that body and everybody. If you want to put it in Buddhist terms, that’s sila.
KF: Yes. It’s karma-sila. I feel like we’re gonna have to wrap this pretty soon, because I’m getting very tired, but there’s one thing I’d like to touch upon before we close. We’ve talked about license. And earlier, Tarin and I talked about permission. Giving yourself permission to be enlightened wouldn’t be possible to overestimate how important that is.
DI: Or even to concentrate. Or even to engage energy.
KF: Right. I agree. But I really wanna go, take this all the way to the end. At some point, in order to be done with the Insight Disease, you’re gonna have to say, I give myself permission to be with this! The lack of permission can hold you up for decades, I believe. And it might be a nice idea to reflect on. For anyone infected with this pernicious disease, to consciously reflect upon this. Have I suffered enough? Have I suffered enough? Have I done enough work? Have I gained the credibility of all my peers? And then ask yourself: Do I care? Or do I really want to be done? If I really want to be done, I’m going to have to give myself permission. And it might not happen in one step. Most people are going to reflect upon this for some time.
HS: That would be a process.
KF: And they’re going to realize, no, I have not given myself permission.
HS: “I don’t know how to do it. I have to learn this.”
TG: Yeah. Agreed. This is very important. It’s been part of my process. I mean, not consciously. I didn’t know that’s what I wasn’t doing. Not giving myself permission. But once you do, you go, oh! I wasn’t doing that.
DI: Yeah. Like you were a completely different practitioner on this retreat versus the last one. Really. I mean, because you hit this one saying, “I’m going to do it. I know how to do it.” That’s what you said. Which is very different from the previous one, which was, “Oh Daniel! Tell me how to do this.” You know what I mean? Which was really different. And it is a different level. Where, you know, I was like, okay, go up to your room, I’ll see you every few days, maybe I’ll say something, you know. You were definitely a whole different animal in terms of your confidence and your sense of applying your own power and the hilarious, “I’m not going to be the only unenlightened guy at this party! I’m gonna friggin’ get stream-entry before these dudes show up!”
VH: It reminds me of that story of Ananda who—
DI: —Yeah! The only—
TG: I was ready to fly into that room.
VH: That’s cool.
DI: Seriously.
VH: You should have these gatherings more often while people are here meditating.
DI: That way you’re not the only unenlightened shmuck in the room. No, seriously. When you said that, that was funny as hell, because that’s my, “I’m on page 37, now I need to get to page 38...”
VH: It’s like the 20 year old peasant at MBMC.
DI: Right! It’s the same kind of thing. Like, ah, damn!
VH: Competitive enlightenment.
DI: Well, I mean, it’s not crazy. That’s not crazy, because that is motivating. And motivation is critical. I really think that one of the big problems with psychologized, Western dharma, is they don’t feel comfortable with their dark emotions, period. They think they shouldn’t have them and they should work through them, and thus, they can’t utilize that power. You know what I mean? I mean, truth be told, I ran on anger! And just sort of a viciousness. Really about 70% of the time.
HS: And a touch of ambition.
DI: And ambition! And some narcissism. And delusions of grandeur. And reckless abandon to the process. And a sort of a weird that I really had come to the conclusion that somehow, no matter what damage I did to myself in this process was going to be okay. Which is sort of ambitious and cruel. I mean, that I could hurt myself and I’d be fine, which gave me a tolerance for my own pain. I mean, that’s weird, but it’s true. You know what I mean? Like, you know, I mean, I was, for some reason, had no problems. Fear. I was terrified of residency. Literally my last retreat, when I finally got Arhatship, because I remember my dad, this is powerful stuff, I remember my dad going through residency, and just being exhausted, and he’s the nicest guy in the world, and then he was an asshole! ‘Cause he was just so friggin’ tired. I was scared of my dad when I was young, and he is an incredibly nice guy. Everybody who meets my dad goes, “God, what a nice guy he is!” Yeah, except when he’s working himself to death. You know, and so from a childhood fear, I had this real fear of residency. You know, and I came out of medical school an Anagami, and I had this three-week retreat that I had managed to get the time for at MBMC, and I was like, “I better fuckin’ do it!” Because that’s what I was going to go after, to go through residency like this. I better have, literally, like… … Well, I mean, that I’m moaning and groaning about being an Anagami in residency is obviously funny, but it says something. You know what I’m talkin’ about.
VH: I have the same thought. Like, I better get this done before I have kids!
DI: Yeah! Seriously. It’s true! I mean, that’s good! That fear is good! That is brilliant shit! Really, I was like, I got three weeks. This better fuckin’ POP! Or else I’m SCREWED! You know? I gotta bring everything I can to bear in terms of basic sanity and clarity to something that I know really sucks! It’s just really screwed up. Any sort of socio-health whatever point of view. You know, and that helped. You know, so I mean, I was able to bring fear, anger, and all that crazy shit to my motivation, and that made a huge difference. Which again would be, if we’re talking about doing it versus getting it done, that kind of stuff helps. Anyway.
VH: Yeah. I just wanted to mention one thing that Kenneth told me as a kind of move toward wrapping up and … I think we’ve been doing it anyway. Just, when I left a six-week retreat and talked to Kenneth, and we were talking about all these friends that were practicing at the time, he’s like, yeah, thanks so much for talking to me, explaining kind of some of the stuff. And he said, yeah, enlightenment is a team sport. And that’s what you told me. And that’s really stayed with me in terms of the sangha element you mentioned. It’s a team sport both in terms of this kind of friendly competition and fear sometimes.
DI: Not always so friendly.
VH: And unfriendly. But also the support. There’s the challenge, but then there’s also the support. And there’s this kind of conversation, which I see is really wanting to make that challenge and support transparent and clear, say, hey, this is how it really is for people when they’re talking about this stuff.
KF: In the Pali scriptures, the Buddha said, “Associate with the wise, and avoid association with wicked people.” I don’t know what wicked people are, but if associating with the wise means hang out with people who are enlightened, that’s very good advice. That’s very good advice.
HS: Thank you.
DI: Thank you. (DhO)
Hurricane Ranch Dialogue II: Daniel Ingram & Tarin Greco (Part I and 10' of Part II).
DI: I'm Daniel Ingram
TG: Tarin Greco
DI: We're sitting here at Hurricane Ranch in Alabama, and we are going to be talking today about AF. It's worth knowing that Tarin here claims actual freedom, I myself claim mere Arahantship. So we will be going to be going back and forth talking about AF today. So I thought we would start off talking about how AF may or may not relate to various traditions. I thought I'd let Tarin start this off, because we've both thought a lot about it but he has got some good stuff.
TG: Well, Richard, the Actual Freedom Trust guy, the guy that founded the Actual freedom method which is the means by which an actual freedom is achieved, attained, realized, is adamant, is absolutely firm in his conviction that this is entirely new to human history. What I am entirely sure about is that this is entirely new to any humans that I've met, and any humans who have written a clear description of their modes of experience that I've read or have heard about. What's not as clear to me is that this has never been discovered, before, because I have found references to what sure seemed like the PCE in old texts.
Something else that Richard has acknowledged is that the PCE is not new, he goes as far as to say that possibly everybody has had one at some point or another. However the recognition of the pure consciousness experience as something that is both possible, and worthy of being made a continuous experience, this is entirely new, and this is what he has termed an "actual freedom." This really may be the case, there is no firm evidence that says it isn't, so if I were to give a hard and fast answer about it, I would say "yea" it may be entirely possible that he's the first. But I'm not confident enough to give a hard and fast answer as such, because of various places where this is indicated to be the ideal outcome in many ways. It depends how you read and interpret. The fact that an actual freedom, and I am speaking from experience here, not just having read about it or heard about it from Richard or any of the other people who did it before I did, does match the orthodox, traditional models of what enlightenment is much, much more closely than that mode of experience that is proposed in what has come to be known as the "hardcore dharma movement" (Dan, Kenneth Folk, a few other people). This looks a lot more like the traditional model than that did.
DI: In some ways, but you must admit the problem of nanas and jhanas and those sorts of things. If you look at the old texts, they say "the buddha praised those arahants who had the formed and formless jhanas." And the buddha himself on his deathbed rising up into jhanas and then going into nirodha and then coming out and all that. You must admit that that looks nothing like what happens in AF, that's one of those arguments against that particular point of you. Because it simply doesn't quite line up right. Neither quite lines up right. Neither what I call arahantship nor what you call AF quite line up with Arahantship found in the old texts, because the arahants clearly had jhanas if you read the old texts or so it seems. And I as an arahant have jhanas. And yet in AF mode, or PCE mode I should say I can't hit a jhana at all that does anything, and then when I come out of that I have jhanas again, and things seem to cycle in a nana like fashion, and so it simply doesn't quite align.
TG: Well, in the old and texts, and by this I am referring to the Pali Canon, there is a mention of Arahants that do not have all the jhanas. You know which one I am talking about, the release through discernment as opposed to the release through (inaudible).
DI: That's true.
TG: Basically the basis for wet insight and dry insight, that distinction. But it is admittedly so, that there is no documentation of people who had jhanas and then through further attainment lost them.
DI: Then through further attainment simply couldn't access them, right.
TG: Well you've seen for yourself now, as of a few weeks ago, what happens when you try to go into jhana which is that.
DI: Attention moves a little bit in various directions, but there is absolutely nothing beyond that in terms of anything that feels like a jhana at all.
TG: Well that's because there's nobody there who can go into jhana. I mean, there needs to be that inchoate sense of being, that feeling of being for there to be, as you call it, an attention wave; or as I call it, a stir of passions to focus, and to sculpt, and to spread out in various ways. The focusing, and sculpting, and spreading out of which constitute a jhanic attainment, a jhanic strata.
DI: Sure, which raises the whole point of this being something else, something beyond and gets into the whole tricky question of whether or not this is 180 degrees from enlightenment or a normal continuation from enlightenment. Richard, of course, being the one who claims it's 180 degrees, which can be argued based on the fact that in vipassana practice we attain nanas and we attain jhanas and we perceive vibrations and reality gets relatively distorted at points. Then you can go on to attain formless realms where you're tuned out from anything normal, or nothingness where your basically tuned out from just about everything. These are extremely distorted versions of the sense field. Yes, rarified. Yes, very pleasurable or profound. But still distorted by a very, very fine tuning of what I'd call the attention wave or attention itself. Based on that sort of logic, if the PCE is the absolute absence of a tunable attention wave in that particular way, and AF is then the elimination of that attention wave, you could argue that the two are 180 degrees diametrically opposed to each other. Because one is about an attention wave that can penetrate all kinds of things, do all kinds of things, create all kinds of things and bring one valid insights into the selflessness of phenomena, and those sorts of things. The fact that nanas and jhanas don't seem to arise in AF mode further argues for their difference.
Argument for continued progression of things from arahantship to AF would be that arahants seem to have a curiously easy time, compared to non-arahants given the incredibly few number of data points that we have. If you look at Trent and Tarin, you think your friend Mes is doing something, is that right?
TG: Mes? Yea. Mes is clearly, clearly close.
DI: And he's a skilled... what did you say he was?
TG: He got arahantship before I did.
DI: There you go.
TG: He hadn't been doing meditation for all to long, he was a very, very dedicated Tai Chi practitioner like maybe two years, a year and a half. Then he got into doing vipassana, and then he, through me, found Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and without even reading it himself, I mean this is before the book came out, I was printing it off of the internet and letting him borrow certain chapters, and telling him about my experiences with it. Completely unbeknownst to me he was staying home, and just knocking the thing out. From morning to night. I kind of noticed "oh yea, he's just not coming out, we aren't seeing very much of him" myself, and some of his other friends, that I know. It's only later that he told me, it's not like he was trying to hide it or anything, that he was doing was staying home and practicing, day and night. He got stream entry after a just a few weeks of doing that. Despite having only ever sat one retreat, a 10-day Goenka course, before. Then he moved on through the paths, in fact he got second path before I got stream entry, and I was a bit dubious about this, I was like "wellllll I don't know."
DI: Isn't it annoying being 1-up'd?
TG: It was, I remember that, it really, really was. I wasn't just skeptical, I was downright cynical. I was slightly resentful, I did not think that it was possible.
DI: Just like I was when when you were initially presenting that you were pursuing AF, same kind of thing, but go on.
TG: Then after I had a bit of experience with the thing, read: I got stream entry, I come back, and I hear him talk, and he's not saying anything different, I'm just hearing it differently, it was like "alright, this guy got stream entry, and by the sounds of it, considering he knows what he's talking about, he may well have gotten second path." I remember, after having gotten back, just teaching him to go through the jhanas, the eight jhanas, the four formed and four formless jhanas, and him just doing it, without any question, with a sentence or two of instruction about each. Going in, abiding, coming back out, telling me what it was like, I'd go "right, that sounds about right." So he was clearly a skilled practitioner, he was good at doing mental exercises, which is what all this meditation, insight practice stuff is about.
DI: Yea. How to tune your mind, how to incline your mind, how to perceive.
TG: It wasn't until after he had gotten what he thought of as arahantship, it was long after it that I did, got arahant, less than a month that we were just sitting around in a park one day, and I was telling him about what I thought. He had heard about some of it before, but I was telling him about actual freedom, and I was telling him about my recent, like 4, 5, 6 hour long PCE that I'd had a few months before that. And it seemed like a twinkle of recognition occurred in his eye, he paused and contemplated and asked me a few questions that just seemed like "yea, I can see why one would ask that, yes that's what it's like." He described to me some type of experience he had, going on a school trip as a kid. I said "yea, that's sounds about right, that direction, that way of experiencing." He went off, a few days, a week later, he came back and told me "hey, I had a PCE, I remembered a PCE, and I know how to do it." And a week or two after that he was in what the Actual Freedom trust writers describe as a virtual freedom.
DI: Maybe for those who are following along who are less familiar with this terminology we should go ahead and define PCE and those sorts of thing, and lay down some basic criteria and descriptions of what they're like.
TG: Sure, sure. Do you want to go with the PCE considering you have more recent experience with it.
DI: Sure, so given that PCE and AF are not quite the same in some ways, and that the PCE has a sort of a thrill or charge to it, most of the time, at least initially when it hits it seems to. So, PCE-mode for me is different from cycle mode in that PCE mode is extremely direct. Things are not shifting, or fluxing, things are just there, so if I look at my hand in cycle mode, it seems to be sampling, sampling, sampling, this stream of impermanent sensations, about my hand. If I look at my hand in PCE mode, there's just my hand. There it still is, and still is just as much in this eerily continuous way.
TG: And yet...
DI: Yes, the hand moves, and the light may subtly change on it, it moves slightly, yet there is not the sampling quality in anything like the same way. Attention seems to be very much, or I should say mostly, because thing kind of fades in and out and it is hard to tell when it ends; very much with this sort of direct, amazing brilliance. Such that colors are just fantastic, shapes are just fantastic, sounds are just wonderful. The fact of basic sensate reality is just this amazing, wonderful thing. It's kind of like where people describe tripping and they're like (trippy voice) "oh my ankle was just unbelievable." It's kind of like that except this doesn't have that high, in that same goofy, high kind of way. But it has some of that wonderful directness of attention that people describe in those sorts of states. So the PCE contrasts with cycle mode in that within PCE-mode jhanas seem to do nothing. So during this, what seemed to be a 53 hour run of a PCE, which is my longest yet to date, a week or so ago, Tarin asked me to see what I could do if I tried to go into jhana. I would try to move attention around, and attention would sort of go forward, and I tried to go into first jhana and it was just nose and room and breath and skull and ordinary physical reality just kind of looking in that direction of it. Then it would kind of widen out to two and widen a little further to three and widen a little further to four, but it was that simply some aspect of where the focus of attention was would widen out, but it absolutely did nothing whatsoever in terms of jhana at all. Other things I've noticed about the PCE is that it's curiously refreshing, I can work much longer in it than I can in normal Cycle mode.
TG: Normal arahant mode
[both laugh]
DI: In ordinary, run-of-the-mill arahant mode.
TG: I'll add something to your description that you're taking for granted.
DI: Oh, sorry, go ahead.
TG: Which is the centerlessness...
DI: Yes.
TG: Of the experience, if that's not there, it's not a PCE.
DI: The centerlessness, the boundarylessness of the field of experience has an open stability that it doesn't have even in arahant mode. Because that openness, that centerlessness, that boundlessness, is somehow warped or moved or phased or something by the attention wave, and the attention wave is what would allow you to have nanas or jhanas or to tune what parts of it your tuning in to. Without that, there is just this wide open field, the sense of out-from-controlness or body-just-moving-on-its-own-ness or words-just-coming-on-their-ownness is extremely striking. The body just seems to do what it needs to do based on whatever natural intelligence and skill and understanding is present. That is a really remarkable thing to perceive well, so in that way you could easily argue that this is not 180 degrees to awakening, this is just a further continuation into even less self, that last bastion of self being the attention wave itself. The attention wave, and this is a critical point that I think you'll like so I'll say it briefly then you can say more about it if you like, because you're better at this than me, the attention wave being not only what creates nanas and jhanas but also creates affective feeling and here's where things get controversial so I'll let you talk about this for a while because your better at doing this than I am.
TG: Well, one way that being actually free is different from occasionally, or even often, having pure consciousness experiences is that there isn't this "wow" factor.
DI: Yea, whereas PCEs particularly when they initially hit really have a bright, clear "wow" factor that really is just delicious.
TG: It's just so utterly, utterly different from anything else. Vineeto, one of the writers and directors of the Actual Freedom Trust on their homepage described the PCE as the self speaking from abeyance, I'm just paraphrasing here, from the corner, going "wow." Whereas even later when things kind of get muddled, where your not even sure your having PCEs anymore, everything just seems to be a big, muted or refined PCE...
DI: Right, like my 53-hour-thing didn't have the "wow" factor after it initially kicked in, but I couldn't get jhana, I needed little sleep, there was little sense of fatigue, there was a vague sense of cycling but it was trivial and seemed to do nothing in terms of irritation or pleasure or bliss or anything.
TG: There's this calmness and consistency, yet you wouldn't call it dull in any way would you?
DI: Oh no, it's very bright-minded, it's very alert.
TG: So there's an exuberance without any jiterriness.
DI: Yes.
TG: There is a clarity to the thing that is entirely sensate, and not merely a mental quality such that "clarity" is a metaphor, the clarity is immediate.
DI: It's kind of like what people are looking for in caffeine but without any edginess to it at all.
[Tarin laughs]
TG: Yea, yea. So back to the last thing that Dan said when he spoke at length about the PCE being devoid of affective qualities.
DI: Largely, largely devoid... the PCE is largely devoid of affective qualities.
TG: Well, the PCE as the term is used by Richard and company and myself and Trent and so on and so forth is entirely devoid of it. It's only when the PCE devolves temporarily or just disappears comlpetely... devolves temporarily into what's termed an "excellence experience" which is the closest that you can come to being in a PCE without being in one. There is an affective quality there, it is the affective quality that most suitably imitates what human experience is like absent of it, sans that quality. Naivete, as Richard puts it is the closest a feeling being can come to innocence. These are terms that are quite common to our language yet are being used in very particular and, to some, peculiar ways, so I'll just define that quickly. Innocence is the utter purity of the PCE. It is the absence of any sense of 'right' or 'wrong,' there's no way to know what's right or wrong, there's just what exists, there's no conflict.
DI: That sort of language is going to throw some people, maybe say it in a way that doesn't imply some sort of functional immorality.
TG: Well, there's no ill will whatsoever, so theres no need to counter that ill will by forcing good will, by having good will that can be displaced. The good will that is inherent in a PCE isn't even a self-conscious one, though with adult sensibilities I know what's going on, I've lived a life that was so different from this that I recognize that, being here now, I don't have a malicious bone in my body, I don't even know where to find one. It just seems like the really obvious thing to do. It seems so sensible to live like this, that any other way, viewed from this perspective is at least slightly abhorrent...
[Daniel laughs]
To possibly incredibly absurd and bizarre and Kafkaesque, and not in a nice way.
DI: That leads nicely to the resistance that comes up to this stuff which is a topic on which you have many good things to say. So talk about the resistance you encounter and some of your commentary on that, because I think that's a valid thing to talk about.
TG: Oh man, the resistance, it's like, Mara only had 10 armies.
[both laugh]
This is like a global assault. From things like "you're repressing your humanity" to "you're killing your humanity" to "you're a robot" to "you're in denial" or "you're deluded".
DI: "Cult follower."
TG: "Cult follower," right, right, at some point it may be "cult starter"... let's see what else... just "misguided," ignorant, I think I've already said "deluded," that one comes up quite a lot, "pathological" that's another one. All because, it just seems really obvious to me, that I don't have to be irritated about anything ever. There's nothing to worry about, ever. There's nothing to fear, there's no one to get mad at, there's nothing to get upset about, in any which way, whatsoever, ever. And, in the absence of that, there's a whole lot marvel at, there's a whole lot to look at with nothing less than wide-eyed wonder.
DI: Still you function just fine, you just traveled around the world, you're applying for graduate school, you're studying for your GRE. You navigate the world just fine without all of that, apparently.
TG: Yea. Let's see, is there anything that I don't do quite as well... I don't know, argue with people, get upset, try to get people to like me... um...
DI: So maybe I should talk about what little part I had in creating some of the resistance to this stuff, I worry that somehow I've created a little bit of a problem...
TG: Oh yes, this is all your fault.
[both laugh]
DI: No, this is definitely not all my fault but one small contributing factor to the resistance to this, which I think I should own up to here, and this is going to be strange for people who have read my book and heard me talk and have heard various aspects of my take on things. All one can do is one's best to describe what one has experienced and what one knows. What I attained that I called arahantship which still had the attention wave meaning I could still get nanas, I could still get jhanas, pure land, nirodha and so forth which was very centerless and very luminous and very empty and it's very transient, it's very open field, it's very natural and it has all these amazing and excellent qualities which are true and I think there is something to be said for cultivating all that. What I didn't realize is that there seems to be one last cherry on top of the sundae or one last big point, and that last big point contradicts some central dogma or doctrine that I unfortunately seemed to have helped perpetuate. So I should go ahead and own up to that right now, and say I'm sorry, but more than that I should explain exactly what that dogma or doctrine is and how it's currently manifesting.
So essentially, from a pure vipassana practice point of view, it does make some kind of sense to meet all sensations regardless of what they are, be they emotional, skillful, pleasant, unpleasant, whatever, with the same discerning eye that apprehends their three characteristics. This is excellent advice for those who want to attain to the insights that vipassana offers, which I think are an extraordinarily good idea by the way, and given how rapidly well-trained insight practitioners seem to get AF I still think it's a good idea in general. It provides a lot of foundation and good perspectives. The problem is that this excellent practice advice which also describes some aspect of the state of arahantship in which emotions, or things that seem like emotions, they're different in some ways, they have a lot of the same characteristics, there can be irritation, there can be restlessness, there can be sensations of fear.
TG: They're no longer compounded the same way.
DI: They're no longer compounded the same way, they are vastly more clearly perceived, vastly less sticky, vastly more like transient phantoms yet they still can arise. They still can arise in some way, as people who have read my "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" know. The problem here comes when one raises AF, which then seems to, inherently, contradict lots of the things that I've said, and in some ways it clearly does. So that's a problem, so now what's an excellent practice point becomes turned into something that then creates an inability to go forward, forward being to AF, which I have not yet attained, but as far as I can tell is an incredibly good idea, and having had lots of experience in the last five or six months with PCEs is a good idea and is attainable. And I think Tarin and Trent and the rest of these kids are not so barking crazy as everybody makes them out to be. In fact I think they are on to something profound and something extremely important.
TG: And practical.
DI: And practical. And doable, which is the nice thing. This stuff seems to be very doable. I'm slowly, with some missteps along the way, getting better at integrating this point of view into my life. So we'll see how long it takes me to land it, anyway, the point is that this central dogma, which essentially is being represented as being "just fine" in heaven or hell or something like that, actually has a problem with it in that you actually can eliminate the hell part, so it seems. This is my working assumption at the moment, I can tell you when in PCE-mode, life is just fine. I have no need for nanas, I have no need for jhanas, I have no need for nirodha, I have no need for the pure land, I have less need for sleep, I feel extremely clear and here. It feels extraordinarily reality-based, I mean, the degree to which it is based on this reality is remarkable which I've always considered the gold standard for insight practice. Somehow even further tuning in to this reality freed of the distortion of the attention wave provides this remarkable clarity which seems to eliminate, as they so boldly claim, the affective qualities that create emotions. Having no emotions, or extraordinarily attenuated emotions in those modes I find just fantastic, and I seem to be able to function just fine if not even better at my job and life and everything. So I apologize for whatever dogma or doctrine I created, which seemed to be good practice advice at the time and described what me and some of my arahant friends were going through, yet seems now to be causing a roadblock to further progress, and that's my fault. So anyway, sorry, there it is. You want to say something about this?
[Dan laughs]
TG: Yea, which is that there are also what could loosely be called ethical ramifications to consider as incentives for becoming actually free. Even without leaving the Buddhist framework, it can be looked at this way, that seeing things as they are the attainment of arahantship, seeing sensations as they arise and pass without sticking to anything, which is debatable, I mean, why are they arising if they're not sticking to something? I won't go into that just now...
DI: Well you should go into that.
TG: I'll go into that later, remind me.
DI: I will.
TG: Which is, which training is the first and the last? It's the training in morality. If it seems, for the sake of morality, for the sake of practical conduct in this world of people and things, if it seems like a good idea to go further, to go differently, than merely seeing things as they already are without changing anything other than "now you see it, before you didn't" then well, why not? To say that the completion of insight training is to come to this point and see things as they are is misguided, in a way, because the whole point of seeing things as they are is to do something about it.
DI: Well, more than that, the quality of the attention wave which allows jhanas and nanas and insight training in and of itself is curiously distorting, so I can tell you when I seem to be in PCE mode and there is no obvious attention wave, anything... I'm now going to use the word attention in two different ways, so there's ordinary attention which is just where you happen to be turning consciousness and there is this distorting factor of the attention wave which is this vipassanizing, sampling, transient thing that interferes with it. It's kind of like a carrier wave or a distorting, fluxing, phase problem. That distorting thing, when it is gone, reality is extraordinarily clear, in a way that it simply is not even in the best of any of the previous things I had ever attained. There is simply an undeniable, unarguable increase in the basic clarity of everything. A wonderful, stable, natural clarity to everything, from the sensation of air through my nostrils against the base of my skull, to visual sensations to whatever. And that clarity lends another level for our natural intelligence to function well, just as in all the previous stages where you see more clearly and your natural intelligence hopefully functions better... So in this particulary way it does seem to deliver the nearly mythical, or so I thought, promised goods of eliminating affect, or in this case eliminating emotions entirely which is sort of different from what has come before, because it's usually a limited emotional range model where you eliminate the bad emotions and you get to keep the good ones. This, actually, we don't seem to see described anywhere, which is essentially you eliminate all emotions whatsoever. So maybe you should talk more about that.
TG: What's funny is that's not actually a loss of any sort, because good emotions are a second rate version of this. They don't lend themselves to being seen as second rate, when your in the midst of them.
DI: When that's all you know.
TG: Yea, when that's all you know, especially when they're there, and there strong. You need to have a bit of a metta perspective, the capacity for it, to be able to understand this point, the point that every emotion is a message, it's trying to deliver something, it's trying to get somewhere. Every desire is an aim for fulfillment, this is that fulfillment, the fulfillment extinguishes the desire, this is not merely the absence of a desire through a beating it back, a denial of it, this is allowing a desire to finally become fulfilled.
DI: By ordinary, sensate reality.
TG: By ordinary, sensate reality. And as this is what has always been here anyway, this ordinary sensate reality, though it was not perceived as such, "I" realize that desire is unnecessary because what "I" always wanted, consciously or unconsciously knowingly or blindly, contrivedly or instinctively, intuitively, is available already, so desire just *poof*, I just *poof*.
DI: So based on that sort of investigation, this is a lot of advertising and round-about description, maybe we should talk about methodology, given my eternal emphasis on pragmatism. So in terms of how to attain this, because the emotion thing does sort of lend itself to doing this which is where one learns to cultivate the PCE and one learns to figure out the roots of affective emotion at all so that allows one to see them in a way such that they diffuse and manifest less, such that the PCE can naturally manifest more, and how to tune one's mind to that, but since you taught me how to do this I'll let you talk about it.
TG: Alright, well, first off, you can't really go about this by thinking of it as a means to eliminate emotion, this isn't that. The elimination of emotions happens as a necessary consequence to the elimination of being, of this feeling of presence, of this sense of "I", of subject. Which, through insight practice, through mystical dis-embedding, disassociating, whatever, becomes just part of the sensate field, and is no more and no less than any sensation of anything else this causes the very binding which causes there any sense of there even being a self in any way, shape, or form, that is felt to be one it causes that to simply vanish.
DI: The basic equation being the feeling of being creates affective feelings and without the feeling of being at all, simply no affective feelings will arise.
TG: Yes.
DI: So this being the standard, if you're going to talk about a standard for AF and a high standard... the danger with any of these things is they will get watered down and people will say "oh I do that" but the high standard for AF, as I understand it, because I haven't done it yet, is that there is no affect whatsoever, ever again, have a nice day, any emotional quality at all. No somatic charge or twang or resonance from any image or sound or sensate input.
TG: Not that I have been able to pick up, even once.
DI: Yea, and Trent describes the same thing. So, back in terms of methods, maybe you should talk about methods to cultivate the PCE and various ways to go about doing this so people can get a taste for what this is like and see for themselves.
TG: Well, the way Richard wrote it, and that's what I had to work with, until I experienced a PCE of my own, is to ask yourself, "how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?" The asking of this question is... you can't really contrive an answer to this, it defeats the purpose if you do, you ask in order to find out. You ask "how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?" as a long and drawn out way of asking "how am I feeling?" "how is it right now to be here?" "what is this like?" You're getting a sense of what the quality of your experience is, in this very moment, here and now. There's actually a split-split second, just when you ask that, that is of the same quality as the split-split second when a sense percept, like a bit of vision strikes the eye, a sound strikes the ear, thoughts, words occur, proprioception occurs, tactile perception occurs, things on the skin, the warmth, the air, there's this immediacy, this directness, this clarity for a split second, that when you pay attention to things in that way you get a taste of and when you ask this question you get a taste of. Now, getting a taste of it, by asking yourself this question is useful because it looks at what the nature of experience is like. But this little brief taste is difficult to pick up, so more likely than that the answer will be a feeling of some sort like "oh, I feel restless and irritated" or "oh, I feel great right now, I feel fine" or [in a convincing 'concerned' voice] "oh, I feel so tender and warm, and, I don't know, my thoughts about this person that I'm very very attached to..." I'll feel this kind of 'fuzzy feeling.' Any of these feelings at all adequately answer the question, now, the thing to do, because the idea here is to induce a PCE, is to figure out how it is that this is not a pure consciousness experience, how do I get to a pure consciousness experience from here? Now, if you already know what a pure consciousness experience is like from your own memory, your own cognitive memory rather than affective memory, because you can't remember how it feels, you can only remember how it is, without that feeling, association, relating aspect of memory, if you already know then you'll be able to then just by remembering you will start to make your way back there from here. You'll see how that is clearly, clearly preferable to this in the same way that a fork stabbed into a piece of food, going into your mouth, is clearly preferable to a fork stabbed into your eye or your hand
[Dan laughs]
It's just like that.
DI: It's just obviously better.
TG: It's just obvious, it doesn't take any kind of illusion or delusion or ignorance to know that one is better than the other, it doesn't take any kind of attachment or whatever else.
DI: Simply discernment.
TG: It's simply discernment, and so discerning thus, you can proceed. However, if you do not know what a PCE is like and you only have descriptions to go by, there are ways to try to get yourself to remember one we'll go into that later if I remember to, but I think it's worth knowing that there is an aspect of the way one feels which is closer to the PCE than other ways that one can feel.
DI: Talk, maybe, about grooving on the sensate wonder of just being here, because those are some of the instructions I found the most useful, when you were talking about how sights just caress the eye, sounds just the ear, air and contact just caress the skin, that sort of simple, very bodily, "flesh and blood" to use an AF phrase thrown around a lot, those are the things that I found helpful, and your way of saying it I found helpful, so maybe you could do some of that.
TG: Alright, I'll see what I can remember of what I said to you months and months ago. In a conversation I never thought I'd have to repeat.
[both laugh]
DI: This is back in February when he had gotten it, he had been in Australia with Ricky and crew, and I flew him out because I was so impressed and had him talk to me for a few days about this stuff.
TG: We spoke on the phone for about 45 minutes and Dan got it, just from the things I'd said, that there was something to be had here. So I came out here for two days or so, and I guess I talked about how there's this natural resonance in sound that is right at the ear. It's not like I'm hearing something out 'there' wherever 'there' could be, it's all just right here. I'm seeing with the eye, it's not I'm seeing through the eye, it's like I am the eye seeing. This is seeing. It's pleasant, it's very obviously pleasant to just experience what this body experiences. If this body were to experience pain it would also be painful. But, this experience here is friendly, for lack of a better word, is safe, is secure, is still, time doesn't move, there's no sense of there being anything abstract which moves or which I am moving through. There's just this world, yes the sun rises and sets, the planet rotates, it goes around the sun, so I understand.
DI: It's all a little abstract bring it down to right here.
TG: Oh, I thought I was being right here.
DI: Oh.
TG: I mean the sun does rise and set.
DI: Sure.
TG: Your moving right now...
DI: But in terms of how that relates to getting a PCE.
TG: Well, something that Richard pointed out, maybe it was Peter, his friend Peter, one of them anyway, pointed out how the second hand of a clock moves, but this isn't time moving, this is the second hand of a clock moving, moving, moving through space. And, I understood, it was just really clear, how there is movement, but there is nothing which moves, in the sense that there is the illusion that there is something ultimate which moves is absent, is vanished. So if you can see that there is a kind of restlessness, a desire, a movement, which feelings impelling or compelling in some way and you can see how that's just not applicable, it may vanish, before your very eyes or more likely when you just happen to be looking somewhere else, and you won't be able to find it, this sense of urgency, this sense of restlessness.
DI: So, other ways to get into a PCE, other modes... so let me talk a little bit about some of my experiments. This is sort of a vipassana thing, if you're able to perceive the wiggling of attention that creates the cycle of the nanas, clearly attention sort of wiggles and focuses in some way. When I hit the arising and passing away then I shift out dissolution then there's fear, misery, and disgust, they have there resonances. Then there's desire for deliverance, which has it's own field-distorting quality and things I look at are not clear unless I look at the periphery and that's irritating. Then it opens out to equanimity and things seem spacious and the attention wave is wiggling. To actually watch how the attention wave distorts a simple thing, like a simple image on paper or the image of your hand in the visual field, to watch that distortion, if you can try to see the thing without any kind of distortion or attention wave at all, just tune in purely to what the attention wave which is creating nanas and jhanas and those sorts of focuses is creating, and instead just to tune into the simple fact of visual or auditory reality. Just to see things being here in the most ordinary way, like before you did insight training, the way you thought everything was here but couldn't actually perceive it to be here. This is the sort of attention-mode which I have found the most helpful, just letting-sensations-be-ness, letting-them-show -themselves-ness, for flashing on to PCE mode. You might want to talk about cultivating felicitous feelings.
TG: Yes, yes, that's extremely important! The number one thing standing in the way of an aspirant, someone who wishes to do this is a deep-seated underlying sense of resentment, that can be easily characterized as the feeling of not wanting to be here, not wanting to have been born. There is this cynical view, this outlook, that is extremely common. I experienced it so much of the time without realizing it and I look around me now and it is clear as day that the vast majority of my fellow human beings are operating on this routine, are living this, are expressing this in their every day lives, constantly, persistently... And that does mean, probably, you listening to this right now, if you can catch what it is to feel resentment, to feel resistance of any sort, this is what I'm talking about. If you are able to see this and are sensible enough, pardon I don't mean to be offensive in any way, I'm just speaking frankly, are sensible enough to see that you would enjoy being here so much more, if only you were more willing to enjoy it, then it would make perfect sense that the hesitation, the lack of consent, the unwillingness, the resentmennt towards and about being here is completely the opposite direction, and you don't want to do that.
DI: In that same way, the gravity that the PCE has is remarkable, once one is able to see it and identify it and notice it's qualities. Gravity meaning that it has this amazing pull, because in comparison to it everything else seems distorted, dull, prone to irritation, restlessness, fear, confusion, those sorts of things. Noticing the automatic pleasant wonder and gentle niceness of abiding in the sense spheres just as they are operating in this ordinary, yet very clear and direct way... When one sees that, then one goes "oh wait a second, that really is better" then that has a lot of pull. So just to see what this stuff is talking about, if you're interested in why I or anybody would suddenly be so interested in it, cultivate a PCE one way or the other and just see. Then go "oh ok, what is this actually like? What does this actually seem like? What are its qualities and aspects?" Then you can see "oh, there really does seem to be this absence of all sorts of unfortunate emotional aspects." Then it will fade, it will dissolve I suspect then you'll have to do it again and you can get into this thing where you're like "how do I get back into PCE mode?" but even that shows something to be said in what all of this is pointing to. So I would really recommend, as a meditation or mind-tuning experiment to see if you can tune the mind in a way that has no attention wave at all where the sensate world is just showing itself, completely undistorted by anything that looks like nanas or jhanas or any of that. Instead it's just cleanly and pristinely presenting itself, in that sort of way.
TG: With regard to felicitous feelings though, if you are rather out of the gravity of feeling resentful but have yet to be grabbed by the somewhat different gravity of being drawn toward a PCE, you are in this, more or less, free-floating territory. You can just take your feelings and desires whichever way, you can fritter them away on petty and meaningless desires which provide no real meaning or fulfillment or long-term reward or you can try taking the advice I'm about to give, and maximize the felicitous feelings. The Actualist method isn't merely about minimizing the harmful, the invidious, the malicious, the sorrowful feelings, the fearful feelings, and the antidotal pacifiers the tender feelings, loving feelings, compassionate feelings, the antidotes to malice and sorrow, respectively.
PART II
DI: In that same way, the paradise-like instructions, or fairy-tale-like aspects of reality for tuning into a PCE, maybe you should talk about that.
TG: Um, let's see. It occurred to me, at some point, that people all around the world who had various ideas of what heaven is, even if they say it's beyond heaven; you know, the usual Buddhist song that freedom is beyond heaven and hell. And yet the total 'what it is'-ness of Buddhist beyond-heaven-heaven, like, I don't know, heaven-squared, is to be found in an afterlife of some sort.
The whole notion of Parinibbana is the freedom that can only come when there is no more remainder. You know, the wretched ilness that is the body has dissolved, and there is only this freedom.
More commonly though, heaven is seen as this place that you go to enjoy a hereafter, where everyone else is good and everything else is great, and if you are theistic then God will be there too...
DI: Streets of gold and virgins aplenty.
TG: Yes, something like that.
TG: It has occurred to me that people can even concieve of those things because there is something that is accessible to experience that is that, and yet, not, not this. I mean, this is what it is to be alive here and now, on this planet, with things like chairs and recording instruments and yourself as a human and other people as other humans and household pets and snakes and rocks and trees. I mean, just this cornucopia of things, like seriously.
This is actually heaven. This is paradise.
This is it. Now, how can this be? How can it be that this is it?
If you treat that like a bit of a koan.
Like "how is it that this is paradise?"
If you think about that, if you contemplate it, if you look for it, if you search it out, if you probe it, you may find yourself suddenly in it.
DI: In that same sort of way I'll talk about a concept that I found useful, which is sort of 'fake it till you make it'. Which is not meaning to imply that you are imitating anything necessarily, but you are essentially aspiring to see something, and the aspiration, sort of moment to moment aspiration to percieve something, with a little bit of skillfull conceptual overlay to help steer things in the right direction because there are better directions than others at least in this regard. And I have found for some reason, I don't know if it's because I like Harry Potter and all that stuff, but the fairy-tale like quality of my life helps me inhabit it almost like a lucid dream, which somehow lends clarity that somehow makes it more PCE-prone, I'll say.
Because I haven't figured out how to always get into a PCE at will, I can't do anything like that, but I can definitely make it more likely to occur, by tuning in to - like essentially thinking of this as my vacation house that I'm sitting in, and having my car be my vacation car, and the restaurant I'm eating in, whatever it may be, be my vacation restaurant, at my vacation resort. You know, and even my vacation job. "This is the job I sort of show up to as my vacation job."
Somehow it sounds naive or crazy or foolish or something even kind of stupid or silly, but it really actually helps *tremendously* to simply appreciate aspects I never would have.
In the same way one has a fresh look at life when one is on vacation. Has a fresh taste of food.
I don't know if when I was in Paris the food was so much better, I think it probably actually was, or it was just that I was in Paris and expecting the food to be so good that I really actually tasted it, but the food was friggin great in Paris.
And if I bring that same quality of just wonderous enjoying and newness and freshness of perspective to my same old house and same old socks that I'm putting on, and my same old bathtub that I'm getting into or my same old car that I'm driving down the same old road. And just notice that 'wow this is actually a really beautiful place that I live....'
Wow this plastic glass in my hand actually feels good. Wow this velveteen comforter that's draped over this couch is really soft and feels nice and is a really good red color.
TG: "It is a lovely red color. There's so many reds in it"
DI: Yeah I agree. That sort of absolute simple fantasyland or wonderland or vacationy more appreciative land newness and freshness actually really helps and it doesn't seem to dull anything and it doesn't seem to make me any more stupid or foolish, it actually makes me vastly more appreciative which makes me less angry less greedy more happy more fulfillled and it makes each moment more fulfilling so even as an immediate result of this practice I have noticed there is something really really sane and good about this. This is just good old wisdom 101 from a certain point of view, taken to an extreme degree but there really is something absolutely fantastic about just noticing wow actually just the light on this shirt and the way it hits it is really cool and just the feel of the air conditioning in this room is just nice because it's a nice temperature and even the heat of the pounding alabama sun has a certain nice warm quality too. In some kind of way and that has really helped me and I think it has made my life vastly more enjoyable, even as I do this practice, so this is a practice that is enjoyable, apparently in its beginning, middle, and end though sometimes I must admit I get frustrated when for whatever reason I think I should be able to get into a PCE and forwhatever reason in that moment I can't seem to.
...which reminds me of Trent's excellent advice, when I think I am doing that it's probably that some subtle aspect of me is panicking and I should just relax and almost certainly when I do that it makes it easier.
Other fun topics: should we discuss some of the recent unfortunate politics about this stuff or should we just leave it in neutral and pleasant...thing
TG: I still have a few more practical things to say about the actualism method, about asking oneself about HAIETMOBA, and kind of being aimed at the PCE and if I find that I am not feeling particularly well, to figure out why.
The way Richard advocates is to remember the last time that I felt well and remember what it was that sent me in a different direction that made me feel bad, essentially.
Or feel the opposite of bad, which isn't quite the same thing as felicity...I'll get into that maybe another time.
But whatever it was that made it so I was no longer aimed at the PCE or aimed at felicity or aimed via sincerity at naievte, ask myself, well, what happened, what went wrong? And it will inevitably be "Oh, someone said this or that happened or that didn't happen and I wanted it to happen and it affected my mood" and well, let's see, man, things were certainly better before that, before my mood soured, now do I want to keep perpetuating this sourness this bitterness, this resentment, this anger, you know, pick your flavour. Or do I want to get back to feeling good and the answer to any sensible observer, quite obvious, and if that sensible observer is you, and you certainly have a vested interest in it being you... The result is you lose your commitment to being bad and in remembering what it is to feel good automatically start to feel better.
It may take a little while, especially at first
DI: And at second.
TG: Yeah. And if the investigation is making you feel worse, well back off the investigation until you start feeling better and then come back to it.
I mean, it's worth looking at. What it was that made me feel bad.
Now the way I ususally went about doing it was I just saw, subsequent to asking myself HAIETMOBA and discovering that I wasn't feeling very well, I would ask myself "do I realize that this is the only moment, the only opportunity I have right now, to enjoy being alive. And that would usually do the trick.
DI:Yeah that's a really curiously important point, actually.
"Now or never."
TG: It's only now that this can happen.
(9:56...) (DhO)
Phenomenology
Key Milestones. Equanimity beats the heck out of the Dark Night. Stream Entry blew pre-stream entry out of the water. When I first got good access to the formless realms and to really deep jhanas, that was a true blessing. Nirodha Samapatti: AH! Now I had something deeply and profoundly restful and healing. Beginning to understand intrinsic luminosity, centerlessness, etc, in realtime: that truly was an improvement.
Fast forward to today: I can sit at peace, at rest, clear and silent: hard to explain how good that is, simply that, not fancy at all, yet oh so worth it. There is a direct sensate clarity that is vastly better than reality filtered through some other way of processing things. There is a lack of time pressure that is such a load off. Because the thing does itself, that takes all the work out of it. So many questions answered: priceless. So many extremely interesting experiences, fresh and natural, rich and whole: worth everything it took and so much more. The integration of the field without boundaries or special aspects: truly remarkable. (DhO)
Daniel's Practice Log. [Daniel's Practice Log is a long thread that spans from 2012 to 2016, where there are updates of his practice with some phenomenological descriptions, but most of it are Q&A regarding Actual Freedom, Jhana, Powers, MCTB, The Three Doors, etc. There is also a Current Practice Notes section in his personal blog]. (DhO)
Some A&P phenomenology (DhOers). [This is Daniel's OP of a thread where many DhO members gave descriptions of their personal phenomenology ]. I am currently feeling the limits of my own phenomenology and was wondering if I could get a bit of a hand from the group. There are many descriptions of the A&P here, and I go into depth about my thoughts on it in the Diagnosing the A&P Thread (stickied at the top of the Recent Posts list), but I was wondering if anyone would be interested in adding to the criteria and phenomenological description of what happens, with it being more in summary/generic/descriptive form rather than people's long stories of the thing, not that I don't like those, but this would get to be a really long thing to slog through for people just looking for the meat of the thing, so try to keep them short and as to the point as possible.
So, DhO, anyone want to add depths, detail, nuance, elaboration, or your own idiosyncratic aspects to what can happen during the A&P? Critiques of that phenomenology? Need for enhanced terminology? ... Any interesting substages, variants, quirky things, raptures, energetic stuff and the like you hadn't seen mentioned anywhere but happened to you in what you are pretty sure is that general territory would be welcome. (DhO)
My worst DN. My worst Dark Night ever was the first Review cycle after stream entry: totally over the top, lasted a few hours, then dissipated, got a repeat Fruition, and then subsequent cycles still involved the stages, but they were not nearly as bad, and rapidly became a near non-issue, and I even called up the Dark Night stages just by naming the numbers in my head as I got good at them, like going on a roller coaster you bought a ticked for just to see what that felt like, and subsequent new Dark Nights were irritating but not as bad, and cycle after cycle they got better and better. (DhO)
Three interesting shifts post 2003 (Attainments Survey). [Daniel gives a short description (circa 2012) of some post 4th Path shifts, plus his criteria for 4th Path, but the most interesting text is some exchange between DhOers about attainments and practices. Check the link below.] I had three interesting shifts post 2003: these I mentioned in some other post, but the first was when this veil of something felt like it was torn through the back of my head while driving home after work and working out and everything had this unusual sensate clarity to it since, though it is less impressive than it was, probably through getting used to it, then about 6 months later there was this time-aligning shift that dropped away substantial amounts of time pressure, then actually there was this shift about 4 days ago, and I haven't had a bodily twang reaction to any emotive thought or external stimulus since, and there have been a lot of external stimuli, but I have had periods that were similar before, and none lasted, so who knows?
2) My criteria for 4th: no sense of doer, controller, observer, subject, center-point at all, meaning a field devoid of a this side and a that side and it remains that way, such that the field is untangled through clear perception, and all phenomena are simply where they are, exactly as they are, known by themselves (to use unnecessarily complicated language), which is to say they all simply manifest as qualities needing no additional thing called awareness or anything to know them, as they simply do their thing in a way that is totally causal and integrated, as in the field of experience is totally integrated naturally by itself as it happens, which means that there is no split, no divide, no way anything could be divided, as what occurs simply is what is, where it is.
My current modeling thoughts are much more complicated than that, as in some post earlier somewhere, but that for me is still core essential understanding stuff. (DhO)
What I see behind the eyelids. Complex moving colors. I never see darkness. I can even see them in full daylight with eyes open but they are not as predominant. I have been this way as long as I can remember. Sometimes they look like just static, like an old color TV not on a channel. Sometimes they organize into swirls and swirling them is easy. Sometimes they organize by color, such as red, blue, violet, green. Sometimes they organized into more complex, regular patterns, geometric shapes, very intricate designs, images, repeated patterns of regular images, and other very intricate moving patterns. When I don't have a candle handy and I want to do kasina practice I just take an eyelid color and/or image and amplify it and use that as the basis of a kasina and go from there. (DhO)
Nimitta sizes. Mine have varied in size, depending on the jhana and what object I was using. They have tended to arise when I was actually using a Kasina object, though have seen plenty of brief bright white lights and jewel-tone sparkles and other similar things as well, usually lasting no more than seconds.
However, when kasina objects (candle flames, dots on computer screens, pentagrams, plates, the moon, etc.) have been used and the kasina afterimage is then the object, and then the nimitta emerges out of that, it has tended to be rather small, say the size of a pencil eraser if held at arm's length.
When the candle flame afterimage turns into the burning red clean, pure circle, and then tends to be about 2-3 times as wide, say a nickel held at arm's length.
When it becomes the spinning yellow star in the red circle with the green and purple rings around it, then becomes significantly larger when it becomes the black spot, say the size of tennis ball held at arm's length or maybe even as big as a softball held at arm's length.
Then it becomes much larger when the lines around that black spot start forming and swirling slowly around it, like pale golden-white tangents to it, say the size of a pizza-baking pan held at arm's length as it expands to be the many-radially-symmetrical aztec-patterned rainbow flux lines, then fills the whole field as it becomes things like a black hole drawn Cosmos-style in those same rainbow flux lines, or whatever, filling everything. (DhO)
Some energy stuff. I realized that I nearly never talk about my practice here directly, which is interesting and another topic of discussion altogether, but I thought I would give a brief practice update, just in case anyone is curious. It is in extreme summary form.
I spent some 10 months or so dealing almost exclusively with something that coalessed into a black sphere of sorts about 2 inches across that settled into the area of my xyphoid, just sort of between the 3rd and 4th chakras. I could both see it at times and feel it. It began to feel like a bomb of uneasy energy that might go off, and so a very large number of hours were spent trying to figure out what it was, why it was there and what would happen if it went off. It is hard to describe in reasonable form all the places this odd journey into dark things went, but it involved wands, tarot cards, a lot of metta practice, jhana practice, energetic manipulation, waking up with a ghost sitting on my bed (this in my little apartment in Tupelo, MS: nice-seeming black man probably in mid 20's dressed in work clothes of a style that couldn't have been newer than the 1930's) and all sorts of other complex sorts of things. I literally thought about taking a trip out to the SouthWest to find a nice desolate desert to meditate in until it exploded in safety. Finally, after what felt like an absurdly long project all related to one single strange object, a few months ago, in the middle of the night, I woke up and the thing suddenly blasted out in all directions in a rapid burst of stark white light reminiscent of the petronus charm that Harry Potter cast while down by a lake that felt like it tore through my chest, abdomen, head, neck and organs in a truly unpleasant but seemingly healing way, sort of like when you rip through old scar tissue and then gain mobility, except that it felt sort of global. It hasn't returned, and I felt lighter and easier for the whole thing.
Then, within a few days, things moved down, and my left psoas muscle went into spasm again, as it did last year, but this time it locked up and stayed that way most of the time for months, bending my body forward a bit and to the left, such that I literally couldn't fully straighten my body, and it caused all sorts of odd back pain that also involves my left lats and even intracostal muscles on the left lateral side, as well as subdaphragmatic pain just to the left of my xyphoid a few inches. As with last year, I poured meditative things into it: careful energetic, chakral, emotional, etc. investigation with resolutions to cause it to release with extremely dedicated and careful somatic, proprioceptive and emotional attention using all sorts of focuses and emphases from radical acceptance to bruit force. Whereas last year I got it to release in a few hours of this, this time it took a few months. Slowly, slowly, it began to relax.
I am summarizing again a long, involved process that consumed many, may hours of attention all during the day and night as well. I felt like I totally reworked my whole relationship of my legs to my body, of my lower body to everything, and for a while I literally couldn't figure out how to walk normally, as if my balance, leg position, posture, foot position, weight distribution, and the combination of muscles that contributed to that couldn't find any configuration that was normal or correct, like everything about walking was entirely foreign and unnatural, but the spasm was getting slowly better.
I got so that I could feel when it was about to try to lock up again and catch it just as it was starting and it would chill out, only to try it again a few seconds later, and I would catch it again, and it would chill out, repeating and repeating and repeating, day after day, week after week. I tried yoga, stretching, various relaxation poses, such as Constructive Rest, deep tissue massages, and many other things.
Finally, one night on the way home, when my body by the end of my shift was bent in the oddes of ways, I stopped by the little, strange-smelling, 24-hour gym that I have a membership to, and it was deserted, just as I hoped it would be. It was about 3am, and I turned on the sauna and went into their aerobics room and began to dance like a crazy person to my favorite iphone dance mix. At first, the middle of my body refused to respond well, feeling locked, tight, stuck, frozen, particularly lower back and into my pelvic area, but, determined to get something to unblock, I pushed through the tension and pain and finally, slowly, after about 20 minutes, things finally loosened up and then really loosened up, and then I went and stretched out in the hot sauna and the thing finally seemed nearly done. Yeah! I repeated the same thing the next night and that seems to have largely done it. I can now walk normally and even run normally, something that was basically impossible for a few months. What any of this has to do with anything, I have no idea.
It should be noted for those who might try to get all mappy that regular practice cycles have continued in the standard cycling way without seemingly having anything to do with the above two phases: seem generally unrelated, so far as I can tell. Jhanas, ñanas, fruitions, none of it seemed to deal with the black sphere or the back thing at all.
Then I got sick and have been dealing with some unfortunate viral thing for about 6 days: first few days of gastroentestinal upset, now just diffuse muscle aches, sore throat, and general heavy-duty fatigue. That I have worked about 80 very hard and intense hours in the last 8 days hasn't helped at all. If it keeps going for a few more days I will get tested for mono...
... As to an epic struggle or whatever, I am just reporting. I have no great context for those things, no great maps for them, no particular frameworks that I can say are definitive. Find me the book that tells what to do when you start to experience a black sphere there doing that and I will read it. In the meantime: this is all experimental, a work in progress, things that show up and I deal with them as best I can given the tools and hints and intuitions I have available.
As to when I started seeing energetic stuff: the first time was the first time I crossed the A&P as a teenager, and stuff like that has shown up on occasion since in various ways, but I certainly don't see or feel it all the time.
As to things being all full of bliss and happiness and entertaining, well, that sounds nice: what do you suggest? I am interested.
Here's the bottom line so far on that: there is a degree of awareness of this body that is far beyond what I had before. This transformed some things and allowed some other things to be seen clearly that I am extremely glad were seen clearly, but it also substantially dialed up the sense of things unpleasant also, and this body was born, will get sick, feel pain and die. So said the Buddha, so has been demonstrated again and again, so my life has gone, as expected.
The clarity about this is remarkable, the facts of its ordinary aging mammalian aspects being highlighted by that clarity. Thus, things like muscle spasms and sore throats and the like are at once perceived in this much wider context that is as broad as the experience field, which really helps, and there is not that annoying sense of some part of things trying to figure out its vantage point as it pretends to observe or try to get away from pain, which also really helps, but the direct clarity about pain itself is very, very real. We wake up to this ordinary life in all its conventional aspects: do your best to care for this body and mind.
As to the black sphere thing: WTF? I have no idea. I do know that if you get your concentration strong and open up to that side of things by intention or accident, all sorts of odd stuff can arise and you get to deal with it. There are no great maps in that territory that I have found. I have some general principles, some guesses, some intuitions, but no more than that. I had never had anything like that happen before, and I have been meditating seriously for 20 years now. I had to wing it. I do get the sense that, if something magickal is happening, include something magickal in the way you address it. Thus, exploration using various props that happened to be around and happen to catch my interest.
I am pretty sure I can't really explain why I chose the props I did, nor can I easily explain why I did what I did with them. Why did I visualize silver circles of protection in the x, y and z planes forming a sphere around me and then practice controlled explosions in that safe space, testing out what their implications might be? Why did I start to try to visualize an idealized and perfect magickal trainer showing me how to do these things? Why did I suddenly feel compelled to walk into a store in Asheville, scroll through about 100 pages of tarot cards, and finally settle on the Witche's Tarot by Ellen Dugan and learn it to a degree that I had never learned the Tarot before? I couldn't possibly tell you.
Sound crazy? Maybe. It sounds odd to me just writing about it, but then I still have this scientist, skeptic voice in there somewhere from my upbringing that looks at this stuff happening and just can't make heads or tails of it. I stayed totally functional in other ways while this was going on, work was just fine, etc. I learned a lot in the processes and am now happy I went through them. It feels like something good happened, particularly the black sphere thing, like something was cleaned out by it. I feel lighter. Both sagas seem to have ended. What will happen now? I have no idea.
Anyway, I am just reporting. Speaking of why I don't report much: the projection, even small amounts of it, is really, really offputting, even for one just wanting to write about their own practice on thier own forum which is vastly more tolerant of this stuff than basically any other place on the web. I don't promise bliss and entertainment in my book anywhere that I know of. Adventure, definitely, but that is not quite the same as entertainment. I promise blissful states and stages, and these definitely happen. I promise clarity about this body and mind: can be done. However, something about having to constantly wade through people somehow imagining whatever they imagine and then projecting that out is more taxing than I think I generally realize and am generally willing to admit. Notice that there are not a lot of the old, high-level practitioners talking about much here anymore. A few show up on occasion, but many have gone elsewhere, and where, I have no idea.
Thus, while the questions are normal, and the projections are normal, there is something strange about how that just makes one want to wander alone, and some of this is still definitely still wandering, as I haven't promised to have figured out everything, just a very few specific things. (DhO)
Crazy-ass experiences. As to crazy-ass experiences, here's a very short list:
- moving flames around with my mind with very Ghost-Busters-style energy blasts that accompanied the force that moved the flame,
- endless OBE stuff and lucid dream stuff, some of which was straight off the cushion and back to the cushion,
- predicting my wife having a car accident 4 years later accurately,
- hearing and seeing all manner of stuff (from British women chatting in their parlor about the news on the tele to pit preachers on Sunday morning talking about how the Buddhists in the monastery I was staying in would all go to Hell, and much, much more),
- have very profound and powerfully explanatory past-life experiences,
- have some bilocation-type experiences,
- being able to put my "ghost-hand" through a wall with all awareness and sensation perception then embodied in that rather than my usual body,
- being able to call up beyond-orgasmic bliss to roll through my body,
- being able to know to hit the breaks to slow down before I could possible see the deer about to run out in front of me on the way driving home,
- being able to make people do or stop doing various things (very grey morality territory here),
- being able to see and manipulate the energy channels in my body,
- being able to know who has called while the phone is ringing sometimes (lots of people can do that, actually),
- banishing a demon or two (whatever that means),
- the endless crazy A&P stuff with my body exploding into energy and fire-works like experiences, bright lights, seeing through closed eye-lids, shaking, traveling, and many other strange things like that.
- long-range formally-cast intentions to have certain situations resolve within certain parameters,
- being able to feel what the person I was giving a back rub to was feeling and where the pain was,
- resolutions to have various jhanic experiences happen or to get stream entry or whatever,
- general subtle-energy manipulation in my body, rooms, situations, interactions, conversations,
- even more subtle things as strange intuitions about how things will go, about what to do or not do in a certain situation. (DhO)
It was very interesting, but in the end it didn't do for me what just taking 100% sensate full-field ultra-inclusive vipassana practice as object does, nor as much as just being extremely appreciative of the wonder of the sensate world and resolving the feelings in it.
Now, there is more to tantra than that, but it was way beyond what the vast majority of even dedicated tantra aspirants that I have talked to were able to do after years of practice, and so, in my own experience, I found it beautiful, but not more than lots of other things.
I would be interested in the specifics of what particular practices with some instructions lead to what specific effects and how much faster and how this is known beyond the standard propaganda. That sort of thing helps these discussions. (DhO)
Formless-Light Vipassana Jhanas. There is what for lack of a better term I will call formless-light vipassana jhanas, which are really formed jhanas, except that they have the qualities of the formless jhanic perspectives, just not full formlessness, and many attain these and don't recognize that this is what they are attaining.
I will call them 11.4.5-11.4.8 using the ñana.subjhana.subsubjhana notation I am so fond of.
So in 11.4.5 (the 4 makes it the light version, as still in 4, just the 5 aspect of 4, this contrasted with 11.5-11.8 (which is what the original poster is probably interested in, I suspect)) we have the wide open, clear, boundless aspect of 11th. This is best appreciated when looking for it just after 11.3, the mini Dark Night of Equanimity, and is best appreciated by people who are using more panoramic techniques, though the first time I chanced into this I was breath, breath, breath and feet, feet, feet. It is formed, but still the spaciousness, the boundarylessness still predominates.
Next in 11.4.6 things can get very direct, very just as they are where they are, as their own consciousness, their own intrinsic presentation of just what they are, comes to the fore. For instance, when watching a movie and shifting into 11.4.6, one suddenly tends to notice that one is in a movie theater, that there are flashing images on a screen, and notice things like what colors are on the screen, what the lighting in the room is like, the 3D nature of there being a space in the room, the angles the walls make with each other, that sort of thing. It would be very easy to paint or draw in this mode, as you can see just what the colors are of everything without your idea of them being superimposed. Thus, it is still formed, very much so, but the presence of things predominates wherever they are, and it is this presence from which consciousness is falsely implied, as really there is no such thing in this context beyond the things themselves, but I digress...
Next in 11.4.7 the total opposite comes to the fore, this being really something like 11.4.F.3, with F standing in place to signify formless realms, of which 7 is really the 3 aspect of the thing, being inverted, out of phase, totally not aligning with what is going on around. So in this one, where as just one stage before (11.4.6) one was hyper-present to just what was there, now one is really the exact opposite, really tuned out from this. I remember the first time I really noticed how this happens walking around: I was studying in a cafe for a medical school exam during 2nd year and I hit re-observation, had to leave and take a break, as the restlessness got to high, so I decided to go to a place called Silk Road Teahouse for some peppermint tea and a cookie, as was my habit, and somewhere on the journey I shifted into Equanimity, and when I got to the Teahouse I was totally out of phase with everything but oddly fine. It was like the Teahouse and my transactions with the cashier and getting the cookie and the tea was all happening in some sort of very out of phase but totally ok fog, well, not like a fog, but it wasn't registering, not really at all, and something about this was more noticeable than anything about the specifics, which were like they were happening in a dream, and a dream that I wasn't paying attention to really at all except to vaguely marvel on occasion that I somehow as apparently navigating just fine without really having much of a clue or any real interest in what was going on and it didn't matter at all. Were I not a map-freak with a lot of theory and practice background it would have been easy to miss this, as it was in some ways subtle, and we generally don't have great language to talk about those really out-of-it moments in our lives, and what we don't have great language to talk about, we often don't remember.
On sitting down with the tea and cookie it became apparent that I was at that point really, really altered in some way, yet functioning totally normally. There was nobody but me in the teahouse, so I closed my eyes, and suddenly I was clearly in very heavy 8 proper: couldn't say I was there, couldn't say I was not there, and this shifted to what they original poster is now looking for...
I will backtrack and describe the first time I got into real 11.5-11.8 that I remember. It was my last day on my 3rd retreat, a 14-day at MBMC, and it was after the guy played the scratch tape of the stages of insight, and I had already broken through ReObs and was in Equanimity, I was sitting there out beyond noting into just staying with what I will call for lack of better terms fluxing suchness and nothingness, which were trying to synchronize. This is hyper-abstract stuff. Body was long gone as any coherent structure, as was nearly all color except what I will describe vaguely as waves of phantom near-black and true ultra-black, though the color was not really the point, and some of that may be the remembering mind's attempt to put details on something that it is really hard to put details on, but regardless, these two things were trying to synchronize, and at points there was nothing, and this nothing was fluxing or presenting or something in great swaths, and nearly everything was out of phase with this vague presentation anyway, and at points you couldn't even say anything even that out there, as there was nothing you could even call nothing or even be sure there was anything to call anything anything, and these various experiences shifted, fluxed, morphed into one another, and I knew then that if the thing that was trying to get this obviously not-properly synced thing to sync then that without doubt would be stream entry.
I didn't land it, as an hour of that later the lunch bell rang and I had to leave and go back to Thailand, and so it would be next retreat before I would get stream entry, a retreat on which I didn't get into vibrating formless realms, just in case you were were wondering, but apparently didn't need to anyway.
So, back to tea and cookies, I mean 11.F... So I was sitting in the restaurant and clearly there was alternately nothing and then something there in a swimming, swirling sort of way, subtly, panoramically, as at this point I was somewhere up in the high end of what I call 3rd path, which was really different from the early ones, and so things were a lot more calm and clear and subtle in some ways, but it was like the out of phaseness of real full-on nothingness, total body/teahouse/etc gone nothingness was oscillating in and out of real 8th, that can't even say anything about it except it is beyond nothingness and that's about it mode, and then all that calmed down, I ate my cookie, drank my tea, picked up my books, read a bit, and shortly thereafter I suddenly finished up that insight cycle.
The point I am trying to make is that it is common for something 11.4.5-8th-esque to show up even when in formed space during the last little bit of the progress of insight, and whether or not someone is the sort of person that tends to incline to what is way out there, way out of touch with this ordinary space of ordinary form, out beyond the easy and familiar landmarks of things such as form and even space, then they might, if they are skilled, in the right frame of mind, inclining to that, and/or have strong concentration (as that really helps), they may convert those into oscillating, fluxing, trying-to-sync formless realms, which are at once really, really far out and also can scare people, as they can be creepy for those who like things like a coherent body image while they are conscious, as well as an awareness of their environment, so this can cause instability of them for many.
They actually naturally tend to lead relatively rapidly to the next path (or stream entry if that is what you are working on), and I suspect that had I even a few more hours on that 3rd retreat of sitting time I would have gotten it, but I didn't know that, so the next 6 months were a bit of a mess, but that's how we learn, eh? and now that I have passed this on hopefully you, should you find yourself in a similar situation, will stay another day or two...
... Just for time reference, that day with the cookie at Silk Road Tea House was during 2nd year of medical school sometime, probably late, which was the Spring of 2001 or so.
In contrast to my early meditative days, by that point I had done all sorts of serious practice, lots of retreats (though most pretty short), thousands of hours of daily practice, had true formless realms easily in daily life (from late 1996 to somewhere in the 2005 range I ritualistically hit all 8 jhanas nearly every night when laying down to go to sleep just to make sure to keep up the skill-set in the face of graduate and post-graduate education's assaults on my time and because they are fun and healing. There is something about repetition that really helps nail things down), had NS easily in daily life, and had cycled and cycled and cycled basically all the damn time, going through what felt like path after path (at that point they rolled through as quickly as every 2 weeks at points...), had periods where the whole field of experience seemed totally empty and integrated (or nearly totally so...), with nearly all boundaries dissolved (only to have them show the subtle flaws in all that later with the next cycle), and was seriously hitting mindfulness with everything I had as often as I could, as I was really charged up to get to get to something beyond all that at the time.
In short, I was totally obsessed with this stuff and with pushing myself to perceive things I hadn't perceived yet clearly and to map better than anyone ever had in the history of the world (this is, unfortunately in some ways, not an exaggeration), so I meticulously mentally cataloged all this stuff as it happened according to this elaborate, Bill-Hamilton-inspired classification system, being the total phenomenology-junky that I was, with a desperate need to prove myself fueled by all sorts of powerful internal forces...
Strange times those were.
Regarding the comment that I had simplified my system of nomenclature: the one I use internally just uses numbers and I know what they mean by internal context, so I slipped a bit and reverted to that above. For instance, I know that to me 11.4.7 means what I say above, (meaning Equanimity ñana, 4th subjhana, Nothingness subsubjhana), and would never confuse it with, say, Equanimity ñana, 4th subñana (A&P), Misery subsubñana, for instance, which those numbers without further clarification could easily imply... (DhO)
Choosing different working assumptions for Morality, Concentration and Insight. When practicing things related to training in Morality, meaning everything to do with things that are not insight practice: assume Free Will, assume choices, assume that choices will have consequences and take responsibility for those.
When practicing the Concentration states: assume Free Will, assume choices, assume that you can stabilize your mind and attain to states as you choose them.
When practicing at the low to moderate end of Insight practices: assume good technique, assume that effort pays off, assume that choosing to notice the Three Characteristics is helpful, or however you conceptualize your practices that I would put into the group of insight practices.
When at the high end of Insight practices: notice that everything happens on its own, according to conditions, and always has, including all choices, including all questions about choices, including all sense of effort, all sense of Free Will, all sense of doing, all sense of knowing, all sense of every single thing, as this has always been how things are. Allow this knowledge to take over and pervade everything all the way through and without exception.
There is something truly wonderful about the whole field happening on its own, that undivided naturalness, that directness, that clarity, that deliciousness, like when a Thai massage therapist moves our limbs for us, it feels good. When everything is like that, that feels even better. It is not that pain doesn't occur, as it does, but knowing directly and totally that the whole field always just did itself really is mighty fine.
[Later on in this "The Illusion of Choice" thread, Daniel gave thumbs up to a fellow poster's nice summary on the (not exactly) temporal sequence:
1. The Non-choice of choice. ("I have free will and I have no choice about this.")
2. The choice of choice. ("I'll use my free will wisely.")
3. The choice of no-choice ("I choose to recognize my lack of free will.")
4. The Non-choice of no-choice. ("Free will? Huh? How would THAT work?")](DhO)
Causality. That reality is causal is a core tennant of Buddhism. It appeals to many scientists as well. That causality is too complex to be fully understood is also a tennant of Buddhism, with the workings of Karma being one of the Four Imponderables, as there are too many factors that weight on what happens in each moment. That causality is the law of the land and there is no free will also works well in practice and holds up to rigorous insight practice and investigation, and ends up being one of the core foundations of deep wisdom.
From an experiential point of view:
- The sensations that seem to imply will and effort arise on their own, naturally, as part of the field of causality.
- The sensations that seem to imply effortlessness arise on their own, naturally, as part of the field of causality.
- Notice the sensations of will and effort arise and vanish on their own.
- Notice the sensations of effortlessness and naturalness arise and vanish on their own.
- Notice intentions arise and precede actions. They arise on their own: clearly perceive this and the mystery is clarified directly.
From a dependent origination point of view, it is on Ignorance of the bare sensate truth of these things that Volitional Formations depend, meaning the sense of a will, a doer, a watcher, a compounded, separate, continuous entity.
Perceive things really, really clearly, and this Ignorance is ended by that clear perception. (DhO)
Temporary speech problems. I had this odd thing where after my last retreat in 2003 it felt like I had two speech centers, one on each side of my brain, and they both would send a stream of word intentions to the speaking center, and these would sometimes be the same, in which case everything went well, and sometimes be totally different, in which case what came out would be a jumbled mess of the two sometimes and sometimes some odd synthesis of them that was different from both, but it was quite disconcerting at points, as it happened post-intention, as it were, so there was no real controlling it. It lasted a few weeks and gradually faded, but I still occasionally have moments when it happens. (DhO)
Recommended Books & Suttas
- A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, by Narada Maha Thera and edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi
- A Critical Analysis of the Jhanas, by Bhante Gunaratana
- A Heart as Wide as the World, by Sharon Salzberg
- A Map of the Journey, by Venerable Sayadaw U Jotika
- A Path with Heart, by Jack Kornfield
- A short introduction of Buddhist meditation lineages in Myanmar: From late 19th Century to Present, by Ariyajyoti Bhikkhu
- A Still Forest Pool, by Achaan Chah
- A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Acintita Sutta, in the Anguttara Nikaya [AN 4.77])
- After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield
- Anupada Sutta (MN 111), “One by One as They Occurred”
- Bahiya Sutta, in the Udana (Ud 1.10)
- Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
- Bodhisattvabhumi, by Asanga
- Buddhist Meditation in Theory and Practice, by Paravahera Vajiranana Mahathera
- Clarifying the Natural State, by Dakpo Tashi Namgyal
- Condensed Chaos, by Phil Hine
- Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
- Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
- Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross
- Dhammapada, one of the most widely read collections of the Buddha’s sayings
- Dharma Paths, by Venerable Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
- Digha Nikaya, sutta 10, usually referred to as DN 10 (The Long Discourses of the Buddha). Morality, Concentration and Wisdom
- Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation, by B. Alan Wallace
- Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment, by Jay Michaelson
- Five Ways to Know Yourself, by Shinzen Young (PDF)
- For a Future to be Possible, by Thich Nhat Hanh
- Great Disciples of the Buddha, their lives, their works, their legacy, by Nyanaponika Thera, Hellmuth Hecker and Bhikkhu Bodhi
- How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan
- Internal Moving Healing Manual of Instruction: Stopping Your Pain & Other Unpleasant Things, by Robert Harry Hover
- I Am That, by Nisargadatta
- In This Very Life, by Sayadaw U Pandita
- Introduction to Tantra, by Lama Yeshe
- It's Ok to Die, by Dr Monica Williams-Murphy
- Journey without Goal, by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
- Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, by Pabongka Rinpoche
- Light on Enlightenment, by Christopher Titmuss
- Loving-Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, by Sharon Salzberg
- Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex, by John Stevens
- Magick without Tears, by Aleister Crowley
- Mahasatipatthana Sutta (“Greater Discourse on Mindfulness”) of the Long Discourses of the Buddha (or Digha Nikaya [DN]), usually referred to as DN 22.
- MN 111 “One by One as They Occurred”, as translated by Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi. Sutta 111 of the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (or Majjhima Nikaya [MN]
- MN 121, called “The Shorter Discourse on Voidness”.
- Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited (tenth edition, 2015), by Sam Vaknin
- Manual of Insight, by Mahasi Sayadaw
- Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, Revised Edition, by Daniel M. Ingram
- “One Fortunate Attachment”, Sutta 131 in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (MN 131)
- Mindfulness in Plain English, by Venerable Bhante Gunaratana
- Modern Magick, by Donald Michael Kraig
- Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi
- My Years of Magical Thinking, by Lionel Snell
- On the Path to Freedom, by Sayadaw U Pandita
- Path to Deliverance, by Nyanatiloka
- Patisambhidamagga: insight stages in the Pali Canon
- Practical Insight Meditation, by Mahasi Sayadaw
- Real Magic, Supernormal, Entangled Minds, by Dean Radin
- Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas, by Leigh Brasington.
- Saccavibhanga Sutta: The Analysis of the Truths (MN 141)
- Saints & Psychopaths, by Bill Hamilton
- Samaññaphala or “Fruits of the Contemplative Life” (Sutta DN 2)
- Satipatthana Sutta, translated as “Four Foundations of Mindfulness”, or “Frames of Reference” (MN 10)
- Secret of the Vajra World, by Reginald Ray
- Shift into Freedom, by Loch Kelly
- Sitting with Demons - Mindfulness, Suffering, and Existential Transformation, by Sebastian Voros
- Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama, edited and narrated by Francisco Varela
- Start Where You Are, by Ani Pema Chödrön
- Sutta Nipata [SN] 2.14
- Swallowing the River Ganges, by Matthew Flickstein
- TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis, by Ian Stewart and Vann Joines
- Teachings of a Buddhist Monk, by Ajahn Sumedho
- The 31 Planes of Existence, by Venerable Bhante Suvanno, transcribed by Jinavamsa
- The Art of Dreaming, by Carlos Castaneda
- The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw, by Erik Braun
- The Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav
- The End of Materialism, by Charles Tart
- The Fire Kasina, by Shannon Stein and Daniel M. Ingram
- The Intention Experiment, by Lynne McTaggart
- The Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Gampopa
- The Jhanas in Theravada Buddhist Meditation, by Bhante Gunaratana
- The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom. The details of the bhumi model can be found in various Mahayana texts
- The Light of Wisdom, by Padmasambhava with commentary by Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche
- The Long Discourses of the Buddha, or the Digha Nikaya, sutta 10 (DN 10)
- Sutta 20 in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (MN 20) is called “The Removal of Distracting Thoughts”
- The Mind Illuminated, by Culadasa
- The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation, by Chögyam Trungpa
- The Path of Serenity and Insight, by Bhante Gunaratana
- The Roots of Wisdom, by Tsai Chih Chung
- The Science of Enlightenment, by Shinzen Young
- The Sense of Being Stared At, by Rupert Sheldrake
- The Stormy Search for the Self, by Christina Grof
- “The Supreme Net: What the Teaching Is Not”, found in the beginning of the Long Discourses (DN 1)
- The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche
- The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
- The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
- The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles, by Gregory Bassham
- Tracing Back the Radiance, by Chinul as translated by Robert Buswell
- Training the Mind, by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
- Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
- Transcending Madness, by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
- Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, by David Treleaven & Willoughby Britton
- Traveling: An Accidental Expert's How to Leave Your Body Handbook, by Alan Guiden
- When Things Fall Apart, by Ani Pema Chödrön
- Vimuttimagga (Path of Freedom)
- Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana, by Shaila Catherine
- Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification), by Buddhaghosa
- Wonders of the Natural Mind, by Tenzin Wangyal
- Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki
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