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January 24, 2013 at 10:41 am #861
Hello, everyone. I like the new forum. Though I make no promises to keep up the thing, here’s my latest practice journal.
Some background:
Got stream-entry last April. Got technical 2nd path while on retreat back in June. Started learning (vipassana-)jhana over the summer and got 3rd path back in October. This matured and deepened, and it felt like there was a baseline shift around the end of November, at which point it was possible for me to cover the entire jhanic arc and to land in the neighborhood of Nirodha samapatti.
Current Practice:
Now that I’ve managed to cover the entire jhanic arc, I’m attempting to deepen my powers of samatha and samadhi. I find that every time I do this, reality comes forward in higher resolution, like swapping out the video cards on your PC. It also seems to help whatever I’m encountered in meditation filter into other parts of my life, leading to those all-important baseline shifts.
My current template for practice is the Anapansati Sutta. Here’s my procedure for practice:
- 1. Lay flat on the floor. This is a new habit I started because I’m having a lot of back and neck problems, and there’s no way for me to sit that’s not distracting. I find I can very deeply relax the body this way, and just a week of meditating like this has caused a lot of the tension in the neck to loosen up. Only trick is, I have to do it second thing in the morning (after downing a big cup of coffee), otherwise it’s too easy to fall asleep.
2. Good wishes for people near and far. I only started incorporating this into my practice recently. It’s good to return to the purpose of all this, which is to cultivate and spread happiness. And I remind myself that if the difficult people in my life were happier – if they had true happiness, which comes from within – my life would be easier, too. So I’ve become attached to this part of the practice. I think it’s important.
3. Chill OUT. This is so important. I used to just jump in and do machine-gun-style noting or just fly up the jhanic arc. But the mind is able to see so much more when it’s calm, and the mind won’t get calm if the body is agitated. It’s like sitting on the edge of a deep pond. You need the water to get very still so you can see the bottom clearly. So I spend about 20-25 minutes going through the entire body, feeling the breath energy as it manifests in every little part. While I’m doing this, I’m releasing any tension there, any sense of pushing or pulling the breath. This requires perception, judgment, and decision. Generally, the more you do this, the better you get at seeing whatever might interfere with meditation, and the better you get at releasing it.
4. Then I just follow the breath in and out of the whole body. There’s the tendency for the attention to contract to one spot, so then I push it back out to the body. If the attention goes beyond the body, I bring it back to the body. Once the attention lines up with the body – it’s like the body is a kasina – 1st jhana is very likely to occur and to occur with a lot of force. I know I’m there because it usually blows all the pain out of my body. All the energy “blockages” – feelings of tension or whatever – are gone, and the whole thing is luminous, even transparent to the eye of awareness.
Once the jhanas get going, there’s very little sense of making them happen. If I do the jhanas at the level of access concentration (an oxymoron for some, but it does seem to be a real thing), I can force myself from one jhana to the next and back down. Doing it this way is more like running on pavement, hitting a patch of ice, and then you stop running and just see how far you slide. And when you’ve gone as far as your momentum takes you, you come back. So once I’m in the 1st jhana, the rapture will either turn over into the ease of the 2nd jhana on its own, or, if I haven’t extinguished all the pushing and pulling with enough diligence, it’ll just kind of break apart. So I’ve managed to spend some time in 2nd jhana this way so far, but only once.
Benefits:
As I mentioned, it’s done wonders for the physical pain. I find I’m unlikely to get frustrated with this approach, even if jhana doesn’t arise, because it’s so relaxing and intrinsically enjoyable. I’ve been practicing more since starting this approach, just because it feels so damn nice and gives me a strong hit of something I’ve needed for awhile.
Off-the-cushion practice:
The Body Breathing: Off-the-cushion practice is very similar in some ways. I return to the sensation of the body breathing as a whole. This can seem so difficult sometimes. I’ve literally found myself wondering, “Where the hell is the breath? How do I feel things?” I never realized I was so dumb in this regard before. Even when I’m doing formal practice, there can be this mystery about it, because I’m so obviously caught up in my concept or mental image of what the breath should be. But it’s right there! It’s so immediate. So it’s a game: okay, how fast can I get to the sense of the breath in the body as a whole?
I was surprised to find the practice is in some ways similar to Kenneth’s instructions in the Direct Path videos, of taking the body as a whole in a loose way and feeling for the energy blockages, and just resting the attention there. The main difference is that, in this practice, when I find a blockage – which I interpret as a bodily fabrication, i.e., some unnecessary sense of doing around the breath or body – I see if I can relax it and bring the whole system down a notch. Doing this while watching TV or a movie is a fun game. How much attention can I keep on the media, and how much attention can I keep on the body as a whole? It’s interesting to watch the bliss arise from this and then experience the disconnect between that bliss and whatever I’m watching.
Cut the shit: Another very important off-the-cushion practice I’ve been doing: shutting down the bullshit stories before they start. This is a very interesting practice, because it involves multiple mental and physical faculties, and because it reveals something important about the attachment to bullshit.
So the trick here is to stop the story before it gets going. If you get yourself worked up about something, it’s kind of too late. You’re aroused, and that tends to lead to more arousal, so even if you stop the mental stuff, the body is still jacked up, so more mental stuff is going to show up, and you’ll have to stop that too, and if you’re unlucky, this will go on for a whole day. Better not to let it start. So you have to have the discernment and wisdom here to say, “Okay, I see this is a precursor to some bullshit, so I’m stopping this right here. ” Not just “letting it go”. Actually cutting it off with a hard, “NO!”, and then replacing it with the thought of something more skillful, like how lucky I am to be alive, and how many things around me there are to be grateful for.
The interesting part is to see what feelings arise here. Usually there’s some general feeling like, “But I have to think about this bullshit! This bullshit is so important!” And that’s really important not just to observe but also to understand on a kind of molecular, value-based level, because that’s the microscopic shit that keeps rebirth going on. If you break those connections – those feelings of things being that important – you … win. Unhappiness can’t arise. So I’m paying more attention to this minutiae now.
Okay! That’s my stuff. I really don’t know if this is getting me closer to “technical 4th path” or not, and, contrary to the title of this post, I’d have to say that matters just a teensy bit less to me right at the moment. Not because I think paths are pointless, but rather because I’m pretty engrossed right now with looking at things on a microscopic level, tightening things up, getting to reality at a much higher resolution, etc.
And I’d just like to say that I am SO grateful to not have to break this post up. And I’m also grateful to be able to use text formatting in here. And it’s lovely to be able to drop s- and f-bombs! This is really nice. I hope Wetpaint stop acting like douchebags and let us have the contents of the old version back, but what a deliverance it is not to have to use that platform anymore.
January 28, 2013 at 8:35 am #975I just had a session that Sucked Ass. I thought I would describe it, because Suck Ass sessions are often more amusing than Really Awesome sessions.
So, I really didn’t feel like meditating! I dragged myself out of bed at 6, even though I was dreaming about preparing some delicious chocolate and vanilla dessert. I abandoned that, because I’m dedicated to the dharma, damnit. Got up, had my breakfast, had my coffee, set the timer, and got ready to bust up some dukkha.
About 15 mins into my 45 min session, I realized I had barely meditated yet. I was pretty much only daydreaming. Ironically, many of these daydreams were about how awesome a meditator I am.
Anapanasati wasn’t getting any traction, so I decided to switch to freestyle noting. Unfortunately I’ve gotten really good at noting with one part of my mind and with the other thinking about god-only-knows. So I switched to noting out loud. Turns out I’ve “mastered” that technique, too, so I got up and walked and noted out loud.
As I’m walking and noting, I notice a good chunk of my mind is still off somewhere else, having fantasies about things, fantasizing about talking about meditation with other people! Unreal!
So I stop and give myself a pep talk. “Look, however great this fantasy feels, is this fantasy really more important than seeing through the veil? Is it really more important than true happiness?” I had to admit it was not as important as any of these things.
So I stood in the center of the room, closed my eyes, and attempted to feel everything around me all at once. When you’re hunting, you practice something called splatter-vision, where you take a loose, soft look off in the distance. Nothing in particular is in focus, but it allows you to see movement more easily than staring at individual things. Here, I was practicing splatter-awareness, not caring about any particular object, but just looking for the ceaseless anicca in things.
Unfortunately right at the moment I heard the words “…and he looks for the ceaseless anicca in things!” go through my head. DAMNIT!
I think Shinzen Young said, “The good meditation is the one you just did.” That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it!
January 28, 2013 at 10:59 am #977Hilarious! I always have a session like this soon (or immediately) after having a “perfect” sit in which everything goes silent and I rise through the jhanas all the way to heaven, and come back down and think, now I’m really, really getting it. And then this happens. Except I’m not as tough on myself as you are; I let the bullshitting run away with me and then think, oh well, if I sit long enough it’ll stop. Which, in fact, it does sometimes, but not always.
I compare it to golf (which I did very rarely when I was younger). I would hit the ball off the tee and it would go a country mile, with a nice satisfying “crack” as the club made contact. I might even hit the next shot beautifully as well. But almost immediately I’d start dubbing, missing shots, taking out huge hunks of turf–you get the idea. Be well.
January 28, 2013 at 3:54 pm #982Sometimes it works to use the reminder, “You can think about that later.” Repeat as necessary.
January 29, 2013 at 8:41 pm #1024Did some walking and noting tonight. Meditation felt more powerful than usual. Disinterest and detachment became strong. I remember looking at a bottle of wine in my kitchen and feeling general disgust for all sensual pleasure. (Wouldn’t surprise me if that was the disgust ñana.)
I hit something that felt like Equanimity ñana, so I sat down, closed my eyes, ceased noting, and just felt what there was to be felt. The entire physical and mental universe showed up “over there”. I thought back to how much emotional discomfort I had been in that afternoon on the drive home from work, and how different it felt now. I thought, “All the world does is hurt me.” And then a bit of sadness welled up.
I thought that was really interesting. Here I was in this place that felt like total detachment and disidentification, but really there was this little bit of covert identification involved. There was a subtle me vs. the world, with a me pushing the world away. That was a good lesson. I have to look there more.
I feel pushed hither and thither lately by mental states and mental attitudes. First I believe this. Then I believe that. Then I’m uncertain. Mostly this has annoyed me, but now I think it’s a good thing. Happiness can only come from within, but when we turn within, we only see more impermanence. So how deep does it go? How far down do I have to go before I find that resting spot? Until I become thoroughly disillusioned with being tossed around by the contents of my mind, it’s a moot point.
January 30, 2013 at 10:30 am #1032Did the same thing this morning: walked and noted for 30 mins. Got to a similar, albeit unstable, point of dispassion and detachment toward things. Had a thought to the effect of, “Why can’t I be this way all the time?”
Concentration was coming and going. It seemed like there were periods of maybe 3 or 4 minutes where the concentration was really on. Awareness and the thing would pull apart. There was a sense of observing things from nowhere. A bit of reflection which I would just note as “reflection”. Then I’d snap back into the experience and be lost there a bit, slow down the noting, make the attention more specific, really see what was going on, and then I’d start to pull out of it again. There were periods of being embedded in fantasy, some with strong emotional content, but there was more dispassion and detachment overall.
At one point I was really zeroing in on the sensations of lifting and moving and pressing the legs – not even noting it, just looking at the whole process really closely, doing my best to see it all as not-self. Where does that sense of free will come in? What does choice look like? It’s hard to say. One can push it back to desire. The desire arises, along with a quick burst of thoughts and mental images that seem to imply doing.
February 4, 2013 at 11:55 am #10912/2/13
Two hour insight session, 15 mins walking, 45 sitting, 15 walking, 45 sitting. Here’s what happened:The first 15 mins were filled with the usual ruminations about practice, progress, maps, comparing myself to other meditators, and fantasies of inferiority and superiority. But each one of these diversions made me smile – especially the inferiority/superiority ones – and I happily welcomed each of these burning passions to enter awareness where they were immediately extinguished. Separation between mind and body was drastic: a thought would arise, there would be negative affect, negative estimation, and unpleasant feeling in the body. Each was noted. The bodily sensation persisted, but there was no confusion between the affect and the bodily sensation. Feelings of anxiety or displeasure could continue in the body, but the mind was unimpressed.
I sat and the bubble of space expanded, first taking my limbs, then my torso, then my head, then my thoughts and feelings. There were fine vibrations everywhere, and the breath felt like silk. Anxiety arose. My heart started pounding. There was a knot in my stomach. I pictured a revolver with a cocked hammer. I watched the way this anxiety manifested – the combination of physical and mental sensations and desires and sensations of doing – seeing the impermanence and lack of control in all of it, and eventually it dissipated. I can’t remember precisely what happened next, but I remember there being a back and forth between a sense of doing and a sense of abandoning. A sense like something had to happen, and the observation of that sensation. A sense of agency, and then a sense of agencylessness as the doing was noticed. By this point I wasn’t doing much noting – just a few notes every minute or so – I was mostly just observing, and if I got knocked off of concentration, I just noted a little more and jumped back in.
When I got up to walk, I began to feel impinged upon by unpleasant feelings and thoughts. I got lost in fantasies about things. I went back to noting out loud or noting silently. When I was sitting, I had wondered a few times if I was reaching the end or had already done so. Now I felt very unenlightened, very humbled, but I just kept noting all this.I sat again. I thought of a line from the Pink Floyd song, “Learning to Fly“: “Fatal attraction that’s holding me fast, how can I escape this irresistible grasp?” I gave myself a short pep talk. I quickly convinced myself through a series of thoughts and mental images that my self-image – whatever shape it takes – is unable to support the weight of my expectations. That kind of thing is just too fragile to support happiness. And I needed very little convincing of this, because I’ve seen it over and over and over again. Much of the sadness I felt was the disappointment of realizing this was true, that life was never going to be to be for me what I wanted it to be, but that didn’t mean I needed to be unhappy. It was time to let it go.
I returned to an awareness of the present and noted “thinking.”
The first thing that went was the feeling of tension in my stomach. I first noticed it was gone, because I had a thought about something I have to do later today, and when I looked to my stomach to notice the tension, it didn’t arise. There was another thought, this time of the past. Again, I expected the tension to arise, but it didn’t. A few moments later, the vibrations in my hands stopped. I hadn’t even noticed they were vibrating until they turned off, like someone threw a switch. At this point, everything from the chest down was perfectly still. The chest and the head quickly followed suit. I pictured my body being buried in bricks and concrete. I tried to find my body, but there was only the breath, a column descending to some spot far, far below me. The radiator made a “click”, and my body reflexively jumped (I have a sensitive startle reflex), but there was no chain of sensations following it. It was perfectly still.
Now the only fabrication occurring was in my mind. Some curiosity and uncertainty about what was happening. Some sense of doing or attempting. But those things seemed to be shutting down one by one. Soon there was just a sense of the observer and very little else. A sentence began to pass through my mind, a word every four or five seconds: “And … that’s … all … she …” I remember anticipating the last word (“wrote?”), but it never came. A bullet fired through the air slammed into sand. It just stopped. Everything. I don’t think I lost consciousness. But the stillness was near-perfect, and all dukkha was gone.
Some time later – I don’t know how long – I opened my eyes and observed the time. It was 10:07. I looked around the room. Everything seemed perfectly normal, but the mind and body were very still. A bit of uncertainty arose, and I investigated my experience a little bit. There was very little sense of self to be observed at any of the sense doors. The mind wandered a little bit and came back. There was no sense of an “I” who had somehow transgressed into distraction and then brought itself back. To be “here” and not to be “here” was as natural as the weather. There were a few minutes left on the timer. I spent them either gently looking around the room, or closing my eyes and watching the arising and passing mental sensations.
The thought occurred to me, “I’m off the ride.”
February 4, 2013 at 9:02 pm #1093I completed the 4th path.
This is a wonderful experience – very worthwhile.
Thank you, all of you, for your wisdom and support.
February 4, 2013 at 9:26 pm #1094Awesomeness. Does that make 3 this year so far?
February 4, 2013 at 9:43 pm #1095No, I did the first three last year.
It was good talking with you last week, by the way. Our chat gave me some inspiration to really go for it. Thanks.
February 4, 2013 at 9:46 pm #1096No I mean, 3 people so far this year!
February 4, 2013 at 10:08 pm #1097You, me, and who else?
February 4, 2013 at 10:29 pm #1098Andy
February 4, 2013 at 10:52 pm #1099Jim. Add me on Skype. You know my Skype name. Just curious to hear more about this. Did you talk to Abre after this happened?
February 5, 2013 at 12:23 am #1101So, most of the guys I could relate to in my own practice are gone now…
*sob*
No, really, this is inspiring sice I’ve been suspecting for a while that further development ( for myself at least) is a myth.Am I correct that all tree of you were confused and lost just a few months ago?
(I think I remember Aquanin was.) - 1. Lay flat on the floor. This is a new habit I started because I’m having a lot of back and neck problems, and there’s no way for me to sit that’s not distracting. I find I can very deeply relax the body this way, and just a week of meditating like this has caused a lot of the tension in the neck to loosen up. Only trick is, I have to do it second thing in the morning (after downing a big cup of coffee), otherwise it’s too easy to fall asleep.
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