Egor Azanov wrote:
First. The model of cessation event from The Mind Illuminated book.
1. Our mind is composed of multiple sub-minds organized in complex forest-like hierarchies.
2. These sub-minds can form committees with different agendas/intentions.
3. They debate, and the winning committee takes the executive seat and from now on is both observer and producer of experience.
4. Other sub-minds either follow the winner or shut up and hide.
5. With training in concentration we can unite more and more sub-minds under the same intention.
6. Cessation event happens when there is a committee of sub-minds as observer but for some reason they do not produce any experience. So it's blank, no space, no time.
7. But this cessation event is observed only by the committee that is now in the executive seat. Those hiding do not have the direct knowledge of emptiness.
8. Subsequent cessation events are (hopefully) observed by more and more sub-minds, eventually by all of them as one.
This, for example, can explain why for some people first cessation produces major changes in thinking and behavior, and for some only minor if at all. There can be a very small but powerful "meditator committee" that effectively shuts down every other part of mind but itself. This "meditator" observes cessation, he is happy and his belief in himself may actually get reinforced, but the "actor" remains just the same.
The more separated our beings are, the more different committees there are, the more unification we need for cessation to produce real changes.
Hmm, I've had thoughts along these lines when trying to understand why that shift may be more significant for some than others. Is this right out of Culadasa's new book then?
It's one piece of the puzzle which has been leading me to view waking up and growing up as synergistic rather than
1) simply overlapping (i.e., higher levels of standard development become awakening as is somewhat implied by Cook-Greuter's work the last time I looked at her paper anyway) or
2) totally independent (a view that I associate with MCTB, more or less).
It seems to me that developing a more coherent inner world (one in which all the subsystems of personality have conscious relationships with each other rather than being isolated) results in more profound energetic/perceptual shifts from meditation, and these shifts also make it easier to develop inner coherence (and outer coherence in relationships) because the meditative shifts tend to produce greater tolerance for ambiguity and appreciation of complexity which makes it easier for these subsystems to get to know each other.
An important caveat to this is that meditative baseline shifts also in my experience, through rendering our mode of experiencing more fluid, grant access to pseudo-stable transpersonal states which can become hide-outs where we avoid inter and intra personal relational work (spiritual bypassing). Interestingly, I'm not sure that there is an analogy here with 'growing up' as it seems to me that the trajectory of growing up leads to greater tolerance for ambiguity, deeper appreciation of the way that things exceed our ability to map them, and thus growing up tends to tilt the system more in a direction of waking up. In other words, while I see how waking up could be detrimental to growing up because of the increased capacity for lovely hide-outs (spiritual bypassing) the converse seems to be not the case-- the more grown up, the easier it should be to wake up and the more easily waking up can be generalized. <--- that's my intuition anyhow.
