Awakening - Emotions vs Suffering

There are tons of maps - every tradition has excellent maps (ETA: that's actually an arbitrary statement based on almost no data). But people don't apply them well. Even when they are very detailed people tend to over evaluate their development.

The problem, in my experience is:
you cannot comprehend the parts you haven't actually experienced, but you think you can. Like meditators desperately looking for path moments and thinking 'I had at least three moments when the world seemed to blink, therefore I'm at third path' or 'I hate rituals so I must be beyond attachment to rites and rituals'. The understanding you have of the territory you are in is totally tangled with your ego and blindness.

A good, experienced teacher can tell you, often, but may not tell you because it leads to obsession with ranking and comparing, which is trappy and disruptive to community because people naturally want to include and exclude others.

An experienced teacher is not someone who thinks they went through the same territory last year. Ones understanding changes over years and decades. I still am not qualified. When I thought I was I was even less qualified.

One thing that tends to help people is to tell them 'not long now, keep working and you'll be done soon.'. This is only slightly true (in that difficult phases in practice are inevitably eventually followed by more peaceful phases). But there's a tendency in some circles to tell people they will wake up and be done and suffered will end, and that's simply not true.

Some of the most frustrated people I've met over the years were told by teachers that they were 'all done', and then spent years floundering around wondering why they were suffering so much (due to ongoing purification combined with deeper perception, greater sensitivity, and sometimes not having a good basis of practice and training or dropping practice because one thought one was done, and unwillingness to give up unhealthy patterns.)

I'm more a fan of 'practice now with what's present' for some of those reasons. And perhaps 'if you think you're awake you're not nearly as awake as you think you are'. There should be a map that just highlights all the traps and errors and hindrances along the way. lol.

@ Ona great to have you participating here again lately! I really appreciate your perspective.

@ Mathew, I liked your babel reference and I think I get your concern about friction arising from folks who share similar experiences but are supported by different sanghas which label and value similar experiences in very different ways. I am picturing a Zen guy and a Prag dharma gal discussing the same experience and the Zen guy is like 'yeah all those lights and energy pulses are just makyo, you're supposed to just keep practicing and not be attached to them' and the prag dharma gal being like 'no that is an a&p event and it's really significant and it means I need to keep practicing till I get to SE!".

Hey, notice the common denominator in both interpretations? hehehe

Seriously though I get the impulse, in response to this 'problem' of communication, to create a single comprehensive map that everyone can agree on. But the thing is, I think that impulse comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how maps work. In my experience it's much more realistic to, as Ona says, meet folks where they are. Some folks can see the natural limits of maps and models and therefore don't expect them to be comprehensive and in their communication they try to listen past differences in terminology and view and some folks get stuck on differing interpretation paradigms even when they are sharing similar experiences and a similar practice. So it goes!

@jake - nice to see you around again too

If feel something useful has been said a couple times here, I'll paraphrase: if a map promotes practice it's good. If the map deters practice it's bad. My apologies if this does not adequately summarize the value of the preceding conversation.

matthew sexton wrote: My point was that these two guys reporting different experiences of being awakened (problematic emotions are gone vs emotions are there but are not a problem), to me, sound like perhaps two guys in different places on the same map.

That's what the one with problematic emotions gone (or reporting so) would LIKE you to think... I agree with everything that's been said above but would also add, different people need different things. That's also why formal universalising mapping is invalid. Everyone starts from a very different place, and what needs to happen for that person to be free/awake will be totally different and maybe the opposite of what it is for someone else. To take some really obvious examples, someone might need to be more disciplined, someone might need to chill out more. Someone might need to start doing rites and rituals, someone might need to let go of their attachment to them. And etc etc in deeper and more significant ways.

'Awakening' is obviously hard to define. But one of the things that has been clear that it did for me that hasn't changed over a few years is that one aspect of 'the end of seeking' is fundamentally trusting that whatever 'direction' your practice takes you post-awakening (and before, although it was harder to see at the time) is right and as it should be - no matter how other people define their own awakening.

If that was obvious and true to everybody, maybe half the churn on meditation boards would evaporate, doubling the signal to noise. Well, I don't know what the actual number is, but it would be good.

Never gonna happen! Boards and forums, for as long as they exist, are always gonna be messy places full of angsty young men making wildly over-exaggerated claims to attainment, trolls, and people having intense arguments about theory and dogma (even more so when they claim they have no dogma) which are either absurd, don't matter, or are irresolvable. Life is suffering

Rowan said: ...one aspect of 'the end of seeking' is fundamentally trusting that whatever 'direction' your practice takes you post-awakening (and before, although it was harder to see at the time) is right and as it should be - no matter how other people define their own awakening.

Chris said: but the key is in knowing the difference between a help or a hindrance to practice. That is where having and relying on a teacher is of great help.

I am going to disagree with you Rowan (how rare!!! ), in that I think in my own small experience I am a lousy, lousy judge of what's best for my practice, in a certain sense. It has been really, really, really eye opening to work formally with a teacher now, in a way I hadn't since working with Alan during year 1. The whole bit in between was 'follow the gut'. And I have a good gut, and a lot of things got worked out. But when I am in a position now of 'voluntary obedience' and am told to do this that or the other practice, or more of this and less of that, it becomes super clear how deeply attached I was (still am) to that me who was smarter than most people, knew better than anyone, had it all worked out, knew what to do, etc. Even my quite astute tendency to 'dive into the hard territory' - which on its good side leads to a courage and perseverance in difficulty - has a less healthy side which is just about wanting to impress people by being hardcore. Hardest practice ever? Doing something really little, boring, and insignificant feeling. Where's the heroics? Where's the stories to tell? OMG, I'm no better than the next frumpy middle aged lady sitting next to me.

And so I have come to see how much of my practice/life revolved around maintaining certain vain impressions of myself, and how cool I was, and how smart I was, and how super hardcore wacky my practice was. I hurt myself, with some of the sh*t I did that makes great stories, and everyone thought was really amusing and cool. Not so cool when you're trying to heal the damage later. Just dumb, and really speaking of a lack of love and lack of care and dignity for this precious wee being, so beloved of her Creator.

So there are certainly some with a better self-awareness than others, but from my own experience and watching people in my Catholic circles now who do versus don't work with a director, there's a big difference in quality of practice and progress made, and we are generally much lousier judges of our direction than we like to think.

I'll also be the only one to say here, I have no idea what 'end of seeking' means. Perhaps one day I will.

Thanks Ona! A lot of things here which have also been provoking ponders for me recently. This is going to go a bit off topic from the suffering question so mods feel free to split if necessary.

On having a spiritual director:
I agree that no matter how hard you try to do the work that's difficult and not to do what is easy or what you're good at, everyone will have blind spots that by definition we may not be able to explore without them being pointed out. There are different ways in which things can be 'hard' - e.g. for myself, the way I now think of as unhealthy, but do not regret at all, was doing long intensive Mahasi retreats. By contrast 'healthier' 'hard' now, for example, I will not shrink from practices that make me emotionally uncomfortable, but I'm equally open to those that seem easy or comfortable or that don't have a 'progress' teleology.

One thing I would say for myself that doesn't seem to be true for you is that I don't regret any of my earlier practices or see them as doing long-term damage, even while I would never advise them for anyone now. I see them all as right for the time, even if the rightness was that I had to learn to let them go, to not approach things that way, and as part of the journey. It might also be the difference between our perspectives on free will and nonduality - I see everything that happened as God working through me, rather than a paradigm in which I can or cannot freely choose to work in accordance with God or not, as an individual who is separate from God.

I also agree that working with a director/teacher/mentor is a really good exercise in humility. Working with you formally was an experience I'm forever grateful for, and in particular doing exercises that I was resistant to and seeing how I've later changed so far in those directions (toward joy and acceptance and trust and surrender, and away from self-effort and cynicism).

I think though, IMHO, that the issue of a teacher at 'later' stages might be another case of, what's right for one person may not be right for another, and right at different times - though as Chris says the problem is figuring out what's right for yourself, through the veils of ego ('I alone will decide and determine what's best!') and/or fear ('I need someone to tell me what to do and how to do it right or I won't get anywhere!').

I really miss having an in-person spiritual community and a teacher, and keep investigating different teaching communities that I have some affinity with, but then I keep thinking about where I might turn to with my current beliefs and practices, and nothing is quite right. Something may come along when the time is right, or it may not. I'm thinking of trying to start my own little group, though I'm very non-entrepreneurial which is always a barrier. But maybe time to face that and see what happens.

So the question for me is, if I had a teacher, who would it be? One of the interesting things I've noticed recently is my interaction with my therapist, who is a long-time and dedicated Zennie. The other day I was talking about some difficult stuff that had come up through my demon-feeding practice which was scaring me off a bit - and though he'd never give an explicit direction he gently said, 'but it's been very fruitful for you recently, hasn't it?' or words to that effect. And I returned to the practice, doing things a bit differently but also remembering that it can be hard to tell between doing something that's genuinely feeding bad tendencies (e.g. trying to do metta but when you do it for the enemy all you can think of is how angry they make you, and you end the practice angry) vs the difficult places that emotional and spiritual work take us, which we should not try to manipulate so as to avoid them arising.

On 'the end of seeking':
I used to be desperate to reach some end I hadn't reached, fantasising that this would 'end my suffering,' and also I was concerned about whether I was doing the right practice or working with the right teacher to take me there as fast as possible. Both those things are just gone. Que sera sera, no dukkha and no ending of dukkha, God acts through me to bring whatever experience IS and WILL BE into being. That's the ultimate reality - on the day-to-day plane, there is and will remain a whole lot of work to be done which will never lead to perfection or closure!

every3rdthought wrote: ...
On 'the end of seeking':
I used to be desperate to reach some end I hadn't reached, fantasising that this would 'end my suffering,' and also I was concerned about whether I was doing the right practice or working with the right teacher to take me there as fast as possible. Both those things are just gone. Que sera sera, no dukkha and no ending of dukkha, God acts through me to bring whatever experience IS and WILL BE into being. That's the ultimate reality - on the day-to-day plane, there is and will remain a whole lot of work to be done which will never lead to perfection or closure!

End of deluded/misguided/ignorant seeking perhaps would be a better way to say it?

Thanks for the long reflection in response. Good stuff. May ponder further tomorrow. It could be an interesting subject to carry on with. But now past bedtime!

Ona Kiser wrote:

every3rdthought wrote: ...
On 'the end of seeking':
I used to be desperate to reach some end I hadn't reached, fantasising that this would 'end my suffering,' and also I was concerned about whether I was doing the right practice or working with the right teacher to take me there as fast as possible. Both those things are just gone. Que sera sera, no dukkha and no ending of dukkha, God acts through me to bring whatever experience IS and WILL BE into being. That's the ultimate reality - on the day-to-day plane, there is and will remain a whole lot of work to be done which will never lead to perfection or closure!

End of deluded/misguided/ignorant seeking perhaps would be a better way to say it?

Thanks for the long reflection in response. Good stuff. May ponder further tomorrow. It could be an interesting subject to carry on with. But now past bedtime!

I think I can see that there was a point of conversion (turning/transition) there, at that first awakening, where there was an end to the ignorance of what I was seeking, in a certain sense, or a surprising change in orientation in the world, but if there truly was no longer any seeking I would not have bothered continuing with anything spiritual and would have just gone back to doodling around with material life, being an atheist, having no interest in practice, not writing about it, talking about it, thinking about it. Like before. Like when you aren't hungry anymore you stop eating.

It's a popular turn of phrase, but it suggests to me an attachment to identity as an 'awakened person' or 'person who has accomplished something' as opposed to 'lifelong spiritual seeker'? Maybe not. Thoughts?

Chris Marti wrote: End of Seeking -- there is no mystery left to the workings of experience. This awakening ended the felt necessity to figure out this abiding, important and motivation-driving mystery. That, however, still leaves much to do since the veils of ignorance are gone and "I" am left bare and exposed to "myself" in ways not previously suspected or imagined. So this is not really the end of seeking but the end of bring driven to discover what ignorance in the buddhist sense really means.

JMHO

So more like the beginning of understanding? Or the beginning of actual practice? Eta: That I can grasp.

Anyone seen this video doing the rounds? Shinzen Young talking about arahats. It's an interesting take and comparison.

When in the clip?

No shortcuts, shagrol!

The whole video is about shinzen talking about research he will possibly be partaking in concerning certain brain lesions in patients that result in what he says is a characterture of what he calls arahat. The way he describes the effects of such brain lesions gives a telling account of how he sees the stage of arahatship. Watch the whole thing.

Thanks for the TL;DR version Chris!

I watched that video a while ago, it's probably the first time I had doubts about Shinzen's theories. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems very baloney sausage.

The arhat description, from what I remember and Chris' retelling, struck me as a red herring. In one other of his videos, he talks about meeting an a theravadian arhat who wasn't capable of walking, had to be carried by his monk peers, exhibited almost no muscle tone... and I had to wonder, why is this the model of an arhat instead of the historical buddha that walked all over india, talking with people, teaching into his 80s?

The zombie arhat just doesn't pass the straight-faced test. Sure it's an interesting curiosity, but I don't think it's what I would use as my model for the desired end state.

I personally would love to grow into that type of detachment, equanimity, whatever. I remain mildly grumpy at being human, at all times: about 1/10th the level it was before, yet present nonetheless. Humanness is overrated for me.

Hmm... for reals?

shargrol wrote: Hmm... for reals?

For sure. I have a different philosophy than y'all, lol. I don't value the tender vulnerability of intimate human imperfection as the highest and deepest thing to "open" to. I like not having to worry about feeling things. And despite potential protests, every path shift has lowered the amplitude of my emotions, which is exactly what I wanted