Stages on the Way to Cessation

Same stuff going on but without the drama. I'm getting used to the feeling of big. My guess is I won't really notice it all that much after a week or so. The mind is nothing if not pliable and impatient for really new stuff. Old stuff gets old... fast. I wouldn't mind a few weeks off from this roller coaster ride.

"
The mind is nothing if not pliable and impatient for really new stuff. Old stuff gets old... fast. I wouldn't mind a few weeks off from this roller coaster ride.

"

that really sounds like the way Dr. Ingram describes the path of insight on the buddhist geeks poscasts.

Here's the deal: I'm in what appears to be hell right now and I let my weirdness and emotions spill over onto these message boards early this morning. I'm sure it's just more cycling or other manifestations of practice, but it's now got a much higher amplitude. Or something like that. I apologize to everyone here, and I'm going to go get a grip before I post here again. I tried to apologize on the thread where this occurred but I see I'm not even capable right now of doing that well. Anyway, I'll be back when it feels better and settles down. Could be tomorrow, could be days form now. Who knows?

Okay. I'm resigned to the fate of having to learn how to cope with daily life as things get ripped apart, re-examined and rebuilt under the hood. Wherever I am now there is a huge difference from where I was a year ago, six months ago. The energy I'm dealing with is far, far greater and the swings of the cycles are, too. This is not a good recipe for managing the affairs of daily existence but so be it. I started this and I *will* finish it.

Hi Chris,

After reading your more recent posts, I was reminded of an email exchange I had with an older, wiser Zen friend. I had just experienced a great release, in which I had found a seemingly unshakable peace. Here's what he said to me...

"Your practice may seem to lose some energy or poignancy for a time, that is natural. it will come back. I think at this point you have to try and keep your practice fresh and not just go to repeat what struck you with awe. I can only speak from the Chan [Zen] perspective, but do not feel fixed or look to repeat what you just experienced. Keep it alive but in some sense forget it, not that you can, but do not try to repeat the same mind. There is really no place to put your feet!...

... And as you rightly point out, there is still a lot of work to do. We are no better than anyone else for gaining this insight. If anything, it may call for more vigilance to keep from getting a swollen head or any other foolish notions. That peace you have found can easily be lost, continue to practice."

The two points to remember are that any peace or freedom we gain in practice can be an object we cling to, and that in reality there is really no place to put your feet. Life happens. Cycles happen. Even after full awakening, when things are seen as they are, there is still practice. Hell, Ramana Maharshi waited 20 years after getting enlightened to start teaching! This stuff takes a long time to sort out. Don't beat yourself up over it, eh?

As always, your posts are timely, memorable, and most helpful.

~Jackson

P.S. By adding the quotation, I was not implying that you're getting a "swollen head" or having "foolish notions." It was just a part of his response to me. We can all gain from his sobering advice, however.

EDIT: Formatting.

But I actually DO have a swollen head and foolish notions! And thanks, Jackson, for the information and the commiseration.

Chris,

This was a very helpful topic for me.

The description of your experiences is very similar to what I wrote in my journal in the period leading up to what I call my first (and biggest" shift in perception (Sep 2008).

I don't recall experiencing this: "...everything, and I do mean everything, winked out of existence. This was like hitting the off switch on your computer. Then, just as fast, everything rebooted and came back online. This winking out has continued to happen to me ever since."

Then I read this - "They used to be Big Events, then speed bumps, now they're kind of like running over a garden hose with my car."
and triggered a memeory. I experience these 'blips' that occur in much less than a second, kind of like frame jumps when your watching a DVD. I never gave them much thought before. Don't think I even wrote about them in my journal at the time. I'll have to go back and look.

Anyway, thanks!

Michael

"I experience these 'blips' that occur in much less than a second, kind of like frame jumps when your watching a DVD. I never gave them much thought before. Don't think I even wrote about them in my journal at the time. I'll have to go back and look.?-AugustLeo

Very interesting, Michael. See if you can call them up and review them. Sometimes it helps to deliberately flutter your eyelids; that gets your mind into the strobing mode. What happens before and after the frame jumps? Is there a perceptual shift? If it happens during a sitting, what territory were you in when it happened? Pay attention to all of these details, as though you were a scientist watching a bird, trying to understand its behavior, looking for patterns and connections. This is the essence of 1st Gear/vipassana practice.

Kenneth

P.S. Michael, let's create a new thread to discuss your findings; it will be good to keep this one focused primarily on Chris's progress.

Hi, Michael. Glad this little topic helped you! And you are very welcome. Please stop by and say "Hi" any time.

Kenneth - " ...P.S. Michael, let's create a new thread to discuss your findings; it will be good to keep this one focused primarily on Chris's progress..." - Thank you. I understand.

Chris - sorry for hijacking your thread a bit. Still learning how to navigate in this forum's envorinment. Thank you again.

Michael

Michael, that's what this is here for - just glad to be of assistance.

It's update time!

It's now abundantly and crystal clear to me that the path is just repetition of the cycles of insight. This is now what I do, every freaking day, every week, all the time. I can more easiy identify the cycles and where I am at any given time by the mood and perceptual swings that are very clearly not driven be events but by whatever process the universe is using to willfully mess with me. (That's tongue in cheek, btw.) The changes can be very strong and it often feels like someone has access to a switch in my head that they can use to dial up the changes, at will. Some of these happen at inopportune times and that has lead to some, uh, interesting results at the office.

Then, ironically, all of a sudden I'm struggling with the jhanas. Either I'm trying too hard, which is a fault I tend to have, or something else is going on that serves to obscure them a bit. They seem fuzzy, and less distinct. I'm less able to figure out which one I'm in. If I fall asleep, or start to fall asleep, this fuzziness goes away and I can easily harden into whatever jhana I'm in at the time, and the really clear "scene" that particular jhana entails shows up. I suspect a rat , which is to say a rat in the form of more change on the horizon, just based on previous experience.

Anyway... more later if I have anything of note to report.

EDIT: spelling

"

Then, ironically, all of a sudden I'm struggling with the jhanas. Either I'm trying too hard, which is a fault I tend to have, or something else is going on that serves to obscure them a bit. They seem fuzzy, and less distinct. I'm less able to figure out which one I'm in. If I fall asleep, or start to fall asleep, this fuzziness goes away and I can easily harden into whatever jhana I'm in at the time, and the really clear "scene" that particular jhana entails shows up. I suspect a rat , which is to say a rat in the form of more change on the horizon, just based on previous experience.

Anyway... more later if I have anything of note to report.

EDIT: spelling

"

You know I recently noticed a similar phenomenon when I sat at a Vietnamese Zen Temple - I saw the stages of insight very clearly, but the jhanas were less distinct if I chose to notice them - made me feel like there were two different sides to the same coin or something.

I think I finally found something that explains it in the Mahamudra literature. They take the position that meditation can be seen from the perspective of A. event processes in the consciousness stream and B. the perspective of structures of mind - which requires an observing position - the Witness.

A is probably responsible for the nana perspective, while B is responsible for the jhana perspective. It would make sense that if you are more focussed on A that B would seem less distinct. Of course they are two different perspectives on the same thing - and it is even possible to shift between these perspectives in a single meditation session. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

I'm planning to do a full write up summarizing Mahamudra and comparing it with our Hinayana technology in the near future.
D

"You know I recently noticed a similar phenomenon when I sat at a Vietnamese Zen Temple - I saw the stages of insight very clearly, but the jhanas were less distinct if I chose to notice them - made me feel like there were two different sides to the same coin or something.

I think I finally found something that explains it in the Mahamudra literature. They take the position that meditation can be seen from the perspective of A. event processes in the consciousness stream and B. the perspective of structures of mind - which requires an observing position - the Witness.

A is probably responsible for the nana perspective, while B is responsible for the jhana perspective. It would make sense that if you are more focussed on A that B would seem less distinct. Of course they are two different perspectives on the same thing - and it is even possible to shift between these perspectives in a single meditation session. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

I'm planning to do a full write up summarizing Mahamudra and comparing it with our Hinayana technology in the near future.
D"

Very interesting, David. The A/B thing makes sense to me. I'll have to check it out during a sit.

Also, I'm definitely interested in reading your comparative study of Mahamudra and Hinayana.

Jackson

That's fascinating, David. It could explain a lot. Oddly enough I was just experimenting with this a few minutes ago and that's more or less what appears to happen. When I start into jhana territory, intend to go there, I get the new fuzziness. When I leave that perspective and go into a more purely observational/non-attached/just-watch-without-doing mode I get more clarity in the jhanas.

Thanks!

And I would also be interested in your write-up.

EDIT: spelling, added comments

Interesting night last night. Went to bed and was watching television when I started to get that certain "buzz" and an aura-like thing surrounding everything. I put up with it for a while but it got to be pretty insistent, so I turned off the TV and just lay there in bed, in he dark bedroom. Of course, when the draw into the buzz is that strong there will be no denying it, so I started into it - it feeling like some jhana or another. There was no arc this time, though, no messing around. This went FAST and was very intense. More so than the norm, at least for me. After a fairly long time, maybe a half hour?, the intensity ratcheted up another several notches. I noticed something unusual at this point -- this was not a typical jhana experience. This was more like what I remember happening during first path, or even before first path, before my first fruition. It seemed to be headed somewhere different.

There is a certain beautiful agony that prefaces a fruition, and that feeling has a "location" in my head. This is where this "thing" went, right to that place in my head where fruitions occur. It went there, and sat. And sat. And sat. A fruition fired off, Slowly, over the course of some time, it intensified and (this is hard to describe), went "up" in flavor, or feeling, or maybe I should call it "pitch." Anyway, it went WAY, WAY up, and sat there, and didn't move. It didn't pulse with the breath any more, either. It was high, very hard, and very, very stable. It makes my body go numb and then disappear. Seriously. And it can make anything sort of disappear. In other words, it appears to me to be revealing emptiness.

It's still with me right now. I'm sitting in a coffee shop and it's doing exactly what it did last night. I don't think this is going to go away any time soon. It intensifies greatly when I turn my attention to it. Otherwise I just feel... tingly.

One more thing - all the energy flow in my body has changed. It's loosened up a lot and is flowing straight through, up my spine, across my forehead (not stopping there like it used to) and going right to the crown of my skull.

That part feels quite pleasant, and freeing

I started practicing The Witness very heavily on Thursday after a conversation with Kenneth on Wednesday evening. We've talked again since and I believe what happened to me as described in the most immediate two previous posts is related to this large change in my practice. The sense of The Witness surprised me with its power, actually. The sense of existing (that old "I am" sense) can become the object of meditation and as such becomes a very powerful tool.

Initial reaction:

While in that state everything becomes sort of "diffuse" and the sense of "I" fades pretty quickly into the sense of generally existing, of just being. When that occurs there's really no one around to sweat the small stuff. I imagine abiding in the Witness is quite possible, and is probably pretty darned rewarding.

More later....

Still practicing The Witness both during and after meditation sessions during the normal workday. I also woke up early the other morning and managed to spend about an hour with the ol' jhanic arc and found out another jhana has shown up. I can count to ten now! The fuzziness I had a week or so ago around "seeing" the jhanas seems to be gone, or at least it was at that time.

I also continue to cycle a lot, and it's not a ton of fun but The Witness seems to help take the edge off of the peaks and valleys.

Very, very busy lately with much too little time for formal practice, which I really dislike. I did have the amazing good fortune to be able to sit with our own Gozen last Saturday while we were both attending a conference (I hope, Gozen, it's okay to reveal that). We also had a number of wondeful, lengthy conversations and I want to state publicly here how much I really enjoyed the time together and will remember all of it for a long, long time.

"
Very, very busy lately with much too little time for formal practice, which I really dislike. I did have the amazing good fortune to be able to sit with our own Gozen last Saturday while we were both attending a conference (I hope, Gozen, it's okay to reveal that). We also had a number of wondeful, lengthy conversations and I want to state publicly here how much I really enjoyed the time together and will remember all of it for a long, long time.

"

Hi Chris,
It was so wonderful to have had the opportunity to sit in meditation with you, and to talk so much over the weekend. And thanks for the Starbucks!

Regards,
Gozen

Though I got little sleep I had a wonderful night last night. I woke up as mind slipped into what I believe was the second Pure Land jhana (high frequency, body oriented, buzzy, beautiful bliss - flavor of gray-ish pink in the visual field). From there the bliss just got better and better for a while until the process slowly turned downward in focus and ended with mind slowly fading away into deep, dark , blank, beautiful nothingness. The way this happens is a sinking into darkness with each successive breath, sometimes every other breath. As the thing goes on it just keeps sinking in. It's kind of like being lowered into a deep, dark, warm well. All external signals (sounds) slowly fade away. All thought slowly recedes. Sense of self disappears. After a little while this doesn't happen to a person, but it just happens. At some point it becomes inevitable that the blackness will come and overwhelm everything no matter what. Before that mind can recover, bounce out, so to speak. And then it can fade back in again, same process, breath by breath. This all started at about 3:30 and ended when I got up with the alarm.

I'm left with the most marvelous chilled-out feeling this morning. It's not elation or excitement. It's mellow and smooth.

This morning an interesting thing happened as I was laying in bed and sort of into/out of jhanas and such. I became very much aware of the progress of mental activity as the mind first engages with an object (the very low-level and fundamental raw data that first hits our senses) all the way to the creation of a separate "thing" or object. What was interesting today was that I was fully aware of the middle step. That's the gray area in between the raw data and the mind-created concrete, separate objects we deal with in our day to day lives. While this wasn't the first time I've been aware of this process for some reason this morning it was that much clearer and... more interesting. I tried to wake my wife to tell her about how I could see where people get their notions about all kinds of shadow things but, as usual, she was half asleep and not all that interested in what I thought was this marvelously fascinating world of proto-thoughts

If I incline my mind toward this process I can perceive it with clarity. A nice metaphor for this is the way my lava lamp I had when I was as teenager worked: thoughts bubble up from the source like the wax globules in the lamp, flow to the surface where they become objects, ideas, concepts, then slowly sink back into the source to be replaced by lots of other bubbles in a never-ending dance.

So why is this important? I have no idea other than it validates what we all here either know or suspect - that what appears to us as a concrete reality isn't, really, and that mind is processing on many, many levels in a massively parallel way so that we can function in our lives without having to pay attention to the processing itself. And our practice is in large part about uncovering enough of that processing that we can come to that realization.

So.... that's all.

Dependent Origination

David --

"I'm planning to do a full write up summarizing Mahamudra and comparing it with our Hinayana technology in the near future."

How is this coming along? I would love to read it.