Brian's practice notes

6/21/10

* 45 min vipassana on treadmill. Not particularly focused, often caught up in thought. Nothing feels easy, I fidget with technique, notice subtle attitude of trying to make things happen. By the end of the session there is some momentum that I try to keep going by tuning in to the observed/watched quality of all sensations during the day.

* ~1 hr watching mind/body
* ~1 hr watching mind/body again

These sessions sucked me in. I feel infatuated with practicing. It's not that things are fun or exciting, it's just this inexplicable gravity sucking me in. What happens is I get still externally and internally and lose desire to do anything but fixate on experience. Awareness wants to settle on the mind and body. There is a quality to experience that is quite altered in a sustained but somehow subtle way. Subtle in the sense that I almost have to tune into it to notice it sometimes. Quite altered in the sense that if I step back and compare this to the way I usually feel I realize it is very different. It is something to do with the sense of mind/body being continuous objects of attention, having the quality of being watched, not feeling as much like a solid continuous "me". There are components to it of a kind of lightness and transparency and sometimes a faint buzziness to the head and body, but all of these are only in a very weird, distanced, muffled way.

I still get caught up in thoughts but watching those arise and pass seems easier than normal if I apply effort. I found a couple of techniques helpful. One is that I voluntarily create a thought, which is easy to track as it comes and goes. This gives focus and momentum for seeing subsequent spontaneous thoughts come and go. The other is to give thoughts a sense of being on display to awareness. I think this is essentially what noting does, as noting a sensation is, in a sense, demonstrating it to yourself or putting it on display.

6/22/10

* ~1.5 hr watching mind

Lately I've come to think identification with mind is the main bottleneck in my progress so I decided to focus on observing thoughts come and go.

When it works well it feels like thoughts and feelings are impartially recorded as they come. It feels as if what is missing when this happens is not so much an identification as it is a process of sympathizing with thoughts and feelings, hence the feeling of impartial observation. The feeling of sympathizing itself smuggles itself in through the backdoor, unnoticed, unless practice is strong.

This is interesting whenever practice-related thoughts arise. They lose their sense of 'doing-ness' and yet what they were intended to 'do' is still done. For instance: 'OK, now keep attention focused this way.' That thought normally would have a sense of "I"-ness or doing-ness, but here where practice is solid it is just an object that is impartially recorded. Yet its intended meaning, the continuance of seeing thoughts as objects, is carried out anyway. These sorts of happenings can lead to a momentary befuddlement which itself is impartially recorded in awareness.

When practice does not work as well I am more aware of thoughts/feelings than I normally would be but still feel 'sympathetic' with them. Most of this session was spent in this state.

(con't 6/22)

* 2 hrs watching mind

Beginning to step on my own toes a bit. I try to stay with all thoughts and feelings, and see that they have the quality of being observed. But this requires a continuous effort that becomes strenuous, and worse, the sense of strenuous effort must also be watched and its quality of being observed must also be known. Feel like I am complicating things and messing it up. There is an intense desire for progress that I also must observe and somehow integrate more skillfully. I must find a way to systematically objectify thoughts and feelings without upsetting the effort/concentration balance.

"Yet its intended meaning, the continuance of seeing thoughts as objects, is carried out anyway. These sorts of happenings can lead to a momentary befuddlement which itself is impartially recorded in awareness."

This is an excellent observation, Brian. For most of what we do, see, and experience there is no governance. We invent the governor as that makes it feel comfortable, safe, as though we're in control of something. So the fact that intent is "carried out anyway" is a very key part of moment to moment existence and you seem to be butting up against that now. So I have to ask you -- what is it that makes you feel un-natural/inconvenienced/funny/odd about that? Which do you think comes first, the natural ungoverned carrying out of the intent or the sense of "me" that often appears to be creating and enforcing the intent?

"what is it that makes you feel un-natural/inconvenienced/funny/odd about that? Which do you think comes first, the natural ungoverned carrying out of the intent or the sense of "me" that often appears to be creating and enforcing the intent?"

The occasion for befuddlement was that normally I experience thoughts as causal and then observe the execution of their intent, which gives the appearance that the experience of causality ('sense of doing') is necessary for the execution of intent. This was a clear counterexample, which was befuddling.

A better model might be that instead of thoughts causing actions, there is some unobserved process X that causes first thought, then action, so they are correlated but only in an indirect way. I am not sure how to integrate this into practice though-- it seems there is a danger of waiting for things to do themselves and in the process not doing anything.

I actually had a similar experience of absence of causality while eating dinner. Usually it seems like chewing food causes pleasure. But here I was just chewing food and then some pleasure arose, there was not an experience that one caused the other.

Why invent a "mystery process" that replaces what you thought was the governing process? What's wrong with trying to get comfortable with things just as they are?

Well there are a few things I might say in response, but I don't want to veer too much into philosophical matters here. I think that is an issue of conceptualizing the experience after the fact, not one about the experience itself or the practice leading to the experience.

I will say though that when I say I was 'befuddled' I don't mean anything like 'uncomfortable, inconvenienced,' etc. which seem to have a connotation of resistance. It was just that in that moment the rug seemed to be swept out from the normal flow of the sense of doing, which caused a kind of momentary surprise or confusion but not aversion.

6/23/10

To bolster my efforts at meditating on the mind, I read this guide on cittanupassana: tiny.cc/q72v6

key passage:

"You are aware of some object and the mind that is aware of that object. You know this mind as the noting mind or consciousness or citta.Then another consciousness-citta arises which is aware-watches over the first one which is aware of object and arises with the
object and because of the object. It knows what this first one is doing, knows its '˜whereabouts' object and behaviour. This consciousness is called watching mind, or one step up mind. Once an object hits the field of awareness the noting mind is automatically there. The watching mind is watching-knowing what the noting mind is doing-experiencing."

So the idea is to stay with 'watching mind' and from that vantage point observe whatever 'noting mind' happens to be doing without controlling or manipulating it or getting involved with its content. I find this distinction useful because it helps clarify how one can remain non-interfering and non-manipulative even as the ('noting') mind can be allowed to do its spontaneous manipulating/controlling thing in its own sphere of influence. In order for noting mind to be completely non-manipulative it would have to manipulate itself, which is a contradiction in instruction.

(con't 6/23)

* 1.5 hr cittanupassana

Alternated between phases of mind wandering, not fully recognizing thoughts til ~1sec passed, and seeing them arise and pass clearly. I found it helpful to divide things into Shinzen Young's categories of talk-image-feel. I did not label (that is an activity of noting mind); sometimes verbal labels spontaneously arose and they were observed as talk-image-feel contents of noting mind.

Most thoughts were practice related, either monitoring current practice or evaluating practice related things more generally. This made it difficult not to get involved in content. Actually I am not sure it is possible to not get involved in content without manipulating noting mind in some way, because refraining from involvement tends to stop thoughts in mid-stream, i.e. it changes their dynamics. Even when I did get involved in content, this was observed by watching mind, except during cases of mind wandering.

Several times there were sweeps of cool energy rising from midsection to head. Occasionally felt faint pressure at the top of the head, about the size of a quarter, a little bit in front of the usual spot. There was some brief mental imagery of subtle energies coming out from there but not going very far. Some soreness in the temples. At the end of the session, very faint diffuse pressure across the whole forehead.

Brian, I have the impression that you are putting the cart before the horse. You are trying to understand things via intellect before they are understood at a deeper level. It is so much easer to map the territory where you live. Your insistence upon understanding the territory you hope someday to visit is keeping you from seeing what is in front of you.

Your challenge is to keep it simple and resist the temptation to indulge your intellect. In order to awaken, you don't have to understand the process. You just have to practice the simple techniques and accept at least provisionally that each moment of dis-embedding leads closer to your goal. If you can spend as much time practicing as you spend thinking about practicing, you will progress quickly. After you are enlightened, if you are still interested in understanding the process at the atomic level, you will be in a much better position to do so; you will be mapping the territory where you actually live.

Realize that there is a choice to be made; if you choose to continue to indulge thoughts, you will take longer to awaken. You are spinning in circles rather than walking up and down the mountain. People spend lifetimes spinning. It's not that one choice is necessarily better than the other; it really is your choice. But I think it's important to acknowledge that if you choose thinking, there is a significant cost in terms of progress. The danger is simply that you won't acknowledge the trade-off and will delude yourself into believing that all this processing is somehow necessary or supportive to your progress, when in reality it is neither. This practice is embarrassingly simple. It absolutely does not require any intellectual understanding beyond the step-by-step mechanics of the techniques.

I have to concur with Kenneth. I have never really been one to analyze my experiences nor think about them too much. I have often thought of myself as quite a simpleton compared to some of the intellect around here. But I think my unbelievably fast progress (and I am not bragging, it has been amazingly fast) has been because of what I have not done. And that is question and analyze and think about the efficacy of the techniques that I have been introduced to, but rather to use them to get immediate results. I am now of the opinion that the simpleton's mind is more conducive to getting enlightened quickly to a highly intellectual mind. Stop analyzing the poisonous arrow and pull it out already.

A post-path simpleton

Kenneth, I'm not sure I see where you're coming from. I have been spending hours doing vipassana and self-enquiry as you advise. I have focused vipassana on the level I feel I am most often embedded in (which is thought) as you have already advised me to do. Is there something wrong with the actual quality and frequency of practice I am doing, as described in the practice logs? If not, does it matter what I do or do not think about the practice?