Help in understanding my experience?

Hi,

I'm new here, although I've been reading the discussion posts on and off for a while. I was hoping that someone could help me figure out my experience from my last 10-day retreat. I added a longer description here, but if you want to cut to the heart of the matter, it begins on day 6.

A bit of background: I've been practicing for three years now, and this was my fifth retreat. I have been "enjoying" the Dark Night for quite some time. I've had no bhanga experience and hardly and A&P experiences, not to mention a recognizable A&P event, but the emotional reactions (fear, doubt, disgust, desire to renunciate) and characteristics of physical sensations (the donut, as Daniel Ingram puts it in his book puts it) have been very Dark Nighty. Last December I had my first recognizable A&P experience, a loop of force of energy of immense pleasure going up and down my body and waking me from sleep. Some weeks ago I had two such consecutive events in sleep at home.

Anyways, here's more or less what happened this last retreat:

Day 1-3:
Getting used to noting, which I had begun practicing at home a few weeks before. Dark night, with constant doubt about my ability to do this technique. Noted doubt many times...

Day 4:
Sensations become more sharp and less hazy, I feel like a stone is lifted of my chest, I'm peaceful and confident and my doubt is gone. I spend most of the day in sitting in strong determination with no pain.

(continued)

I couldn't understand Daniel's discussion of formations, and seemed to experience nothing like what I could understand, so maybe this was not equanimity, but I took it then, and still do now, to be Equanimity. In a session in my room, lying down, I begin having energy traveling through both my arms and my neck, top of the head and higher spine in great speed. After sometime the arms feel dull/burning and the inner part of the elbow is burning hot, staying like this minutes after I stop mediating. My head is bobbing up and down, or at least it feels so, from the energy traveling in it. This continues into the night, and I hardly sleep.

Day 5:
Day 4 energy thing repeats itself a couple of times when I'm in sessions on my bed. In the hall, I'm moving between DN and equanimity.
At night, a move from DN to equanimity. I then lose myself in thought, or doze off, and suddenly wake to have a strong burst of energy shooting out of my body into the air. Kind of like the X-men's Cyclop eye thingie, but shooting from my entire front. I take it to be a A&P event. After this I can hardly concentrate and can hardly find sensations on the body.

(continued)
Day 6:
I experience Bangha, and another sort of experience where I feel my body to be empty from the inside. Throughout the day I still have the burning in my hands and energy in spine/top of the head. At some point the energy (vibrations) begins to flow from my legs to my head, through the spine. I can feel the energy spilling from the spine to my brain, just gushing into it. The brain is just a mass of vibrations and energy. My noting is zooming quickly all around, being drawn again and again to the point contact between the spine and the head. Then I give a small mental "push", and I begin to be drawn / sucked / shrink into somewhere. My heart is racing. There are a few phases to this sucking. I get sucked until everything falls around me. Then I somehow materialize back. I feel my body as very cool. It seems my toes reappear first, then the rest of me. Throughout this process I am (a) conscious, (b) thinking, (c) my heart is beating, (d) I can hear the air conditioning unit. As I rematerialize, I again find that I can hardly focus on meditation. I try to note but I can't concentrate on more than 3-5 notes in a row, and most of my body is just unresponsive. I don't know if its an after effect of the event or just my excitement about it. I can't sleep most of the night, and not meditate. My head alternates between pain, pounding and vibrating (and this happens again after every later shrinking event). I feel fresh, elated, happy, etc. But I can't say that it's because of the event or because I think it to be a huge thing, perhaps fruitation. At the same time, from now on, I keep rolling in thoughts on whether this was fruitation.

(continued)
Before the course I prepared only by reading carefully Mahasi and Daniel Ingram's descriptions of the path up to equanimity, because I could not imaging that I'd be able to cross it. So now, without knowing what fruitation is like, I am constantly thinking of whether this was it or not. This keeps preoccupying me during the next days until day 10 or so.

At night, I again have the same energy flowing from spine to brain and throughout the body. My attention again begins to shrink, but it seems to stop dead just before shrinking into nothing and reappearing. I feel like it's not done, and unlike before, the energy is still zooming throughout my body.

I now realize I am kind of mixing the days, as I had no paper and pencil and had ended up using the pencil for the interview list along with a variety of paper materials. So I have nothing listed for day 8.

Day 9:
Goenka gives his instruction on how to proceed after bhanga, describing an opening of the whole body, the flow in the spine and the ability to pinpoint any point in the body with precision and get a sensation there, limited to that area, instantly. I am lying in my room and again get all the energy flowing around, and suddenly it clicks and I understand that what I had before was what he describes, but that his description ends with the spine being open and not with the shrinking event that I had. I have energy gushing into the brain again as before but it does not click into shrinking. I meet with the assistant teacher and tell him that I am experiencing what Goenka talked about earlier. He tells me to continue opening the body. I tell him that I did a day before, and that the energy flowed from my spine to my brain. He asks what happened then and I tell him I shrank.

(continued)

He tells me that meditation often features weird events and that I should just accept it and continue as usual. After the interview we have a group sitting. I meditate and as I reach equanimity things begin to go super quick. I don't get the energies flowing, but as I noting increases in speed shrinking happens again. It is not as forceful as the first event but I am again disoriented by it.

To make things short, I experience this shrinking twice more by noting super quickly until the end of the course. I have now come back home and sat for two hours and could not tap it again. I read the descriptions of fruitation in Daniel's book and half of what I experienced seems to fit and half does not. I could cycle through the stages pretty well during the course, but I find it hard now. It is also not always crystal clear to me what stage I am in. During the course I felt like I could will myself from A&P to DN to EQ, but I am not 100% I can identify these perfectly. At other times, the cycling was crystal clear and I could actually feel my mind shift and the experience with it. The shrinking event itself seemed a big deal, and I don't think it could be A&P since it comes both after Goenka's description of post-bhanga and because I was able to repeat it by willing my mind to note faster and faster. However, it does not seem to fit Daniel's description of fruitation since there was definitely consciousness and a sense of time, and I had no insights into any of the 3Cs.

So what is this? What to make of it?
Thanks a lot!

Hello Squee,

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'll take a crack at identifying what you're going through.

You wrote: "Sensations become more sharp and less hazy, I feel like a stone is lifted of my chest, I'm peaceful and confident and my doubt is gone. I spend most of the day in sitting in strong determination with no pain." Sounds to me like Mind and Body, which is generally focused and not unpleasant.

Next: "lying down, I begin having energy traveling through both my arms and my neck, top of the head and higher spine in great speed. After sometime the arms feel dull/burning and the inner part of the elbow is burning hot, staying like this minutes after I stop mediating. My head is bobbing up and down, or at least it feels so, from the energy traveling in it. This continues into the night, and I hardly sleep." This kind of energy-blockage experience sounds more like the Three Characteristics stage than anything else.

Next: "I then lose myself in thought, or doze off, and suddenly wake to have a strong burst of energy shooting out of my body into the air. Kind of like the X-men's Cyclop eye thingie, but shooting from my entire front. I take it to be a A&P event. After this I can hardly concentrate and can hardly find sensations on the body." And I think you were right - A&P all the way.

(continued below)

(continued from above)

Day six sounds again like going from Three Characteristics into a rather explosive A&P event. The energy build up, the speeding up of things, and the disorientation are big clues.

I don't see many - if any - markers of either advanced DN or Equanimity territory. My best guess is that this was not stream entry, nor review fruitions, nor anything like that. Keep practicing regularly, and keep a journal here if you can. Keeping track of you're experience in a public setting will help others who have traversed the territory get a better sense of where you're at.

Now, about Daniel's use of the word "Formations"...I've actually had many conversations with Daniel and others about this, because his interpretation of "formations" is way off base. The Pali word for "Formation" is "sankhara", which is often translated as "volitional formation" or "constructed consciousness". Since the long name for the Equanimity stage is "Equanimity with regard to Formations", it makes sense that at this stage one would have equanimity regarding constructed arisings consciousness, which would normally cause one to move, shift, or simply quit practicing. You're finally able to chill out and let things be as they are, while being fully engaged in all phenomenal arisings.

"Formations" has absolutely nothing to do with a particular experience of 3D, luminous, shimmery phenomena-trying-to-sync-with-awareness, as Daniel so often describes what he calls "Formations". So don't worry about seeing what Daniel sees. Just keep practicing, and let us know what comes up.

I hope that helps. Practice well.
Jackson

Welcome, Squee. Jackson's analysis of your practice is so comprehensive and accurate that I have nothing to add except to reinforce two of his points.

1) "I don't see many - if any - markers of either advanced DN or Equanimity territory."

Right. "The dark night," as we use the phrase here and at the DhO is a technical term that refers to the "dukkha nanas," Insight Knowledges 6-10. It is not a catch-all term for unpleasant phenomena while meditating. There is a good deal of suffering in the 3rd nana, for example, and in daily life for people who have not yet reached the dukkha nanas, but that kind of suffering does not equal the dark night. The dark night is, in fact, although often unpleasant, a genuine meditative attainment in its own right (after all, it comes AFTER the vaunted Arising and Passing of Phenomena). Seen in this light, maybe we should be celebrating yogis who are suffering in the dark night rather than pitying them!

2) "'Formations' has absolutely nothing to do with a particular experience of 3D, luminous, shimmery phenomena-trying-to-sync-with-awareness..."

Right. That particular section of MCTB has caused a great deal of confusion. I've talked to Daniel about this and my impression is that if he had it to do over again he would omit that passage. Daniel told me that yogis often approach him to say that they think they are seeing "formations."

"Of course you are," he tells them. "EVERYTHING you can see is a formation, by definition." In other words, the most useful understanding of "formations" is that it is essentially synonymous with "phenomena." All compound phenomena are formations and all phenomena are compound phenomena. You and everyone else on Earth are seeing formations every moment of every day of your life. You have never seen anything else.

"2) "'Formations' has absolutely nothing to do with a particular experience of 3D, luminous, shimmery phenomena-trying-to-sync-with-awareness..."

Right. That particular section of MCTB has caused a great deal of confusion. I've talked to Daniel about this and my impression is that if he had it to do over again he would omit that passage. Daniel told me that yogis often approach him to say that they think they are seeing "formations."

"Of course you are," he tells them. "EVERYTHING you can see is a formation, by definition." In other words, the most useful understanding of "formations" is that it is essentially synonymous with "phenomena." All compound phenomena are formations and all phenomena are compound phenomena. You and everyone else on Earth are seeing formations every moment of every day of your life. You have never seen anything else."

Thanks for providing further clarification, Kenneth.

Daniel and I had a conversation about "formations" at the Dharma Overground a little over a month ago. Here's think the link, in case anyone is interested in reading it...

bit.ly/bNJRzj

Thanks for the clarifications guys!