Sauntering Down The Endless Path - A Practice Journal

Been busy with studies, hoping to finish soon, so haven't kept up with the meditation journaling, which seems to take as much time as the meditation itself sometimes.
Oh, i remember you asked about me experience with self-hypnosis. Be careful with that, i just figured out why i havent been able to properly notice sensations in my throat and jaw the last three months... Self-hypnotic anasthesia, forgot to make it temporary. Working on removing it, hope i don't have to pay a hypnotist.

Direct Mode: I found the lessons on letting go the more useful part, actually - but i agree the disembedding is good too.

I didn't formally sit for two days but have been continually noting, and working more with mahamudra, and direct mode. I've also been reading the early suttas more regularly rather than later commentaries, I've abandoned magick for the moment as there's a freshness to practice which is keeping me focused on the dharma over anything else. A few interesting conversations with Nick have also expanded my view and caused me to look deeper into what's possible when we take things back to basics, back to what ol' Sid was getting at and how beautifully he expressed the simplest things. Interesting times.

Tonight, I sat for an hour beginning with getting into 4th jhana and noting from there. As Villum mentioned in the above post, the letting go part of DM is incredibly useful, and I feel that it's improved the accuracy and efficiency of my vipassana practice, but what's really interesting is using this same letting go as you move through the jhanas. It seems that a lot of the more subtle aspects of each jhana show up clearer as the grosser aspects fall away more quickly allowing them to be examined more readily.

On the recommendation of Steve Coe, I've been bringing binary noting (self-referencing) into daily practice too. This is new to me and has been incredibly useful for immediately disembedding from internal dialogue, something which I'm still prone to getting caught up in at times, so I need to say a big thanks to Steve for his advice.

Anyhow, got some stuff to do so I'll sign off for the moment.

Metta

I've worked mainly with samatha practice lately, although the balance between insight and concentration just happens naturally after a point and I end up riding the arc up to fruition. I've been deliberately working with access concentration into 1st jhana trying to figure out a really basic, phenomenological way to explain it to someone with no knowledge of the terminology we use, as part of this Down To Earth Dharma project.

Much as I haven't been keeping my notes up-to-date, I've continued practicing daily for at least an hour (formal) with noting, Witness, direct mode and kasina work through the day. Concentration feels like a well toned muscle these days, access concentration is instantaneous (full-on nimitta showing up) and soft jhana occurs within seconds so I'm going to continue working with this until I'm confident that I've attained mastery of, at least, the rupa jhanas.

Concentration feels like the most natural way to go at the moment, although I always start noting once I'm up in the arupa jhanas. Old habits die hard, I suppose....Ha!

Metta

Can you explain "nimitta"

and also:
www.leighb.com/jhananeuro.htm (for a phenomenological explanation)

Yes - Im curious how you experience it and from what object. I will be interested in the project too. I have a feeling the face of dharma is going to be very different in 30 years...!

Cheers for that link, Mu! I've actually been reading Leigh Brasington's stuff lately but hadn't checked that one out.

Right, so "nimitta", as I understand it, is the sign that you've gotten access concentration but, as far as I know, it can manifest in different ways for different people. I tend to use either kasina, breath, or bare awareness as a starting point with samatha but have found the breath, and also the white kasina leads, to one of two things:

1. A bright light appears and becomes like a solid object positioned at the crown chakra area, the light expands out and the descends to fill my entire visual field which is when I switch to concentrating on some positive sensation within the body. There's no A&P stuff happening, it's all very low-key but with that distinctive sense of being "locked in" to concentration.
2. I get a distinct "dropping" feeling and the visual field darkens quickly, as if I've fallen backwards into an abyss , but this stabilizes into a pleasant, velvety darkness whereupon I can turn to the pleasant sensations.

The whole nimitta thing confused the hell out of me for a long time, until recently when I read an interesting piece on it here: www.urbandharma.org/udharma/nimitta.html which cleared up quite a few things and has led to some other interesting stuff. I hope that's a bit more useful, this article is really good and worth a read anyhow if you're interested in this stuff.

Stuck with samatha in seated sessions since (alliteration for the win) the last update, and direct mode in daily life.

I saw Mu's recent post in his own thread about finding perfection in every moment, and I have to say that I absolutely agree with this. If we can be here, in this moment then we can experience the end of suffering in it's entirety. Here and now is perfection. If we leave it as it is, it's already there.

I realize that this post is unusually brief for me, it's been all about just maintaining that thread of awareness throughout the day lately, as Owen's mentioned, and enjoying the experience of this moment so any reporting on this would just sound like me telling a story. I'll no doubt post some more but, as I'm doing mainly jhana practice lately, there's not much to tell and my vipassana sits generally just follow the same patterns up and down the arc.

We shall see......

Got my noting groove on tonight again. I had noticed these little flickers of anxiety in the solar plexus and up into the chest area happening from about 6pm, just tiny explosions of tension, with rising, blurry waves of this weird fluttery jaggedness accompanied by some typical 6th ñana imagery, so I decided to take them head on. This has been the first notably unpleasant set of sensations I've noticed for a while, most of the time I'm just grounding the emotion in the body or bringing the attention into the moment so things have been rather wonderful lately which is why I decided to vipassanize these sensations.

There's still something there which can identify with sensation if mindfulness isn't being maintained, or if I'm not grounding the emotions. I could sit there and dissect sensations, see their constituent parts and watch them vanish without incident but, still, the appearance of these anxiety/Dark Night symptoms almost caught me off guard!

One thing about tonight's sitting though was seeing that resting in Dark Night territory can be a really nice experience, this is something I'm coming to see more and more about going through the dukkha ñanas, 3rd jhana is inherently pleasurable, attention is very relaxed and the clarity available for doing insight practice can be incredible. Give it a try. Learn to love Dark Night.....Ha!

Peace out.