Falling off the cliff (practice journal)

Tuesday 7/12
Started off feeling a lot of back pain and throbbing throughout the chest. I noted this as vulnerability, then opening to experience and spaciousness. I kept getting distracted by explaining thoughts about my practice. Then I had the feeling of releasing a lot of tension, and not knowing what was going to come next, I noted "not knowing". This seemed like a powerful thing to note, and gave me a sense of freedom that I hadn't experienced before.

Wednesday 7/13
I was distracted from the start by explaining thoughts about my practice, and wondered if this was the "slippery mind" Kenneth was talking about in last night's virtual sangha. Then I felt a distinct shift, like I was shifting into a different jhana, along with a release of tension. I felt more clarity, and the visual field became an infinite plane which seemed to be very close to the mind's eye. I became absorbed in watching the yellowish-orange clouds moving around in this plane, and had a sense of being watched by the experience surrounding me. The clouds kept forming what looked like indistinct faces looking back at me. One of them looked like the typical "grey alien" you see on those TV shows about alien abductions (except that it was yellow, not gray). I had the thought that "they" were as curious about me as I am about "them", and felt a sense of relief and more letting go.

Thursday 7/14
Again there were lots of distracting explaining thoughts about my practice at the beginning of the sit. I started Mahamudra listening, and noted patience and relaxing. I remembered a strange dream I had this morning where I was riding a bike down a slushy road and came to a T-intersection on the side of a cliff with no guardrail. There was a bus coming from the right, and as I turned left, the bike slipped out from under me and went off the cliff, and I tried to grab on to the road to keep from falling off too. I returned to present awareness and kept Mahamudra noting, and my thoughts gradually quieted down. I felt my entire body opening to experience, and had a visual/kinesthetic thought of a spherical shell opening to reveal a point of light inside. I had a weird sense that I had 360-degree vision, even though I had my eyes closed. I felt a jhana shift with a change in eye focus. Then I felt "I" was a single point surrounded by experience (which was also me), and noted relief, safety, exhilaration, and joy.

Friday 7/15
I was much more relaxed at the start. The back pain appeared again, but this time it filled up a larger space inside my body and was throbbing noticeably. I quickly went into Mahamudra noting, and noted happiness and opening. I heard the notes as auditory thoughts before saying them, and shifted into noting very quickly for a few moments. Then there was a shift into a different jhana and I naturally put my focus on the visual field. I became absorbed in watching the clouds of color before me, and was noting very slowly. I kept getting distracted by various thoughts (visual and auditory). Eventually I returned to present awareness, and felt surrounded by experience which also seemed to be alive. I had the sense of 360-degree vision again, and felt warmth and compassion emanating from the changing experience surrounding me. I felt connected to everything, with no separation between myself and everything else, and a sense of relief connected with that. Then I noticed that the visual field seemed to be inside the head, while the sensations in the body seemed to be below it. I tried to imagine the visual field taking up the space around the heart instead, but this was very difficult.

Saturday 7/16
I felt very relaxed from the start, and was able to do Mahamudra noting throughout. When I sat down I immediately entered the space I've been exploring lately of seeing from a single point surrounded by experience all around with 360-degree vision. Then I felt compassion emanating from all around the center point, and had a visual thought of the Buddha looking serenely at me. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude at the sight of this image. Then I was absorbed with watching clouds, and distracted by explaining thoughts. Towards the end of the sit there were flashes of kinesthetic/visual thought with my body and the room and all of the stuff in it all integrated in one image, and along with that a sense of completion.

Sunday 7/17
Experimented with going through the jhanic arc today. Started off with noting positive mind states, waiting for the bodily bliss of the 1st jhana to show up. When it did, I tried to focus on it, however it was very chaotic and I had a hard time staying with it. There were also some distracting thoughts and I didn't feel all that concentrated yet. So then I switched to breath counting and did several rounds from 1 to 10 until my mind settled down. I tried again to focus on the bodily bliss, it was a little easier to stay with it but it was still very chaotic. Then I went into the 2nd jhana by paying attention to my forehead and relaxing the effort of staying with the bliss waves. I was only able to enter it very lightly, but it was stable. After staying there for a few minutes, I widened my attention to the entire body and pretty quickly went in and out of the 3rd jhana and then entered the 4th jhana, where I stayed for the last third of the sit. This was a very peaceful state, where thoughts and sensations would arise and then go away on their own without my wanting to get caught up in them. I recognized some elements of the 4th jhana from the territory I've been exploring in the last few sits, namely the expansive sense of attention and being inside a cocoon made up of experience. Finally I had a vague feeling that the bell was going to ring, and then the bell rang.

Tuesday 7/19
Noted for a few minutes, then felt pulled into equanimity/4th jhana. Stayed there for the rest of the sit keeping my attention on the visual field (which seemed more three-dimensional than usual), the sound of the air conditioner, and the spaciousness containing everything else. Kept getting distracted with various thoughts, whenever I noticed this I would return my attention back to the visual field and the sounds in the room.

Wednesday 7/20
Intense throbbing back pain at the start, with the throbbing continuing up into my chest and getting quite unpleasant at times. Also itching in the ears and tension throughout the body. I switched back and forth between 4F noting and Mahamudra noting until a few minutes later when the body sensations died down. Then I was left with stillness and the usual clouds of color moving through the visual field. I noticed that everything in the visual field was actually made up very tiny particles that were turning on and off very quickly. Sometimes an entire group of them would go on and off in synchrony, and I noted this as "flickering". Other times they did so randomly, which I noted as "shimmering". I wondered if I was looking at the firing of individual neurons in the retina or visual cortex or wherever. I spent the rest of the sit observing and noting this shimmering/flickering phenomenon. At the end of the sit when I opened my eyes, I could still see the shimmering everywhere I looked. (I can still see it now too, if I look for it.)

Thursday 7/21
This went similar to yesterday's sit; there was throbbing back pain at first, then I was focused on the shimmering/flickering quality of visual experience. However this time the back pain kept popping up throughout the session, and I also kept getting distracted by thoughts. About halfway through I felt compassion and curiosity emanating from the clouds of color I was watching, and I felt a sense of gratitude towards them.

Friday 7/22
Did some more jhana practice today. Started with noting positive mind states until bodily bliss manifested, then focused on the bliss and tried to make it stable. There was a gradual dropping away into the 2nd jhana, then the 3rd, where I felt heat emanating from my skin. Then I relaxed further into 4th jhana, but I was only lightly in it, and kept getting distracted by visual thought and brief mind-movies.

Saturday 7/23
Noted until I felt bliss, tried to stabilize bliss but couldn't, then slipped into 4th jhana w/out going into 2nd or 3rd. Noted shimmering, then it felt like I was being observed by something, and feeling compassion from that which was observing me, and I felt gratitude for that. I examined the sense of my experience converging to single viewpoint, by trying to "turn around" and look at the convergence point. I noticed there were other viewpoints present from which experience could be observed, and I felt like I was many and one at the same time. Everything became very still and peaceful, and it felt like everything was turning on and off very quickly in synchrony. There was a sense of energetic stillness permeating everything, and I stopped noting and just sat observing. There was a sense that something (not me) was aware of the emptiness and was being playful with it. The bell rang, and I opened my eyes, feeling deeply refreshed.

Monday 7/25
Noted for a few minutes, then switched to mindfulness of breathing. Had a lot of trouble staying with the breath, kept spacing out. Bliss of 1st jhana arose very briefly halfway through the sit, but I wasn't able to solidify it.

Tuesday 7/26 (my 33rd birthday!)
Body sensations were prominent throughout the sit, mainly throbbing, aching, itching, and hunger. I don't usually get hungry during my sits, so that was a surprise (an annoying one). I noticed that hunger feels like a gnawing sensation inside my guts, and associated with it is a strong desire to do something about it NOW. The sense of hunger kept popping up throughout the session, and it was very difficult at times to resist the temptation to get up and get something to eat, which was unsettling and humbing at the same time.

Wednesday 7/27
Started with mindfulness of breathing along with counting out-breaths from 1 to 10. After about 10 rounds of this I noticed the bliss of 1st jhana, but wasn't able to fully enter it. After another 15 rounds of breath counting the bliss returned more strongly and I was able to lock in to 1st jhana. From there I naturally moved through 2nd and 3rd to 4th, where I stayed for the last five minutes or so of the sit. There were some subtle body sensations, pleasant feelings of energy running through my muscles, but otherwise I was concentrated on the sense of spaciousness present in the jhana.

Thursday 7/28
Started with mindfulness of breathing/counting out-breaths. Pretty quickly entered 1st jhana and stayed there for a couple of minutes, then did the same for 2nd and 3rd, then reached 4th and stayed there for the rest of the sit. My attention remained focused the entire time on the sounds in the room, the shimmering nature of the visual field, and the sense of space encompassing it all. Thoughts arose occasionally, but they seemed distant and muted in volume and weren't distracting.

Friday 7/29
Again started with mindfulness of breathing and counting out-breaths. It took a lot longer than yesterday to enter access concentration, almost 10 minutes (the first half of the sit). Went into 1st jhana, which seemed more chaotic than usual, then stayed in 2nd jhana for a while. Then I think I skipped over 3rd and went directly into 4th, where I stayed for the rest of the sit. I was only lightly in each jhana and I kept getting distracted with various narrative thoughts.

Saturday 7/30
Started with mindfulness of breathing, but this time my mind was fairly settled from the start and I didn't feel the need to count out-breaths. Pretty quickly tuned into the rhythm of the breath, and from there entered the 4th jhana directly. After several minutes of being still I had a short mind-movie where I was meditating in a hut in the jungle, and a cobra came in and bit me on the ankle, and then I tried to suck the poison out of the wound. I snapped back into present awareness and focused on feeling metta and compassion. This seemed to open up a new level in my experience, and there were very abstract impressions of something being exchanged back and forth along a circular path from a single point inside my head to just in front of my eyes and back again. The shifting clouds of color in my vision coalesced into a single large white spot which seemed to be like a giant eye looking right at me. Just before the bell rang, there was a shift in my perspective and I suddenly felt like I was floating in interstellar space and gazing upon a gigantic galaxy rotating before me, and I had the funny thought that galaxies are the eyes of the universe looking at itself.

Several hours after the last sit I had an unusual experience (or maybe it was a non-experience... I was idly thinking about how I don't know where my life is going exactly or how it's going to turn out, when it occurred to me that I don't even know what's going to happen in the very next moment. Suddenly there was some kind of a blip and I immediately realized that nobody and nothing ever knows for sure what's going to happen in the next moment, there isn't any kind of divine plan for the evolution of the universe, nobody really knows how anything is going to turn out in the end, and I don't have to keep searching for the way I'm "supposed" to be living, because there isn't one. This brought a huge sense of relief, and the feeling that I can stop searching for a while and focus on getting my life together instead, and a huge feeling of energy swelled through my body, like I had just flipped a circuit breaker back on. Then I wondered about the blip that had happened before all of these thoughts. I couldn't remember anything happening during the blip itself, there seemed to be an infinitesimal discontinuity in my memory. I had the strong sense that everything (absolutely everything, including me) jolted to a screeching halt just before the blip, and then it all started back up afterwards.

Monday 8/1
Did mindfulness of breathing to access concentration, then entered 4th jhana. Was only lightly in the jhana and kept getting distracted by thoughts. Tried looking for fruitions (on the theory that if what happened Saturday night was a path moment, then I should be experiencing fruitions now), and I had the sense that everything was flickering in and out, but wasn't sure if I was imagining that or how I would know if I had one.

Tuesday 8/2
Mindfulness of breathing, didn't really get to access concentration. My concentration seems to be a bit worse these past couple of days.

Wednesday 8/3
Again did mindfulness of breathing, but kept spacing out and didn't get to access concentration. I think I need to go back to noting 4Fs for the next few sessions, the jhana stuff doesn't seem to be working out for me so well.

Friday 8/5
At the beginning of the sit there was a lot of muscle tension and a strong throbbing sensation in my chest (probably my heartbeat). I also noted curiosity and not-knowing. Gradually I settled in and became more aware of the space of the room I was in and the shimmering clouds of light behind my closed eyelids. The lights were a bluish-white color and seemed brighter and more active than in previous sessions. I watched them flicker for a while, noting as seeing, flickering, and movement. Suddenly there was a sense of a release of tension all over, and I felt relieved, like I had just let go of a heavy weight. I spent the last five minutes of the sit feeling very content.

Sunday 8/7
There was a strong pulsation in the center of my chest that lasted for several moments, and occasionally some itching was noticed in my ears. Focusing on the pulsation, I became deeply relaxed and content. The clouds of color I normally see with my eyes closed were not moving very much, they seemed to hanging in space, and behind them there was a small silver disk right in the center of my field of vision, looking like the moon appearing and disappearing in a cloudy night sky. Gradually the clouds started to move again and shimmer like they usually do, and they coalesced into a large bluish-white spot in front of me. I noticed that I was feeling unusally relaxed and peaceful in this sit, and I was grateful for it. Towards the end the chest pulsations came back, and I noticed that they went at a slower rate than the cloud shimmering. I tried to pay attention to both the shimmering and the pulsating at the same time, and there arose a subtle feeling of spaciousness itself vibrating in synchrony with the visual shimmering.

Monday 8/8
Lots of body aching and tension at first, and some faint pulsating in my chest, then I started to feel hungry. The hunger kept growing, and along with it highly unpleasant feelings of frustration and anxiety and the desire to stop meditating and get something to eat. About halfway through I got up from the cushion and laid down on my bed, and switched to mindfulness of breathing instead of noting out loud. The pulsations in my chest became more noticeable, and developed some complex harmonics (I'm pretty sure this is me being aware of my own heartbeat, along with the pulse in various other areas of my body). I also noticed shimmering again in my field of vision, and I spent the rest of the sit focusing on the interplay between the shimmering and the chest pulsations.

Tuesday 8/9
A few moments after starting, I locked in to the state I entered last time where I was aware of both pulsations in my chest and shimmering in the visual field, though this time the chest pulsations were faint and hard to notice. I spent several minutes noting while in this state, then I stopped noting and naturally fell into a light trance. My eyes shifted focus and I entered the 2nd jhana (somehow I skipped over the 1st), then after a few moments my eyes shifted focus again and I entered the 3rd jhana, where I stayed for a while (I guess to make up for all of the previous sessions where I skipped it . I spent a while familiarizing myself with the quality of attention in the 3rd jhana; it seemed I was aware mainly of the edges or surfaces of things and not so much the centers or insides. For example, I could feel heat emanating from all over my skin, but I wasn't that aware of sensations occurring inside my body, while in the visual field I could see rings of yellowish light continually being formed and expanding outward. After a while I felt pulled toward the 4th jhana, so I slowly relaxed my eye focus and let go of the subtle effort keeping me in the 3rd. I spent the last few minutes of the sit in the 4th jhana, being present in the all-encompassing clarity and spaciousness in that state.

Wednesday 8/10
Again I started by being aware of vibrations and shimmering while noting. I had an argument at work yesterday, and I kept getting distracted thinking about it, and finally I remembered that I'm not at work right now, I'm sitting on my cushion, so I can let all of that go, which was a relief. About halfway into the sit the investigating turned itself towards the sense of an observer, and it seemed that the observing process was part of a chain of causal links that led from a sensation arising to the awareness of it to saying the note out loud. All sensations and the observer of those sensations seemed to be all on one side of some sort of fundamental division, but what was on the other side was completely unknown. It certainly wasn't me, or the observing process, or anything else that was being experienced at the time. Also, the sensations and the sense of the observer all seemed to be wispy, insubstantial, and flattened out, like I was viewing a mirage on asphalt on a hot day, or watching a movie and viewing the screen from an extreme angle instead of straight on. (Of course, now that I think about it, the sense that sensations were insubstantial and flattened out was itself just another sensation, wasn't it?

Thursday 8/11
Did noting and samatha practice. I guess not much happened because I forgot to write any notes afterwards.

Friday 8/12
Noted lower back aching and hunger in my stomach at the start. I was waiting for the hunger to go away, when I remembered a Chogyam Trungpa quote I saw yesterday: "Samsara is waiting for something to happen". I placed all of my attention on the feelings of hunger, and they broke up into aching, throbbing, burning, stretching, squeezing, pain, and a strong desire to eat. There seemed to be lots of energy present in the feelings making up hunger. About halfway through the hunger receded into background, though the burning part of it was still present. Then there was stillness and a sense of relief. I realized that any sensation can provide the mental energy needed to keep going through any meditation, and I felt gratitude for that. Then I noted shimmering in the visual field and pulsating in the chest, along with the burning in the stomach still. At the end I noted again the thinness or flatness of my experience that I encountered in the session on 8/10.

Saturday 8/13
I sat in a chair this time instead of on the floor. The first half of the sit was spent noting and entering stillness. I noted tenderness and vulnerability in the heart area, and it occurred to me to try the perspective switching technique I read about this morning in Antero's journal:

kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/44...set=174&maxResults=3

I wandered up and down different points along the spine, basing the attention from each point and experiencing things from the perspective of that point, and noticed very different sets of sensations for each place I tried. Here they are in the order I tried them:

Heart - Tenderness, openness, compassion, deep sadness (yet felt good in a way to feel the sadness fully)

Base of spine - Lack of emotion, total stillness, no obvious vedana, felt like a reptile, absolutely no desire to change things or to do anything

Third eye - Felt energy getting sucked out of my forehead through a small tube

Throat - Constriction, anxiety, embarrasment, not knowing what to say, worry about what's going to happen next

Genitals - Confidence, swagger, cockiness (ha ha), self-assuredness, pleasure and ease in being exactly who I am here and now

Gut - Murkiness, confusion, hollowness (it was a few hours after I'd last eaten..)

Head area as a whole - Clarity, understanding, intellectual curiosity, wanting to analyze everything, break things down into parts and then put them back together again to see how they work

Space above top of head - Surrounded by energy streaming down from above, luminosity permeates all

Feet - Groundedness, stability, steadfastness, feeling like an unmovable mountain.

Afterwards I was amazed at the distinctness of each place where I could rest attention, and could see how all of them are useful in their own way.

Sunday 8/14
I decided to try practicing the formless jhanas today. Did Mahamudra noting until feelings of excitement and bodily bliss arose, then I luxuriated in those sensations to enter the 1st jhana. It seemed I was in the jhana a little more solidly than usual, and I was very focused on my breathing, which was somewhat chaotic and shallow. From 1st I felt pulled to enter 2nd, where I was able to drop the effort of focusing on my breathing, which naturally became deeper and more regular. I broadened my attention to the entire body to enter the 3rd jhana, then dropped the sense of deep contentment and tuned into the underlying equanimity to enter the 4th, where my attention became very wide and encompassed the space I was sitting in. For 5th I extended the boundaries of space itself outwards, until my sense of physical objects within the space disappeared and I felt like a point floating weightlessly in space. To enter the 6th jhana, I noticed the sense of awareness pervading the sense of space, which caused an abrupt shift much like turning the lights on in a dark room. The 7th and 8th jhanas were hard for me to enter and stay in. For the 7th, I tried to notice the nothingness underlying the space-pervading awareness, and it seemed as if I was catching glimpses of innumerable points of total blackness distributed throughout the awareness. For 8th, I tried to drop the effort of perceiving, and there was a sense of solidity manifesting just in front of the third eye, and somehow I was aware of it without perceiving it through any of the senses, though this was very subtle and hard to maintain.

(cont)

Then I went back down through 7th, 6th, and 5th, with the physical world gradually congealing more and more at each step. I noticed in the 5th jhana going down that the breath was shallower and irregular, like I was catching my breath during free-fall, and it was similar to the breathing pattern in the 1st jhana. Finally I stopped in the 4th jhana and focused on the heart area, and felt vulnerability and gratitude and a deep sense of peace.

Monday 8/15
I didn't get much sleep last night and was very tired this morning, so just plain old noting seemed the easiest thing to do. I noted frustration and embarrassment connected with the feelings of exhaustion. These feelings naturally turned themselves into compassion for myself, and releasing of some tension surrounding my continuing insomnia. At the end of the sit my eyes shifted focus, and I was intensely concentrated on a single spot in front of my forehead.

Tuesday 8/16
I noted until I entered access concentration, then went through the rupa jhanas in order from 1st to 4th. I stayed in the 4th for the rest of the sit but kept getting distracted by narrative thoughts and hypnogogic states. At the end it occurred to me that narrative thoughts are a kind of similarity relationship over moments in time; that is to say, a narrative gives us a way to judge how similar two moments are to each other. While having this insight into relative thought, I also kept in mind the absolute perspective that no two moments are exactly alike.