first ever practice journal!

I'm going to use this thread to describe some of my experiences working with Kenneth's direct mode techniques. Some of my previous experiences are here: kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/46...enneth%27s+NYC+class

A brief introduction: I've done a lot of Mahasi-style (or MCTB-style) noting, gotten great things out of it, but eventually came to a point where I didn't see any value in it for myself anymore. I'd been hanging around at that point for a number of months, went to one of Kenneth's classes on a whim, and in talking to him, came to realize that there are ways that a person can continue not to perceive phenomena clearly which are intractable to that style of noting (or were for me), and that there is definitely something important going on concerning emotions and seeing phenomena clearly that needs to be worked on.

Variations of noting don't really sit well with me anymore. Anything remotely Mahasi-like sends me from review-A&P to review-Equanimity to cessation in 5 or 10 seconds and doesn't achieve anything aside from possibly getting me closer to a world record for total number of review cycles per minute. Noting out loud, noting with a partner, noting triplets, etc. seems unhelpful in its own way (unrelated to nanas). Noting "yes" or "no" in relation to the presence or absence of narrative-forming is OK but I don't have much experience with it. Sometimes I like to cultivate jhanas but I don't know if it does any good aside from being interesting in itself. NS has nice aftereffects when I access it through jhana practice, but they don't seem to be nearly as strong when I do it through the "NS spot," so I attain it only sporadically (which perhaps I should change). I have attained "rigpa" a whole bunch of times, but it tends to be fleeting, and I feel like it happens mostly by accident. (cont)

(I just realized that this is not actually my first-ever journal, but it will at least be the only one I've written in any detail. So nyah.)

Another general thing about my practice is, I have a tendency to try to do everything "by force," and it tends to work extremely well. Mahasi-style noting is easy to do by force and it's been very powerful, albeit extremely disorienting (just sit down and note everything as fast as humanly possible; this is the driest kind of dry insight practice). The states I described in the previous thread I linked to are also easy to attain in a similar way (e.g. I force my attention onto emotional states and onto my body in a way that makes the former congeal into the latter, and then I hold it there in a vise-like way until it stays). Jhanas can't be attained this way, so I try to assess whether I'm in a suitable mood for them or not before I try, and I don't try if I'm not. Rigpa supposedly can't be attained this way which is why I probably can't figure out how to attain it at will.

This attitude towards practice may or may not say something about my psychology, but it definitely does inform how I go about practice, since (uncommonly?) it works really well for me, and if you're going to read about my practice, you need to know that.

I also tend to talk about practice in a dry, technical way. This is probably more suited to progress of insight stuff rather than direct mode stuff, but we'll see. (cont)

(cont) For the last few days I've been regularly and consistently cultivating what I call the stage 6-associated state (see the linked thread; I'll call it "state 6" for short). I got to a point where I could bring it up on command in about 3-5 seconds. This tends to happen when I get a lot of momentum for the practice going, but I've never had it at my fingertips in such an easy way before. Last night I had some extra time before bed so I just tried to keep up state 6 + state 7 while I did some miscellaneous light reading. After a while it occurred to me that something was different, and after thinking about it for awhile, it seemed that the emotional grounding of state 6 and the clear perception of proprioception of state 7 were not things I had to actively keep up, because it was just somehow really obvious that emotions are just body states and my sense of a body is just an unremarkable sense of a body. I don't know why, but recognizing that was really surprising to me, and I had a sudden strong cessation a few moments later (very rare during direct mode practice). I spent the next hour or so marveling at how simple all this was, and my body felt quite blissed-out. That hour wasn't spent in state 6 or state 7 (the senses weren't extra-sharp, the sense of "groundedness" of state 6 was only present if I directed my attention in that way), but the recognition of what those states are about persisted despite that, which made me think that I didn't really understand what stage 6 and 7 must be about. I flirted with the possibility of having attained one or both of them, but figured that thinking about it really didn't matter.

Today, the lack of a self in the proprioceptive sense was effortlessly clear to me for most of the day, and the bodily grounding of emotions was mostly effortlessly happening (but there were a few moments where it didn't happen and I had to force it). (cont)

(cont) Right now I feel like the bodily grounding is fading and I can't bring it up on command, because I've lost momentum or because it's too late at night for me. The lack of self in the proprioceptive sense is still mostly effortless but there are a few moments where I'm not sure about that. I'm not really sure what to do in those moments, because I only know how to cultivate state 7 from state 6, and state 6 isn't arising on command, but somehow the moments end and it's effortless again.

The combination of no-self-in-proprioception and body states appearing as emotions is new to me, and not a combination that I would have expected was possible, but apparently it is.

(When I say "no self" I don't mean the feeling that a self is lacking, or some kind of dissociated feeling, but just not having the sense of a body appear to be me or not me or anything like that. I used to get dissociated "no self" experiences once in a while after going through some cycles during 3rd path, but this is subtle and [literally] unassuming rather than the in-my-face impression that "I" had simply vanished and left some kind of empty spot in mental space.)

Since I seem to be having these experiences without the sensory clarity or "groundedness" of states 6 and 7, I feel like I was confused about what stages 6 and 7 were about in the past, or I'm confused about what they're about now, or I was confused both then and now. Funny stuff!

For no reason that I can tell, the blissed-out body stuff is still happening, but not as strongly.

My final reflection for now is that seeing body states as emotions inherently sucks, and seeing body sensations as a self inherently sucks, and when those things aren't happening, everything is relatively awesome, even though there are moments that have negative qualities in other ways. (cont)

(cont) The relief of not seeing things in those ways is not exactly similar to the relief of clear seeing from attaining paths, because it's direct and palpable and gross, whereas the changes that path attainment brings regarding attachment and aversion are related to subtle properties of the mind.

Also, I'll clarify that the blissed-out body stuff that began last night and is continuing into today started BEFORE the strong cessation, so whatever is causing it, it's not cessation-afterglow.

(Hey, Kenneth, in retrospect I'd like to title this thread "practice journal: all direct mode, all the time" since that's a better description of it. But I don't seem to be able to change the name of the thread by myself. Can you use your moderator-powers to do it?)

Woke up today, bodily grounding is definitely not my default state anymore, though it comes back kind of easily. Proprioceptive selfing goes back and forth between on and off, but is somehow subtle even when it's on. Feeling hungry and getting unpleasant body sensations because of it, and yet my body is still chilled out beyond what's normal for me. Planning to spend a number of hours today cultivating state 6 + 7 + 8 and doing nothing else, and we'll see how that plays into things.

Great reports, EndInSight. Very clear and straightforward.

(It isn't possible to change the name of a thread, so we'll have to make the best of it!)

Keep up the good work.

Kenneth

Still mostly blissfully chilled out today. I think there has been some permanent shift in my practice, though I can't quite pinpoint what it is. My best guess is that, even when I'm not in state 6 or 7, the lack of embeddedness of those states seems to bleed through to regular (non-direct mode) life. For a while I imagined that attaining stage 6 or stage 7 would be like being permanently in state 6 or 7, or being permanently in some kind of direct mode experience, because I thought that the direct mode / sensory clarity stuff was directly responsible for the disembedding, but now it occurs to me that it's not *required* that things play out that way, whether or not they do.

Today I went on a long trip as a passenger, so I had a lot of time to practice while staring out the window and listening to music. I tried to cultivate state 6 as the foundation of the practice, and then let states 7 and 8 flit on and off on top of 6 without worrying about them, so long as 6 was firmly in place. When I listen to music or sounds, I normally find the "internal echoing" of the notes or sounds (the mind duplicating them) to be extremely prominent; today I got to a kind of direct-mode experience where this internal echoing became very subdued, and it seemed that I was able to hear and appreciate detail in the music I was listening to in a way that doesn't normally happen. There was a sense that everything was really delightful, regardless of what it was, but the delight seemed to be a property of experience rather than a body state. At one point (watching cars driving in the other direction on the opposite side of the highway) I had the thought that the visual scene was like one of the animations set to music in Fantasia---vibrant, fantastic, wonderful---but for no reason other than that the scene was very clear and that direct mode was suppressing some gross aspects of my experience that normally get in the way of that appreciation. (cont)

(cont) I also had some reflecting thoughts afterwards about whether all the Eastern religion stuff along the lines of "God is infinite bliss" refers in some strange way to an experience along those lines, because in that experience 1) awareness is doing its own thing, and 2) what it's doing seems unquantifiably good in a way that doesn't happen in normal states of consciousness, and also 3) "infinite bliss" sounds like some kind of jhanic absorption, but some sources that talk about it are referring to a state that a person can function in, not maximally absorbed jhana, and probably not constant A&P-like raptures either (in other words, not the same kind of bliss that the word typically refers to).

Also reflected on whether the description of the goal of meditation in"Mindfulness in Plain English" is describing the same thing in more straightforward language:

"Traditionally, Buddhists are reluctant to talk about the ultimate nature of human beings. But those who are willing to make descriptive statements at all usually say that our ultimate essence or Buddha nature is pure, holy and inherently good. The only reason that human beings appear otherwise is that their experience of that ultimate essence has been hindered; it has been blocked like water behind a dam."

Well, that sure ain't technical 4th path, and yet the method described is pretty traditional samatha + mindfulness...hmm. (cont)

(cont) I'd think that cultivating direct mode like this would make it easier to get it to stick around afterwards, during other tasks, but that seems not to have happened. The bleeding-through of the disembeddedness of states 6 and 7 is strong enough that I managed to forget to be present so many times after I stopped being a passenger and started interacting with the world, because nothing bad is really coming up, and whatever does come up that would have been bad seems half-grounded in some sense already, so there aren't any real reminders to be present once I get lost in thought or in whatever tasks I'm doing.

So, I formally resolve to stay present during large parts of my day tomorrow, whether or not any suffering comes up, even if (in the absence of obvious suffering) the original thirst that brought me to do this practice in the first place has been slaked.

Another quick thought. I used to use "just a body" as a mental cue for how to get into state 6, because the shift from the perception of an internal space where emotions happen to the perceptual mode lacking that really had the sense of suddenly inhabiting my body (or even outright being my body) as one of the most prominent features of the shift, with the emotion no longer being there (hence "*just* a body"). Now that the state 7 stuff is bleeding through to everything else, "just a body" is no longer an effective cue, because suddenly entering state 6 no longer has this contrast between having some kind of internal emotional space and being a body. (There is still a contrast of some kind, but nothing that I can pin down in a few words).

I have other cues I've used (the other common one is the question "where is this emotion located?") as well as non-linguistic ways of getting to state 6, so it's not a problem, but it's interesting enough and different enough that I thought it was worth writing down.

I also feel like I've got my Eastern religion cred back. Doing a spiritual practice that leads to a sense of inhabiting the body, and the common refrain "you are not your body!" (which is self-evident to me), made strange bedfellows.

I'd be very interested hearing about what practice got you to 4th path, if you have a moment and feel like sharing that info.
Thanks.

Excellent points and techniques you are bringing up.

Thanks a bunch!

RevElev, my understanding is that the KFD culture objects to people popping in brashly and proclaiming 4th path. So I'll just tell you what I've done and let you decide what it is.

Before I learned about pragmatic dharma, I spent many years living through crazy A&P / dark night cycles. I also meditated during that time (anapanasati / samatha), but all the progress of insight stuff that was going on was actually totally independent of it (so much so that I never thought those experiences had anything to do with meditation; they never happened during it, for example)

Later, I did Mahasi-style noting with no samatha whatsoever, completely dry. I believed it was going to lead to something good, even if I wasn't sure what, so I gave it 200% effort, like my head was on fire and this was the only way to quench the flames. I would note whatever came up as fast as humanly possible, and then switch to noticing as fast as humanly possible, generating immense physical tension, making my heart race as if I were sprinting uphill, for hours and hours and hours. That got me stream entry (though only by accident when I had decided to lay down and relax for a bit before another session) and 2nd path.

Getting 3rd path was harder; I had built up this powerful ultrafast artillery barrage-style noting / noticing skill but didn't know how to use it effectively. It was as if I was previously surrounded by enemies, and so any direction I fired in would be good, but now most of the enemies were gone and just firing randomly meant bombing bare rock. Eventually turning it towards the apparent observer and noting "not me, not me" very fast did it.

At that point my practice became more formless; I could note very fast, but there was no more static self left ("me") so I had no idea what to look for. (cont)

(cont) I did really random stuff like making a taxonomy of the basic components of experience and rapidly noting each of them, one by one, which seemed to produce lots of new cycles that ended with a review cessation (not path cessation) and may or may not have helped. (Lots to say about this practice, but not here.) One day I decided that I wasn't getting anywhere so I resolved to follow my breath at every possible moment no matter what else I was doing, and got into this state where anytime I would stop doing things I would fall into some kind of jhana / bliss absorption from following the breath, and while doing other stuff there would still be lots of bliss / concentration stuff in the background. At the end of the day I was reading some Buddhist book (forget what), following my breath, and suddenly had this momentary mental image of my body and mind and all their contents, and all my feelings, laid out together on the same "plane" as if there were no difference between them (feelings were "just there" like everything else), and then an immediate pathlike cessation. At the time, it was a big deal (in retrospect, this was the divider between early 3rd path and mid 3rd path).

After this I realized that the stuff to note wasn't the appearance of a gross static self, but the "relational self" that was still there (manifesting as grasping / aversion towards objects, without any apparent self there to be doing it). So I did a lot of things like digging my nails into my arm and rapidly noting "not mine, not mine" to the pain, or getting in sexual situations and rapidly noting "not mine, not mine" to the pleasure. I had a lot of pathlike moments, each of which made my default perception more dissociated from various kinds of painful or pleasant objects. (At one point I remember going out into the cold and thinking "this is painful, but not painful *to me*! I'm unaffected!") (cont)

Eventually I got to what is in retrospect late 3rd path, where my default perception was that every mental phenomenon whatsoever would manifest in empty, property-less mental space, splayed out grotesquely and completely revealed in front of awareness. (At the time I thought of the Holodeck on Star Trek; a blank room that all kinds of stuff can manifest in). It seemed really stereotypically mystical / Eastern religion-y. One day, out of nowhere, I realized that the "empty, property-less mental space" was a phenomenon itself, so I noted the hell out of it and got a pathlike cessation.

After that, my perception was full-on dissociated from everything; nothing appeared to occur "to me"; things would be nice or nasty, but never nice or nasty "to me," and I had a lot of confidence that I was totally liberated from pleasure and pain. The dissociation was so palpable that I would continually think "phenomena are here, but there is no 'me' left to observe them, and no 'me' left to grasp at them or push them away. Non-attachment is effortless." (In retrospect I associate this perception with the 7th oxherding picture; you look around and think "no me over there!", but miss the fact that you're walking around and generating that kind of internal talk). So I was very confident that I was "done" and walked around, alternatingly satisfied that enlightenment was so good and unsatisfied that there wasn't some kind of cosmic bliss-out at the end of the rainbow that would cover up all the normal human unhappiness that I still had with me.

At this point I started thinking about neuroscience and studies showing that monks were really, really happy, and I wondered if I missed out on something better because I did way too much dry insight in the course of my attainment. (cont)

(cont) So I started doing intense jhana practice and getting NS everyday, hoping that it would make me permanently happy by rewiring my brain for bliss. It seemed to me that jhana was really worthwhile in a way that no normal experience was; jhana-bliss was "soft" and "soothing" whereas I was full-on dissociated from the pleasure of regular life experiences, and jhana-rapture felt like it touched me in some secret deep-down magical place, in contrast to the A&P-like "tingly energy sensations" that come through sex or other things in daily life. And, after doing that for awhile, I felt really good, except when I didn't have a chance to do jhana or wasn't in the mood to do it, at which point I would have a kind of "blah" negative mood that felt really irksome to me.

One day I was reflecting on the 10-fetter model of enlightenment and the meaning of "lust for material / immaterial existence." If I were 4th path, then I would have dropped that already, but there would also have been a point where I had dropped sensual desire and ill-will and not totally dropped those two. So I wondered about when that might have been in light of what my moment-to-moment experience of having dropped the lust for rarefied existence was like. But I couldn't straight-facedly find anything that I had gotten rid of that I could call "lust for rarefied existence" that hadn't been gotten rid of more or less at the same time as sensual desire and ill-will. And it dawned on me that my desire for jhana was precisely lust for rarefied existence, and the impression that jhana-pleasure touched me in some special way was just the feeling of being joined to pleasant feelings (as described in the Sallatha Sutta, www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.than.html ), whereas regular stuff didn't feel that way because I had dropped those grosser fetters previously. (cont)

(cont) At the time I had been in one of those unpleasant "blah" moods that bothered me, and I saw the feeling of being bothered as the analogous faux-joining to unpleasant feelings. So I aimed my rapid noting at that mood, while I tried to muster up every possible reasonable way I knew of to understand "not self" (hoping that one of them would be sufficient)...I think I made a mantra out of whatever string of ideas I came up with at the time (e.g. "not me, not mine, not hurting me, not perceived by me," etc.)...and got a pathlike cessation.

After that I felt like someone had played some kind of joke on me, because I must have gotten 4th path then, and yet I felt somehow as if I was a normal person who had never meditated before and didn't have any perception of the emptiness of phenomena or phenomena "just being there" or anything like that. So that was confusing. I wondered what good all the time I wasted on meditation had done me if I was back to where I began in life (blissful ignorance). I spent a number of days like that, sort of perplexed and not really thinking about spirituality much and just doing my own thing, when out of nowhere some subtle confusion I had about things occurred to me, sort of like (if I put it in words):

"the perception of self, me-ing, mine-ing, and the perception of not-self, not-me, not-mine, and dissociation are all the same; the appearance of self and the appearance of not-self are just different sides of the sunyata coin; whether I see all phenomena are empty or feel like I haven't meditated before makes no difference to anything"

but not really, because I had figured out at least part of that after the previous pathlike moment, and this was different. In any case, I thought I needed to do some kind of noting to make it official, but I didn't really know what to note, so I just noted whatever came up, and had a pathlike moment. (cont)

(cont) After that I had no new realizations, no pathlike moments, and no significant doubt about having attained 4th path, which brings us to today.

The core understanding from that attainment, as I see it, is that phenomena are just what they are, and pleasure and pain are just what they are, and being just what they are, they can't be grasped at or pushed away, and all the previous grasping and pushing away were merely "apparent grasping" and "apparent pushing away", themselves just as not-self as anything, and so in some sense it doesn't really matter whether I'm attached or not.

The core cognitive effect of that attainment is that there is no more dissociation. It never occurs to me to think "this hurts, but it doesn't hurt me!"; it just hurts; the same goes for pleasure. Since "it doesn't hurt me!" makes no sense, there isn't any way left to "hide" from unpleasantness by dissociating (imagining the unpleasantness in one place and reflecting, "that place is far away from here!") but there isn't a "me" who wants to hide or dissociate anyway, so it makes no real difference. Jhana is good. So is everyday life. My body and mind search out positive experiences because that's how they function, but no longer because those experiences appear to touch me in some deep secret place in my soul.

Despite the fact that attachment and non-attachment (in the pragmatic dharma / vipassana sense of the word) are the same in terms of emptiness, it's much better to live without attachment. Without attachment, I'm just living a regular life doing regular stuff in regular ways, whatever that stuff is. And I don't think about attachment or non-attachment or emptiness or anything like that anymore, except in special contexts like this one. (cont)

(cont) ANYHOW, those are the practices I've done. Ultrafast noting / noticing, and freeform reflection to get inspiration for what to apply the noting to. As I made my way through 3rd path, the amount of time noting became very small and selectively applied, which is why the descriptions get longer and more narrative-like (the practice *was* the reflection that I've narrated, and I don't know how to explain it except by retelling it).

I don't necessarily recommend other people to do what I did (I omitted any mention of the temporary psychological side-effects, which were overwhelming at times); it only worked for me because I had the attitude "I don't care how much suffering this causes me today as long as it gives me clarity in the end" which helped me bear it. Even so, there were times when it sucked so much that I wanted to stop but couldn't.

I do occasionally wonder whether I really did attain 4th path, since I spent a lot of time thinking that I had and then later having been proven wrong, but this kind of wondering is purely theoretical, as I have not had any aspect of my own experience throw doubt on it.

I hope that reading that was interesting for you!

Wow!
Thanks for the detailed explanation, it was very interesting. I find it fascinating that people can take different routes to enlightenment, and am currently very interested in how some people can make quick progress, and others flounder for decades. Personal feel of flounder will do that.
I just assumed you were post 4th based on the exchanges you've had with Kenneth. He didn't seem to have a problem with it, so neither do I, obviously.
Thanks again!

I've never talked to Kenneth about whether I've attained 4th path, so I don't know what he thinks.

Sometimes it can be good to hear about what other people have done (like it kicks something loose in the mind), but I guess the value depends on a lot of things. Hope that my experience will prove useful to you somehow.

I don't know why I made progress at the rate I did (relatively quickly), but I imagine that having an obsessive personality and one track mind (constantly thinking about dharma, explicitly or subconsciously) helped me.

Where is your practice at now? Do you have a public journal?

I assumed (ya I know, @$ out of u and me...) since he seemed to accept you were working stages 6, 7, and 8, he also accepted you had 4th.
I may have gotten stream entry early March, my best guess is that I'm in the dukkha nanas approaching 2nd path, and grinding my teeth all the way! LOL!
My journal: kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/43.../A+beginners+Journal

So much for the power of formal resolutions; didn't get much direct mode time in at all.

When I'm in direct mode, everything is great, but it's as if once I'm out of it, my mind can't conceptualize what was so great about it, and so there's no urge to pursue it (and an urge not to pursue it if I could be doing something else). Because...what's so great about it? Nothing in particular. Just that everything is clear and the perception of individual moments is replaced by a sort of beginningless, endless flow of time. Doesn't sound good at all until I start to approach that mode of perception, when it dawns on me, "boy you're stupid, why weren't you doing this all along?"

Bodily grounding is mostly gone, but freedom from proprioceptive selfing is my default experience 95% of the time (outside of direct mode, even!). I don't really know how that happened, especially because state 7 is much harder to produce for me than state 6, so I've spent a lot more time in 6 than 7. I think that this quasi-attainment is somehow responsible for my body feeling chilled out for no reason. The feeling of being a body is "hard" and when that feeling goes, the body is comparatively "soft" with a kind of pleasant subtle warmth in the chest and forehead.

Despite this, having the comparison of direct mode to regular experience, I'm struck by how coarse and undesirable this bodily bliss is. My understanding of the dukkha characteristic of phenomena was that no matter how many pleasurable sensations I had, they would never satisfy me, because the feeling of being joined to them or touching them is an illusion, and "I" can never actually have them or interact with them in any way. (Imagine being thirsty and having your throat not connected to your stomach; you can drink all day and it will never help because you can't get the water inside of you.) (cont)

(cont) But now, stuff like this makes more sense to me as an interpretation of dukkha:

"Sensual pleasures in the past were painful to the touch, very hot & scorching; sensual pleasures in the future will be painful to the touch, very hot & scorching; sensual pleasures at present are painful to the touch, very hot & scorching; but when beings are not free from passion for sensual pleasures '” devoured by sensual craving, burning with sensual fever '” their faculties are impaired, which is why, even though sensual pleasures are actually painful to the touch, they have the skewed perception of 'pleasant.'" ( www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.075x.than.html )

Dukkha is literally that these sensations have an unpleasant quality in themselves...which has only become an interpretation that makes sense to me through comparing direct mode (with its relative absence of this stuff) to it. Doesn't mean that pleasure is bad, just that pleasure is defective compared to another mode of experience. And, I'm not sure I'm sold on it as an interpretation, but at this point I think it's an interpretation that's definitely in the running. And it is, as far as I can tell, the traditional Buddhist understanding of dukkha, rather than the modern secular one (which is something like "everything is suffering because bad things suck and good things suck when they go away," implying that good things are not dukkha so long as they're around).

Other observations. Direct mode is easier to get and stay in when I'm looking at a moving visual scene rather than nothing. In general, it's easier when something is happening that takes up sensory bandwidth but doesn't require me to do much interaction. Sitting at a cafe is good. Sitting at a computer is not. Listening to a static sound is not helpful, but listening to music is, and some kinds (Bach) are better than others.