first ever practice journal!

Having destroyed so many defilements, more and more of my experience is dominated by stepping watchfully through their broken shards (pure sense experiences previously associated with feelings).

Surveying the wreckage, seeing the outcome of this scorched-earth policy, is a beautiful but uncanny thing.

I take immense pity on my past self, who was completely dominated by defilements, stuck in some endless battle between mental impulses that just spun him round and round helplessly in samsara. And I have compassion for other beings and for my current self, all of us still battling defilements that we can't clearly see.

The etymology of Avelokitesvara occured to me as interesting in this context. One who is free from it all surely may have world-transcending compassion for unenlightened beings such as ourselves. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avelokitesvara#Etymology )

Other than that, at this point I can usually see pretty well what the non-affective component of a clear feeling that arises is, and simply pay attention to that to actualize it. Much easier than before. No jhanas or tactile comparisons needed. Like when you stop needing paper with extra-large lines to write in during elementary school.

The rest of today is dedicated to work.

Tried Kenneth's Ships in the Harbor technique tonight. Wow, it's good. The idea seems so clever: if you try to pay attention to any sense object that's presenting itself, you fight a battle with your own mind trying to attend to the sense object and not the mental representation (affective distortion) of it. If you try to pay attention to a *future* sense object that never arrives, so much more attention gets diverted from the mental representation and towards whatever sense objects are here now. (When waiting for a future sense object, the mind can't substitute a mental representation to interact with it, because the sense object isn't here yet and so can't have been distorted by the vedana --> craving --> clinging process; to actually notice the object, the mind has to put the representations aside and watch the sense doors.)

I tried including the breath during the practice, and the whole thing gets very jhanic, but it's tough to balance listening with attending to the breath.

I tried including investigation during the practice, but it seems redundant; the grossest affect in experience gets actualized much better if I notice it with bare attention while listening rather than trying to do anything specific.

I tried assuming that the ships might manifest in any sense, not just hearing, and this has some promise.

As a formal practice, my impression right now is that it's similar to but better than HAIETMOBA (it doesn't cause the subtle tension of having to repeat the words). HAIETMOBA is better for daily life (less mind wandering when there's a specific task to do) but perhaps not for formal sitting.

It's possible that the similarity of these results to my prior practices is just because of my prior practices, but it seems more likely to me that we're all barking up the same tree and talking about it in different ways.

Interesting shift yesterday. At one point I asked HAIETMOBA and, immediately, the thought occurred to me: "Everytime I do this my attention shifts to something affective, as if to compare it to sense objects; what reason do I have *not* to stay with the sense objects?" This wasn't reflective thought, precisely, but some kind of spontaneous arising of a WTF moment. And then there was the shift, and about a minute later a jarring cessation which itself produced no different experience.

Not sure how to explain the shift. The sense that 'I' am affects is greatly weakened somehow. The sense that there is some kind of divide between sense objects and actuality (two sides of experience) seems not to be present. The sense that some faculty of my mind controls whether sense objects or affects are perceived also seems not to be present. Experience is just whatever it is, the mind can incline either way, but the distinction is blurred, and the difference that the inclination either way leads to is very subtle. The sense that 'I' can look at sense objects is suppressed. The sense that 'I' can't look at sense objects is suppressed. Sense objects just appear without 'me'; affects appear with the sense of afflicting 'me', but not quite being 'me'.

In some ways this is analogous to the shift I called 4th path in the past.

I had a similar experience to this about a week ago while looking at dependent origination, but a large part of that shift was psychological and seemed to regress pretty quickly.

The consequences of this shift in terms of suffering seem significant. Everything seems OK. Ultrastressed from work? Barely feeling it. Ultratired from 4 hours of sleep? Barely feeling it. It's as if mood no longer affects my performance or behavior; only biological limitations do. (cont)

(cont) (For example, too much cognitive work and cognitive function deteriorates from overuse, but not really because 'I' feel burnt out.) And it isn't because I somehow grew indifferent to my mood and can persevere despite it, but rather, the phenomenon of mood as a feeling seems not to be present in any overt way anymore, and without it, whatever would be impaired by it runs more effectively.

The only exception to this seems to be muscle pain in my back. OW. I haven't been successful at actualizing that part of my body after committing to do it, because it seems it requires overt affects for my method to work, and the back is not a place that has many. But lying in bed last night at about 3:15am, I made some strong progress there because of the pain that was present.

I don't think this experience is yet out-from-'my'-control because I had to work to actualize the back pain. But otherwise, whenever I pay bare attention to the moment, sense objects are immensely clear and prominent without 'me' trying.

I want to give a general overview of how practice plays out for me, just for the record. When I actualize an affect, it doesn't seem to appear in the same form ever again. However, it can be replaced by a slightly subtler or less intense version of itself, which in turn can be actualized, on and on, until basically nothing is left but the sense object. I stick with the most prominent affect, when that's gone I turn to the next one, etc. Often this involves chasing affects all throughout my body. Actualizing affects in certain areas appears to carry over to other affects that would arise in that area (they often stop arising, also seemingly permanently), but not to similar affects in different areas. Finally, the "attention bounce" phenomenon continues, but as affects stop arising, attention has a more limited variety of things to bounce to. (cont)

(cont) "Attention bounce" is, I think, what other people mean by vibrations or the attention wave; it has complicated dynamics and lots of frequencies overlaid on each other; actualizing affects does seem to simplify it, but the process is very gradual, and it's only obvious that the long-term trend is towards a simplified attention wave (fewer overlaid frequencies) when I look at it over the long term. The last shift I mentioned seems to have done *something* significant to it, but even so, I can't quite say what other than "simplifying it" because of the graduality of the process.

Even if the attention wave changes very slowly and needs to be observed long-term to see that change, the lack of variety in affects is EXTREMELY obvious.

I can see the attention wave in precise, almost excruciating detail at times; even if the detail is unclear, I can see that the number of mind-moments in a second's worth of experience is extremely large, because the rapid fluctuation of the attention wave is always obvious in some way. I don't know if this is a common experience, and if not, I want to chalk it up to the kind of dry insight that came so easily to me (e.g. trying to notice 20+ phenomena per second), which continually built my ability to see it by default. I don't know if this is good or bad, but at this point it makes it extremely, undeniably clear to me what isn't a PCE, as I can detect the most minute fluctuations in the attention wave even if the affect they correspond to is completely indiscernible. I have definitely not had a PCE since being back from retreat, but I had one experience that was 95% there; on retreat, I had many experiences which were up to 99% there, but still not it. Rather humbling to see how hard it is for me to actually produce that mode of perception.

These percentages reflect my best judgments, which may or may not be as accurate as I think. (cont)

(cont) To clarify what I meant about mood and biological limitations, I can clearly perceive the sensations that correspond to the feeling of being stressed or being tired; they just don't seem to get distorted into those feelings except in a very small way. And when they're not distorted into feelings, they're not negative experiences as far as I can tell, just indications about the functional state of my body and mind. So I can also infer how sh*tty I *would* have felt in the past in various states; but now, in the same states, things are fine.

I note that, in a recent past entry (not gong to look it up), I said that the negative feeling of tiredness still existed for me; now, it seems that it barely does. Progress!

There's a lot of spontaneous gratitude when I reflect on how things are turning out for me.

I asked a practice question related to my experience of synaesthesia in another thread, and Chris expressed surprise that I hadn't discussed it here before, so here's a very quick discussion.

Ever since I learned about synaesthesia I was abnormally fascinated by it, and wondered whether I had some form, as (for example) music would always produce all kinds of visual experiences for me, which I had previously just taken to be what happens when anyone listens to music. However, I ultimately dismissed the idea, since synaesthetes seemed to report very precise, very clear cross-modal experiences, and all mine seemed to be in the "mind's eye", vague, and murky (sometimes murkier than other times). The strong commonality seemed to be that neither I nor synaesthetes were able to control the cross-modal flow of experience...so I simply assumed my brain was wired in some way that wasn't typical but wasn't synaesthetic either.

However, having discovered the difference between actual experience and affective experience, having recognized that affects are always "low resolution" copies of something, and having learned the process which eliminates them, the "vague, murky" visual experiences ultimately turned out to be affects, and the actual experiences underlying them turned out to be...crisp sound-->visual synaesthesia. Duh. I've been aware of these experiences all along, but until now have generally only been able to look at them obliquely (except for some special moments in life), as the affects so overpowered them.

The actual experiences themselves are endlessly fascinating. Even the affects are often beautiful, albeit (as with all affects) bittersweet.

There's much more to this story, but there's no need for it to be public. (cont)

(cont) Having these experiences covered up by default with so much affect seems uncommon, but who knows. The only similar thing that I know of is the way that my experience of my body was covered by affect. As far as I have seen, my actual body is always at peace, always easeful, always with some kind of tactile pleasure. That was a surprise for me to find. I wasn't even able to see that obliquely until I had destroyed a *lot* of body affect. I have never heard a regular person say that their experience of their body is remotely similar to this, so I suspect that this default state is almost universal. So, perhaps something similar occurs for many other synaesthetes in whatever modalities are involved in their condition.

Wikipedia cites 1 in 23 as an upper bound for the prevalence of any form of synaesthesia; maybe you have it, but don't yet recognize it?

Trying to look more closely at the actual experiences underlying synaesthetic affects, I think, as I glimpsed what I can best describe as a "visualsound" (an experience that doesn't present as having a separate auditory and synaesthetic visual component, but a single, undifferentiated, unitary sense object), I had a full PCE for a tiny fraction of a second. I don't know how it's possible to have such a short-lived PCE, but for that fraction of a second, there was the recognition of absolute perfection, some kind of silent pleasureless ecstasy that transcends all description; no 'me', no 'being', just the "visualsound" object in all its sensory glory, absolutely nondual in the strongest way I can imagine.

What is strange about the experience is that it didn't trail off into an EE and didn't have any sort of "afterglow". Just a moment of (as best as I can tell) perfect freedom inserted into my regular experience-stream.

I suspect that I will find that the actual objects underlying all my synaesthetically-connected senses are unitary, even though their affects are not. (I can imagine affective hearing without affective synaesthetic vision, even those those two senses are linked for me; I am not sure whether I can imagine actual hearing without actual synaesthetic vision except theoretically.)

I think my practice, for the indefinite future, is going to focus on seeing these cross-modal experiences more clearly. I see very little in my moment-to-moment experience that needs more clarity besides these things. But, since I doubt I can describe this phase of practice in any useful way that others could relate to, I will just bow out of posting about it for the time being. (I may post about things that I think may be relevant to others, if they come up.) (cont)

(cont) If I undestand him, Nick theorizes that the fruition-attainment is a PCE, and the experience of a full PCE (rather than a "partial-" or "almost-PCE") marks some kind of non-cessation path moment. For the sake of shedding light on that theory, I notice no difference in my moment-to-moment experience except that the actual synaesthetic visual sense is much clearer (I know "where" it is, and how to look for it, in a way that I didn't before; it's super-obvious to me right now). I don't know if that's support for or against, but that's how things are for me.

Also, even a fraction of a second of a PCE is pretty mindblowing.

EDIT: One psychological change is interesting. Before, exploring this PCE and near-PCE territory was something that was new and unique and uncharted and had all kinds of surprises. Now, as amazing as it is, it's more like..."duh, no big relevation there, but why am I not living like that all the time?"

EDIT 2: In case some sound-->vision synaesthete with the same problem as me (too much affect covering the synaesthetic sense) reads my practice journal in the future...for the record, the best hint I can give as to where the visual synaesthetic sense should be looked for, is "in the actual sound" or "next to the actual sound". Don't worry about what that means, just try it. This seems true as a general rule (for X-->Y synaesthesia, find Y in X). DON'T look in the imagination, and don't look wherever you "visualize" stuff if you think that place is different from the imagination. Don't look "under" the affects or anywhere "close" to any of these places.

Pretty fast progress, so I can post a bit.

The choice to work on synaesthesia was a good one. The beginning was very hard (as I could barely see the actual senses), but after I blasted it with dry insight for long enough, it's very simple. I focused on synaesthesia associated with music, and now, when I listen to music, the actual experience is so compelling that I almost can't stop the attentiveness-to-sensuousness if I wanted to. Actualists seem to think that things like walking around in nature are better than sitting meditation, probably because they're more immersive and interesting, and the principle is similar here. (I'm not going to describe the full extent of my synaesthesia, but I experience music in four modalities [hearing, seeing, tactile / kinaesthetic, texture [or mind?; hard to categorize this perception]], so it's damn immersive.) I won't describe the experience itself, but anything other than a religious metaphor seems to fall short. But, I emphasize, it's just experiencing sense-objects apperceptively; their multimodal aspect isn't fundamental.

Synaesthesia not related to music is next on my list.

It seems that not having addressed these modes of perception directly was a terrible oversight, as they're not just incidental things, but the basic fabric of all my experience. Not addressing them seemed to put a glass ceiling on the maximum degree of attentiveness-to-sensuousness that I could manage. The "five [separate] senses plus mind" model is a compelling way to think about experience, and the best way I have to communicate about basic everyday stuff with others (talking about the details of my own perception is something I usually avoid in person, and that model helps me avoid saying things like "watching the singer's voice", etc.), but I didn't consider how practice along those lines might be holding me back. I'm dumb sometimes.

Working on clarifying my synaesthetic experiences is showing diminishing returns, so I'm going back to HAIETMOBA / etc. for awhile.

The only thing I have to report is, I've noticed this strange thing ever since I began actualizing synaesthetic experiences (starting precisely then)...I'll be doing something (not practice related), all of a sudden I'll realize that I've been working on it for awhile and that I haven't been keeping track of time, I'll have a moment of "wow, I bet it's been *hours* since I checked!"...but when I check, it's been a much shorter time (say 45 minutes). This happens on other scales (I listen to music, suddenly consider that 8-10 minutes must have passed, but check and realize only 3-4 have passed).

I don't know what it's about. It's almost as if there's a lot more "experiential time" in some quantity of "clock time" than before.

Not sure what to make of it.

EDIT: It was interesting for me to read Nick describe what sounds to me like what I mean when I say "ecstasy" (see e.g. post #259). Lately I've had a lot of almost-glimpses of this inserted into my daily experience, from causes that I can't quite see, and possibly a very limited number of repeats of the full thing. It occurs to me that I forgot to mention that the experience in #259 was certainly not a first for me, though I can't quite say for sure when I've had it before. (As a side note, what's interesting about the full thing is, it appears that it's always invariant in terms of "magnitude"; every experience of it is transcendent, but identically so). I wonder if I have a different understanding of what a "full PCE" is than other people...but in any case, I'm psyched that this practice does indeed seem to lead to what I've been aiming at and hoping for. Also psyched for Nick!

To clarify what an "almost-glimpse" of ecstasy is...I have no idea. There is a kind of experience whose magnitude can vary, and when its magnitude is as high as possible, it transforms into a new kind of experience, fundamentally *NOT* like the lesser versions of it, but sharing some kind of weird resemblance to those versions. One can't recognize the universe experiencing itself *to some extent*...as far as I can see, it's all-or-nothing. But whatever generates that recognition does seem to be something that can be incremental, and this is the sense in which there can be an "almost-glimpse" that is not the full thing. Wonder, then more wonder, then even more wonder, then even MORE wonder, then, suddenly..something else.

I consider the "full experience" to be identical to complete affectlessness, just the pure experience of sense-objects. The sense-objects are the ecstasy, and the ecstasy is this kind of God-experiencing-itself recognition (or whatever non-religious terms you like) that I find no words to describe apart from "the meaning of life".

Bernadette Roberts who's description of 'no-self' seems to match what Nick, Owen and AFer are experiencing also calls *ecstasy* the affectless vanishing of the sense of self revealing "this kind of God-experiencing-itself recognition" that she calls "matter seen as it really is when not filtered by reflexive consciousness", equating it with the transfigured resurrected mystical body of Christ (due to her Catholic background).

Thanks for pointing that out. I'll look into it, but perhaps not immediately.

Alex, as we are sort of in the same boat (not free, working towards it, perhaps close-ish to it?), I'm curious if you recognize this ecstasy as an experience you've had in the past...and, if so, approximately when in your practice / life?

Also, do you think of a PCE (or recognizing what you called 'rigpa' in the past, which you later found is also necessarily recognized during a PCE) as an experience that must include it, or no? On retreat a few weeks ago I had one (*maybe* two) experience which I didn't call a PCE only because it was lacking this God-recognizing-itself feature, and I assumed there was some infinitesimal affect that I couldn't see which was getting in the way. It was extraordinary in terms of stillness, but not really in terms of wonder, which may explain the lack of this feature. Unlike the experience in #259, it lasted for a while(15 mins--2 hours? don't remember) and trailed off into an EE.

Nick says that his past PCEs didn't include it, so I realize I'm probably confused about what everyone means by PCE. It may also explain why I've been so confused that people here have said things like "oh, I had a PCE today, pretty cool" rather than reacting to a PCE as they would to being hit across the head with a sledgehammer...stillness-without-ecstasy is infinitely less impressive in my experience.

(EDIT: IMO, stillness-without-ecstasy is still *so much better* than normal experience, as it does appear to be suffering-free, apart from the "suffering" of not recognizing the ecstasy. But it doesn't seem to have "impact". I would not ever think to involve a term like "God" to describe it...it seems almost like a form of blasphemy to consider such an experience to be the utmost.)

After thinking over the fact that Nick reports having this experience only sometimes, and that whatever he and Owen have attained can happen without focusing on it, and that it's obviously impossible to stabilize outside of that developmental attainment, I've decided to focus completely on actualizing experience while not cultivating the perception of wonder at all. I will try to find as much time as possible for actualizing jhanas, as described by Nick, as a formal sitting practice.

In a way, I find it motivating to recognize that the attainment that leads to this "ecstasy" experience appears to be all about stillness and the end of 'me', but without the ecstasy component at first. Some days, the gap between my experience and the "full thing" (as best as I recall it, distorted by affect) seems to be unimaginably vast and impossible to traverse. On the other hand, when I reflect on the experiences I originally thought were not PCEs but now recognize may have been, and I compare them to my current experience, I realize that my current experience isn't unimaginably far from it, and in fact, attaining that (as a linear progression from where I am now to there) seems very reasonable and possible, and something that can be reasonably expected to happen sooner or later. (Hopefully sooner.) I "understand" in some way how to get from here to there. Whereas getting from here to that *and* ecstasy...not really fathomable to me at the moment.

Other than that...dunno what to write. Today was a *very* stressful workday, but, as usual, I hardly feel stressed. The main ways I knew that it was stressful was to notice a mild-moderate "ache" in my head, and to listen to the internal complaints I generated. (Listening to myself bitching about how things suck, when 'I' feel reasonbly fine, is rather funny.) Other than that, there's mostly just OK-ness.

"I will mention that talking with someone anonymous, they told me how their first or second full blown PCE was so much cleaner and more high defintion than directly post-AF. It seems that one may get a glimpse of what this mind/body organsim looks like without 'being' nor even residue in a full blown PCE. (Nick, Owen's practice thread)

like someone said, to get AF, you don't have to chase down each little thing, you just need enough momentum to get it done. (Beoman, Owen's practice thread)"

I "get it" now. It's so much simpler than I was making it out to be. Duh.

Indefinite posting break, will hopefully return with the housebuilder's head.

(redacted)

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Hi End,

Before you can claim the same as 'Nick', perhaps you should show it here in this thread with phenomenological descriptions so that we may compare your ongoing experience. As far as Tarin's experience goes, it isn't exactly the same. But it perhaps matches other so called 'newly free'. So calling it AF might have been hasty. And thenagain maybe we are talking about two possible stages of AF. "Newly free' versus a few years down the track with some 'deepening.

What happened to give it a few weeks? Perhaps it is just a very sligh and subtle refined 'being' that is hidden from current view?

Oh, your welcome.

Nick

I'll be happy to have a public discussion about this in a few weeks.

How would you define developmental enlightenment?

A starting place for a definition might be something like "developmental enlightenment is something one attains in levels, and each level offers a clearer experience of non-clinging, the absence of suffering, and the no-self nature of phenomena, which form a permanent baseline that rises as the level that one has attained goes up."

So, the technical-model paths are forms of developmental enlightenment, as is anything that further increases the baseline clarity and insight that one attains at the apex of the technical model (4th path).

"'˜When one walks naked (sans '˜I' as ego and '˜me' as soul) in the infinitude of this actual universe there is the direct experiencing that there is something precious in living itself. Something beyond compare. Something more valuable than any '˜King's Ransom'. It is not rare gemstones; it is not singular works of art; it is not the much-prized bags of money; it is not the treasured loving relationships; it is not the highly esteemed blissful and rapturous '˜States Of Being' ... it is not any of these things usually considered precious. There is something ultimately precious that makes the '˜sacred' a mere bauble. (Richard)"

When one walks naked, that is the recognition of the Supreme, that is perfection, that is Godhead.

Or so it seems. I don't yet walk completely unclothed. But once in a while, a gust of wind arises and haphazardly blows around whatever threads there are that remain....and, in the apparent absence of an 'I' to clutch them vainly and awkwardly to my body, that is truly astounding.

When the wind dies down, there is the recognition that something important happened, without the full understanding of what it was.

It appears that this does not require any special development as a prerequisite to experience, but development helps to make sense of it and will perhaps eventually stabilize it. It does not appear to be affective (but one may regard it affectively if that form of mental reaction is present). I had a chat with Kenneth last week about 'rigpa' and have been wondering since then about whether this is what he means by it.

Time will tell. Currently, I don't hold to any specific opinions about these things. I just call them as I see them, indifferently.

how's the synesthesia post-shift?

oo and grats on the shift! fun times these are =).