first ever practice journal!

Two 30 minute sits. During the first I had music on to see if that would help; it didn't. State 6 was hard to sustain; bounced between it and some sorry attempts at bodily grounding. The second was better; got into state 6 reasonably fast, it seemed stable, and paid a few quick visits to state 7. Reflecting on it now, it might be helpful if I knew how to get into 7; my method is just to continue with 6 and not get caught up in anything, and somehow I tune into 7 and there it is.

It also might be helpful if I had a map or taxonomy of how direct mode deepens. I recognize state 7 as a deepening of 6, but then there is something that is a deepening of 7 but I don't know what to call it. And if I knew what it was, it might be easier to get there.

I noticed that, when cutting off enjoyable trains of thought, the train of thought would sometimes try to plead for the opportunity for one last comment at the end, something like "let me say one more thing and THEN you can get rid of me!" It's funny that my thoughts personify themselves this way, and slightly pathetic. Often, whether or not I agree to it, they manage to slip in a parting word, and occasionally (maybe a fourth of the time) it's something clever, unexpected, or psychologically insightful that I wouldn't have otherwise thought of. Hmm. When I do jhana practice and am trying to rein in my thoughts, something similar can happen, a kind of sudden unexpected insight into something completely not related to meditation but very interesting in itself (sometimes forgotten memories that are relevant to something happening in my life; sometimes new and useful perspectives on a issue I've been thinking about). Wonder if there's a connection. Also, wonder how to harness it; it seems powerful.

Also, I resolve to attain Kenneth's 6th stage as soon as possible. I'm tired of seeing things in any other way. I had the impression that I was almost there some time ago, until my practice fell apart; I can get to that point again, I will keep the bodily grounding up 24/7 when I'm there, and then I will be done with this particular bit of stupidity forever.

I was so aggrieved by the idea of not having attained stage 6 yet that, after I wrote that post last night, I decided to attempt 24/7 (or at least 16/7) grounding starting right then, even though the day was over and I had to sleep. Grounding (or state 6) with eyes closed is harder for me than with eyes open, because I use a lot of perceptual things to confirm it's happening, but they're mostly visual or relate to vision. So I spent some time laying in bed, being grounded with eyes open, and trying to work out what the perceptual confirmation would be for eyes-closed grounding by closing them, seeing how things appeared, and then opening them a bit later to confirm whether they were present only when what I used for eyes-open also indicated grounding. I think I got this worked out moderately well, but I can't really put it into words, other than that I focus on the core thing, which is the absence of an internal space for "emotions" to play out, without seeing this absence in terms of an altered sense of how my body is related to the [visual perception of the] physical space it's in.

Currently, ~95% of my experience is automatically grounded, so long as I'm tryiing. The 5% that isn't consists of "subtle" emotions that I don't immediately recognize as emotions, so they sneak past my guard. Things like "the quiet desolation of a gray rainy day" (can you guess the weather here?). Once I recognize that they are emotions and focus my attention on them, they resolve to unique sensations on my face or throat and nothing else.

When I'm doing high-stakes or intricate work, I end up forgetting about grounding and hope that momentum carries me through.

The method I've been using today is to get totally jazzed on caffeine to the point of overstimulation. So long as I'm grounding emotions, all that results in is some strange body sensations that are hardly bothersome. And when I'm not grounding them, I get *instant* feedback in the form of overt anxiety, which is a very strong motivation to go back to grounding. I doubt this is a good long-term method, but it got me back to a high level of proficiency at this very quickly. I may try it again tomorrow.

Anytime I'm not engaged in something, I do formal practice. Lots of random bits of state 7, but the restlessness from overstimulation seems to bounce me out of it quickly. But I don't care much at the moment. I WILL ATTAIN STAGE 6.

My main cue, which I repeat in my mind very frequently, is "just a body". When proprioceptive selfing is temporarily off, it's "just in (this room / this street / this bus / this line / wherever I am)". They seem very effective for tuning into the experience of no-internal--emotion-space which seems to be the ultimate way to ground it all, once "where is this emotion located?" and the lightning rod practice have gotten the process started.

Some things that dawned on me earlier today, which I'll write down here before I leave to go out with friends for the evening.

There is actually no internal-emotion-space, just the illusion of it. The perception of internal-emotion-space is caused by body sensations that resolve into feelings on the face and inside the head and chest. I walked around all my life wearing these like some kind of tragicomic mask, imagining that I saw the world "through" these emotions, and that they colored my experience of the world for better or worse. But they're just sensations, and they can either be perceived clearly or poorly, and that's it. When some emotions but not all are resolved, there is an intermediate experience that seems part-grounded and part-ungrounded (because of the remaining face / head / chest emotions which present like some kind of fuzz over experience). When all emotions are resolved, there is no perception of internal space, and the apparent clarity of experience is greatly increased. This implies that every moment of experience has some kind of emotion included in it, even if that "emotion" is neutral and not anything that is called an emotion in English. This is my best understanding of emotions, in brief.

If all the body sensations misread as emotions went away, it seems that there would be no sense of "being". The body sensations that have positive, negative, and neutral vedana are exactly the things that are read as "being". This is true whether or not they are misread as emotions. This is my best understanding of the perception of being, in brief.

Woke up, remembered to ground, and after a few moments the process is back online.

After recognizing that the ever-present neutral face / head / chest sensations were being misperceived as "internal space," and that these qualify as emotions solely because they're misperceived in the same manner as other things (anxiety etc.), the practice is so easy; it almost does itself. At the moment, state 6 is ready to be accessed anytime I stop doing other things and tune into it, and it continues on (perhaps somewhat irregularly) of its own accord when I go back to doing stuff. And even without the vibration-suppression / EE aspects of being in state 6, grounding can continue in a less overt way (which I hope is just as effective). All that seems to be required right now is the minimal commitment of devoting a small portion of my moment-to-moment experience to willing my attention to focus in the right way; a little bit of attention yields grounding, a little more yields state 6.

It seems that I have my attention wrapped around the part of my mind that misperceives body sensations very, very securely. It can wriggle around and put up a fight, but it can't escape unless I slacken my effort and allow it to. But there will be no letting go until I constrict it to death.

There is very little knowledge in the pragmatic dharma circles about how long it takes to attain stage 6 once constant bodily grounding is in place. I get the impression that this is not well-charted territory, even though some people (Kenneth, perhaps Owen, perhaps Antero) have already trod through it. So I'm going to keep up a count of how many days it takes. Yesterday was surprisingly powerful and close enough to continuous grounding, so let's call that day 1, and call today day 2.

I have no idea how I'm supposed to tell when I'm done with this. (cont)

Perhaps (sticking with the python metaphor) I'm done when the misbehaving part of my mind goes limp and the struggle ends. But we'll see.

Apart from that, here's my best attempt to align my own state 6 / state 7 taxonomy with the EE / PCE taxonomy that other people use.

State 6: *Very* mild EE, vibrations are lessened, sense of being "present" instead of off in some illusory mental place, some kind of suppression of affect because emotions are resolved to body sensations (which involves less suffering) but all kinds of positive and negative body sensations can easily arise.

State 7: Moderate EE; the typical qualities of this mode of experience begin to become clear. Strong suppression of vibrations, sense of things being "now", sense that "now" somehow has a long duration, the perception that I am the body or that the body is mine is absent, other self-related perceptions lessened, affect (positive and negative body sensations) lessened, experience seems more interesting than usual.

"Deeper" state 7: Strong EE, vibrations hardly apparent, most perception of self is gone, "now" seems to have no beginning or end (segmenting of "now" into moments makes little sense), most affect is gone, experience seems fascinating and fantastic, being alive seems wonderful, narrative thoughts are suppressed but still possible, thoughts present themselves in a very subtle way which is hard to describe. Previous states are moderately different from normal experience, but this is a radically different state of consciousness and the shift between it and anything before it is unmistakeable.

I see these states as discrete, but I don't know if that's because they are or because I have a penchant for maps and discrete states are easier to map. Supposing that they are discrete, I imagine there is one EE state beyond what I just described and THEN the PCE

(cont) But I haven't had those experiences yet so I don't know if it's so or why I think it's so.

Finally, it seems to me that the common perception of "moments" of time is caused by vibrations. Each vibration of the body appears as a "moment" of time. The more vibrations are suppressed, the more time seems like a continuous flow and not a discrete series or a quantized approximation of a continuous flow.

"Perception of moments" = "perception of vibrations" is actually really confused in the sense that we all recognize that vibrations are not instantaneous but arise and pass over a short period of time, meaning that our "moments" of time themselves stretch out over time. So thinking about time as a series of moments actually disagrees with our own experience. And yet the two are tied together anyway, forcing a perception that can be rationally recognized as inaccurate, but which is stubbornly persistent despite that.

Excellent analysis. So far what you've been writing lines up quite nicely with my own experience. I recognize the states you mention above quite clearly.

Today was fine; grounding went well, though sometimes I forgot to keep trying or got distracted by hanging out with friends, but hardly any emotions got past me, and the ones that did I grounded immediately and they were immediately resolved. I'm going to estimate that I did the practice during 60-70% of the day, and the rest was momentum.

There were times that it seemed like I literally didn't have to try, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world that all affect is body sensations and nothing else, and, being so obvious, "trying" to see emotions that way is absurd, like "trying to see colors as visual" would be. It didn't last, but I'm getting more and more of that as time goes on. A tentative guess is that stage 6 is attained when experience is constantly like that.

The caffeine thing is not just a great way to know when emotions are grounded or not, but also a great way to know when I'm in state 7. When emotions are not grounded, there's overt anxiety. When they are grounded, there's tense body sensations. When state 7 occurs, the majority of those body sensations (affect) drop away immediately. The transition, the sudden peace, is unmistakeable. (It's also remarkable that state 7 can brush aside so much negative affect as if it were nothing.) Unfortunately, this much caffeine makes me too restless to stay in state 7 for more than a minute or two (and the transition out of it is equally unmistakeable) and I don't think I can get to the deeper state 7 for more than a few seconds like this so I think I'll let up on it tomorrow; it did it's job (constant feedback boosting my ability to ground to very high levels very quickly) and now maybe it's no longer needed.

Day 3 of attempted constant grounding. Most affect is drained out of my experience. When I turn my attention to it, there is a strong sense of "now"; sometimes there is even when I don't turn my attention to it. "Now" doesn't seem to be an object; there is no physical or mental sensation I can find that corresponds with it. "Now" seems to be a label for what's left when vibrations are suppressed. (Obviously there is no object called "suppressed vibrations," tho' there is one called "recognizing that vibrations are suppressed," which is not what I'm talking about.) What seems to work well for attaining state 7 is tuning into "now"...not doing anything to bring up more vibrations, not manipulating attention overtly, just noticing the sensory stuff and the sense of my physical body being surrounded by stuff in the physical world (= spaciousness without "being")...usually state 7 is ushered in by the narrative thought "hey, it's now!", but following the narrative about "now" doesn't help.

Everything has an undercurrent of interestingness and purity and wonder, but I cannot find any objects corresponding to those, and suspect that the situation with them is similar to the situation with the perception of "now".

I have a really visceral dislike for bright, hot sunny days with cloudless skies (today's weather). For whatever reason I usually get a strong sense that they are boring, ennui-ridden, and oppressive. It's very specific to those conditions (I like bright sun, warm days, summertime...just not that specific combination). Today, there was...nearly nothing. Barely any reaction. Not the typical reaction replaced with neutral feeling, apathy, numbness, or equanimity. Just nothing. Just a day. Just sun, sky, deep shadows, sensations of heat. Almost no qualities at all. It's f*cking great! (cont)

Thought about something that mumuwu said about his experience of what I think is state 7 re: perception of the body. There is much less perception of the body in state 7 than what I previously described, and this is actually kind of a core feature of state 7 in my opinion. The less affect, the less body-related stuff there is (by definition), the less the body features in the totality of experience, *especially* compared to state 6 (bodily grounding at the shallow end of direct mode). But the sense of a body is still stronger than when not in direct mode because perception has a kind of "perspective-ness" to it: seeing seems to be happening at the physical location of my eyes, feeling seems to be happening at the physical location of my skin which is at a particular place in space in relation to the physical world around it. By contrast, hearing seems to be happening wherever the source of a sound is, not literally at my ears, but the sound is coming from a particular place in the physical world which I locate in relation to my ears, so it still has this "perspective-ness" but the linguistic explanation sounds different.

Sometimes I have the impression that I can't tell whether I'm in direct mode or not. This sounds kind of dumb, because from my descriptions I obviously *am* in direct mode, but I notice more vibrations than I think I should, more little bits of affect (body sensations) than I think I should...reasoning it out, it seems that my sensitivity to vibrations and affect has gone up, and I notice more things in real time that would have gone under the radar or just gotten blurred together with other stuff.

I still have a sense of "being", certain sensations on my head and face and chest, but it seems to be somewhat unimportant.

Looking at my description of the mode of experience I find myself in, it sounds bland and pointless and not like anything that is worth cultivating. (cont)

So, I want to reiterate that it really is f*cking great, even if the words that describe it make it sound otherwise.

If I could talk to my past self about it, I would say "if you don't see why this is good, you don't understand the experience, even though you *think* you do; and the only proof I would accept that you have actually had and understood this experience (and not something whose linguistic description impersonates it: apathy, lethargy, numbness, blankness, relaxation, equanimity, on and on) is that you no longer believe that lack of affect = lack of worthwhileness."

(Note: Much less caffeine today. Don't know whether what I'm describing is what I would have described yesterday if I wasn't flying around the place, or is some kind of genuine deepening of the practice.)

Hi EndInSight,

Great stuff. Very Inspirational.

Eric

Practical reflections and notes to myself from today's practice.

* Walk and look straight ahead, not at the floor. The floor is closer to untextured than straight ahead; untextured surfaces have more prominent vibrations; noticing vibrations makes me investigate them ("vipassana reflex") which messes up direct mode. Straight ahead has lots of interesting objects in the visual field and gives a sense of my body in relation to its surroundings (spaciousness) as well as a better sense of perspective as I move around in relation to those objects.

* If some broad situation presents as "like" something, that is emotion, that is affect, that needs to be dealt with. If I find certain summer days dreary and oppressive, that presentation is my own reaction. If I find the night air cool and mysterious, that presentation is my own reaction. Warm, inviting social gatherings...again, my own reaction. The things are just what they are, just jumbles of sensate experience without further qualities, and anything else is my own addition.

* When things present as "like" something, no matter how good it is, no matter how much pleasant nostalgia it brings up, they will be much better when they stop presenting as "like" anything.

* Things seeming bland, empty, or boring is presenting as "like" something. Same for "affectless" (?).

* Paradoxically, as direct mode moves from shallow to deeper, the sense that random things are subtly "like" something becomes more prominent as the more salient overt affects fall away. (The sense that every situation has subtle qualities it's "like" reminds me of my childhood experiences.) So this is a good sign. So encourage it without clinging to it. Don't indulge nostalgia. (cont)

(cont)
* If I fall out of a deeper direct mode experience back to state 6 and have to face unpleasant body sensations, don't ruminate, don't reflect about why it comparatively sucks, don't worry, just shut up and figure out how to go back. If I fall back to state 6 and there are no unpleasant sensations, just shut up and figure out how to go back without questioning why or having an internal debate over it.

* If I fall back and end up in state 6, that is sufficient to attain stage 6, so that is still success; definitely no reason to worry; if worrying starts, reflect on how everything is going according to plan so as to cut off the worry, then see above.

* If worry about not having yet had a PCE (because I want one / am curious about having one) starts, reflect that my current mode of experience is much better than before I started, reflect on how rapidly it has improved, reflect that the step-by-step ultragradual approach has never ever failed me in all my practice, recognize that I will probably be banging them out sooner or later, and cut off the worry.

* Don't forget to eat enough and drink enough. Being hungry or thirsty is a really pointless way to conjure up some affect and mess with direct mode.

Day 4. Really sh*tty practice; I had no energy today and could barely remember that I was supposed to be doing something related to direct mode every once in a while. On the other hand, absolutely no emotions appeared to me that weren't grounded automatically (apart from the neutral "sense of being" / "internal space" / head and chest sensations), so I'd say I have hella momentum going, which is why I'm continuing the count of days and not resetting it. And I can't seem to figure out where the proprioceptive "I"-sense has gone, because it's been absent all day too. But the unpleasant body sensations related to low energy and lethargy were myriad despite that.

I think the problem is that I veered too far away from the stimulant regimen that was working so well for me. On this continuum:

(no stimulants...a little stimulation...just right...overstimulated...chest exploding, head bursting)

the correct amount for this practice is actually very close to "overstimulated," just a tiny bit less than that. Yesterday I hit the mark very well. Today, I fell short. So I had some extra caffeine recently and things are looking better already; hopefully I can salvage the rest of the day's practice.

End of Day 4. More stimulants fought off the lethargy and things seem back on track.

Took a short walk outside around sunset. The sense of a body situated in physical space was very striking. Actually, the perception of space around me was outrageous...standing at a street corner, I don't think I ever realized how much space is really covered by a few blocks.

I feel confused when I try to assess how much affect I have going; while I was walking around I reached a state that I might have confidently said had very little affect yesterday, but now I see all kinds of very subtle enjoyable body phenomena hiding at the edges of my ability to discern them...warmth, relaxation...are they feelings? Are they just sensate experiences? I don't think I can confidently say either way what the case is. I half-worry that this means the full PCE is farther away than I thought, but am also half-enthused because that would mean that there's a lot more awesomeness ahead of me.

Note to myself: focus more on cutting off narrative thoughts. Be swift and unwavering, like an executioner wielding an ax.

Reminder note to myself: DON'T LIE DOWN, it messes up direct mode for whatever reason. I recognized this before and wrote it down but seem to have brushed it aside today.

Really mixed day. Not sure whether to restart the count or not. My mindfulness was utterly messed up and it was a struggle to get to state 6 and hold it for more than 10 seconds. Lots of tension and negative body stuff. On the other hand, it did all seem quite grounded, with the exception of the "internal space" sensations, which are only seen as body sensations in state 6 or beyond.

Random reflection: are vibrations just a perceptual flaw (in the conventional sense)? Do I experience vibrations only because my attention is not strong enough to stay on any object...in other words, with perfect attention, would I be stuck in direct mode permanently?

Ajahn Brahm says that, in jhana 2 and beyond, attention is absolutely unwavering and there is no perception of mental movement (which I take to include vibrations). We don't experience that because Ajahn Brahm uses the "complete absorption" definition of jhana. Does that practice lead to a different kind of transformation than vipassana because of the way it trains attention?

In some other eastern traditions there is an emphasis on complete absorption (not in those words) and the claim is that complete absorption is the way to liberation, the permanent infinite bliss of God while walking around, etc. Same outcome as training attention via direct mode?

Vipassana has an effect of vibrations, by getting them to be relatively synchronized compared to the pre-path mess that they are. Most people report a sense of relief at stream entry. Is the core problem of suffering just the existence of vibrations, which is reduced as they become less out of sync and less prominent (their existence / prominence itself is a kind of out-of-syncness)?

There is some deep connection between vibrations, emotion / affect, and suffering, which I can't quite figure out. Not sure it would even help me to figure it out, but I'm pathologically curious.

after doing some reading on the absorption stuff (not my own experience!) - it seems that the idea might be that the self gets thinner and thinner in pure absorption due to the fact that if all thinking is cut off completely for a long period of time, the mental circuitry behind it should begin to atrophy.. Thats just my speculation though - when I find out for myself I will let you know

If you get good enough at it to get some complete absorption going, I definitely want to hear about it!

Two steps forward, one step back. Yesterday was one step back. Last night into today is two steps forward. State 6 is effortless, happening without trying. Stage 7 appears randomly without trying.

When stage 7 appears, things that would normally be affectively pleasant are somehow transformed. Instead of an emotional body rush from music, for instance, there is just tingling (no discernible vedana) and a body sensation that is hard to characterize. "Lightness". "Deliciousness." "Delight." I don't really know what a good description would be. It's fantastic. Is it affect? Is it not? Is it some kind of intermediate thing? Somehow I can't tell.

More later.

Somewhere in direct mode, walking around outside, for about 5-10 seconds it was as every sensation was the kiss of God...then, back to direct mode territory that I'm familiar with. Can't say that I would be able to explain what I mean by that description, but there it is anyway. No real affect apart from the "delightfulness" thing, which occured in spades.

In that experience, there were still vibrations. Still not a PCE.

Strangely enough, it seemed as if the part of my mind that's responsible for certain kinds of reflection / executive decision making, such as "let's look for vibrations and see if there are any!", was not able to function during that experience. When I say that there were still vibrations, it's some kind of retrospective assessment, not something that I noticed in the moment. Perhaps that's what has to turn off for direct mode to deepen.

Apart from that , state 7 has been pretty easy to get to, though it's not completely stable.

When I assess the goal I started with, I can't tell if I made it or not. Every emotion (apart from the "internal space" sensations) seems always grounded, even when mindfulness has been sh*t. There may be emotions I can't yet discern, or I may just have a lot of momentum going, or the "internal space" sensations are part of what need to be seen to truly count as attaining stage 6. I suppose I'll find out soon enough.

Kenneth, could you offer your opinion about the "internal space" sensations I'm describing in relation to the definition of stage 6? I call them emotions only because they seem to be something other than body sensations but turn out not to be. Other than that, they don't resemble anything else that would normally be called an emotion.

OK, I just had what I think may be a PCE (or at least extremely close to one), for 30-40 minutes. I see that the details are hard to recall properly once it ends (because it's such a different mode of experience), so I'm going to record them here now, because it will be important for me to figure out whether this is actually a PCE / direct mode practice, or some kind of epic confusion on my part.

I laid down and turned on some music while playing around with direct mode / state 6 / state 7. When I listen to really awesome music, I typically get A&P-like rushes, and so I watched how that developed in context of the different direct mode states I was familiar with. I got to a point where the sense of "being" (which is what I pre-path, might have thought of as a subject of sorts) flicked on and off; when on, things are normal, when off, "being" is just a body sensation. It struck me as funny in some way that something as rarefied as this, which might be called "self" or "spirit" or "being", could be as mundane as a body sensation, especially because all that was going on was a body, laying there, with music playing...nothing otherwordly at all.

Eventually the sense of "being" seemed to turn off, and there was just (as far as I could see) a body, music, and these intense physical rushes / tingling. Unlike A&P tingling, it seemed to be free of affect. Despite that, they were really amazing-seeming. After a while, I had some doubt that they could really be affect-free, so I wondered, "what if I incline towards something free of anything that might be affect?"

Very soon after, I entered a state where there were no body rushes, and just a kind of all-pervading wonderfulness (not the right way to describe it, but I can't do better) of the various senses, with various sensations in the body that seemed to be related to music. (cont)

It had the following features:

* Absolutely no detectable bodily vibrations. Absolutely no sense of out-of-syncness, which is one of the core features of vibrations as far as I can see.

* Visual field still has "static", visual junk, pulsation in it. (vibrations? just my visual field being quirky as always?)

*Instead of reacting to music in terms of emotion (imagined as a mental experience) or affect (pleasant sensations in the body), the music seemed to cause all kinds of interesting body sensations with no discernable affective quality, apart from "wonderfulness", whatever that is.

* Although I had an inclination to keep listening to music, if the song ended and I didn't turn anything else on, there was no sense of craving, missing the music, desiring that there should be more, or any difference in the basic impression of "wonderfulness". Just a change in the sounds that were being heard and the body sensations.

* The internal duplication of sounds seemed to be gone, though I "sang along" with the lyrics via thoughts at certain points.

* It seemed very clear that the only things in experience were the five traditional senses and thoughts. Just a body with senses, laying there.

Overall, the experience was not what I expected a PCE to be. The best description I can think up is "divine ecstasy of the senses," but that makes it sound as if it has some otherwordly, rarefied character, which it does not. It's completely mundane. Just this world. Just this body. But "divine ecstasy of the senses" gives some indication of how utterly amazing it is.

The only real reflection I have after this experience is that every emotion and every affect seems to be a poor and unhappy caricature of what experience would be like if those things were gone.

So, what do you think? PCE? Near-PCE? Confusion? Opinions, please!