Yogi Rencarts' Practice Notes

So, here's about me. Once upon a time I had problems with depression, anxiety and panic attacks. I was pretty good at hiding it though (sometimes). This started when I was a teenager and I was only able to deal with it by using medications - several different kinds over the years. Sometime in 2007 I came across a youtube video of a Theravadin monk named Ajahn Brahm and was really intrigued by what he was teaching. After checking out many more of his videos and podcasts I started meditating along with guided meditation that he had as an mp3 on his website. It was a kind of concentration type of meditation on the breath. I was able to use this daily meditation to give me the confidence to get off of all my medicine. This was great for a while. Then I started to feel like things were not working so well. Later, I felt like I was not very good at it and could only meditate myself into a state of 'feeling better' occasionally. I eventually started going to a meditation center and practicing with a group of Tibetan Buddhists. The practice is called Ngondro and is filled with tons of instructions. I was confused about the Theravadin breath meditation on some details of how to get my monkey mind to settle down so all of the details of the Ngondro practice seemed like the way to go. With all the chanting, mantra recitation, visualization, hand mudra and other things it was easy to get concentrated and burn up my nervous energy before the part of the Ngondro session that just silent sitting and focusing on emptiness. It worked pretty well. ...

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Which ended up being a problem. After a while I started to notice that I was getting into some very odd territory. I now know it to be dissolution and the beginning of the dark knight (dukka nanas). I felt very disoriented like the top of my head was not there a lot of the time and that I was really opened up and getting all of these harsh vibrations that felt like they were just digging right into me somehow. The intensity of all of this was pretty overwhelming at times. I did handle it okay though. Having gone through having panic attacks and still keeping it somewhat together when I was younger I had some experience with dealing with an inner experience that didn't make sense to me. Anyway, I thought I would try some other types of meditation. I tried various things and that didn't help improve the situation much. My thought continued to be "what's next?, will this get better?, worse?". At one point I heard Daniel Ingram on a Buddhist Geeks podcast and really found his take of things interesting. I read a lot of things on his website and read his Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. The book blew me away. I ended up reading it over and over looking for clues on where I might be on the map of insight but I couldn't really place myself. At this point my meditation experience was just too muddled to see the transition points or qualities of the nanas and jhanas. I gave up my daily Ngondro practice and started doing vipassana daily. First I tried the noting practice and ended up dropping the labeling and just started looking very closely and carefully at whatever I was experiencing and attempting to see my experience at 'the level of individual sensations' - in meditation and in life. This helped tremendously but took a while to get skilled at. I felt like I could almost tell when I was shifting into different nanas and jhanas. ...

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This close and careful inspection of my experience took me a long way and helped me to feel like I was moving in the right direction on the map even if I could only barely tell where I was on it. Somehow this was better than the Tibetan approach where there was lots of details in the 'what to do' department and hardly anything in the 'what to expect' department. Or maybe I just missed all the mention of the dark night territory stuff in all the talks I have heard from Tibetan Lamas. So, I discovered at some point that exercise really helped a lot with my meditation. I started riding a bike during the week and it drastically helped my practice. I did walking and running some too. It seemed to move some energy out of my head and into my body and I started getting into a very level/balanced and was very much noticing subtle vibrations in my experience. This was happening day after day and was very peaceful. Then about a couple of months ago I was sitting in meditation and I got into this same peaceful state directly after some harsh vibrations where my attention and eye focus was way out on the periphery - and something happened. It felt like I fell asleep just for an instance and then I was dropped into my body. After that I got a nice wave of bliss on the top of my head that started to tingle from the forehead and slowly the tingling moved back across the top of my head from the front to the back - like energy or something. It was not very dramatic or overwhelming. But afterward my mind seem to operate differently in regards to attention and awareness. I could now meditate and see distinct differences as I progressed up the nanas and jhanas. After I went back and reviewed the descriptions of these in Daniel's book and here at kennethfolkdharma I could see these clearly all the way up to equanimity. ...

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Also, every time I sit to meditate I start at the A&P. So, I'm taking this to be stream entry. I can now call up jhanas just by bringing my mind to them and remembering what they are like and call up fruitions by going to equanimity and focusing on the little ball of pressure behind my thirdeye/brow area. It's all fantastic. I have been exploring a little with the higher jhanas too since now I seem to suddenly have an incredible amount of focus. I think I can manage to get all eight and pure land one and two. Although, I understand that there is a way to do something called 'compounding' jhanas where you can fool yourself into creating a sort of fake jhana based on lower ones. I'm really not too concerned about it though since what I'm able to access is so mind blowingly awesome. Jhana six 'infinite consciousness' and pure land one are so wonderful and healing. ...

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So now I have been working on alternating between two approaches based on advice I read Kenneth suggesting to someone. I have been exploring the jhanas by bringing my mind to them and calling them up and entering them slightly (although sometimes I enter more deeply) and stay for five breaths and then exit. I do this for each jhana and play around with familiarizing and disembedding in this way. The other approach that I just started is to enter the sixth jhana and get somewhat deep into it and focus on the witnessing quality of that jhana and then when I get a good feel for it I enter into A&P and just let the jhanas/nana arise naturally from there while keeping focused on remaining with the witnessing awareness. I haven't quite mastered this approach. I sometimes get stuck at certain levels, particularly the third jhana and sometimes the eleventh (equanimity).

Since now I always start at A&P and because my meditation was such a muddled mess before stream entry I seem to not really have a feel at all for the first jhana. Is that weird? I just don't get what Mind and Body, Cause and Effect, and Three Characteristics are.

Am I in the review phase of pre-stream entry territory? Is that why I can jump from jhana to jhana? Will this ability go away with the new territory when it begins?

Any comments about any of this would be much appreciated.

(edited for terminology)

Wow--that's a wonderful story. I can't offer any advice (too much of a beginner), but I want to say, welcome to KFD. It's a great place to hang out, and I'm sure you'll find lots of good counsel here. Best, Laurel

Welcome!
I'm also to new to offer any helpful advice, but...If it was stream entry, you certainly seem to be in a review phase.

"Since now I always start at A&P and because my meditation was such a muddled mess before stream entry I seem to not really have a feel at all for the first jhana. Is that weird? I just don't get what Mind and Body, Cause and Effect, and Three Characteristics are.

Am I in the review phase of first path? Is that why I can jump from jhana to jhana? Will this ability go away with second path when it begins?"

Welcome!

I know what you mean about the first three nanas / first jhana. At this point it's only just off to the side of my "normal" mental experience, so it doesn't stand out so much!

FWIW, I didn't find that I had any strong ability to distinguish jhanas until after second path. It wasn't the priority in my practice at that time- I am only getting to it now! So there's no way to know for sure how these phenomena line up. But if you're experiencing post first-path Review, then at some point you will feel like you lose your level of sensitivity to the jhanas, and your ability to navigate them. Then it will come back again at another time. It's not a problem- that variable sensitivity is built into the nature of the nana-cycles, I think.

However, it sounds like you've been a really diligent student of the jhanas (especially if Ajahn Brahm was your first inspiration- he's very pro-jhana!). That's a skill you won't lose!

So I should expect things to fuzzy up some before too long. Bummer. I am really enjoying exploring all of this.

I guess I will just work on building more concentration and work on The Witness thing.

(7/1/2011)

Had an interesting meditation session this evening. Attempted to will myself into fourth jhana and had some difficulty doing it. It wasn't very stable and didn't work as well as it has been working recently. I spent some time there trying to just 'witness' the qualities of the jhana and let it just be. I do this sometimes and am able to get absorbed into it and rise up to the fifth and sixth jhana and get absorbed in the sixth so that I can have more powerful witnessing quality and let myself just experience whatever jhana comes up - staying with the witnessing quality as a focus. This time I ended up giving up on my quest for the sixth and just witness (without getting to the sixth first). One reason I let go of willing my way into the sixth was because I was getting some energy that seemed to be building up. So, as soon as I let go and just witnessed I seemed to have drifted into A&P an it was extremely intense with bright internal lights and the sensation that I was filled with pure electrical energy. It was much more intense that I can ever remember the A&P being. I eventually drifted on into dissolution and the dukka nanas and then reobservation all with such a powerful intensity. This seemed to have strong energetic imagery in it that seemed to not be the typical hypnagogic imagery which only seems to come up for me when my concentration isn't very strong.

I'm wondering if this was post-stream entry jhanas since it was so different in intensity. Is that possible? Is that the way it works? I think I might have had this same type of strong intensity a week or so ago after getting what I fairly certain was stream entry. Although that time it was not really this intense but somehow had the same sort of strong qualities as this.

It was not fuzzy except for the fact of being fuzzy in the way of being sort of overwhelmingly electrical.

(7/2/2011)

Sat twice already today and now I'm very sure that I have two levels I can operate at. I can review pre-stream entry territory or work in this new path territory. This morning I sat and resolved into equanimity (of pre-stream entry) and got a fruition there (by focusing with effort on the little ball of pressure that shows up just behind the third eye area) and was relatively quickly booted into the A&P of post-stream entry. The feel of it was sort of like the look of the cover art on Daniel's MCTB book-with all that energy flowing around the meditating guy. I just watched closely and didn't manipulate anything and just witness it. Then I seemed to float on up to dissolution and on through to somewhere in the dukka nanas and then back down.

In the next sit later in the day I decided to just try and stay in the new territory and just work at that new level. Seems like this is the thing to do if I want to make progress and move things along. So I sat and just did the whole witness/non-manipulating thing. I seem to have to make a little effort here and there because I would sometimes (especially at the beginning of the sit) naturally drift into pre-stream entry territory. But, now I am really getting a feel for the distinction between the two and that helps. So, after nudging myself a little I seemed to have landed in the first jhana of post-stream entry. Sort of like A&P but with some effort going on. This was interesting to me since first jhana was a bit of a mystery to me because I haven't been getting to it recently. So from there I eventually went naturally on up to the wild A&P electrical craziness and lingered there for a bit. Then on to dissolution and a just a little dukka nana stuff before beginning to drift back down. It's interesting that this new stuff seems to have a level of intensity that seems to invoke a quality of embeddedness for me so I guess that is the work that needs doing.

I think I have been using wrong terms for paths here. So, if you "get first path" then that means that you were pre-path before and now you have begun the first path since you got fruition for the first time and begin a new cycle of insight which is first path. Is that right? I was thinking that it was second path that happens after the first fruition moment.

(edited the posts above because I was confused about the terms 'first path' and 'second path')

Pretty disoriented at this point. Not sure what's what. I'm kind of thinking that my meditation has reverted back to the pre-stream entry stuff. So confusing. I can get to equanimity nearly every time now and it all doesn't have the same intensity as what I was taking for new territory. So, I'm guessing I went backwards - hopefully only temporarily, though.

Oh yeah. Thanks to all you guys that have welcomed me aboard. I've gotten a lot from reading the other practice threads on here. Such a great group of helpful folks.

(This 2,000 character count limit is pretty crazy though. Ha ha ha.)

Wow. I hit the dark night now. Yuck. Going to work on concentration practices to see if I can dig myself out of this hole.

Rough day.

(7/6/2011)

Spent an hour this evening working on concentration. Focusing on the Anapana Spot. I found it extremely difficult. Way more difficult that usual. I had a lot of really crazy imagery come up but I stuck in there. I feel a little better after meditating now. Maybe this is the approach I should take for dealing with this dark night stuff.

I like to use the techniques from the first part of the book Practicing the Jhanas where it talks about focusing on the Anapana Spot.

"We will not be describing the actual experience of any jhana for two reasons. First, people using this book as a guide may tend to try to duplicate what we experienced. Second, each meditator's localized consciousness is slightly different. As this localized consciousness enters jhana and is purified through jhana, the experience is unique for each person."

I just read this in Practicing the Jhanas book. This is pretty amusing to me now. I spent a lot of time thinking that I was not doing meditation right because no one explained to me that there is all this territory in meditation that just feels wrong, awkward and out of sync and that is just how it is. It doesn't mean that I'm doing it wrong just because I can't focus 'single pointedly' while in the dukka nanas (3rd jhana).

Wow. I'm thinking I might have gotten another path/insight cycle (2nd path). I went through the jhanas/nanas at the post-stream entry level of intensity and eventually got into the area of low equanimity. I noted all the sensations as quickly as I could and after a couple of times of feeling as if I was going to fall back down into re-observation suddenly it all got really clear (high equanimity) and I just applied the same technique as I did when I got stream entry. I just thought of Daniel's example of having my hand on the surface of water with the top of my hand remaining dry and the bottom remaining in the water and just focused on that idea of perfect steadiness. Then I felt a contraction or pulling inward at the brow chakra area about an inch or two into the brain and there was a little ball of pressure there that sort of throbbed and would turn all consciousness off and on several times. This created some nice waves of bliss that really super charged the equanimity qualities. So I sat there a while and just hung out in equanimity and took in the bliss. I think I might have went on up all the way to the 8th (Neither-Perception-nor-non-perception) where the whole thing starts to go off again and perception flickers and fades. After going back to equanimity and being there a bit more I didn't feel like I was going to go back down lower so I just got up.

I'm going to pay attention to see how this affects my daily life to see if I can detect any major perceptual changes. I guess that's the real test. With stream entry there was a really big one that never went away so I'll see if that happens here. Right now I am just filled with all this bliss energy so I'm not really sure. I might not be getting any sleep tonight. It's really worth it though. Ha ha ha.

I sat for a bit this morning and began at the A&P so that was great. I have been starting at the 'just before A&P' place. That's kind of how I see the first jhana stages. They are the 'just not quite into A&P yet' stage. So then I go on up petty quickly to equanimity and settle there for a while and then get thrown into A&P again where there is all this energy that feels like it wants to settle down and integrate somehow but there is some difficulty in that happening. I'm just watching it and letting this all happen. It doesn't seem like a problem or anything. I just think things are just now starting to settle down after last night's fruition (maybe path?) event. I'll see how the day goes. So far I feel pretty different. A lot like stream entry except a little more ...ummm ...something (words fail me).

I'm definitely in the review phase again now. The jhanas are once again very clear and easy to access by resolution or just allowing them to flow one to another. Also, it's clear that another big shift has occurred with my perception of everything. I look out and things just seem broader, brighter and more inclusive. After stream entry things seemed to really jump out at me. Whatever I turned my attention to just seemed to present itself to me effortlessly - and I get a more panoramic sense of things. Now with this perceptual shift it seems like not just what I turn my attention to presents itself to me, but everything including the background (things I'm not particularly focusing on) presents itself too me too. My awareness just seemingly gets it all at once including sight, sound, feel, smell and everything. It's really fantastic. Most definitely a step closer to what I'm looking for.

I've been sick a lot lately. So my meditations have been a bit low-energy. I had an amazing lucid dream a few days back. I was totally aware and in control. In the dream I was able to fly around high in the air around tall buildings for quite a while. I have played around with lucid dreaming some but have never been able to sustain such a dream with such control or pristine detail. It was pretty amazing. I'm pretty sure is was a result of my meditation practice.

As to my sickness, it's strange being sick and much more aware of the sensations of it. In a way it helps it to be not so much of a problem. That is, until the pain gets to a point that it affects my level of mental energy. Then it goes back to being a problem again because my awareness goes down. It's interesting to me how awareness of sensations of pain affect how pain feels.

Been working on developing the 8th jhana. I seem to be able to get to it but it's not very stable most of the time. I just feel like there is something there that is important for me to learn and understand. If I can get it stable and really enter that state of Neither Perception nor Non-perception in a solid way then that would be a good step in the right direction for me.

I thought I was already getting to the 8th jhana but I found a thread in the DhO about this jhana and found that someone described what I had been experiencing and was told that it was not the 8th ( www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discu...ards/message/2051472 ) and gave advice on how to access the 8th in a stable way. So I have been working on this.

I'm still doing a minimum of 30 minutes a day of meditation. More like an hour on most days but I felt like I needed a minimum. I'm trying to balance concentration and investigation.

So, I haven't posted in a while. I was working on dis-embedding using the Jhanas as a gauge to try and smoothly move up and down them without getting stuck and identified with any experience along the way. Then I got deeply interested in the difficulty of getting into the 8th Jhana in a stable way. I got a little better at doing that. Recently, I heard an extremely interesting interview on Buddhist Geeks with Jeffery A. Martin. He has done research with folks who report having what he calls persistent non-symbolic consciousness, which I believe is the same as (subject/object) nondual awareness (the complete experiential internalization of the no-self idea). His descriptions of the state were very interesting. I began to think about how when I get into the 8th jhana and come out of it that it seems to make a lot of things clear about some fundamental aspects of awareness itself - and how I seem to be shifting into or maybe getting in touch with the boundlessness of awareness. Also, recently I read Jeffery's book The God Formula where he describes a sort of version of 'The Secret' that he says is backed by a lot of research that he has conducted. So I decided to attempt to use it to attempt to just visualize this non-symbolic consciousness into existence for myself. So, I went through the process that he describes and then sit and do my meditation session after that - with the idea that this would be the cause of my entering into a permanent state of non-symbolic consciousness. I did my best to just surrender to this idea and really believe that this would work. After getting up from meditation I felt very different. I'm not sure that I even have the words for it. Everything is just soaked in awareness and is just known. I watch myself do things but somehow it just doesn't feel like me in here anymore.

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I used to feel like I was a thing that was in my body looking out at the rest of the word and now everything that used to automatically consider to be me is now just experience arising within a vast field of awareness with the vast field of awareness not at all being me either. It's just all happening on its own somehow. When this first happened I seemed to be in this state (state is not the right word here) but then occasionally slip back into the other mode of existence (subject/object mode). But, it seems to be staying all the time now. It is amazingly peaceful most of the time. It seems like the identification process is just not engaging anymore although I am exactly the same in every other way. I'm trying to not slip back into subject/object mode and keep this going. I'm a little concerned that I will loose this. I definitely feel like the seeking has come to an end. It seems to be something that doesn't have much of anything to do with the cycles or Jhanas. However, I do suspect that working of developing concentration and dis-embeddedness were key to getting this to happen.

I do really hope this is permanent (whatever it is). I'll keep posting as I get a better handle on this.