Yogi Rencarts' Practice Notes

This sounds wonderful--please keep us in the loop.

This change in consciousness has been the best thing that has happened to me. However, it does seem to leave me sometimes. Not too often though. Only when I have a stomach ache or insomnia. I'm guessing that since this change is so new for me I'm having a bit of an adjustment period. It seems like my previous mode of experience is something that happens inside of this new mode (non-symbolic consciousness/ nonduality). Like it's all the same thing it's just that nonduality is a zoomed out version of duality. Sometimes I can just bring my mind to notice the not-me aspect of reality or I can just think about having a mental identification process in my mind and just dropping it - and then I can just return to non-symbolic consciousness. There have been a couple of times when all of that didn't work at all and I just had to wait for it to return on its own - mostly when I am exhausted.

I've pretty much lost all interest in meditation. I don't have any interest in exploring the jhanas or getting something out of meditation. Nonduality was what I was looking for and all I'm interested in now is deepening my connection to this mode of being. I do still meditate though. I'm not looking for anything now. I feel like my searching is just over. It feels like there is just nothing I really did in order to get this. The meditations I have done don't seem to have lead me here. It feels that way - but I know intellectually that it must have been something that I did that opened things up so that this was possible. It seems impossible that in the short time I have been meditating seriously that this could take place. This does seem like a starting point too in a way - even though I feel that seeking has ended for me. Now that the self is gone it is time to work on the 'not so optimal' habit patterns that still remain - and there's tons of that left to work on.

In a month I have a Goenka 10 day meditation retreat that I signed up for. I thought about just cancelling that but I think I will go anyway and see how it goes. Maybe that will help me in someway that I can't think of now.

I have been watching a lot of Conscious TV on youtube ( www.youtube.com/user/conscioustv ). They have some great interviews with folks that have gone through this. I am particularly interested in the way they describe it. I just feel like this is so extremely hard to put into words. These guys are trying to describe the indescribable and some are doing a pretty good job and some - not so much. Also, some people are adding significance to this that I feel may be overdoing it a bit. I do get where they are coming from though. I'm thinking that this is just what happens when the sense of self is dropped.

Even though, I'm posting all this here, I haven't told anyone at all in my life about this happening. I just don't know of anyone who would believe me. I'm not sure I could even explain it well enough to get anywhere near what this is anyway. I think I might give it a year or so before talking about it. Dealing with doubt and projections doesn't sound fun at all.

Hey, just wondering...you described second path, and then some kind of jump to non-symbolic consciousness. Do you consider that to be 4th path according to the technical model? What happened to 3rd path? (Do you use the technical model?)

For what it's worth, I think I understand what you mean by non-symbolic consciousness (as a developmental attainment), and had it become a permanent feature of experience quite a while ago. ("Nonduality is a zoomed out version of duality" is a clever way to put it, and there is a sense in which I found that true; but I don't relate to it in other ways.) Not continuing the typical 1st gear practice (probably what Goenka retreats emphasize) was, for me, a Really Bad Decision. So I'm glad to hear that you're planning to go anyway.

(Where is your retreat? I was thinking of signing up for one in MA around the same time, but haven't yet.)

Thanks so much EndInSight, for posting! After much thought and going back to re-read the revised four path model in MCTB, I 'guess' this would have to be third path. Although, when I'm in this other mode solidly (zoomed out) it seems like there just isn't anything left to do. I'm totally open to and excited about the possibility that there is more left and I'm just failing to imagine what it might be. So I guess I won't say that this is fourth path even though it sure seems like it a lot of the time and the whole 'Wisdom Eye' opening thing really speaks to me. (Is the revised for path model the same as the technical model?) I'm guessing that when it says this in MCTB about third path this might be my situation: "the practitioner is more and more able to see the emptiness, selfless, centerlessness, luminosity, etc. of phenomena in real-time, so much so that it can be very difficult to notice what artificial perceptual dualities remain" ( dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wi...0Four%20Path%20Model ).

I'm going to Kaufman Texas ( www.siri.dhamma.org ) for my retreat on the 21st of September next month. Maybe the retreat will help clarify things for me.

Again, thanks so much for your comments and questions. It challenged me to really think about this. I'm going to really work at looking for the limits of this thing and see what might remain for me to do.

"Although, when I'm in this other mode solidly (zoomed out) it seems like there just isn't anything left to do. I'm totally open to and excited about the possibility that there is more left and I'm just failing to imagine what it might be."

In my personal experience, it was seeing that "zoomed in" is just as nondual as "zoomed out"...not because when zoomed in one could zoom out and recognize the nondual viewpoint on the previous experience, but because the zoom (the perspective on experience) is fundamentally irrelevant to nonduality, as nonduality is always the case.

In other words, for me, the full realization was when I permanently saw everything as nondual whether or not my experience seemed dual, nondual, embedded in 'self', or whatever else. i.e.it's not a matter of stabilizing the zoomed out perspective, but seeing something new about perspectives and embeddedness and how nonduality goes beyond them.

I don't know how to "look for" that insight, it kind of just dawned on me one day, somehow, outside of doing any sort of practice. Probably having a regular, serious practice would have made it happen sooner for me, but I had mostly quit regular practice at that point, like the idiot I sometimes am.

(Also, even after this realization, not continuing 1st gear practices was a Really Bad Decision...though, at the time, I stopped because I couldn't see that there were doing *anything* for me, as there was no more confusion left about this particular form of the duality / nonduality issue [true], and I didn't think they had any use beyond clarifying that particular issue [false].)

>"I'm going to really work at looking for the limits of this thing and see what might remain for me to do."

Good luck, and let us know how the retreat (and your practice in general) goes!

Also...in my experience, the full realization was a lot better in terms of everyday life than the zoomed-out thing. The full realization was like a return to a normal, everyday kind of experience...life goes on, everything is nondual, but nonduality is really really prosaic (has no particular flavor). In comparison, the zoomed-out thing had this dissociated kind of quality (as if when I looked at experience, I could *see* its not-self, nondual nature in some palpable way, because self / duality was a tangible thing that was missing). Which was weird. So, I was much happier when I stopped feeling dissociated.

Someone described a rewiring and purging process that can happen at a certain place. I'm thinking that this might be where I am. I have this very strong sense of completeness much of the time now. I feel like I have gotten a very important piece of the puzzle here. Now I feel like I just need to trust the process. The thing I got recently that has to do with untangling identification with sensation and more importantly identification with awareness changed the game in a big way. Meditation has really changed too. Suddenly not being so identified has affected meditation and confused the situation a bit since it feels like this has more to do with life in general and not just something from meditation. In a big way all of life has become the practice now. It is so entertaining to see myself talking and walking around in the world with out a sense of self being there. It's all just a flow of things happening and nothing else. Just sensations in a vast field of (not my) awareness. It's pretty fantastic. Then things occasionally just go back to pretty much the way they were including all the identification and suffering and need to get away from the suffering - yet there is still something different that I can't quite place (I think). Mediation was a bit of a problem for a while after this last shift. I just wanted to rest in the effects of the non-identification thing and for some reason this would hold things up and I wouldn't progress through the jhanas. Now I guess I have had some integration happen and now the jhanas are starting to happen faster again - but along with this comes some kind of remaining identification. The jhanas seem to trigger this identification at certain points. Something to do with awareness I think. So I guess the plan is to just continue on and attempt to clean up the crumbs. The grounding exercise that Kenneth describes was very helpful for getting things moving again with the jhanas and in life.

Had an interesting meditation session earlier today. Intense A&P and powerful fruition. I was able to keep a zoomed out, non-identified perspective too. It felt productive.

I thought I had better post something since I haven't in so long. I'm still integrating the thing that happened in early August of last year. I realize now that when I got up from my meditation that day that my "sense of self" pretty much went away to never return. Life is totally different now. I still have a sort of phantom "sense of self" that comes in from time to time but it's just a hollow reminder of the way it used to be.

I still meditate an hour a day. I don't do it to find anything or get anything. It just seems to help somehow on a relative level. I'm definitely not 'looking' for anything. The thing I was looking for was found on that day in August (actually something was lost - but whatever).

I've been doing a lot of running. I just completed two half marathons and plan on beginning a full marathon training plan soon. I hope to run a full marathon in October. I find it pretty interesting that the running just seems to happen on its own. Somehow things are just set in motion and there may be discomfort, pain and struggle but it all just happens without a person at the center of it all. Totally amazing.

I see know, pretty much all the time, that there is this energy of 'just being' or maybe just the essence of existence itself that is what all experience comes out of - that is somehow not experience. It's between and around the individual sensations that makeup experience. Emptiness, I guess. Even when my experience is just lots and lots of misery this is completely obvious and somehow wonderful.

So it's been well over a year now and I still do think this is where I'm at: 'dissolved the sense of the center point actually being the center point, no longer fundamentally make a separate Self out of the patterns of sensations as they used to, even though those same patterns of sensations continue' (4th path '“ revised 4 path model).

However, as the MCTB states it can be that the sense of self just goes back from time to time and it all seems to come undone and I'm back to being a self in a body looking out at the world. I seem to be free of self at least 75% to maybe 80% of the time. I need to work harder on the keeping the level of clarity and acceptance high enough to keep in '˜free of a center point' mode. It is the most fantastic thing. Yet even when the thing shuts down and I'm back to having a sense of self arise it doesn't seem so bad since I know fairly certainly that I can get free of it if I work on that or just wait around for it to happen on its own. It would be nice to have this be permanent and not have to think about it. I have heard reports of people who have had it happen where it just never became permanent and the shifting back and forth just continued on and on. We'll see what happens.

(continued)

I have been reading about the Actual Freedom thing again. Lately I find it fascinating. I have theorized that maybe emotions can be eliminated just as sense-of-self can be eliminated. Sense-of-self is something that the mind adds to experience as it arises. It may be that emotions are the same sort of thing. I certainly still have all the emotions. They are very different now and much less of a problem and seem to just do their thing and flow on out. Yet obviously, they are still problematic. It would be nice to at least see if this is something that can be done. The AF website has some information on it that is not quite right and seems to miss key points and unfairly condemn things based on that. But there is some nuggets of wisdom in there that have gotten me curious enough to take it seriously. There are two paths that are confused in Actualism and Buddhism. They are the path of getting free of a sense of self and the path of getting free of emotions. There seems to be some overlap but for the most part these are separate issues. I thought that when I got free of a sense of self that the emotion thing would not be a problem but now I see that I may have been mistaken. Getting swept up in emotion (whatever the emotion is) is not a good thing and it is worth looking into what can be done about it. So I'm going to start working on that path and see what happens.

Wow. I just noticed that I didn't write anything about my really intense 10 day meditation retreat on this thread. How interesting. This would be a huge deal for a lot of people yet somehow I didn't say anything about it. Well it was interesting. I had really wonderful experiences and really agonizing experiences. It was difficult to apply their system of body scanning when I was so used to working in a different way. I usually just keep a very wide focus of attention and try to just closely detect each little sensation as fast and as inclusive as possible. So this new body scanning thing really slowed me down for a while and cause some frustration. But, I got better at it as time went on. I did have the thought often that I just didn't know why I was doing this since I had already gotten the sense of self thing taken care of and my goal was really to find a way to keep that as a permanent fixture in my life which really seemed to have nothing to do with meditation. It was really odd. All that meditation did help in some ways but the thing I was looking for all this time was already found for me before I even went on the retreat and that became really clear.

So I thought that I might state my current goals since I think it might be good to have this written out. My main mission as of late is to just keep checking in with my state to try and see if I can just maintain the no-self mode constantly and really examine what causes me to drop out. I think it has to do with not having enough energy for keeping awareness strong enough to ward off the 'sense of self' mental process. When I attempt to ask myself "How am I experiencing this moment of being alive." in the AF practice this really seems to boost my awareness and get me back out of 'sense of self'. So that is pretty cool and useful.

My other goal is to figure out what a perfect state regarding emotions might look like. I mean I'm trying to imagine what it would be to be without emotion and instead exist in a peaceful/helpful way without anything being able to hook me into getting irritated or mad or even absorbed into some passion. Just peacefully celebrating each moment of aliveness. The AF guys paint a pretty picture with their descriptions and logic but some of the vocabulary they are using is difficult for me to parse. Also, I wonder if maybe there is another way to go about such a thing. The main idea is that I feel like I need to start thinking about what's next for me.

Here's a couple of things I made today. The first is a pdf file I created that is the text from the AF website on a page called This Moment of Being Alive. The information in there seemed to be a pretty complete explanation of Actualism. However, when I first read the page I didn't really think so. Mainly because I didn't notice that throughout the page there are these really tiny images that are links to popup windows that contain further explanation. The explanations are bits of text from the AF mailing list and really helps to clarify many points. So in my pdf I added all that inline with the text of the page.

Here's a link to it:
dl.dropbox.com/u/41194929/yogi_rencarts/...20Alive%20+notes.pdf

Also, I'm crazy about text-to-speech so I made a mp3 using my favorite tts program Balabolka so that I could put this mp3 on and just listen to it repeatedly and try to absorb the nuances of these instructions.

Here's a link to the mp3:
dl.dropbox.com/u/41194929/yogi_rencarts/...20Alive%20+notes.mp3

Speaking of TTS, this is also how I studied MCTB. I have listened to my tts mp3s of that book hundreds of times while at work, in the car, riding my bike and running.

I've moved my practice notes to DhO:
www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discu...ards/message/3590724