Jim's practice journal

I'm fresh off a retreat where I got second path. One of the things I resolved there was to be less socially isolated, so I thought I'd give this a try.

Sat 45 mins, choiceless noting.

Felt normal at the start of the sit. Lots of planning thoughts, usually accompanied by fidgeting and movement. Energy felt a lot higher than concentration, but as concentration caught up, moment-to-moment awareness increased. After awhile there were coarse vibrations in the hands, and at one point there was a large, double-pulse of light in the center of my visual field, after which there was a gentle pulsing in the body that seemed to change with the phase of the breath. A little while later it felt like space predominated, and my body parts began to feel further apart from one another. I thought I might be passing over into dark night, but I did not have the experience of the bottom dropping out that I usually associate with that, so maybe I passed into equanimity without realizing it. Mind tended to wander off again into planning thoughts, and fidgeting accompanied them. Tranquility increased quite a bit toward the end, and I felt very 'normal' once again. Off the cushion, everything feels normal, relatively solid, but easy and calm.

Welcome Jim! Social isolation be damned! I happen to know that the reason you are claiming 2nd Path is because your teacher, Beth Resnick-Folk, agrees with you that you got it. I would love to see your description of your path moment posted here if you are willing to share it. I often read your notes along with Beth, and I know that you are gifted at phenomenological reporting, so I think a lot of folks could benefit from seeing your descriptions.

All best,

Kenneth

Yes, Jim, share your path moment, please!

Congrats!

Hey Kenneth. I really appreciate all the help, insight, and dharma diagnosis you and Beth have provided me over the past few months. It's really made the process a lot smoother than it would be otherwise. And yes, I'd be happy to share my war stories.

I got to the retreat thinking I was in second path review, but looking back now, I'm pretty sure I mistook an A&P for a path moment. I hear it happens to the best of us, and I am nowhere near the best (yet!) when it comes to dharma diagnosis.

It's just as well that I thought I was in review, because I think if I had arrived at the retreat with an agenda, I would have experienced a lot more discomfort than I did. Instead I walked in with a 'let's see what this is like' attitude, which helped a lot in the first few days as I was getting used to retreat life, sleeping arrangements, the food, the subculture, communal showers, and not finishing the day with a cold beer.

Once I got settled in (around 3rd day), I had what seemed like an A&P. I wasn't sure how to read that (new cycle, old cycle but more intense because I'm more concentrated, etc.). My practice was feeling very different now in the retreat environment, and I still wasn't sure how to map yet.

I was falling back on Mahamudra noting a lot during this time, because choiceless noting was suddenly not getting traction, I was beginning to experience a lot of negative affect, I felt kind of lost (not sure where I was on the map), and I feel like the openness, friendliness, acceptance, and warmth that I generate in Mahamudra noting are foundational for whatever I do, wherever I am, because they make my vipassana better.

Still, I was insistent that I was still cycling in review, even after I woke up in the middle of the night with what felt like an 800 lb gorilla sitting on my chest demanding to know exactly what the f$%k I thought I was doing.

I began feeling persecuted during the day by unwanted, negative fantasies. In retrospect, the psychological issues getting kicked up were rather minor, the sort of thing I could easily distract myself from in a non-retreat environment. But there was nowhere to go here, no distractions, and the mind was getting quieter and quieter so you could hear a pin drop and it would sound like a roar. I felt like I was being eaten by biting green flies. I really started to suffer at this point.

Still, I was INSISTENT I was in review! And so I was blaming myself for the psychological turmoil. 'You have to get over this.' 'Chill out!'

Meanwhile, Mara's thugs are kicking the s#%t out of me. 'Review THIS!'

Also, I was getting existential dread during this period, which I was incapable of the last time I was in review, but even THAT didn't convince me I was in dark night.

I went into an interview with one of the teachers and described what was happening, and she told me I was clinging to high energy experiences. I thought, 'Lady, I am not clinging to anything.' But finally it broke through, and I left the interview and finally realized what was happening.

The practice changed that afternoon. I started anchoring in the body and noting the negative, pestering fantasies. But instead of naming the fantasies as 'planning thought' I would note them as, 'That's the way the mind is.' Or 'That's what the heart wants.'

See, there was a shift taking place here. I was still having high aversion, but I was noting the aversion instead of having aversion to the aversion (...to the aversion to the aversion to the aversion...).

Also, I was not taking the fantasies or the aversion to the fantasies personally anymore. I was not noting 'That's the way MY mind is,' I was noting 'That's the way THE mind is.' It started occurring to me that everyone - everyone on the retreat, everyone in the world - has a mind/heart that wants to pull love toward itself and to rid itself of vile things. It just does that, like a mechanism or like an animal or an untrained dog that sees a bird and chases after it. Sure, I have MY specific psychological content, but what difference should that make? I'm not doing anything really harmful or really great, so why get caught up in that? We're all somewhere on the spectrum between Hitler and Dipa Ma, so what is there to get so excited about?

'That's just what the heart wants.'

I think Ron Crouch describes this early stage of Equanimity as no longer being in the dryer with the negative thoughts but standing outside the dryer and watching them tumble around. I was still a hurricane of headspace, but I couldn't work up the blame for it anymore. I couldn't feel bad about it. And if I did feel bad about it, well, that's just the way the mind is, so that's okay, too.

It's as though a new dimension opened up, orthogonal to the dimension in which I was experiencing all this suffering. In After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, Jack Kornfield describes how he still had all the same psychological issues he had before he started practice, but now it was like they were in a room the side of an airplane hanger rather than a small studio. That's how I started to feel: like there was room to breathe, finally. There was a big cushion of mindfulness and acceptance around everything. It occurred to me that if I accomplished nothing else on this retreat besides realizing I can be okay with all this neurosis, I had made a quantum leap toward happiness.

(edited for content)
(to be continued)

"
Yes, Jim, share your path moment, please!

Congrats!

"

Thanks, Chris. I'm typing out the unabridged version for the benefit of posterity (and because I didn't keep a journal on the retreat).

I really enjoyed St. Vincent's album 'Strange Mercy' when it came out, but I can never listen to it again after this retreat. It was the last album I listened to before I left, and it was stuck in my head the entire time. The whole two days I was in dark night I kept hearing, 'Best finest surgeon, come cut me open' again and again. I awoke from crazy, restless dreams hearing that song. I hate it now.

In a way it was like I was doing surgery on myself. The aforementioned teacher who told me I was clinging to high energy experiences also said that when you submerge a dirty cloth in water to clean it, all the dirt seeps out and turns the water black. This is what the process of purification is like. You can't purify the mind without also having to deal with all the gunk (psychological stuff) that comes out in the process.

My job at the retreat center each night was cleaning the stoves, which was a difficult job and left a bucket of black water each night. I involuntarily gave a look of disgust when she used this metaphor, but it proved to be accurate.

This particular morning, at least I woke up with a different song from the album. 'Forgive the kids for they don't know how to live, run the alleys casually'¦' Still annoying, but perhaps a good omen?

Once I was no longer having aversion to my aversion to my aversion..., there was a lot more energy freed up for concentration, which increased drastically at this point, coming into balance with my energy. I started choiceless noting again, which now felt like it had a lot more traction than it had the previous few days.

Over the course of the morning, experience felt like it was gradually 'inflating'. I wasn't sure what this meant, so I began investigating exactly how it is I knew that experience was becoming more spacious. There were sensations on the fringes of my body, as though my borders were being gently pushed apart. In the sitting posture, my limbs felt as though they were getting further away from one another. Thoughts and fantasies were still arising, but they were becoming wispy, less likely to stick to me, easier to touch, note, drop, and move on from. I was intimate with my experience, though it was also like watching from high in the rafters of a stadium.

My head began to feel as though it was filling with helium. I felt light-headed, and I began noticing disruptions to my sense of equilibrium while doing walking meditation. It felt like I was walking on the deck of a ship.

With the exception of a post-lunch power nap, mindfulness was nearly continuous from the first sit at 5:45 in the morning until I finally dropped from exhaustion 12 hours later. Meditating was effortless at this point, as my interest level in phenomena was very high, and energy and concentration were in near-perfect balance.

By mid-afternoon, space seemed to have inflated so much that it was dropping out of the equation all together. (Picture a balloon in front of you that is inflated so much that the surface finally looks flat, like standing on the surface of the Earth.)

As space dropped out, time predominated. It was merely one sensation after another, after another, without the intuition of any spatial hierarchy, i.e., without any central observer. It was merely birds chirping, left foot, seeing, tickle, thought, right pinky, tasting, heat, etc.

I switched to second gear practice, watching as a sensation from the bottom of the foot or a sensation of birds chirping in the distance was quickly followed by the sensation of the head or the visual field, giving rise to the impression that there's a central observer toward which these experiences are funnelled. The thought, 'I see you!' went through my experience, as though to say, 'The trick is up. There is no one behind the curtain. There is no curtain.'

There was an increasing sense that I was approaching the ultimate elements of experience and that there was not much further to go. This was my Mortal Kombat moment, where I seemed to hear a voice in my head say 'FINISH HIM!' I stopped noting and began just to sink into this experience of ceaseless, uncontrollable flow, letting go of expectation, effortless seeing the characteristics of anicca and anatta, feeling the dukkha slip away, knowing all this, knowing the knowing of it, releasing, releasing, releasing.

Well, releasing is very hard, as it turns out. I wasn't really sure what I was looking for or what would happen. 'There's something I'm missing!' But there was really no sense of what that might be. Some frustration began creeping in. At this point I had been going for about 12 hours and was just exhausted.

After the dharma talk that evening, I sat outside to enjoy the cool night air, to just let my mind coast a bit and cool itself. I was experiencing a lot of disequilibrium at this point while walking, even though I hadn't formally meditated in two hours. I sat down on the stone wall to rest, and I stared up at a light on the side of the building, letting my mind wander a little bit in fantasy, just pulling off the gas, letting myself relax.

As I was staring at the light, I felt a quick jolt of imbalance, and as I did, there was a 'blip' through my visual field, like it had just been very quickly pulled up and a little to the left. As perception came back, the visual field remained slightly distorted toward that direction, and then quickly snapped back, almost as if to go 'B-DOIIINNNG'. The whole thing took less than a fraction of a second, but it was a discrete experience.

'Huh?' I thought. And then less than a minute later it did the same thing. I was having frequent 'B-DOIIINNNG's. 'Maybe that's why I keep feeling so vertiginous,' I thought.

And then I thought, 'Wait, are those cessations?'

See, I don't have a very good sense of what cessations are like. When I got stream-entry, I was having discontinuities in my experience, but I wrote them off, because they didn't seem dramatic. I expected a fruition to involve the windows of the apartment blowing out and people on the streets below running away to avoid the fire and glass pouring down on them. 'Why won't I get stream-entry, damnit?!?' And finally Beth and Kenneth were like, uhhm, you can stop now. (That's not what they said, but it was like that.) And then we were able to discern from the aftermath of the experience that I had gotten stream-entry and was now cycling.

So I got kind of excited when I began noticing the discontinuities. I wasn't experiencing cycling at this point. I just felt like if I tuned into the body, I was in equanimity. But it was hard to tell, and like I said, I was exhausted at this point. I never feel like I work hard enough, but I consciously let go at this point and decided to see what things looked like the next day.

(to be continued)

I hung out up here for awhile and then decided to play around a bit. I opened my eyes and fixed my concentration on the back of a yogi's head in front of me for a bit. The visual field started distorting a bit, but I didn't feel like I was hooking on to a jhana. (I actually had no idea what jhana was supposed to feel like, since I've never done it before.)

I played around concentrating on a few other stimuli like the hands or the breath. Finally I just turned my attention to the body as a whole (which I had been using as an anchor the previous day), and immediately it seemed like the other sensations faded into the background, and the border of the body felt like it expanded a little and started pulsing. (I almost laughed, because it reminded me of that graphic on here with the body flashing and the strata of mind.) The concentration was fixed there naturally, like it was in a groove, and it felt weird, like I had ended up in a distinct, discrete state. I figured it was a jhana, only because it seemed so much different from any experience right before or after it, but I don't know which one it was.

After awhile I dropped the fixed concentration and moved back to moment-to-moment concentration. When the bell sounded ending the session, I cheerfully got off the cushion. I don't think I had even adjusted my posture since sitting down.

The whole day was simply wonderful. I didn't really feel like meditating anymore, though when I did, it was effortless, with energy and concentration in immediate balance.

(I amused myself by wondering what the retreat staff would do if they found me lounging on a cushion in the meditation hall, smoking a cigarette. 'Just celebrating second path, man! What?')

Well, the next day I woke up feeling like a million bucks. All the back and neck pain I had been experiencing the previous few days was completely gone. I didn't feel enlightened (especially not at 5:15 in the morning before caffeine!), but I felt more normal than I had since I had gotten there. Second path or not, this was a huge improvement!

Sat down to meditate. IGNITION!

If you've had this experience, you know exactly what I mean. One day it feels like you're riding a bicycle, and the next day you're flying around on a Ducati.

Started out with very fast, very precise, very tranquil noticing/noting. In the Progress Of Insight, Mahasi Sayadaw says that the yogi in review should be able to get up into equanimity in as few as 5 acts of noting. I wasn't quite that fast, but it was close. Experience quickly inflated, there was a short feeling of alienation and strangeness as dissolution and the dark night kicked in, but then peace pervaded, space dropped out, the sense of a central ego became weak, and I was up in what I consider high equanimity -- all in about 2 minutes.

Bitchin.

I should add that I had exactly zero concerns about time or really anything at this point. Boredom was impossible. Discomfort was impossible. Being bothered by anything -- nearly impossible.

Off the cushion, though, everything was marvelous. I went for a walk, during which I experienced another discontinuity like the night before. I stopped and tuned into my body, where I was experiencing many quick, gross sensations. I had another one of these discontinuities while laying down to take a nap in the afternoon, right after which there was gentle twinkling behind my eyes which gradually faded. (Could also have been an act of falling asleep, of course.)

I remember at one point on my walk, there was a feeling like the bottom falling out of experience, like a great void opening, a type of experience I associate with existential dread. To my great surprise, fear did not even rise. It was like trying to strike a match underwater. I kept tuning in to the sensations. There was so much life just pulsing and vibrating gently around me. I was holding my experience so lightly, without any effort whatsoever.

'If this isn't path, I'll eat my shoes.'

But really, I was having such a kick-ass time, I didn't care much whether I had gotten path or not.

I think that was Thursday - by far my most intense, most joyous day. It was also the most powerful my mind has ever felt doing vipassana. I don't even think I meditated that much. I may have gone to half of the sits. I just let the mind do what it was going to do, which for the most part was kind of a default or autopilot vipassana anyway. All I had to do was tune in to the experience of the body as a whole, and experience immediately expanded and flattened out and became light and easy and devoid of obstruction or worry without any illusion of a central point to gunk things up.

I knew the experience would eventually end, that the mind/heart had opened to the fullest extent it could at this point in my practice, and that it would soon - maybe in a few days or weeks - begin its natural process of closing again, like it did last time, like the mind is wont to do, but I was okay with that.

I was tasting liberation. No matter where I was 'on the map', I knew that much. I had tapped into a whole new strata of experience. It wasn't the nanas themselves that astonished me at this point. It was the relationship I had developed toward the entire process this time through it. It was like I had discovered another mind to put my relative mind into. This higher mind of absolute rest and tranquility had knowing for its nature. It had no inherent opposition within itself, but it could contain all opposition.

At least that's the way it felt. I had experiences later which challenged my confidence in my ability to identify with this infinite mind. But that's the nature of these things. Even the absolute is relativized to some degree, since we're all finite human beings subject to sangsara. When you get up to the absolute, it's like you pull the ladder up behind you, so it appears eternal, self-contained, imperturbable, with the phenomena but not identical with them. It is the process of arising and passing away but which itself does not arise or pass away.

And yet the realization of this is still a process that occurs in time, and at least in the early stages of awakening - which I'm going through - the heart/mind goes through a process of opening, receiving the gift of fruition, and then gradually closing again, until it is time to start the cycle over. The temptation is to feel identified with this process, as though the point is that I get A&P, that I make it through dark night, that I get equanimity, that I get a fruition. I still experience that to some degree, and of course everyone ought to take credit for the effort they put into this amazing, difficult process.

But it was clearer to me this time than it was during first path that there's another dimension to this, and that the point isn't so much how many times I cycle but rather the relationship I form to that cycling. The relative mind goes through these cycles, but it seems like there's a strata that does not, but which simply knows to some degree or another that they're taking place. I advocate mastering states/stages to whatever degree it's helpful, of course; but perhaps the bigger point of all of this is not to master these discrete stages (which, let's face it, can be unpredictable despite the maps) but to develop equanimity toward the entire movement itself.

Perhaps. I haven't been doing this very long, but that's where I'm at with it at this moment of post-path bliss.

THE END
(for now)

Wow, great descriptive account! Bravo on 2nd path. Now the fun begins

"Wow, great descriptive account! Bravo on 2nd path. Now the fun begins "

Do I win a season pass to Six Flags Great Adventure?

"Do I win a season pass to Six Flags Great Adventure? "

No, but you do get to unlock the next world and try to rescue the princess over again. But this time you get to play as Luigi instead of Mario.

THANK YOU MARIO!

BUT OUR FUNDAMENTAL DUKKHA IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE!

Yesterday:

30 mins walking, 15 sitting
Nothing really stood out to me this session. I had a lot of planning thoughts and fantasies at the beginning. It felt like I had a difficult time getting concentrated. When I did, there was a lot of speed, a lot of heat, and a lot of itching. While I was walking, I began to experience disequilibrium (feeling like walking on the deck of a ship). Interest in sensations increased, and it seemed as though my noting/noticing was more nuanced and quicker.

Sleepiness took over for awhile while I was sitting, so I kept my eyes open a lot. After awhile, the energy picked up a bit, and there was a tendency to fidget and fantasize. When I realized the energy had risen again, I screwed down the concentration a little bit. Again, lots of heat and itches. Got up at the end feeling pretty normal.

This morning:

30 mins sitting
Started out with a lot of energy and very little concentration. Mind tended to spin off into fantasy which would be accompanied by fidgeting. As the mind settled in, sensations in the body predominated, especially tickling or itching. Noting/noticing increased rapidly, and the sensation of heat increased in the body. The mind felt 'hot' (moving quickly). The visual field behind my closed eyes started to predominate. It seemed to glow gently. This mental heat/speed/intensity fell off after awhile, and by 15 minutes into the sit, it felt like everything was cooling. Fantasies started predominating again. I tried to take a gentle attitude toward them, just treating the distraction as another arising and passing. There was less fidgeting now with each act of planning or fantasizing, so it was sometimes harder to tell what was going on and to bring myself back. Occasionally the visual field would jump into prominence, and there would be a quick, gentle flickering there. Itches were there, and when I brought awareness to them, they either fell off or decreased in intensity and then popped up somewhere else. Awareness seemed to be gently expanding, and the mind and body felt like they were gently cooling as tranquility became stronger.

BTW unless stated otherwise, I'm doing choiceless noting (i.e., noting whatever predominates and not using any anchor like the breath, body, hearing, etc.).