Dear All
Kenneth Folk said
If you are used to thinking of ñanas as lasting for some period of time, you can miss this. But if you pay careful attention during the first few seconds of your sitting, you can see the early ñanas flash by. The easiest one to spot, as always, is the 4th (A&P); you might notice a brief bout of white light and/or a vibration in one of the extremities. This will quickly give way to a more diffuse awareness, perhaps a sense of coolness on the skin, and a feeling of chilled out bliss (all 3rd jhana/5th ñana phenomena), then a little rough patch of unpleasant sensations (dukkha ñanas 6-10) before the equanimity settles in. All of this can happen in less than a minute, so you really have to be on your game to notice it. If you stop meditating for a few weeks you can get rusty, and this process of rising up to the cutting edge of your practice will take longer.
I read this last night for the first time and had a go this morning. Wow, it works! Took me a bit longer than a minute, but not much. But really clear. Then I got so excited that it all got messy for the rest of the sit and I was unable to replicate it as cleanly. Thank you Kenneth, so much. I've never thought too much about how meditation works. I just know I have to do some stuff to get to the nice place which turns out to be A&P
OR Equanimity, everything else is just like taking the wrapping off a parcel, necessary but dull. I now know that this is not the case. Often I get stuck trying to get the wrapping off, as it were, and it takes ages to transition to 4th or Equanimity. Kenneth's point about it all being natural and not to mess too much with the progression is very useful as I normally try to force the issue, sometimes trashing my sit all together. Now I know better.
Transiting up to Equanimity often happens very quickly, if I can get a firm enough grip on my, I dunno, mind stream? Is that an appropriate word to use? The dark night stuff in between is barely noticeable, usually a mild sense of dissatisfaction. Bit of jolty, clunky stuff, physical aches and pains maybe. Then, spacious clarity, lovely jubbely.
Up till now I've just been trying to get to equanimity as quickly and as often as possible, but with out any plan. This has been a fairly hit and miss affair. I'm pretty sure I've been mistaking post rapture A&P for equanimity on a regular basis and then falling back. Need to lock that one down.
It’s still a mystery how I got here. Three years of serious illness and two years before that of very patchy practice. Then as soon as I started to recover, I was spontaneously dropping in to this crystal, spacious clarity. Subconsciously, I knew I had to do something with it sharpish, hence my hurried and fairly painful return to practice.
But what was I doing while sick, to end up here? There was something else in Kenneth's post that struck me
Conversely, no matter how much one investigates, without accessing all the relevant strata of mind through concentration no progress is made. While the former situation can be a problem for those who have not yet attained to the 4th nana (A&P), the latter situation is very common among those who are post A&P but have not yet attained to Path.
Now, I have never done much concentration practice, my mind always slides off to observe change, Which is why I loved Goenka so much for so long. And Goenka was great training to enable me to survive my illness.
When I was sick, the symptoms that I had were brute physical, many, varied, constantly changing, and very strong. They were also pretty much immune to any drug treatments. No other distraction worked sufficiently to block them out for long either. So my only option was to observe them, this removed some of the fear and uncertainty, and did actually reduce the severity a little. For much of the time, in bed for example as insomnia is one of the symptoms, I would spend hours just observing the rushes, sweats and spasms. (Insomnia also induced mild hallucinations that I kind of got used too as well.)
It was a bit like doing Goenka but in glorious high definition. Eventually I would get sick of it all and crawl off to watch late night telly. There is some great stuff on a three in the morning by the way.
Previously I have assumed that this activity would fall in to insight territory as the sensations were always changing and I was basically using a Goenka methodology. I am now thinking that what I was doing was some kind of concentration practice?
In my experience Goenka does not talk too much about Samadhi. It’s all insight, insight, insight. Some traditions, I'm thinking of the Forest Tradition here, regard insight and concentration as opposite ends of the same stick. Do one and you are automatically doing some of the other as well.
If you are still reading, thanks you for wading through my content. At this stage, process and content are still fairly enmeshed, picking the two apart is a job that has to be done I suppose.
Originally I was just going to say thanks to Kenneth, but things got out of had. Oh well.
Howard