End in Sight:
Since I guessed Equanimity, and you think otherwise, I'd like to figure out why I may have been wrong so I can be more helpful and accurate in the future. Could you tell us specifically why you now think you were in A&P and why you changed your mind?
Apologies End in Sight for not replying sooner and clarifying why I changed my mind and now think the experience I described was actually an A&P event. I've just been waiting and observing, and not wanting to post anything prematurely.
I've realised quite a lot since this thread started a month ago. I can understand how someone could have come to the diagnosis of Equanimity based purely on my description of my experience in the first post. I've since gone on to realise that my description of the experience may not really be that accurate a reflection of my actual experience. I think it was perhaps clouded by some false assumptions and subject to some scripting – one of the evident traps that stems from knowledge of the Stages of Insight or any cartography of conciousness. Having said that, my specific description of the kinds of sensations I encountered is still pretty accurate.
So, what do I think was wrong with my initial description and why did I change my mind from a diagnosis of Equanimity to A&P?
a) I guess a had a fair bit of (latent) respect for Tarin's opinion on the matter.
b) I can see that I wrote my description wanting to believe that I actually passed through the stages that I said I did, therefore I think I scripted myself into describing my experience in a way that matched up with my (incorrect?) understanding of the stages.
c) I said above “I believe I started the retreat already in the middle of the Dukkha nanas.”
Now, I think I made this claim based on some ill-informed assumptions. The first was that I assumed because I had crossed the A&P on retreat in the past, I must automatically be in Duhkka nana territory, that the Duhkka nanas were my 'baseline', or that if I went through A&P again it would only be fleetingly and would not present with any degree of intensity, or would present exactly as it did in the past and therefore be recognisable.
I might also have given too much weight to the idea of me being a 'Dark Night yogi' after reading MCTB, which I think rather too neatly and conveniently explains the agonising years of depression, angst, dysfunction and soul-searching which followed (and preceded) my first A&P experience, but which perhaps can not be entirely attributed to “Dark Night” issues. (Although I definitely think they were a factor.)
So basically, I thought I was a Dark Night yogi because I had had an A&P event and later got depressed, therefore when I meditate I must be meditating in the Dark Night stages.
I suspect this might be a common mistake.
d) I thought the diagnosis of Duhkka nanas was accurate because of the kind of sensations I was experiencing in my meditation – predominately (as I described in my first post) “ intense knots of pain around the throat, chest, and solar plexus chakra areas, as well as the spine, with accompanying emotional sensations of fear and panic et. al...sensations like someone was taking a grinder to my chest plate”.
When, after days of observing these intense sensations, they finally dissolved and subsided, and a state of tremendous calm arose, I think I naturally assumed this was the transition from Re-observation to Equanimity. Well, maybe...but maybe not.
When I said “intense knots of pain”, I meant what I think of as “emotional pain”. I use this term here as distinct from gross physical pain, such as sore back, sore knee, sore shoulder. I kind of identify these sorts of physical pains and discomforts as being at the surface level of the body, whereas the kind of pain I was referring to seems to be located 'inside' the body, predominately at the chakra points or energy centres, seems to be connected to (deep-rooted?) emotional issues, and requires a more subtle awareness to investigate. (Shinzen Young gives a good description of the differences between physical and emotional sensations on this
Sounds True podcast, which I well worth a listen for other choice Shinzen tidbits as well.)
I may have made the incorrect assumption that these knots of “emotional pain” automatically correspond to the Duhkka nanas, while Three Characteristics nana is only about gross, surface-level, physical pain. Was this an incorrect assumption? Reading Kenneth Folk's “Idiot's Guide to Dharma Diagnosis” he says:
If you have persistent solid pain, you’re in the 3rd ñana.
Now, I guess I assumed that because my meditation was quite strong, because I didn't have any problems with
gross physical pain, because my awareness was quite laser-like and focussed, because during meditation I would regularly perceive my body as quite formless, and because I had crossed the A&P in the past, that this kind of solid, interior emotional pain, which when investigated (in a piercing and penetrating fashion) provoked quite intense emotional arisings, was related to Dark Night stages. Was this an incorrect assumption? Opinion anybody?
e) There seems to have been a qualitative change in the nature of my attention post-retreat, which lines up pretty well with Daniel's description of Dissolution in MCTB (although I am aware, once again, of the danger of scripting here):
Whereas one might have felt that one’s attention had finally attained the one-pointed focus that is so highly valued in most ideals of meditation during the Arising and Passing Away, during the Dark Night one will have to deal with the fact that one’s attention is actually quite wide and its contents unstable. Further, the center of one’s attention becomes the very least clear area of experience, and the periphery becomes predominant...most meditators are not expecting this at all and so get blindsided and wage a futile battle to make their attention do something that, in this part of the path, it simply won’t do.
This is a fair description of what I have experienced in my daily sits post-retreat, as opposed to the laser-like precision of my awareness pre-retreat. I have, however, experienced no on-set of Dark Night symptoms that can be expected, as the common warning goes, to follow the A&P 'like thunder follows lightning'. But perhaps that is because of the conditions in which I live (meditation centre) and the fact I'm maintaining a consistent practice. I don't know.
So, they're the reasons that I changed my mind about the diagnosis. However, the reality is I still have no firm view as to “where I'm at”, and the liberating thing to come out of all of this is that I'm not really worried about it any more, although I do find these cases of dharma diagnosis pretty interesting. My main focus at the moment is trying to practice well, and I have to say that last retreat really cleaned out some deep-rooted stuff, and I'm feeling calmer, more at ease, and more open than I ever have, and I'm getting on far better with those close to me. That in itself is a very good thing.
Dylan