steven cundiff:
End in Sight:
steven cundiff:
From what you have written here you have not gnosised the 9th....you have only briefly touched the 8th...and you have only had a glimpse of your true nature and haven't even recognized it.
I will keep your opinion in mind.
steven cundiff:
There is a bit of a language gap here....what you define as the silent still observer is just your individuation being still....
This conversation will not be productive unless you know about my practice thus far. So, how much do you know about my practice thus far?
You haven't told me much about your practice,
And this is why I am surprised that you have the inclination to tell me about my own practice, and to tell me about the correspondence between the words I use and the words you use. (Indeed, this is how the thread began...noticing the lack of any easy correspondence between your vocabulary and ours.)
steven cundiff:
Please tell me about your practice thus far...start at the beggining a go through to where you are now...and give me the milestones of gnosis you have come to along the way.
Instead (as I am not asking you to be my teacher, but to give me straightforward advice about the 9th jhana), I will describe my experience of jhanas 5-9 for you.
5: A perception of boundless space, in which there is no perception of a body or of form, nor any "fake" perception of space that is internal to one, nor any "fake" perception of space that is somehow a quality of attention.
6: A perception of boundless awareness underlying space (without the perception of space, with the same qualifications as before).
7: A perception of an object called "nothing" underlying boundless awareness (without the perception of awareness, with the same qualifications as before).
8: A perception that is not of an object called "nothing" and is not of any sense-object either. (without the perception of "nothing", with the same qualifications as before)
9: An experience that has nothing whatsoever to describe it in a helpful way, aside from what it lacks...perception and feeling.
If you are interested in stating whether you think these descriptions are or aren't accurate (and, if not, why not), that would be interesting to me; otherwise, let me know your thoughts on the 9th jhana.
If you are not interested in addressing either of those issues, I suspect we have approached our respective practices too differently for this conversation to be especially helpful to me, and will not waste your time by asking you to spend further time discussing the subject of my own practice with me.