| | The night before last I was scanning and it seemed like I might be hitting the 3C's, as phenomena sped up I could sense every neural signal in my body simultaneously it seemed, it felt like I was pixelating, does this sound familiar? I'm definitely in 3C's now anyways, I can tell a mile away, the left side of my jaw always hurts so bad, it grinds when move it and it hurts to eat, it sucks so much.
With some practice I've discovered that it's quite possible to hop from noting to scanning, in that order, but more difficult to go from scanning to noting, but it can be done with a little extra mindfulness.
I had some questions again..
* Because you say you begin your meditations at your cutting-edge, does that mean that all the advice about having panoramic awareness during the DN mean that I ought to apply that right off the bat? Because my perception was that I should wait until I'm in the third jhana.. which was already saturated with perceptions of deep jhanic absorption and diffusion leading to dissolving bodily sensations from past experiences--but if those perceptions are wrong, or especially if I'm anticipating two previous jhanas including an A&P then I might not see what is right in front of my face.
* For noters, and I don't think this is the appropriate thread to get this answered, but I'll try here first, it appears that one thing I've learnt through all this is to learn to balance my abdomen/breath between the foreground and background to fine tune it with another primary object, as rapid as those objects may or may not be, and it requires constant attention to get the most of your practice. Does this sound right?
* And for anybody who has at least one attainment already, when you begin a new path, do you lose all your concentration and feel like a newbie? Not that this is what I believe has happened to me, but I am curious if it has happened to me. Especially after I read this thread where Tarin was comparing EQ to feeling like being the last person to leave an empty, quiet building and when mixed with the four distinct phases of my meditative experience and a kundalini smokestack feeling that leads into the diffusion and donut awareness which bottoms out to that empty building feeling, it sounds like I've been everywhere before.. except that in the empty building feeling, I've gone much deeper until reality is a steady pulse, and I've merged with it until I was gone except some vague perception of my breath or awareness, which I managed on, I believe, a number of occasions, but most definitely once, to have a complete black blip which affected me off the cushion for a bit. This whole thread would make a lot of sense if I just hit the DN of second path, and found that it massacred my concentration.
By the way, concentration in meditation is an interesting thing. I've discovered that you can only get as much as your "physio-energetic circuit" thing will allow you, to use Folk talk. This means, in my case, that although I know quite well how to meditate, when the path throws me a speedbump somehow, maybe to overcompensate I'll triple my meditation time, and re and reread everything I've ever read about meditation to fine tune what I'm doing incorrectly, but if I'm looking for quick success, it will be to no avail. The path allows, if it has spat me out pre-Mind and Body, only that sort of concentration, which is chipping away at developing solid access concentration. Now that I'm in 3C's again, I feel the kundalini building, I feel the knot of energy behind my nose all the time, I can meditate solidly when I drive again with great confidence that my next sit and especially tomorrow it will be very fine, and within a week I'll be at A&P. And although I know how to go beyond A&P, the path won't let me, or rather, my physio-energetic circuit won't.
I've also learnt that I've been rationalizing my mystical expectations into completely non-mystical expectations, I think that may be one reason the DN catches me off guard, especially when it spits me out at pre-M&B, when I can't even hit the first jhana anymore I lose my grip on reality and become a neurotic mess.
..
PS. Sometimes, in (a) certain phase(s) of meditation, I'll begin rocking my body forward and backward pretty hard, if I'm seated, it keeps banging against the seat, for minutes, does this sound like any nyana? I know deep into the third, it's sort of like intertia pushing me back in a fast car, and my face always turns to the top right, whereas, if I remember correctly, when I thought I was in third jhana before, I would slouch. But rocking about? |