| | Being basically the person you describe, I still find that doing this would be helpful, and actually have started a website that, when it gets going, hopefully will do this, unless we want to do it here.
It is http://mindtrainingterms.org.
Here is my rough draft of a blurb on the subject, which perhaps deserves its own post, but since it was raised here:
A few concepts and apparent needs have been converging recently, the short list of which are:
A number of terms have been used by different people in various different ways to describe things about meditation practice, in this case mostly claims to various attainments, and the word they are using to describe how their practice is going and what they have done typically is an indirect proxy term for a group of aspects of their practice that could be described in more nuance and with more precision and clarity if they instead talked more directly about the various attributes of their practice. By way of example, instead of saying, “I am an arahat,” one could describe what phenomena and specific changes in their practice lead them to call themselves that.
A number of researchers have been trying to study meditators using various instruments, questionnaires, fMRIs, EEGs, and the like, and noticing a problem related to point number one, specifically that people might say things like, “I am an arahat,” and numerous different practitioners may actually be describing different things about their practice by using that word, and so unless they really ask what they mean by that in terms of the specifics of what now seems to be different that , they risk possibly misclassifying people and then falsely interpreting how their scan or test or whatever relates to their claimed attainment, thus making for possibly erroneous conclusions.
The combination of people attempting to shoehorn their practice aspects and abilities and the personal mental changes from “normal” (whatever that is) that they are experiencing at that time, which, past a certain point can get quite complex and nuanced, into archaic, dogmatic, drama-producing, narrow, politically complicated, possibly imprecise, disparately-defined terms, such as in this case “arahat”, with the need for researchers to be able to do good research and publish it in a way that describes accurately what people reported and how it correlated or didn’t with whatever test modality they were researching leads me to the following conclusions:
There would likely be significant benefit to be derived all around, both for the practitioners and for the researchers, if a more sophisticated, nuanced, elaborate, comprehensive, and flexible set of terms was used to describe practice, and It would be even more useful for the scientific description, publication, and the wider dissemination of the useful aspects of practice if that lexicon of terms were at once straightforward enough to be unambiguous whenever possible and also unburdened by the cultural barriers that come with lexicons that derive from religious traditions as well as non-Greco-Latin roots, which are both prevalent biases in the current culture of science here in the West.
The next questions that arise are what would this lexicon and way of describing practice look like, and also who and how would the lexicon be derived, selected, defined, and codified in a way that would make it successful, by which I mean that it would:
Be able to define as clearly as possible the wide range of techniques and effects that mind training can produce, and actually be utilized by those who are doing that mind training or the research on those same people.
Describing Attainments
A number of the better conversations I have had recently with people about their practice has involved a much greater emphasis on the bare phenomenology of what has been recently happening and what seems at that time to be different rather than on terms such as and including words like “arahat”.
Basically, these conversations have involved a much more broad, complex, and detailed description of the various aspects of practice. They also generally involved standard English words for most of the conversation.
In no particular order, the things we generally discussed were:
The sense of a doer or will: anything different or the same about it, such as but obviously not limited to: more clearly perceived, less clearly perceived, completely gone, even more completely gone, sometimes completely gone, at times has been completely gone, is somewhat attenuated, is occasionally attenuated, is still quite present.
Panoramic Perspective: how well does the concept of panoramic perspectives describe your practice and how has this changed?
Dreams: did you dream before and do you dream now and how are they the same or different? Have you lucid dreamed and how has this changed with practice?
Traveling: have you ever and can you still travel out of body, with what degree of regularity and control, duration, etc? Can you do it from waking or do you have to start in a lucid dream? Can you come back to body being fully awake or do you have to come back to a dream? etc.
Sleep: do you need more, less, or what, if anything, is different?
Ordinary Visualization Ability (meaning the ability to picture something in your mind in a way that has nothing to do with the visualization abilities that are a result of hypnogogic states, concentration practices, visualization meditation practices, etc.) : same, different, there, not there, or what?
Extraordinary Visualization Ability (meaning those related to hypnogogic states, concentration practices, etc.): same, different, enhanced, diminished, gone, or what?
Cycling: do you cycle through the insight stages or something like them, and did you cycle before, and what it is it like now and how has it changed?
Fruitions: have you ever attained them, can you attain them now, did you ever have the notion that they had duration of any kind (either experienced or not experienced), how many could you at your best attain/day and how rapidly from inclination to them happening, can you get multiple back to back, etc.?
Subject/Observer: seems to be localized, seems diffuse, seems gone some of the time, seems to be stronger, seems to pervade everything, seems mostly gone, varies depending on other circumstances, seems utterly and completely gone, or what?
Oneness: any sense of oneness with anything at any time: sometimes? often? never? not applicable? etc.
Feelings: do you still have the internal feeling of feelings, and if so is anything different about the way you experience them?
Feeling Triggers: is there anything different about how stimuli that would have at some point in the past (and perhaps now) have triggered feelings are reacted to and if so, what is different, if anything, and how has this changed?
External Affect: do people still perceive you to have feeling and, if so, how has this changed as a result of practice, if at all?
Formed Concentration Stages (jhanas): did you ever have and do you still have them, and if so, which ones and how developed (stability, duration, rapidity of access, various objects, etc.)? If you had them, are you still able to access them now, and how has this changed?
Formless Realms: did you ever have they and do you still have them, and if so, how developed were/are they (with formed/bodily phenomena somewhat present, very present, subtle or gone or what, stability, access, duration, etc.)?
Diving Abidings (brahma viharas: Loving-kindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, Equanimity): have you practiced them, and could you stay with the phrases, feel the actual feelings, take them to their ultimate jhanas (3rd or 4th, depending) and how has this changed with time? If you could access them before, could you still access them?
Powers: did you ever have any, do you still have them or can you access them, and if so how often, how easily, what concentration conditions were/are required, etc.? Did they just arise arise occasionally or did you have stable, reproducible access? How has your interpretation of those experiences varied with time?
Energetics: have you ever perceived energetic phenomena (vibrations, chakras, energy channels, etc.) and could you ever manipulate them, and can you now and what conditions would be required to do that? Could you see them, feel them, or just know them in some other way?
Cessation of Perception and Feeling (Nirodha Samapatti): do you think you have ever attained it, which version did you attain (NS Lite: sense of duration/experience still somehow present, or NS Regular: experience and everything else utterly gone), can you still attain it, do you have any notion of how long the attainment has been able to last (either by external or internal reference) and what conditions would be required for you to do that?
Suffering: what is suffering like for you now on any level and how do you describe it? What causes the mind and/or body or the complex of these to be disturbed, if anything?
Memory: has practice changed your memory of events in any way and if so how, with consideration for both short term and long term memory?
Visual Field: anything different about it, or any other sense door, for that matter?
Relationships with others: has practice changed the way you related to others and if so how, assuming the ability to generalize this very complex topic?
Compassion: do you feel compassion, and, if so, how has practice changed it if at all or your understanding of what compassion is?
Peace: is your mind more or less peaceful or what and how has this changed with time?
Ethics: has your practice changed your concept of morality and ethics, and if so, how and how has this evolved with time?
Task Fatigue: has meditation practice changed your ability to stay on tasks with less fatigue in any way?
Freshness of Experience: how much of your experience would you describe as new or fresh rather than, say, stale, repetitive, or something like that?
Silence: do you perceive your mind as silent and if so when/how often?
Thoughts: how has meditation practice changed what thoughts do, how they relate to you, and how clearly and often you perceive them to occur?
Time: anything interesting about it or different and how has that changed with, uh, time?
Pleasure and Pain: has meditation changed anything about they way they are perceived and/or related to? Specifically, there are reports of things like orgasms suddenly doing nothing whatsoever for people, or pain similarly doing nothing at all to people, etc.
There are probably a bunch more things that could be placed on this grid, but those are some of the more common ones that have been bandied about recently, and these sorts of conversations turn out to be so much more fun than trying to shoehorn people into very narrow concepts such as single path names and the like, as it turns out that there is all sorts of variability in how people respond to those questions even among people who claim the same crudely labeled attainments.
While these could end up looking a bit like a character sheet from D&D (for those old enough to remember what that was), the effect is a much more nuanced and productive discussion of exactly what people are experiencing and it also leads nicely to all sorts of fascinating practice discussions, I have found. Anyone up for filling in that character sheet?
This is actually a setup for a more sophisticated discussion of the goal and promises of practice and what is possible and how developments may occur in a non-parallel fashion sometimes, as well as terms such as "enlightenment", which, given that the level of discussion is now at this much more nuanced level, seem paltry by comparison. |