| | I am pretty sure that I'm somewhere in the equanimity stage right now. My meditation sessions have a calm matter of factness to them, as opposed to the highs and lows I'm used to. I am also getting a lot of the sort of altered perception of self and world that Daniel mentions in the MCTB chapter on equanimity. So it seems to behoove me to be on the lookout for formations.
Yet, from descriptions I have read, I am still not quite clear on what formations are supposed to refer to. I have had some experiences that seem to bear family resemblances to Daniel's discussion in MCTB but also some differences or lingering points of uncertainty.
For instance, here is an account of a recent experience during a walking meditation.
I was focusing primarily on visual sensations as my objects of vipassana, though allowing and noting all other sensations as well, particularly any bodily and mental sensations that arose in response to visual sensations. I entered into a highly attentive and equanimous state. I felt very calm and absorbed. I moved slowly. I experienced the world not as the ordinary world with a certain externality and reality and inhabited by people and objects, but as "just a bunch of sensations". People were sensations. I saw them not unlike one might see a person in a lucid dream; obviously recognized as a person on some level, but at the same time there was a spontaneous, effortless experience of being noncommital/agnostic/skeptical about their "true nature" above and beyond their status as configurations of perception. I noticed subtle, automatic mental and emotional reactions upon perceiving people that normally would go unnoticed. The two were co-existing smoothly in time and space; there was this sense of this and then that, like an unbroken flow or pattern of sensations, between the external and internal. The following aspects of experience were heavily attenuated: substantiality, solidity, reality, meaning, importance, heaviness. The world really was something like "just sensations". Why get so worked up over a bunch of sensations? I was neither blissful nor afraid, just there in the moment experiencing. Body, and to a lesser extent, mental, sensations were experienced as arising alongside external perceptions in a kind of cause-and-effect, not-self way. I did not have a feeling of no-self in particular, although many subtle thoughts and reactions to perceptions were observed rather than experienced as a means of observation, i.e. seen as sensations rather than identified as self. I experienced some impermanence/flow phenomena. At one point my hands began to tingle like pins and needles, though in a bearable way. I felt my hands as energetic, bundles of energy, a fluid happening, rather than as a normal inert solid object. Several times, absorbing myself into the visual scene, things took on a vivid, now, frozen-in-the-moment quality not unlike the experience of a vivid photographic memory, except the experience was still happening. However, my memory for these visual moments is in fact more vivid than normal visual memory.
I suspect that the bolded parts, referring to an unbroken, natural, seemless flow of experience for both external, bodily, and mental sensations is something like a formation. Is that right? But, I still cannot reconcile other aspects of the description of formations in MCTB, such as:
If you could take a 3D moving photograph that also captured smell, taste, touch, sound, and thought, all woven into each other seamlessly and containing a sense of flux, this would approximate the experience of one formation.
They contain not only a complete set of aspects of all six sense doors within them, but include the perception of space (volume) and even of time/movement within them.
What I experienced was kind of like an unbroken flow or stream of experience that in some sense disregarded the internal/external distinction. But it did not include anything to do with taste or smell, and did not really include a visceral feeling of space. It was also more stream-like than object-like; the description of formations provided in MCTB seems to denote something object-like, like "this chunk of stuff all together is a formation".
Also, the plural part of the word puzzles me. Is a formation supposed to refer to the entire field of experience? Or some attended subcomponents of the entire field of experience that cohere in a special way? Can multiple formations be experienced in one moment, or does "formation" refer to one unbroken stream of experience over some duration of time? |