Hey,
I've been noticing more and more that I seem to be Cycling through the Nanas in daily life. The cutting edge of my practice is the mature form of the 11th, High Equanimity.
I was a Dark Night Yogi for years. Thanks to the help of some friends who were into Pragmatic Dharma, I read some of the descriptions of The Progress of Insight. From that point on I had a sense that I could change things and that I had enough information and evidence-based faith that it was my responsibility alone. A little later on, when I actually started a formal practice, The Dark Night melted away and I moved into EQ.
Then I noticed that every few days when my practice got weak or stopped entirely(my life was and still is kind of disorganized), I would have bouts of DN stuff.
It would happen in two ways:
Either I'd fall into really nasty but fairly short periods of Re-Observation, or I would cross the A&P and then fall through the Dukkha Nanas from Dissolution through Fear, Misery, Disgust, Desire for Deliverance, and finally to Re-Observation in the standard pattern(even nastier).
I'd always get back to EQ by practicing choiceless awareness with a very strong component of acceptance, but usually after being blind-sided by The Dark Night and its unpleasant effects.
Thus, I resolved to catch these pesky insight stages and actively observe my sense of self-as-thing dissolve whenever the process jumped back to that point. This was highly educational, as I became verly closely related to not only the awful side-effects of the DN, but some of the more primary characteristics of it, like the dynamics of how one progresses through it and how it feels on the bare sensate level when it is taken as an object.
Since then, I'd say that I've been in EQ(mostly Low EQ) about two thirds of the time. It lasts for a few days and then is punctuated by a cycling episode or two.
When things get murky and my perpective seems limited, I resolve to cross the A&P, ramp up, pop, enter Dissolution, and then rocket through the Dark Night to EQ on a powerful and seemigly automatic wave of metta.
When I cross the A&P, sometimes it is unintentional, but usually what happens is I notice that my physical energy is ramping up and think "oh, ok I guess it's time" and then actively participate. The A&P has become relatively minor for me. When I am aware that it's happening, it comes in the form of a flow state of rapidly surging physioenergetic phenomenain my body related to the loop that is created between intentions and actions as I perform simple physical tasks.
There is a feeling of participating in the ramp-up, and then letting go to watch the momentum carry me though the experience.
I'm starting to think that sometimes I am crossing it in subtler ways, which leads to a subtler and sneakier Dark Night.
I don't have Fruitions.... I think. I had a really abrupt and powerfully clear state shift a while ago. it manifested as a brief unknowing event which felt like a quick dip. I can't say for sure that the sense feild disappeared, so I pretty much wrote it off. I havent been able to repeat it.
Anyway, the reason I'm posting this is that I wan to ask the community how common it is to experience cycling before Stream Entry, and also directly before subsequent Path Attainments. I'm familiar with the theory about how review cycles follow path attainments before the next set of stages arise, but basically what I'm asking here is whether or not anyone has heard of incomplete review cycles on the front end of a Path rather than after attaining it.
I may have gotten Stream Entry a while ago. It's unclear to me. I think I'm probably Pre-Path and just getting acquainted with the complexities of EQ and the broader pattern, but I think it's possible that a blackout I had a while ago was actually Stream Entry, and I just skipped review and entered The First Nana of Second Path.
Ugh. I think about it less and less as I ease into the direct experience of it, but I felt like it was time to ask.
A description of the earlier "blackout" unknowing event(which could definitely be improved upon) can be found
here.I may write a new description with better precision about what I was experiencing by relating it to what I've done and been able to understand in the past few months since that last post about it. I think this post is aiready long enough.