Hey all.
Treat this as much as a practice log as a claim. It's my process & progress, one month after my loss of sense of watcher and doer (agency).
Also, I have decided to write a little about the beautiful Ox Herding pictures and line them up to the MCTB way of thinking. I never trained in Zen, and everyone's path happens in a slightly different way, but for me, the Ox Herding pictures captured, explained, and crucially guided my process almost perfectly. I guess I enjoy working with metaphors.
The cool thing with the Ox Herding Pictures is that once you truly understand the picture, you realize that stage. Oxen 6-8 I found especially valuable in hinting me into what else needed to be let go of after initial non-duality had been attained. I really recommend them to anyone who likes pictures of animals. Like the MCTB model, they refer only to insight, non-dual perception, they are not an emotional model.
1st Ox Herding Picture
No Ox
One is totally identified with their thoughts, and has no clue about ideas like mindfulness, etc.
2nd Ox Herding Picture - the 1st Vipassana Jhana
Seeing the tracks
One begins to follow the teachings and starts to have some clearer experience of the processes of the body, senses, thoughts, and 'mind'.
3rd Ox Herding Picture - 2nd Vipassana Jhana - The Arising and Passing Away
Seeing the Ox
For the first time, one comes to know some aspect of reality (not the self) very clearly and directly, in naked truth as one has never been known it before. Reality is seen and believed to be something beyond what was previously thought. Very exciting stage, people tend to think they are enlightened at this stage if they are not familiar with maps.
4th Ox Herding Picture - MCTB Stream Entry
Catching the Ox
I wrote a
thread on my SE moment here. This stage in the Zen and MCTB tradition are exactly equivalent. The stream is entered and will carry you, the ox is caught on a string and now cannot ever totally get away again, (but it is unruly).
5th Ox Herding Picture - MCTB paths 2 & 3
Taming the Ox
At this stage experiences of watcher-less-ness became more frequent, and the sense that nothing in the sense fields could be me, or not me, increased.
Also, the perception of luminosity started to happen more frequently, but to be honest, not in a big way. I have always had some experiences of luminosity - staring for a while at some objects in nature e.g. rocks, and suddenly, they lose their fixed rockness (aka become empty), and become incredibly alive, intense, vivid, and a sense of lightness pervades. These experiences continued at this stage, now even more stunning because you are viewing empty sense objects from a lighter no-watcher perspective. But I was not paying too much attention to this, as it hadn't occured to me to, and also I was busy deconstructing other things and working on my motivation and belief (aka faith).
6th Ox Herding Picture - in MCTB late 3rd or 4th path territory
Riding the Ox Backwards aka Switch 180 Rodeo
- aka what some might would call Enlightenment
So this is
what happened to me a month or so ago. (thread here). Suddenly, no thought or intention patterns at all were ever seen to be 'me' and all the 'watcher' patterns of sensations are always seen clearly as just more non-special sensations. It feels like there is definitely no-one at home. The state was simply a stunning flow of total effortlessness, total lack of doer, free-flow, improvised, totally "in the zone", 100% of the time, even when engaged in thinking. No thoughts having special 'me' status, so it is impossible to have any fixed idea about who or what you are, leading to a sense of falling continuously. The mind cannot 'go' anywhere away from you anymore, the concept as mindfulness as something which you can do, or not do, is forever changed.
The boy, now riding backwards and playing a flute, on what was previously a savagely bucking bronco, is the most beautiful and apt image.
At this point all "personal will" was eradicated. Practice dropped from 2 hrs sitting + 3 hrs walking/contemplation + reading per day, to an average of no sitting or 45 mins sitting and a bit of light walking contemplation per day.
7th Ox Herding Picture - in MCTB 4th path territory
Boy at home, Ox forgotten
However the main duality in the 6th Ox for me, was subtle (or indeed, incredibly unsubtle, rampant, desperate) clinging to the state itself, basically some kind of idea there is a mind (the ox), which is now a certain way (doer-less, watcherless, seemingly non-dual).
In the Zen tradition they say "now wash away all traces of enlightenment" which is what this stage is about. A Zen master said to one of his students at this stage "Its (Enlightenment) foul stench is still upon you..." which is quite a nice image, very true!
So practice here became eradicating any real belief in 'mind', so there can be no possibility of believing that you can "have an enlightened mind", or "have a deluded mind", or in fact any mind at all. I constantly questioned and searched for mind - where is mind (no evidence is found) etc etc and also constantly tried to look for any real evidence of time (none found). This was useful because without time, there can be no mind. Without time there can be no non-dual state, and no unenlightened state.
Eventually there is no belief in a inherently existing "mind state" and you are just the boy, no Ox (no mind), just as he has always been, and as he always was.
It's a very beautiful metaphor because you started with no Ox (i.e. no idea what 'mind' is, totally identified with your thoughts). Then, you had to find it (learn about how your mind works and how it relates to 'you'), then after a big struggle, you tamed it and became a rodeo ox master, but now, the ox has done it's job, and you have no need for it. It comes full circle.
8th Ox Herding Picture - Totally non-dual perception, MCTB 4th Path strictest definition
Nothingness, Emptiness
In the previous stage 7, it still somehow did feel like there was something, a thread (however slender) that was somehow tying together all the sensory input and making it seem like there is some sort of 'you'. There was definitely no watching presence, no doer, and no me to be anything, but there was still something linking... In my case this was the feeling of a "centre" to my experience field, which was caused by believing that objects in the sense field along with their properties like distance and position were a somehow real.
So the practice I was doing is seeing all the sense fields as empty of all objects and characteristics, especially distance and position.
For example, distance of sensations is not inherently real, it is imputed (inferred, interpreted) from other characteristics.
Similarly bodily feeling sensations do not have an actual position, the "where" they come from is created by thought, by a mental image or model.
So I would for example walk and pay attention to some body sensations in the ankle or lungs, then look at the visual field and feel that for example, my foot step could be occurring in the same place as say a tree 50m away, or that my breath sensations were the entire visual field, not separate in distance, and also even not inherently separate in nature - eg audio is mixed with visual and touch, which we infer into 3 distinct flavours of sensation.
All sensations occur nowhere and everywhere, at the origin point, which also is infinite in size. When I had this realisation it seems like the centre is gone now.
Then there was period of wanting the world to appear a certain way, which caused confusion. for example I would be seeing the hologram - the illusion of forms and distances in the 'world' which I knew to be just a formless, locationless, sense field. And becoming confused as to why it was still appearing as the hologram (illusion) when it is known to be locationless emptiness. Then I realised that the interplay of both is the nature of reality, the middle way. Precisely emptiness manifesting as form. It's like a magic eye (stereogram picture) of a dinosaur. Before, you always saw the dinosaur, and thought it was real. Then you came to know that actually it was just a flat picture of dots. But your mind still creates the dinosaur, and if you are averse to seeing the dinosaur, and keep wanting it to disappear, you will become frustrated! The nature of your optical system is to show you the dinosaur. So you give up trying to see the world in any particular way, and the dinosaur still appears, but in a light, effortless and empty way, just dots, which are happily manifesting as dinosaur for now.
So in the last picture the boy, who was resting in pure, mindless nature, was nonetheless still a person, human in form. Now in stage 8 , with the utter destruction of centre, he is nothing. No-one, no mind, no centre, no body. The person dies totally into the experience field.
Just to re-iterate, this is just how it has happened for me so far. The elements of emptiness happen in different ways and orders for different people probably.
9th Ox Herding Picture - not sure yet! Open to hear from people!
Trees 'n' stuff
10th Ox herding Picture - also don't know yet! Anyone know?
A fat guy
Would really appreciate any feedback or any pointers on where to look for more dualities.AEN was super helpful so far and thanks to everyone who replied. As I said I am relating my experience and my interpretation of it, which I think is a helpful process for me and others. Also the stages and nature of insight are just something I find so magnificently beautiful and interesting.
On where practice goes now:** I am going to try to stay curious, keep looking for more insight related stuff.
** But my next goal is to try to clear out the back end - become more emotionally integrated
** And also I think I would like to eradicate non-useful thought (l love that sentence).
On how this related to life and relations - is this at all interesting to anyone?Some themes that I have going on:
1. How much am I suffering? Am I suffering at all?
2. Everyone else seems mad. Properly mad.
3. The hilarity of trying to talk about it to anyone, on a spiritual path or not
4. A rocky on-off-on-off start to a very intense romance
5. The total, farcical ludicrousness of thoughts
6. Concept of time falling away.
7. How this is impacting the relationship with my mum and brother
8. Memory becoming drastically poorer in some ways
9. Losing will to do a lot things I used to like doing
10. general megalomanic / superiority feelings
11. seemingly total fearlessness of one type.
12. the thinking-bit-of-the-mind's total inablity to keep up with the nature of perception
13. not seeming to be at all self-realised sometimes
Well done if you made it this far! I enjoyed writing this and hope some people get something out of it.