| | Feeling it might be helpful to describe my current experiences.
Recent Practice -
Background: On September 5th I started sitting meditation at home, generally 2-6 hours a day with many other hours spent attempting mindfulness during busy activities. Switched from busy job to sustainable part-time teaching to free up time for practice.
Weeks 1-2: After reviewing MCTB maps and a few other sources I started trying to implement basic practices from Practical Insight Meditation. At first difficult to transition from my busier life to my less busy one and a lot of complicated relief and emotion took my attention, but eventually the fact that I had planned to have nothing else to do but meditate started to work and I started noticing thoughts of aversion to meditation that would then be followed up by a "yeah... so what?" kind of feeling that would then press me on.
I began with my breath as my object and expanded into any other sensation I could note in any of the six sense doors. I tried to ground myself in the present by noticing a thought about the past or future as it arose, kind of 'comparing' it with another impression that involved time and they both seemed to sort of dissipate in intensity. Bothersome thoughts: I would try to intensify and note sensory qualities that belonged to them. At some point a lot of my sitting attention would be drawn to the many "touch points" I could notice wherever I felt sensations of pressure in my body. I tried body-scanning, was all over the place.
My concentration weak at the time I started this, an my forays into early insight stages seemed infrequent but real enough, and some days I experienced the intense vividness and vibrancy that I think is part of the first vipassana jhana. Started discovering many little details about how I experience my home. Got distracted from any particular object of focus and let myself experience whatever my mind shot for. Lots of intellectual and emotional energy was freed and it was difficult to hold myself back from pursuing creative interests. One day I stopped practice inexplicably and read and wrote extensively for two or three days. I made surprising progress in a number of projects but then cut back deciding to rededicate myself to practice.
Weeks 3-4: Picked a new object - an adjustable metronome. Each click over time began to dissolve into several distinct sounds, and I started noticing physical sensations in my ears and causal relationships between clicks, my noticing of clicks, and sensations all over my body. I felt very empowered and impressed at the degree of exactness I was reaching much of the time, and it seemed more clear to me what knowledge of cause and effect meant, but I was having trouble seeing any of the three characteristics beyond maybe the speed/impermanence of the sensations. It feels like it would be a long an exhausting effort to describe all of what I was learning (just about clicks!), but the new richness gave me more faith in the process.
My concentration was improving and it occurred to me that I might have an easier time with visualization than with sounds. This made sense as I had begun to naturally stare at and observe objects around me, and in college I had found visualization to be a) one of my stronger personal mental tools (helping me up to General Relativity problems about curvature) and b) one of my favorite activities (mapping fractals for unsolvable problems in a chaos theory class).
I read more about kasina meditation and my guess was lucky - early experiments felt like something my mind was very willing to do. Not as magically easy as I had hoped (definitely some ego and wishful thinking), but I decided to switch object again to full-time kasina.
Weeks 5-present: My kasina object has largely been candle flame and the after-image, with some time spent on an a bowl, and some time spent on multi-colored disks on my wall (these can be flipped over when one color is dull to intensify the next one).
My concentration at first still felt not good enough, but in time I felt able to notice the near-constantly attentional blinking and shifting in my vision or in my eyes even when fixed on a single spot. I discovered that relaxing beforehand helped, as did using a kind of full-body awareness of my seeing process. If I could not focus on the flame or image then sort of 'circling around' and surrounding it helped. I noted off thoughts whenever possible. Subtle mental noise and self-talk felt persistent even if I could almost mute it.
Suddenly, while viewing a bowl I passed quickly though the nimittas (turned the same color as the background, grew dark, disappeared, and the reappeared as as a luminous object). I pursued this luminous object and cultivated I again again, which was semi-reproducible through tweaking my mood, relaxation-level, body, and the periphery of my attention. I started enjoying the first samatha jhana and decided to pursue more insight. The luminous kasina objects still seem a little miraculous and their vividness encouraged me.
In the last week I've discovered that my kasina insight experiences using a candle flame and after-image are creepily close to what Daniel briefly describes in the MCTB chapter on the vipassana jhana models. I closed my eyes and the after-image would dissipate before a clear, bright, red orb appeared. It started shaking, flying away, misbehaving. After a few sessions of that behavior it contained a golden spinning star-like center, then the whole image began flashing, the dot became dark, the image borders became multi-colored and moving in complex ways, and colors and difficult-to-make-out motions had started filling the surrounding area and into my whole peripheral vision.
Powerful emotional experiences have also been filling my daily life. A few sharp spikes of apparently irrational fear. Periods of amazing sensual languor. Disaffection. Lucid dreams. Terrible nightmares (lots of what I would describe as death-related imagery, a reaper entity, and one dream where my body was being unraveled in morbid red strands out from my knee). Contained over-reactions to normal daily details. I've been approaching this as a product of practice and trying to keep it self-contained, though it seem to influence other people in my life at least a lite bit if not directly. My partner also says I seem a bit sad this week. I think I have been experiencing dark night stages. Curious if any of it is scripted from received ideas, but unsure.
In the past three days the kasina objects can be conjured without a material counterpart - and often do so unprompted, and sometimes seem like they can be sustained for an indefinite period of time. The peripheral activity is crazy now, the center unclear, and the colorful peripheral chaos is now near-constant even in my open-eyed vision.
Yesterday while meditating I experienced a difficult-to-describe period during which my whole body and much more of my attentional field became involved. I was on the lookout for spatial effects and my visual field (/everything?) at times felt like a tight dark cloth against my eyes and at other it times felt like I was looking into deep far-off space. My mental gymnastics, expectations, and dharma theory got too crazy and I felt very miserable and irritated and lots of bodily pain. My working hypothesis is I'm in a maturing third vipassana jhana baseline. I have many conversations where my attention seems to totally float a second season behind, often my body and actions feel like agency is missing and that we're just going through the motions. From the bodily pains I have sometimes I'm open to the possibility I could be merely in three characteristics, but I'm pressing on either way. Many phenomena seem very unpleasant - especially sounds, which can seem to be composed entirely of screeches.
Want to get enlightened! I'll update more as things change. Very open to any feedback that will help me finish this stuff. I admire this community and am happy that I can pot something like this somewhere.
Previous Practice -
I've practiced on-and-off for maybe ten years. I actually think I had a re-observation-into-equanimity moment once before, and it was such a total, rapid, and constant perception of fundamental suffering belonging to every thought, motion, or tiny interior act of self-posturing that I desired intensely for release and relief until I (unknowingly Eckhart Tolle style) had a concrete realization that "there is no self to destroy" and somehow made a powerful peace in it, which led to me spending two months (during which I had almost no obligations beyond three lectures at Chinese universities) just passively and calmly observing every thought I had sitting in hotel rooms. Went away, eventually. I have no idea of how to navigate my mind to replicate the transition, and I honestly feel a little scared of having another re-observation after that. Pressing on though.
I have looked into actualism and feel I made a little progress into cultivating PCEs.
My last retreat with ordained (Zen) monks was in 2010 and throughout college I sometimes sat with a Zen group. Hit many samatha jhanas, a few A&P-like events, was generally very confused. Had a blissful seemingly random depersonalization event in 2010 that had a long afterglow and shifted my outlook and personality in a positive way, and changed my relationship to memory/my remembered past.
Met Daniel Ingram randomly when he visited Brown/Cheetah House before I graduated. Told me I seemed to be in the dark night (that was years ago). Later I read MCTB and responded well - my areas of study were mathematical logic and philosophy (particularly philosophy of mind, pragmatism, and ethics), so this presentation of the Theravada was quite up my alley. The time. This is my first attempt to implement it seriously, no excuses. Seems to appeal to some of my similar-minded friends |
