To CCC: I'm sorry that you are not satisfied with my post. Are you frustrated because you want to connect and communicate with people here better? Do you have any particular dharma topics that you want to discuss here? Maybe you can start a thread on the topics you are interested in.
To Nick: Thank you for the link. This should be really useful for my practice in the time to come.
To Trent and Tommy: Thanks for the support

To anyone else: please feel free to critique my posts. I'm still learning to comment on this place so that it could be as fruitful to my own and other's practice as much as possible.
Daniel M. Ingram:
What is your understanding of the theoretical differences between 3rd and 4th, meaning, what criteria do you personally use for 3rd, and what do you think you are looking for, specifically? This will help clarify some points of language to make any discussion more productive, I think, and help make it more personal for you in particular.
I think this is part of the problem; I'm not sure what the difference between 3rd and 4th is. If possible, I would like to use the jhanic criteria. However, my ability to concentrate has been quite inconsistent. The insight cycles seem to interfere with my ability to concentrate; to make things more complicated, I also have a hard time assessing where I am on the Jhana practice.
The way I have been assessing my insight stages for the third path has been the overall qualities during days in general. For example, during A&P event, I would notice extremely high energy. All 7 factors of enlightenment were almost perfect, and in retrospect, I could remember some corruptions of insights that arose. With all these, there was still a sense that I still need to learn something from the path. Then, during dark night, of course I was quite miserable. Then, I thought I got to equanimity when I seemed to be able to see the world differently. Compassion arises more naturally, and I could see things (in life and through insight cycles) changing constantly and could mostly accept these changes.
Now, the only reason I have for thinking skeptically that I have attained the third path is that I did not get any fruitions for a couple of months before it suddenly appeared again about a month ago. Then, it seemed to appear at least once a week until now. The reasons I don't think I have it are the followings:
1) With other paths, with only dry insight practice, before getting fruition for the path, I always have high energy and perfect 7 factors of enlightenment for a couple of days before it appears. The concentration is definitely at the jhanic level. 45 min sitting seemed like 2-3 min sort of things. Before fruition this time, this did not seem to happen. Of course, this could just be because I cycled through other nanas while meditating. Also, to make things more complicated, I have just been doing samatha practice during the sit, and sure, sometimes it could feel like time flew by really quickly (not 2-3 min though).
2) While I stop getting frustrated with the cycling process which happened all days long, I could still see some subtle resistance for some of my daily life activities. I thought that the anagami should have no resistance for performing new spontaneous tasks (?)
Daniel M. Ingram:
Could you say a bit more about what your waking, walking around experience is like?
I think I would log my experience of my daily life today.
1 h meditation in the morning: used breath as an object. This went with only intermittent thoughts. I could concentrate reasonably well on breath. In the middle, I could feel quite strong vibrations at the heart center as what happened lately and also some pressure at the eyelid.
After getting up, I still felt quite refreshing from the sit and general qualities were quite neutral/ pleasant. I could still feel vibrations at the heart center with slightly unpleasant quality, but it did not bother me. While this happened, I talked to my dad and he suggests changing my flight ticket so that I would not stop over at Japan anymore. I could feel subtle resistance to that comment. After lunch, I felt really tired with some slight shoulder pains and pain at the back of the neck. This also did not bother me; I have figured that it's better for me not to fight and just took a short nap in the afternoon when this happened. After that my former co-worker showed up, flying all the ways to Boston from India. This was the co-worker that I mentioned to my boss a couple of month ago that she probably did not like me very much. She seemed quite happy and we got along really well today with me cycling through A&P stage (maybe). This could be one of those strange events that happen during the path (?) After that, got to equanimity again, and slightly after that another fruition appeared. Felt bright and neutral until now.
Did I answer your questions?
With metta