| | Author: telecaster
Since my insight-type meditation has varied in amount and intensity over about a 30 year period (hard to believe so long, but that 30 years is just chronological range, I'd say within that there is maybe only three years or so all together of real effort) and all of it really was on my own (I've done one-day retreats where I never connected with or spoke to a teacher) I think I had hit various stages from time to time. I saw early on that my thoughts were not real, and I got a vague understanding that there wasn't an unchanging "me." I've gotten some great peace of mind and had hours, days, or sometimes longer of strong awareness without much suffering. And then, weeks, months, years of strong disastisfaction that I couldn't sustain the good experiences. I've gotten subtle tingles all my life and I'm getting them now just by writing about them. So without much real understanding to base it on I feel like my adult life had been kind of a weird cycling through weak A&P and varying in intensity Dark Night. Right now, when meditating, I get the tingles, and a sort of surge of energy up my spine to my head that causes my head to jerk -- these come and go. I guess what I think I am missing and why I think I am quite a ways from really going through "mind and body" is I feel like when I get there I'LL KNOW IT, I won't have to guess. (Note: the way I got interested in this stuff back in the late 70s was from reading Jack Kornfield's "Living Buddhist Masters," which had chapters on several Vipassana masters that got me very excited. Anyone else read this book?) -one more thing: one bad side effect for me of my kind of weak apprecation of non-self/empitiness was an inability to commit to life as "me." I mean, there was always somebody here and that somebody always needed care and feeding but I had a hard time integrating that in my life. |