| | Dear DhO'ers,
As some of you have already read, in the 27th of December I began a 20-day retreat by myself, with the guidance of Tarin Greco. I got to stream-entry during this retreat, and I'd like to share my experiences here. This is a very large post in four parts, which I index:
1. My retreat 2. Back home 3. A discussion of the Mystical-Schmystical 4. Gratitude
1. My retreat
On the fourth day of the retreat, at about 7h30 PM, I had my first fruition experience, which I would repeat a number of times on the following days. However, my experience since then seems to be somewhat different than Daniel's descriptions in MCTB, and I think it would be interesting to discuss why that is the case. I'll use the words "understood", "were", "realized", "concluded" instead of "I think I understood", "seemed to be", etc... Just so you know I am not as confident about my "insights" as it might seem.
Up until the moment of fruition, my retreat experience seemed to follow the classical vipassana insight cycles that Daniel has described so well. (1) Effort turns to (2) widespread ecstasy that joins into (3) violent vibrating pain smoothing out into (4) a panoramic wide vibratory quality. The four jhanas, over and over again, everywhere in my brain and body.
One thing that I realized at the time is that the "four jhanas" were a very generic method of the nervous system to "integrate" or "release" tension. I felt that the "vipassana nanas" were based on the same process that was happening in my feet, my knees, my shoulders, my internal organs, etc. Happening instead on the "higher" parts of the nervous system, i.e. the brain, this same process would trigger reactions of emotional pain and misery, and that this was what provoked the emotional aspects of the insight cycles.
Fruition, I've come to believe, is just the very same "tension-integration" process happening on a specific part of the brain dealing with higher-level cognitive attention. My first few fruitions would happen by applying effort in the "attention" aspect of experience, i.e. I would "pay attention, again, again, again, again..." rhythmically and intensely, i.e., I would do noting practice. Attention would then gain an automatic rhythmic micro-vibratory quality, turn into larger and violent medium-vibratory shaking, and then to a smooth panoramic-vibratory experience. In this last phase I would have glimpses of my sensation of space, or my whole body moving simultaneously, etc, wide panoramic stuff. Then I would usually sit, stuff would still be wide and pretty much everything would calm down except for the annoying aggressive vibration in the third eye area; as I would focus on that, it would eventually also calm down, leaving a kind-of spacey feeling. Then I would relax, maybe gently space out, and then "zzt" or "wham" or "bzzt" or something like that, and then relief, peace, complete whole body-and-mind relaxation-integration. "Coming home" is a perfect description :-)
Although this has some elements of Daniel Ingram's precise and detailed description of a fruition, it is certainly no match in completeness or clarity. I'm stressing this because my last few fruitions happened in a somewhat different way, and I'm going to describe that now; however by comparing my previous description with Daniels', you can get an idea of how imprecise my mental image is of what I am about to describe.
In any case, my experience of fruitions changed at some point. You see, during the whole of 2009 I have had a very hard time dealing with symptoms of what I thought was a "kundalini awakening". What happened in my retreat and since then confirms my suspicions. In any case, this had led me to read books on the spiritual tradition of yoga, which describes the kundalini-awakening related phenomena. In these books, fruition is always described as an explosion in, following a rise of energy to, the crown chakra. During the first few days after stream-entry, my fruitions slowly changed from this "ever-widening of attention" description into something else, much more similar to what is described in the yoga literature.
What would happen is this: I felt a tremendous amount of tension in the base of the spine. Believing that my "mission as a meditator" was to release as much tension as I could, and believing that the four-jhanas where the way to do it, I would simply get the four jhanas happening in the base of the spine. I would do touch touch touch, go through 1st-3rd-jhana, and when the tension on the base got into the fourth-jhana quality, something different would happen. A massive amount of vibratory energy would be released, force it's way up my spine, reach the third eye, blast its way through, and then somewhat violently and forcefully widen my attention to the point of fruition. After this it would slowly and vigorously descend, opening my "chakras" along the way, and these would flow out tremendous amounts of energy bringing me to convulsions and other bizarre body phenomena, such as abnormally slow breathing.
I was sometimes scared, but all the emotional aspects that Daniel describes so thoroughly happened only briefly and vaguely. Furthermore, I had the impression that I knew which area of the brain was "activated" or "stimulated" when these phenomena where present. While in "dark-night", there would be "energy" somewhere in the rear-middle of the brain, slowly and painfully moving up.
Then I remembered that my yoga books (which I did not bring to the retreat) mentioned a way to connect the third-eye and crown chakras, and I had a vague idea of the location that needed to be stimulated. So I proceeded to 4-jhana'tize this area. This triggered more energetic phenomena, and as this connection was "purified", the upward resistance of the nervous system became less and less, to the point that I felt I could "approach" fruition easily simply by pushing energy up to the crown, and then "retract" not-so-easily by focusing somewhere else further down. So typical fruition was: I would focus on the root to spinal nerve to third-eye to crown connection intending to lead energy upwards; it would do so, and when there was enough energy at the crown I would have fruition.
This kind of experiments occupied my last few days of retreat. Although I was very excited and energized during those days, and I could feel my energy going up and down, there was no emotional "dark-nightish" response any more. I was convinced that my depression was over, which was my foremost meditative goal anyhow. Furthermore, the whole root to crown connection was so cleared up that there was a constant upward pull of energy leading to a permanent four-jhana full-body nervous dissolution/catharsis, which was scary. I decided that I needed to go back, give it some time, gain some perspective, and think things over. That was on my tenth day of retreat.
2. Back home
Coming back home did by no means stop the dissolution process. The first few days I was euphoric and borderline egomaniac, but this faded down into a much more reasonable and balanced condition. Then one day of intense full-body shaking and dissolution, I got really scared, which generated more energy and shaking, and then more fright, in a dreadful cycle that let to a panic attack. The next day I understood what had happened, and I've managed to avoid having panic attacks since then. However, the dissolution proceeds further every day, sometimes at a somewhat uncomfortable pace, but mostly it is ok.
The somewhat surprising factor for me is that having Daniel Ingram's book and interviews as my primary raw-material for expectations, I was expecting to cycle through the vipassana nanas over and over again. But this is hardly the case. Instead, I feel that I'm diving deeper and deeper into pleasant and ever-more-subtle mind states. My perception refines every day. I am learning to do something that could be described as "connecting with silence", and I get better and better at that too. I am assaulted by feelings of unity. My attitudes towards others changes for the better every day. Unpleasant habits are quickly wrapped in their own awareness, and fade away with small effort. My whole body's muscles relax tensions that I wasn't even aware of (I am now able to do things on the saxophone that are supposed to require years of training, simply because the front of my body is fully relaxed while playing). I am learning how to transmute unpleasant emotions into raw energy and back into pleasant emotions; e.g. changing frustration into enthusiasm.
It is sometimes still scary, particularly when plenty of energy gets released. To help with this, I've begun practicing Chi Kung and reading about the "energy channels" that exist in the body. Cleaning and maintaining these channels seems like a huge task all in itself. I've opened up the front channel aka the conceptual vessel, and that was a huge help with the big energy release phenomena, as now I usually direct energy into the guts (aka lower Dantien). But all over the body stuff is opening up, and if I meditate for more than a short while, the releases are so intense it becomes unpleasant.
But no vipassana nanas… no cycling, no excessive euphoria and no depressive reactions. The four jhanas still happen over and over again, but while they are accompanied by the same changes in cognition (e.g. I'm smarter in the fourth jhana), these are no longer of an emotional nature, and my actions are only slightly influenced by the jhana I happen to be in. Also I either don't have fruition in the end, or it is so subtle I don't realize it.
Besides not having any more "dark nights", at least not so far, I do have other phenomena that MCTB does not mention. It feels as if the sexual function was expanding its role and presence. My perineum area no longer has that huge tension that it used to have. Instead it seems to suck up energy that is going down, and redirect it back up through the spine, in an extremely sexual and pleasant manner that feels very close to "coming". I sometimes feel that the sensations of ecstasy are getting too much to handle, to the point that occasionally my body temperature goes up almost by a degree, and when this happens I drink a lot of water and focus on abdominal breathing. Then the energy seems to get absorbed by the intestines, which will grumble with all sort of funny noises and eventually warm up, cooling and calming down the rest of the body.
3. A discussion of the Mystical-Schmystical
I found all these things described in the yoga tradition. Happily, there is also a very pragmatical, no-bullshit teacher of yoga, called Yogani (http://www.aypsite.org). In his books on yoga, his website, and its forum, many people describe these kind of heavy-duty symptoms as purification and opening, and most of these people claim to be progressing towards enlightenment with hardly any emotional or mental discomfort.
The path of yoga seems to be divided into two distinct practices: the practice of "inner silence" and the practice of "ecstasy". Inner silence is also sometimes described as pure bliss consciousness, shiva, etc; ecstasy has other names such as kundalini, shakti, sexual energy and so on. I'm guessing that a correct yoga-insight translation would call "subject" or "observer" to "inner silence" and "object" or "phenomena" to "ecstasy". Yogani prescribes mantra meditation for inner silence practice and spinal breathing pranayama for cultivation of ecstasy. Eventually, he describes, the two are seen to be one and the same, what yoga tradition describes as "the union of shiva and shakti", and that is the final point of enlightenment, which sounds pretty much the same as insight tradition's merging of subject and object.
Kundalini is the likely explanation for all the powerful and bizarre emotional, mental and physiological stuff that I've been going through.
Now the conjecture pertains to the question: "why is it that the progress of insight is described as a bipolar roller-coaster, but the progress of yoga is described as a gradual falling into a permanent state of ecstatic bliss consciousness?"
My conjecture is the following: (1) enlightenment a process that happens somewhere in the crown-chakra region of the brain; (2) by correct and sufficient stimulation, eventually our cognitive attention comes to synchronize sufficiently with reality, and realize "the truth" about subject-object duality; (3) There are probably many ways of getting this stimulation to happen, and this corresponds to the various enlightenment traditions that we know of; (4) insight practice stimulates this part of the brain by working directly with attention; (5) Yoga works by cultivating the "witness", developing the sexual function, and eventually leading energy to the crown by using specific body postures and other techniques.
The results, it seems, are not entirely the same. If my conjecture is true, then this would mean that in the end of the insight tradition process, a specific part of the meditator's brain has been sufficiently and correctly stimulated that it causes no needless resistance to the surrounding reality. But in the end of the path of Yoga, the entire nervous system of the practitioner has been stimulated and refined with the same thoroughness and density.
Does this make sense? It seems to imply that even arhats are missing out on part of the fun. Daniel and others arhats here have mentioned that when all was said and done was what needed to be, they felt like normal, regular blokes. Just to emphasize that a little further, let me cite something Yogani wrote: "The rise of Shiva, Shakti and their final union everywhere within us make up the three stages of enlightenment – First, 24/7 inner silence. Second, 24/7 whole body ecstasy. And third, 24/7 ecstatic bliss, the joining of the divine polarities of silence and ecstasy, yielding an endless outpouring of divine love, which is unity. […] It is an unending cosmic orgasm within cell and atom in us."
I am very curious to hear what you have to say!
4. Gratitude
Stronger than my intellectual-mystical curiosity is my feeling of gratitude towards this community. I have passed through such difficult times last year that I sometimes considered taking my own life. Whenever that idea came to mind, I usually replied to myself:
"Come on, it would be stupid to kill myself without at least checking out what the Buddhist dudes are talking about…"
So I did. I've had enough personal, direct experience to conclude, without reservation, that the Buddhist dudes were right all along. So, with tears of gratitude, I would like to specifically thank Daniel, Trent, Kenneth, Hansen, Tina and of course Tarin; but I am also very grateful to so many others who posted here, because reading these posts was a cause of growing curiosity and conviction, as well as good company in dark times.
Thank you Buddhist Dudes!
Affectionately yours, Bruno |