Jake:
Okay- so why are you looking for patterns? See what I mean; clearly you have an agenda, and that is okay, but it isn't to look for patterns. it's to look for patterns *for some reason*. So what is it? Will finding these patterns help you with your practice? motivation? a paper you are writing for school?
Surely curiosity is a simpler motivation than the desire to achieve esoteric spiritual goals or to complete schoolwork!
Any background on what motivated you to write this post and what you are looking to get from it will probably help you get more and better responses. As it is-- it feels a bit opaque. In general if you shared more about yourself and your personal experience with practice, study etc. that will also help the community here get a feel for you.
My reticence stems from a scientifically-minded attempt to avoid warping the responses with my own speculative theories. I also try to avoid talking too much, and the easiest point to keep the impulse in check is before I get going. But you're right, the voice that results is unproductively opaque, and in the interest of conversation, I will answer my own questions.
Jareth Dekko:
1. At what age did you cross the A&P? How did it happen?
At age 7, I underwent cognitive behavioral therapy for my dyslexia. The therapist's central technique was to briefly show me a word such as "should" on a flashcard, and then ask me to visualize it and spell it by reading what I visualized, or to spell it backwards, etc. In this way, supposedly, I would learn to "see" the letters instead of blindly passing my gaze over them.
My reading skills improved dramatically, but later that year I developed a non-24-hour circadian rhythm disorder and had an usually vivid dream in which a huge figure in a blue robe appeared before me, disappearing moments later. The hood of the robe had fabric over the face, with circular eye holes trimmed in gold, and there seemed to be no one inside; all that was visible through the eye holes was the back of the hood. I remember being particularly impressed with the instantaneity of the coming and going, describing it as being like a light being turned on and off by a lightswitch, one of the things dreams are known for their inability to portray.
2. What's the furthest point you've reached on the path of insight?
Stream entry. See question 5.
3. What's the highest concentration jhana you've experienced?
I don't think I've experienced any. When I attempted to learn concentration meditation I was already in the dark night, had little success, and have yet to repeat the attempt.
4. Have you been anywhere else, beyond or outside the path of insight and the concentration jhanas?
I've had a handful of odd experiences which may have been due to unwittingly slipping into the "psychic powers". See question 13.
5. Besides crossing the A&P, were any of your significant insight-related milestones attained in the absence of formal practice? If so, under what circumstances did they occur?
Yes; in fact, almost all of them.
After learning the basics of insight meditation and gradually increasing my practice time to an hour a day over a period of several months, I meditated for half a day straight, alternately sitting and walking, and again crossed the A&P, then abandoned formal practice due to a lack of motivation, only later understanding why. I was subsequently diagnosed with a treatment-resistant complex of sleep and attention disorders, for which I was put on Adderall, an amphetamine-based stimulant. Simultaneously, and for what I thought were unrelated reasons, I began experimenting with polyphasic sleep.
The drugs and sleep experiments provoked a number of additional A&P events, all of them either in dreams or fantasies, or immediately before or after, in the hypnogogic state or refractory period, respectively. Additionally, the more successful adaptation experiments involved long periods of severe sleep deprivation and resulted in spontaneous crossings from re-observation into equanimity. After a vivid dream in which my mind was on fire and I felt I was going insane, I would wake up feeling completely rested and at peace, as if I had slept soundly for eight hours. This effect was so striking that every time it happened, I assumed I had slept through the alarm, but upon checking it I would find it was still running, and that I had slept for only ten minutes.
I told my psychiatrist about the A&P events, and she said they were byproducts of the concentration-enhancing effect of Adderall; since no object is unworthy of investigation, sufficiently strong concentration can lead to insight progress regardless of the context in which one applies it. Despite this explicit theoretical understanding, it never crossed my mind when conducting my sleep experiments that the associated mental transitions were insight-related.
Later, still without formal practice and on an even higher dose of Adderall, I got stream entry. Since that time I have reduced my dosage.
6. Did the way you attained any of your spiritual attainments feel like cheating? What were the consequences, if any?
None of them felt like intentionally cheating, but as I progressed, they increasingly felt wrong, as if by randomly mashing keys in a computer game I had by sheer chance wound up in a secret area that I lacked the context to understand. This is something I repeatedly dreamed about as a child.
As to the consequences, the only one I've noticed is a tiny but persistent unease.
7. How would you rate your mindfulness?
Fair. I have a large vocabulary, an eccentric cultural literacy, and a facility with cross-domain metaphorical thinking, and so I enjoy a great deal of nuance and precision in my recognition and classification of unusual sensations. However, I'm quite poor at attending to most sensations in the first place, preferring to tune them out.
8. When you're in a store which plays music over the public address system, do you ever absently start humming an unrelated tune?
Yes. See above.
9. Do you have an aversion to eye contact? Did the way you experience eye contact change at any point along the path?
I have both an aversion to and a fascination with eye contact.
The earliest memory I have of "looking through" someone is at age 8. I don't remember whether I had an aversion to eye contact before I crossed the A&P.
10. Do you have any clinically diagnosed mental peculiarities?
Dyslexia, non-24-hour circadian rhythm disorder, sensory defensiveness, ADHD (inattentive type), and narcissistic personality disorder with schizoid tendencies, though I tend to think they got that last one the wrong way around.
11. How would you rate your "mindlessness", your skill in concealing arbitrary elements of the perceptual field from conscious awareness? Have you trained this ability?
Excellent when it comes to emotions, otherwise about average. I haven't trained the ability, but I find the idea interesting.
12. What's your MBTI type?
INTP, subtype TPNI ( Theorist > Architect > Editor > Actuary )
13. Have you interacted with mysterious entities? If so, where along the path did the interaction occur? Did you initiate it?
Yes, at least twice. The same entity both times, though I only later noticed this. I suspect the first was in equanimity, it took place when I was about 16, after an 11-hour walk in the dark that left me physically exhausted. The second one I'm unsure about, it happened during an episode of polyphasic sleep which occurred spontaneously a month or two after I discontinued my experiments.
Though in a sense I "initiated" the first interaction, I later realized I had been manipulated into doing so. The second time it was clearly her.
14. Assuming you've attained stream entry, and that you remember clearly some of your experiences of the three doors, did they take forms described in MCTB? If so, what aspects were dominant? If not, what was different?
I hesitate to answer this, because my memories are not as clear as I'd like, and a couple of the experiences may have been near-misses, but in almost every case, there seemed to be an aspect present which Daniel does not describe, of a sound, a voice, a word, a thought, or something in between those things. In one case, during the approach to the three doors, it started as a low, complex, synthetic-sounding noise, gradually becoming more organic and voice-like. In other cases, it started as a female voice and became more mechanical and abstract. The two routes seem to lead to the same point. Sometimes it arises spontaneously.
I recently had a near-miss experience in which the thing seemed to be only half-formed, and was revealed to be a conceptual synthesis of three different words, two of which are, in most contexts, mutually exclusive. To the extent that they were blended together, the result was an alien concept that would otherwise have been unrecognizable. Although I have never used nitrous oxide recreationally, I understand that doing so can provoke a similar fusion of opposing concepts. This certainly fits with the feeling that accompanies this aspect, which is one of absurdity.
15. Did you have any unexpected problems after attaining stream entry?
Yes, two: it seems to have strengthened my intuition in a way that still has me slightly off-balance, and reality's membrane seems slightly thinner, though people have long said simply knowing me makes them feel that way, so perhaps this is a consequence of better knowing myself.