Hi Eric,
Eric M W:
I also found this one by Beoman in another thread:
After my stream entry I was very hyper-charged and energetic. My first review phase was amazing and I could fruition at will doing just about anything. I would totally show off with it, too. Like I would be like "ok I'm gonna lean back in my chair, hang my head upside down, then have a fruition just for the heck of it", and then I would do exactly that. Great stuff.
http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/4876916
My question to Beoman remains-- why the sudden shift in opinion on the benefits of meditation? Vipassana seems to provide a whole lot of fun, interesting, and profound levels of experience. I am curious as to why this is a bad thing. I do not mean to come off as confrontational. Rather, I simply do not want to be fooled into taking a path that seems fun but is really not worth the trouble.
It's a good question. For part of the answer you need look no further than the next paragraph from this post you quoted. The next paragraph I wrote is (emphasis added):
Encouraged by that ease of mental manipulation, I decided to make as rapid progress as I could through the next cycle.
Things started falling apart pretty quickly, though, and I got myself into a pretty unpleasant state wherein I would be making rapid progress through the cycles, yet
I would also be in a lot of pain as a result of not going through it all carefully. I would say to take your time and really investigate, and heed well Daniel's advice in this easy-to-miss sentence of his:
On the other hand, even if you gain all kinds of strong concentration, look deeply into impermanence, suffering and no-self, but can't just open to these things, can't just let them be, can't accept the sometimes absurd and frightening truths of your experience, then you will likely be stuck in hell until you can, particularly in the higher stages of insight practices.
Also at the end of that post I allude to the reason that I stopped meditating:
Good luck, and I would recommend you reflect often and well on what exactly your motivations are for pursuing this - that is, what you expect to get out of it - and what you are currently getting out of it, and whether those two are matching up.
Basically, what I wanted to get out of meditation, and the actual results I was getting, were not matching up. I started meditating because I saw that there was much more to life - that it was possible to lead a much better life than I was - and I wanted to lead that better life. There were initial successes, though nothing definitive. Then I found MCTB and my life quickly became more and more miserable - commonly termed the Dark Night. I pushed through it and got stream entry, which was quite an accomplishment, I felt awesome about it, and I felt awesome for a brief period. But then the Dark Nights continued - the post above described what happened after stream entry, not before.
I had been pushing for a while and being miserable for a while. Then I learned about actualism, and recognized somehow that that's what I wanted. What Richard was writing about, seemed to align much better with what I initially got into meditation for. However, I was misled - doesn't matter whether it was intentional or not - and was practicing "aff" (mostly with Trent as a guide), and not actualism. It took me visiting Richard & Vineeto in Australia to see that I was misled. As soon as I figured out where I had gone wrong with actualism - and how meditation would never, ever lead to PCEs (except maybe by accident) or actual freedom (not even by accident) - then it was easy to make the decision to switch. It did take a few months of intense cognitive dissonance until I could say all this with confidence, though.
It is possible if I kept meditating I would have gotten better results from meditating. I'd argue I tried it for a long time, but I could have done it more, or differently, perhaps. But as soon as I understood that it would never lead to what Richard describes, I had no reason to continue down that path.