| | “With no real certainty I think that many times over the past 30 years I've gotten an awareness of ‘body and mind’ but I doubt I’ve ever gotten to a stage farther than that. No ‘cause and effect,’ no ‘three characteristics,’ and definitely no ‘A&P.’ I realize now that some of the experiences that I had suspected may have been A&P were actually unitive states brought on by entering the ‘body and mind’ stage.”
When I read the quote above by Telecaster, I heard a little voice say, “Ooohhhh…”
This might be where I am as well. I do have some questions.
Is it the case, then, that those who do not deliberately practice noting of intention--as in picking up a glass of water per the labeling technique described by Mahasi Sayadaw—will nonetheless hit this Cause and Effect stage? (I'm only now starting to practice in this way.) Is C&E described in other maps as a fairly universal thing? If this is the case, then maybe I have gained a better sense of where I am: body and mind.
One thing I wonder about is the idea of smaller fractal patterns within larger ones. That’s, after all, a fundamental characteristic of fractals, right?
For me, there was a unitive experience years ago that, as I was reading MCTB, sounded so much like Daniel’s description of the A&P. I was walking around for a few days feeling as though I were enlightened. I became zealous and almost evangelical in precisely the way he describes. The experience itself--which involved a kind of hard concentration in which the eyes were open and all sense of the observer vanished for quite some time, accompanied by very strong energetic phenomena, a profound stillness, and so forth--has continued to stand out to me as head and shoulders above all the other meditative moments. Moreover, this was followed by a decline in intensity that seemed reminiscent, in some ways, of the Dark Night. I even drifted to a dharma center, confused, in just the way Daniel describes.
But has there never been any crossing of the A&P at all? Could this have been just an echo of the larger pattern—all happening prior to the meditator attaining cause and effect? A small sine wave within the larger one? Hmmm... |