Let's try this again.

I would like to review what could be considered my "Dark Night Wanderings" and ask for suggestions about how to proceed.
Before I get into it, let me just say that this community is really inspiring and the quality of the conversations is simply incredible. Part of the reason I have lurked for so long is that every time I have had a question it has been easy to find a thread intelligently discussing it. Thank you, all of you, and especially thank you Daniel for hosting this site, writing MCTB, and most recently appearing in the videos referenced in the "Books and Websites" section. Making this information and the conversation about it accessible is profoundly valuable to me, and I believe to humanity. Namaste.
Now that I know what to call it, I have obviously crossed the A&P many times since my late teens. I won't go over the all circumstances except to mention one thing: a certain professor from the University of Toronto named Leslie Dewart published a book in 1989 called
Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature. I had the great good fortune of studying briefly with Professor Dewart shortly before he retired. I remain utterly convinced that his book contains something of profound importance for the very survival and success of our species, but unfortunately nobody gets it and even I can't explain it clearly, even though I actually started a PhD with the intention of doing just that. I feel like if I could do one important thing in my life, it would be to retrieve the golden key buried in that book and make it available to the world. Now I wonder whether my unshakable feeling really points to something important, or whether it's simply a side effect of having been exposed to Leslie Dewart and his book when I happened to hit an A&P episode. Perhaps both are true, and maybe even one caused the other.
About ten years ago I hit a crisis from which I emerged sober and attending LOTS of meetings. I have since managed to cut back from a dozen a week to about two, and I have become known in the local recovery community as something of an "atheist/Buddhist" resource guy. I started sustained meditation practice with Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). I practiced daily for many years. For some time I sat with the wonderful crazy-in-a-good-way folk at Shambhala, attended a number of courses there, and formally took Refuge. The Vajrayana stuff did not attract me, but the sincere basic goodness of the community certainly did. I have attended five Levels of workshops by the Human Awareness Institute (HAI) which have been profoundly helpful in sorting out issues of love, intimacy, and sexuality. And in the last year I have been tightening up what you might call the first training in morality by getting very active in the ManKind Project (MKP) with palpably good results. AHO!
To sort out what was happening to me when things got hairy I turned to doctors for help and I have tried on for size a large wardrobe of psychiatric diagnoses, none of which quite fit right. For over a decade I took an astounding variety of drugs. A year and a half ago I read Peter Breggin, thought better of it, and under supervision tapered off completely. Notwithstanding one intervening skull-crushing depression (which may have been an extended withdrawal effect -- but they don't study that, do they?) I have been fine. My only complaint now is that my sleep patterns are seldom stable, but I have resolved to stop dissecting what might be wrong with me and start cultivating and celebrating what might be right, and there seems to be enough to work with.
I have attended three 10-day Goenka Vipassana courses. My experience of the first was like drinking from the Fire-Hose of Truth. The second was like sifting through the cold soggy ashes of every defilement and defect of character that had ever afflicted me. The third course was vastly more pleasant; insofar as it was on the far side of the yucky stuff, I wonder if I may have attained the stage of Equanimity (?) but the dominant theme of the third course was a veritable monsoon of creativity that would not stop. I emerged from that course with a design for a fully adjustable meditation bench and a scheme for making it available for free to newcomers to meditation. I have made and tested prototypes and taken steps to start a business based on this (see
DanaBench) but I am more of a designer and fabricator than a business dude so between that and generally dealing with the Dark Night I don't have any benches ready to offer yet.
Under the ideal conditions of a course I have been able (but only twice ever) to maintain continuous mindful contact with my breath for an entire hour with no lapses. Body-scanning as I have learned it, however, is another matter: I find it brutally hard going, even after three courses, so much so that when I sit at home I seldom even attempt it. I am thinking of maybe going back for a fourth course in a few months, and trying to punch through to stream entry -- maybe I will have some luck on "the sixth day of my fourth course" too -- but something isn't quite right. Am I missing something idiot simple, or am I trying to do a technique that works for others but will never work for me for whatever reason? What could I do instead? I want to attain stream entry. I believe that some of you guys have done it, and that with the right technique and right effort, I can do it too.
I would be most grateful for pointers and feedback, thank you.
Cheers,
--Tarver