| | Thanks for replying Daniel.
To answer your questions: When I sit I can get a fruition, but it's not a sure shot. Sometimes, like 1/3 of the time it just doesn't happen. My last few formal sits have been <45 minutes though. I'm getting back into daily practice, so a couple days will reveal more. Right now I can honestly say, it's not exactly clear, easy, or straightforward. And not repeatable to anywhere near the same degree hitting jhanas is.
More information that may help: -The only way I can confidently describe them is 'blips', or a gap in attention, after which I have to run a little memory trace trying to piece together what I experienced. Sometimes I conclude it was just a shift in breath, or I was spacing out while my eye twitched. Other times not so. I'll even twitch my eye to see if it felt anything like it, haha... -I feel like it's way more likely (every time I remember it actually, totaling at least 15) to happen in formless territory, like if mid sit I get through what I think is dukkha stuff, a period of prolonged clarity, spontaneous arising of 5th-8th jhana qualities, and 'blip'. Regardless of whether or not it is a fruition, this rough sequence is the most common one for the event I'm trying to describe. It happened twice for me yesterday after reading your reply (but not having time to respond). Once was on a public bus. -There is definitely stuff happening before (not so much after), but don't know how to describe it. To summarize my experience during the above process, I'm usually applying continuous (if not always rapid) observation of one or more of the 3Cs on sensation after sensation (mental and physical, but the distinction blurs pretty early on in this territory)...much like your "shooting space invaders" bit in MCTB. Then I'll find out suddenly I somehow stopped doing that, but it doesn't feel like a normal spaceout (because that memory trace usually uncovers what distracted me).
This is why I asked about fruition practice. To repeat the sequence a couple dozen times and see if I could notice more. Nothing I experience has anything remotely resembling intelligent entities, toroids, or stuff staring back at me. "Reality strobing in and out" I would agree with, but it seems pretty easy to describe a bunch of weird meditative experiences with those words.
For now I'll continue practicing as I have before. From your reply to my thread in Concentration, doing a couple sits of "go to 8th jhana, chill out for a bit, drop out, and do insight in 5-7th and see what happens" with the aim of repeating these blips seems like a good place to start looking for fruitions from. What do you think? |