| | Some quick background: due to various factors in my life, several months ago I began undertaking a kind of contemplative practice of my own making. (Up til that point I had never seriously undertaken any contemplative practices and was not religious, and in fact didn't fully realize until later the similarities between what I was doing and contemplative practice in general, although I did have several intense and fulfilling experiences with psychedelic substances years before that proved useful as a reference point.) All sorts of interesting things happened as a result, which I will describe shortly. However, I wasn't really sure where to take it, and at the same time I began reading up on all manner of contemplative ideas and traditions. Buddhism seemed particularly attractive. Not long ago a friend of mine directed me to MCTB and it was like a revelation, a clear technique and map to help me orient myself and cultivate my practice-- just what I needed. I am committed now to the path of vipassana. At the same time, it would seem like a shame (or maybe outright foolish) to just neglect the progress I made on my own and the techniques that I know work so well for me. So what I would like to do is describe briefly what practices I did and what my results were, and then inquire as to how they could be integrated with a practice focusing on vipassana and samatha meditation.
My basic approach was to change my perception of reality by fixing my mind upon certain concepts or perspectives, in such a way that I would eventually begin to alter my experience of the world in accordance with those perspectives. I tried a bunch of different perspectives out, but the following wound up being my favorites.
1. Perceive the world as if in a lucid dream. In a dream when you become lucid, you have a realization: "wait a minute, this is a dream!" Say you're dreaming that you're in a subway, and then you become lucid. The dream world is still there, but instead of being a I'm-in-the-subway-as-usual world, now it's a I'm-in-the-subway-in-a-dream world and by extention I'm-in-the-subway-but-only-in-my-mind world. Doing the same exercise while awake, you might transition from a I'm-in-the-subway-as-usual world to a I'm-in-the-subway-in-existence world. You have a realization: "wait a minute, this is existence!" It's a deeper, broader, more penetrating insight into your current situation, which entails a sort of broader awareness that is not swept away by the mundanity of the habit of experiencing things and doing things in the world. You sort of transcend your current situation by becoming aware of and coming into contact with that thing which contains your current situation: in the dream it's your mind, in waking life it's the universe as a whole and the basis of all that, existence.
This practice is closely related to...
2. Rouse awareness of pure existence itself, the easily overlooked but astounding fact that there is *something* rather than *nothing*.
Staying with the perspectives of (1) and (2) in the proper sort of way for a sufficient amount of time, I found that I could eventually generate intense experiences of bliss, peace, awe, fascination, and love for all things. The particulars varied: sometimes, pure joy and bliss; sometimes, deep and thorough peace or equanimity; sometimes, profound gratitude and compassion and love; sometimes, profound and ineffible mystery and awe over the baffling fact of existence. Always, the experience of having suddenly realized or remembered something vital, very much like shaking the cobwebs out of the eyes or becoming lucid in a dream. My experiences from these practices resonate well with a description of sat-chit-ananda or being-awareness-bliss that Aldous Huxley provides in The Doors of Perception. I suppose these correspond in some way to various intermediate samatha and vipassana jhanas-- I would guess it was a phase of Arising and Passing Away. It was intense and profound stuff.
There were also interesting secondary effects, like having a more spacious and useful perspective on issues in my life, and sometimes a sense that my visual faculties had become extremely sharp and clear.
3. Perceive myself as a channel through which the universe perceives itself. That is, rather than considering my perspective as being "in here, looking out there", I would try to experience my perspective as a particular instance of the universe as a whole having become self-aware and introspecting into its own nature. Rather than me-perceiving-world, it was universe-perceiving-itself. As a corollary, I would then perceive other people and animals as other channels of universal self-perception, as if we were independent mental processes co-existing in the same larger mind of the universe.
This method is effective in creating feelings of unification, as if I and other beings are branches emanating from the same tree of underlying existence. In more intense instances, I have felt like a profoundly different kind of creature doing this practice, again more like a relatively de-centralized "channel" of perception for the universe at large, rather than being an independent unit perceiving things solely on its own behalf.
I think there are clear analogues between what I was doing here and some elements of Buddhist practice, e.g. focusing on the nature of experience itself rather than content, and altering states of consciousness and experiences of selfhood. But there are contrasts as well.
Most obviously, the Buddhist path is well-mapped out and established. During my own practice, after a while I sort of got stuck because I could fairly reliably create these amazing experiences and perspectives but didn't know where to take it next. I am extremely grateful for having a sense of guidance now and a sense of what I can do to get permanent, lasting insights.
But I don't want to get rid of what progress I already made, and it's unclear how best to integrate it with the established vipassana / samatha path. One thing is that my methods are kind of working the exact opposite angle of vipassana practices that I have learned about. Daniel mentions something like this in his book-- my techniques if anything were cultivating experiences of permanance / finality / eternality (as opposed to impermanence), love and compassion (as opposed to suffering), and something I gather is akin to True Self (as opposed to no-self)-- although the experiences of eternality and love arose in a secondary way, as a consequence of my focusing on the awareness of existence, rather than as a result of explicit cultivation. Also, rather than investigating the three characteristics of experience, I was working the angle of just noticing and appreciating the bare fact of existence itself, which is seemingly working on a fundamentally different conceptual level.
Any comments at all would be appreciated, particularly regarding useful insights or connections with Buddhist maps or techniques I may have missed, but if I could boil it down to a couple of relatively straightforward and focused questions, I guess it might be something like this:
1) is there any precedence in Buddhist practice for cultivating awareness of bare existence itself? are there any practices or consequences for insight here? (sat-chit-ananda?) how does it relate to the insight derived from observation of the three characteristics?
2) for practice and progress in insight, what are the relative merits and relationships of unification, True Self, and no-self? I have read (and just re-read) Daniel's chapter on True Self vs no-self, but it is still somewhat obscure to me. I do not see the distinction between unitive experience and True Self experience. I am also unclear on the possibilities and pitfalls of using a True Self view rather than a no-self view to cultivate insight. |