Rich W:
Hi Jake
Yes, I agree with you..I have always thought that the goal was to become more transparent..so that emotion and thought flowed through without sticking, and thus were lighter and less troublesome. I think this fits in with your defintion.
Even completely unproblematic and utterly transparent, in my experience. This (DhO) is a funny place to talk about this. At one time, the prevailing assumption here could be summed up in these or similar terms, but back then I couldn't quite relate to the prevailing culture around these issues. Later, the complete elimination of all 'troublesomeness' became more mainstream here, but I can't really relate to that either. This is more view talk though and not a proper response to your question.
Rich W:
In terms of practice I was just after some general practices you have experiemented with and what you found useful and for what purpose....rather than having anything more specific in mind. Does that make sense? It might help me to decide what practices to try and which ones are worth sticking at for some time, on top of ym base practice.
So here are some practices I have done:
Spent some time practicing according to Namkhai Norbu's Dzogchen teachings. The basic unit of practice is called a 'Thun' and consists of a suite of Vajrayana style practices integrating body, speech, mind and the nature of mind. I.e., some singing/mantra, visualization, mudras. This integrated activity rises and falls in choreographed waves; in the trough of the wave, when the visualizations dissolve and the vocalizations stop and the body becomes still, there is a 'resting' practice which might be more shamatha flavored or more 'rigpa' flavored, depending. Also in this practice genre are physical practices called Yantra Yoga or Trulkhor, which are movements synchronized with breathing including retentions. Also things like prostrations etc.
Took a break from this style to practice Vipassana according to my understanding of MCTB, KFD etc-- prag dharma. But not noting, just noticing style (noting always seemed too clunky). Worked briefly with a prag dharma teacher. Soon experienced what in retrospect I would identify as Stream Entry according to the standards of this community, shortly followed by more intensive practice in this style which led to another seeming complete cycle. After this, the cycling seemed intrinsically problematic in some fashion, like an artifact of this style of practicing which was generating a funny altered form of identity. I switched back to a more Vajrayana/Chan style approach to shamatha/vipassana/sila as I have described in above posts and over months and years have deepened into what I am describing. Also have begun feeling a pull back to Vajrayana practices of body speech and mind as detailed in prior paragraph.
Here is some little context pertaining to my tendencies and temperament, as I feel that these factors along with the views unconsciously and later consciously held are way way way more important than techniques:
Before I had a really dedicated practice, from an early age was always interested in the nature of reality and experience. Had a massive A&P type experience in early adolescence. Throughout my teens and twenties I would regularly flash into spontaneous insights (every day, every other day). As I described it at the time, there would be a sudden noticing that I could just 'let walking walk' or 'let thinking think' and there was no-one who was 'behind' these phenomena. Then during my twenties I started to have more spontaneous insights into what I then called 'Unworld', a state in which suddenly all phenomena would point back at a seemingly impersonal Witness, as if every phenomena were literally pointing back at 'me', and World would lose its solidity and appear as mere phenomena as if all the contents of world were mere impressions appearing to 'me'. These glimpses would be accompanied by a spontaneous appraisal of them that they were untrue, that they were revealing something at the very root of illusion in fact, a solipsistic sense of Self at the root of my more ordinary personal self-ing. Yet I could acknowledge the impulse to become absorbed in that cosmic indifference of the Witness, and felt a deep sense that my path was about coming INTO World, not escaping. Alongside these insights into no-self and the Self there were also moments of complete openness and simplification in the natural state in which all experience would become transparent, utterly open and clear and simple, without a sense of solipsism yet without any sense of solidity to World, like World is just a perfect and pure hologram arising spontaneously in a wide open clearing.
Somewhere in my late twenties, when I had a fairly stable daily practice along Vajrayana lines, I suddenly realized that heretofore my motivation had been to understand-- to understand the nature of reality and experience. This had led to practicing for my own personal peace and clarity and I was at a point where I could sit down and practice and reliably access deep peace and clarity, whether of a more shamatha style or glimpses of Rigpa as in holographic luminous World in wide-open clearing of stillness and silence, but it was mostly limited to sitting and practicing or moments of activity in daily life in which there was no communication happening.
Suddenly I realized that this was completely irrelevant if I was going to continue to move through daily life as an irritable, moody, arrogant, morally ambiguous ass. The motivation shifted on a deep level to investigating reactivity in daily life, which meant understanding my 'cage' of karmic propensities in detail, and digging deeper and deeper to see how I was dishonest with myself and inauthentic about my intentions, thoughts and feelings in daily life and relationships, projecting onto others and living in a bubble of these projections. So the motivation shifted from understanding reality and experience, and the fruit which was coming from that which was personal peace, to wanting to understand the psychological and psychic dynamics of interaction, relationship, identification, projection and reactivity, out of a deepening acknowledgement of my tendencies giving rise to and dovetailing with others' suffering. I saw the need for a communicative freedom.
In the year prior to taking up Vippassana I spent nearly every waking moment investigating experience and the nature of reactivity and the natural state of innate perfection and purity and easy going kindness. I never sat or had any formal practice during this year, but did utilize Vajra Breathing during daily life to build concentration (although I didn't think of it this way). I utilized life experiences to examine the dynamics of reactivity, identity, and the identityless responsiveness and automatic insightfulness of the natural state. I was obsessed and couldn't let it go; I knew the time had come to break through to a new way of being (a new default mode or baseline, as people say here). A deep drive to move in this direction motivated the investigation. When I took up practicing Vipassana then there were two key results: one, quickly recognizing the major stages of insight (A&P, DN, EQ) which had characterized my mindstates for a long long long time, that breakthrough to a new baseline quickly and relatively smoothly followed. The shadow side of this was that that deep impulse to escape had to come to the fore for this to happen--- suddenly on the other side of SE there were many many states of jhannic and Witness-like 'distance' available rather easily. So soon, within a few months of that second apparent cycle after which this stuff was really getting out f hand, I switched to the more natural, senses open, grounded in everyday life, Chan/Vajrayana practice-- but obviously, on the basis of the baseline shifts, at a new level of depth, consistency and practicality.
In short, I don't know what good any of these descriptions can do anyone else as I hope I have made clear my perspective that temperament, personal history, views unconscious and conscious, and motivations for practice, along with degree of psychological and psychic authenticity, play enormously significant roles in what results from merely deploying simple techniques such as noticing sensations or etc. Yet I do hope it helps in some way. Generally I am reticent when it comes to these things, and have never been much of a journalor. When not prompted to I don't spend much time if any thinking about my past, and whatever stories I come up with always seem laughably inadequate, 'likely stories', little fictions that perhaps have some glimmer of truth. Oh well