Discussion Forum Discussion Forum

Dealing with the Dark Night

Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions

A couple months ago I realized that something was wrong with me and I had to seek out help. This is the email I sent to several teachers looking for advice:


My Experience:

To summarize my problem, through meditation I have been flat-lined into an terribly dull and silent, completely joyless anhedonia state. My willpower is incredibly diminished and it is very hard to get basic things done. I also very often feel unreal like I am in a dream, similar to depersonalization symptoms. Though certain times, the emptiness can be peaceful when my ego is not freaking out about the future. I am 95% sure this is the result of the meditation as I was otherwise pretty healthy and other causes seem unlikely.

I am a 19 year old man that started practicing mindfulness meditation along with self inquiry techniques in early 2011. Sometime after I started practicing meditation on my own, I joined a Zen group called the Heart Circle Sangha in Ridgewood, NJ to which I go most Sundays. Sometime in July 2011, 6 months after I began practicing mindfulness meditation and introspection, I have not felt right at all; in fact I have felt almost completely emotionless.

My spiritual practice up until July 2011 was going very good actually, alot of my anxious and jealous thoughts had subsided and I felt like I was making progress. Before then I felt pleasure and pain at different times in meditation, and there was motivation to keep going. When I wasn't at the Zen center, I would do a combination of sitting and walking meditation for 2 hours a day. I was a really intense seeker.

Then I really started to get into self interrogation after watching youtube videos with adyashanti and papaji. The impression I got from them was that it is beneficial to question every thought, and question "whos thinks that?" I also used netti, netti netti.

So I analyzed my thoughts over and over again relentlessly... watching all the painful things in my mind everyday for at least 2 hours walking or sitting. Eventually certain untruthful thought patterns started to subside, but I was sort of depressed and I wanted to completely eliminate all self-hating thoughts for good.

I think I can trace it back to one or two days when my symptoms of DP/DR started to kick in. After watching a couple satsang videos about the "void", self inquiry techniques and confronting your fears one day in July, I sat down and meditated. For some reason I was overwhelmed with fear at this stage. It sounded like the fear described by certain gurus that arises when you come close to revealing some sort of truth and the ego wants to hold on, so it releases tremendous amounts of fear.

I don't remember much except I closed my eyes to meditate in a dark room at night to confront the fear. I then, for a brief moment, perhaps a 30 seconds, I had the experience of all normal perception of my body disappearing, and getting sucked into a black hole of nothingness. Part of me was excited, thinking I was close to an awakening, but there was crippling fear throughout my body and I was truly terrified. Also my heart beat so fast that it was probably comparable to a heart attack. After 30 seconds it was too disturbing and I got up off the chair screaming.

At the time I thought something good had happened because I was confronting deep fears within, so I must be getting close to the truth. A day passes and nothing happens. The next day something similar to the void happens and I experience it a bit longer.

There was an aftershock of fear from the two situations, but besides that I didn't think anything had gone wrong. Its only after looking back almost a year later, can I really pinpoint that period of about a week in my life as when I started to become mostly emotionless, severely apathetic, and experienced symptoms of depersonalization and derealization.

My Zen teacher told me I should probably have taken a slower, less intensive and more Zen path to enlightenment, but unfortunately its too late for that and I need to correct myself from the current situation.

Since then:

-I do not feel any emotions except in a superficial sense. I used to actually feel something; but I have not felt barely a drop of joy, happiness or even sadness and grief for months. Positive and negative emotions are both effectually gone. Very rarely, maybe once every 3 months I'll have a brief cry and it feels like a great release.

-All the spiritual techniques that used to work so well for me seem to have hardly any effect anymore.

-Lack of joy and positive emotions has proven to be extremely debilitating because I now release that pleasure is the motivation for everything I used to do. So I just slump along.

-Nothing looks right. Trees used to be beautiful. Paintings used to be beautiful. Even girls. Now I can only superficially appreciate beauty. And its not in a depression type way. I just don't feel it; more like a robot.

-I have lost interest in all my former hobbies and interests, if I still do any of my former hobbies its just a habit and I don't derive any pleasure from it. Even my favorite music has become rather dry and tasteless.

-My thoughts are almost completely blank. Originally I thought this was a symptom of spiritual progression, but I have discovered that it is more like a great hindrance to everything in my life. I cognitively can't think straight. Even if I try really hard to concentrate on something, my mind is like "eh, whatever" and drifts off into nothing.

-Chronic tiredness- whether this relates to all the other cognitive symptoms or not; I've noticed that my symptoms of physical fatigue and tiredness all started back when the mental problems started. There is literally no mentally motivation to get out of bed.

-I do not feel the endorphin rush of exercise the same way I used to, so it is very hard to exercise. Now when I exercise it seems to magnify my symptoms of depersonalization.

-I feel like I am the observer of my mind/body, and like I am helpless to get my life back on track

-Driving in a car feels really weird and it is hard to focus on the road

-I constantly feel dreamy and spaced out like I am not really here (which is partially true though, I guess)


That was a couple months ago. Now I would describe my problems a bit differently:

-I don't really feel like im in a spiritual process. I feel more like broken. My cognitive abilities suck. I lose track of my thoughts and just don't have the mental energy to do something unless I absolutely absolutely have to.

-I was depressed somewhat and had social axeity (not debilitating, self diagnosed but it was bad at times) for years before I started meditating. I wish I would have stayed in the AP and earlier stages longer because in the dark night I don't have the mental energy to confront my thoughts. Now I feel more helpless and debilitated than ever. Might a well take social axiety and depression over this.

-Chronic fatigue is still here no matter what diet and supplements I try. Seems to be related with the dark night. It kind of feels like I'm always sick.

-The guilt of appearing so lazy to the outside world is unbearable. The only conclusion employers, family and other people who don't really know about me can come to, is that I am a lazy stupid fuck.

-Overwhelming extreme apathy about everything. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I hope one day Ill care about something or someone again

-My appetite is so annoying. I used to like preparing healthy meals with organic meats and vegetables. Now im usually not hungry enough to go through the trouble of preparing meals, or really have the energy to. The only thing I seem to consistently have an appetite for is ice cream.

-It is SO difficult to meditate because a year or so ago, after a meditation session I would feel GOOD now after a meditation session I feel despondent and often WORSE is terms of mood and feeling.

Btw I've been on prozac for a month now and I don't think its helping.

If you actually read this long post, thank you. I am so horribly lost.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 11:27 AM as a reply to Charlie B.
Charlie B:
Then I really started to get into self interrogation after watching youtube videos with adyashanti and papaji. The impression I got from them was that it is beneficial to question every thought, and question "whos thinks that?" I also used netti, netti netti.

So I analyzed my thoughts over and over again relentlessly... watching all the painful things in my mind everyday for at least 2 hours walking or sitting. Eventually certain untruthful thought patterns started to subside, but I was sort of depressed and I wanted to completely eliminate all self-hating thoughts for good.


This is your problem, most likely. Try watching all the pleasant positive things in your mind for at least 2 hours a day.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 11:36 AM as a reply to fivebells ..
TBH that's not really helpful and it seems like you didnt even read my post.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 12:04 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
No, no, I read it. It's unfortunate that my response was unclear. I have been pretty much exactly where you are, for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Choosing to watch only the painful things in your mind has conditioned your attention to only see the unpleasant things. You need to recondition it to see the pleasant things as well. If ice cream is the only pleasant thing you can think of at the moment, then use a fantasy of ice cream as the object of your meditation, or find something nice to look at on Reddit Aww or the like and use that. You could also do metta or joy meditation if you prefer something more traditional, but that will give you fewer pleasant experiences to work with, and it sounds like you're struggling in that regard.

I am deadly serious about this, and have a very clear and precise idea of what you're going through, based on your post. That idea could be wrong, please let me know if you think so, but please know my suggestion was not flip or ignorant of what you'd said.



Serious Cat Is Serious


RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 12:22 PM as a reply to fivebells ..
I have anhedonia. There really is no sense of pleasure. And im not being dramatic about it. There just isn't. If there was something pleasant to focus on I would love to focus on it.

The only reason I was observing my negative thoughts was to dislodge them because they were becoming unbearable. That was a year ago. None of the debilitating stuff had happened yet by then.

That was the advice of teachers and books I read, to dislodge the untruthful thoughts. Now I don't intentionally focus on them. I just note them. Is it my fault that the only stuff that seems to come up is negative? I really really can't help it. I remain neutral and third person about it and that seems like the only thing I can do.

Now the problem is not thoughts. The problem is I can't even function right for God's sake. I don't really nearly have as many thoughts as I used to like a year ago.

The problem is first of all, having some clear confirmation that I'm in the dark night.

Second of all finding someone who has been through the type of dark night I've been going through. Not every seems to have such a debilitating experience. I'm looking for someone who has, so I can learn what to do from them.

Third of all managing my symptoms

Fourth of all, again if I am actually in a dark night, getting to stream entry as quickly as possible because that seems to be like the only thing that would make me functional again.

I know cats and stuff are nice to look at it but I have been spending WAY too much time on the internet since the crappy symptoms starting appearing, since I don't have the energy or money to too much else. I want to try to spend less time on it.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 1:14 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
Try and check out the extent to which your thoughts about the problem actually create the problem. For example thinking something along the lines of "this guy has no idea what I am going through, maybe this is unique to me and there is no way out of it" creates things like despair. Every time I have experienced epic intense dark nights in which I was freaking out about whether anything was working or ever would work the advice that got me out of it was something along the lines of this:


it sounds to me like you're going through your first dark night, not a second cycle. but whatever the case, if you've been practicing, anything new and unfamiliar is usually good news, no matter how bad it might feel--you're breaking new ground, making progress. a few things about the dark night:

you absolutely cannot trust your thoughts and feelings in the dark night ñanas, no matter how logical, sane, and true they may seem. the more you hold on to your ways of reasoning, interpreting, analyzing, judging, making conclusions, thinking, making sense of anything, the tougher the resistance you'll face. the mind is simply out of tune at the moment. i don't know what it technically involves (frequencies/energy/or what) but the mind is like a musical instrument with strings getting tuned but not yet in harmony, and sometimes you might think, well it's gotta be either this thought (a bit flat) or that thought (a bit sharp), and believing either one will get you nowhere because neither one is it. only when you let go of this complicated mind, let go of the need to know anything, and let the effects work themselves out (as josh mentioned) will things start tuning up.

think about it--what's the only thing you have that's totally fail-proof? the only way to stay perfectly clear from any kind of wrong view? how can you orient your mind so that there's not a chance you're gonna screw it up and generate new tensions, complications, or hindrances? the only thing you can really really trust is how things appear to your perception at the sense doors--feel that sensation, see that, hear that, taste that, smell that, notice that thought arise. those are your only faculties for direct knowledge and your express ticket for moving in the right direction, so keep your watch at the sense doors like a top guard dog, and every thought and feeling that arises concerning practice (that's not about paying attention to the senses) is potential bullshit and not to be trusted, and a waste of precious moments of practice opportunities.

possibly the worst way that the mind messes with you in the dark night is to make you think your practice is crappy and your efforts aren't going anywhere. towards the later dark night stages, what often happens is that the worse it feels and the harder it gets, the farther along you are, closer and closer to the tipping point before equanimity ñana.

make use of every second you have in your sits and daily life to pay attention to bare sensing without adding a single interpretation or analysis about what's going on. dump all your energy into paying attention to the present sensations more and more constantly, subtly, intensely, objectively (non-judging), and equanimously as possible. you can't waste one second of possible practice, things are already bad enough. stay vigilant, stay innocent/unknowing, stay determined, and everything will fall into place.

jill


http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/2324721


It is so easy and intuitive to spiral deeper into the dark night, basically you think that things are terrible, which makes everything suck worse, which really makes them suck, so on and so on. It takes some fortitude to stop doing the intuitive thing and taking your aversion as a friend, to just watch things at the level of sensations in the body without letting your dark night perceptions use them as fuel. You gotta drop what you think you know about these sensations, even drop the idea that they are suffering. Drop the idea that you have tried this before, drop the idea that you are in the dark night, this is spiraling aversion, sort of like a couple of mirrors facing eachother, you might notice that the further down the mirror tunnel you get the, more green it is, that's cuz mirrors reflect green light more than any other color, so as their reflections are reflected over and over you end up with just a big green blob. Your perceptions in this mode of perceiving things tend to be more on the side of "all bad, all bad" which builds on itself more and more.

In short, focus on sensations in the body, particularly in areas of tension, without knowing anything about them, even that they are tension. In this mode of unknowing, who is to say your experience isn't fine already? Take some time to do this with eyes closed sitting, exercise might help too... Less reading + Internet would be good also.

Any sense of "this guy is trivializing my problems." well, that is a painful perception which isn't in alignment with the truth, so maybe seeing that you can see the way you are screwing with yourself.

Adam

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 1:25 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
I signed up on here just to because this message thread piqued my interest....

I can relate to quite a few symptoms that you describe.... I'm not sure if mine were as extreme as you describe, or maybe I have forgotten the past intensity....

Some suggestions from my search for answers and support....

- Shinzen Young has a youtube video discussing parallels of DP/DR with enlightenment... he doesn't offer great answers there, but does go into some nice detail about the similarities of symptoms but almost opposite effects...
- Willoughby Britton of www.cheetahhouse.org offers some great resources and research.... she has a post titled 'DARK NIGHT RESOURCES" in this 'Dealing with the Dark Night' sub-forum..
- You need to be very careful with spiritual practices and communities regarding dark night, DP/DR, dissociation, etc. type symptoms. Teachers and other practitioners who aren't familiar with what you're going through, often will suggest techniques that actually might make it worse instead of better. Spiritual practices can be easily used as avoidance...
- It might be more useful to focus on more physical body and energetic body type practices.... I found qi-gong and taoist inner alchemy practices quite helpful.... breathing and pranayama type practices should help with feeling at a physical level... psychology can also be very helpful.... though there's many branches and theories of psychology....
- Spiritual bypass is a common issue..... Mariana Caplan and Robert Augustus Masters both have good books covering the topic..
- Oprah's Lifeclass offers some interesting material, it's not exactly dark night or hard core meditation, but I've found them very informative and offers some great lessons..


....... I would recommend that you 'Allow' yourself to take a break and recover, stop worrying about what other people think or trying to rush yourself to recovery..... You have gone through A LOT, your nervous system is most likely totally shot, exhausted, worn out, and is essentially short-circuited right now... so at a minimum it will take some care and time to recover and heal up a bit..... then it might allow you some more energy and consistency to manage things...

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 1:30 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
There are at least two things that it sounds like you may not be perceiving clearly:

To summarize my problem, through meditation I have been flat-lined into an terribly dull and silent, completely joyless anhedonia state. (...) I do not feel any emotions except in a superficial sense. I used to actually feel something; but I have not felt barely a drop of joy, happiness or even sadness and grief for months. Positive and negative emotions are both effectually gone. Very rarely, maybe once every 3 months I'll have a brief cry and it feels like a great release.


This "dull" experience sounds like an emotion. (If it were not an emotion, I don't think you would not find your current state unpleasant; but your current state sounds unpleasant, and so it would be the experience of dullness, which you interpret as not feeling anything whatsoever, which is unpleasant (albeit not unpleasant in the way that sadness or grief or despair etc. would be unpleasant.))

If you look carefully, you may find that when things "don't look right", in that moment you're having an acute attack of this "dull" experience, separate from how things look:

Nothing looks right. Trees used to be beautiful. Paintings used to be beautiful. Even girls. Now I can only superficially appreciate beauty. And its not in a depression type way. I just don't feel it; more like a robot.


The other thing that you may need to look at more closely is the experience of depersonalization:

I feel like I am the observer of my mind/body, and like I am helpless to get my life back on track


What experience carries the sense of being the observer of your mind and body?

Looking at these things more closely may help if you're in the DN and the DN is causing your symptoms. Whether you are in the DN, and, independent of that, whether the DN is the sole cause (or even a partial cause) of your symptoms, I couldn't really say. If your problem has nothing to do with the progress of insight, it's possible that looking at these issues may make things worse, or have no effect. So I'm not offering you any advice about what you should or shouldn't do; rather, I'm saying, if your problem is the DN, exiting that state would be helped along by examining these things. And I'm not sure how you or anyone else could tell for sure whether you're experiencing DN symptoms or some other kind of psychological problem, except in retrospect.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 1:43 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
Charlie B:
I have anhedonia. There really is no sense of pleasure. And im not being dramatic about it. There just isn't. If there was something pleasant to focus on I would love to focus on it.


I hear you. You have an appetite for ice cream, though. What is driving that? You could eat some ice cream very very slowly, a tenth of a teaspoonful a minute, and attend to the pleasant sensations of that, for instance. Even if it has negative associations for you, there must be some positive sensations driving the appetite.

Charlie B:
The only reason I was observing my negative thoughts was to dislodge them because they were becoming unbearable. That was a year ago. None of the debilitating stuff had happened yet by then.


I know, I I know. I've been there. It's a natural misinterpretation of the teachings which I made too. It's nobody's fault, it's just the way things worked out.

Charlie B:
...I don't intentionally focus on them. I just note them. Is it my fault that the only stuff that seems to come up is negative? I really really can't help it.


One thing I've been doing lately when I've been particularly stuck in finding something pleasant is resting for a second or two at each peak or trough of breathing, until the natural urge to keep breathing appears. When the breath starts again, there is a sense of pleasure associated with this. If you try this, don't hold your breath, though.

Another recommendation from my teacher which I have found helpful is to help other people or animals. If I see an earthworm struggling on the sidewalk, I move it somewhere safe. If someone asks me for money, I ask them what they want it for and I go with them to buy it for them. I provide dharma advice to people on the internet. :-)

Charlie B:
Now the problem is not thoughts. The problem is I can't even function right for God's sake. I don't really nearly have as many thoughts as I used to like a year ago.


No, the problem is not thoughts, the problem is conditioning of attention. You've actually made really good progress in your meditation which will stand you in good stead when you're able to move forward again. But right now you're in a cul-de-sac, because your natural tendency to negativity led to an emphasis on negative phenomena. The way out of that cul-de-sac is to recondition your attention to note the positive phenomena too.

Charlie B:
The problem is first of all, having some clear confirmation that I'm in the dark night.


Yes, you are totally in the dark night. This is insight disease. You can get out of it, though.

Charlie B:
Second of all finding someone who has been through the type of dark night I've been going through. Not every seems to have such a debilitating experience. I'm looking for someone who has, so I can learn what to do from them.


I've been there. Try my advice. After a decade of driving my practice with insight and power, someone finally got through to me earlier this year and persuaded me to use metta and compassion instead. It's paying off handsomely. It was also my first step to managing symptoms very similar to yours, and to stream entry, which happened a couple of weeks ago.

Our culture reveres insight and power, and we are drawn to spiritual practices which promise this. We want to manipulate and dominate our environments, including our internal experience. What could be more seductive to a modernist than a meditation manual which lays out step-by-step instructions and diagnostics of progress so you can figure out whether it's working for you? And the seduction isn't based on false advertising; these are very powerful approaches. The trouble is, they inevitably get subverted by our natural desire to manipulate and dominate ourselves. So we attend to the bad things we want to fix, seeking to understand and destroy them, never realizing the power we are granting them in the process, never realizing that the problem is with the direction of attention itself.

I'm not saying you were wrong to attend to these things, just that you moved too quickly. One result of meditation is attention to all sensations of the present moment, mental and physical. That means the pleasant and boring sensations as well as the unpleasant. And the pleasant sensations can be important, because they provide the confidence and stability to go deeper into the unpleasant ones. But that is the path of loving-kindness, not power or insight, so it's less appealing to us.

Given your belief that you have anhedonia, this might make your situation seem hopeless. But the fact that the anhedonia arrived after your insight practice supports the idea that this is actually conditioning of your attention, in which case you will still have room to move, no matter how powerful the conditioning so far has been. In that case, you basically have a bad habit you want to kick, not a disease.

Charlie B.:
I know cats and stuff are nice to look at it but I have been spending WAY too much time on the internet since the crappy symptoms starting appearing, since I don't have the energy or money to too much else. I want to try to spend less time on it.


I am happy to mail you pictures of cute animals if you like. Let me know. :-)

Oh, and also, I am by default a ruthless, mildly sadomasochistic person who sees doom in every portent and to whom this sappy stuff doesn't come easily. I am recommending it because it works.

You can go too far in the other direction, of course. Then you end up like this person, addicted to bliss. Buddhism is called the Middle Way because the broadening of attention enables you to keep both extremes in mind (positive and negative) so you don't fall prey to either one.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 1:48 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
The dark night is delineated by a pain that occurs to a sincere follower of the path.

It is actually described best here:

Painful now, pleasant later
6a (3) There is a way of undertaking things, bhikshus, that is painful now, but ripening as pleasure
in the future?
Here, bhikshus, someone,
is by nature strongly lustful, and he constantly feels bodily and mental suffering born of lust;
is by nature strongly hateful, and he constantly feels bodily and mental suffering born of hate;
is by nature strongly delusive, and he constantly feels bodily and mental suffering born of delusion.
6b And yet, despite his pain, despite his grief, weeping with tearful face,56 he lives the holy life fully
and perfectly.57
With the body’s breaking up, after death, he is reborn in a happy state, in a heavenly world.
This, bhikshus, is a way of undertaking things that is painful now, but ripening as pleasure in the
future.58


Basically what I'm trying to say is, the dark night is not delineated by the experience of many 'unwholesome' phenomena, namely the five nivarana.

But rather occurs to a sincere follower of the path because his nature is defiled.

In other words:

Don't take any symptom of depression, sadness, hatred or disgust to mean you are in the dark night.

The dark night is born of moving towards extinction. It doesn't occur to people who are not moving towards extinction.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 4:05 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
@ Adam and others

By the way this will probably sound angry but its not directed at anyone. Its just a general frustration.

The reason I reacted like that is because I felt like I was being trivialized in a way like "eh not a problem just keep meditating". A part of me must have found that insulting.

Thoughts of "omg it feels like im the only person in the world that must be going through this" are only furthered by comments like that you know? That is a persistent thought pattern I have because it makes total sense. Not many people have even heard of the dark night so they will just tell you its a regular depression or w/e. My mind wants at least some agreement that im in a dark night because then I can view it as a positive thing.

This BS about "AHH forget the stages don't even talk about them" is why I stopped meditating almost a year ago when I started feeling crappy. Because I thought something BAD had happened and my Zen teacher or the practitioners around me seemed to agree. NO ONE SAID at my Sangha "Its ok this is normal to feel like that when you make progress". WHAT A DIFFERENCE THAT WOULD HAVE MADE.

This has gotta be only one of several forums on the internet that is actually all pro-maps. So to hear things from people on here sounding like "eh whatever dont worry about the maps" makes me want to STOP meditating. However, the recognition from others that, yes, yes, you are in the dark night gives me just enough energy to CONTINUE practice. See the difference?

Ok that was a justified rant I feel.

Anyway your advice seems great thank you kindly. I think I may print out that quote from Jill on a piece of paper to remind myself of it The only problem when I try to do a "dont believe any thought" practice is that I end up arguing with my own thoughts

I do watch the sensation in my body, and I do walking meditating feeling the sensation in my feet, and breathing meditation, but the reason I got this far in my practice is I think, confronting my thoughts and asking are they true. I want to continue to do that but people keep saying "oh no looking at your thoughts will make you unbalanced, just observe physical feeling". Idk about that. Would anyone agree with me that it's ok to keep looking subtly at my thoughts? It seems to have helped me in the past.

Looking at the sensations in your body is excellent but I feel I really made progress when I started to see they were associated with a thought (I forget what stage that was). But even now I keep uncovering more and more subtle thought patterns like...

"Why does thinking about my past relationships hurt so bad?" ... because I wanted to feel like a wonderful person in her eyes
"Why did I want to feel like a wonderful person?".... because I thought that would validate me finally as a person
"Why did I wanted to be validated?" .... because I felt so unworthy of her and women in general
"Why did you feel unworthy?"... because I dont feel like anything special
"Why do you need to be special?" .......... I DONT KNOW! emoticon

I feel like when I truly discover a thought pattern like that it is a sense of FREEDOM. Like oh, its just my thoughts, THANK GOD nothing is actually wrong with me. But some of these thought patterns are so subtle you have to like dive deep in your mind and sometimes you get lost in it.

I'm glad to know that people where I am tend to feel automatically "this is bad this is bad". Makes me feel less special about my suffering, which in turn, makes me suffer less.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 4:47 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
Try this:

If you're uncertain you are in the dark night keep in mind that you can correct this situation whether you are or you are not: (Statements like "My spiritual practice up until July 2011 was going very good actually, alot of my anxious and jealous thoughts had subsided and I felt like I was making progress" seem to suggest that this is very likely dark night symptoms.)

I'm going to make a suggestion based off a sense of overall messiness with regards to the hindrances, as well as your suggestion of a lot of mental illness-type symptoms to which I am most definitely no stranger to: ( I'm the type of guy who makes posts like this: http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3373753 ). I'm not at all suggesting you HAVE a mental illness, so please don't get worked up over that.

Take a step back for a moment and forget about doing insight for a little while and cultivate samatha jhanas. Sit at access concentration and then cultivate the samatha jhanas and immerse in their bliss. Suppress all of your hindrances using the samatha jhanas. What happens when you suppress the hindrances? Do these symptoms go away, temporarily?

If you take a significant while to do/accomplish this or decide you want to live with your hindrances suppressed for a while by practicing daily samatha, you will likely backslide and then have to start over at mind and body. If you have good samatha skills (which from reading your post, it doesn't seem like you do) you can practice this for a shorter while and then continue insight without backsliding, if you wish not to backslide.

Backsliding is not necessarily a bad thing, as starting over at mind and body -> cause and effect -> three characteristics -> a&P -> dark night would give you a much clearer/cleaner indication of progress as well as a much cleaner dark night to work with. If all was not completely understood at the first pass through stages -> A&P you are likely going to automatically backslide and have to do it again anyways. If you are uncertain of whether you actually passed A&P or not, then this would seem much more likely to actually happen anyways.

-Tom.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 4:52 PM as a reply to Tom Tom.
I hope your shitting me about backslidding. It just sounds awful. Not sure what you mean but starting all over again sounds cruel?

Here's why I feel I passed the AP
-I felt super concentrated
-I was had a certain feeling that I was making tiny little insights like each milisecond, sometimes when I got concentrated
-At certain points I felt tons and tons of bliss that made me feel high. Nothing like I had experienced in my life before that.
-At a certain point the bliss stop happening so often but I was not really concerned at all. This seems to sound very similar to the "Dissolution" phase Daniel talks about.
-A couple months after that I started getting really into conspiracy theories and scaring the crap out of myself with them. I had frequent nightmares with aliens or government agents that wanted to kill me. And that sounds very much like the Fear stage.

Tom A Vitale:
Try this:

If you're uncertain you are in the dark night keep in mind that you can correct this situation whether you are or you are not: (Statements like "My spiritual practice up until July 2011 was going very good actually, alot of my anxious and jealous thoughts had subsided and I felt like I was making progress" seem to suggest that this is very likely dark night symptoms.)

I'm going to make a suggestion based off a sense of overall messiness with regards to the hindrances, as well as your suggestion of a lot of mental illness-type symptoms to which I am most definitely no stranger to: ( I'm the type of guy who makes posts like this: http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3373753 ).

Take a step back for a moment and forget about doing insight for a little while and cultivate samatha jhanas. Sit at access concentration and then cultivate the samatha jhanas and immerse in their bliss. Suppress all of your hindrances using the samatha jhanas. What happens when you suppress the hindrances? Do these symptoms go away, temporarily?

If you take a significant while to do/accomplish this or decide you want to live with your hindrances suppressed for a while by practicing daily samatha, you will likely backslide and then have to start over at mind and body. If you have good samatha skills (which from reading your post, it doesn't seem like you do) you can practice this for a shorter while and then continue insight without backsliding, if you wish not to backslide.

Backsliding is not necessarily a bad thing, as starting over at mind and body -> cause and effect -> three characteristics -> a&P -> dark night would give you a much clearer/cleaner indication of progress as well as a much cleaner dark night to work with. If all was not completely understood at the first pass through stages -> A&P you are likely going to automatically backslide and have to do it again anyways. If you are uncertain of whether you actually passed A&P or not, then this would seem much more likely to actually happen anyways.

-Tom.http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3373753

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 5:59 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
No need to argue with your thoughts, if for example a thought makes a statement of "xyz" don't start asking is it xyz or abc? Instead you should simply be aware "oh I just thought xyz." you don't "think out" thoughts, just know that they occurred.

You can relate to your psychological issues in this way rather in the reaction way, in which you look at each bit of psychology and start trying to judge it. Notice how you mentioned justification, well ultimately something in your mind is saying "I am justified in thinking and feeling this way, it really is bad, feeling bad is correct." well, just know, from someone who has believed that thought with every part of my mind, that they are results of warped perception, and that perception makes things seem worse. But don't go judging that perception, drop your emotional judgement entirely, and simply watch it, accept everything.

More in terms of what to do about thoughts, just turn attention back to all the sensations, emotional and physical, that make up the body. This practice is a way to find an even more skillful way of relating to thoughts, they provide information, but they aren't "you" and they don't have the ultimate say.

Don't worry about "backsliding" i don't think that's a good term for it, because the way this works is you keep improving equanimity, cycle after cycle, until the cycles stop because there is no reactivity left to fuel them. So while you might be lower than you were before, your next dn will be plenty higher than this one. I can identify a period of probably four months where I related to dn experiences via spiraling lower and lower, now I just relate to it as a strange voice saying melodramatic silly things which I can actually laugh at, and a few painful sensations in the chest.

You could relate to it that way right now, you control how you relate to stuff at some level, so use what control you have to form some equanimity and observance, as long as some attention is present you are rolling down the hill, the extent to which you brake is the extent to which you push back at the ground you are covering. It's like pulling a bandaid off, might as well rip it off quick and not hesitate out of fear of experiencing suffering, all you do then is draw it out. So say thank you to the suffering, the most counterintuitive thing you can do, because it is bringing you towards equanimity. That's the best part about the maps in my opinion.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 8:40 PM as a reply to fivebells ..
Fivebells,

While I'm going to give your methods a decent shot, and some of them I definitely agree would be helpful, some of what you're saying doesn't resonate.

Firstly I agree about looking up things to cheer you up with doing metta. Wishing love on something has a different feel then trying to do insight and seems helpful in times when insight is failing me.

But the part that is not sitting with me right is that it sounds like you're suggesting like I'm making my experience up. Look we all distort our experience somewhat, I get that. But for the most part I'm being clear. The feelings of joy I used experience, joy as I used to know it, is gone. Its not there. PLEASURE is there, although less, from giving the body what it wants such as ice cream, a cool shower when its hot, and air conditioning.

But joy, its not really in my radar of consciousness. I mean alot of little things used to give me joy, even when I was depressed. Getting a compliment, talking to a stranger, helping someone out, hearing good news, finishing work, doing well on a project, thinking an inspirational thought, somebody smiling, would all produce a little "inner smile". That whole genre of emotion is effectually gone for the time being.

So to sit here and have someone tell me something like "Your just not focused on the good stuff. You've conditioned your mind into focusing on the bad". Are u 100% absolutely sure you know that's what going on with me?

Experience is experience is experience. If I look clearly at some of the bad stuff that arises, I can get in a place where I accept it and its ok. But my experience is that the joy I used to feel is not arising at the moment. Its not because I'm not letting it arise, its just not. But I'm not fighting that! I just predominately feel neutral about this whole thing.

I'm really not into manufacturing joy that clearly isn't there. Manufacturing joy when you are in early stages or post stream entry, sure! But if this is the dark night, why the hell would joy arise that often anyway, isn't this supposed to be my trial period? The no joy isn't my main problem. The fatigue is.

My point of view is this. Experience is experience. I'm not going to manufacture some feeling, I don't need it. If it is the time in my life to feel joy, then I'm sure it will give me joy.

You are making it sound like I have a choice. Believe me, take my body and mind and try to produce some joy with it. It ain't happening at the moment.

PEACE... YES definitely possible, I feel something like that sometimes.

But joy is not in my experience right now and any attempt to try to manufacture it just seems dumb. I don't want a smooth pleasant dark night. I want to get OUT of the dark night, completely.


fivebells .:
Charlie B:
I have anhedonia. There really is no sense of pleasure. And im not being dramatic about it. There just isn't. If there was something pleasant to focus on I would love to focus on it.


I hear you. You have an appetite for ice cream, though. What is driving that? You could eat some ice cream very very slowly, a tenth of a teaspoonful a minute, and attend to the pleasant sensations of that, for instance. Even if it has negative associations for you, there must be some positive sensations driving the appetite.

Charlie B:
The only reason I was observing my negative thoughts was to dislodge them because they were becoming unbearable. That was a year ago. None of the debilitating stuff had happened yet by then.


I know, I I know. I've been there. It's a natural misinterpretation of the teachings which I made too. It's nobody's fault, it's just the way things worked out.

Charlie B:
...I don't intentionally focus on them. I just note them. Is it my fault that the only stuff that seems to come up is negative? I really really can't help it.


One thing I've been doing lately when I've been particularly stuck in finding something pleasant is resting for a second or two at each peak or trough of breathing, until the natural urge to keep breathing appears. When the breath starts again, there is a sense of pleasure associated with this. If you try this, don't hold your breath, though.

Another recommendation from my teacher which I have found helpful is to help other people or animals. If I see an earthworm struggling on the sidewalk, I move it somewhere safe. If someone asks me for money, I ask them what they want it for and I go with them to buy it for them. I provide dharma advice to people on the internet. :-)

Charlie B:
Now the problem is not thoughts. The problem is I can't even function right for God's sake. I don't really nearly have as many thoughts as I used to like a year ago.


No, the problem is not thoughts, the problem is conditioning of attention. You've actually made really good progress in your meditation which will stand you in good stead when you're able to move forward again. But right now you're in a cul-de-sac, because your natural tendency to negativity led to an emphasis on negative phenomena. The way out of that cul-de-sac is to recondition your attention to note the positive phenomena too.

Charlie B:
The problem is first of all, having some clear confirmation that I'm in the dark night.


Yes, you are totally in the dark night. This is insight disease. You can get out of it, though.

Charlie B:
Second of all finding someone who has been through the type of dark night I've been going through. Not every seems to have such a debilitating experience. I'm looking for someone who has, so I can learn what to do from them.


I've been there. Try my advice. After a decade of driving my practice with insight and power, someone finally got through to me earlier this year and persuaded me to use metta and compassion instead. It's paying off handsomely. It was also my first step to managing symptoms very similar to yours, and to stream entry, which happened a couple of weeks ago.

Our culture reveres insight and power, and we are drawn to spiritual practices which promise this. We want to manipulate and dominate our environments, including our internal experience. What could be more seductive to a modernist than a meditation manual which lays out step-by-step instructions and diagnostics of progress so you can figure out whether it's working for you? And the seduction isn't based on false advertising; these are very powerful approaches. The trouble is, they inevitably get subverted by our natural desire to manipulate and dominate ourselves. So we attend to the bad things we want to fix, seeking to understand and destroy them, never realizing the power we are granting them in the process, never realizing that the problem is with the direction of attention itself.

I'm not saying you were wrong to attend to these things, just that you moved too quickly. One result of meditation is attention to all sensations of the present moment, mental and physical. That means the pleasant and boring sensations as well as the unpleasant. And the pleasant sensations can be important, because they provide the confidence and stability to go deeper into the unpleasant ones. But that is the path of loving-kindness, not power or insight, so it's less appealing to us.

Given your belief that you have anhedonia, this might make your situation seem hopeless. But the fact that the anhedonia arrived after your insight practice supports the idea that this is actually conditioning of your attention, in which case you will still have room to move, no matter how powerful the conditioning so far has been. In that case, you basically have a bad habit you want to kick, not a disease.

Charlie B.:
I know cats and stuff are nice to look at it but I have been spending WAY too much time on the internet since the crappy symptoms starting appearing, since I don't have the energy or money to too much else. I want to try to spend less time on it.


I am happy to mail you pictures of cute animals if you like. Let me know. :-)

Oh, and also, I am by default a ruthless, mildly sadomasochistic person who sees doom in every portent and to whom this sappy stuff doesn't come easily. I am recommending it because it works.

You can go too far in the other direction, of course. Then you end up like this person, addicted to bliss. Buddhism is called the Middle Way because the broadening of attention enables you to keep both extremes in mind (positive and negative) so you don't fall prey to either one.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 8:50 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
Charlie B:


But joy is not in my experience right now and any attempt to try to manufacture it just seems dumb. I don't want a smooth pleasant dark night. I want to get OUT of the dark night, completely.



Well why didn't you say so? (I'm joking, btw.)

Here's your solution:

Bhikkhus, what is the pleasant means and quick realization?

Here, bhikkhus, a certain one secluded from sensual thoughts, angry thoughts, hurting thoughts and evil thoughts ... re ... and abides in the first higher state of mind. Overcoming thoughts and thought processes ... re ... abides in the second higher state of mind. Developing equanimity to joy and detachment ... re ... experiences pleasantness with the body too and abides in the third higher state of mind. To this the noble ones say abiding in pleasantness with equanimity. Dispelling pleasantness and unpleasantness and earlier having dispelled pleasure and displeasure, purifying mindfulness so that unpleasantness or pleasantness does not enter the mind, he abides in the fourth higher state of mind. He abides relying on these five powers of a trainer- Such as the powers of faith, shame remorse, effort and wisdom. The five faculties of faith, effort, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom are sharp in him as a result he realizes the destruction of desires quickly with successive leading. Bhikkhus, to this is said the pleasant means and quick realization.


The pleasant practice, towards extinction, is none other than jhana itself.

The painful method is the practice of various loathsome perceptions (disgust with the world etc.):

Bhikkhus, what is the difficult means and quick realization?

Here, bhikkhus, a certain one abides reflecting loathsomeness in the body, loathsomeness in food, detachment from all the world, seeing impermanence in all determinations and the perception of death is thoroughly established in him. He abides relying on these five powers of a trainer- Such as the powers of faith, shame remorse, effort and wisdom. The five faculties of faith, effort, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom are sharp in him as a result he realizes the destruction of desires quickly with successive leading. Bhikkhus, to this is said the difficult means and quick realization.


I'll repeat what I've been saying though:

Do what you need to do.

That is the highest practice, the accomplishment of your duty, to other people.

So we can sit and endlessly talk about techniques (I don't get that sometimes), but at the end of the day, there really is no point for discussion, as everyone knows what they need to do. Just no doing (no one does it).

No point in procrastination, the jumping in point is always now.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 10:10 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
I hope your shitting me about backslidding. It just sounds awful. Not sure what you mean but starting all over again sounds cruel?

Here's why I feel I passed the AP
-I felt super concentrated
-I was had a certain feeling that I was making tiny little insights like each milisecond, sometimes when I got concentrated
-At certain points I felt tons and tons of bliss that made me feel high. Nothing like I had experienced in my life before that.
-At a certain point the bliss stop happening so often but I was not really concerned at all. This seems to sound very similar to the "Dissolution" phase Daniel talks about.
-A couple months after that I started getting really into conspiracy theories and scaring the crap out of myself with them. I had frequent nightmares with aliens or government agents that wanted to kill me. And that sounds very much like the Fear stage.


It was given only as an option to cure all the doubts you expressed (and then were repeated by others) about whether you were actually in the dark night or not. The mere fact that you responded in this way indicates that yes, indeed, you are actually in the dark night.

Keep practicing.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/8/12 10:07 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
Hi, Charlie. I'm glad you're going to give metta a go. I have high hopes you will benefit from it.

Of course I'm not 100% sure this is what's going on for you, but I am sure enough to strongly recommend this. Say 95% sure. If you're going to give metta a serious shot, there's no need to argue about the rest. That's my hypothesis, the prediction is that metta and resting attention on pleasurable objects will improve things, the early results seem positive, and you're prepared to test it further, so lets see how it works out. We're all modernists and empiricists here, right? emoticon

Don't give up too soon if it gets worse before it gets better. Sometimes the relaxation helps you perceive things you were missing before, and that can lead to disturbance. If that happens, just note what comes up, and rest attention on the chosen object again, as usual. And be sure to let us know how it goes!

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/9/12 12:20 PM as a reply to fivebells ..
Tom and fivebells,

Someone said something earlier in the thread like "Maybe the worst thing your mind does to you in the Dark Night is to make you think your practice is actually not doing anything for you and is a waste of time". Boy does my mind do that to me.

So thanks for the encouragement.

The motivation to keep practicing through the DK is ultimately what I'm looking for.

RE: Think I'm in the Dark Night, Looking for more Opinions
Answer
8/10/12 2:25 PM as a reply to Charlie B.
I'm not sure why, but since I've stepped up my practice a couple days ago I've become ridiculously restless, shaky and its even harder to note anything. I hope this is part of the "it gets worse before it gets better"