-- Timus --:
> Here's < some related material from Shinzen Young. Maybe it helps.
Timus - Thanks! Shinzen Young is definitely addressing the technique I asked about, that is for sure. He even mentions Dark Night here, which is interesting. He even discusses a number of reasons why meditators might want to look for "the Gone" besides simply wanting to work their way up the stages of insight leading to non-dual knowledge. I like that he also brings up this practice in regards to exploring the matter of "the sense of self," which is something I've been looking into in my practice.
It is my understanding of the theory of the path of insight is that the farther along the path you get the more "tuned" you get to noticing the endings of sensations. Ron Crouch hypothesized that some of the unpleasantness of Dark Night can be attributed to being in a place where one is constantly starting to get tuned into the back-ends of sensations, which creates a feeling/impression that one is behind/slow/missing stuff/etc.
Alas, not a lot of concrete examples of what this technique looks like when noting, for instance, gross and subtle sensations, but still a great article.
Here is what I perceive to be most interesting/useful for my own purposes...
What if I were only allowed to teach one focus technique and no other? Which technique would I pick? Hard choice. But I think it would be the technique I call “Just Note Gone.” Here’s why (and how).
Here are his basic instructions:
How.
Here are the basic Instructions:
Whenever all or part of a sensory experience suddenly disappears note that. By note I mean clearly acknowledge when you detect the transition point between all of it being present and at least some of it no longer being present.
If you wish, you can use a mental label to help you note. The label for any such sudden ending is “Gone.”
If nothing vanishes for a while, that’s fine. Just hang out until something does. If you start worrying about the fact that nothing is ending, note each time that thought ends. That’s a “Gone.” If you have a lot of mental sentences, you’ll have a lot of mental periods – full stops, Gones!
Why.
Most people are aware of the moment when a sensory event starts but seldom aware of the moment when it vanishes. We are instantly drawn to a new sound, or new sight, or a new body sensation but seldom notice when the previous sound, sight, or body sensation disappears. This is natural because each new arising represents what we need to deal with in the next moment. But to always be aware of sensory arisings and hardly ever be aware of sensory passings creates an unbalanced view of the nature of sensory experience.
There is only a finite amount of real estate available in consciousness at any given instant. Each arising somewhere causes a passing somewhere else.
Figure-Ground Reversal
As you become more sensitive to detecting Gone, you may come to a place where you note it so frequently that Goneness itself becomes an object of high concentration. The gaps between the “Gones” get shorter and shorter until a figure-ground reversal takes place. Gone becomes the abiding ground. Self and world become fleeting figures. Needless to say, experiencing something like this will have a huge impact on how you relate to aging and death.
People sometimes ask me why I don’t make breath the centerpiece of meditation, as many teachers do. There seems to be a general impression that the ultimate goal of mindfulness practice is to be able to stay focused on the breath. I sometimes jokingly parody that notion with the slogan “Real meditators are able to come back to the breath.” If you insist that I give you something to always come back to, I would say “Real meditators are able to come back to Gone.”
Self-Inquiry
Where things go to is where they come from. There are many ways to explore the question “Who am I?” One of them is called Self-Inquiry. In that practice, whenever a sense of self arises, you ask “What’s behind this?” “Where did this come from?”
Another way to answer that question is to watch where things go to (i.e., Note Gone). Both approaches can be effective. The very beginning of what’s about to be can be found at the very end of what just was.
The Dark Night
Are there any possible negative effects from working with vanishing and the related themes of Emptiness and No-Self? Occasionally there can be. In extreme cases, the sense of Goneness, Emptiness and No-Self may be so intense that it creates disorientation, terror, paralysis, aversion, hopelessness and so forth. Unpleasant reactions such as these are well documented in the classical literature of contemplation both East and West. In the West, it is sometimes referred to as “The Dark Night of the Soul.” In the East, it is sometimes referred to as “The Pit of the Void” or as “the unpleasant side of bhanga” (dissolution).