Hi Nikolai,
Thanks for the information. I too have spent many a session basically doing choiceless awareness of bodily sensations alone. This in fact is where I start to perceive things at the level of "formations" I am talking about in my original post. From choiceless awareness of bodily sensations, I gently start to roll in sensations from other sense doors as they occur.
Your post makes me ponder something I read in MCTB a while ago, that has made me a bit confused. It's a single sentence: "Basic dharma theory tells me that it is definitely not possible to perceive both fingers simultaneously". While I have noticed that there is a flitting of perception from one bodily sensation to another, in sequence, it seems that sensations from other sense doors can be and are perceived simultaneously. For example, a smell and a sound may occur at once, with a niggle in the knee all occurring to my perception at what appears to be the same time. These is the beginning of my "formations".
Thanks for your help,
Julian
Nikolai S Halay:
Hi Julian,
As Daniel says....what is still being taken as subject?
Your descriptions so well put remind me of what was happening to me just before I got stream entry. Everything that was being observed in that wide focus, taking in every sensations that arose as object.....suddenly there was no more object and I went through the dukkha door. Sucked up into something and released and then...a "what the hell was that?" moment and then a bliss that left me dazed and happy for a couple of days.
I never completely understood Daniel's take on formations. I got frustrated cos I wasn't experiencing what he described in his book. So I gave up that idea of formations and just went with being equanimous with every physical sensation that crossed that wide focus you describe. After all everything we experience is accompanied by sensations on the body even the illusion of "I".
With that wide focus, the sum of sensations making up the "I" was observed, like a sensation at the throat plus a sensation between and behind the eyeballs plus etc,..which were shifting around and blipping in and out of the bare sensate experience. At times I wanted only to stop those sensations of "I" from blipping in and out. Then after some time I realized that those sensations would arise regardless and thus the job was to see those sensations as they are...just sensations. When those sensations of "I" were included as just other sensations with all the other ones, then there was no more object and that's when it all happened.
Hope this helps.