@ Ian: Thanks for your thoughts on the general and relative helpfulness of the available criteria and descriptions of the levels. I’ve been spinning-out a bit lately regarding the maps, and your comments, along with simply paying consistent, precise attention to my thoughts about the maps, really helped to put things into perspective for me. I also appreciated your pointer to
Into the Stream, which though a little abstract, was still useful.
@ Mike: To be totally candid, and perhaps reveal a great deal of ignorance and/or slothfulness on my part, I don’t find the Pali cannon very accessible - that’s not to say I don’t think there’s just tons and tons of good and useful information in it - its just to say that I usually come away from reading a lot of it more confused than when I started. I do find the fetters to be an interesting approach to mapping, and I would like (in theory) to learn some more about them - so thanks for reminding me that that is a good place for me to go to learn. I appreciate it

With regard to Shaila Catherine’s exhortation to “cultivate fruition as a meditative state”, that’s an interesting concept. My personal experience with Review was been that Fruitions are going to occur, a lot, whether I’m shooting for them or not, and that’s just part of Review. So if what she’s saying is: shoot for multiple Fruitions - got it, makes sense. If what she’s saying is actually more along the lines of “try and abide inside the actual unknowing event that comprises a Fruition” than I couldn’t be farther away from that - my Fruition experiences don’t involve “me” being ANYWHERE OR DOING ANYTHING; they’re a total non-experiential event that I come out the back-end of thinking “Woah. What was that?”
With regard to your comment “maybe looking to one's conduct in the months and years after this possible stream entry event, would be a better diagnostic criteria than a narrative description of the event itself” I’ve come to the same conclusion, see my response to Jane below.
@ Jane: It doesn’t sound like Review to me either, Jane. Since then, I’ve been in what seems like Dark Night territory. I could be wrong. As you note, I wasn’t keeping a practice log at the time (I do now), and I think that would be very helpful determining exactly what happened. But for now I’ll assume it was the “pernicious trickster” the Arising and Passing Away, and The Meditater will just keep on meditating.
Thanks for everybody’s thoughts on this subject!