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MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?

Well, after many people asked for it, and also after much confusion by not putting it in there, I have decided that at the end of MCTB 2 will be a section that is autobiographical and will use that to illustrate various dharma points and talk about some things that are just easier to talk about that way.

So, I know what points I want to say in that section, but I was wondering, as I now finally have time to really work on MCTB2 (I have taken a new job the logistics of which leave more time for things like that), I thought I would ask if there was anything that people thought would be useful to include in that regard.

Anyway, if anyone has thoughts, let me know...

Daniel

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/27/13 7:03 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Generally, there's little information about the impact it made on the rest of your life. If this would be useful is another question. If it is, those questions come to my mind:

In hindsight, what would you have done differently?

What difference did it make to have experienced an A&P and not knowing what to do with this? How did people near you react to you telling about those experiences?

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/27/13 7:17 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
First, Daniel, I look forward to reading it. I think it's going to be funny and insightful, and you'll probably point to your own "mistakes" again to help the rest of us (well, me) be fine with/recognize those same mistakes should/when I make them, too.

I think it'd be great to include a section that considers adolescents' experiences. So many larger changes are happening to the brain in the teen years and a meditative map could be useful to adolescents who relate to meditation/contemplative traditions. If you recall your own adolescent experiences that could help...maybe even other teachers would contribute here. I remember Ven. Yutadhammo recounting some event in his adolescence and I thought, "probably a lot of kids experience this kind of thing or something similarly inexplicable". It doesn't have to be major, but I suspect a lot of us start down the meditative enthusiast route early on and that the adolescent brain offers up some significant fruit, which can be useful if a person has a choice to consider that fruit within some map they like.

And early childhood is also an interesting area. It could be neat to have an early childhood section in there for parents and include some stuff from the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Division of Personality Studies, Dr. Ian Stevenson's/Tucker's data collection. How parents could listen and not lead nor over-interpret a young child's speech and accounting --- as there are a small number of children who seem to know very specific facts about other lives and express this between the ages of 2 and 6 when language is forming. These children seem to occur in families of any cultural and religious tradition, so such a chapter could become a useful reference tool without becoming a huge book on the subject. Just a small, helpful chapter?

I don't know if these are up your alley or for this book, but also I'd say I hope you can take your time-- like I am thinking of how meditative experiences often take a year to consider and start to understand and you encourage people to watch over the course of a year to consider some meditative phenomena or the outcome of one experience. I have found this spot on advice. So I'm wondering if a book you write tomorrow, is it only editable by you in April 2014? You have a lot of experience and ability to connect across disciplines/subjects in that noggin, so I'm keen to read it and personally hope it's a "slow-food" meal. Make sense?

Thanks for asking.

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
Answer
4/27/13 11:57 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
I would like to hear how you dealt with work and school and meditation at the same time. Some of your retreat experiences that you touched on briefly in MCTB 1, if there any more interesting anecdotes, would be good reading. emoticon

It would be interesting to put in how meditation affects your career (what it does and doesn't do).

I would also like to know how you are now and how much meditation you do per day (if any).

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/27/13 1:11 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
I wonder if it might be useful to have an introductory section with the basics of your story, the progress of insight, and how to do Mahasi-style vipassana, followed by a yogi toolbox runthrough including the most useful supplemental techniques you've found for aiding vipassana, and why they're useful:

  • alternate concentration practices and why some objects of concentration can be better than others, like using a bowl or candle as a kasina, why focusing on your heartbeat is problematic, whether you can get jhana concentrating on the movement of the breath through the whole body [and what focusing on the breath throughout the body really means: perception of air flowing into your lungs, but also breath-related changes in circulation and muscle activity]
  • what you consider the minimum criteria for calling a state 'jhana', whether attainment of this minimal or 'soft' first jhana is recommended or necessary for insight
  • HAIETMOBA and PCEs as tools for deepening insight practice, whether these states have any corollaries in older forms of buddhist meditation (e.g. are PCEs rigpa or not rigpa and whether that matters)
  • using self-inquiry (Who am I?) to identify regions of sensation that are poorly perceived and deserve special attention

Also, if all effective insight practices involve the development, recognition and strengthening of the same mental reflex, what are the essential characteristics of this mental reflex?

Echoing katy above, the supplemental practice and theory section might be followed with life advice, including tips for teens and those suffering with difficult home lives, mental illness, and/or chronic pain, and whether one should incorporate supplemental practices for dealing with the DN.

The expanded powers section could come last, with a warning that western materialists can safely skip it [until insight meditation shatters their precarious worldview].

You could produce volumes about your experience, but there's obviously merit in being able to recommend a relatively compact book as the all-in-one for effective insight practice.

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
Answer
4/28/13 1:45 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Daniel, do you perform [ or appreciate ] traditional arts like music, painting, fiction writing, dance, acting, martial art, etc ? How did that changed after enlightenment?

Edit: added in [ --- ]

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/27/13 4:01 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Post 4th path practices, and any adjustments/rebuttals to your view of maps and attainments. Looking forward to it!

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/27/13 6:09 PM as a reply to Matthew Horn.
I agree with Katy and Matthew.
Your experiences of how to integrate practice into life to be a lifestyle.
More information on what to look for and the orders of magnitude to expect - some of the experiences can be very subtle and very hard to detect. This especially would be useful to the pre-path experiences and the fact that fixed definitions of milestones on the maps are not always helpful due to the tremendous variability of experiences around them

Additionally, if you have any experiences on how to integrate jhanas into practice ie effectively combining Shamata and Vipassana.

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/27/13 6:14 PM as a reply to bernd the broter.
I'd like to know about the times when you got frustrated with the tradition, when you weren't so keen on meditation and when you almost jacked the whole thing in. (I am presuming these things happened to you and that I'm not the odd one out!)

Also, I want to hear the really mundane stuff about squeezing practice into your life, when you did lots of practice, when you did less, and so on.

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/27/13 10:16 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
I have never really found a satisfactory explanation on the different routes to enlightenment. Vipassana followed by samatha, samatha followed by vipassana, both simultaneously, and dry insight.

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
Answer
4/27/13 10:41 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
I'd very much like to read about your career as a doctor, specifically;

--Whether you have gained any special insight into illness and disease.
--Whether you believe illness and disease are created in the mind.
--Why you don't use high jhanic states to see inside patients' bodies in order to accurately diagnose tricky conditions.
--Why you don't use high jhanic states to see inside patients' minds, in order to diagnose faulty ways of thinking/perceiving
--Why you don't use high jhanic states to heal people of illness (but instead use only partially effective synthetic medicines).
--Why you need the high-stress, high-powered, high-status ED lifestyle.
--Why you suffered so greatly when you were ill recently. Since Buddhism is about putting an end to suffering, this is a real sticking point for me. Reading your account of that difficult time, I truly wondered whether you had achieved anything worthwhile at all. I asked the question on that thread but never got an answer. With no true answer to this, I'd have to conclude the Theravada practice is not one to engage.

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/27/13 11:39 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Changes to the Self
How did your sense of self change at each path moment?(e.g...At what point did the sense of doer leave; when did proprioception shift to a nondual nature...etc?) Were the permanent changes only at path moments or were there also shifts between paths? Between 3rd and 4th path there seems to many shifts, could you go into your experience of that? Did the shifts change in intensity as if the selfing process had a rebooting ability or the selfing process adapted to the shifts? Post 4th path what modifications to the selfing process are you working on?

Magik
I would love to hear about your experiences with magik and how it played a part in your path.

Thanks,
~D

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/28/13 2:01 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
I hear a lot of talk about Bill Hamilton. Bits of this and bits of that, but always excellent bits. Could you talk about Bill? Who he was, where he came from, his dharma journey, what he attained, what and how he practiced, his horizons, his beliefs and speculations, his teachings, and that sort of thing? It sounds like he was a key figure in your work, and an interesting dude in his own right, but I've not been able to find much information about him.

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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4/28/13 2:21 PM as a reply to Mind over easy.
Read his book Saints and Psycopaths.

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
dark night depression self-esteem jung
Answer
4/29/13 12:35 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Can´t wait to hold it in my hands!!!

How about
- Statistical data. How many vipassana hours do people need to reach stream entry?

- Neurological aspects a la "Zen and the Brain" by Steven Austin. There must be lotsa stuff out there. I also know a hardcore yogi who is a university neurologist, I could hook you up.

- psychological aspects. Self-esteem is a huge issue in spiritual circles as it seems. Sigmund Freud wrote about the neurotic aspects of being religious.

Dark night vs. depression (Ron Crouch researches on that).

Something I´m very interested in is C. G. Jung´s work on individuation which I assume has a great deal to do with depression.
Should you read that material I advise to also check out Joseph Campbell´s work on mythology and "the hero´s journey", he is very influenced by C. G. Jung.


Simply more geeky stuff about jhanas and nyanas ;-)

Any personal learnings, discarded beliefs, new understandings since MTCB1

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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5/1/13 12:39 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
I'm curious to know how you choose your teachers. Did you find them by chance or did you seek out the best and travel as far as necessary to study with them? What criteria did you use to separate the good ones from the bad, the competent from the clueless and the just eccentric from the completely bonkers? Also what matters in a good teacher and what doesn't?
And feel free to name names. emoticon

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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5/29/13 5:17 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Hi Daniel,

Just a few thoughts/questions came to mind about the relationship between your work and your Dhamma practice:

I would really like to know about your relationship with the orthodox (conservative) medical establishment. Specifically, how much do they know (if at all) about your achievments/attainments in the field of meditation?

What (if any) aspects of what you have learned as truths (and not beliefs or speculation) about reality, are in direct contradiction to what is generally accepted in today's modern medical science? Is there anything that would be perceived as a "threat" by the orthodoxy?

Have your experiences ever gotten you in trouble at work. Have you ever been labelled a heretic, for example?

It would be interesting to know how much or how little you have discussed your "dharma life" with your peers at work.

Is it something you have kept fairly separate from other Doctors and medical staff, or is it something you have openly discussed?

Have you had any adverse reactions?

Would some Doctors view the experiences you have described as at best being hallucinations and at worst being some kind of mental disorder?

Not sure if some or any of these questions are useful to what you have in mind...

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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5/29/13 2:08 PM as a reply to Piers M.
That one has a really short answer:

Nearly total compartmentalization.

I don't talk about what I do related to meditation at work or with my colleagues or even in my home town barely at all except among the closest friends and then extremely rarely and in extremely superficial, whitewashed terms.

If they know anything, it is from the internet, and only perhaps 3 times in 10 years of working in hospitals has anyone asked me anything about that, and then it is the most basic questions, and the conversation has been less than 5 minutes each time, as there has been basically no conceptual or paradigmatic foundation for a conversation.

I might as well have said that I had a PhD in the advanced applications of differential equations to structural resonance problems or the severely endangered Micronesian language Woleaian. Nearly all have only asked out of some odd sense that it was strange, and not with any real interest, and it is nice that words like "arahat" mean as much to them as other Pali words, that being nothing.

In only the narrowest ways to those Venn Diagram circles overlap, and that is at places like the CDMP (Contemplative Development Mapping Project), where neuroscience, religious, psychological and the like researchers meet to discuss things related to the science of meditation, and in that one small circle of friends does my MD and MSPH in epidemiology hold some small relevance to things meditational and might get me some small bit of acceptance.

RE: MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
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5/31/13 5:42 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Thanks for the answer.

It kind of shoots a few holes into my concepts of an arahant. From a conventional point of view, I can understand why you haven't discussed meditation at all with colleagues or even "non-dharma" friends if I can put it like that. Some people will just never understand.

However, I had always thought that someone who is fully realized is also completely transparent, in the sense that their inner life and outer life are like mirrors. There's nothing to "hide".

For example, someone like Eckhart Tolle (it's not my place to say if he's an arahant or not in Buddhist terms, but surely having listened to many of his teachings he is certainly awakened to a high degree). He also appears to live the life that he teaches. Everyone one who meets him or sees him on You Tube etc. knows what he's about. There doesn't seem to be any compartmentalization going on there.

Same would be said of the Buddha and his closest disciples, right? And some of the highly attained monks from the forest traditions in more recent times.

But I guess there always has to be exceptions to the rule. Or I just had the thought that maybe there are more highly attained individuals around in everyday ordinary places than anyone would care to know (because usually exposure comes from those who are standing on a platform and teaching). Wonder how many preferred to just keep quiet...

MCTB2: "My Spiritual Quest": Anything you want me to include?
Answer
5/31/13 2:34 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Hi Daniel,

You skipped completely over this aspect of Piers' question, and it has been something I've been meaning to ask you about ever since our conversation back in 2005. If you'd prefer not to make a public statement about this, I can understand. Feel free to PM or email if you would like privacy and have the inclination to respond to this question.

Piers Mackeown:
What (if any) aspects of what you have learned as truths (and not beliefs or speculation) about reality, are in direct contradiction to what is generally accepted in today's modern medical science? Is there anything that would be perceived as a "threat" by the orthodoxy?


More specifically, I wonder whether or not you have noticed areas in allopathic treatments that conflict (or perhaps are not as efficacious) with what you know about medicine and how the body works. One particularly vicious treatment that comes immediately to mind is the chemo-therapy used in cancer treatment as opposed to certain alternative (and perhaps more natural) treatments that might be pursued. I've been studying these things for the past several decades, and most assiduously in recent years (now that I've become older) and have been using some treatments (some with great success) that might be considered as "folk medicine" by some modern practitioners of the healing arts, simply because they were never taught it in med school or never experimented with it for themselves.

There are a few old-school docs out there who are doing groundbreaking work in keeping the old knowledge alive. One of the docs I listen to and follow in his daily email list is Dr. Joseph Mercola. Another is Dr. Al Sears, who has traveled the world in search of alternative natural healing techniques.

Just to give one example, I've been using garlic gel tabs for stave off common colds for years with a nearly 100% success rate (depending on when I first noticed the cold coming on and whether I did something about it at the time). The allicin compound in garlic is the active ingredient, it being a natural anti-biotic that has slayed many a cold virus attempting to take hold of my body. And just recently, I've successfully used it as an alternative to amoxicillin (the pharmaceutical alternative to penicillin) to handle tooth aches.

Anyway, would be interested in your observations if you are of a mind to reply.