| | Oh, yes, I understand you now! I've never really used the donut metaphor but I do know what you're saying. The way I've experienced them basically lines up with that. VJ's- 1: Just working, building up, mindfulness is usually not consistent and takes a lot of manual effort, Mind & Body being the first sign of progress, with the flavors of 1st jhana mildly present 2: Easy access to jhanas, high mindfulness, energy manipulation, synchronicity becomes common (off the cushion) focusing on any spot is easy. This is the one place where I definitely perceive vibrations clearly 3: Everything winds down, then sucks, negative mind states, overwhelming inability to examine "internal" sensations, content takes on a hounding nature, like a bunch of mosquitos that you know are surrounding and swarming you, but you can't ever pinpoint one, and you certainly can't just flail wildly and kill them. You just get bit and move on... 4: At first, profound calm and clarity, which can easily solidify into jhana (1-4 all seem easily accessible here), with potential for a lot of bliss. Then, winding down further, the whole thing seems like a vast dream with a sense of someone in the middle of it, physical boundaries can get fuzzy, sense of being in a room or on a floor can vanish. There is also the potential for feeling nothing special/enlightening/insightful whatsoever, and it seems to happen after what would be low equanimity.
I can map a lot of meditation experience into these VJ's, which are theoretically very clear cut, but I'm basically trying to say that they don't feel so clear cut anymore, and sits are getting less and less textbook, in regards to the above description. My experience of vibrations is a bit different. I got my start doing fast noting without an object, but rather, noting sense doors. The experience was that after ramping up my noting, there would be a clear tingling, vibratory quality to the whole body (seemingly what Goenka calls Bhanga or Dissolution, although I don't know if he's really referring to the specific nana... he didn't really give much technical information for the first retreat). The field of vision would be flickering, the body would be flickering, hearing would get choppy, etc... These things are still present to some extent, but very much less so.
Contrast that to now, where in my practice, impermanence is more about watching things as they appear in the field, and watching them flux, shift, move around, change, and disappear. It isn't quite in line with how Daniel stresses fast noting and perceiving ever quicker vibrations, but hey, not everyone works in the same way, and not everyone was doing fast noting or focusing on vibrations when they got path. In fact, I feel that fast noting has the potential to make the mind less calm and hence less sharp, whereas this new approach allows me to also "reserve my interaction with sensations", sitting back and making a point of watching without getting involved, which then allows me to examine how my mind is naturally lunging out at these things (unsatisfactoriness), and how when I don't do anything except watch with a bare minimum of involvement, it's clear that there isn't anything I did to make the things appear, flux, or disappear (no-self). There is definitely a point in equanimity where everything seems super ordinary and not meditative/insightful, and another one of my theories is that if one's baseline approaches this point, going through the nanas will have the qualities of ordinariness. Under this hypothesis, it seems that not only do we have to go through each of the nanas, we have to travel up and down the nanas from the viewpoint of each nana. Now there's a sub-jhana/sub-nana thing to think about...
I think I understand what you're saying about one-pointedness too, although I disagree. I've really only understood one-pointedness in a more classical sense, and that is in the context of jhana practice. Especially clear in the 4th jhana, one-pointedness, to me, means/feels like the stable, fabricated, non-wavering, seemingly solid absorption of the mind to the field. But as I understand it and practice, vipassana is about disrupting solidity and stability in the field, releasing and seeing through fabrications, and especially scrutinizing and deconstructing jhanic factors if they do arise. In fact, I've never really heard anyone suggest that one-pointedness is specifically necessary for seeing vibrations, asides from the related notion that one can practice jhana and use the clarity from jhana to proceed with vipassana. One-pointedness is fabricated and allows one to solidify the field for jhanic absorptions and their factors, and vipassana deconstructs fabrication, without mercy for good or bad patterns of sensations; that's basically the premise I'm disagreeing from. This is sort of a sidetrack from the original topic, but it's still an interesting and useful topic to discuss. |