| | Well, Jake, I still disagree completely. Equanimity is simply not available in a true Dark Night, and the lesson of the Dark Night is not equanimity at all but the three characteristics of suffering. If one pretends to jump to equanimity through fiat of will while in the DN, then that in itself will guarentee more cycling before the path comes to its goal. I can't state this strongly enough. Since my own thread asking people to discribe formations was highjacked by dat Buddha-field and others (including, finally myself  ), I'm going to have to take the lazy way here and repeat here what I said there: Hi Psi Phi and dat Buddha-field:It so happens that I've currently been reading Thanissaro Bhikkhu's The Wings to Awakening, which is one of the most brilliant dharma books I've ever laid eyes on. It is extremely clear, but it is also not an easy read, simply because the Buddha's system is complex, with many layers of subtlety and feedback loops. In fact TB incorporates not only the ancient analogies in this work, which is both a translation of and commentary on core teachings from the Pali Canon, but postmodern analogies with chaos theory, among other things. Anyway, I'm not only a fan of TB, but a devotee of his meditation methods. His body of work on how to meditate basically is my meditation practice. I do not "note" after the Burmese tradition and never have. Interestingly, TB, in this work I'm currently reading talks about noting practice as one currently popular in the West, and he sees it as a fine practice. He talks about investigating the Three Characteristics, and there are a number of meditation methods, or "themes," for doing so. I happen to follow TB's breath meditation instructions. I also do not treat samatha and insight as completely separate practices; instead, after the manner of TB, in my practice I enter jhana and then pull a bit out and above whatever jhana I enter to "investigate" the three characteristics of its factors, those characteristics being (1) inconstancy/instability, (2) unsatisfactoriness, and (3) insubstantiality (not self).What I have been trying, so far without success, to convey to dat Buddha-field is that, despite the way jhana and vipassana can be combined in a single sit, and really should be according to the Thai Forest teachers, there remains a difference between states of jhana and stages of insight. This difference exists just as much according to TB as according to Daniel M. Ingram. Your apparent confusion, dat Buddha-field (Zach), is in thinking that each separate stage of insight progess involves a will-to-release, or else one remains "stuck." This is simply not so. When release really does come, it comes automatically. And it comes in a specific stage, at the end of the path: High Equanimity nana. So, dat Buddha-field, when on your other thread you say that people stay stuck in the Dark Night because they don't learn its lesson, and you say its lesson is that they should incline toward release right then and there, I say this: No, that is not at all the "lesson" of the Dark Night. The knowledge of suffering is simply discernment of the phenomenology of suffering, its three characteristics. Release is not possible in DN territory. If it were, then it would not be the DN at all, and you would have moved on without learning the knowledge of suffering--which is to say, you would not have moved on at all. Psi Phi to dat Buddha-field:So , you seem to be asking a tricky, entrapping, or mis-leading question, implying that I feel craving to attach self to fabrications and what-not. When actually what I was pointing to was that the self concept and the fabrication concept both stem from not seeing the true impersonal nature of phenomenon. So I was basically refuting the teaching that the mind requires effort to think and fabricate, for, from my view thinking and fabrication is due to cause and effect of an impersonal nature, and that, from my view:
The mind does not require effort to fabricate, but does require delusion(ignorance) to fabricate, as you have also stated earlier, that fabrications do arise from ignorance. And to sum up, the self, if taken as a concept that stems from ignorance and delusion, is also just a fabrication. And if it is just a fabrication, why all the fuss and bother of taking a mere fabrication so seriously, as we mostly do as humanity. In essence we are the fabricators of our own suffering. Let go of the fabrications, let go of dukkha.
Now this discussion is going to get wild. Psi Phi, yes, fabrications/formations are, as MCTB1 says, "what, from a high dharma point of view, is happening all the time." In other words, where there is dependent co-arising, there is fabrication/formations. What is very subtle and complex about TB's--which is to say, the Buddha's--treatment of all this is that, while dependent co-arising involves the entire cosmos, phenomenology, and all of time, in addition to involving our individual personalities and wills, so to speak, the noble path does consist of Right Fabrication, if you will. So long as we have to participate in fabrication, and we do, we should do so skillfully. And here is a tasty morsel of things to come: Daniel connects insight in this way, in MCTB2, with the Four Bases of the Powers (ie, Magick)--meaning that, as I read him, much like Thanissaro, he addresses the necessity of the individual will (Power) into arriving at release!
Now, problematically, Dat Buddha-field, on the thread he started about how people remain stuck in the Dark Night because they are not inclining to release while there, seems to be mistaking path (stages) for the end of the path (release). When one is in the Dark Night, for example, one is discerning the characteristics of suffering in its many combinations of the aggregates. But "release" absolutely does not occur in the stage of the path known as Dark Night, Knowledges of Suffering, dukka nanas. On this level of path, release from fabrication/formation is not available at each moment; only discernment of the three characteristics of phenomena of that stage is available in the present moment of the stage.
When discernment of the three characteristics of the sufferings (Fear, Misery, Disgust) is sufficiently thorough, EQ emerges, and when discernment of the three characteristics is discerned even in EQ--thence cessation. Cessation is automatic. It is not fabricated--not by any self or otherwise. It cannot be willed from the place of Equanimity. It certainly cannot be willed from the place of the Dark Night. In fact, it is an oft-repeated truism on this forum that cessation/path/fruition comes during moments in High EQ that one is not even on the lookout for release. It arises from a kind of forgetfulness of all except the formation/fabrication one is currently investigating from within.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, from The Wings to Awakening:
Thus, for instance, in the practice of meditation, as with any skill, it is important not to focus desire too strongly on the results one hopes to get , for that would interfere with the minds' ability to to focus on giving rise to the causes leading to those results. If, instead, one focuses desire on putting the causes in proper order in the present moment, desire becomes an indispensable part of the process of mastery. These qualities [of desire, exertion, effortful/skillful fabrication] are necessary for anyone who pursues a path, but are automatically abandoned on reaching the goal at the path's end. The image of the path [incremental stages of insight] is important here, for it carries important implications. First, the path is not the goal; it is simply the way there, just as the road to the Grand Canyon should not be confused with the Grand Canyon itself. Even though many stretches of the road bear no resemblance to the Grand Canyon, that does not mean that the road does not lead there, just as neither the road to the Grand Canyon nor the act of walking to the Grand Canyon can cause the Grand Canyon to be. The goal at the end of the Buddhist path is unfabricated, so no amount of desire or effort can bring it into being. Nevertheless, the path to the goal is a fabricated process, and in that process desire, effort, intent, and discrimination all have an important role to play, just as the effort of walkng plays a role in arriving at the Grand Canyon.
Here is TB again, and this is pretty heavy-duty stuff; everyone should read this book:
The fluid complexity of dependent co-arising means that it is inherently unstable, and thus stressful and not-self. Although some non-Theravadin Buddhist texts insist that happiness can be found by abandoning one's smaller, separate identity and embracing the interconnected identity of all interdependent things, this teaching cannot be found in the Pali Canon. The instability of conditioned processes means that they can never provide a dependable basis for happiness. The only true basis for happiness is the Unfabricated. The Pali discourses are quite clear on the point that the fabricated and Unfabricated realms are radically separate. In MN 1 the Buddha strongly criticizes a group of monks who tried to develop a theory whereby the fabricated was derived out of the Unfabricated or somehow lay within it. Stress, he says, is inherent in the interdependent nature of conditioned phenomena, while the Unfabricated is totally free from stress. Stress could not possibly be produced by absolute freedom from stress. Because the nature of conditioning is such that causes are in turn influenced by their effects, the Unfabricated could not itself funtion as a cause for anything. The only way the Unfabricated can be experienced is by skillfully using fabricated, condition processes . . . to unravel the network of fabricated, conditioned processes (dependent co-arising) from within.
The entire pattern of dependent co-arising is a map showing how the different aggregates group, disband, and regroup in one another's presence in a variety of configurations, giving rise to stress and to the cosmos at large. . . . One of the the most basic features of the Buddha's teachings is his confirmation that the knowable cosmos, composed of old kamma, is made up of the same factors that make up the personality; and that the interaction of the aggregates, as immediately present to awareness in the here and now, is the same process that underlies the functioning of the knowable cosmos as a whole. As a result, descriptions of dependent co-arising slip easily back and forth between two time scales--events in the present moment and events over the vast cycle of time.
This is where I think dat Buddha-field is coming from, but with the one mistaken notion that release is available before the end of the path; again from TB's text right after the passage quoted just above:
It is important to remember, though, that the Buddha discovered the principle by observing events in the immediate present, which is where the individual meditator will have to discover them as well, Thus the practice takes the same approach as phenomenology: exploring the processes of conditioning from the inside as they are immediately experienced in the present moment. This is why the pattern of dependent co-arising lists factors of consciousness--such as ignorance, attention, and intention--as prior conditions for the experience of the physical world, for if we take as our frame of reference the world as it is directly experienced--rather than a world conceived somehow as separate from our experience of it--we have to see the processes of the mind as prior to the objects they process.
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