| | Formations are a subtle thing, in that they are so ordinary, in that they are the ordinary phenomena that make up your world, the room, the body, space, thoughts, and plenty of people don't notice they are perceiving them, even very good meditators.
It is that the field integrates, but as everything is otherwise largely the same, most people don't notice that much is different. Things are more flowy than vibratory, and counting formations is really not the point, as that involves something that is very much going in the wrong direction. You will notice that in MCTB it mentions nothing about specific frequencies in Equanimity, and that omission is intentional.
If you want to try it, which I don't really recommend, open your eyes and count the number of times you notice the space you are sitting in, but be sure to include the count in the counting, as the whole point of formations is that they begin to include everything, including effort, meditator, meditation, analysis, and anything and everything that seems to be on this side.
It is like the flowing pulses of attention/manifestation/space/phenomena begin to recognize that they perceive themselves all the way through, as an integrated fluxing volume with various qualities that we can pick out as being what we ordinarily think of as the six sense doors but now are actually starting to notice things in a put-together, integrated, all just as and where they are sort of way, which, as it is no different in specifics from the standard way we perceive things, is missed entirely by most people.
Thus, counting formation is a very 1st vipassana jhana way of looking at the 4th jhana, sort of like writing your college application essay in crayon, sort of like having to Fred Flintstone pedal your Ferrari, sort of like talking to someone on tin cans with string connecting them as opposed to video Skype: very primitive, very missing the point.
The point is that the whole thing, the whole field, begins to become and include the meditation. This is the lesson of the 4th vipassana jhana, and so we learn to flow with the whole shifting volume of attention and everything in it, front to back, in and out, this side and that side, doer and done, knower and known, Subject and Object, all part of the whole thing, together, and this is how, when the Three Characteristics of that are perceived naturally, totally, of the whole of everything in that moment of the sense field, then Stream Entry or Fruition or whatever arises. |