Good luck and please enjoy some of the equanimity you've attained. It's nothing to sneeze at.
Equanimity was really awesome the first time I was squarely in it (even mistook the peace for SE for many months), but after seeing it fade over and over again, there is a sense of despair, that even the greatest peace I can find still disappears and I can backslide to re-ob.
This may not seem helpful, but what one has to do at equanimity to get a fruition is give up effort. The effort or push toward stream entry is what must be dropped in order to attain it. I mean this as in; right at the moment in equanimity when effort is dropped, stream entry is attained (so to speak).
My intuition tells me this is true, but as I let up in EQ, I feel like I always backslide. At first, it was gung-ho noting, even up through equanimity, and I fell back. Then, there was just not practicing at all... obviously, I backslid there too. After my first vipassana retreat, while I was squarely in equanimity, I tried just sitting with indiscriminate awareness and acceptance, watching everything with as little judgement or expectation as possible. Sits went by and... bam, backsliding to re-ob. This is so disheartening because I feel like from high effort, to calm and easy effort, to no effort at all, no approach was good enough.
Equanimity isn't just equanimity. There are stages within equanimity that occur after exiting re-observation.
How far are you making it up the sequence from the table here: :
Low Equanimity
Early Mastery
High Mastery
High Equanimity
The differences between these four are discernible if you look (click the link to the table for details). Are you making it all the way up to High Equanimity and not hitting Conformity/Change of Lineage/Path/Fruition or are you stuck somewhere between Low Equanimity and Early Mastery?
If you keep falling back to Re-observation then you have to pass back through Early Mastery and Low Equanimity to get there. Make sure you're hitting the edge of high equanimity every time you sit as Conformity happens after High Equanimity and after no earlier stage..
Good point. To describe my experience with equanimity...
The first few times, it was definitely an immature equanimity. I remember being surprised by the joyful aspect, as I thought it was all blandness, ordinariness, etc...
I've definitely had the near misses as well. Sitting in very calm and quiet, almost completely still equanimity, then a sudden intense gravity feeling between my eyes, like being pulled up, with an extremely shocking quality, then it's over as fast as it came on (less than 1 second). I mistook these for fruitions on a few occasions.
On that vipassana retreat I went on a few months ago, after landing more consistently in EQ earlier and earlier in the day and sustaining it for longer amounts of time, formless stuff came up quite a bit, and sometimes I literally could not find my body or the floor, and all sense of being in any room disappeared, like I was hanging out in space. I also think I've hit infinite consciousness too, judging by some experiences where everything within my perception felt like it was somehow in my mind and alive and conscious, exactly like the feeling I get in lucid dreams.
I suppose I do have to own up to not following through with equanimity, as it's so easy to steep in the peaceful aspect. There's also the anticipation of SE, but after a few times in EQ, the joyful/energetic/anticipatory qualities started to fade, as I realized that taking any pleasure in getting to EQ would lead to falling back to re-ob quickly.
I was in the same boat as you until the recent past. I also posted in another DN related thread you posted that the key to progress from RO is to simply give up trying to get something better or get somewhere, and fully accept the agony, pain and misery.
At the same time, you have to be aware of what is causing suffering and what are the different forms of suffering. What gives you pleasure? What gives you joy ? Why do you seek pleasure? Investigate these themes and keep dropping the causes you realize. This is how morality is developed. Without maintaining at least 5 precepts, it is impossible to nurture solid concentration that helps give rise to penetrating wisdom.
Surrendering in re-ob is not necessarily the part that is bumming me out here. In sits, when it all overwhelms me, sometimes I literally laugh heartily, simply laughing at the intense misery and agony, laughing at the claustrophobic aspect of it, laughing at the predicament. The tricky part is that EQ is as impermanent as re-ob, and the despair comes from the fact that I seem to be repeating EQ > re-ob > EQ > re-ob over and over again.
Concentration isn't necessarily my weak point either; I can get into the formed jhanas with a few days work but I typically feel more inclined to do vipassana. The precept debate is a debate for another place. Check out some of your favorite arhats, teachers, enlightened folks, and see that they definitely do not always follow 5 precepts.
When this happened, my mental state also transformed from agony and discomfortness to clarity and restfulness. I think this was when I shifted into some sort of tangible Eq that doesn't fall back and from there on things got easy peasy. There's no agony anymore, no desire to fruition, no feeling of trying to get somewhere, and life has a regained some sense of beauty.
Not trying to be a buzzkill, but I definitely have been through this transition many times, but there is always a slide back down if you don't land the fruition.
Not sure these are the relevant measures, but I'm curious as to how long this has been going on, at what "dosage" and quality? FWIW I spent 18 months around EQ before SE at a dosage of an hour a day, perhaps pushing 99% aware and present. It took a certain amount of persistence and faith I suppose, but I knew other people had "done" it, a couple of whom I had met in person.
The consistency has been sporadic, and this is probably one of my practice flaws, but I'm in a demanding college program so semester seasons are quite weaker as far as practice goes. There have been periods where I put in 2 hours + a day (up to 5) of seated meditation, and also on and off periods of a few weeks where noting was probably as high as 80-90% of the day noted. On average, I'd say I sit an hour a day, but the consistency is bad. How Daniel managed to do what he did during med school, I have no idea. Personally, when I get into practice during school and cross the A&P and get into DN territory, life becomes hellish (this is the case at the moment). There is no way for me to know the intensity of re-observation for others, but some days I literally have to will my body to even move through the halls, since during times of more intense and around the clock practice, I feel like everything is meaningless and a trap. School work seems impossible during an existential crisis... how am I supposed to feel remotely worried about getting letters on a fancy piece of paper when I feel like everything is pulsing in a chaotic and violating way? When it's clear that none of the shit I learn in school is actually bringing me lasting happiness? I don't know how people can go through some of these stages and still be productive in life. My GPA probably looks like one of Daniel's graphs for the progress of insight, if you map it along my time at school practicing.