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RE: Eric_G's Three or so

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
3/25/14 12:53 PM as a reply to Eric G.
Eric G:
Still a slight amount of agitation lately. Equanimous, but a little grumpy now and then. Haven't had a solid fruition in days, maybe this is some re-ob type stuff getting processed. I do notice some fluttering discontinuities when I get in the place where I would usually have a fruition, but these don't strike me as complete, and I wouldn't say I'm in review.

The sense that things are out of my control seems to be increasing slightly.

And, I got to play with baby goats the other day.


Sounds like you are making progress. What do you mean with solid fruition?

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
3/27/14 10:19 AM as a reply to John Power.
John Power:
What do you mean with solid fruition?

There seem to be some cessations that are somehow deep and complete enough to "do the damage" and some that are milder near misses that don't quite move you into review. Kind of like there's an electrical charge that has to be grounded, but you need solid contact to completely discharge it in a single moment, as opposed to some kind of slower partial leak of the charge.

I did have a relatively solid blip>flash>bliss wave last night. Also multiple appearances of 5th jhana in the background, something I used to get a lot but hadn't seen in a while. Perhaps because I had meditated consistently for a few days.

Maybe sorta kinda seeing the agitation and so forth as just happening, as part of the whole picture. Long way to go there. Baby steps.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
6/10/14 9:57 AM as a reply to Eric G.
I have had some more obvious cycling and fruitions since I've been meditating regularly again, up from basically nothing for a while.  It was interesting to re-read some of my journal from a few months ago and see that there has been a kind of sucky overlay for a few months.  I seem to be spending unusual amounts of time in the reobservation area.  I may be relatively okay with it, but it still sucks.  I'm speculating that it may be like the fractal model of the paths playing out like the progress of insight on a larger scale.  Although I've felt pretty well cooked for a while.

Seems to be an increasing amount of detachment.  Harder to generate false enthusiasm for things, I seem to just have to go with the flow, things either get done or they don't.

Also kind of random but I've been noticing as I come out of dreams there is a tremendous amount of pulsing, i.e. the heartrate seems to be way up in dreams.  Never really noticed that before.

Had a dream a couple of weeks ago where I was trying to repair some kind of old clothing, and it just kept falling apart.  It would seem the old clothes just aren't cutting it anymore.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
6/18/14 6:42 PM as a reply to Eric G.
The sucky overlay continues, although things seem to be looking up for the moment.

The other night I experienced I guess a rapid cycle.  It was unusual in that I was feeling okay, and then was kind of swept rather suddenly into some unpleasant stuff.  This was not psychological stuff, it felt very physical.  There was even a sourness, a literal taste of sourness in my mouth, and this kind of chemical unpleasantness kind of slowly moved thru my body, almost like body scanning or some sort of slow histamine release.  I experienced a little worry, as I often do in re-ob, that this suckness would persist.  But it passed and (big surprise) everything was okay.  But yeah, very physical, chemical.  That whole thing played out over a few minutes.

EDIT:  also a lot of surface of the skin stuff, kinda 3rd jhana-ish

I do notice cessations every now and then but they seem a bit weak.  Not quite the !KA-CHUNG!s that I used to get after 2nd path, but more like fast little .blip.s that I've tended to downplay in the past.  We'll see.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
6/18/14 5:49 PM as a reply to Eric G.
Eric G:

I do notice cessations every now and then but they seem a bit weak.  Not quite the !KA-CHUNG!s that I used to get after 2nd path, but more like fast little .blip.s that I've tended to downplay in the past.  We'll see.
Same here....The blips are very subtle/weak. I get next to no bliss wave at all. Just a nice calmness. Last Saturday I had three blips in one meditation all of them weak. Sometimes they seem much stronger like I'm completing a cycle vs a review, but totally not the Ka-chung of first path.
Good luck,
~D
Edit: The shifts between vip jhanas is much more smooth too...esp into 4th...used to feel like dropping 6 inches into stresslessness. Now it's hard to tell the transition points.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
6/19/14 4:57 PM as a reply to Eric G.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
6/25/14 2:31 PM as a reply to Dream Walker.
Came up into equanimity again yesterday, I feel like a shift of some kind happened.  Time will tell.  Basically, it's been a long time since equanimity felt fully, truly equanimous.  Something about months of underlying suck, kind of a long series of reobservation-heavy cycles, seems (for the moment) to have resolved a bit.  Feels much more stable than previous cycles, the underlying uncomfortable creepiness seems quite faded away and I feel more normal, more like my usual self.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
7/7/14 7:13 PM as a reply to Eric G.
Continuing to feel "better".  More equanimous with every cycle over the past couple of weeks.  Which is to say every few to maybe 48 hours as I see it.

I had been going with this model of cessations getting kind of "weaker" or faster, but last night I had a "strong" or deep or complete one last night.  Not nirodha, but a very clear blip - flash.  I suppose I do have a mild attachment to them happening that way (good luck with that, says to himself).

I assume I then went thru the cycle during the night as I had a fear dream.  Those dreams don't seem particularly scary any more (knock on wood), it's just that after the fact I recognize them as having scary or dangerous content.  I would say that is my most reliable pointer to the fear nana, the fear/danger dream.

It may be overfitting, but the model of something like the progress of insight/4 jhanas matching up with the paths seems increasingly reasonable to me.  1st path required (seemingly) a lot of effort, 2nd path had lots of joy and amazing experiences, then things quieted down and most recently it almost seemed like I was depressed.  Although I can't recall a tremendous amount of talk about late path depression, maybe Kenneth.  After the 2nd path dark night I was really unscathed by dukkha for a long time, and then in recent months it came back pretty consistently for a while.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
7/20/14 10:43 AM as a reply to Eric G.
Couple of observations.  I was thinking about my mom with Alzheimer's, a few years back when she was first starting to have memory problems I just getting into hardcore meditation and I described to her a little bit of being present and aware.  She seemed to be saying that indeed was her experience at the time, of just kind of being now.  Coming up to present I see her doing all these things which just seem to be based on feel.  The short term memory is gone so there is no immediate past and there's not a lot of cognition either.  I was seeing some similarities in terms of going with the underlying feeling and a certain amount of lack of discursive thought.

Another thing is that I seem to see conversations in a different light.  I tend to see them as games or meta-programs where people are just kind of running their programs, playing their recordings of their stories, and I see surprisingly little real awareness or interaction.  The most common game (not that I wasn't aware of this decades ago) is that one person seems to want to control or dominate the conversation, and just plays all their recordings while not really letting the other person talk.

Getting a lot out of the last section of Nirmala's book Nothing Personal.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
7/21/14 10:00 PM as a reply to Eric G.
A bit old, but I noticed your mention of what you thought was Nirodha Lite...

There are lots of unknown events or experiences, experiences where things blink or fade out, and the list of things they can be is moderately long, but the most common ones happen during the A&P, during Dissolution, and during the Formless Realms, and, if you have 5th, you very likely have chanced into 7th or 8th at points, as not everyone notices 6th for being what it is.

Real Nirodha is actually pretty rare, even on this forum. I can count the number of descriptions that I thought might actually be it on one hand. It is a relatively sudden and total power outage, like the cord has been pulled on the computer of your mind and the thing just shuts down totally, and I mean totally. Other things that can feel like that are really strong 8th and even some state shifts can feel like it happened briefly, and then Fruitions can do that also.

Just my two cents.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
7/24/14 8:13 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Daniel M. Ingram:
A bit old, but I noticed your mention of what you thought was Nirodha Lite...
Thanks, so maybe not NS.  I'm admittedly not the most technical of yogis, leaning towards "getting gone" and feeling/allowing everything, not cultivating jhanas but noticing them.  Relying on my notes the "strongest" experience of the mystery cessation came shortly after I had reached equanimity on 2nd path, and I was also starting to recognize 8th jhana around that time, and I was practicing a lot, relatively speaking.  One night I had 7 or 8 of these mystery cessations almost back to back.  The pulling the power cord analogy resonates, and then plug right back in.  I'm very familiar with "regular" cessations, maybe I was just experiencing those in a slightly slower form.  On rare occasions I have experienced some slowing of the visual field in particular, for example.  But yeah, it was like going unconscious and coming right back.  Muh muh muh my nirodha emoticon

There is another experience I referred to very briefly, it may be nothing, but it's kind of like I seem "gone" for a while.  There is mainly the sense of coming back from a very deep cessation with no memory of having been anywhere.  The Alzheimer's cessation.  No real perception of an entrance or duration, just the exit only.  It's also vaguely analogous to maybe when someone is lost in thought and then comes back, except in this case there is no lost in thought, just gone.  And again the sense of booting up from a complete cessation.

Both of these things I have only experienced while reclining and both of them are extremely rare for me.  No more than a dozen of each, while I would claim >1000 regular cessations.

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
9/1/14 2:40 PM as a reply to Eric G.
Still going thru a long, equanimous, but blah phase that doesn't seem quite as intensely depressing as it did a while back.

I suppose there is the possibility that I have been legitimately depressed, but I kind of doubt it.  I feel like I already worked that out of my system on multiple fronts, i.e. having gone thru tons of therapy back in the day and getting to a point, somewhere around 2nd path for instance, where I felt absolutely bulletproof wrt depression.  There is also the koan of who exactly would be depressed.

My sense is that there has indeed been a loss, the loss of self, the loss in that sense of my former life, all the little beliefs and egoic chasings of status and whatnot, attachment to self identity.  And the giving up of control.  So if depression is approximately some kind of loss, there is that.  Kind of a general apathy.  Things get done, but not as much of the planning ahead and getting ahead kind of thing, just what needs to be done, which is a change for me.

This article vaguely resonates 10 Reasons Why I Don’t Care Anymore and Neither Should You

RE: Eric_G's Three or so
Answer
10/2/14 4:39 PM as a reply to Eric G.
Seemed to have gotten thru that depressive phase into a more familiar equanimous phase.  I never really experienced such a long phase like that since well before I got into meditation.  If I map it as a dark night, I'm not sure it really fits, as it was way too long and there were way too many cycles permeated by this funk.  I tend to think of it as the after effects of really severely pulling the rug out from under oneself.

I'm not exactly where to place it, but for my own purposes if nothing else I wanted to just use the word fourth or 4th so it would be searchable.

It's a weird thing to talk about.  I certainly don't see an individual homunculus or anything, kind of hard to believe anyone would, but at the same time somewhere around 5 years ago I was definitely very attached to an idea or set of ideas about myself.  Looking back, it's kind of like the way you might see that an arrogant person's view of themselves is out of line with reality, except on multiple dimensions.  The cartoon me.

I don't have a super strong non-dual kind of experience on a day in and day out basis, but on rare occasions there is an extremely strong, decisive experience of everything just happening in a field of awareness.  And that strong version kind of leaks out weakly in everyday life.  I'm generally pretty aware, and I'm aware that other "normal" people clearly often aren't.  And even if I'm not what I would call aware in the sense of an open, full awareness I don't seem to be overly attached to the thoughtstreams that I may be temporarily focused on.

I have been doing some formal meditation lately, it usually ends up in the 30-60 minute range.  I may require a few minutes to get to an 8th jhana range, but sometimes if I am well practiced I may jump straight to 8th.  I don't consider these hard jhanas at all.  Other times I may notice 4th nana but more typically I may start out around equanimity or so.  Lately some cessations have been showing up very quickly, as soon as I close my eyes to meditate or lie down to sleep.