Daniel M. Ingram:
Well, some people cross the A&P, hit the Dark Night, get to Equanimity, and get Stream Entry. They are the very lucky ones, as this is extremely unusual.
The vast majority of people who cross the A&P and then subsequently hit the Dark Night won't get to Equanimity in any easily recognizable way the first (or even second or third...) time around, and will then fall back, and later on recross the A&P, hit the Dark Night again, and at some point will get to Equanimity.
The vast majority of those will not get stream entry after attaining Equanimity, but will again fall back and likely recross the A&P again at some point.
Walking up and down this territory again and again is very common before getting stream entry, as the lessons at each stage are subtle, not easily learned, and they must be learned sufficiently for stream entry to arise.
I personally crossed the A&P at least 6 times in daily life before going on retreats, and so had at least 6 Dark Night episodes during that time, wasn't sure I ever crossed to Equanimity during that period, and then on retreat crossed the A&P on my first two retreats and hit the Dark Night again, also without an obvious Equanimity phase, and then crossed the A&P on my third retreat, hit the Dark Night, got to Equanimity, retreat ended, and then I fell back into the Dark Night, and then finally, on my fourth retreat, crossed the A&P, hit the Dark Night, got to Equanimity, and finally landed Stream Entry. This is a very normal sort of general pattern, and I call it the Standard Pattern for this reason. Notice descriptions here of very similar things by many, many practitioners.
Helpful?
Daniel
I'll give another thought, just food for thought.
It seems to me that the stages and jhanas relate to attitudes that we have regarding things that are important to us or blockages. Like a learning process.
For example, lets say we have an negative attitude regarding money. So:
We change that attitude, the mind feels released and focus on how to get money and how good it is (AP).
We find that we cannot make that much money and we even loose some (DN).
We find that we did our best effort and gained some and loosed some (EQ).
Now, these stages apply the same to insight (3Cs), even more because insight really changes the way we look at things.
So, if you are at EQ in insight but something changes drastically in your life you instantly focus and go back to AP.
It seems that the mind doesn't keep "multitasking" like: Money = AP, Insight = EQ.
The other difference is that, for some people the same attitude is used for everything and some make compartments. And sure there is leakage.
So, the stages of insight are the same stages that we happen for everything and it has to do with how the mind copes with disruptional information.
And, for sure, insight is disruptional information.
Most of the problems occur because insight stages leak that state into a lot of important things in our life (not insight related), where we are in a different "stage".
Again, just food for thought.