<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0"> <channel> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_thread?p_l_id=&amp;threadId=3139960</link> <description>RE: Richard's insight practice</description> <pubDate>Sun, 19 Oct 2014 01:41:08 GMT</pubDate> <dc:date>2014-10-19T01:41:08Z</dc:date> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602963</link> <description>Does it have to though?  Wanting something badly can be seen through as much as anything else. Just let yourself be excited the same way you let your mind wander or you let your emotions arise and pass. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/closed_eyes.gif" &gt;</description> <pubDate>Sat, 11 Oct 2014 16:59:35 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602963</guid> <dc:creator>Not Tao</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-11T16:59:35Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602785</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Dream Walker:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Richard Zen:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Last night I was doing some noting and I reduced the verbal note from outloud down to mental and then just to consistent bare awareness (because I felt it allowed more detail). I started noticing that my mind was going into a dream like state (but still wide awake) and there were several bits of mental talking from different people with separate identities. A lot of it was incoherent but I could tell it had some kind of affect and without that kind of mindfulness it&amp;#039;s running in the background. I&amp;#039;m thinking I may have tapped into an area where views are stored from different people I&amp;#039;ve met. Whatever mental conditioning a person has is deep inside. It was the deepest not-self experience I&amp;#039;ve had so far because the sense of agent disappeared and every experience, movement and intention became not-self. I&amp;#039;ll try to see if I can do this for more than a few minutes. This may be the first time I could actually note a wandering mind without feeling totally lost in it. I&amp;#039;m eager to see what more can come from bare awareness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I think Daniel&amp;#039;s instructions in MCTB says it right in that if there&amp;#039;s distractions there should be MORE noting during this time. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;during this time. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;The dream like state you describe where thinking takes the backseat is what happens to me right before popping out of that state into the three moments leading to cessation. I do not do any noting at this stage of high eq....I dont &amp;#034;do&amp;#034; anything but let it happen. Maybe make a resolution and see what happens.&lt;br /&gt;good luck,&lt;br /&gt;~D&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thanks for the tips.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Ahh the elusive cessation. I have to be careful because I wanted it so badly before and that&amp;#039;s exactly what makes sure you don&amp;#039;t get it. </description> <pubDate>Sat, 11 Oct 2014 05:59:06 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602785</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-11T05:59:06Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602764</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Richard Zen:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Last night I was doing some noting and I reduced the verbal note from outloud down to mental and then just to consistent bare awareness (because I felt it allowed more detail). I started noticing that my mind was going into a dream like state (but still wide awake) and there were several bits of mental talking from different people with separate identities. A lot of it was incoherent but I could tell it had some kind of affect and without that kind of mindfulness it&amp;#039;s running in the background. I&amp;#039;m thinking I may have tapped into an area where views are stored from different people I&amp;#039;ve met. Whatever mental conditioning a person has is deep inside. It was the deepest not-self experience I&amp;#039;ve had so far because the sense of agent disappeared and every experience, movement and intention became not-self. I&amp;#039;ll try to see if I can do this for more than a few minutes. This may be the first time I could actually note a wandering mind without feeling totally lost in it. I&amp;#039;m eager to see what more can come from bare awareness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I think Daniel&amp;#039;s instructions in MCTB says it right in that if there&amp;#039;s distractions there should be MORE noting during this time. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;during this time. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;The dream like state you describe where thinking takes the backseat is what happens to me right before popping out of that state into the three moments leading to cessation. I do not do any noting at this stage of high eq....I dont &amp;#034;do&amp;#034; anything but let it happen. Maybe make a resolution and see what happens.&lt;br /&gt;good luck,&lt;br /&gt;~D</description> <pubDate>Sat, 11 Oct 2014 04:40:20 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602764</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-11T04:40:20Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602700</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;katy steger:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;I had little preparation due to other committments and I had too much content but I have found I have a sense of humor and descriptive quality with my wording that got the Toastmasters people less bored. Of course all the praise leads to serotonin and it gets to your head but it was quite healthy and I can disregard it when I compared my current skills to what is expected in business environments that are often demanding and hypercritical. Having a cheering section provides that extra motivation to stick your neck out.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This is great to read, especially as you&amp;#039;ve given the community some great summaries of &amp;#034;good chemistry&amp;#034;, like here:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;[url=]&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;dharmaoverground&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;web&amp;#x2f;guest&amp;#x2f;discussion&amp;#x2f;-&amp;#x2f;message_boards&amp;#x2f;message&amp;#x2f;4539340&amp;#x3b;jsessionid&amp;#x3d;62105ACD8C9C592F98A68DFFA69846B4&amp;#x3f;doAsUserId&amp;#x3d;U4FYRpmIICQ&amp;#x25;3D&amp;#x25;2F-&amp;#x25;2Fmessage_boards&amp;#x25;2Fmessage&amp;#x25;2F10847&amp;#x25;2F-&amp;#x25;2Fmessage_boards&amp;#x25;2Fmessage&amp;#x25;2F95028"&gt;http://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/4539340;jsessionid=62105ACD8C9C592F98A68DFFA69846B4?doAsUserId=U4FYRpmIICQ%3D%2F-%2Fmessage_boards%2Fmessage%2F10847%2F-%2Fmessage_boards%2Fmessage%2F95028&lt;/a&gt;[url=]&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Yeah I noticed that. I find wisdom faster than I can apply it but it&amp;#039;s sinking in at whatever pace it&amp;#039;s going to LOL!</description> <pubDate>Sat, 11 Oct 2014 01:18:25 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602700</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-11T01:18:25Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602676</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;I had little preparation due to other committments and I had too much content but I have found I have a sense of humor and descriptive quality with my wording that got the Toastmasters people less bored. Of course all the praise leads to serotonin and it gets to your head but it was quite healthy and I can disregard it when I compared my current skills to what is expected in business environments that are often demanding and hypercritical. Having a cheering section provides that extra motivation to stick your neck out.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This is great to read, especially as you&amp;#039;ve given the community some great summaries of &amp;#034;good chemistry&amp;#034;, like here:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;[url=]&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;dharmaoverground&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;web&amp;#x2f;guest&amp;#x2f;discussion&amp;#x2f;-&amp;#x2f;message_boards&amp;#x2f;message&amp;#x2f;4539340&amp;#x3b;jsessionid&amp;#x3d;62105ACD8C9C592F98A68DFFA69846B4&amp;#x3f;doAsUserId&amp;#x3d;U4FYRpmIICQ&amp;#x25;3D&amp;#x25;2F-&amp;#x25;2Fmessage_boards&amp;#x25;2Fmessage&amp;#x25;2F10847&amp;#x25;2F-&amp;#x25;2Fmessage_boards&amp;#x25;2Fmessage&amp;#x25;2F95028"&gt;http://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/4539340;jsessionid=62105ACD8C9C592F98A68DFFA69846B4?doAsUserId=U4FYRpmIICQ%3D%2F-%2Fmessage_boards%2Fmessage%2F10847%2F-%2Fmessage_boards%2Fmessage%2F95028&lt;/a&gt;[url=]</description> <pubDate>Sat, 11 Oct 2014 00:21:40 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602676</guid> <dc:creator>katy steger</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-11T00:21:40Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602598</link> <description>Now that I&amp;#039;m making myself busy and making committments, those actions have made it hard to return to procrastination habits and indifference. I recently joined Toastmasters and did my first ice-breaker speech. The meditation practice has made the nervousness much less, yet nervousness is still there at the beginning of a speech. I think it&amp;#039;s pretty obvious I have plenty of emotions but they don&amp;#039;t seem to hurt much at all. Considering I find the Buddhist texts that believe in eliminating emotions quite scary then I think I&amp;#039;ve found a happy medium. If you like what you&amp;#039;re talking about then you get excited to continue and it all looks natural.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I had little preparation due to other committments and I had too much content but I have found I have a sense of humor and descriptive quality with my wording that got the Toastmasters people less bored. Of course all the praise leads to serotonin and it gets to your head but it was quite healthy and I can disregard it when I compared my current skills to what is expected in business environments that are often demanding and hypercritical. Having a cheering section provides that extra motivation to stick your neck out.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve also started to talk to professionals to get more information on my career path by creating coffee meetings and I&amp;#039;ve gotten more information about how things are and challenged some negative beliefs that wouldn&amp;#039;t have been challenged if I stayed introverted. Stepping into that extroverted world is a breath of fresh air. More dopamine and serotonin in the right contexts is healthy because it&amp;#039;s guilt free and sends you in the right direction.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;When going against preferences the results of that are similar to cognitive therapy in that the rewards for going against preferences create new and better preferences/desires. There are times where I relax and just meditate to replace time I might waste online or watching TV or some other pointless endeavour.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 10 Oct 2014 22:01:53 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5602598</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-10T22:01:53Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5600526</link> <description>Last night I was doing some noting and I reduced the verbal note from outloud down to mental and then just to consistent bare awareness (because I felt it allowed more detail). I started noticing that my mind was going into a dream like state (but still wide awake) and there were several bits of mental talking from different people with separate identities. A lot of it was incoherent but I could tell it had some kind of affect and without that kind of mindfulness it&amp;#039;s running in the background. I&amp;#039;m thinking I may have tapped into an area where views are stored from different people I&amp;#039;ve met. Whatever mental conditioning a person has is deep inside. It was the deepest not-self experience I&amp;#039;ve had so far because the sense of agent disappeared and every experience, movement and intention became not-self. I&amp;#039;ll try to see if I can do this for more than a few minutes. This may be the first time I could actually note a wandering mind without feeling totally lost in it. I&amp;#039;m eager to see what more can come from bare awareness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I think Daniel&amp;#039;s instructions in MCTB says it right in that if there&amp;#039;s distractions there should be MORE noting during this time. Maybe if there&amp;#039;s a sensation of any kind it has to be noted consistently enough to be seen for what it is and there seems to be so much embedded in consciousness when you take a deeper look. It also challenges some of the perceptions that sitting down is doing nothing when in fact the mind is constantly doing something.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2014 13:51:57 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5600526</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-07T13:51:57Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5597084</link> <description>Okay now that I think I&amp;#039;m gaining much more control I&amp;#039;ve going to push myself everyday to go against useless habits and leave them behind for good. If there&amp;#039;s a&lt;strong&gt; preference &lt;/strong&gt;I&amp;#039;m going to think about opportunities to do differently. The goal is to refrain from those habits and to do nothing at the minimum (just to avoid doing the wrong thing) and ideally do more work and expand myself.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The benefit of getting busy will also create a momentum to not fall into a quick sand of complacency and procrastination. The thread won&amp;#039;t be about perfectionism but a record of pushing against complacency, and developing renunciation. The goal will be to have some record keeping of the power of habits and aversion. If any meditative discoveries are made they will be included.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2014 19:45:21 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5597084</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-03T19:45:21Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5594512</link> <description>I&amp;#039;ve noticed with noting intentions that much of the habit that arises is rehearsing. After teaching dharma to so many people (including in imagination) the habit is really strong. There&amp;#039;s embedded in the rehearsing lots of telling what to do for people that I don&amp;#039;t like  &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt; </description> <pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2014 14:15:17 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5594512</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-30T14:15:17Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5592895</link> <description>It&amp;#039;s pretty clear now the difference between intentions that are habitual vs. intentions that go against preferences. Intentions that are habitual are so fast (you can see this when noting while driving or doing any automatic work) that they look like they arise at the same speed as actions. The 1 second notes are so slow that many actions are already complete before you can note intentions. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/laugh.gif" &gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Any movements to adjust your seating, scratch an itch are clearly happening on their own and without consistent mindfulness the habits perniciously act own their own. Intentions are an &amp;#034;about to&amp;#034; feeling when you have to deliberate and push against your preferences. If it&amp;#039;s within your preferences it quickly acts, if you don&amp;#039;t stay present consistently and relax the intention/action.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;For the most part my equanimity is still improving. Feeling sorry for myself continues to release faster and faster. Everything just appears to be in a space of knowing (which sometimes feels very fabricated.) Consciousness as a separate entity is gone. Consciousness to me is just whatever is happening. It used to feel like consciousness had a location and it&amp;#039;s clear it doesn&amp;#039;t.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thoughts aren&amp;#039;t a problem precisely because if you don&amp;#039;t treat them as a problem then they don&amp;#039;t hurt at all. This is the case even if you&amp;#039;re not paying attention but that is likely due to past periods of mindfulness practice. Paying attention to thinking will make the thinking (even negative thinking) seem harmless. Use metaphors of the ocean and waves for thinking and consciousness and view them as an inseparable part of the mind. As soon as I think &amp;#034;this shouldn&amp;#039;t be there&amp;#034;, &amp;#034;this is deficient in some way&amp;#034; the aversion creeps up.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve also noticed when noticing bare attention that thinking can move more freely but when noting the thinking subsides. For practical reasons we need to switch from one to another being careful that bare attention doesn&amp;#039;t turn into inattention.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;76&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;8932&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/76/talk/8932/&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 13:00:33 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5592895</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-26T13:00:33Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5586661</link> <description>For noting throughout the day I returned to the Mahamudra Moonlight book I read years ago.  I&amp;#039;m pretty sure I didn&amp;#039;t understand it then but it&amp;#039;s much more understandable now.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The complexity in these books can be difficult to do in practice so I tried to simplify the 4 yogas down:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;1. &lt;strong&gt;Welcome all experiences (including obstacles)&lt;/strong&gt; - This seems to relax the body instantly when it&amp;#039;s tried.  This is best used when you put yourself in situations that will test your equanimity. Consistency in mindfulness needs to be there for it to work. Returning to the breath time and time again can restart the process.&lt;br /&gt;2. &lt;strong&gt;Don&amp;#039;t examine the meditation&lt;/strong&gt; - This keeps you noting and makes the consistency improve.  There&amp;#039;s naturally less self-referencing which can only be of help.&lt;br /&gt;3. &lt;strong&gt;Don&amp;#039;t look at experiences as deficient&lt;/strong&gt; - If you&amp;#039;re welcoming the experience you need to feel it&amp;#039;s good enough (especially if it&amp;#039;s a difficult situation).&lt;br /&gt;4. &lt;strong&gt;There is no inherent meditator or meditation&lt;/strong&gt; - When the above steps are followed this step is more inferred because it feels like this. Also the first step is all that&amp;#039;s needed and the steps afterward simply support it further when the mind goes off.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The obstacle I introduced myself to is Toastmasters.  My first meeting was quite good (it&amp;#039;s a supportive environment) but It&amp;#039;ll be challenging public speaking fears.  You can see the reactive embarassed looks on people&amp;#039;s faces when they get up there. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/smile.gif" &gt;  The practice is meaningless unless it&amp;#039;s used in new, uncomfortable, challenging situations.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I made a mnemonic to remember the steps which when repeated often can condition the right habit so you eventually don&amp;#039;t need the mnemonic anymore.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The Buddha &lt;strong&gt;welcomed&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;examiner&lt;/strong&gt; and found no &lt;strong&gt;deficiency&lt;/strong&gt; in his/her &lt;strong&gt;meditation.&lt;/strong&gt;</description> <pubDate>Fri, 19 Sep 2014 14:48:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5586661</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-19T14:48:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5585825</link> <description>The past month has been difficult in dealing with aversion.  It&amp;#039;s like a brick wall at times even though it doesn&amp;#039;t hurt much at all anymore.  Using Rob Burbea&amp;#039;s noting strategy I can see why. Perception and consciousness are essentially the same and perception affects clinging.  I&amp;#039;m noting now a little deeper and after a couple of hours of meditation I&amp;#039;m noting more detail.  When arisings and passings do their thing towards the mirror of knowing I start noting &amp;#034;space&amp;#034; and everything else &amp;#034;perception&amp;#034;.  A couple of hours doesn&amp;#039;t seem like enough so I&amp;#039;ll have to take more time.  The benefit of this noting (more bare awareness than noting) is that perceptions do start to fade a bit and 3D subject/object experience at times goes into 2D which creates more relief.  I&amp;#039;m not sure how successful this will be but I&amp;#039;ll just keep at it.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2014 23:55:17 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5585825</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-17T23:55:17Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5571782</link> <description>I&amp;#039;ve been returning to An Eternal Now&amp;#039;s e-book and I can tell I didn&amp;#039;t really understand it the first time I read it.  It makes more sense now that I discovered other explanations from countless other sources so I can understand what he means. LOL! I feel that he&amp;#039;s correct that the neti, neti practice does create benefits but can create a dissassociated &amp;#034;noter&amp;#034; that is noting.  Letting go of aversion to a wandering mind is what helped a lot and his description I think is even better.  It&amp;#039;s more like everything is already letting go and that &amp;#034;trying to let go&amp;#034; is more clinging.  This brings that clarity I&amp;#039;ve seen in the past but I notice more when I&amp;#039;m seeing things as they are WITH the thinking and the intention to pay attention.  Noting is intending to pay attention and if those activities are excluded you can&amp;#039;t see any further.  As you would expect the repressed material (including some really angry violent revenge stuff) comes out but as usual I&amp;#039;m not acting on it and choosing to let go is more like not adding to it or not adding an aversion before letting go happens.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;While running I realized that I&amp;#039;ve been neglecting vedana again and I think I have been for about a year now.  While the metta practice is (slowly) helpful I need to be more aware of habitual aversion (that doesn&amp;#039;t hurt much but is still making choices for me) and practice taking actions that are needed but aren&amp;#039;t preferences.  This is the only way to change habits.  You can use whatever techniques to make things fun but there is always going to be a natural resistance in the brain to pushing yourself.  I didn&amp;#039;t run all that much this summer and now that I&amp;#039;m doing it again I can feel the resistance.  By just noting &amp;#034;unpleasant&amp;#034; and to keep going eventually the body lets go of the aversion and you continue until you actually are tired.  The first couple of kilometres seemed like such a drag and after a couple more kilometres I wasn&amp;#039;t thinking about the aversion because it was gone. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Seeing emptiness in all experiences still means the habits return and I like attending to the breath (but without huge force).  It&amp;#039;s more like Right Effort towards the breath.  </description> <pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2014 03:28:36 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5571782</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-22T03:28:36Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5570520</link> <description>Your consistency of practice is a good model for me.   I admire also how you seem to be keeping your practice a &amp;#034;hard simple&amp;#034; way.   I used to be a weight lifter, so I can appreciate that  :-))&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;When I get stuck on a thought or scene or emotion (the other day I got stuck on love and joy) I will jog it loose by employing the 6-directions which I learned from some ancient practice; or if a thought I will repeat that thought and let the shift occur until nothing further occurs. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I agree about the automaticity of the mind; however conscious creative visualization helps me to do what my mind is doing compulsively and doing it self-determinedly, consciously.  I select an importance my mind is popping up with.  Very zen, eh!   I&amp;#039;m pretty sure you know this :-))  You seem to me like one who is aware of how one can get lost in identification with one&amp;#039;s mind/thoughts/emotions.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;best wishes for you and your practice,&lt;br /&gt;colleen&lt;br /&gt; </description> <pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2014 19:33:38 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5570520</guid> <dc:creator>Colleen Karalee Peltomaa</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-18T19:33:38Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5570494</link> <description>It&amp;#039;s pretty clear that thoughts just arise on their own.  There&amp;#039;s no do-er-ship involved.  I mediated for three hours just following the breath and it was interrupted by thought after thought after thought.  I treated the thoughts with equanimity and let them drop on their own.  Each time it dropped samadhi would re-engage.  Sometimes the samadhi doesn&amp;#039;t re-engage so quickly and that&amp;#039;s due to angry thoughts, but I just continue on regardless.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2014 17:51:06 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5570494</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-18T17:51:06Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5570335</link> <description>Okay so after my vulnerable post I&amp;#039;ve since deleted I decided to focus on the cessation of experience more and especially looking at thoughts.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;talks&amp;#x2f;audio_player&amp;#x2f;179&amp;#x2f;10999&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/talks/audio_player/179/10999.html&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;talks&amp;#x2f;audio_player&amp;#x2f;186&amp;#x2f;3239&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/talks/audio_player/186/3239.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;talks&amp;#x2f;audio_player&amp;#x2f;179&amp;#x2f;10999&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2014 03:13:28 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5570335</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-18T03:13:28Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5569085</link> <description>Wow!  You could afford liquor?  Doing good, Richard, and I see everything working out perfectly for you.  &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt;</description> <pubDate>Thu, 14 Aug 2014 22:28:11 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5569085</guid> <dc:creator>Colleen Karalee Peltomaa</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-14T22:28:11Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5565299</link> <description>With letting go I&amp;#039;m reminded of Nagarjuna&amp;#039;s examination of time.  When we let go a lot of the thoughts that are let go of have to do with the past or the future.  Even the present is gone very quickly.&lt;em&gt;If the present and the future&lt;br /&gt;Depend on the past,&lt;br /&gt;Then the present and the future&lt;br /&gt;Would have existed in the past.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If the present and future&lt;br /&gt;Did not exist there,&lt;br /&gt;How could the present and the&lt;br /&gt;Future be dependent on it?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Without depending on the past,&lt;br /&gt;Neither of the two could be established.&lt;br /&gt;Therefore neither the present nor&lt;br /&gt;The future could exist.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;By this very method, without substitution,&lt;br /&gt;The remaining two; as well as …&lt;br /&gt;Superior, inferior, average, etc.; and&lt;br /&gt;Unity, etc., should be understood.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A nonenduring time is not grasped&lt;br /&gt;Nothing one could grasp as time&lt;br /&gt;Could exist as enduring.&lt;br /&gt;If time is not grasped, how it is known?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If time depends on a entity&lt;br /&gt;Then without an entity how could time exist?&lt;br /&gt;Since there are no entities at all,&lt;br /&gt;How could time exist?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description> <pubDate>Thu, 07 Aug 2014 03:31:22 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5565299</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-07T03:31:22Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5564514</link> <description>While walking near the river I tried to remember what I was like last year and it&amp;#039;s getting better.  When letting go in the past there was an intention to look for a mirror awareness at the back of the head even if I wasn&amp;#039;t entirely aware this was happening.  Now when I let go there&amp;#039;s no need to search for anything.  The beautiful awareness is already operating.  I think not indulging preferences for extended periods of time helps one see how intentions can be like sensations and as Rob Burbea points out that any intention to pay attention to an object can have some tanha.  Letting go is all that seems to be needed.  This is a far cry from the days I was noting the shit out of everything but with too much clinging to results and trying to find &amp;#034;stream entry&amp;#034; and creating a &amp;#034;noter&amp;#034; that&amp;#039;s noting.  It&amp;#039;s much less of a quest now.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Right now it&amp;#039;s mostly smooth with some little bits of clinging here and there.  As I continue to let go without doing anything more it will smooth out further.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 05 Aug 2014 03:02:30 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5564514</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-05T03:02:30Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5564399</link> <description>A good test for a &amp;#034;no preferences&amp;#034; practice is to play a competitive video game where the habit is to feel aversion when losing and feeling conceited when winning.  Try not reacting either way.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 04 Aug 2014 19:57:22 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5564399</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-04T19:57:22Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5564074</link> <description>In working with intentions it&amp;#039;s pretty clear why they are so repetitive and difficult to deal with is because they are underpinned by preferences.  I hear others talking about equanimity towards formations, or specific neutrality towards everything etc. Being aware of preferences and letting them go you can see some of the hidden clinging that was operating all the time.  It&amp;#039;s okay to have preferences but letting go of the hold of preferences brings relief.  If it feels a little wrong to let go of a hold on preferences then the clinging can be seen right there.  Practicing this way the sense of self sinks a little further.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;39&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;2043&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/39/talk/2043/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;talks&amp;#x2f;audio_player&amp;#x2f;96&amp;#x2f;1368&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Sun, 03 Aug 2014 23:00:27 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5564074</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-03T23:00:27Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5560977</link> <description>The no-self freedom makes one just accept things as they are.  It feels like you&amp;#039;re just normal without being a meditator but you&amp;#039;re a version of you that has less stress.  I had many glimpses of this in the past but until you see more detail (especially &lt;strong&gt;intentions&lt;/strong&gt;) the brain likes to cling to what is not seen throughly.  Now that I have a lot more freedom it&amp;#039;s time to DO something with it.  I&amp;#039;ve decided not to abandon concentration practices completely like some do because dealing with old conditioning requires new conditioning.  Metta is something that I&amp;#039;ve practiced little with and even doing basic metta practices during the day (without absorption) it can clear the mind of &amp;#034;enemies&amp;#034;.  There&amp;#039;s a lot more that can be done with the practice to seep into habitual thinking.   &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m starting to look for new friends which is a good sign for an introvert like me and helps to bring more perspectives in your life.  Mental judgments happen still (feeling that others are superior to oneself) but there&amp;#039;s more acceptance because socializing is just another skill.  Also when choosing who to spend time around it necessary to reject and be rejected again and again to get better at this skill and not waste time with people who aren&amp;#039;t a good fit.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaoverground&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;web&amp;#x2f;guest&amp;#x2f;discussion&amp;#x2f;-&amp;#x2f;message_boards&amp;#x2f;message&amp;#x2f;5556399"&gt;http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5556399&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1hr Metta practice:&lt;/strong&gt;  I followed Finch&amp;#039;s instructions and they help.  I flipped easily between the 1st two jhanas simply by focusing on just myself.  By switching from &amp;#034;May I be happy&amp;#034; to remembering a happy memory to &amp;#034;May this body be happy&amp;#034; it&amp;#039;s possible to fall into jhana quite easily.  There&amp;#039;s less strain now that I don&amp;#039;t cling to jhanas.  There&amp;#039;s an echo in my mind to when I did cling to them and the brain immediately looks at that as danger and the mind quiets down which naturally helps the jhana.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Lots of metta to all those teachers, books, advanced practitioners who helped when I got stuck.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 26 Jul 2014 16:52:45 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5560977</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-26T16:52:45Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5559679</link> <description>Hello Richard, just wanted to thank you for the links you shared with me about dependent arising. I&amp;#039;ve only listened to John Peacock&amp;#039;s talk so far. I found very helpful and clear. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Have a nice day,&lt;br /&gt;Andreas</description> <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2014 19:03:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5559679</guid> <dc:creator>Andreas Thef</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-23T19:03:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5559616</link> <description>The consistent mindfulness still feels slightly harsh so I&amp;#039;ve gone back to the Clarifying the natural State instructions and the mindfulness is getting smoother again and even more smooth when I use the below instructions from Lama Kong Ka.  I can start seeing in Daniel&amp;#039;s instructions on seeing everything that is considered a self and how both instructions point in different ways to the same thing so there&amp;#039;s a smoothness from a lack of aversion to what&amp;#039;s happening.  Things are causal or happen on their own.   &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m still working with intentions and trying to notice and feel them.  This talk goes into more detail:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;audiodharma&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;talks&amp;#x2f;audio_player&amp;#x2f;4927&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;http://www.audiodharma.org/talks/audio_player/4927.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Some notes from Maria:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Intention is about motivation.  Eg. Baking a cake for someone to enjoy vs. Showing off.&lt;br /&gt;Using intentions to guide conditions is better than just reacting with default intentions.&lt;br /&gt;Default intentions “I want what I like and I don’t want what I don’t like”.&lt;br /&gt;Motivations determine whether intentions are skillful or unskillful.&lt;br /&gt;Intentions are ethically neutral but motivations are not ethically neutral.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Feel the energy to move your hand.  That is your intention.  The motivation to move your hand or not move your hand is the energy for the action.  Volition is also in the continuing of the action.  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Checking your intentions allows you to stop them.  What you think will be the inclination of the mind.  Letting go of clinging is renunciation (a form of intention).  Make intentions based on what is skillful instead of self-measurement.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Align intentions with deep values. When purposefully cultivating intentions you can at a later time check into your intentions as you go along with your day and have ready made intentions to remind yourself of.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If the intention is good then when there are mistakes there will be less self blame.  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;By paying attention to motivation, intentions, action, &lt;strong&gt;and the continuance of the action&lt;/strong&gt; I can see how incredibly quick they are, because they feel one and the same.   Since any Right Effort movement is exercising intention then you can see how intentions are all over the place and habitual intentions have to be countered by the intention to pay attention. Eg. Adjusting intentions to return to the breath.  When paying attention is happening (hopefully as often as possible) this time should not be wasted and the skillful intentions and actions should be put in place.  More paying attention = more freedom. This also means that being tired of pay attention can reduce your freedom from old habits.  By developing better habits when there is more attention hopefully when someone is tired their good habits will kick in.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Seeing things happening on their own feels even more true when trying Lama Kong Pa&amp;#039;s instructions.  It&amp;#039;s like I can notice more of the sensations when I pursue &amp;#034;naturalness&amp;#034;.  I really understand now how there&amp;#039;s no self in the experiential level and because of how quiet, peaceful (yet groundbreaking) it&amp;#039;s convincing.  I can also see how old habits still have to be dealt with but there&amp;#039;s no need to make that project a &amp;#034;self&amp;#034; project full of the typical judgment and aversion.  Just Do, Observe, and Correct intentions. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt;  I don&amp;#039;t know if I fully understand intention in an experiential level yet but this combination is working.  I&amp;#039;ll know if I can follow Kong Pa&amp;#039;s instructions to deliberately cultivate desire and aversion and not act on them but just observe their nature.  It&amp;#039;s clear to me now that having my senses knocked out in classical stream-entry is not necessary to see and understand non-inherency.  Everything happens as causes and conditions and seeing this in more clarity can allow cultivating better intentions/actions/habits.  Because of tiredness and ignorance there will be errors and falling off the wagon but now that isn&amp;#039;t a self-judgment anymore.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Lama Kong Pa&amp;#039;s instructions point directly but it&amp;#039;s very subtle:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="https&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;google&amp;#x2e;ca&amp;#x2f;url&amp;#x3f;sa&amp;#x3d;t&amp;#x26;rct&amp;#x3d;j&amp;#x26;q&amp;#x3d;&amp;#x26;esrc&amp;#x3d;s&amp;#x26;source&amp;#x3d;web&amp;#x26;cd&amp;#x3d;1&amp;#x26;cad&amp;#x3d;rja&amp;#x26;uact&amp;#x3d;8&amp;#x26;ved&amp;#x3d;0CB4QFjAA&amp;#x26;url&amp;#x3d;http&amp;#x25;3A&amp;#x25;2F&amp;#x25;2Fwww&amp;#x2e;abuddhistlibrary&amp;#x2e;com&amp;#x25;2FBuddhism&amp;#x25;2FA&amp;#x25;2520-&amp;#x25;2520Tibetan&amp;#x25;2520Buddhism&amp;#x25;2FSubjects&amp;#x25;2FWisdom&amp;#x25;2FMahamudra&amp;#x25;2FThe&amp;#x25;2520Essentials&amp;#x25;2520of&amp;#x25;2520Mahamudra&amp;#x25;2520Practice&amp;#x25;2FThe&amp;#x25;2520Essentials&amp;#x25;2520of&amp;#x25;2520Mahamudra&amp;#x25;2520Practice&amp;#x2e;rtf&amp;#x26;ei&amp;#x3d;5OnPU4XJO4eIjALA9oDIBA&amp;#x26;usg&amp;#x3d;AFQjCNESyy3ec9YoGAgB7iUrnTfxE5uRzw&amp;#x26;sig2&amp;#x3d;89VkM1gKURadVFqzweK5Xw"&gt;https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=0CB4QFjAA&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.abuddhistlibrary.com%2FBuddhism%2FA%2520-%2520Tibetan%2520Buddhism%2FSubjects%2FWisdom%2FMahamudra%2FThe%2520Essentials%2520of%2520Mahamudra%2520Practice%2FThe%2520Essentials%2520of%2520Mahamudra%2520Practice.rtf&amp;amp;ei=5OnPU4XJO4eIjALA9oDIBA&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNESyy3ec9YoGAgB7iUrnTfxE5uRzw&amp;amp;sig2=89VkM1gKURadVFqzweK5Xw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&amp;#039;Equilibrium&amp;#039; means to balance body, mouth, and mind.&lt;br /&gt;The Mahamudra way of balancing the body is to loosen it, &lt;br /&gt;of balancing the mouth is to slow down the breathing, &lt;br /&gt;and of balancing the mind is not to cling to and rely on anything.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;This is the supreme way to tame the body, breath ,&lt;br /&gt;and mind.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034; &amp;#039;Relaxation&amp;#039; means to loosen the mind, to let everything go, to strip off all ideas and thoughts.  When one&amp;#039;s whole body and mind become loose, one can, without effort, remain in the natural state, which is intrinsically non-dis- criminative and yet without distractions.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034; &amp;#039;Naturalness&amp;#039; means not &amp;#039;taking&amp;#039; or &amp;#039;leaving&amp;#039; anything:&lt;br /&gt;in other words the yogi does not make the slightest effort of any kind.  He lets the senses and mind stop or flow by themselves without assisting or restricting them.  &lt;br /&gt;To practice naturalness is to make no effort and be spontaneous.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;The above can be summarized thus:&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;  &lt;strong&gt; The essence of equilibrium is not to cling.&lt;br /&gt;   The essence of relaxation is not to hold.&lt;br /&gt;   The essence of naturalness is to make no effort.&amp;#034;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;THE  ERRORS  IN  MAHAMUDRA  PRACTICE&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&amp;#034;(1) If one&amp;#039;s Mahamudra practice is confined soley to the effort of stabilizing the mind, the activities of all one&amp;#039;s six consciousnesses will be halted, or dimmed.  This is called a &amp;#039;frozen ice&amp;#039; type of practice, and is a very harmful tendency in Mahamudra meditation which must be avoided.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;(2) He who neglects the clear &amp;#039;Awareness&amp;#039; but abides soley in Non-distinction will see or hear nothing when confronted with sights, sounds, smells, and touches. . . This is an error due to having become sluggish.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;(3) When the last thought has gone, and the next one has not come, this immediate, present moment is a very wonderful thing if one can abide therein; but, if he does so without clear awareness, he still falls into the error of sluggishness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;(4) he who can hold the bright Awareness but thinks there is nothing more to Mahamudra also falls into error.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;(5) If one only cultivates &amp;#039;Blissfulness,&amp;#039; &amp;#039;Illumination,&amp;#039; and Non-distinction&amp;#039; without practicing &amp;#039;penetrating-observation-into-the-mind,&amp;#039; it still cannot be considered as the correct Mahamudra practice.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;(6) He who develops a dislike to manifestation os most likely to have gone astray.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;(7) He who concentrates on his Awareness and cultivates the illuminating-void Self-mind &lt;strong&gt;[I&amp;#039;m assuming non-inherency]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is said to practice Mahamudra correctly.  However, this &amp;#039;concentration- effort&amp;#039; has a tendency to hinder that spontaneity and freedom of spirit, without which it is difficut to unfold the vast and liberating Mind.  One should therefore never forget to practice the &amp;#039;looseness,&amp;#039; &amp;#039;vastness,&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;spontaneity.&amp;#039;&amp;#034;&lt;br /&gt;*   *   *   &lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;What, then, is the correct Mahamudra practice?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;[Answer:] The ordinary mind [Tib.: Thal.Ma.Ces.Pa] is itself the correct practice.  That is to say, to let the ordinary mind remain in its own natural state.  If to this mind one adds or subtracts anything, &lt;strong&gt;it is then not the ordinary mind but the so-called &amp;#039;mind-object&amp;#039;&lt;/strong&gt; [Tib.: Yul.]. &lt;strong&gt;To make not the slightest intention and effort to practice, and yet to not be distracted for a single moment, is to practice the natural mind correctly.&lt;/strong&gt;  Therefore, as long as you can keep your Self-awareness, no matter what you do, you are still practicing Mahamudra.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description> <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2014 17:07:32 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5559616</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-23T17:07:32Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5559098</link> <description>A couple of recent dharma talks that I really needed.  They emphasize the need for consistent mindfulness and reduce the complexity.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;25&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;24102&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/25/talk/24102/&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;96&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;24093&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/96/talk/24093/&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2014 03:46:08 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5559098</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-22T03:46:08Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5558785</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;x x:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Richard, I just wanted to thank you for sharing your notes. This last bit of self-conceit is very tricky to notice (so subtle but still very significant) and I&amp;#039;m really appreciating your articulation of it. Best wishes for your practice!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;As far as the career life/interpersonal &amp;#034;conflict&amp;#034; goes... one skill I&amp;#039;ve been working on is &amp;#034;naming the game&amp;#034;. Part of the challenge of bullies and bulldozers are kinda on autopilot and they don&amp;#039;t really take in factual information, because that&amp;#039;s not what is motivating them. They aren&amp;#039;t looking for the right answer, they&amp;#039;re trying to establish/maintain whatever position or role they have staked out. So sometimes the direct approach doesn&amp;#039;t quite work because they manouver around the position, not the facts. Even though with a clearer mind it&amp;#039;s possible to chip away at the foundation for their stake... sometimes it&amp;#039;s easier just to say &amp;#034;my sense is you are really staked out there.&amp;#034; &amp;#034;from my perspective it seems you want X&amp;#034;   Basically simply naming the game they are playing. Then it&amp;#039;s up to them to justify it or deny it, and you haven&amp;#039;t done anything except name their game. Just one more practical tool. Of course, they might have an insight into our own positoning and call us on our stuff. The appropriate response is &amp;#034;I see what you are saying. Thank you for pointing that out.&amp;#034; (and mean it!) &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thanks for the advice. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The last bit is difficult (nama-rupa) because it connects to everything else and is not separate.  I have to resist habitual intentions more and more (which to me is truly letting go).  Just last night I was meditating and I really hit no-self.  It was like the self was exhausted and couldn&amp;#039;t be bothered so it relinquished on its own.  The vibrations in the skull and everywhere else was just experience but I didn&amp;#039;t feel like I was in a jhana or a self was locatable anywhere.  It was very liberating but temporary as of right now I&amp;#039;m continuing to note because that result is gone again.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 20 Jul 2014 16:19:58 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5558785</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-20T16:19:58Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5558709</link> <description>Richard, I just wanted to thank you for sharing your notes. This last bit of self-conceit is very tricky to notice (so subtle but still very significant) and I&amp;#039;m really appreciating your articulation of it. Best wishes for your practice!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;As far as the career life/interpersonal &amp;#034;conflict&amp;#034; goes... one skill I&amp;#039;ve been working on is &amp;#034;naming the game&amp;#034;. Part of the challenge of bullies and bulldozers are kinda on autopilot and they don&amp;#039;t really take in factual information, because that&amp;#039;s not what is motivating them. They aren&amp;#039;t looking for the right answer, they&amp;#039;re trying to establish/maintain whatever position or role they have staked out. So sometimes the direct approach doesn&amp;#039;t quite work because they manouver around the position, not the facts. Even though with a clearer mind it&amp;#039;s possible to chip away at the foundation for their stake... sometimes it&amp;#039;s easier just to say &amp;#034;my sense is you are really staked out there.&amp;#034; &amp;#034;from my perspective it seems you want X&amp;#034;   Basically simply naming the game they are playing. Then it&amp;#039;s up to them to justify it or deny it, and you haven&amp;#039;t done anything except name their game. Just one more practical tool. Of course, they might have an insight into our own positoning and call us on our stuff. The appropriate response is &amp;#034;I see what you are saying. Thank you for pointing that out.&amp;#034; (and mean it!) &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt;</description> <pubDate>Sun, 20 Jul 2014 11:10:55 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5558709</guid> <dc:creator>x x</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-20T11:10:55Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5558557</link> <description>A good talk that helps clear up the confusion of nama-rupa and consciousness:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;169&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;15836&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/169/talk/15836/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m zeroing in on unskillful intentions to let go of them more often.  Of course the skillful intentions should be acted upon.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;169&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;15836&amp;#x2f;"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Sat, 19 Jul 2014 16:13:22 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5558557</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-19T16:13:22Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5558462</link> <description>When I worry about how I&amp;#039;m doing compared to the past I can see clearly how much better things are.  I&amp;#039;m still dealing with existential issues with career but I&amp;#039;m finding in arguments and debates with people I&amp;#039;m becoming more confident and I don&amp;#039;t believe what people say about me.  All I&amp;#039;m doing is hearing the criticism and seeing if it actually makes sense and if I&amp;#039;m able to do something about it.  I can see how people will criticize me no matter what I do and how the amygdala likes to exagerrate problems.  I can also see when I win debates with just plain logic how irritated they can get.  Seeing how people stress over perceptions instead of being naturally tired from normal exertion teaches how one can drain themselves from their thinking habits alone.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I think a lot of bullies and bulldozers get used to just criticizing and having people not have answers or they stay quiet.  To have someone actually analyze what they say to see if it&amp;#039;s actually TRUE you can see they aren&amp;#039;t prepared for it.  Conflict is starting to become fun because as long as I&amp;#039;m fair to the other person and take true criticism and do something about it I know I&amp;#039;m doing better than many people.  The pangs in the stomach from receiving criticism from others is really low.  I remember some years ago how bad I had IBS.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m having much less of those feelings of &amp;#034;oh why isn&amp;#039;t my life going this way or that way?&amp;#034;  Those thoughts do arise but the pain and strain is so much less.  Seeing how reifying objects and constantly daydreaming about preferences is the beginning of the stress.  There is no permanent happiness.  The brain will always find perceptions that lack the quality of expectations.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This leads into nice periods where I&amp;#039;m just looking at cause and effect and creating causes instead of just judging and analyzing.  It&amp;#039;s a relief.  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The following talk mentions how beneficial &lt;strong&gt;letting go of preferences&lt;/strong&gt; as a deeper understanding of letting go.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;10832&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/10832/&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A long with letting go of preferences I&amp;#039;m still looking at the 3 characteristics but truly I haven&amp;#039;t gotten enough from it beyond equanimity.  Just because things are impermanent doesn&amp;#039;t mean I still don&amp;#039;t want it.  By targeting preferences while looking at the 3 Cs I can see some improvement like dousing a small fire before it gets too big.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 19 Jul 2014 03:20:09 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5558462</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-19T03:20:09Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5556337</link> <description>The above practices are really good.  I&amp;#039;m looking at the nama rupa more closely so that &amp;#034;consciousness&amp;#034; is breaking down into those parts.  Remembering is a part of the knowing which helps with recognizing objects to like and dislike.  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;There&amp;#039;s more freedom but at the same time there&amp;#039;s more consistent mindfulness.  One has to be very aware or the habitual &amp;#034;consciousness -&amp;gt; contact -&amp;gt; recognition/perception/remembering what object &amp;#034;is&amp;#034; -&amp;gt; vedana -&amp;gt; craving -&amp;gt; clinging -&amp;gt; action&amp;#034; mass of reactivity as it starts up like a mental bubble.  Adding to the noting &amp;#034;intention&amp;#034;, and &amp;#034;object&amp;#034; helps breakdown the stress to it&amp;#039;s root cause of time/object/self attending.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This subtle tanha really does affect a person and moves quickly.  So when relaxing in consciousness (the advaita vedanta enlightenment) there is much less obvious pain that existed before meditation but the subtle attachments are unaffected.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;When noting this detail the sense of self reduces as more phenomenon like intentions to pay attention to an object appears to be this impermanent process that can be waited out to gain relief.  As soon as the brain recognizes an &amp;#034;object&amp;#034; the mental stress starts up (albeit not very strong).&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I can now see the subtle mental pain in attention:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;Attention: The mind’s movement of attention to a perception/object/experience feels similar to the push and pull of craving/aversion.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description> <pubDate>Sat, 12 Jul 2014 16:43:31 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5556337</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-12T16:43:31Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5552586</link> <description>Okay I think I&amp;#039;ve exhausted what I need to work on (including in daily life).  It doesn&amp;#039;t mean I&amp;#039;m perfectly purified or some such nonsense but the below is a lot to chew on for some time.  Rob Burbea really lays it out and I&amp;#039;ve made some notes.  Reading Nagarjuna has really helped in understanding the mistake of inherent existence.  I&amp;#039;m currently still in the Advaita Vedanta acceptance of everything, but the Buddhist additions have made it much better.  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve benefited the most from the &amp;#034;Clarifying the Natural State&amp;#034; book to learn to welcome the impulses to avoid aversion to aversion.  I&amp;#039;ve also benefited from Daniel&amp;#039;s advice along with Andrea Fella to let go of aversion to a wandering mind.  Currently I&amp;#039;m working on the below to deal with perception and how it&amp;#039;s depended on consciousness.  Consciousness is already leaning on past likes and dislikes (sankharas).  Seeing the movements happen this early is relieving more stress but I need much more practice as I&amp;#039;m still new to being (almost) perceptionless on a regular basis.  I want this to be a regular habit that allows functionality and relaxation while doing tasks as opposed to some awkward practice that represses perception.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The following talk is covered more towards the end of the notes.  The starting part is from other talks and I can&amp;#039;t find out which ones they were from.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;9553&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/9553/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Minds are what glue things together. See &amp;#034;things in vibrations.&amp;#034;  There are pleasant and unpleasant frequencies happening all the time.  You can develop tuning into the pleasant.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Just look at things as empty, the mind goes to nothingness and seeing nothingness as another perception you go to NPNYP.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Arhat understands perception/cessation/beyond time&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Believing in things and investing in things leads to a time sense.  “How will this thing be for me in the future? How has it been in the past? How is it for me now?”&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If time is empty then arising and passing away are also empty.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Consciousness (self), objects and time cannot exist without the other.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;No matter how subtle sense of self there is there will always be an investment.  “How will it be for me?”&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Conceiving is more important than thinking.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: arial&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;helvetica&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="color: #222222"&gt;To conceive = to form or devise (a plan or idea) in the mind.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If I have any “thing” for consciousness, wrapped in the perception of the thing the concept is included of “not that thing”.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Perception of stillness includes the possibility of a lack of stillness in the future.  Time is woven into the perception of a thing.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The investment/attachment in a thing makes the future sense gain in significance.  Conceiving is wrapped up with delusion.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Consciousness/Knowing depends on time since knowing needs a present moment.  Present moment is empty so consciousness is leaning on something empty of inherentness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;10 links version of dependent origination:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Nama-rupa: depends on consciousness.  Consciousness depends on Nama-rupa.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Nama-rupa: Nama &amp;#x2013; Perception, vedana, attention, intention, contact.  Rupa &amp;#x2013; ancient 4 elements.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Attention: The mind’s movement of attention to a perception/object/experience feels similar to the push and pull of craving/aversion.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Attention: Consciousness + intention directed at this or that whether we are aware of it or not.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Push and pull depends on object and vice versa.&lt;br /&gt;The sense of an object for consciousness depends on attention.  It could be deliberate or not deliberate.  Attention needs objects.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The present moment for consciousness exists because of objects.  Time is dependent on knowing/consciousness.  Knowing depends on time.  Attention needs an experience/moment.  If there are mutually dependent they are mutually empty of inherentness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Ignorance is being ignorant of what qualities and actions bring suffering or freedom, and forgetting impermanence, and believing in a self that is real.  Self can be anywhere on the spectrum from big self down to just perceiving an object or even perceiving nothing.  Believing in that trinity of subject/object/time is root delusion.  The subject must have an investment.  Intention to pay attention&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Sankharas: Neurosis, impressions that carries into the future.  Fabricators, fashions, movements of the mind that fashion or fabricate experience, dukkha and the whole sense of reality.  Out of delusion comes these impulses, intentions, ways of relating, conceiving, and perceiving that fashion and fabricate.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#039;And why do you call them &amp;#039;fabrications&amp;#039;? Because they fabricate fabricated things, thus they are called &amp;#039;fabrications.&amp;#039; What do they fabricate as a fabricated thing? For the sake of form-ness, they fabricate form as a fabricated thing. For the sake of feeling-ness, they fabricate feeling as a fabricated thing. For the sake of perception-hood... For the sake of fabrication-hood... For the sake of consciousness-hood, they fabricate consciousness as a fabricated thing. Because they fabricate fabricated things, they are called fabrications.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The intention to pay attention is a very subtle movement of sankhara.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Intentions require an object to intend to attend to.  I have to believe in this object to intend to pay attention to.  I can’t have an intention without a sense of the next moment and a sense of a subject with an investment.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Time is dependent on knowing, the movement of intention, sankharas, investment and conceiving of an object in the present moment.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I cannot find any aspect of the mind that is not empty.  Delusion is also dependent on the other factors.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In practice you see the mind dependent on empty objects so it is empty as well.  In that platform then time and present moment can be included as empty.  What’s important is seeing the emptiness in experience as opposed to cessation.  Cessation happens with the fading.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Whether there’s a center in the knowing there is dukkha.  Objects are in space and time.  Knowing is not separate from empty perceptions.  The whole of existence is groundless.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Phew! Lots of meditation notes to plug into the practice.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 02 Jul 2014 04:42:34 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5552586</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-02T04:42:34Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5550123</link> <description>A little video that&amp;#039;s describing how I feel when I follow Right Energy.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="https&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;youtube&amp;#x2e;com&amp;#x2f;watch&amp;#x3f;v&amp;#x3d;gXBZRJO5_OU"&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXBZRJO5_OU&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2014 04:48:39 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5550123</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-06-25T04:48:39Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5539914</link> <description>&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: lucida&amp;#x20;sans&amp;#x20;unicode&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;lucida&amp;#x20;grande&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;I&amp;#039;m reading Nagarjuna and find a lot in there to meditate with.  By noticing how the amygdala treates objects as inherently existing you can notice the difference just by looking for vibrations and impermanence in all experiences (including thinking).  When getting irritated at work with something monotonous you can just look at objects with MORE DETAIL to find less solidity and less to be distracted about. (Eg. just by noticing the impermanence of touch in particular to rid the mind of the belief that the object being touched is &amp;#034;out there and permanently real&amp;#034; is a reminder that the brain may be noticing something &amp;#034;out there&amp;#034; but it&amp;#039;s really just the brain reconstructing experience in a simplified way and then attaching to it in a simplified way.  This is fun to do with all sensations like when eating something really delicious.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Some blunt quotes that are interesting in how he weaves in the middle path.  All concepts (including a self-concept) can feel separated more than they actually are:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: lucida&amp;#x20;sans&amp;#x20;unicode&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;lucida&amp;#x20;grande&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;...space is neither an entity, the abscence of an entity, an entity with characteristics, nor indeed the characteristics themselves.  The remaining four elements - earth, water, fire, and air - are to be treated like space.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Identifying the cause with the effect is not appropriate.  But not identifying the cause with the effect is also not appropriate.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: lucida&amp;#x20;sans&amp;#x20;unicode&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;lucida&amp;#x20;grande&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;Those of little intelligence, who see in terms of the &amp;#034;is-ness&amp;#034; and &amp;#034;not-is-ness&amp;#034; of entities, do not perceive the peaceful stilling of what can be seen.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: lucida&amp;#x20;sans&amp;#x20;unicode&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;lucida&amp;#x20;grande&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description> <pubDate>Sat, 31 May 2014 00:32:28 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5539914</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-05-31T00:32:28Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5532435</link> <description>&lt;span style="font-family: verdana&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;geneva&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;11929&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/11929/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;T&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;11929&amp;#x2f;"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;ime and the emptiness of Time&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It&amp;#039;s pretty clear now that clinging is all over the place.  Just searching for the present moment and finding just vibrations and perceptions gets the brain to let go of thinking about the future or past and there&amp;#039;s plenty of resistance to that.  Concentration and jhanas can come quickly doing this practice but that resistance shows how much letting go really still needs to happen.  I like this better than chasing &amp;#034;gone&amp;#034;s but ultimately it&amp;#039;s the same practice.  What I like about it is that it brings to light how much actual thinking is still operating in consciousness and how consciousness is all about clinging to some object right at the beginning.  It&amp;#039;s leaning to reach out to objects right away.  There is relief in letting awareness be awareness but there&amp;#039;s a danger that without the Energy Factor it&amp;#039;s a slide back to the same habits.  Welcoming does work with letting go so I&amp;#039;m still using this and finding it helpful.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This is disconcerting but there is potential freedom here to wean the consciousness further.  I&amp;#039;m looking at basic consciousness very differently now.  It&amp;#039;s not a quiet placcid mirror.  It has plenty of disturbances going on.  I&amp;#039;m going to continue to let go but also not repress.  The speed of this clinging is daunting.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;</description> <pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2014 03:44:11 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5532435</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-05-13T03:44:11Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5531705</link> <description>&lt;span style="font-family: verdana&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;geneva&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;20&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;20798&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/20/talk/20798/&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;Awareness watching Awareness&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The above talk has been helpful to describe what it&amp;#039;s like to release control of experience.  The no-self aspect increases. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The next goal is to do work with this awareness to watch the reactivity as it is.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;talks&amp;#x2f;audio_player&amp;#x2f;175&amp;#x2f;23263&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/talks/audio_player/175/23263.html&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;Am I dreaming?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;EDIT: Welcoming what is in experience (especially what you can&amp;#039;t change) is another way of increasing equanimity.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;9813&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/9813/&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;Guided Meditation&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;</description> <pubDate>Sun, 11 May 2014 16:03:17 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5531705</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-05-11T16:03:17Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5530853</link> <description>&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;I&amp;#039;m practicing with Time to compare how objects and self appear with it.  As I look at the unfindable present moment, all I get is short-term memory in the form of passing sensations.  The time increases in strength when I start looking at objects for their meaning to how it will help or hinder the self.  The sense of time increases and the reality and clarity of perceptions increases.  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;When I relax the push and pull of clinging along with searching for the present moment the senses start fading.  My vision when I briefly open my eyes is more faded and the colours are also faded.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Clinging happens very quickly so now I&amp;#039;m able to see this because the quick vibrating is happening while a &amp;#034;solid&amp;#034; self is complaining about some such object or situation to pan out.  The self feels solid but the space doesn&amp;#039;t.  It&amp;#039;s almost like an empty struggle against impermanent phenomenon.  There is new pain I can see with every conceptualization and objectification.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;By not clinging to my job interview, when I didn&amp;#039;t get the job, there was less suffering.  Making jobs have a meaning for &amp;#034;my life&amp;#034; to have value and importance is setting up clinging dependencies.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;buddhism&amp;#x2e;vipassati&amp;#x2e;ch&amp;#x2f;ebooks&amp;#x2f;paticcasamuppada&amp;#x2f;4-suffering-in-dependent-origination-always-depends-on-attachment"&gt;http://buddhism.vipassati.ch/ebooks/paticcasamuppada/4-suffering-in-dependent-origination-always-depends-on-attachment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: #353535"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;Geneva&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;Suffering in the operation of Paticcasamuppada must always depend on attachment. Take a farmer who works out in the open, exposed to wind and sun, transplanting the young rice plants : he thinks &amp;#034;Oh! I&amp;#039;m so hot!&amp;#034; If no clinging arises in the sense of &amp;#034;I&amp;#039;m so hot!&amp;#034; there is merely suffering of a natural kind and not of the kind associated with Dependent Origination. Suffering according to the law of Paticcasamuppada must have clinging to the point of agitation about the &amp;#034;I&amp;#034; concept. So it happens that the farmer becomes irritated and dissatisfied with being born a farmer. He thinks it&amp;#039;s his fate, his karma, that he must bathe in his own sweat. When one thinks this way, suffering according to the Law of Dependent Origination arises.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: #353535"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;Geneva&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;If one is hot and has a backache but nothing more, if one simply feels and knows that he is hot without any clinging to the &amp;#034;I&amp;#034; concept as above, then the suffering of Dependent Origination has not arisen. Please observe this carefully and make clear the distinction between these two kinds of suffering. If there is clinging, it is suffering according to Dependent Origination. Suppose you cut your hand with a sharp knife or razor blade and the blood gushes out. If you simply feel the pain but don&amp;#039;t cling to anything, then your suffering is natural and not according to Dependent Origination.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: #353535"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;Geneva&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;Don&amp;#039;t confuse the two. Suffering according to Dependent Origination must always follow upon ignorance, formations, consciousness, mentality/materiality, sense bases, contact, feeling, craving, attachment, becoming and birth. It must be complete this way in order to be called Dependently Originated suffering.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: #353535"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;Geneva&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;Now we can put the whole matter briefly. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Someone who has studied the dhamma may understand that the internal sense base (e.g., the eye) comes into contact with the external sense base (e.g., the form) which has a value or meaning and which then becomes the base of ignorance. For example, take your eye. Look about you. You see a variety of things: trees, stones, or whatever. But there is not any suffering because nothing of what you see has any value or meaning for you. But if you see a tiger or a woman, or something that has meaning, it&amp;#039;s not the same. One kind of sight has meaning and another kind has no meaning. If, for example, a dog sees a pretty woman, it means nothing to the dog. But if a young man sees a lovely woman, it has a lot of meaning. Seeing a pretty woman has meaning for a man. The dog&amp;#039;s seeing is not a matter of Dependent Origination. The young man&amp;#039;s vision is a matter of Dependent Origination.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: #353535"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;Geneva&amp;#x2c;&amp;#x20;sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;We are speaking about people: people in the act of seeing. Whenever we look about we naturally see whatever is there and, if there is no meaning, it has nothing to do with Paticcasamuppada. We see, perhaps, trees, grass and stones, none of which, normally, have meaning. But maybe there&amp;#039;s a diamond or a sacred stone or a tree that will have meaning; there will be mental events occurring and Dependent Origination will become operative. And so it is that we distinguish the internal sense bases (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind) from the external sense bases (form, sound, smell, taste, tactile sensation, and mental objects), and these latter must be meaningful things. In this way they become the base for ignorance or stupidity or delusion. At this point of contact between the internal and external sense bases, sense consciousness arises. The consciousness arises instantaneously and gives rise to mental concocting a kind of power to cause further compounding or brewing up. That is, it brews up mentality/materiality, body and mind of the sort that is crazily stupid because it is prone to suffering.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 12px"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description> <pubDate>Sat, 10 May 2014 16:08:41 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5530853</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-05-10T16:08:41Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5527881</link> <description>Richard Zen - 2014-04-29 01:01:06 - RE: Richard&amp;#039;s insight practice&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Recent practice has got me to understand the analyzing and strategizing better.  There&amp;#039;s also futurizing and remembering.  Just by watching it arise and pass away it feels like a self at first and then when it passes away it doesn&amp;#039;t.  Trying to see this is just another &amp;#034;trying/attention to pay attention&amp;#034; and it starts leaving no room for a &amp;#034;self&amp;#034;.  There was a slight tension that relaxed further than before and now there&amp;#039;s a small dark night again.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thinking now feels more like a small pinching or tension in the skull that subsides quickly.  You can see the System 1 acting automatically and the System 2 pushing to see sensations.  Very interesting.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;-------------------&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Richard Zen - 2014-05-01 03:22:10 - RE: Richard&amp;#039;s insight practice&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I know that mindfulness is the anchor of the 7 factors of awakening but I feel that Energy is just as much important.  It banishes the hindrances and starts to change habits.  Mindfulness by itself is good because it can diminish reactivity to perceptions but the overall habits are slow to change.  With energy you can feel the resistance at the beginning when you&amp;#039;re activating it and how you have to abandon the wrong thinking multiple times before the hindrance gives way.  Then you prevent it from coming back by not feeding more negative thinking.  After that you cultivate what is useful and more importantly you make effort to sustain it.  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It reminds me of Bhante G&amp;#039;s description of throwing a rock in the air and seeing it lose energy and fall.  Everything in our body is like physics so the constant relinquishing, cultivating and sustaining is needed or the efforts lose energy and old habits return.  It reminds me of impermanence.  It&amp;#039;s also a good practice to prove causes and conditions for certain factors.  With practice you can see negative thoughts be replaced by positive mind states in ridiculously short time spans.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Doing this the brightness that I&amp;#039;ve experienced in the past returns and can be sustained for longer periods of time.  Instead of a brief wondrous A &amp;amp; P you can get a longer duration but it has to be constantly cultivated or it wanes.  Walking around town with this glow it&amp;#039;s like there&amp;#039;s a lamp in your head.  When getting up in the morning it&amp;#039;s the perfect time to start it up again.  Sometimes there&amp;#039;s a little too much strain and concentration has to be developed by watching the breath to soothe the excess energy and if there&amp;#039;s laziness more investigation and energy is needed.  Trial and error can make it more subtle.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The most fun part of this practice is that you can see the actions you take when you follow the 7 factors compared to cultivating only concentration or open mindfulness.  More skillful actions occur.  Without this effort I can&amp;#039;t see any way forward.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 07 May 2014 10:33:40 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5527881</guid> <dc:creator>Migration 6.2 Daemon</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-05-07T10:33:40Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5457046</link> <description>Well I think the practice is yielding more fruits. I&amp;#039;m starting to care less about whether career happens or not. I&amp;#039;m in a &amp;#034;stressful&amp;#034; period where I may have to move to another community and a new job with different people but I&amp;#039;m strangely serene about it. I think it has to do with the fact that happiness to me is not the external things anymore. Things can be good and interesting and should be sought after but they don&amp;#039;t have to arrive or stay. The vantage point from the death-bed (like from Viktor Frankl) cures you of that blindness of a belief in immortality.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m very confident now that treating people with respect and kindness is an okay track I&amp;#039;m on and it has yielded benefits that are intangible but I can tell a lot of people like me more. This has created ire amongst some in management and I&amp;#039;m being replaced by someone who&amp;#039;s more &amp;#034;suitable&amp;#034; which probably means they are more conformist and can be like pals in serotonin domination fetishes. I got very little training at this temporary assignment but this person replacing me got a HUGE amount in a short-period and you can see the unfairness that shows up. Yet I don&amp;#039;t see their happiness at all and it does look like delusion. Being rejected still feels unpleasant in the gut but it is so much less than it used to be. The rejection in the past used to be closer to ulcers or irritable bowel syndrome. That&amp;#039;s not happening anymore.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The new job I&amp;#039;m interviewing for is a DREAM job with the type of work I want and yet if I don&amp;#039;t get it then that&amp;#039;s okay too. Ten years ago I never would have been this way. I would be ruminating constantly about &amp;#034;what if this happens or that happens&amp;#034;. I feel now that I&amp;#039;m actually lucky to have experienced the suffering I did because if I didn&amp;#039;t I wouldn&amp;#039;t have seeked Buddhism and I would have gone on with ridiculous habits of excess pride and self-measurement. Those bad habits lead to depression and in some cases suicide.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Mental sanity and physical health are now my favourite hobbies. Co-workers even say that I don&amp;#039;t look my age.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m at the point now that if I bag groceries for a living that it wouldn&amp;#039;t be so bad. I&amp;#039;m not kidding. As long as I have a job that gives me the basic necessities I&amp;#039;m very okay. Ultimately this body will die and that won&amp;#039;t be any different no matter what status you develop or not. This gives me a power that is so different. I feel somewhat rebellious by nature and I will continue treating people equally (INFPs) even if it bothers hierarchy types (ESTJs, ISTJs). They are not happy because I can see their complaining and I&amp;#039;ve already seen workaholics who ignore their spouses and children. They could be smarter than I am but they are not wiser. They are stuck in a rut. Family, love, positive relationships, and environments that support that are a better happiness. It&amp;#039;s all about memories. If you cultivate good experiences that create good memories that&amp;#039;s what you want on your death-bed. You won&amp;#039;t remember the hours of overtime and sacrifice to bosses. If you have some sense of love and higher calling along with the overtime then you&amp;#039;ll probably remember that more because it&amp;#039;ll include more people. I&amp;#039;m not against working hard but it has to include the right attitude as a foundation or it&amp;#039;s pointless like chasing your tail.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Being rejected by cults of personality are blessings in disguise. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/laugh.gif" &gt;</description> <pubDate>Sat, 26 Apr 2014 15:27:19 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5457046</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-26T15:27:19Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5448384</link> <description>More measurements and dualities to relax:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;10832&amp;#x2f;"&gt;Maya and Nirvana (Beyond Measure of Mind)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A world of &amp;#034;this and that&amp;#034;. &amp;#034;Where movements of mind and perceptions of form are cut off this is where the unfabricated is&amp;#034;.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 23 Apr 2014 13:07:22 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5448384</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-23T13:07:22Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5445662</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Superkatze one:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Richard Zen:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt; Also notice clinging to the present moment. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/smile.gif" &gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What is the &amp;#034;present moment&amp;#034;? Isn&amp;#039;t clinging to something just the effect of not having realized the inherent non-existence of the clung-to? If so, which contemplation will lead you to a place of less clinging? The miniscule observation of the cause and effect relationship between object and reactive pattern or the destruction of the view which underlies the reactive pattern?&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Clinging to the present moment has to do with the context in Rob Burbea&amp;#039;s talk above &amp;#034;Wisdom of Non-duality&amp;#034;. He&amp;#039;ll explain it much better than I can.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 22 Apr 2014 12:51:28 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5445662</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-22T12:51:28Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5445643</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Richard Zen:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt; Also notice clinging to the present moment. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/smile.gif" &gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What is the &amp;#034;present moment&amp;#034;? Isn&amp;#039;t clinging to something just the effect of not having realized the inherent non-existence of the clung-to? If so, which contemplation will lead you to a place of less clinging? The miniscule observation of the cause and effect relationship between object and reactive pattern or the destruction of the view which underlies the reactive pattern?</description> <pubDate>Tue, 22 Apr 2014 11:58:32 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5445643</guid> <dc:creator>Superkatze one</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-22T11:58:32Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5444788</link> <description>So this Burbea talk on Nagarjuna and noticing the affect of dualities of any kind (Wisdom of non-duality) has thrown me for a loop today. Basically I start letting go much sooner than before and I can now see how subtle dualities &amp;#034;this is better than that&amp;#034; is affecting me. This morning the letting go created a slight &amp;#034;unbearable lightness of being&amp;#034; feeling that eventually subsided. Other than that today has been incredibly smooth like never before. Doing things is now less painful. The Advaita Vedanta &amp;#034;rest in consciousness&amp;#034;, &amp;#034;don&amp;#039;t do anything&amp;#034; etc is now seen through as masking more subtle clinging and laziness. By noticing the smallest possible aversion it can be let go sooner and doing tasks is now becoming more effortless. There&amp;#039;s still tiredness but the real kind as opposed to aversion masking as tiredness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;When you mix what is learned from the &amp;#034;Clarifying the natural state&amp;#034; book of not repressing anything but also not adding rumination, plus adding the 7 factors of awakening, and then noticing how quick the perception is with dualities of experience things are normal but even more smooth. Notice dualities in liking something vs. not liking something. Notice posting in this forum vs. not posting LOL!. Especially notice doing something with enjoyment as a short-term relief vs. doing something more constructive. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Notice blocking unpleasant sensations vs. allowing them. Notice blocking a wandering mind vs. noticing you&amp;#039;re already back. Notice wanting your life to be a certain way vs. accepting all the flaws. Notice disliking what is happening vs. accepting it. Notice being concentrated vs. not being concentrated. Notice disliking the effort in concentration practice vs. not meditating. Notice excluding something from experience vs. including all things in experience. Notice not welcoming experience vs. welcoming all experience. Notice disliking people vs. liking people. Notice over-analysis vs. doing. Notice not accepting the doing vs. accepting the doing. It just goes on and on.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Eg. When driving home I knew I needed to get some milk. The conditioning quickly thought &amp;#039;na I can just go home and do without it.&amp;#034; &amp;#034;I have to pick up some gas, oh I did a wrong turn so maybe I should do that later?&amp;#034; I felt the aversion in that thinking/clinging and quickly let go. I went and got the milk and gas (even if I had to drive a longer way) and felt totally normal and quite bright and relaxed with no clinging. The above description is much slower than how it actually happened. It&amp;#039;s more like a minuscule tightening in the head that is let go of right away. This is making the Energy factor of awakening smoother since maintaining this result seems to require only a subtle effort. Forcing with too much concentration could just be more aversion to what&amp;#039;s there. There&amp;#039;s a quick subtle question underlying things and that is &amp;#034;do I really need this?&amp;#034; &amp;#034;Is that really important?&amp;#034; This question is non-conceptual in that it&amp;#039;s more like feeling pain and letting things drop without adding more content. Then you go and non-chalantly do what&amp;#039;s needed instead.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I can now see more clinging than I have ever seen before and I think this is probably my new best day. I can see how this can work with internet, home habits etc. I can also see how this can blindside people into thinking they are enlightened. As far as I&amp;#039;m concerned a fully enlightenment person may not entirely exist. It&amp;#039;s a gradation between full blown addiction habits on one hand and complete liberation of habits on the other. Ultimately debating this or much of anything has to be done with skill or else it&amp;#039;s another clinging. LOL!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Very appreciative!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Metta to all who&amp;#039;ve provided good information to me FOR FREE! This is what makes this website great. The pointless debates are a waste of time. Oh wait! Is that another duality? As long as I&amp;#039;m not clinging it&amp;#039;s okay. The carefulness can&amp;#039;t stop.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;EDIT: Also notice clinging to the present moment. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/smile.gif" &gt;</description> <pubDate>Tue, 22 Apr 2014 01:20:14 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5444788</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-22T01:20:14Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5442051</link> <description>Development doesn&amp;#039;t really stop. Realization is one thing but habits/conditioning takes longer to deal with.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2014 22:52:00 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5442051</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-20T22:52:00Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5441406</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Richard Zen:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;10028&amp;#x2f;"&gt;The Wisdom of Non-duality&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I get the impression that this is a talk I&amp;#039;ll revisit again and again -- very profound and more than a little challenging. Thanks for sharing.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2014 18:40:50 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5441406</guid> <dc:creator>John M.</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-20T18:40:50Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5438990</link> <description>With getting projects done I&amp;#039;m finding that the cognitive therapy methods of reminding yourself of the benefits is working. This is especially true when one &lt;strong&gt;repeats the reminder again and again while doing the activity.&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;#034;I will really enjoy it when the floor is clean&amp;#034;. &amp;#034;I really like it when the dishes are clean&amp;#034;, &amp;#034;I&amp;#039;ll be so happy when the microwave is clean&amp;#034;, etc. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In between tasks there&amp;#039;s an aversion to go to the next task so meditation comes in handy at this point. You let go of all thinking and just sit down and wait until the aversion is completely gone and then pay attention to the benefits of what things will be like when the task is completed. Then off you go and do something else. Savour the results.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The harsh aversion in the skull needs to be a warning sign that it&amp;#039;s already affecting you and it&amp;#039;s already making choices for you. Just sit down and relax until you feel better. When you feel better you&amp;#039;re more functional and can do more tasks. Rinse and repeat.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Right effort hits the nail on the head and is quite similar to CBT. We have to let go of unwholesome thinking, prevent unwholesome thinking from arising, cultivate wholesome qualities, and then to strengthen the wholesome qualites after they have arisen. It&amp;#039;s like the mind gets some success but quickly wants to dip back down to negativity.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 19 Apr 2014 23:41:33 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5438990</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-19T23:41:33Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5427851</link> <description>I&amp;#039;m bouncing back and forth between no-self and and self but it&amp;#039;s getting clearer that I still have a subtle problem with dualism. The following talk is describing my experience really well. Just walking around in my experience there&amp;#039;s an understanding that my senses are creating experience and there&amp;#039;s a fragility and fakeness about them. It&amp;#039;s hard to explain but when you don&amp;#039;t block thinking and don&amp;#039;t ruminate the freedom there can reveal a more subtle situation that can veer between waking up in the morning and feeling that things are real and by the end of the day with mindfulness a kind of nihilism where things are built up and fabricated. It&amp;#039;s yo-yo-ing back and forth. Not manipulating experience also can highlight impermanence really well.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;10028&amp;#x2f;"&gt;The Wisdom of Non-duality&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Having a view that things are real or not real is another dualism. Trying to &amp;#034;stay&amp;#034; in non-dualism conceals a little bit of aversion.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 15 Apr 2014 13:09:58 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5427851</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-15T13:09:58Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5409464</link> <description>I hope it shows that if you stick with it there are some goodies that come along.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Today was quite good and the effect from yesterday is still there and it appears to be a new baseline but very normalized. The wow is gone but the relief remains. From experience I know that the old bad habits will continue and there will be consequences to unskillful actions that will cause pain but resisting adding to the impulses and just watching it fall makes it come under control without the aversion to try and block it. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The pain of reactivity to perception is not a problem because there&amp;#039;s no clinging to extend it. The head seems to get a nudge or small pressure then subsides because I&amp;#039;m not adding anything to it. Concentration is more like keeping with being, as opposed to stopping anything or pushing anything. I&amp;#039;ve had experiences like this in the past but I&amp;#039;m not forgetting it like in the past.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The rest of the book just takes those great subtle insights and continues advising to let go of all desires which I think Daniel has mentioned most people won&amp;#039;t do all the way. People tend to stop at 2nd path from what I remember he said.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2014 00:20:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5409464</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-10T00:20:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5409336</link> <description>Nothing much to say, just that your thread is a good read and I&amp;#039;m getting some help with your insights. Keep going and thanks for sharing!</description> <pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2014 22:47:43 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5409336</guid> <dc:creator>Jean B.</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-09T22:47:43Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5400245</link> <description>Well after eavesdropping on Daniel&amp;#039;s recommendation of &amp;#034;Clarifying the Natural State&amp;#034;, I&amp;#039;m reading it and I&amp;#039;m already getting benefits from it.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This morning was quite good in that just letting the thoughts go where they want (something Daniel harps on a lot) it&amp;#039;s starting to really work. By the end of the day old mental habits arose but it&amp;#039;s clear that I have to switch interrupting the thoughts less and just let them be and die away so that meditation is not used to block the thoughts but to resist adding to them. So right effort now is more like just dropping the addition to habitual thoughts so they just fall away. No blocking or clinging. They fall away on their own and thinking can be freed. Just ordering a sandwich and a coffee and I was in bliss. All kinds of thoughts I normally block arose and just left own their own. It&amp;#039;s a normalized kind of bliss very different from jhanas. My chest got a bit of fear and bliss at the same time but I just let it be.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Last night I got a hint of this after some reading and I was brushing my teeth and letting the habitual thoughts be as they are and pass away. I got a glimpse of a &amp;#034;self&amp;#034; that was trying to block this stuff. The mental habits broke through it and it was like the Bahiya Sutta where thinking was just thinking and it never was a self. Thoughts now are more integrated with everything else. It&amp;#039;s more like a &amp;#034;suchness&amp;#034; now. That book is razor sharp and I&amp;#039;ll be interested what else I can glean from it.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m still very aware that I can feel emotionally hurt and feel vulnerable but it&amp;#039;s more like stuff happening and lots of equanimity with this. I&amp;#039;m feeling very grateful right now.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The goal now is to see how much I can let go.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2014 23:37:29 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5400245</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-08T23:37:29Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5390218</link> <description>My equanimity is getting stronger. I still feel pangs of anxiety when there&amp;#039;s persona non grata tactics at work. It just doesn&amp;#039;t hurt as much anymore because I&amp;#039;m &lt;strong&gt;letting go of needing to be successful&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a big step for me because it&amp;#039;s probably my longest running attachment.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I can see that one manager in particular has glib psychopath tendencies. When she does a faux pas she likes to look at my facial expressions like she needs to know what empaths feel because she can&amp;#039;t understand empathy. She constantly talks about how she has no feelings etc like it&amp;#039;s a badge of honor. She says she likes Harry Potter but really she&amp;#039;s more like Voldemort in ostracism tactics and talking behind people&amp;#039;s backs. In the past I used to be scared of these people. Now I find them comical/tragic/stupid/retarded/deranged. By giving Metta to them it&amp;#039;s strange like trying to pet Godzilla. &amp;#034;Poor Godzilla...&amp;#034; It works but it also highlights how random, chaotic, and arbitrary pursuing success can be.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;We recently had a &amp;#034;Positive Outlook&amp;#034; seminar where she and most of the finance department attended. It was quite good and pretty much listed all the Buddhist understandings (including perception) and Christian views. Despite that you can tell the hypocrisy and how little people will actually do the practice. If Mahasi retreats have a 50% success rate in getting stream-entry then a seminar must be nil. Most of the staff probably wanted this as secret teachings to help them dominate.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;By letting go of wanting success you can still pursue excellence but you have to be not expecting anything. Paying attention to the benefits of actions is good enough.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 07 Apr 2014 01:40:49 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5390218</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-07T01:40:49Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5388991</link> <description>My practice now doesn&amp;#039;t even resemble a practice because the 7 factors are quite good and I&amp;#039;m starting to analyze why when my eyes are closed it&amp;#039;s easier to pop into light jhanas but harder to do with the eyes open. Understanding perception and letting go needs to go deeper to allow relief with the eyes open.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 06 Apr 2014 17:27:28 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5388991</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-06T17:27:28Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5388987</link> <description>LOL! Rob Burbea even laughs and says that there&amp;#039;s a place for letting go of ALL clinging. People will probably get farther that way when there&amp;#039;s too much analysis.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 06 Apr 2014 17:23:18 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5388987</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-06T17:23:18Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5387654</link> <description>yea, for me it&amp;#039;s usually way more lol.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;it was also really funny how the talk was like a confessional &amp;#034;guys I hate to break it to you but buddhism is just another attachment&amp;#034;</description> <pubDate>Sun, 06 Apr 2014 04:03:33 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5387654</guid> <dc:creator>Adam . .</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-06T04:03:33Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5387514</link> <description>It&amp;#039;s a good reminder that ruminating about Buddhism can create stress the same as any desire.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 06 Apr 2014 02:43:17 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5387514</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-06T02:43:17Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5387293</link> <description>thanks for that talk richard, really nice</description> <pubDate>Sat, 05 Apr 2014 22:57:48 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5387293</guid> <dc:creator>Adam . .</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-05T22:57:48Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5374743</link> <description>My portable mental seclusion is increasing. It&amp;#039;s getting easier with dispassion and disenchantment to have a more quiet mind while still thinking. The struggles I still have are when I quiet the mind with the 7 factors and the mind resists with more mental noise. This is actually a good sign and now I can continue with the cultivation of a quiet mind and continue with the effort to relinquish the mental complaining because it doesn&amp;#039;t make things better. Mental complaining doesn&amp;#039;t make you more functional.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The mind has a subtle belief that if it&amp;#039;s quiet it somehow won&amp;#039;t get things done. This is absolutely not the case. A quiet mind can think deeply and taking action will have much more results than just day-dreaming and mentally desiring things. I&amp;#039;m more interested in seeing what happens. The ego has to trust that all there is, is cause and effect. There are applications to day-dreaming when it&amp;#039;s aimed at developing motivation but that is targeted and controlled compared to letting the mind free-wheel with every distraction.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I may not have achieved stream-entry but the following shows how being addicted to Buddhist concepts is also another clinging trap:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;74&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;22715&amp;#x2f;"&gt;Gil Fronsdal - Ease and nothing to do&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The answer to most questions is to quiet the mind and get on with life. One needs to be at peace while taking action.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 03 Apr 2014 12:34:16 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5374743</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-04-03T12:34:16Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5353464</link> <description>As much as the 7 factors of awakening is helping the following post really puts how much farther there still is:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;awakeningtoreality&amp;#x2e;blogspot&amp;#x2e;ca&amp;#x2f;2014&amp;#x2f;03&amp;#x2f;space-between-thoughts-nature-of-mind&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;Space between thoughts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;The underlying substratum (or gap) that seems to abide apart from thought is actually an illusion created by the supposition that thoughts are relating to each other in time. So thought B is supposing that it follows thought A etc., and then thought B will even suppose it can refer to thought A, but by the time that&amp;#039;s occurring it&amp;#039;s thought C. None of them ever touch, no two thoughts are ever present together in the immediacy, so a thought isn&amp;#039;t referencing anything, but only infers that other thoughts have preceded it, it is an illusion. Even the idea that there is more than one thought. That very idea creates the notion that there is a space between them etc.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description> <pubDate>Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:40:36 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5353464</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-27T00:40:36Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5348317</link> <description>Continuing with the 7 factors of awakening and it&amp;#039;s obvious that it&amp;#039;s about inertia and you have to be on it in the morning and empty the mind of all thoughts (which happily includes the current conditioning) and go about your day. Yesterday was interesting in that it took some time to gain control of the mind. As it gets clearer some outbursts came out in my car driving to work. I started venting about people that did me wrong in the past almost like a Gestalt therapy. It was very angry and loud. When I finished I just shook my head. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I reasserted the 7 factors and gained some control. There was less need to put on some music. I just enjoyed the ambient sights and sounds with a clear mind. When I got to work the control and quietness increased further and everybody at work started looking like animals (which scientifically they are). It&amp;#039;s similar to Jill Bolte Taylor&amp;#039;s experiences on her TED talk (without the stroke). You can see people lost in their thoughts and looking monkey-like (including myself). I got more work done and felt extremely functional. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What is so uncanny is how things feel when the emotional projections aren&amp;#039;t there. Situations feel more like opportunities rather than an affective narrative of your life with a preordained grim destiny. The sense of wonder of existence is amplified. You ask yourself &amp;#034;What I&amp;#039;m I doing here?&amp;#034;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I remembered to view my thinking and I can tell now that thinking and clinging can be separate. It&amp;#039;s when the thinking seems to be habitually connected to the addictive chemcials and a loop of separateness appears. When in consistent mindfulness there&amp;#039;s plenty of room for deep thinking. I will enjoy practicing this from now on. This is closer to the &amp;#034;thinking without a thinker&amp;#034; ideal. &lt;strong&gt;So I would recommend that when people are on the internet or reading something to be completely in the body while doing so. It&amp;#039;s possible to be quite functional this way.&lt;/strong&gt; I still have to experiment with deeper thinking than this. Can I solve more difficult puzzles while still being present?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;These are just momentary periods of relief and the practice has to be continually refreshed or it returns to the same old same old.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 13:04:53 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5348317</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-25T13:04:53Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336618</link> <description>While balancing energy with the 7 factors of awakening I&amp;#039;m noticing perceptions more and continuing to relinquish the useless ones. It&amp;#039;s starting to become enjoyable to do this as a silent mind has more relief and yes the energy improves with a quiet mind. The habitual perceptions need to weaken. Habitual perceptions also have a feeling tone of boredom, lack of wonder, lack of interest. Those are red-flags to let go of those perceptions.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I still keep coming back to this talk as I understand more and more:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;9548&amp;#x2f;"&gt;Non-duality and the fading of perception&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Letting go of perceptions of Buddhism is also a requirement to have a quiet mind, and so is following what causes unnecessary fear and going towards that while relinquishing those perceptions that are causing the aversion.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Reading books (especially books about self-improvement) is a good way to practice relinquishing bad perceptions. Any skill you want to learn can bring up negative failure schemas and mental scenarios that will lead to anger/revenge/stress. This is a big key for me and will likely be the most important habit to develop which is a quiet mind during stressful situations. Basically bad perceptions limit your life potential because they release cortisol at the wrong time and release happy chemicals at the wrong time.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2014 16:05:00 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336618</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-23T16:05:00Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5328405</link> <description>The recent added consistency has improved things and allowed my anger to come under control more. There&amp;#039;s still work to be done. Just seeing the thinking without a movement to &amp;#034;see&amp;#034; or &amp;#034;notice&amp;#034; the thinking with force makes what feels like a self appear more like just stuff happening. Very subtle.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Sometimes when a executive function thought appears there&amp;#039;s a flash of a face like it&amp;#039;s a &amp;#034;me&amp;#034; or something familiar but it&amp;#039;s just more sensations. All that&amp;#039;s left is all there was but without a self.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;On the self improvement front I&amp;#039;m finding it easier to just simplify things by quieting the mind as much as possible and getting on with things. This frees things up further and when there&amp;#039;s too much analysis just emptying things and just &amp;#034;getting on with it&amp;#034; is a relief. It&amp;#039;s counter-intuitive to my typical INFP mode of behaviour but as I&amp;#039;ve read in another psychology book, feeling types have trouble moving beyond reflection into action. This analysis is so accurate, (and scary), that only action can solve it. Repetitive reconditioning.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 20 Mar 2014 06:38:50 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5328405</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-20T06:38:50Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5316362</link> <description>I&amp;#039;m really benefiting from Analayo&amp;#039;s new book. It&amp;#039;s interesting in that by improving the context of practical meditation I could benefit from the teachings I&amp;#039;ve already read. Reading something ancient without context and guidance can be like spinning wheels. Today I&amp;#039;ve been just following the breath and checking the mind-states. It&amp;#039;s like balancing a boat to prevent too much energy or too little energy. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Energy and mental habits are now coming together in that stressful thoughts will lead to sluggish mind-states. Seeing cortisol in real-time messing up my mind-states is a big red flag on how stress does not make us more functional. Letting go of hindrances and increasing investigation improves energy and when there&amp;#039;s too much energy the concentration practice calms me down.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m also getting a tantalizing preview of a world where I can be mindful and think deeply at the same time. I&amp;#039;ll need to develop this further with consistent effort to see if this is really possible. My chest is feeling a little too much excitement and anticipation but that&amp;#039;s probably normal.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 16 Mar 2014 23:07:17 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5316362</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-16T23:07:17Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5299179</link> <description>The subtlety of no-self is strange in that the mind wants to find something significant but it finds normality instead. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The self right now just feels like thinking that&amp;#039;s deep enough to mask your senses in the present moment. This can&amp;#039;t be avoided because deep thinking will happen. It&amp;#039;s how you react when that type of thinking relaxes. When there&amp;#039;s reactivity it&amp;#039;s just what happened. By viewing reactivity as happenings (which they are) it makes everything look like cause and effect.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Looking at thinking this way creates some freedom in not having to react to the reactivity.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This can cause a strange result in that when looking at people they also just look like cause and effect which has a mechanical feel to it not unlike androids. Reflecting about this is just more reflecting.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:37:24 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5299179</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-14T12:37:24Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5249597</link> <description>I&amp;#039;ve been doing some meditation for a few hours this weekend. While taking a shower I started getting a sense of being in the body much more completely while still being quite normal. The need to loop into an analyzer and strategizer in the mind has weakened even further. Before it was like the thought loop needed to happen before being with the senses and now it&amp;#039;s more I don&amp;#039;t need to do anything. It feels so great to cry at a movie and feel full emotions without pain. Love and massive empathy is starting to really come out in a mushy but accepting way. Though I&amp;#039;ve always had empathy it&amp;#039;s now more a beautiful thing I enjoy as opposed to something I want to repress because I don&amp;#039;t give two fucks what an &amp;#034;alpha male&amp;#034; is supposed to be, which more and more looks like National Geographic animals ripping each other&amp;#039;s flesh and quite possibly deranged and hypocritical. I love my emotions.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 02 Mar 2014 19:06:10 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5249597</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-02T19:06:10Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5240590</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;John Wilde:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Like. Especially if that independent/ autonomous source of happiness is mutually beneficial.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It&amp;#039;s easier said than done but it&amp;#039;s a good goal. If you can start your own business or be so valuable in a business that you are almost a consultant then it&amp;#039;s possible. Other people just save money like crazy and retire as soon as possible. Some become monks and nuns or live like that and spend so little money that they don&amp;#039;t need as much of it. There are many choices but I think step one is just to have personal goals that have nothing to do with work. If a hard working parent believes that the goal of seeing their child in a recital is just as important as work, then there&amp;#039;s a better chance at a life balance.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 04:11:53 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5240590</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-28T04:11:53Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5240522</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Richard Zen:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;(...) I know I still don&amp;#039;t follow that &amp;#034;Meet your happy chemicals book&amp;#034; as well as I should so it&amp;#039;s time to include reminders that I can bring up at work on how to deal with people. At work it&amp;#039;s crystal clear that serotonin is the way that people are motivated. Any little joke or remark will make people lose their serotonin and start thinking negatively about you. If you don&amp;#039;t mirror their pain (related to nonsense complaints and fake problems) it will bother them.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My pet peeve of envy is another nut I haven&amp;#039;t been able to crack because when you are in close quarters with people, any improvement on your part is instantly noticed by someone and it spreads like a network of Stasi informers. Just BRUTAL! Even cleaning my desk up before other people for an office move was enough to cause envious comments from people. People are hyper accurate and even to the point of paranoia over pecking-order and the most petty differences are evaluated. Many of the managers seem to use cronyism and nepotism to insulate them from this envy. It&amp;#039;s like a wolf-pack and you have to be part of the dominant group to survive.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Having this accurate awareness of the craving of serotonin has given me more understanding of my own feelings. One manager made it pretty clear she knows how ostracism works with people even if she doesn&amp;#039;t know exactly how. I&amp;#039;ve been going through some of that ostracism and now I can see it&amp;#039;s a need on my part to belong. It&amp;#039;s like starving people of oxytocin and serotonin. You can feel it in your body but once you know the game you can let it go because the self-referential thoughts and beliefs are the real problem. It&amp;#039;s very easy to get bitter and angry with &amp;#034;the system&amp;#034; but ultimately it&amp;#039;s my fault if I let it get to me. As long as there&amp;#039;s people watching you there will always be a &amp;#034;the system&amp;#034; to complain about. LOL! &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Interesting stuff, isn&amp;#039;t it? When you see this happening in yourself -- see it clearly and blamelessly instead of just semi-consciously trying to get the best outcome for yourself, or being pissed off about other people doing it while denying that you&amp;#039;re essentially the same in this regard -- it gets really interesting, and pretty funny. (The phenomenon itself, that is; the consequences often aren&amp;#039;t funny at all). &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It makes it easy to see why human societies are so unstable, and why strife and violence can break out so easily, and how networks of alliances can spread the ripples far and wide. (And in the most extreme case, when there&amp;#039;s nothing to contain it... a network of alliances can pull literally millions of sane people into a meaningless meat grinder, as in WWI).&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Richard Zen:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Csikszentmihalyi was right in that people need to find more independent sources of happiness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.”&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Like. Especially if that independent/ autonomous source of happiness is mutually beneficial.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 03:43:36 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5240522</guid> <dc:creator>John Wilde</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-28T03:43:36Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5240476</link> <description>Aversion now just feels like a tension in the skull with a little in the chest but it&amp;#039;s impermanent. I can wait and then the usefulness of bringing up the benefits of the right action seems to replace the pain with motivation. Just asking in my mind &amp;#034;where are you aversion?&amp;#034; gets me to stop the old train of thought. The aversion really does pretend to be tiredness but when it&amp;#039;s influence dissipates and is replaced with motivation the energy comes back. Very strange but it&amp;#039;s fun to manipulate, and matches quite well with what Daniel Kahneman&amp;#039;s work on attention and effort is.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;F*&amp;amp;k it! If advertisers are so good at manipulating our desires and creating desires we should take charge and create our own desires. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Mnemonics acts as a feedback loop like noting and it gives you that reminder you need to keep going and why you want to keep going. I&amp;#039;ve been enjoying the benefits of having lunch ready before I leave for work, clean dishes, and laundry when I need it. This may seem obvious but when you have poor habits it can be a revelation. All I&amp;#039;m using from the Willpower guide is feedback loops/developing motivation/disenchantment.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The biggest drain of time and the biggest lure and pull is anything with a screen. I&amp;#039;m sure I&amp;#039;m not the only one. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/darth_vader.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;When the aversion starts, the feedback loop to remember why I should do what I should do forces the brain to ask &amp;#034;can I be motivated for this?&amp;#034; It&amp;#039;s equivalent to having a coach following you except you are your own coach and he/she is always there when you slip up.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This has sparked some inspiration to create a mnemonic for work. I know I still don&amp;#039;t follow that &amp;#034;Meet your happy chemicals book&amp;#034; as well as I should so it&amp;#039;s time to include reminders that I can bring up at work on how to deal with people. At work it&amp;#039;s crystal clear that serotonin is the way that people are motivated. Any little joke or remark will make people lose their serotonin and start thinking negatively about you. If you don&amp;#039;t mirror their pain (related to nonsense complaints and fake problems) it will bother them.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My pet peeve of envy is another nut I haven&amp;#039;t been able to crack because when you are in close quarters with people, any improvement on your part is instantly noticed by someone and it spreads like a network of Stasi informers. Just BRUTAL! Even cleaning my desk up before other people for an office move was enough to cause envious comments from people. People are hyper accurate and even to the point of paranoia over pecking-order and the most petty differences are evaluated. Many of the managers seem to use cronyism and nepotism to insulate them from this envy. It&amp;#039;s like a wolf-pack and you have to be part of the dominant group to survive.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Having this accurate awareness of the craving of serotonin has given me more understanding of my own feelings. One manager made it pretty clear she knows how ostracism works with people even if she doesn&amp;#039;t know exactly how. I&amp;#039;ve been going through some of that ostracism and now I can see it&amp;#039;s a need on my part to belong. It&amp;#039;s like starving people of oxytocin and serotonin. You can feel it in your body but once you know the game you can let it go because the self-referential thoughts and beliefs are the real problem. It&amp;#039;s very easy to get bitter and angry with &amp;#034;the system&amp;#034; but ultimately it&amp;#039;s my fault if I let it get to me. As long as there&amp;#039;s people watching you there will always be a &amp;#034;the system&amp;#034; to complain about. LOL! &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Csikszentmihalyi was right in that people need to find more independent sources of happiness. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.”&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So what I need to remember at work:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Create my own rewards. (Carrot)&lt;br /&gt;Develop skills that make me more autonomous (skill)&lt;br /&gt;Test perceptions with reality to reduce disappointment (disappointed)&lt;br /&gt;Build pride in something once a day (pride)&lt;br /&gt;If I&amp;#039;m not the top dog I should enjoy the fact that I have less responsibilities and pressures those people have (dog)&lt;br /&gt;Imagine yourself in someone else&amp;#039;s shoes (shoes)&lt;br /&gt;Build trust with people in small stages (trust)&lt;br /&gt;Match work with skill-level and increase skill-level before taking on more work (match)&lt;br /&gt;Create legacies even if small (small)&lt;br /&gt;Take satisfaction in small influences I have (satisfaction)&lt;br /&gt;Share pain with others (pain)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Bugs Bunny chases the Carrot with Skill but is Disappointed when a Prideful Dog with nice Shoes, who Bugs doesn&amp;#039;t Trust, lights a Match for a Small bomb of revenge for the Pain Bugs caused.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 03:08:34 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5240476</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-28T03:08:34Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5228775</link> <description>&lt;strong&gt;1 hour meditation:&lt;/strong&gt; Just letting go of perception seems to spark habitual thoughts to arise so I think this may be a good sign, though it&amp;#039;s unpleasant how slippery the mind gets in equanimity. I can kind of see what Rob Burbea means in that weakening perception will weaken consciousness but I&amp;#039;m still a long way from getting to that point and will probably need a lot more hours to do this. I&amp;#039;m still at times talking to myself out loud about some of the habitual mental rehearsing/arguments with people that will probably never happen. I think this is just a residue of the last dark night where mental speech and verbal speech re-synced in a different way. I&amp;#039;ll be interrupting that more often because it&amp;#039;s one thing to do that when you are alone but I don&amp;#039;t want to appear like a mental person if this happens in public. LOL! &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/big_grin.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I developed a body mnemonic where each body part represents a daily and weekly task I need to complete. This has been helpful coupled with the CBT mnemonic to reinforce the motivation and to downplay the aversion to get things done. For example I can visualize my forearm splashed with toothpaste and that detailed image can help me to remember to brush my teeth when cycling through this mind-palace. A good chunk of the &amp;#034;Incompletion Trigger List&amp;#034; is in my mind so that if I miss something those basic things will be done at a minimum. I&amp;#039;ve included enjoyment and recreation to the mnemonic so it won&amp;#039;t be too austere. Another benefit is that when you use these mind-palaces over and over again things can become automatic and cycling through the mind-palace will be less needed.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;youtube&amp;#x2e;com&amp;#x2f;watch&amp;#x3f;v&amp;#x3d;TIKlBR9qC0Q"&gt;Mnemonics FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This will be a good test of how much free time I actually have when things are getting complete as idle time disappears. It&amp;#039;ll test actual fatigue versus simply aversion. I haven&amp;#039;t used my toes yet so I can still add more tasks. This practice seems to be opposite of what David Allen (GTD) would recommend (which is to get everything out of your mind) but I think with my personality type if it&amp;#039;s not in my mind it probably won&amp;#039;t be done. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Letting go of perception is now being a nice part of this strategy to give quick relief if there&amp;#039;s any doubt or confusion.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 24 Feb 2014 03:24:44 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5228775</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-24T03:24:44Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5224296</link> <description>I tried to go &amp;#034;perceptionless&amp;#034;/&amp;#034;evaluationless&amp;#034; throughout the day and interrupting old mental habits. Obviously one can&amp;#039;t do this while driving but it&amp;#039;s more like letting go of perception and clinging faster and then using perception in a more skillful way. It seems to push up all kinds of mental crap that you normally deal with and shows the remaining mental stress conditioning that is yet to be dealt with. It feels like an answer to the subtlety that one searches for in vain in chasing experience. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It is similar to how Rob Burbea looks at those who&amp;#039;ve achieved stream-entry and view all experiences as impressions in awareness. Instead of pushing things aside it&amp;#039;s more like being prepared for when perception starts objectifying and reacting to the likeability or dislikeability of those objects. Perception is like pincers in your brain constantly readying for an object to react to. The pincers act but their &amp;#034;stickiness&amp;#034; is less because you are recoiling from the useless object. It&amp;#039;s like a suction-cup that doesn&amp;#039;t quite latch on.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Doing this one feels even more normal than before like one has never meditated yet there is less stress because there&amp;#039;s sidestepping of the old mental habits.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This practice makes it more subtle than before and eliminates some of the striving that comes from meditation (though albeit not much striving like I had when I first started). After I completely let go I sometimes go into my CBT mnemonic to create a new positive attitude which is perfectly okay to cultivate.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 22 Feb 2014 01:35:39 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5224296</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-22T01:35:39Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5213136</link> <description>I did a 1 hour sitting last night and I just focused on the mind-stream and repeatedly interrupted the habitual thoughts. I now see how pervasive these habits are and how much work there still is to be done. This reminds me of how daunted I was when I first enjoyed the jhanas but found insight and noting really difficult. Now that equanimity is more effortless the weeding of the mental garden looks like a brand new project and a brand new destination. It requires more care and consistency because any perception or evaluation of the practice is just more of the same mental landscapes that cause affect that lead you down similar paths. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The mind gets crystal clear when you interrupt old conditioning repeatedly but the habits are so strong that it requires constant deconditioning. Each time the habitual thought appears and is interrupted it returns almost like water cascading down irrigation. It&amp;#039;s like a Trojan horse that penetrated your head years ago and was running the town all this time but Priam still thinks he&amp;#039;s in control. The challenge is to change the irrigation so that the thought habits go in the healthy direction. The sense of delusion is really clear and it&amp;#039;s also unsettling because of how quickly it comes back. It&amp;#039;s like the conditioning is waiting for me to stop interrupting so it can continue on it&amp;#039;s merry way. I guess you can call that System 1 of Daniel Kahnenman&amp;#039;s Thinking Fast and Slow vs. System 2. System 2 needs a nudge to work but System 1 is automatic so what you program into that is paramount.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;We are adapted by nature to receive and are made perfect by habit.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Aristotle&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The mnemonic for CBT is helpful and just bring it up can point you in the right direction. I will now create some more mnemonics for basic duties and possibly include many, many more for things that are reminders to aim at purposeful actions. Each time it&amp;#039;s recalled it gets etched in the brain more permanently.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 17 Feb 2014 16:24:30 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5213136</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-17T16:24:30Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5199070</link> <description>Thanks! That&amp;#039;s very clear. As the mental habits get weaker they can be abandoned much faster and I do find that poem very apt for the kinds of &amp;#034;slings and arrows&amp;#034; I have to go through with liars and manipulators. It&amp;#039;s easy to abandon yourself when you become a target by another group of individuals.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2014 00:48:20 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5199070</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-12T00:48:20Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5197342</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Richard Zen:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&amp;#039;m getting much better at catching mind states.&lt;/strong&gt; When you purposefully quiet your mind (also out of enjoyment) you can compare the thinking patterns that appear and see clearly how they affect you and create moods (sometimes involving music). &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;By interrupting it faster and faster by letting go faster and faster &lt;strong&gt;it&amp;#039;s very clear these unhelpful mind states are very conditioned and need to be weakened as much as possible &lt;u&gt;and replaced with healthy ones&lt;/u&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;By relishing a quiet mind (which may be an attachment, who cares?) there&amp;#039;s a natural pull to just enjoy ambient sensation and no more.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Richard, you&amp;#039;re right AT the THRESHOLD! Just another step or two, and you will cross it. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;BTW, relishing a quiet mind is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an attachment. By relishing a quiet mind, you are able to become aware of what you&amp;#039;re thinking (i.e. to hear yourself think!). Ergo, to see the often hidden-from-sight processes of mind. This is a positive thing (accomplishment)! &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Consider the following with regard to the ideas of attachment with a quiet mind: there are quite a few suttas in which Gotama is depicted as walking away from an assembly of people who would be arguing (either with one another or with himself) or who would be talking aimlessly with pointless talk. When his point to them was not heard or recognized, he was not above simply walking away, back into the solitude of his own world where things made sense once again. He often sought seclusion from the destructive or mindless thoughts of others. It simply made no sense to him to subject himself to such useless atmospheres.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Once you begin actively seeking quietude and seclusion in everything you do (especially during those times when you are in the midst of outer turmoil being caused by others), you will know &lt;em&gt;nibbana&lt;/em&gt; by directly experiencing it. A quiet mind knows what is true and real and does not argue with itself. It is &lt;em&gt;at one&lt;/em&gt; with itself. Perhaps that&amp;#039;s what the meaning of the word &lt;em&gt;atonement&lt;/em&gt; is: at-one-ment. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It&amp;#039;s kind of like the poem &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; by Rudyard Kipling, the first verse of which goes: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you can keep your head when all about you&lt;br /&gt;Are losing theirs&lt;/strong&gt; and blaming it on you; . . . (concentration with equanimity!)&lt;br /&gt;If you can &lt;strong&gt;trust yourself &lt;/strong&gt;when &lt;strong&gt;all men doubt you&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But make allowance for their doubting too;&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (insight and wisdom!)&lt;br /&gt;If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, . . . (equanimity!)&lt;br /&gt;Or being lied about, &lt;strong&gt;don&amp;#039;t deal in lies,&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (equanimity!)&lt;br /&gt;Or being hated, &lt;strong&gt;don&amp;#039;t give way to hating,&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (more equanimity!) &lt;br /&gt;And yet don&amp;#039;t look too good, nor talk too wise; . . . (humility!) &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;And other salient lines from the poem: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If you can think&amp;#x2014;&lt;strong&gt;and not make thoughts your aim;&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (insight and wisdom!)&lt;br /&gt;If you can meet with triumph and disaster&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And treat those two imposters just the same;&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (equanimity!)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If you can &lt;strong&gt;bear to hear the truth you&amp;#039;ve spoken&lt;br /&gt;Twisted by knaves&lt;/strong&gt; to make a trap for fools, . . . (more equanimity!)&lt;br /&gt;Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And stoop and build &amp;#039;em up with worn-out tools;&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (equanimity and humility!)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you can force&lt;/strong&gt; your heart and nerve and sinew&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To serve your turn long after they are gone,&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (concentration!) &lt;br /&gt;And so hold on when there is nothing in you&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Except the Will which says to them: &amp;#034;Hold on&amp;#034;;&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (more concentration and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; giving in!)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (nobility is sublime!) &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;&lt;/strong&gt; . . . (more equanimity!)</description> <pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 07:27:39 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5197342</guid> <dc:creator>Ian And</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-11T07:27:39Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5197293</link> <description>I&amp;#039;m getting much better at catching mind states. When you purposefully quiet your mind (also out of enjoyment) you can compare the thinking patterns that appear and see clearly how they affect you and create moods (sometimes involving music). The future possibilities that my mind thinks are often completely inaccurate and totally catastrophic. It can be worse when my perceptions are negative but things are actually slightly more negative than I perceived &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/big_grin.gif" &gt; They move so quickly but because I&amp;#039;m in equanimity (and it&amp;#039;s getting deeper) they don&amp;#039;t hurt much but still create enough hindrances to repeat old habits. By interrupting it faster and faster by letting go faster and faster it&amp;#039;s very clear these unhelpful mindstates are very conditioned and need to be weakened as much as possible and replaced with healthy ones. By relishing a quiet mind (which may be an attachment, who cares?) there&amp;#039;s a natural pull to just enjoy ambient sensation and no more.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 05:25:40 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5197293</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-11T05:25:40Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5176487</link> <description>Now that I have recovered fully from the latest dark night my sense of self is being seen through. Strategizing and analyzing just appear to be things that just happened as opposed to a self that is thinking. When the mind wanders it&amp;#039;s just what happened. Most of it is conditioned. If I do something different than what I expected or thought I should do it&amp;#039;s just more stuff that happens. This of course could be a trap as it&amp;#039;s obvious that habits need to be worked on relentlessly to prevent indifference. One thing to remove the aversion is to mentally dwell on the benefits of a said action to make it desirable (no different than what advertising does). By paying attention to ONLY the pleasant benefits it motivates the brain to move forward. The result is that I&amp;#039;m enjoying to clean the apartment. The habitual aversion does come through but consistently bringing the brain to how enjoyable it is when dishes are clean, the car is clean and the apartment is clean can counter it.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What people like to coin as an &amp;#034;attention bounce&amp;#034; is very clear now. For example, going shopping today my mind, out of habit, wanted to go the same route as going to work but because I&amp;#039;m clearly present I could feel the tug but keep on the correct lane to my true destination. This bounce is from a habit. Another kind of bounce happens when you want to do something you should do but the brain moves away in aversion towards some other option that is less aversive (which is often habit again). You can feel the tug and the lack of motivation afterwards. When you&amp;#039;ve meditated for so many years this kind of thing is now easy to see, and less powerful but these mental tugs are still dangerous and sneaky. They can control your life because they work so quickly. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The key is noticing how quickly and sapped the desire to do the right thing is when aversion happens. Let go of the thoughts related to it and implant positive beneficial reasoning until the motivation returns. There&amp;#039;s something dry and dead when you&amp;#039;re forcing yourself to do something you don&amp;#039;t want to do.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 01 Feb 2014 19:34:44 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5176487</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-01T19:34:44Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5163131</link> <description>I&amp;#039;m finding I&amp;#039;m getting into a habit of talking to myself. It&amp;#039;s like I&amp;#039;m trying to get my speech situation under control and it&amp;#039;s starting to feel completely normal again. Thank God!</description> <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2014 03:50:46 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5163131</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-28T03:50:46Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5160609</link> <description>&lt;strong&gt;2 hour meditation:&lt;/strong&gt; I just put on some meditation music and relaxed my body and maintained equanimity with anything and focused mainly on perception. To see the mind notice sensations and to objectify them as unpleasant you can see the story appear just after. I just relaxed the perception and came back to the vibrations. I find meditation to be weirdly normal and non-explosive. Paying attention to thoughts as sensations is very easy. Many thoughts appeared with images of annoying co-workers and bosses and just relaxing the body and relaxing the thoughts creates relief. Noting to me is just bare sensation. Perceptions really feel like something. Even the attention to see perceptions is a sensation as well and can create a small bit of tightness. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Towards the end it appears clearly that certain preoccupations of the mind are very habitual and have to be relaxed again and again. Yet this knowledge makes you less aversive and fearful of those thoughts coming up. After letting go of aversion to a mind wandering all there is, is noticing that it&amp;#039;s wandered and just relaxing it. I went and made a cup of tea and just watched how the mind went quickly back to the thoughts and I just keep relaxing it. It&amp;#039;s a relief to know that rehearsing Buddhist practice in the mind is waning.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It&amp;#039;s very easy to get caught up with enemies and fantasizing revenge and it is so useless. I don&amp;#039;t want to be the customer in Minority Report wishing to imagine killing my boss. It&amp;#039;s so easy to let the approval of others be a reason why you like or dislike yourself. It&amp;#039;s best to just let go over and over again. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Looking at enemies in your mind as attachments is a good thing. It&amp;#039;s possible to remember how other people were in your mind for so long and how the brain just picks up new people to do the same thing and create the same feelings to new faces. The brain is accurate in finding people trying to stop you because those people usually have the power to stop you. As in the book &amp;#034;Meet your happy chemicals&amp;#034;, it&amp;#039;s true that if you bring mammals together they try and dominate each other for serotonin. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The brain also likes to pick up possible romantic partners and fantasize in a similarly useless way that has no reality whatsoever. Remembering other past environments you were in and how infatuated you got and how easily the brain can replace one face for another and still add gravitas via the emotions towards the next person as if it was &amp;#034;new&amp;#034; and &amp;#034;amazing&amp;#034; shows how quickly the brain shifts allegiances.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I really am developing a desire to wean these mental habits further. Thinking needs to be useful yet some of the wandering mind needs to happen to condition what are useful fabrications and perceptions. Weeding the garden and planting flowers.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jan 2014 05:12:39 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5160609</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-27T05:12:39Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5157630</link> <description>It is less effort than noting but sometimes the noting is too conceptual and doing a Shikantaza practice can show a concentration that seems effortless. There&amp;#039;s always a doing but I find my jhanas are weak but more pleasant because there&amp;#039;s so much less effort. I just wait for them to happen. It&amp;#039;s like tuning a radio but effort I think will still be needed. No matter what practice you do there&amp;#039;s always a need for consistency of attention to gain clarity. Perception is really difficult because we construct solidity from pointillist experience and seeing the fabricating/building/mountains out of molehills &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/big_grin.gif" &gt; has to be seen over and over again.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;11513&amp;#x2f;"&gt;Samatha, Nibbana and the emptiness of perception&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:03:48 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5157630</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-26T00:03:48Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5156353</link> <description>Hey, I&amp;#039;ve been reading through some of your posts and also I have an interest in shikantaza. I am wondering what your take is on the difference between Shinzen&amp;#039;s description of shikantaza and other descriptions that emphasize more effort. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In addition to Shinzen&amp;#039;s style, I have seen the practice taught as simply setting the intention to be here and avoid getting lost in thoughts, but adding no more structure. In my own experience this can actually be a lot higher effort than &amp;#034;doing nothing&amp;#034; but letting going of effort when it is noticed. Alternatively, the way I often have practiced is to apply effort to continuously notice some sensation that is occuring in my awareness, sort of like noting but without the notes. This can be even higher effort.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;For some reason, even though I have obtained higher states of awareness using Shinzen&amp;#039;s technique in the past, I naturally incline towards the practice styles that are higher effort because I am worried that I am not getting anywhere when I just &amp;#034;do nothing,&amp;#034; which is likely a flawed reasoning but hard to get around. In my own experience with Shinzen&amp;#039;s technique, a large part of its power is the fact that it goes completely against the grain of the desire to &amp;#034;get somewhere&amp;#034; in the first place. Another issue I run into with it is I haven&amp;#039;t really seen any other teacher talk about his style of shinkantaza, as it seems like other sources do advocate more effort.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 25 Jan 2014 14:39:21 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5156353</guid> <dc:creator>Elijah Smith</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-25T14:39:21Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5151451</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt; noticing that aversion after the mind wanders isn&amp;#039;t necessary&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Wow, I was just noticing the same thing this morning. My mind was wandering during meditation and I was getting frustrated, and then I realized that in any given moment, I am only responsible for that moment - not past moments when my mind was wandering - hence no reason to be frustrated.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 18:18:03 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5151451</guid> <dc:creator>Jason Snyder</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-23T18:18:03Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5150768</link> <description>I just went out and grabbed something to eat and I feel much better now. The numbness is greatly reduced but it seemed to start in the jaw, go to the shoulders and then to the chest/arms/hands. There&amp;#039;s a slight headache in the skull but things are better. I hope to be completely normal by tomorrow. The brain seems to have learned not to manipulate attention as before.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;That was the worst reobservation I&amp;#039;ve had since I first had reobservation. At least it was only one week instead of 3 weeks. I have no idea how others could go farther than me in 2 years without even worse headaches and withdrawal symptoms. At least I didn&amp;#039;t get nausea like some drug addicts do when they go through rehab.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 04:58:50 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5150768</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-23T04:58:50Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5150376</link> <description>Boy these withdrawal symptoms have been wicked. Yesterday I felt like I had a hangover + numbness in the jaw and back of neck + burn-out all in one. The numbness doesn&amp;#039;t mean I can&amp;#039;t feel my hands touching my face but it&amp;#039;s the only word I can find. In a few hours it faded and now the numbness and speech impediment is fading but slower. I still feel I can speak well and people understand me but there&amp;#039;s a weird mental lack of confidence with speaking now. Not pleasant.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;For some context it should be understood that I don&amp;#039;t sit much and all this stemmed simply from noticing that aversion after the mind wanders isn&amp;#039;t necessary. Just that insight caused all this. It&amp;#039;s pretty clear that my brain is adjusting and taking some time to do so. It&amp;#039;s pretty shocking that paying attention to reality and just letting go of unnecessary stress can do this.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;These kind of experiences are the reason why people will naturally shy away from meditation. Part of me wants to give up now and just focus on changing habits.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:29:05 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5150376</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-23T00:29:05Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5136338</link> <description>This morning is more interesting in that I can just stay with the knowing much more easy because everything is included. There are less gaps. All thinking, muscle movements, reactions, intentions to pay attention, are sensations. Everything gets smoother because any mental loop to analyze the practice is just more of the same. The sense of cause and effect being constant and just one thing after another leaves normality as it is and squeezes any &amp;#034;self of the gaps&amp;#034; out. Any rating of the quality of the practice just looks like more thoughts trying to be a controller. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;There are deeper levels of stress but it&amp;#039;s like you have to bump into these insights before those stress levels can even be seen. I know there&amp;#039;s more because of time and how the present moment is an elongation of experiences by short-term memory and subtle thinking but I have to get there when I get there, otherwise it&amp;#039;s just more thinking about the practice.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:29:27 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5136338</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-16T14:29:27Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5131964</link> <description>Another shift today that brought more relief and more dark night reactions. I used to end sensations with thoughts and now that I don&amp;#039;t anymore I noticed that I still push slightly the intention to pay attention when the mind wanders. This is just another form of stress because there&amp;#039;s an aversion to the mind wandering. When I notice the mind wandering I don&amp;#039;t need to intend to pay attention since I&amp;#039;m already back (otherwise I wouldn&amp;#039;t have noticed the mind wandering in the first place). Experience is even more smooth now.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The relief was big but then I got some yucky sensations in my chest that have been appearing here and there throughout the day. Any deeper insight seems to trigger more of these sensations, but since I&amp;#039;ve experienced these many times before I know it will go away.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2014 01:17:29 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5131964</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-15T01:17:29Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5109265</link> <description>Today at work I was at (what should have been a nerve wracking job interview) but I acted strangely non-chalant because of the experience I had just a couple of hours before. For the past few days I&amp;#039;ve been just enjoying my mindfulness of the body and really feeling what it&amp;#039;s like to have a torso, arms, legs, etc. What happened was that I could notice the sensations of thoughts just as effortlessly. Sensing thoughts felt the same way as what sensing an arm feels like. For a brief moment the sense of separation was almost all gone. Even when it returns it&amp;#039;s not all that much. After the interview I still did cling a little rehearsing what I could have said different etc and that&amp;#039;s where noting can bring you back.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What&amp;#039;s allowing this to happen is seeing deeper into perceptions and because &lt;strong&gt;I&amp;#039;m self-referencing less about the practice&lt;/strong&gt;. For a long time I was still self-referencing a lot with practice and when that habit finally starts going is when things get even better.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 08 Jan 2014 03:39:53 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5109265</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-08T03:39:53Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5099803</link> <description>&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;9548&amp;#x2f;"&gt;Non-duality and the fading of perception&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve listened to this dharma talk a few times. It&amp;#039;s helpful in getting me to understand the &amp;#034;dependent&amp;#034; part of dependent origination and how minute you have to go in seeing all kinds of perceptions (short vs tall/likes vs dislikes/beautiful vs ugly/smart vs stupid). It&amp;#039;s interesting how there are also limitations that force people who take meditation seriously to just enjoy likes and dislikes in a reasonable manner (otherwise how would there be any preferences?) while at the same time being ready for the reactivity that will show up if you&amp;#039;re not paying attention. Adding perception (from the 5 aggregates) between vedana and tanha, in Dependent Origination) is a good idea.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Just listening to it I flipped through some jhanas (though they are nothing like they used to be). It&amp;#039;s effortless non-clinging but also less WOW! at the same time. You can see how the meditation practice itself can be prone to these dualisms (good meditation vs. bad meditation) and just thinking about meditating or intending to pay attention creates these very small tensions that could be conceived of as stress but in equanimity don&amp;#039;t appear to be. Subtlety, subtlety, subtlety is what it&amp;#039;s all about. So many layers.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 02 Jan 2014 04:40:29 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5099803</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-02T04:40:29Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5060335</link> <description>Another nice old Burbea talk on awareness:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;talks&amp;#x2f;audio_player&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;12484&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;The Nature of Awareness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It&amp;#039;s another reminder to go deeper. My equanimity is getting so smooth but deceptive. It&amp;#039;s also interesting how narrow the equanimity is in the beginning when you first get there and when you&amp;#039;re about to give up sometime later it&amp;#039;s so wide with less push and pull you think you&amp;#039;re done. Yet awareness is aware of awareness.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 20 Dec 2013 03:38:19 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5060335</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-12-20T03:38:19Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5040113</link> <description>Okay here again a tidbit from Daniel for someone else is helping my practice.&lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/glare.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Daniel M. Ingram:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;bill was coming from a perspective that when doing insight practices, where you looked at the granular nature of things, very digital, very particle, to do that really well required high dose, consistency, and the like, as any subtle solidification can block the fruits of the practice, this being the classic Mahasi perspective&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Throughout the day I&amp;#039;ve been tuning into the vibrations and granular structure of things and whether it is there or not. When it&amp;#039;s not, there&amp;#039;s already a tension and clinging that has arisen. The thoughts about practice and any narratives already produce a small tension and solidification. With a marker like &amp;#034;vibrations&amp;#034;, and &amp;#034;grain&amp;#034; it&amp;#039;s easier to let go sooner. Lots of big issue stuff came up today and it was even easier to recognize the beginning of the fabrications and just let them go sooner. Again the normality is increased but the act of the brain to leap out into different times (future/past) can be seen to be slightly stressful and tuning into the vibrations in the sense doors can relax the tensions before they become fullblown. By noticing more and doing less there is ironically more control. The need for verbal noting seems so archaic now because it&amp;#039;s not as fast as noticing small rapid changes that are happening all the time. Even thinking about typing the experience can cause a little solidification but just tuning into the bare attention (without a forceful push to do so) relaxes the tension.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Doing a 1 hour sit I can definitely see how a Shikantaza or Rigpa practice can get into jhanas by accident if the solidification progresses into an absorption. Any mental wandering is being disidentified and now flickering attention and intentions to pay attention is now being disidentified. No-self is becoming clearer now that subtle clinging can be seen. Clinging about the practice creates some of this solidification so it&amp;#039;s easier to let go of that as well because the same tension is recognized. The brain feels like it has nowhere to go and nothing to do so the relief is there and muscles (especially the head) are more relaxed. It&amp;#039;s like a cocoon of vibrations.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If the mind is thinking about a like there&amp;#039;s usually a tension because I don&amp;#039;t have what I like now, or I enjoyed it and it&amp;#039;s gone. That&amp;#039;s why the tension is so pervasive.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;When I&amp;#039;m like this it feels like a steady equanimity without a jhana. As the senses started fading it took a while for them to come back and sharpen again. In order to fade my senses into a cessation will take a lot longer than 1 hour. LOL!</description> <pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 04:35:53 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5040113</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-12-17T04:35:53Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5030976</link> <description>Practice threads can be a good reminder that there&amp;#039;s always room for improvement and updates. It takes years for most people to get major insights (if they ever get there) so one has to be patient and keep at it. Also if you forget something you learned you can remind yourself just by going back and re-reading.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 14 Dec 2013 16:49:48 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5030976</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-12-14T16:49:48Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5028909</link> <description>richard, just wanted to chime in that as an amateur mediator, watching your progress is quite illuminating&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;many times i find myself nodding me head as i read these updates... puts a lot of my not fully grasped insights into words&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;it&amp;#039;s inspired me to start my own practice thread... here&amp;#039;s to hoping i update it as frequently as yourself&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;- rein</description> <pubDate>Sat, 14 Dec 2013 13:25:52 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5028909</guid> <dc:creator>rein drop</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-12-14T13:25:52Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4951065</link> <description>I&amp;#039;ve been having more sits and noting much more during life. By focusing on the clinging as the main target for relaxation it zeros in on the problem without manipulating too much of anything else so you feel normal and can be functional while doing work. Self-referencing is the enemy. It&amp;#039;s just an extra loop that takes up processing power that can be used elsewhere. It&amp;#039;s amazing how many weird loops are there are with fake scenarios/catastrophizing/rehearsal of conversations for a future time. Just relaxing the body and relaxing the thoughts reduces tension because it&amp;#039;s a relaxing interruption instead of a mental debate on how that looping shouldn&amp;#039;t happen. Just relax and get on with the task. That&amp;#039;s a good principle whether you&amp;#039;re aiming for jhana or just want to get on with a task.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;During difficult situations like dealing with job security or possible meetings with judgemental people noting has been a huge help. Most people believe performance = self-worth which is a trap. Performance should only = performance. Noting just exposes thinking as just thinking. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m studying more and find it easier to let go of aversion and following the same patterns. I&amp;#039;m focusing more on realistic ways of studying. Along with the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve I&amp;#039;ve added some other things that make my studying efforts more like a slow adding to detail and preventing myself from going to new subjects too fast.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;youtube&amp;#x2e;com&amp;#x2f;watch&amp;#x3f;v&amp;#x3d;RH95h36NChI"&gt;Principles of Deep Processing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;More chores are getting completed and a key use of noting is improving my beliefs in dealing with the failure schema. The schema creates so much aversion that unless it&amp;#039;s interrupted with accurate non-judgemental noting it will create avoidance or procrastination. &lt;strong&gt;The simple trick is to notice when you&amp;#039;re thinking about the task that you need to do and the aversion starts welling up in your body. There&amp;#039;s a fake tiredness that appears that really is aversion and very little tiredness. By applying consistent noting at this point to let go of any aversion or attachment to distracting activities it&amp;#039;s easier to stop the conditioning and move on to the necessary task.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It&amp;#039;s like creating a space of relief where you can park temporarily and then once the aversion has disappeared I can then go do the task I need to without pushing against aversive thoughts. The reward is still the same as in goal orientation but it&amp;#039;s important to like the benefits of what you are doing which then gets the brain to prefer those activities to the short-term gratification that distraction brings.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m still in the dark woods with meditation as life improvement and it has to include basic beliefs that failure is okay and a genuine resolve to continue without needing an instant reward or big successes. Mental narratives with failure and success both have to be abandoned. Too much pride and depression fucks everything up. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/smug.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My sitting meditation is still a mixture of Shikantaza and noting. Sometimes there is a noticing of how things are gone by understanding that future turns into the past instantly. It&amp;#039;s hard to ruminate when everything is past and the present moment is just short-term memory. I also like Cittamatra as a reminder that everything I&amp;#039;m experiencing is just impressions on awareness. Of course awareness is aware of awareness so there&amp;#039;s more but even that is good enough to reduce clinging.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;11119&amp;#x2f;"&gt;Cittamatra&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaseed&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;11125&amp;#x2f;"&gt;Guided meditation&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Fri, 29 Nov 2013 06:13:45 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4951065</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-11-29T06:13:45Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4874485</link> <description>After about an hour of meditating I finally got to equanimity in a very clear pleasant way that hasn&amp;#039;t been felt in a long time. Some power tools used outside were just sounds. Seeing is just seeing, etc. How I usually get stuck here is habitual thoughts appear, including faces of weird people I&amp;#039;ve never seen before, and weird dream-like scenarios. Along with Ian And&amp;#039;s advice and Nick&amp;#039;s advice to continue being neutral to all phenomenon (sensation, recognition, craving, clinging) I was able to make the equanimity deeper. That child-like presence is very delightful. Every time a habitual thought or scenario appears I just notice the clinging and go to vedana in the body and just watch it pass away. As I keep doing this the jhana seems to revive again and again and go deeper and deeper. The thoughts versus jhanas are very chunky in that when a thought stream drops the jhana energetically appears from the background. The one hour session seemed to end in a flash and I just continued on. Dependent origination is starting to feel less linear and more like sensation, recognition, craving, and clinging are happening roughly the same time. Clinging happens a lot sooner than I thought it did. In equanimity the mind still wants to wander in thoughts about the practice, views, future and past (though the future and past is more narrow at this point).</description> <pubDate>Mon, 11 Nov 2013 18:03:05 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4874485</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-11-11T18:03:05Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4842781</link> <description>Just continuing the above practice but with completely silent noting but making sure to acknowledge what&amp;#039;s happening, including small attention movements and small intentions and small analysis. I&amp;#039;m adding more body relaxation and relaxation of the thoughts. It&amp;#039;s greatly helping. I can see that clinging happens just by being conscious. Any little thoughts about practice and stories (even small ones) are just more clinging. It&amp;#039;s a challenge to notice when the attention moves around to notice it properly without naming it but I&amp;#039;m getting better at it and more consistent. The result is a very deep relief with no rigid jhanas and a powering down feeling. It&amp;#039;s also important to notice feeling tone in sore parts of the body or any physical pain and just let it be. I will have to do this for a long time so the powering down can go all the way. 1 hour went by like nothing. Very delightful nonetheless. Any clinging to progress of any kind will fuck it up.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m just reminding myself Ian And&amp;#039;s advice on disenchantment with the following:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Sensation, recognition, craving, clinging.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2013 03:23:20 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4842781</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-10-31T03:23:20Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4831656</link> <description>I&amp;#039;m reading The Method of No-method The Chan Practice of Silent Illumination to improve my Shikantaza. I&amp;#039;m finding the noting method beneficial to keep things going but there&amp;#039;s always a little tension or headache that results from it. By switching between the two practices I&amp;#039;m getting good results. The noting can deal with difficult things you have trouble seeing and the Shikantaza can alleviate the tension while still noticing what&amp;#039;s happening. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;For example if I worry about the practice I could note worry, but I could also do nothing and watch &amp;#034;worrying&amp;#034; thoughts. By noting first and then seeing the same phenomenon and doing nothing I get the same result without the tension. This has further made my self-referencing habits weaken and a newer freedom is appearing. I&amp;#039;m even more normal than before but with a complete acceptance of what is in the thinking department, so even if I&amp;#039;m lost in thoughts just being aware that it&amp;#039;s happening is enough and just getting on with life. Thoughts about progress, how to practice, checking if it&amp;#039;s working, are just more sensations so the rest is deeper and the letting go is deeper. Sometimes noting &amp;#034;worry&amp;#034;, &amp;#034;doubt&amp;#034;, &amp;#034;confusion&amp;#034; along with purposefully relaxing the body and then noting &amp;#034;relaxation&amp;#034; can turn you back to where you need to be.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;One thing I like to do at work now is just starting the Shikantaza practice by noticing the vibrations in body (in a very light way) and watching the mind move in habitual directions. It&amp;#039;s like you can feel a tension in the skull moving in different habitual directions but you don&amp;#039;t do anything except be aware. The perceptions and clinging can just relax. The vibrations touch the atmosphere and that&amp;#039;s the anchor and the tension of mind has nowhere to feed.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;There&amp;#039;s more to learn as I find mindfulness disappears when talking to people but now when I finish conversations and I get self-conscious about whether it was a good conversation or not it is helping me to not care if I run out of conversation or if my jokes aren&amp;#039;t funny enough. Mindfulness can also disappear when enjoying entertainment. When thoughts go negative, interrupting the thought stream with &amp;#034;why?&amp;#034; can also keep the mind from forgetting how interesting the moment is. Conceptual space is still pretty solid and I&amp;#039;m not sure how to deal with that.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 25 Oct 2013 01:57:16 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4831656</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-10-25T01:57:16Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4809093</link> <description>I got a little stuck in the past few days. I haven&amp;#039;t wanted to do anything except just noting when I started using Ken&amp;#039;s app. I talked to Beth to look for more depth in my noticing and I need a little more consistency. Along with noting &amp;#034;attention&amp;#034;, and &amp;#034;intention&amp;#034; I can see more &amp;#034;reflecting&amp;#034;, &amp;#034;confusion&amp;#034;, &lt;strong&gt;&amp;#034;equanimity&amp;#034;&lt;/strong&gt;, &amp;#034;planning&amp;#034;, &amp;#034;strategizing&amp;#034;, and &amp;#034;imagining&amp;#034;. Naturally after some imagining happens more stress appears. My mindfulness today was a little tighter now. I don&amp;#039;t have to look for vibrations because if you note about once per second they&amp;#039;re there. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/big_grin.gif" &gt; More detail + more consistency = more relief.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:57:10 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4809093</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-10-16T00:57:10Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4774673</link> <description>Self-referencing is weakening. It feels so much better.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 06 Oct 2013 18:36:05 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4774673</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-10-06T18:36:05Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4742471</link> <description>More thawing is happening again. Coming out of my car from work I was just with the sensations even to how wind feels on my eyes. The sense of self continues to be like the thoughts but the mind or (consciousness) is naturally withdrawing from the mind-stream to what&amp;#039;s happening phenomenologically now. It&amp;#039;s like a gentle resting in the body with little bits of bliss and beautiful rest. Every time I get caught up in thoughts it&amp;#039;s feeling more and more like a shocking waste of time and a neglect in how nice now can feel when you are a healthy human being with no major disabilities or chronic pain. I don&amp;#039;t want to take it for granted.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 26 Sep 2013 01:30:11 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4742471</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-09-26T01:30:11Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4734633</link> <description>As I continued this practice I could see how it was about momentum. As the momentum pushes you the distractions are easier to ignore. You concentrate which calms the addictive part of the brain so you can do more but I found a lot more insight than I expected. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My brain likes to imagine a willpower that can study for work plus learn a new language plus clean the house in unrealistic time scales. By the time I got to studying I was so tired and when you&amp;#039;re mindful you can feel that intentions are limited and each successful push to complete something else depletes you further. In order to master a new skill, other activities must get out of the way or else the energy will be so depleted that you can&amp;#039;t do much even if your force yourself. Intention is like a muscle that gets tired. Being mindful of the body shows you how wrong the expectation/belief was. The imagination really does want to experience things other than what actually happens. This is a really valuable lesson for me.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It reminds me of a comment that AEN mentioned some time past on how you can&amp;#039;t just run a marathon but if you keep practicing then eventually you can. There&amp;#039;s too much on my plate. I also need to look at my energy levels and see if there&amp;#039;s anything I need to do better.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 23 Sep 2013 23:53:26 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4734633</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-09-23T23:53:26Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4729259</link> <description>I tried out as I promised Fitter Stroke&amp;#039;s practice with concentration and intentions. I did this and I didn&amp;#039;t get into jhana but it didn&amp;#039;t matter as it helped greatly in dealing with negative schemas. I got a lot of work done on my project and can&amp;#039;t wait to do this again. Mixing this with metta will be my next step as per Shinzen&amp;#039;s focus on the positive. Negative emotions had very little hold. The only way forward for me is to do this while dealing with long-term projects. Positivity is action and negativity is paralysis.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 22 Sep 2013 16:56:13 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4729259</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-09-22T16:56:13Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4716778</link> <description>Today at work I got some more dark night symptoms of crabbiness but I was under control of it. I&amp;#039;ve seen it before and it&amp;#039;s just aversion that is persistent. The asking of &amp;#034;why?&amp;#034; to disrupt repetitive thought habits has been helpful and I&amp;#039;m not asking the question verbally anymore since I can see the thought stream is onto something boring and repetitive and I just return to now to gain relief. It&amp;#039;s really helping my insight disease in rehearsing dharma tactics endlessly. It&amp;#039;s a reminder to prevent wandering and to enjoy presence. My concentration was quite good today. I&amp;#039;m not hitting as many ticks on my pomodoro technique sheet. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I know now that if I have a problem I&amp;#039;m having trouble solving, then that is precisely where the mind will lose it&amp;#039;s composure more than any other time. The anger as usual is directed towards people who did not support me fully or were hostile on purpose to prevent my success. Per schema therapy it&amp;#039;s okay to let that anger out but the relationship changes. It&amp;#039;s more like I accept that these people treated me this way and that I&amp;#039;m right to be angry but there is no need to ask for redress or forgiveness on their part. I also have had lots of prior negative judgements from people and any closed door meetings in offices can trigger me to think another judgement is upon me. This time I understood what happened and realised that no matter how convincing (how reactive the amygdala was) I was still able to realise that there really was no danger. In the end there wasn&amp;#039;t but now I&amp;#039;m not afraid of the reactivity since it&amp;#039;s a survival instinct that can read facial expressions and situations for danger and that when it goes off inaccurately it&amp;#039;s mainly because of bad past experiences. Self-compassion can now intercede. It means my emotions can be there and be released without a need to repress them or ruminate on them.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The thought formations are clearer than ever in my last sit. Ken&amp;#039;s advice to not live a proxy life and Dan&amp;#039;s advice that you cannot experience anything other than what is happening now is really getting me to understand the amygdala. Our daydreams are just proxy experiences because they trigger the &amp;#034;experience&amp;#034;/&amp;#034;amygdala&amp;#034; to react based on the thinking. So it&amp;#039;s important to use the pre-frontal cortex and other brain areas to stay with the current data in the present moment to prevent the mind from going off into inaccurate amygdala piano-playing which will wreck your life. The amygdala is always running but the continuous attention is regulating it and making it more accurate. Daydreaming of pleasures and pains is just this proxy life just trying to manipulate your amygdala. When it succeeds in making you release dopamine and other pleasant chemicals it just wires the brain to do it more and more. Any kind of PTSD situations is just wiring that is so strong that any reminder of past traumas can trigger the amygdala negatively. Mental rehearsals for possible future conversations will definitely trigger the amygdala and that&amp;#039;s something I still do but again the relationship to it is different now that I know why it happens and that I&amp;#039;m probably being too hyper-vigilant. Some rehearsal is necessary since for example you may have to go to court over something traumatic so the pain will be brought up again and again in order to prepare a case. You may have to debate someone or prepare to perform a skill. But if a rehearsal is just repetitive and not of use then it&amp;#039;s okay to interrupt it with a query so it stops and the query is passive and inquisitive enough to prevent reactivity over reactivity. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/big_grin.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;boingboing&amp;#x2e;net&amp;#x2f;2013&amp;#x2f;08&amp;#x2f;12&amp;#x2f;whos-afraid-of-the-amygdala&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;Who&amp;#039;s afraid of the amygdala?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;MKB: Is it reasonable to link the amygdala and fear, then? I mean, is any part of the brain really a single-function tool … like a pie-crust crimper you’d buy from Williams Sonoma? Or are they more like, say, a food processor, able to do multiple jobs?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;PW: There’s two answers to that. The first is that you have to start somewhere. Nobody believes that fear is the amygdala’s sole function and we know it can’t teach you everything you need to know about being afraid. But we do know it’s an older area of the brain and it’s reactive. It’s picked up on these things like facial expressions and it tells the brain, “the last time we saw that facial expression something bad happened.” It sends that signal to the prefrontal cortex, where decisions get made. The amygdala produces an alarm reaction and the prefrontal cortex is in charge of cancelling or corroborating the alarm.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Say you’re looking at a snake. That shape could mean danger. But it might not. The amygdala sends the same alarm despite the context, whether you’re in a field or in a zoo. The prefrontal cortex can cancel the alarm call in a zoo. [If the communication between the two parts of your brain is happening and the prefrontal cortex is working properly] the same stimulus should give very different outcomes based on context. We believe that circuitry is critical to how well people regulate anxiety and whether they will succumb to an anxiety disorder.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;MKB: But what the amygdala does isn’t just about fear and anxiety, right? That seems to be what your research is showing.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;PW: That’s the other answer. As you do more research, the next thing you realize is that the amygdala doesn’t just do anxiety. It’s not the fear center of the brain. Instead, it responds to things, and calls up other areas of the brain to pay attention to them. It makes the rest of the brain better at learning.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;MKB: Does paying attention come first, or does the amygdala kick in and make you pay attention?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;PW: &lt;strong&gt;It’s always monitoring on idle. It’s never off, the engine is always warm.&lt;/strong&gt; It’s very automatic. We’ve used studies with backward masking &amp;#x2014; we’ll show people fear faces, but really quickly and cover them with a neutral expression face. People report only seeing the neutral face. But their amygdala still activates because of the fear face. So you’re not even consciously always privy to what the amygdala is privy to. It snaps to that attention without your permission. It can automatically react to something that you don’t necessarily “see” in the environment &amp;#x2014; the look of someone’s eyes, the shape of a snake &amp;#x2014; and once it goes, the vigilance level across your brain just changes. You might not even be aware of why that is, but now you start searching the environment much more carefully. This can be part of how you end up with panic attacks. But it’s also that healthy sense of wariness that we all have and should have. But the amygdala isn’t the voice in your head asking, “Is everything okay?” It’s the system that gets the voice going.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;MKB: How does knowing this help us better understand what’s happening the brains of individual people?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;PW: One front to our current research is watching differences in normal levels of anxiety, looking for translation to disorders. Part of what interests me in studying undergrads is that we’re hoping to pick up on something that will help people understand normal fluctuations and disorders. &lt;strong&gt;The idea is that people with anxiety disorders don’t recruit the prefrontal cortex as well as they should, and the degree to which they can recruit it predicts their symptom severity. &lt;/strong&gt;So if you can recruit the prefrontal cortex a little, you’ll have fewer symptoms of PTSD than someone who can’t. We know there are problems with this system [the connections between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex] in kids raised in neglectful situations. Those kids search for threats too often. We know hypervigilance is a key symptom of anxiety. The problem with anxiet disorders isn’t hyper fear. It’s hypervigilance.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My Shikantaza sit today was quite good. Just letting things show themselves and my relationship to vedana is improving. If some uncomfortable twitch from blood movement in the leg appears I can just watch it&amp;#039;s impermanence with less reactivity. Small pains in the body are embraced. The brain started getting fast strobing pulses that were pleasant and the whole body was in rapture and pulses. The difference is that it wasn&amp;#039;t a concentration state where I was solidifying anything and so the bliss was much better and earworms disappeared (though they come back pretty clearly) but everything feels fine and heavenly. Just even trying to force a jhana was slightly painful and the brain could make a comparison with just letting it be versus holding onto a mindstate.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 18 Sep 2013 04:50:35 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4716778</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-09-18T04:50:35Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4712686</link> <description>I did a meditation run today which really was just running and not much else. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/big_grin.gif" &gt; The only thing different I did was add some schema therapy (pros and cons of actions after affect naturally passes away) throughout the day and got some work done but while I was running I added some of Nick&amp;#039;s advice on &amp;#034;why&amp;#034;. Instead of watching equanimously things arise and pass away I would interrupt the thought stream with &amp;#034;why?&amp;#034; since many of the thought streams still had some affect even if it didn&amp;#039;t bother me much, but it was refreshing to return to now instead of letting the mind go off willy nilly. There was a little pressure in the skull when this happened so I&amp;#039;m hoping this is deconditioning rambling thoughts instead of conditioning them. If it feels healthy and good I&amp;#039;ll just keep doing it. Some of this reminds me of the AF flowchart Tarin did except it&amp;#039;s laughably smaller and probably more efficient but ultimately the same thing.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2013 03:01:37 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4712686</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-09-16T03:01:37Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Richard's insight practice</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4697546</link> <description>I was able to keep the noting throughout the day today but I got a little tired. The noting I was doing was very subtle and I was able to stick to it throughout a lot of boring work so the time did not drag. Seeing more things hit consciousness just keeps getting better. It becomes obvious when thoughts start appearing like a self when they link together into stories. I have to face my schemas so that my consciousness can see more and disembed from those habitual thoughts. When dealing with any schema those thoughts have enormous affect that if avoided you can get good at your practice but be fooled because you didn&amp;#039;t test it in those rough conditions. With a failure schema the brain brings up all the people who got in your way or gave you ultra negative assessments in the form of mental visions and the brain tends to go off into replaying that at a faster rate when you face what will disprove the schema. It especially appears when there are problem solving situations that are difficult. The brain just wants to relieve these periods and then demotivate, when persistence is needed instead.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;To start working on this schema I&amp;#039;ll keep noting and seeing freshness while using the following memory book:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;amazon&amp;#x2e;com&amp;#x2f;You-Can-Have-Amazing-Memory&amp;#x2f;dp&amp;#x2f;1907486976"&gt;You can have an amazing memory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It helps deal with primary and recency forgetting which should make all my finance reading something that can be memorized to a certain extent that will be helpful. It&amp;#039;ll also take a lot of stress out because my expectations of what I memorize will be realistic over the months necessary to get better.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 13 Sep 2013 01:00:24 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4697546</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-09-13T01:00:24Z</dc:date> </item> </channel> </rss> 