<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0"> <channel> <title>Arising and Passing (A&amp;P)</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_category?p_l_id=&amp;mbCategoryId=118172</link> <description>Everything related to Arising and Passing should go here.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 19 Oct 2014 00:56:26 GMT</pubDate> <dc:date>2014-10-19T00:56:26Z</dc:date> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P Criteria too Broad?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604752</link> <description>true dat</description> <pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 17:39:04 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604752</guid> <dc:creator>Daniel M. Ingram</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-14T17:39:04Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P Criteria too Broad?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604746</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Daniel M. Ingram:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Your point about sorting this out is a good one, given that it is not always easy. Definitely not all psychedelic experiences include the A&amp;amp;P, but some definitely do, as plenty here will attest, and teasing that out is complex and could benefit from more research dollars from people who know science, that territory, and the insight maps well, which obviously is a hard combination of things to have align often.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I feel it&amp;#039;s important to recall that the map layed out by the Visuddhimagga regards knowledges of formations; insight into the nature of experience.  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;People have weird energetic sensations.  People get depressed.  These are normal human things. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If we have some &amp;#034;A&amp;amp;P phenomena&amp;#034; but we remain lost in content and identified with our experience, then there is nothing gained, nothing known, and nothing purified.  If there is no insight into the nature of reality, then what has been attained?  Where does the wisdom come?   &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This tendency to build conceptual mountains out of every blip and twitch is a failure to recognize the nature of wisdom.  </description> <pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 17:34:37 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604746</guid> <dc:creator>dat Buddha-field</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-14T17:34:37Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P Criteria too Broad?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604576</link> <description>Your point about sorting this out is a good one, given that it is not always easy. Definitely not all psychedelic experiences include the A&amp;amp;P, but some definitely do, as plenty here will attest, and teasing that out is complex and could benefit from more research dollars from people who know science, that territory, and the insight maps well, which obviously is a hard combination of things to have align often.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 13:45:18 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604576</guid> <dc:creator>Daniel M. Ingram</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-14T13:45:18Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P Criteria too Broad?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604410</link> <description>I don&amp;#039;t think so, personally.  Maybe the key is in the name.  If a person can see everything arising and passing away - as in, they have an insight about the nature of experience - and then that insight begins to eat away at their sense of &amp;#034;being&amp;#034; - as in they begin to see their very core arising and passing away - then I think that is the A&amp;amp;P which results in the dark night.  It&amp;#039;s an existential crisis.  The mind starts to believe it doesn&amp;#039;t actually exist the way it thought it did, so it goes through stages of greiving and fear as it lets go.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I think a lot of people here, specifically, have depression and axiety issues, so these things get conflaited and compounded and the whole thing is very messy as everyone tries to explain the path from their own experience.  A good question to ask is, is the fear or sadness coming from a focus on the self (why me) or a focus on experience (what is happening to me?)  In the end, it&amp;#039;s about the insight in Buddhism - how do you see the world, or what perspective are you looking from?  It&amp;#039;s about coming into a viewpoint about the nature of experience.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 07:01:36 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604410</guid> <dc:creator>Not Tao</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-14T07:01:36Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>A&amp;P Criteria too Broad?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604355</link> <description>Given the possible breadth of symptoms, it seems you would be hard-pressed to find someone who &lt;em&gt;doesn&amp;#039;t&lt;/em&gt; have some kind of strange experience that would qualify, especially anyone who ever took a psychedelic. You couple that with some generic emotional problems (depression/anxiety) which are increasingly symptomatic in society, it seems to me that you&amp;#039;re dealing with a pretty big chunk of the normal human population, and maybe that&amp;#039;s the point, but is &lt;em&gt;anyone &lt;/em&gt;who fits this profile a dark night yogi?</description> <pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:14:00 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5604355</guid> <dc:creator>masa</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-14T05:14:00Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5600131</link> <description>I haven&amp;#039;t heard enough about the arising and passing yet. &lt;br /&gt;What I&amp;#039;d like is to know if it really is like some sort of atomisation of perceived experience and why this is profound. I&amp;#039;d like to know what sort of neural correlate this has too.&lt;br /&gt;I still have no real idea whether I&amp;#039;ve experienced it or not. If, say, a strobing effect in the vision is A&amp;amp;P - as I&amp;#039;ve seen someone say - then I&amp;#039;ve experienced that but I can&amp;#039;t say that in itself is profound (though seemingly it accompanies a fine sort of energetic state (to use wooly language)).&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Here is an example of someone describing A&amp;amp;P in those terms - http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=35&amp;amp;t=13020&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;There&amp;#039;s also a more subtle arising and passing, which is when sense impressions start to arise and pass, come and go, change, flux, very rapidly, like a seethe of bubbles in boiling water, or a shaken can of coke , or a fast flicker of a TV screen. Sounds can break down into tiny individual bits of noise, vision can flicker or kind-of strobe, tactile sensations can become... I dunno, it&amp;#039;s hard to describe. Seething.&lt;br /&gt;This can lead to the shocking insight that everything is impermanent, everything (or at least everything we can sense) is constantly changing, arising and passing away both on a mundane and supramundane level.&lt;br /&gt;It&amp;#039;s pretty cool.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;Experiencing the sort of ecstasy where you merge with your surroundings and seem to be plunged into a pool of life &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; seem profound (because it&amp;#039;s such a major blow to your idea of being a fixed isolated self) but I would be hard put to say there was anything &lt;em&gt;especially &lt;/em&gt;atomised about it. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Although having said this I think that any sort of pleasure feeling from the pins and needles type you find in body scanning to the full on ecstasy does have a kind of atomised quality - that&amp;#039;s why it&amp;#039;s called pins and needles I think, because it feels like a mass of miniscule points of sensation.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If A&amp;amp;P is experiencing a quantisation of feeling and experience then it seems to me that most people experience that in their day to day life (relaxation, sex etc). so are there two types of atomised perception - one day to day and one found in meditation ?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Or, alternativey, is it just a matter of focus, that meditation will simply amplify and focus the normal experience of everyday atomised perceptions ? That seems to be my experience.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;By that I mean that the practice I had was deep breathing and body scanning, getting to focus on the natural low level buzz in the body, the kind of pins and needles sensation of being alive. Eventually this led to ecstasy, but I would not say there was a qualitative difference between the two - simply that I normally perceived a trickle of &amp;#034;pins and needles&amp;#034; whereas meditation made me feel a waterfall of it. Or as the famous saying goes, a drop to an infinite ocean. If anyone would have listened I would have told them how it seemed to be like the difference between a bath and the reservoir from which you get your bathwater from -  it&amp;#039;s the same water, just the boundaries and depth have changed.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;BTW&lt;br /&gt;Oceanic metaphor for this sort of experience seems prevalent in Sufi and Hindu scripture and poetry, from what I&amp;#039;ve seen, but not so much in buddhism. Is this so ?</description> <pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2014 00:09:00 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5600131</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-07T00:09:00Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: What kind of suffering does enlightenment get rid of?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5597917</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;Hi Tom Tom!&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;Is there anywhere else you have written about these powers? If not do you mind dropping me a quick note summarizing them?&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;BTW I tried to send this to you as a PM but &amp;#034;Tom Tom&amp;#034; didn&amp;#039;t appear in the user list that drops down.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: #111111"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 16px"&gt;Thanks!&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This thread is from a few years back.  As far as powers-type experiences, I was referring to the stuff I wrote in these two threads:&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;discussion&amp;#x2f;-&amp;#x2f;message_boards&amp;#x2f;message&amp;#x2f;1909651"&gt;http://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/1909651&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaoverground&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;discussion&amp;#x2f;-&amp;#x2f;message_boards&amp;#x2f;message&amp;#x2f;3485413"&gt;http://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3485413&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;dharmaoverground&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;discussion&amp;#x2f;-&amp;#x2f;message_boards&amp;#x2f;message&amp;#x2f;3485413&amp;#x2f;en"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:43:39 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5597917</guid> <dc:creator>Tom Tom</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-04T21:43:39Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: What kind of suffering does enlightenment get rid of?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5597612</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Tom Tom:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;-I could feasibly write the &amp;#034;extra extreme&amp;#034; version of what&amp;#039;s written in MCTB regarding the stages of insight if the above instructions are not followed. Including verification of very impossible sounding powers that most people here likely don&amp;#039;t believe in.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Hi Tom Tom!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Is there anywhere else you have written about these powers? If not do you mind dropping me a quick note summarizing them?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;BTW I tried to send this to you as a PM but &amp;#034;Tom Tom&amp;#034; didn&amp;#039;t appear in the user list that drops down.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thanks!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Edd</description> <pubDate>Sat, 04 Oct 2014 13:40:43 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5597612</guid> <dc:creator>Edd</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-10-04T13:40:43Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5592665</link> <description>The &amp;#034;what is it really? what really is happening?&amp;#034; question usually get&amp;#039;s into some kind of metaphysics or materalistic model. It&amp;#039;s an interesting question, but even if you KNEW the answer, it wouldn&amp;#039;t really effect the actual practice/cultivation of that experience in meditation. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m kinda dodging the question, cause I don&amp;#039;t really know... but I will say that experientially, you are able to see experience as very elemental proto-thoughts and proto-sensations at an incredible rate and that experience seems to lead to an insight about the contructed nature of perception.That way of looking at the world is almost an instinctual thing the mind does itself so that it can understand itself. The A&amp;amp;P just follows from practice, all on its own.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Then you have the insight and you don&amp;#039;t need that _specific_ kind of perception to sense the contructed nature of mind anymore. The solid sense of self is seen through to a greater degree. The A&amp;amp;P is a pretty signficiant insight, but it&amp;#039;s so mind blowing that it is hard to relate to normal reality. Basically after A&amp;amp;P you then start seeing the constructed nature of your own psychology and identity, which can suck which is why it is often the dark night. But at the end, and very ironically, stream entry is a very normal almost minimal kind of event which brings everything full circle and that mindblowing insight is integrated into normal everyday life.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Hope that helps. But all of this talk is just talk, ultimately. So I hope it&amp;#039;s at least a little interesting.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 21:58:08 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5592665</guid> <dc:creator>x x</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-25T21:58:08Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5592518</link> <description>.... or, is this A&amp;amp;P fragmentation less to do with reversing or closely observing the composition of whole mental phenomena from pixelled data, than it is to do with the frequency but which neuronal activity oscillates - the beta, delta, theat waves etc ? That is, is it like slowing film down and seeing it frame by frame ?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m out of my depth here - but it&amp;#039;s going to be something along these lines isn&amp;#039;t it - rather than just being a mysterious and nebulous &amp;#034;seeing into the nature of things&amp;#034; ?</description> <pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 18:54:38 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5592518</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-25T18:54:38Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5592299</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;James Yen:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;I believe it&amp;#039;s because according to Daniel&amp;#039;s experience he has found that those specific sensations are reliable indicators as to whether or not a meditator is experiencing or passing through A&amp;amp;P. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Just to put a finer point on it, these experiences are correlated with A&amp;amp;P, they tend to appear during this stage. They tend to be confusing or distracting the first time they are experienced, which is why they are worth mentioning so that people don&amp;#039;t get confused and mistake the experiences with some kind of special progress or abnormal achievement. The experiences themselves are not important, but rather the view, as you mentioned, of things coming and going on their own, of experience being more distinct moments rather than continuous, and the observer being somewhat removed from the experience itself.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;When diagnosing, it&amp;#039;s also important to understand what led up to these experiences. Did someone have a regular practice? Did they go through mind and body, cause and effect, three characteristics? It&amp;#039;s not as simple as &amp;#034;trippy experience of body and mind being little dots of experiences&amp;#034; = A&amp;amp;P, but sometimes it&amp;#039;s a pretty safe guess.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 11:29:29 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5592299</guid> <dc:creator>x x</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-25T11:29:29Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591638</link> <description>Well, I&amp;#039;m not convinced that spiritual insights are wasted on someone like Arthur Koestler, or that he is not on a path of practice just because he&lt;strike&gt; is &lt;/strike&gt; was intellectual. His meditation on mathematics seems to have produced a profound shift - why cannot prolonged scientific thinking be as good a meditation object as watching the breath ? And with the added benefit of being actively creative ? I personally like the art and poetry that comes from moments like this.&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m getting a bit further with understanding what the A&amp;amp;P is supposed to be - Kenneth Folk on Buddhist Geeks -&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&amp;#034;One way to talk about this is with the traditional simile of the rope. You’re walking down the road and you see a rope and as you get closer, you see that the rope is moving and you consider that to be a little bit fishy; probably it isn’t even a rope. As you get closer still you can see that the supposed rope is really a line of ants and as you get closer still you see that the ants are moving individually in both directions. Each and has its own body and little articulated legs and everything is moving. If you kept on drilling down, you would see that the ant is composed &lt;br /&gt;of all sorts of little sub-body parts and then molecules and atoms and so on, the idea being that what appears to us to be solid is not solid; &lt;br /&gt;it appears solid because we’re not looking closely enough. And at the Arising and Passing Away you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; looking closely enough and you&lt;br /&gt; finally see it for what it is. That is a life-changing event because you always assumed that things were solid and now you see in real time &lt;br /&gt;that they are not. So that is the second chunk of the Progress of Insight.&amp;#034;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This sounds rather reminiscent - in it&amp;#039;s way - of several things from science - atomic theory, quantum theory, molecular explanations of mental events, Planck length pixelisation of space (hope that&amp;#039;s right), cellular automata. &lt;br /&gt;But mostly it sounds like an examination of sensory phenomena as it is constructed from discrete neurons and chemical events.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve got &lt;em&gt;Visual Intelligence&lt;/em&gt; here, by &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;dqDP34a-epI"&gt;Donald Hoffman&lt;/a&gt;, which goes into how the brain will create a solid or smooth object from the input of the retina which is made of discrete cells taking in discrete photons. Kenneth Folk&amp;#039;s description of the A&amp;amp;P looks like an uncovering of that process in action by way of developing close attention.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m sure there will be some science out there going into this, one of those guys who like to scan meditators etc ???&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; - a wee bit more - Hoffman - &lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;cogsci&amp;#x2e;uci&amp;#x2e;edu&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x7e;ddhoff&amp;#x2f;ecs&amp;#x2e;pdf"&gt;http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ecs.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;The human eye focuses an image onto a light-sensitive sheet of neural tissue called the retina (Dowling, 1987). This image is captured by a discrete array of cells in the retina, called photoreceptors. Each photoreceptor generates a signal which varies in time with the discrete number of photons of light that the photoreceptor catches. This discrete array of time-varying signals is the starting point of vision. The only information this array makes explicit is the varying number of photon catches at each individual photoreceptor. It does not make explicit lines, curves, two dimensional regions, three-dimensional shapes or any other aspect of the visual forms of objects and their environments. The perception of visual forms is the consequence of sophisticated processes of construction which engage literally billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connections between neurons. Every line, curve, 2D region or 3D shape that we see is a construction of our visual system, created on the fly starting with just the photon catches at the retina. Vision researchers have made substantial progress in describing the constructive processes underlying the perception of visual form.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: sans-serif"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 24px"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;Hmm.. ?</description> <pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 00:27:19 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591638</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-25T00:27:19Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591576</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;John:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Which one crossed the A&amp;amp;P ?&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;sqcLjcSloXs"&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqcLjcSloXs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;Soooo, obviously he finally got non-dual...</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 22:26:32 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591576</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T22:26:32Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591559</link> <description>Which one crossed the A&amp;amp;P ?&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;sqcLjcSloXs"&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqcLjcSloXs&lt;/a&gt;</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 22:06:49 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591559</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T22:06:49Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591516</link> <description>Hello hello,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Well, I have a Buddhist agenda, which is to push everyone to practice regardless of what experiences they have.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Ultimately what I&amp;#039;m saying is: it doesn&amp;#039;t matter if someone has already crossed the A&amp;amp;P in the past or not, what matters is what that experience has on the future as a consequence, if it causes one to be proud, abandon it, if it causes one to not practice, it&amp;#039;s useless etc.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Throughout a spiritual quest one will have numerous (literally uncountable) amounts of spiritual experiences and whatever, no need to search for one of them, practice sincerely regardless of whether or not one has them.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Ex: I find the fact that one who comprehends Buddhist doctrine, is searching for answers on a forum like this, and has started a meditation practice a more reliable indicator of someone who has crossed the A&amp;amp;P, then someone who merely has a &amp;#034;blast of universal consciousness&amp;#034; while high on pot and concludes he knows everything.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The latter person probably has a textbook A&amp;amp;P, but his experience has no effect on his mental continuum because he does not strive, the first person strives.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A koan for you: which one crossed the A&amp;amp;P?</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 20:11:34 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591516</guid> <dc:creator>J J</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T20:11:34Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591473</link> <description>James,&lt;br /&gt;I dont know why you say it&amp;#039;s ultimately only available to people who possess the noble eightfold path, Daniel&amp;#039;s survey seem to say it happens to anyone. Or do you mean those random people have the path naturally ?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;[just edited a bit to keep things simple]&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;But I guess you cover that in the second part of your answer.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;OK</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:40:56 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5591473</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T18:40:56Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590837</link> <description>I believe it&amp;#039;s because according to Daniel&amp;#039;s experience he has found that those specific sensations are reliable indicators as to whether or not a meditator is experiencing or passing through A&amp;amp;P. Ultimately A&amp;amp;P phenomena are only available to people who possess the noble eightfold path (traditionally defined as stream-enterers, but this may also include dhamma-followers and faith-followers), their possession of the path (or stream) allows them the ability to see the arising and passing of phenomena in real time.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;As such the external characteristics of the event, the bliss, rapture, kundalini explosion do not matter so much as the presence of the eight factors in the meditator.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Moreover I explicitly &lt;strong&gt;guarantee&lt;/strong&gt; that anyone who practices meditation with the correct intention (the noble eightfold path) will eventually, with certainty, cross the A&amp;amp;P.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Not only that, if anyone is involved in any spiritual, renunciation-related, activity and is striving for awakening and experiences those symptoms, I can also nearly guarantee that it is an A&amp;amp;P.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Cheers.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 01:14:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590837</guid> <dc:creator>J J</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T01:14:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590824</link> <description>&amp;#034;The sutta that I linked directly states that the cultivation of satipatthana is none other than seeing the arising and passing away of sensations&amp;#034;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So, why does Daniel just list a range of specific sensations and not the broader category of all sensations generally ? &lt;br /&gt;Is it because by developing that insight which applies to your general experience it usually unmasks energetic/nervous system sensations as a by product - which can be a marker but not the A&amp;amp;P itself ?</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:58:14 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590824</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T00:58:14Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590818</link> <description>Hello,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I would not say so, I vaguely recall a discourse (not a sutta but some reading in a book) that stated that hunters and other professions also attain samadhi but not the kind that meditators do. Anyways the point is, they obtain some form of concentration, but I would not necessarily say that it begets spiritual progress.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The reason being that intention plays a part, as does view, speech and action and so on and so forth.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The sutta that I linked directly states that the cultivation of satipatthana is none other than seeing the arising and passing away of sensations, but that the method of &lt;strong&gt;obtaining&lt;/strong&gt; the cultivation of satipatthana is the noble eightfold path.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:52:32 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590818</guid> <dc:creator>J J</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T00:52:32Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590791</link> <description>OK so what I&amp;#039;m seeing from Shinzen&amp;#039;s bit is that it&amp;#039;s a close attention to inner phenomena. He doesn&amp;#039;t say it&amp;#039;s specifically the kind of energy events you get in meditation, but rather general emotional and mental events - seen with stronger attention than normal.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m assuming that this is like being aware of the very first neurotransmitters that are released in any particular mental event - say hunger or a bout of desire, and paying attention until they are metabolised to something else.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So, let&amp;#039;s say I was lost in the desert and hadn&amp;#039;t eaten for weeks, and I found a nice, juicy burger sitting on a rock - would my craving focus my attention on the experience of eating it in this way ?</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:29:46 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590791</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T00:29:46Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590785</link> <description>That&amp;#039;s helpful, yes, because it reaffirms that it&amp;#039;s the way of seeing, not the content of what is seen - as it were, that&amp;#039;s it&amp;#039;s a state of concentration and not an event.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So I&amp;#039;m not sure if I&amp;#039;ve had that, although I&amp;#039;ve had all sorts of feelings come and go in meditation. Given that it&amp;#039;s a description of extremely close attention of a mental phenomena then I have to ask whether this is simply available to anybody intently focussed on something - say a hunter or surgeon ?</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:07:28 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590785</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T00:07:28Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590772</link> <description>I&amp;#039;ve had zaps - because I meditated years ago, the feeling of ecstasy and oneness - and I recognise that from descriptions when I see it, usually. What I don&amp;#039;t recognise is whether it&amp;#039;s A&amp;amp;P in these maps because it&amp;#039;s not clear to me whether the zap is the A&amp;amp;P or whether A&amp;amp;P is a viewpoint from which the zap is seen. Just saying it&amp;#039;s an otherworldly event is no use, really, so I assume the latter.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;[I mistakenly replied to myself here]</description> <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:01:18 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590772</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-24T00:01:18Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590702</link> <description>Hey Not Tao,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I highly doubt that, you describe here in your &amp;#034;Perfect Stillness and a Baseline Shift&amp;#034; a nearly classic A&amp;amp;P:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Then about a week ago, I was laying in bed trying to keep a completely open panoramic awareness (something I was trying to do all day for a while), and these little fireworks started going off all over my scalp. It felt like little currents of electricity running through or something. There was an enormous amount of pressure as well, like a migraine headache without any pain. I remember thinking that my brain must be rewiring itself or something, haha. That’s what it felt like. Between the third eye pressure and the pressure at the base of the skull it kind of felt like there was an arrow through my head. None of it was particularly unpleasant, though.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This went on for quite a while, so I gave up trying to do anything and just rode on those funny throbbing waves since they are kind of pleasant. I’m not really sure what I was thinking about or doing, I may have been in a drowsy sort of state, but out of nowhere this sudden “stillness” happened. Now this phenomena is incredibly odd. I was really disoriented after it happened. The best way to describe it is that it was nothing, but I was aware of it. It was like someone dropped a bottle of ink on my brain and it made a kind of non-sound like a “WHUMP”. I think the sight/sound combination might have actually been the experience of losing sight and sound, if that makes sense? All I can really say is that it was completely still, like my whole mind turned to ice. It could be called blissful, but that doesn’t seem like the right word to use…&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description> <pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2014 23:34:33 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590702</guid> <dc:creator>J J</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-23T23:34:33Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590452</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;John:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;So it&amp;#039;s not the phenomena themselves, it&amp;#039;s the way in which the phenomena are experienced that is distinctive of A&amp;amp;P ?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So, what is different, in the above, to the normal way anyone would experience, say, being hungry for a pizza coming and going ? Because experiencing feelings and thoughts coming and going is universal.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Is it (A&amp;amp;P) a matter of close focus and absorption solely in the phenomena of pizza lust, or in a state of - for want of a better word - trance, rather than the usual everyday scattered mental kaleidoscope of hunger mixed with other thinking and feeling ?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Lets get geeky. Check out the diagram on page 30. continue to read..heck read the whole thing...its really good - &lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;shinzen&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;Articles&amp;#x2f;WhatIsMindfulness_SY_Public&amp;#x2e;pdf"&gt;http://www.shinzen.org/Articles/WhatIsMindfulness_SY_Public.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;good luck,&lt;br /&gt;~D</description> <pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2014 21:02:59 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590452</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-23T21:02:59Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590425</link> <description>Interesting.  By these definitions, I&amp;#039;ve never even experienced the A&amp;amp;P.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2014 20:22:28 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590425</guid> <dc:creator>Not Tao</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-23T20:22:28Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590403</link> <description>Hello John,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In the lower nanas (pre-A&amp;amp;P) the perceptions of impermanence, suffering and no-self are conceptual, meaning that there is a lag between seeing a thought arise and pass (or any other sensation) and the thought actually arising and passing.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Upon crossing or entering the A&amp;amp;P it is now possible to notice in real time, sensations, arising and passing. This happens non-conceptually but experientially. One can feel vibrations, flickers and so on and so forth, just by virtue of noticing them.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Here&amp;#039;s a relevant sutta:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;img src="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;i&amp;#x2e;gyazo&amp;#x2e;com&amp;#x2f;e505f8f0618b6ebbea6684eb4c9cd773&amp;#x2e;png" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;http://dharmafarer.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/12.11-Satipatthana-Vibhanga-S-s47.40-piya.pdf</description> <pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2014 20:15:30 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590403</guid> <dc:creator>J J</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-23T20:15:30Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590388</link> <description>The general A&amp;amp;P domain can be amazing, trippy, rich and syrupy, celestial, or religious inspiring --- lots of variation of wonder and awe. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The A&amp;amp;P &amp;#034;event&amp;#034; is usually some shock or zap or mindblowing event that is so other-worldly that it convinces you that there is some domain or aspect of existance that is outside normal life --- lots of variations of my life is different, the material world doesn&amp;#039;t matter as much to me anymore, I&amp;#039;m a seeker, I&amp;#039;m religious, I&amp;#039;m a mystic, I&amp;#039;m a real meditator, etc.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Are you looking to understand a past experience, an experience you are encountering in your practice now, or just looking ahead to what might happen?</description> <pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2014 20:06:47 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590388</guid> <dc:creator>x x</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-23T20:06:47Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Trying to define A&amp;P for myself</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590238</link> <description>I got confused by the long list of things that Daniel ascribes to A&amp;amp;P because they look just like a collection of phenomena with nothing connecting them. But a questioner asks for clarification and Daniel says,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;At its core, the insight you can depend on in the A&amp;amp;P is that they directly perceived something to fully arise and vanish rapidly (except the few who have the slow-goo variant, in which case it is slow) on its own: that is obviously not much to hang your hat on.&amp;#034;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I can hang my hat on that much better I think. So it&amp;#039;s not the phenomena themselves, it&amp;#039;s the way in which the phenomena are experienced that is distinctive of A&amp;amp;P ?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So, what is different, in the above, to the normal way anyone would experience, say, being hungry for a pizza coming and going ? Because experiencing feelings and thoughts coming and going is universal.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Is it (A&amp;amp;P) a matter of close focus and absorption solely in the phenomena of pizza lust, or in a state of - for want of a better word - trance, rather than the usual everyday scattered mental kaleidoscope of hunger mixed with other thinking and feeling ?</description> <pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2014 18:18:43 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5590238</guid> <dc:creator>John</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-23T18:18:43Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Time needed from a&amp;p to stream entry</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5577214</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;Jen Pearly:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I say all this not to disagree with the others above, but just to point out that it is different for different people. I for one don&amp;#039;t believe, however, that purposely cultivating equanimous regard for the Dark Night does a thing to bring stream entry along. Everything is really fairly automatic once A&amp;amp;P Event is crossed. You don&amp;#039;t get anything from the DN except disenchanted with samsara. &lt;strong&gt;If there is any good in it, then that is it: You feel just how extreme suffering can be, and you know what it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to have equanimity within reach at all. So disgust and complete wretchedness bring about Desire for Deliverance. And that&amp;#039;s when the tide turns.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;Jen,&lt;br /&gt;You succinctly explain the &amp;#034;secret&amp;#034; ingredient. I was thinking about this the other day, why can some people rewire their brains and why some can not. The stress/fight or flight center is wired to the pleasure center...exhilaration/fear etc. Cultivating dispassion and seeing the suffering clearly seems to help in getting the brain to rewire sensations out of the stress/fight or flight center. Many people get stuck in EQ and can&amp;#039;t seem to get SE to happen. This may be one of the biggies....why rewire when you are still getting your jollies/serotonin rewards from other things than the untried promise of SE? It seems like the people here who suffer/depression and embrace it get the dukkha door to open up pretty easy. Why do so many people stop at SE or second path? The in your face existential suffering is the stick that can not be ignored, it&amp;#039;s what keeps me going.&lt;br /&gt;Just some thoughts,&lt;br /&gt;~D&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This comment really hit home for me.  While I&amp;#039;ve had plenty of insights into the truth of suffering, I also seem to have developed pretty decent equanimity that has percolated into all my states of consciousness.  I usually take this as a blessing, because it makes quotidian life much more bearable, but as Dreamwalker pointed out, it can also be a hindrance.  I&amp;#039;m a bit jealous of Jen&amp;#039;s measly 100 hours getting her to SE.  If I had to make a rough estimate, I think I&amp;#039;ve sat about 2,000-3,000 hours over the last 5 years in retreats and daily practice, and still no SE.  But it is so so so easy to turn your daily sits into an insipid routine where nothing gets done for years at a time.  I know that first hand, so just keep yourself motivated and remind yourself every time you sit why your doing it.&lt;br /&gt;-T</description> <pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2014 03:13:46 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5577214</guid> <dc:creator>Teague</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-05T03:13:46Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Time needed from a&amp;p to stream entry</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576854</link> <description>Thanks for all the reactions. Very useful for me. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Out of the reactions it is very clear to me that an estimate about the time can not be made on forehand.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So instead of thinking about time frames I&amp;#039;ll focus on equanimity and trying to be aware as much of the time as possible at this stage.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Regarding going for long retreats, at this time this is not possible for me. I will do a retreat in december. And there is a possibility that i can leave for a month in october. Next year I hope to do the Mahasi 60 day retreat, and if my responsibilities and finances permit I might stay longer.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Once more thanks for the reactions. I am very glad that I found a place where I can openly ask this kind of questions.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2014 08:12:07 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576854</guid> <dc:creator>Pjotr Hill</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-04T08:12:07Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Time needed from a&amp;p to stream entry</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576469</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Jen Pearly:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I say all this not to disagree with the others above, but just to point out that it is different for different people. I for one don&amp;#039;t believe, however, that purposely cultivating equanimous regard for the Dark Night does a thing to bring stream entry along. Everything is really fairly automatic once A&amp;amp;P Event is crossed. You don&amp;#039;t get anything from the DN except disenchanted with samsara. &lt;strong&gt;If there is any good in it, then that is it: You feel just how extreme suffering can be, and you know what it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to have equanimity within reach at all. So disgust and complete wretchedness bring about Desire for Deliverance. And that&amp;#039;s when the tide turns.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;Jen,&lt;br /&gt;You succinctly explain the &amp;#034;secret&amp;#034; ingredient. I was thinking about this the other day, why can some people rewire their brains and why some can not. The stress/fight or flight center is wired to the pleasure center...exhilaration/fear etc. Cultivating dispassion and seeing the suffering clearly seems to help in getting the brain to rewire sensations out of the stress/fight or flight center. Many people get stuck in EQ and can&amp;#039;t seem to get SE to happen. This may be one of the biggies....why rewire when you are still getting your jollies/serotonin rewards from other things than the untried promise of SE? It seems like the people here who suffer/depression and embrace it get the dukkha door to open up pretty easy. Why do so many people stop at SE or second path? The in your face existential suffering is the stick that can not be ignored, it&amp;#039;s what keeps me going.&lt;br /&gt;Just some thoughts,&lt;br /&gt;~D</description> <pubDate>Wed, 03 Sep 2014 04:40:56 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576469</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-03T04:40:56Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Time needed from a&amp;p to stream entry</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576329</link> <description>Hi. I crossed the A&amp;amp;P almost a year ago to the day that I got stream entry this year. Honestly, I was very lazy about practice and put in less than 100 hours total to get to SE. I never went on a single retreat, and I tend to sit only 30 minutes a day. I sat only once a week during the DN, if that. When DN got really horrific, I just spun out and did not practice. I absolutely did not develop one iota of equanimity toward the Dark Night. I nearly ended up on a psych ward, in fact, so severe was the anxiety, depression, and disgust. I finally went on SNRI antidepressants, and when they kicked in I was able to meditate again, and EQ emerged right away.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I say all this not to disagree with the others above, but just to point out that it is different for different people. I for one don&amp;#039;t believe, however, that purposely cultivating equanimous regard for the Dark Night does a thing to bring stream entry along. Everything is really fairly automatic once A&amp;amp;P Event is crossed. You don&amp;#039;t get anything from the DN except disenchanted with samsara. If there is any good in it, then that is it: You feel just how extreme suffering can be, and you know what it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to have equanimity within reach at all. So disgust and complete wretchedness bring about Desire for Deliverance. And that&amp;#039;s when the tide turns.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2014 23:53:26 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576329</guid> <dc:creator>_</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-02T23:53:26Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Time needed from a&amp;p to stream entry</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576273</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Pjotr Hill:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;At the moment I believe i have a good change at streach stream entry in a 10 day retreat. However as I consider my self still as a baby regarding this stuff, I might be completely wrong with this believe...&lt;br /&gt;So my questions especially to people who reached steam entry:&lt;br /&gt;- Does my view seem realistic?&lt;br /&gt;- What length of retreat would you advice for stream entry?&lt;br /&gt;- Are the different stages sort of comparable in time length if one works diligently?&lt;br /&gt;If any more information from me could be helpfull to better answer these questions please ask!&lt;br /&gt;Any reactions and opinions would be highly appreciated!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;There are tons of variables that affect the speed at which you can progress. The problem is in measuring the variables when you have no yardstick with which to measure it. &lt;br /&gt;-How is your concentration?&lt;br /&gt;-How well can you stay in the now with noting?&lt;br /&gt;-How willing are you to clearly see things, especially the difficult stuff.&lt;br /&gt;Most people find that getting to EQ is pretty fast compared to the length of time from getting from EQ to stream entry. If it takes you a ten day retreat to get to EQ then you can expect that EQ to SE will take longer. This is not a rule, just an observation from many many posts.&lt;br /&gt;Remember that Stream Entry only happens in the now....any now....now now or future now. If it happens the moment you read this or if it happens years from now, make it the same thing. Hold your expectations towards it with equanimity as that is where it will happen. So we have the time and place covered.. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/smile.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If you can, how about a retreat for as long as it takes? Pack everything up and go for a year? Hit SE and go for second path? &lt;br /&gt;Good Luck,&lt;br /&gt;~D</description> <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2014 22:22:56 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576273</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-02T22:22:56Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Time needed from a&amp;p to stream entry</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576237</link> <description>Time from A&amp;amp;P to SE varies considerably. Most of the heavy lifting is done in the early nanas, with A&amp;amp;P and the Dark Night happening more or less on their own. If you can keep up a good practice and maintain equanimity through the Dark Night, stream entry tends to come sooner rather than later.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Two hours a day is great, but be sure that you are maintaining mindfulness throughout the day, as much as you can. </description> <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2014 19:47:48 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576237</guid> <dc:creator>Eric M W</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-02T19:47:48Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Time needed from a&amp;p to stream entry</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576233</link> <description>Thanks for your reaction and advice, it makes sense to me. I will look into the things you mention thanks! &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;To try to better explain myself: I guess i think that i might have been a &amp;#034;dark knight yogi&amp;#034; for some time, and caused myself and others suffering because of this and because of my own ignorance. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It is not that I demand a timeline. I however want to get through this, and having a better understanding of what is required might help me to make choices that allow me to do this. I want to try to fit this into my life, progress and decrease the chance of getting stuck.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2014 19:33:27 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576233</guid> <dc:creator>Pjotr Hill</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-02T19:33:27Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Time needed from a&amp;p to stream entry</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576211</link> <description>The best way to get to stream entry is to develop equanimity towards all experiences (including meditation).  By demanding a timeline to get there you&amp;#039;ll likely be self-referencing instead of meditating.  I would recommend reading lots about dependent arising and Nagarjuna&amp;#039;s middle path.  The understanding is needed in the meditation and in daily life.  Understanding the Buddhist description of timelessness is also a part of the the practice and can be a practice in of itself.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The Visuddhimagga has good descriptions of the path and so does Daniel&amp;#039;s book and Mahasi Sayadaw&amp;#039;s book.  Once you get these understandings you can&amp;#039;t read too much.  You need to keep it simple and keep letting go of holding to preferences and be equanimous towards all experiences.  You have to fade your senses with letting go repeatedly.&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;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;teacher&amp;#x2f;210&amp;#x2f;talk&amp;#x2f;11929&amp;#x2f;"&gt;http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/11929/&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;thehamiltonproject&amp;#x2e;blogspot&amp;#x2e;ca&amp;#x2f;2014&amp;#x2f;07&amp;#x2f;the-yogi-toolbox-specific-neutrality&amp;#x2e;html"&gt;http://thehamiltonproject.blogspot.ca/2014/07/the-yogi-toolbox-specific-neutrality.html&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Basically it will happen when it happens.  Timelines are something look back at after you get stream entry, not before.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2014 17:44:21 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576211</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-02T17:44:21Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Time needed from a&amp;p to stream entry</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576199</link> <description>Dear reader,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Last week i did a week retreat, and I am pretty sure that I am in the arising and passing away. After this retreat i have a much deeper faith in the path.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The things that helped me:&lt;br /&gt;- I dropped content as soon as I noted I was thinking about stuff&lt;br /&gt;- I did my best to look into impermenance, suffering and no self &lt;br /&gt;- I gave it my maximal effort, trying to stay aware all the time&lt;br /&gt;This gave me some good insights a lot of mindfulness and concentration and a lot of faith.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Assuming that my own diagnosis is right. And it took me 6 days to get there. (I probably have been there earlier in life but than didn&amp;#039;t know what happened.) As I am very motivated and have faith that it is possible to achief stream entry in my next retreat I wonder what length of retreat would be a good idea? I only did two 10 day retreats and one 8 day retreat so far.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;At the moment I believe i have a good change at streach stream entry in a 10 day retreat. However as I consider my self still as a baby regarding this stuff, I might be completely wrong with this believe...&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Untill the next retreat t I will try to keep on noting during daily life and do 2 hours of formal meditation daily.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So my questions especially to people who reached steam entry:&lt;br /&gt;- Does my view seem realistic?&lt;br /&gt;- What length of retreat would you advice for stream entry?&lt;br /&gt;- Are the different stages sort of comparable in time length if one works diligently?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If any more information from me could be helpfull to better answer these questions please ask!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Any reactions and opinions would be highly appreciated!</description> <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2014 15:32:19 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5576199</guid> <dc:creator>Pjotr Hill</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-02T15:32:19Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5353272</link> <description>maybe it was just energetic stuff and not true A&amp;amp;P?&lt;br /&gt;maybe it could be A&amp;amp;P and was not because critical mass wasn&amp;#039;t achieved?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;to me A&amp;amp;P about right and left hemisphere, its synchronization and perceiving world from different perspective that after experiencing it cannot be just simply ignored as it was before. If you expect A&amp;amp;P to blow your mind then your expectation is good but how much energetic it will be only depends on how much you resist and how much energy will be needed to break potential barrier of your left hemisphere centered mind insisting to be real self.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;and as for &amp;#039;nuanced advice&amp;#039;: note hell out of reality!&lt;br /&gt;it&amp;#039;s not very original but have good effect/practice ratio &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/tongue.gif" &gt;</description> <pubDate>Wed, 26 Mar 2014 21:33:14 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5353272</guid> <dc:creator>Paweł K</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-26T21:33:14Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Is this A&amp;P?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5349108</link> <description>My thoughts on my sudden change in attitude:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A realization I&amp;#039;m having is that my no-self, no-ambition, no-desire behavior of the past two years went unnoticed because I almost immediately had cancer after what I&amp;#039;d call loss of self view (perhaps SE, but let&amp;#039;s not debate that here), and no one expected anything of me. But the past few months I&amp;#039;ve been well, and people around me have been growing alarmed over my lack of interest in a job, or in settling down in any way back into the traditional samsara.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Sure I can do it, but why bother is my feeling. Secondly, I don&amp;#039;t feel like I know what&amp;#039;s going to happen to me the next day in terms of side effects of awakening - they yank my life around all the time.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This makes people close to me quite unhappy, and at least for their sake I should get back to an appearance of normal life. It doesn&amp;#039;t have to mean a regression to self identity, but if I stopped acting so weird and got an appearance of my old life act together - job, maybe kids I will be left in peace. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It also comes from the realization that life is actually quite nice with the objects attained by decisive action. Sure I don&amp;#039;t need them, and though I see no real danger of waking up one day homeless or living on charity, it feels suddenly like I know how to reconcile the spiritual life with the material life without giving up either.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Like a weight has been lifted, and I don&amp;#039;t need to save the world anymore by sacrifice.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Does this make sense? Thoughts?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thanks.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:09:58 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5349108</guid> <dc:creator>Chee Ni</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-25T17:09:58Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Is this A&amp;P?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5348880</link> <description>It happened last night, as soon as I went to bed around 2 am I felt vibrations in my limbs, spine, head, and torso. My hands raised up to the sky and remained there for a bit. I played around for a bit with intensifying sensations in various parts of the body, and then moving them around. I had remarkable command over the sensations, like I usually have when I have these events. The only other times I have such command is on retreats or whenever I have been doing Vipassana for a few hours. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Since I&amp;#039;ve had these night time events many times before, it was nothing new or interesting. I know it stays active if I remain on my back, and it can cause me to jerk semi-violently - which can wake up my partner who was fast asleep. So a few minutes later I shut it down by rolling onto my side and sleeping. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It certainly wasn&amp;#039;t in any way a negative feeling, but I can&amp;#039;t really claim there was any bliss.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Since waking up I have a lot of will to do things in contrast to the couch potato phase of last week where I&amp;#039;d read dharma books and meditate or just be without stirring out of the house. A sudden desire to go out in the world and do things. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;Carpe diem! etc.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Even feeling like I need to get what I deserve from the world, a goal oriented no-nonsense style, quite in contrast to my no-views + no-desires + no-aggression state of the past few weeks or even months.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve immediately had some very useful outcomes. I had a difficult conversation I didn&amp;#039;t even know I was putting off out of short-sighted compassion. It just came out very cohesive and cogent, with great clarity. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Since then I&amp;#039;ve made a list of a bunch of major things to fix in life, and suddenly it struck me that this could be an A&amp;amp;P event, and all this energy to do things or knowing what I want is going to vanish soon. Maybe I shouldn&amp;#039;t start what I can&amp;#039;t finish or won&amp;#039;t want in a few days.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I am new to MCTB. The idea of knowing where I am on the map has been revealing - it means I can actually have some planning and control over my life, which has so far been a roller coaster of unpredictability.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What do you think?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thanks and love, peace and kindness to all.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:36:56 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5348880</guid> <dc:creator>Chee Ni</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-25T15:36:56Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5337202</link> <description>Thanks. I was using Robert Bruce&amp;#039;s system when I first started meditating but never kept it up. Perhaps I should work on that. Also, Robert Bruce and Robert Anton Wilson both warn against opening higher chakras before the heart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9C892sV5X4</description> <pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2014 19:41:29 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5337202</guid> <dc:creator>Droll Dedekind</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-23T19:41:29Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336787</link> <description>I personally have never heard of that happening. I had all of reality explode in my A&amp;amp;P but I still seem to be alive &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Have you ever tried Robert Bruce&amp;#039;s New Energy Ways program to help balance and strengthen your energy body?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;http://www.astraldynamics.com.au/content.php?130-new-energy-ways&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Hopefully a more experienced practitioner will come along and put your doubts to rest.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2014 17:45:40 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336787</guid> <dc:creator>Eric M W</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-23T17:45:40Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336756</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Eric M W:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Droll Dedekind:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Eric M W:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;A&amp;amp;Ps tend to be blissful, but this is not always the case. Some people may find them scary, unsettling, or just plain weird, no bliss involved. Daniel talks about this in his Cheetah House videos if I recall correctly.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Some people find Dissolution blissful but others (such as myself) it sucked balls. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt; Everyone is different!&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Ah, I found that clip. Thank you.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Now, is there a reason I should let the A&amp;amp;P event happen to its fullest extent (even though it feels like there&amp;#039;s a buzzing beehive shaking back and forth in my head)?&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;That&amp;#039;s a good question... I&amp;#039;d say let it happen as much as you can stand it, while paying attention to the 3Cs of what&amp;#039;s going on. When the A&amp;amp;P is &amp;#034;crossed&amp;#034; it is often a pretty big thing so it makes sense to let it crescendo.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Maybe someone can provide some reassurance that my third eye isn&amp;#039;t going to explode open and cause some kind of energetic imbalance/short circuit. That&amp;#039;d make me resist less.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2014 17:04:07 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336756</guid> <dc:creator>Droll Dedekind</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-23T17:04:07Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336590</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Droll Dedekind:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Eric M W:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;A&amp;amp;Ps tend to be blissful, but this is not always the case. Some people may find them scary, unsettling, or just plain weird, no bliss involved. Daniel talks about this in his Cheetah House videos if I recall correctly.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Some people find Dissolution blissful but others (such as myself) it sucked balls. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt; Everyone is different!&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Ah, I found that clip. Thank you.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Now, is there a reason I should let the A&amp;amp;P event happen to its fullest extent (even though it feels like there&amp;#039;s a buzzing beehive shaking back and forth in my head)?&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;That&amp;#039;s a good question... I&amp;#039;d say let it happen as much as you can stand it, while paying attention to the 3Cs of what&amp;#039;s going on. When the A&amp;amp;P is &amp;#034;crossed&amp;#034; it is often a pretty big thing so it makes sense to let it crescendo.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2014 15:47:47 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336590</guid> <dc:creator>Eric M W</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-23T15:47:47Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336518</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Eric M W:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;A&amp;amp;Ps tend to be blissful, but this is not always the case. Some people may find them scary, unsettling, or just plain weird, no bliss involved. Daniel talks about this in his Cheetah House videos if I recall correctly.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Some people find Dissolution blissful but others (such as myself) it sucked balls. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt; Everyone is different!&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Ah, I found that clip. Thank you.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Now, is there a reason I should let the A&amp;amp;P event happen to its fullest extent (even though it feels like there&amp;#039;s a buzzing beehive shaking back and forth in my head)?</description> <pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2014 15:03:32 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5336518</guid> <dc:creator>Droll Dedekind</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-23T15:03:32Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5335582</link> <description>A&amp;amp;Ps tend to be blissful, but this is not always the case. Some people may find them scary, unsettling, or just plain weird, no bliss involved. Daniel talks about this in his Cheetah House videos if I recall correctly.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Some people find Dissolution blissful but others (such as myself) it sucked balls. &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt; Everyone is different!</description> <pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2014 02:02:47 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5335582</guid> <dc:creator>Eric M W</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-23T02:02:47Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5335254</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Droll Dedekind:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Am I resisting the full A&amp;amp;P event because it&amp;#039;s not blissful/pleasant, or is it not blissful because I&amp;#039;m resisting the lack of control from the beginning of the A&amp;amp;P? &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I didn&amp;#039;t really answer my own question, I provided a possible explanation, viz. the second above&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I realize it&amp;#039;s a possibility, but I&amp;#039;m hoping for more nuanced advice. How are you so sure? Is it at all possible that my A&amp;amp;Ps just aren&amp;#039;t pleasant?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thanks</description> <pubDate>Sat, 22 Mar 2014 20:35:49 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5335254</guid> <dc:creator>Droll Dedekind</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-22T20:35:49Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5334955</link> <description>you answered yourself:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;I resisted&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;to really enjoy experience (any experience) you have to be open to what is happening no matter what is happening and I mean it in a sense that sukha won&amp;#039;t appear if you are not open</description> <pubDate>Sat, 22 Mar 2014 17:52:45 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5334955</guid> <dc:creator>Paweł K</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-22T17:52:45Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5333696</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Eric G:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;I think the A&amp;amp;P can be mild for beginners or advanced, depending on the person and conditions like concentration. Maybe just a little more pleasant or a touch more light.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The A&amp;amp;P for me in day to day life is definitely pleasant, a bit of brightness, a bit of an electric feeling. If I&amp;#039;m well concentrated I can get a lot of joy there. From what I can tell, Daniel is a very intense guy &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Maybe feel that resistance and be aware of it, allow it, and maybe when you see it like that it might let go a bit.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m not much of a chakra guy but there&amp;#039;s definitely something going on in the brow area.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My A&amp;amp;Ps are intense, but perhaps I overstate the intensity because unpleasant raptures naturally tend to register as &amp;#039;intense&amp;#039;. I think it&amp;#039;s worth mentioning my concentration is pitiful (to be distinguished from piti-ful (; ). Does concentration power smooth out or make pleasurable the A&amp;amp;P?</description> <pubDate>Sat, 22 Mar 2014 02:25:14 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5333696</guid> <dc:creator>Droll Dedekind</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-22T02:25:14Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5333346</link> <description>I think the A&amp;amp;P can be mild for beginners or advanced, depending on the person and conditions like concentration. Maybe just a little more pleasant or a touch more light.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The A&amp;amp;P for me in day to day life is definitely pleasant, a bit of brightness, a bit of an electric feeling. If I&amp;#039;m well concentrated I can get a lot of joy there. From what I can tell, Daniel is a very intense guy &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/happy.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Maybe feel that resistance and be aware of it, allow it, and maybe when you see it like that it might let go a bit.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m not much of a chakra guy but there&amp;#039;s definitely something going on in the brow area.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 21:23:48 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5333346</guid> <dc:creator>Eric G</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-21T21:23:48Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5333024</link> <description>An a&amp;amp;p without bliss would be the mark of a pretty advanced yogi I think.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 18:14:50 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5333024</guid> <dc:creator>Adam Dietrich Ringle</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-21T18:14:50Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>A&amp;P without bliss?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5332815</link> <description>Last night I had my first obvious A&amp;amp;P in about two months. I had just finished up with a 30 minute session of Reichian exercises, and I was feeling static-electricity-like energy throughout my whole body (and, weirdly, mostly in my arms). Right after the Reichian I began meditating by focusing on my chakras one-by-one from the bottom up. While I was doing this I was considering the idea of kundalini as it relates to sexual tantra, and where the A&amp;amp;P fits into sexual tantra. After I focused on each individual chakra I focused on all of them at once; in about a minute I felt an increase in vibrations and intensity of the energy in phase with the breath. I thought, &amp;#034;Awww shet, speak of da devil&amp;#034; as the vibrations continued to intensify, &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; in my head. At this point my skin got very hot, and my heart started beating faster. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Besides focusing on chakras prior, the above is the typical beginning of an A&amp;amp;P for me. Throughout the whole intensity-crescendo I never experience bliss. I mainly experience a mild sense of apprehension and I generally feel that I&amp;#039;m resisting something. Eventually, the vibrations will get so intense in my head that I put the brakes on by opening my eyes for a second or two, then the vibrations will wane and I end up in dissolution. This is how last night played out (although I let the vibrations intensify much longer than usual).&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Also, my last obvious A&amp;amp;P (before last night) was exactly as Daniel describes here (without the climax; I resisted)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;I began trying to catch it, second after second, really going after the visceral, perceptual experience of what was observing, and before I knew it, got into this rapid-fire back and forth, super-concentrated state of everything vibrating in my head, and the whole thing zapped back through my skull at very high speed into some black space, and it was done&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Now, as far as chakras go I&amp;#039;d be willing to wager that my brow/crown chakras are much more active than my lower centers (especially heart). Is this why A&amp;amp;Ps are so head-focused for me? Is this why the A&amp;amp;P isn&amp;#039;t pleasant for me?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Are A&amp;amp;Ps usually blissful? Am I resisting the full A&amp;amp;P event because it&amp;#039;s not blissful/pleasant, or is it not blissful because I&amp;#039;m resisting the lack of control from the beginning of the A&amp;amp;P? &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;And, my most important question, does resisting the A&amp;amp;P event matter? Am I resisting some necessary energetic process? If so, how do I let down my resistance? &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Any stabs at these questions would really help. Thanks.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:31:12 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5332815</guid> <dc:creator>Droll Dedekind</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-21T15:31:12Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Squashed frogs, and hedonism</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5319926</link> <description>I saw a squashed frog during a walk today. It reminded me of two things. You know how kids run around when they are little and squash bugs. There is a kind of pleasant glee that comes from watching those little things pop.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Well, this frog was really smashed good. It had guts spilling all over the place...&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This I feel is compassion.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Love is seeing that poor little guy and realizing that he is smashed to smithereens. Completely annihilated, yet whole somehow.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I don&amp;#039;t know,,,just some thoughts.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 17 Mar 2014 18:43:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5319926</guid> <dc:creator>Adam Dietrich Ringle</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-17T18:43:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Squashed frogs, and hedonism</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5319921</link> <description>As far as I can tell right now, the secret buddhadharma is actually that you should do whatever you want.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 17 Mar 2014 18:38:48 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5319921</guid> <dc:creator>Adam Dietrich Ringle</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-17T18:38:48Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5314721</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Zendo Calrissian:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt; All this being said, I am pretty convinced that I have not achieved the necessary insights for SE (I know Daniel and others say that if you have gotten this far, you have the skills to finish). My practice has been concentration heavy and I simply don&amp;#039;t feel that I have the insights to move on so I fully expect to be repeating DN. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;Don&amp;#039;t have any expectations either way...If you saw clearly the sensations and noticed that they are not you, not permanent and not satisfactory then you have progressed to where you need to be. Continue the work with diligence and skillfulness. Move up the layers of EQ to high EQ and get very gentle with the noticing of the sensations. Drift a little. they will do their own thing of rising and passing away. You need not force it at all at that stage. Have fun.&lt;br /&gt;Good luck,&lt;br /&gt;~D</description> <pubDate>Sun, 16 Mar 2014 16:14:33 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5314721</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-16T16:14:33Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5314597</link> <description>Good question. I have to say, the way I&amp;#039;ve felt since Friday has been amazing. I&amp;#039;m still exactly the same person but I feel more engaged with life, people and the world. At that farmer&amp;#039;s market I mentioned, I really was interested in the people I interacted with--this is not like me. Also, in interactions with my wife. As in all relationships, she does shit that pisses me off. But now it isn&amp;#039;t just that those things don&amp;#039;t bother me so much, I see why they happen and they are generally a response to something I was unknowingly doing. In an instant, I saw the whole karmic dance play out--me doing something unintentionally causing her to respond in a way that pissed me off and then me getting angry at her for this response. I just changed the behavior and bang. The whole thing circumvented. And my intention for changing the outcome wasn&amp;#039;t even motivated by my desire to not be pissed off, it was out of compassion for her feelings.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So to answer your question Sawfoot, I&amp;#039;m not there yet but equanimity has given me a taste and it is very real. Nothing is different but your outlook but that is a powerful change. I still expect to backslide to DN. It went so fast for me I&amp;#039;m not sure I really gained much insight from it. But I&amp;#039;m OK with that. I&amp;#039;ve been here now, I know I can get back and I know I&amp;#039;ll move forward.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 16 Mar 2014 15:14:48 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5314597</guid> <dc:creator>Zendo Calrissian</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-16T15:14:48Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5314256</link> <description>Its a ride, isn&amp;#039;t it. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Convinced that the whole path was BS and about to post a tirade of shit? Sounds familiar. But I would be interested to hear what has changed? Are those insights about the BS still compatible with what you think now?</description> <pubDate>Sun, 16 Mar 2014 11:50:23 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5314256</guid> <dc:creator>sawfoot _</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-16T11:50:23Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5304887</link> <description>I&amp;#039;ve held off posting because I wanted to be sure what was going on. I know that the A&amp;amp;P can cause a bunch of confusion especially when you try to figure out where you are afterwards. I have to say though, I&amp;#039;m pretty confident that it was the A&amp;amp;P and I got to enjoy 4 days of the DN. The DN for me unfolded pretty much EXACTLY like MCTB described. This makes me wonder if this whole ride has been sort of self programming. You read about it, you meditate heavily, then things unfold the way they are supposed to. Weird.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;That being said, I had the A&amp;amp;P Monday eve. I awoke Tuesday morning and I felt this annoying tone in my head just for a second right as I awoke. The rest of the day I wasn&amp;#039;t sure where I was on the map. In fact I was pretty sure I was in the 3 C&amp;#039;s. I was sure I had a migraine coming on (I get them about twice a year) but it never would materialize. Everything in my view seemed to be comprised of &amp;#039;dots&amp;#039; that vibrated and shook. There was a light annoying buzzing around the peripherals of my eyes and that persisted most of the day. Other than that, things were manageable.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;On my way back from the zendo about 9pm while driving, I was pondering the A&amp;amp;P experience and I got an awful terror. I won&amp;#039;t go into the details as the nature of the fear as it was ridiculous, especially to a skeptic like myself. Regardless, it was scary. Then I suddenly realized that I didn&amp;#039;t know where I was. I was completely lost for a second. Soon as that passed, I saw some sort of small creature run out in front of me and I slammed on the brakes. Turns out I hallucinated the small creature. Thankfully, I was on a country road and no one was around.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I made it home, slept reasonably well and woke up with the same annoying buzzing around the peripherals of my eyes. This was the point that I figured I was in the DN. I was still unsure but I took Daniel&amp;#039;s advice to heart and (I&amp;#039;m paraphrasing):&lt;br /&gt;-Kept practicing diligently&lt;br /&gt;-Didn&amp;#039;t try to keep focus on an object if that wasn&amp;#039;t going to happen (and it sure as hell wasn&amp;#039;t going to happen)&lt;br /&gt;-Exercise (this is my emphasis). It helps, believe me. Even if you don&amp;#039;t want to.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;3 days earlier I basically sat in the wonderful equanimity of the 4th Samatha Jhana any time I wanted. Now, not so much. Not at all, in fact. But I was OK with that.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thursday afternoon, I went for my allergy shot so I headed for lunch out by myself which is my custom. After your allergy shot you are required to wait for 30 minutes presumably to ensure you don&amp;#039;t launch into some sort of anaphylactic shock. I generally read a dharma book at this time and I had just got a copy of &amp;#034;A Path With Heart&amp;#034;. 10 pages in I began to weep. My practice was meaningless and futile and completely heartless (I still hold this view to some degree). I headed to lunch and barely held it together while I ate. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I was becoming convinced that this whole path was BS and I was about to post a tirade of shit here on DhO. Glad I didn&amp;#039;t. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The buzzing became super intense, everything in my view was vibratory &amp;#039;dots&amp;#039; and I still thought I had a migraine coming on. I just decided that this was OK. Didn&amp;#039;t worry about it. Somehow, I felt some sort of &amp;#039;pre-equanimity&amp;#039; here because there was some relief. I just stayed with the same strategy--diligent practice (2-4 hours a day) and letting the fact that I could barely even get to the 1st Jhana be OK. BOOM.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Friday was equanimity. A complete fucking relief. Saturday, it is still holding. I went to a farmers market and it was crowded (I hate crowds). I was totally fine with it. I loved it. I was so thankful to be alive. All this being said, I am pretty convinced that I have not achieved the necessary insights for SE (I know Daniel and others say that if you have gotten this far, you have the skills to finish). My practice has been concentration heavy and I simply don&amp;#039;t feel that I have the insights to move on so I fully expect to be repeating DN. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ll get it eventually...&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thanks for reading.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 16 Mar 2014 05:22:43 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5304887</guid> <dc:creator>Zendo Calrissian</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-16T05:22:43Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287745</link> <description>Ha, the limits of my stimulant abuse are 2 cups of coffee in the morning.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 14:59:43 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287745</guid> <dc:creator>Zendo Calrissian</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-12T14:59:43Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287739</link> <description>Thanks for relating your experience, Sawfoot. My gut tells me that, like you, there is more to come. I&amp;#039;ve been doing too much anticipating and I need to just relax, enjoy the moment and let what happens happen.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 14:57:42 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287739</guid> <dc:creator>Zendo Calrissian</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-12T14:57:42Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287418</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Zendo Calrissian:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;So I&amp;#039;ve suspected I was in A&amp;amp;P for about a week now. I&amp;#039;ve been able to go deeper than before almost effortlessly. Before last week I could sort of reliably attain the 2nd Samatha Jhana. Now I hit the 4th every time I&amp;#039;m on the cushion whether I want to or not (even noting or body-sweeping). Lots of colors, geometric shapes and a crap load of white light. Once I even hit the 5th. Shit got really weird but afterwards I had a clarity of mind that I have never experienced before that lasted for hours. It was astonishing.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Anyway, last night I went to a Tai Chi class and before the class I was stretching in front of a mirror. I started noticing reality strobing and vibrating in my peripherals. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and I became pixilated and began to vanish. I knew what was happening but as class was about to begin I didn&amp;#039;t want to get into this altered state while interacting with people so I sort of resolved to not let it happen. Things stayed strange for a while but slowly settled down and I was able to complete the class.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So I&amp;#039;m wondering 1. Is that it? Now I&amp;#039;m headed to DN? 2. Did I kick the can down the road and It will recur? 3. This was not the A&amp;amp;P all? 4. All of the above?&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;In my experience, I hit what I took to be A&amp;amp;P while on retreat, in the zendo. But because I was surrounded by people, there was an element of fear and being self-conscious. So afterwards, it definitely felt like an A&amp;amp;P event but perhaps something missing. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A week or so later, while meditating alone in my house, I had a repeat experience, similar to before, but this time no holding back, and a lot of more intense. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So in my case, I think I might have &amp;#034;willed&amp;#034; the A&amp;amp;P away initially, but I wouldn&amp;#039;t say it stopped, just that it wasn&amp;#039;t fully expressed. Obviously this is just my experience and it isn&amp;#039;t necessarily true that it will apply to you, though I get the sense from what you say that there could be &amp;#034;more in the bank&amp;#034;, but then again I wouldn&amp;#039;t worry or set up up the expectation of looking for it. You could take the position that whatever needs to be expressed will find its way out (and might already have).</description> <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 10:31:30 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287418</guid> <dc:creator>sawfoot _</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-12T10:31:30Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287402</link> <description>In my experience, I hit what I took to be A&amp;amp;P while on retreat, in the zendo. But because I was surrounded by people, there was an element of fear and being self-conscious. So afterwards, it definitely felt like an A&amp;amp;P event but perhaps something missing. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A week or so later, while meditating alone in my house, I had a repeat experience, similar to before, but this time no holding back, and a lot of more intense. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So in my case, I think I might have &amp;#034;willed&amp;#034; the A&amp;amp;P away initially, but I wouldn&amp;#039;t say it stopped, just that it wasn&amp;#039;t fully expressed. Obviously this is just my experience and it isn&amp;#039;t necessarily true that it will apply to you, though I get the sense from what you say that there could be &amp;#034;more in the bank&amp;#034;, but then again I wouldn&amp;#039;t worry or set up up the expectation of looking for it. You could take the position that whatever needs to be expressed will find its way out.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 10:28:00 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287402</guid> <dc:creator>sawfoot _</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-12T10:28:00Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287080</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Zendo Calrissian:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;All that being said, I still thought that I hadn&amp;#039;t even attained Mind and Body until I read a post by you from another thread:&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;stuart chas law:&lt;br /&gt;Is it possible to have such a mild knowing of Mind and Body, and Cause and Effect that it doesn&amp;#039;t register?&lt;br /&gt;Dream Walker:&lt;br /&gt;Yes&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Another thing to think about&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Florian Weps:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Here&amp;#039;s another interesting topic, if the situation is right (i.e. everybody is relaxed and the subject is childhood memories): what kinds of mind games did people play when it was bedtime and the lights were off but they couldn&amp;#039;t sleep yet. Surprisingly many people got several ñanas that way. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Intensity of everything is subjective and how much people notice and then accurately remember varies greatly. &lt;br /&gt;~D</description> <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 05:23:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287080</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-12T05:23:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287054</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Zendo Calrissian:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Good point, Dream Walker. Honestly, I&amp;#039;m not sure I&amp;#039;m even in A&amp;amp;P at all. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Some light reading about the A&amp;amp;P &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;1509672"&gt;Diagnosing the A&amp;amp;P&lt;/a&gt; in case you have not read it.&lt;br /&gt;~D</description> <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 05:09:23 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5287054</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-12T05:09:23Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5286760</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Zendo Calrissian:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;So I&amp;#039;ve suspected I was in A&amp;amp;P for about a week now. I&amp;#039;ve been able to go deeper than before almost effortlessly. Before last week I could sort of reliably attain the 2nd Samatha Jhana. Now I hit the 4th every time I&amp;#039;m on the cushion whether I want to or not (even noting or body-sweeping). Lots of colors, geometric shapes and a crap load of white light. Once I even hit the 5th. Shit got really weird but afterwards I had a clarity of mind that I have never experienced before that lasted for hours. It was astonishing.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Anyway, last night I went to a Tai Chi class and before the class I was stretching in front of a mirror. I started noticing reality strobing and vibrating in my peripherals. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and I became pixilated and began to vanish. I knew what was happening but as class was about to begin I didn&amp;#039;t want to get into this altered state while interacting with people so I sort of resolved to not let it happen. Things stayed strange for a while but slowly settled down and I was able to complete the class.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So I&amp;#039;m wondering 1. Is that it? Now I&amp;#039;m headed to DN? 2. Did I kick the can down the road and It will recur? 3. This was not the A&amp;amp;P all? 4. All of the above?&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;1. Could be, hard to say though. Time will tell. Anyhow don&amp;#039;t worry too much, because you will probably cycle around a bunch till you get stream entry.&lt;br /&gt;2. As I said above, it will probably recur. Until stream entry, you will cycle ALL the way through the Vippassina jhanas numerous times, until you get stream entry.&lt;br /&gt;3. Probably trust your gut on this, based on your description it seems likely. Anyhow it&amp;#039;s not that important, just keep practicing and see what happens. You know.. don&amp;#039;t worry about it too much!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Also the fact that your concentration is stronger could well be a sign of the A+P. Ha and that you haven&amp;#039;t been able to sleep for 3 days is an indication something involving keyed up energy is definitely occurring, unless you&amp;#039;re abusing stimulants.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 00:28:20 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5286760</guid> <dc:creator>T DC</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-12T00:28:20Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5286312</link> <description>Good point, Dream Walker. Honestly, I&amp;#039;m not sure I&amp;#039;m even in A&amp;amp;P at all. My practice tends toward the concentration. Even when I note, the focus I place on noting pushes me through the Samatha Jhanas. In fact, the insight practices seem to have made my concentration practices even stronger even though that isn&amp;#039;t what I was trying to accomplish. I do note sensations arising and passing and can note a large number of them. I can sometimes even hear constant sounds broken into constituent parts or frequencies. It&amp;#039;s hard to describe. Once I was listening to music and focusing on particular notes. At one point it seemed like one of the notes slowed down while I focused on it but all the other ones stayed at the same speed. Like I pulled that note out and held it for just a second.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;All that being said, I still thought that I hadn&amp;#039;t even attained Mind and Body until I read a post by you from another thread:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;stuart chas law:&lt;br /&gt;Is it possible to have such a mild knowing of Mind and Body, and Cause and Effect that it doesn&amp;#039;t register?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Dream Walker:&lt;br /&gt;Yes&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;It dawned on me that maybe I was in A&amp;amp;P after all. And when the weird mirror thing happened, I figured it was likely related to the A&amp;amp;P stage. Still not sure though. I&amp;#039;ve felt odd all day today, light-headed with major sensitivity to light (no pupil dilation) but no other strangeness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Edit: Also, I haven&amp;#039;t really been able to sleep for 3 days.</description> <pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 21:19:15 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5286312</guid> <dc:creator>Zendo Calrissian</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-11T21:19:15Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5285962</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Zendo Calrissian:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;So I&amp;#039;ve suspected I was in A&amp;amp;P for about a week now. I&amp;#039;ve been able to go deeper than before almost effortlessly. Before last week I could sort of reliably attain the 2nd Samatha Jhana. Now I hit the 4th every time I&amp;#039;m on the cushion whether I want to or not (even noting or body-sweeping). Lots of colors, geometric shapes and a crap load of white light. Once I even hit the 5th. Shit got really weird but afterwards I had a clarity of mind that I have never experienced before that lasted for hours.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;If you want more feedback I would recommend giving more phenomenological descriptions of things. Notice above that you are stating where you are at not describing...so we do not know if it is true or not. The &amp;#034;colors, geometric shapes and a crap load of white light&amp;#034; are the only descriptions...is this your description of fourth jhana as you are experiencing it? Please expound upon &amp;#034;Shit got really weird&amp;#034; &lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/big_grin.gif" &gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Thanks,&lt;br /&gt;~D</description> <pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 19:35:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5285962</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-11T19:35:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5285269</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Zendo Calrissian:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;So I&amp;#039;m wondering 1. Is that it? Now I&amp;#039;m headed to DN? 2. Did I kick the can down the road and It will recur? 3. This was not the A&amp;amp;P all? 4. All of the above?&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;The answer to all your questions is practice and wait and see. Past performance is not predictive of guaranteed future results. The first time thru you just have to see what happens....the second time and the times after are more obvious.&lt;br /&gt;Good luck,&lt;br /&gt;~D</description> <pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 15:25:45 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5285269</guid> <dc:creator>Dream Walker</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-11T15:25:45Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>I think I "willed" the A&amp;P event to stop</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5285260</link> <description>So I&amp;#039;ve suspected I was in A&amp;amp;P for about a week now. I&amp;#039;ve been able to go deeper than before almost effortlessly. Before last week I could sort of reliably attain the 2nd Samatha Jhana. Now I hit the 4th every time I&amp;#039;m on the cushion whether I want to or not (even noting or body-sweeping). Lots of colors, geometric shapes and a crap load of white light. Once I even hit the 5th. Shit got really weird but afterwards I had a clarity of mind that I have never experienced before that lasted for hours. It was astonishing.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Anyway, last night I went to a Tai Chi class and before the class I was stretching in front of a mirror. I started noticing reality strobing and vibrating in my peripherals. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and I became pixilated and began to vanish. I knew what was happening but as class was about to begin I didn&amp;#039;t want to get into this altered state while interacting with people so I sort of resolved to not let it happen. Things stayed strange for a while but slowly settled down and I was able to complete the class.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So I&amp;#039;m wondering 1. Is that it? Now I&amp;#039;m headed to DN? 2. Did I kick the can down the road and It will recur? 3. This was not the A&amp;amp;P all? 4. All of the above?</description> <pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 15:15:45 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5285260</guid> <dc:creator>Zendo Calrissian</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-11T15:15:45Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: What kind of suffering does enlightenment get rid of?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5263476</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Jake T Smith:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;I heard that when you are fully enlightened you no longer have suffering. What is meant by suffering though? Anxiety &amp;amp; depression? Does enlightenment get rid of anxiety and depression?&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I can only say what I&amp;#039;ve read, since I&amp;#039;m not enlightened.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;#034;They&amp;#034; (various teachers) say suffering ends altogether. The body-mind which was once so intimate becomes like a character on a movie screen. The character continues to feel pain and pleasure and may even struggle to escape difficulty, (just as the character in a movie would), but you are unharmed. Death and torture are of no concern.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Regarding depression and anxiety, access to jhana should cure this (jhana is bliss, so it cannot co-exist with negative mind states).</description> <pubDate>Sat, 08 Mar 2014 08:05:31 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5263476</guid> <dc:creator>C C C</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-08T08:05:31Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Weird Psychic Stuff</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5259614</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;A D R:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Duel Ventilation shafts, dual spirits, blinking eyes, and recurring head stuff from day to day. What does all this have to do with Arahantship? Or Buddha-hood for that matter.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Perhaps ask yourself; what action is occurring right now that is causing such dissatisfaction? Not occurrence, but action. Perhaps contemplate the notion that it isn&amp;#039;t a random occurrence that is causing this dissatisfaction, but some mind born action, which perhaps is allowing a belief structure to trigger the dissatisfaction. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;You want to end the dissatisfaction. This is obvious from your posts. Perhaps sit down and ask yourself what &amp;#039;belief structure&amp;#039; is holding this dissatisfaction in place? &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My dissatisfaction = the discrepancies between all these occurences and what the frack &amp;#039;arahantship&amp;#039; or &amp;#039;buddhahood&amp;#039; really means in my mind. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;VS&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My dissatisfaction = the habitual mind-born actions, due to not seeing, that start with unseen urges that trigger thought loops/belief structures* to take shape which then trigger and are re-triggered by shitty unpleasantness in the physical body, looping back and re-enforcing this process of dissatisfaction again and again and again. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;* such as what the frack &amp;#039;arahantship&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;buddhahood&amp;#039; should be or shouldn&amp;#039;t be consisting of.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I think the best plan of action when one is battling such doubts and craziness, is to sit down and ask oneself, what is the &lt;span style="color: #F30F0F"&gt;belief&lt;/span&gt; in the mind in this very moment that is at the core of this experience of &lt;span style="color: #F30F0F"&gt;dissatisfaction&lt;/span&gt;. Name it, say it out loud, write it down. Then question the hell out of it: is it valid? where does it come from? how does it manifest? is it subtle? is it gross? Does it come and go, come and go? What happens when it is absent?Why does it still &amp;#039;come&amp;#039; to then go? How is it giving &amp;#039;shape&amp;#039; to my reality? Burn the paper it was written down on. Let its &amp;#039;absence&amp;#039; present in and of itself just by allowing there be space for its absence to be noticed. Ignorance and blindness keeps things chugging along. Paying attention to (and questioning) &amp;#039;belief structures&amp;#039; will allow them space to drop. The questioning may not even result in &amp;#039;answers&amp;#039;, but the very act of questioning will allow space to unclench and relax your fist*. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;*Not sure if this will make sense, but clench your fist tight and think thoughts, &amp;#034;I must clench my fist!!!! Keep clenching tight! Keep going!!! This is what I must do!!!&amp;#034;. Now stop those thoughts and start questioning &amp;#034;Why am I clenching my fist so hard? What is the purpose? Why am I listening to Nick? What does clenching my fist result in?&amp;#034;. I assume there may be more tendency to relax and unclench (let go of) your fist than when thinking the former thoughts. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Nick</description> <pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2014 20:28:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5259614</guid> <dc:creator>Nikolai .</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-06T20:28:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Weird Psychic Stuff</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5258784</link> <description>Can you be a bit more specific about what you&amp;#039;re experiencing?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In general, there is a lot of unusual dualistic experience on the way to non-dual consciousness. Think of it as peeling back layers of an onion. First, the duality of the ordinary physical world drops but then you realize that the duality of our consciousness has a lot more layers, including all the weird psychic stuff you allude to. Getting to arhatship requires seeing all of it, the normal stuff and the strange stuff.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2014 18:18:24 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5258784</guid> <dc:creator>Avi Craimer</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-06T18:18:24Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Weird Psychic Stuff</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5257382</link> <description>Duel Ventilation shafts, dual spirits, blinking eyes, and recurring head stuff from day to day. What does all this have to do with Arahantship? Or Buddha-hood for that matter.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2014 15:18:03 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5257382</guid> <dc:creator>Adam Dietrich Ringle</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-03-06T15:18:03Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: What kind of suffering does enlightenment get rid of?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5220327</link> <description>Hi Jake WM,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I no longer believe awakening fully cured me of psychosis (though I have used other methods that have essentially &amp;#034;cured&amp;#034; me). Whether it cured me of mood problems is possible though for possibly different reasons than other people since my condition was perceptually oriented from the beginning (this is gone into detail in the links below). I was asked about this recently in this thread (it&amp;#039;s a sidetrack in the post and you&amp;#039;ll have to scroll to find it): &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;5126180"&gt;http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5126180&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I have written very extensively about this topic in this post: &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;3373753"&gt;http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3373753&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I have also kept the above thread up to date with edits.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I have also PM&amp;#039;d you with my e-mail address.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Let me know if you have more questions.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Tom</description> <pubDate>Wed, 19 Feb 2014 22:53:10 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5220327</guid> <dc:creator>Tom Tom</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-19T22:53:10Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: What kind of suffering does enlightenment get rid of?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5218807</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Tom Tom:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;I&amp;#039;m likely a very small minority (only due to few that try), but I was able to cure major mental illness by becoming awakened in a relatively short period of time (on pretty much no retreats), and have a good amount of hospitalization experience/experience with psychosis. I believe we&amp;#039;ve talked about this before and I gave you some advice in an earlier thread. PM me if you need more guidance. As someone who did succeed, I am prone to encouraging people to give it a go, but there are others who feel that they did not succeed (or who are currently not succeeding or dark nighting) who would be prone to suggest otherwise. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Though as someone who did succeed, I will tell you that the circumstances require a different kind of practice (derived/modified from it though) than everyone else is doing here (and that doing exactly what Daniel did, or anyone else on this forum or any other for that matter, is likely to lead to episodes of psychosis/mania, maybe depression). Again, send me a private message and I can go into this in more detail. To anyone else reading this in similar circumstances, I would give the following advice:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;-Do NOT start doing insight practices until you are stabilized/reasonably happy/not depressed/or having any episodes by doing basic mindfulness/breath practices. It took me about 1.5 years of this. I will give you much more detailed advice if you PM me.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;After starting insight practices:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;-Do NOT note in your head until you are at least mctb 3rd path (as this will create a tangle of spaghetthi that will most definitely lead to mania/psychosis - especially upon hitting review).&lt;br /&gt;-Do a technique I call &amp;#034;very light noting&amp;#034; (note out loud on occasion, like once every minute/30 seconds). Don&amp;#039;t note out-loud every second like Kenneth Folk suggests, as this will likely lead to mania/psychosis too. Noting becomes less necessary at higher paths.&lt;br /&gt;-Be very wary of review cycles and keep someone around/or someone&amp;#039;s phone number if you&amp;#039;re likely to hit path and enter a review. All episodes of acute psychosis happened to me in review.&lt;br /&gt;-Avoid &amp;#034;sitting&amp;#034; meditation of longer than about 3 hours a day. Just because you can&amp;#039;t &amp;#034;sit&amp;#034; longer than this doesn&amp;#039;t mean you cannot become very highly awakened.&lt;br /&gt;-These are major points, but I have a lot more and how to accomplish them if you PM me.&lt;br /&gt;-I could feasibly write the &amp;#034;extra extreme&amp;#034; version of what&amp;#039;s written in MCTB regarding the stages of insight if the above instructions are not followed. Including verification of very impossible sounding powers that most people here likely don&amp;#039;t believe in.&lt;br /&gt;--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I would not agree that it does not make you &amp;#034;happier.&amp;#034; It does make you happier (but takes some time/effort to stabilize as well as going through a lot of unpleasantness that was already there anyways, but was being ignored), and it is not the same &amp;#034;happiness&amp;#034; as the impermanent variety of &amp;#034;happiness&amp;#034; that you may be thinking of. It is a much better happiness. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Even during periods of very horrible hellish mind-states (and unhappiness), it helps, as there is less reactive stuff going on (oh, poor me) in unfortunate or strange circumstances. Seeing everything as not really &amp;#034;that big of a deal&amp;#034; is a big improvement over whatever mental health problems (hellish states) were already going on, in experience.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I know I am reviving an old thread but the private message page is slow and not working for me. It seems like the whole user database is being pulled on that page and its giving my machine a heart attack.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Anyway, Tom Tom I am interested in speaking with you over PM. If you could message me that would be great. Like I said I have tried to message you but it hasn&amp;#039;t worked. The content of this message has resonated with me and I think I could benefit with a discussion with you.</description> <pubDate>Wed, 19 Feb 2014 16:02:55 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5218807</guid> <dc:creator>Jake WM</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-02-19T16:02:55Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Am I totally wrong about experiencing the A&amp;P and nanas?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5143630</link> <description>In my experience the A &amp;amp; P is more like seeing vibrations with fast noticing/feelings of hope/the brain feeling like it can&amp;#039;t contain it. The dark night is less like depression and more like a disenchantment with what you liked before. This would be specific in that there was some pain you were ignoring that you now see clearly. Also during this period it&amp;#039;s common to not want to do anything but not really out of depression but more out of not wanting to feel the pain. Equanimity is a little like getting your head above water but it&amp;#039;s more like a new found resiliency with stress plus a much more quiet mind. This was amazing when it first happened but it was quite narrow and more like a concentration attainment and then I fell into reobservation before the equanimity became a more stable habit. You have to keep practising and getting used to the withdrawal symptoms to have a more stable equanimity. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This is time where you want to see more detail of emptiness and use that equanimity on as many aspects of your experience as you can.&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;11929&amp;#x2f;"&gt;Time and the emptiness of time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What your brain is reacting to emotionally is experiences that go into the past practically instantly. The present moment is short-term memory. Ruminating/Clinging on life situations that instantly go into the past should seem less and less necessary as you pay attention to how fast impermanence is. It would be good when you get in a bad mood to ask the question &amp;#034;Why?&amp;#034; as if you&amp;#039;re asking why the brain is wasting the present moment with negative narratives and just interrupt it. When you hit equanimity it will be even easier to do this. Interrupt it with &amp;#034;why?&amp;#034; and return to your body. Do it over and over again if you need to so that you can deal with the mental habits. Eventually asking why won&amp;#039;t be necessary as your brain will learn to go to the answer (your body) right when you see the mind has wandered.</description> <pubDate>Mon, 20 Jan 2014 03:32:04 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5143630</guid> <dc:creator>Richard Zen</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-20T03:32:04Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Am I totally wrong about experiencing the A&amp;P and nanas?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5141621</link> <description>Dear JC,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;People trying to figure out if they crossed the A&amp;amp;P is a common theme, as numerous recent and old threads will attest, so you are in good company.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Just based on a few things you probably have.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If you will notice in the thread called &amp;#034;Diagnosing the A&amp;amp;P&amp;#034;, it can be a huge deal or subtle, happen in all sorts of circumstances, and look like lots of different things, while all being basically functionally the same, so far as we can tell.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Not everyone has lights and energetics. As reports here will show you, the range of experiences is vast.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Given the various mystical experiences you say you have had, and given that you seem to perceive cycles, and given that you are looking around forums such as this one, the chances are pretty high that you have crossed and perhaps more than once.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;However, there is something about formal practice that will show you aspects of the pattern and the stages that you may never have noticed before, and that is actually typical. I personally couldn&amp;#039;t have told you that I went through the early stages and the A&amp;amp;P before I had formal training and good map theory, even though I had crossed the A&amp;amp;P at least 6 times over about 10 years before I started formally practicing.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Been on retreats? Have any time for them now or soon?</description> <pubDate>Sun, 19 Jan 2014 02:16:43 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5141621</guid> <dc:creator>Daniel M. Ingram</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-19T02:16:43Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Am I totally wrong about experiencing the A&amp;P and nanas?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5141498</link> <description>For a while I have been going under the assumption that I must be a Dark Night Yogi, that the periods of depression I&amp;#039;ve experienced may have been related to this, and that the times when I&amp;#039;ve felt like my head popped above the water were related to coming out of the DN.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;But, while noting and practicing vipassana recently I noticed for the first time that I could &amp;#034;watch&amp;#034; the notes going on their own without me &amp;#034;doing&amp;#034; them... like the part of my brain responsible for the noting was going forward on its own automatically, but I no longer identified with it.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This has me wondering if this was me actually reaching Mind and Body / Cause and Effect / the 3 Cs for the first time, and if I haven&amp;#039;t actually crossed the A&amp;amp;P.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I had been assuming that the A&amp;amp;P - DN - Eq cycle had been going on in the background for a while and was related to my emotional swings... but what if it hasn&amp;#039;t? What if I&amp;#039;ve never actually crossed it?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve certainly had plenty of mystical experiences, both with psychedelics and without: I&amp;#039;ve had unitary experiences where everything seemed like part of the universe talking to another part of the universe, experiences where I clearly seemed to be missing or not there in a really liberating sense, and so forth. But I&amp;#039;ve never had the strong physical/energetic/light effects described.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Is it possible I&amp;#039;ve never crossed the A&amp;amp;P, and if so, should I consider not crossing it for a while (based on going through periods of depression)?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Is it possible I have crossed the A&amp;amp;P but just haven&amp;#039;t developed the access concentration and vipassana skills to really be aware of the different nanas?</description> <pubDate>Sun, 19 Jan 2014 00:50:14 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5141498</guid> <dc:creator>J C</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-19T00:50:14Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5105261</link> <description>:-) Hi Heather, and Happy New Year!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Just for some clarification about &amp;#034;objectless awareness&amp;#034;, is what you&amp;#039;re referring to a (usually)-eyes-open seated meditation-practice that&amp;#039;s a combination of calming and clear-seeing, roughly like this description of &lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;ddmbanj&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;node&amp;#x2f;1192"&gt;&lt;em&gt;mochao&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;mozhao&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (anglo-Japanese is &lt;em&gt;mokusho&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In your daily life, would you say that you have a good &amp;#039;handle&amp;#039; on the four close placements of mindfulness (body, sensations, mental states, mental objects)? Perhaps it&amp;#039;s been described differently to you, but have you received (or found) well-rounded basic instructions for off-the-cushion daily-life practice? &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Also (having a Soto Zen background myself), I imagine there has been good emphasis by your teachers on ‘holistic compassion’ (i.e includes you as well as others) and owning ones actions (a.k.a ‘taking responsibility for ones actions’), with mention of appropriate &lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;www&amp;#x2e;berkeleybuddhistpriory&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;pages&amp;#x2f;articles&amp;#x2f;rmj_articles&amp;#x2f;Contrition&amp;#x25;20and&amp;#x25;20conversion&amp;#x2e;pdf"&gt;&lt;em&gt;sange&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;/contrition and willingness to change? (Dogen certainly writes about contrition…I’m not getting heavy here but just checking some basics are in your backpack:-)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;You may already be familiar with this... &lt;a href="http&amp;#x3a;&amp;#x2f;&amp;#x2f;en&amp;#x2e;wikipedia&amp;#x2e;org&amp;#x2f;wiki&amp;#x2f;Dhamma_vicaya"&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dharma-vicaya&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (examination/investigation of truth) functions with mindfulness like a knife with a fork...some foods one can pick up with just a fork, but some one will need to use a knife on:-) Face, penetrate, clarify, resolve... Some stuff one really must turn to face: though a person may long to escape from it into the light, they will be unable to...it has grabbed them by the ankles! One needs to own responsibility for this &amp;#039;stuff&amp;#039; as, like it or not, there it is and no one else is going to take care of it. This often-disturbing activity of stuff-facing-and-the-rest can seem counter-intuitive when one just wants peaceful bright spaciousness, but dualistically clinging to stillness and fearing activity, one cannot feel free in &lt;u&gt;both&lt;/u&gt; rest &lt;u&gt;and&lt;/u&gt; function. Health &amp;amp; Safety Regs advise always conducting deep-work dharma-vicaya, or penetrating ones personal &lt;em&gt;kōans&lt;/em&gt; (existential or spiritual dilemmas/questions), under the watchful and benign supervision of holistic-compassion/non-judgemental-awareness:-D&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve talked a fine load of shop (or similar), and hope Dan will come along with something more sensible.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Wishing you every blessing for your ongoing practice&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Peace (-:</description> <pubDate>Sat, 04 Jan 2014 09:26:15 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5105261</guid> <dc:creator>Anne Cripps</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-04T09:26:15Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5103524</link> <description>My 2c, the zapping in and out thing sounds to me more like what Dan calls &amp;#034;Nirodha-lite&amp;#034;, which is not a fruition but I personally consider to be more awesome/important than what Dan calls &amp;#034;Nirodha Samapatti&amp;#034;. I experienced it once and it was far more profound than the latter because there was an experience of the non-experience, whereas with Dan&amp;#039;s NS there is no experience of the non-experience, just a gap of missing time (like once I was listening to a song while it happened and it was as if the music simply skipped forward a few seconds). Although then again maybe what Dan means by Nirodha-lite is not the same. This would require a lot of conversing probably. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;As to the relation between what I&amp;#039;ll continue to call &amp;#034;Nirodha-lite&amp;#034; and the paths as described in MCTB, it doesn&amp;#039;t seem to me you have to be 3rd path to attain to it, indeed it sort of seems like something else, but clearly you have to have good concentration to get to it.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;As to it being an A&amp;amp;P, it also seems unrelated, it&amp;#039;s again more post-8th-jhana than 2nd jhana. As to it being stream-entry, no I don&amp;#039;t think so *per se*, again it seems like something separate from the paths, although maybe if one attains to it without having been a stream-enterer before it&amp;#039;s enough to do the damage, just some wild speculation there though. In a sense the set-ups are pretty similar I guess, with stream entry you get into murky not-well-experienced formless realms territory and then you blip out and that&amp;#039;s it, whereas with this you get into that same formless realms territory and then you get that experience of non-experience.</description> <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2014 20:08:54 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5103524</guid> <dc:creator>Beoman Claudiu Dragon Emu Fire Golem</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-03T20:08:54Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5103002</link> <description>Those are some really well-done phenomenological descriptions.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The real question that I have is if that second event, the one where you say you vanished and reappeared, was another A&amp;amp;P, which can involve an A&amp;amp;P event in which it really does seem like we vanish and re-appear, or was that stream entry, which is clearly your guess to some degree and perhaps it is right, or was that something else.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Figuring out which it was is complex and usually best done by talking to someone about it, and even then is not always easy.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The implications of the A&amp;amp;P vs stream entry are many and vary by the person to some degree, but are probably worth sorting out, as they have practical and practice implications for your everyday life, and traditional instructions as well as real-world useful tips will vary depending on which it was, assuming those two as most likely candidates.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;How is your life different after that second event?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;How is your mind and how it does if function after that second event? Any differences from before that second event?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;How is sitting after that second event?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;How do the stages of insight present after that second event?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Could you sit down and have the stages of insight shift through you if you inclined that way?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What state of mind do you sit down in when you decide to turn the mind to insight at the beginning of the sit?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Have you been on a retreat since?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Do you have any stream-enterer friends you can talk with?</description> <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2014 13:06:50 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5103002</guid> <dc:creator>Daniel M. Ingram</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-03T13:06:50Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5102673</link> <description>:-) Hi Heather!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Bravo for your practice!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What would you say has stayed with you, in terms of insight or freedom (release) from former misperceptions, since the events described below?…&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;I was listening intently to the voice of the officiating priest to see if I could discern when she stood up to offer incense by the change in her voice. And then that&amp;#039;s when I zapped out of being. I remember hearing-feeling the chanting so intensely and then nothing. There was no-arising phenomena: not me, no chanting, no zendo, no nothing. Of course, I didn&amp;#039;t know that no phenomena arose until after I zapped back. It was like I slipped into a gap of nothingness, just like the Heart Sutra says: no skandhas, no sense objects, no sense consciousnesses, no nothing. When I zapped back, I struck the bell just as the priest stepped back to walk toward the altar. I was all I could do to stay on the cushion because the body was flooded with (I know it is nothing but energy!) energy. I had enough to run several marathons. I had to bite my lip, grip the striker, and hold onto the cushion so I wouldn&amp;#039;t jet off the ground. It was incredible!&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;I just did a five-day retreat where there was an experience of &amp;#034;no owner&amp;#034; of thoughts/perceptions. They -- thoughts/perceptions -- just seemed to be floating somewhere in the head but not really part of me. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;After either of these, did you have a particular sense of how you should develop your training next, or what you thought you should do in inner development?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 24px"&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;B&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;r&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: red"&gt;i&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;g&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;h&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;t&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt; B&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;l&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;e&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: aqua"&gt;s&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;s&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: blue"&gt;i&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;n&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;g&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: purple"&gt;s&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="color: inherit"&gt;!&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt; (-:</description> <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2014 08:51:57 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=5102673</guid> <dc:creator>Anne Cripps</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-01-03T08:51:57Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4707472</link> <description>Exactly one week before I hit this very crappy persistent migraine state that manifests as visual &amp;#034;snow&amp;#034; and undulating, more &amp;#034;macro&amp;#034; distortions that the physicians call metamorsopia (August 2), I crossed the A&amp;amp;P Event. It was really the culmination of several months&amp;#039; worth of experiences that happened in frequent lucid dreams. I had been meditating only about 30 minutes a day (samatha-vipassana breath meditation in the Thai Forest tradition), before bedtime. While awake, I never willed myself to experience lucidity. The dreams were spontaneous. In them, as soon as I realized I was dreaming, I felt empowered to do anything, and what I always chose to do was to sit cross-legged and meditate in the dream. These were always blissful and magical feeling experiences. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In the penultimate one I experienced, I was at a party in a home in the center of some woods in the south. There was dark paneling everywhere in the house. Neil Finn showed up and started singing (why not), and I was strangely sad that no one was paying much attention to old Neil. I started talking to this Christian mystic/gnostic friend of mine. She was helping me rearrange furniture into different formations. Suddenly we sat facing each other on the floor, in sitting meditation, and started meditating. Suddenly, the walls of the home blew open, like the petals of a flower, and everyone disappeared except for us two. The floor became a barge or raft and we were zooming rapidly across an ocean. The water flowed over the floor we sat on, but we stayed still and kept meditating, though with eyes open, and if driving the scene. Then the bliss became unbearable and everything burst into a glowing negative-image state--blue-white luminous glow. The flowing, swirling water surges were all aglow.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The dream after this one happened almost before I was totally asleep, and it was like I could see through my eyelids. And then the room began to swirl in paisley types of designs, Persian rug designs, and sudden I just &amp;#034;knew&amp;#034; something. I knew the arising and the passing. And I can&amp;#039;t really explain this knowing in words. The next day I woke up and walked in downtown Apex, after a rain. All the twinkling lights from the little shops and the greens of the trees and grass--everything was ultra clear, ultra real. I was euphoric all day. I felt something had happened. I felt now &amp;#034;on a mission&amp;#034; and very faithful to it. Suddenly, I was able to meditate all night, with no pain and no desire to stop.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;That following week, my vision became really screwed up: edgy vibratory, with difficulty concentrating. I experienced negative emotions, but no outbursts or conflicts with others. Finally, my vision suddenly became radically distorted. It became a medical emergency. I was having one of my several persistent migraine auras. The fact that all this edgy negative stuff started right after that couple of months of lucid dreaming tells me that my persistent migraine auras are at least in part one manifestation for me of the Dark Night. I&amp;#039;m certain now. This much of the pattern is crystal clear: I had an A&amp;amp;P stage followed immediately by dissolution. I guess I&amp;#039;m still there, in the dark now.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I think I&amp;#039;ve done these cycles before--before I started any practice. My first aura happened in church, after a blissful state, when I was 12. Another A&amp;amp;P that I remember from around age 18 involved my spontaneously leaving my body and zooming backward very fast into space. &amp;#034;I&amp;#034; was looking back at myself and my friend by a pond, but we sort of weren&amp;#039;t there. I had the bliss and the feeling that I could keep going, but I decided to return because of my loved ones. And--BAM--I was back solidly in my body, looking at the pond and the sky. I asked my friend, &amp;#034;Did you feel that????&amp;#034; He never answered, just smiled.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 14 Sep 2013 03:18:53 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4707472</guid> <dc:creator>_</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-09-14T03:18:53Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4427960</link> <description>Hi watching out,&lt;br /&gt;Wow, that is a lot of &amp;#034;stuff&amp;#034; going on. You seem to have a very good memory of all the things that happen. I&amp;#039;m probably not the best one to reply but sense no one has I will make some suggestions.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;First, all that &amp;#034;stuff&amp;#034; is awesome when you are experiencing it but...&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Just let it happen and don&amp;#039;t cling to it. If you are doing noting, and I think you should continue to do that, just keep noting what is going on as it is going on and then go back to your object like the breath. I would also get in the habit of noting post-meditation, during the regular part or your day as you are doing your normal tasks. Let go of the dialogue in your mind and simply note what is passing through. Look for the sense of spaciousness and stay with that. This is actually much harder to do than sitting in my opinion but it brings great rewards.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Read up on the the three characteristics in MCTB and look for them in all of your experiences. Understanding impermanence, suffering and no-self is what leads to emptiness. All things are empty of inherent existence. You must gain an intellectual understanding of emptiness and then you will find it in experience.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A solid understanding of the 5 aggregates made a big difference for me. These are the things we &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt;, and they do not have inherent existence. &lt;br /&gt;1. Form&lt;br /&gt;2. Feeling&lt;br /&gt;3. Perception&lt;br /&gt;4. Mental Formations&lt;br /&gt;5. Consciousness&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Look for the &amp;#034;I&amp;#034; in them and you will find that you cannot find the &amp;#034;I&amp;#034;. This will give you an experiential understanding of no-self.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Best Wishes,&lt;br /&gt;Darrin</description> <pubDate>Tue, 25 Jun 2013 13:12:04 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4427960</guid> <dc:creator>Darrin Rice</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-06-25T13:12:04Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Interesting Dream... A&amp;P Happening in Dreams?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4397712</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Mind over easy:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt; Some people who practice say the DN is not that bad for them, but I seem to be one of the people who get really shaken up by the territory. This has gotten much better over the time I&amp;#039;ve practiced. &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt; &lt;br /&gt;It&amp;#039;s one hell of a ride for me.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Well, being detached and mindful of everything is basically the key, &lt;strong&gt;but as you go deeper, there are more and more subtle ways in which you don&amp;#039;t want to let go, &lt;/strong&gt;and when you get to 3rd vipassana jhana, you&amp;#039;re basically faced to let go of a lot in order to get to EQ. Personally, I think the letting go that happens in re-observation to get to EQ is similar (or, the same, depending on how you look at it) to the shift from 3rd to 4th shamatha jhana, so doing jhanas up to 4th and then starting vipassana is also a good route.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;That&amp;#039;s a great observation. Reminds me of a song : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tp0r9197uo&lt;br /&gt;For years I read or heard about letting go, but through meditation learnt what it actually means. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A couple of days ago, out of the blue I was having intense stomach aches. This went on and off for 3-4 days. I thought maybe it was my diet. I did my best with WebMD to diagnose what medical issue I could be having, but nothing matched up. On the last night it became so severe that I couldn&amp;#039;t sleep. I almost believed that I have an appendix issue and I will need to be operated the next day, that&amp;#039;s how severe it was. Luckily the next day it stopped aching completely and by night I was feeling really good, like I&amp;#039;m back to my old self. I was able to appreciate art after a long time. I think this was when I first hit low eq, but I&amp;#039;m still not sure. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve read some of your posts, and I totally relate to some of your DN experiences. When I started this practice, I had no idea how serious Daniel Ingram was in his book about the dangers of the DN. In times of strong DN&amp;#039;ing, I&amp;#039;ve dealt with intense feelings of loss and uncertainty, self-hate (strong in misery/disgust), bleakness in life, lack of any point to life, helplessness (related to seeing anatta), etc... from my experience, I&amp;#039;d say that if you can get better at getting to equanimity consistently, the better you&amp;#039;ll be able to proceed smoothly through the DN nanas. Once the 3 characteristics start sinking in and you get familiar with the territory, sudden crises and roadblocks become natural, predictable cycles, and you get better at navigating smoothly, applying the right focus, etc... &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This is why I&amp;#039;m glad to be here. It is comforting to know there are other people going through the same thing when almost everyone you know in real life doesn&amp;#039;t come close to understanding what&amp;#039;s going on. I also experience a lot of laziness and the only thing to do is really push myself into doing what needs to be done. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt; With the emotional intensity, repressed memories and emotions, that kind of stuff, I find it useful to practice in whatever way you practice mindfulness. It seems to come up for a good reason, as the next thing that surfaces to detach from, and the more your practice can indiscriminately penetrate even the toughest things that come up in meditation/daily life, the more you&amp;#039;re able to deal with anything that comes up with less pain and stress.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My take is that if I just do the meditations and keep the process going, the subconscious stuff is always being worked on. &lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;m glad I started this at a relatively young age even if it did slow down my worldly progress. The older we get the more things we repress, the more attachments we create, and the more things we have to deal with later on. I agree that mindfulness and acceptance is key to sailing through rough waters, but at the time it is also challenging to do so.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:39:52 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4397712</guid> <dc:creator>Sweet Nothing</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-06-16T19:39:52Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Interesting Dream... A&amp;P Happening in Dreams?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4397511</link> <description>I feel ya on the dreams, especially during fear-reobservation. I&amp;#039;ve had some seriously scary and emotionally strong dreams, almost always in that territory. I do agree that repressed emotions play some part in these dreams, probably brought to the surface by the shift from 2nd to 3rd vipassana jhana. Some people who practice say the DN is not that bad for them, but I seem to be one of the people who get really shaken up by the territory. This has gotten much better over the time I&amp;#039;ve practiced. What works for me is being mindful of times when I have a bigger A&amp;amp;P crossing, and being aware that the changes in thoughts and feelings are part of the territory. Being detached to the glory of the A&amp;amp;P is also helpful. Well, being detached and mindful of everything is basically the key, but as you go deeper, there are more and more subtle ways in which you don&amp;#039;t want to let go, and when you get to 3rd vipassana jhana, you&amp;#039;re basically faced to let go of a lot in order to get to EQ. Personally, I think the letting go that happens in re-observation to get to EQ is similar (or, the same, depending on how you look at it) to the shift from 3rd to 4th shamatha jhana, so doing jhanas up to 4th and then starting vipassana is also a good route.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I&amp;#039;ve read some of your posts, and I totally relate to some of your DN experiences. When I started this practice, I had no idea how serious Daniel Ingram was in his book about the dangers of the DN. In times of strong DN&amp;#039;ing, I&amp;#039;ve dealt with intense feelings of loss and uncertainty, self-hate (strong in misery/disgust), bleakness in life, lack of any point to life, helplessness (related to seeing anatta), etc... from my experience, I&amp;#039;d say that if you can get better at getting to equanimity consistently, the better you&amp;#039;ll be able to proceed smoothly through the DN nanas. Once the 3 characteristics start sinking in and you get familiar with the territory, sudden crises and roadblocks become natural, predictable cycles, and you get better at navigating smoothly, applying the right focus, etc...&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;With the emotional intensity, repressed memories and emotions, that kind of stuff, I find it useful to practice in whatever way you practice mindfulness. It seems to come up for a good reason, as the next thing that surfaces to detach from, and the more your practice can indiscriminately penetrate even the toughest things that come up in meditation/daily life, the more you&amp;#039;re able to deal with anything that comes up with less pain and stress.</description> <pubDate>Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:18:21 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4397511</guid> <dc:creator>Mind over easy</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-06-16T18:18:21Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Interesting Dream... A&amp;P Happening in Dreams?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4394899</link> <description>I haven&amp;#039;t gotten path, but my &amp;#034;actual&amp;#034; A&amp;amp;P also happened while strolling around at the retreat. It&amp;#039;s also the only A&amp;amp;P I ever had while awake. I did try some hallucinogens and experienced milder A&amp;amp;P like events, but they never altered my baseline like the A&amp;amp;P did. I haven&amp;#039;t read much of MCTB yet, so I wasn&amp;#039;t sure there are several A&amp;amp;P events, thanks for pointing that out. That would also mean there will be multiple Bhanga&amp;#039;s, interesting. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I know it&amp;#039;s interesting to see how things play out and it&amp;#039;s fun to decipher how the process unfolds itself. I stressed on ignoring dreams because in my experience, my dreams have been over the roof crazy ever since I entered DN. It&amp;#039;s extremely hard to interpret what&amp;#039;s really going on because dreams are so abstract. Mostly I&amp;#039;ve had dreams related to shadow/repressed emotions and memories, A&amp;amp;P like phenomena, meditation related phenomena, and the like. When I wake up, I&amp;#039;m like &amp;#034;That was something.&amp;#034; ..that&amp;#039;s about it. I dont know if there is any way to make anything of it and this is why I just ignore it. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In any case, if this was A&amp;amp;P, you should be in dissolution soon enough.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:30:38 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4394899</guid> <dc:creator>Sweet Nothing</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-06-15T20:30:38Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Interesting Dream... A&amp;P Happening in Dreams?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4394390</link> <description>Sometimes the A&amp;amp;P is gradual, but check out the thread &amp;#034;Diagnosing the A&amp;amp;P&amp;#034;. It can definitely happen many different ways, with a lot of effort or possibly no conscious effort. I&amp;#039;ve crossed it while walking around school, doing nothing whatsoever, after building up concentration, after a few minutes of noting, while riding the bus, while working out, asleep (apparently), awake, with effort, without effort, with trying to do so, without trying to do so. Sometimes it lasts hours (rarely for me), other times it lasts 10 minutes, others it lasts one. Not to mention if you&amp;#039;ve gotten path (I&amp;#039;ve gotten stream entry at least), you&amp;#039;ll cycle automatically, including through the A&amp;amp;P with no effort or intention to do so. There may be an infinite number of A&amp;amp;P events that all appear and play out differently, under varying circumstances, but are still the same insight stage.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Why not contemplate though!? It&amp;#039;s interesting to see the variability in the ways that different states and stages can play out, different contexts, different setups, different time frames, different perceptions... etc. If you&amp;#039;re in it to meditate and understand experience, I don&amp;#039;t see the harm in reviewing experiences and trying to understand them better, especially in terms of which insight stages they could possibly be and what made them come about. Not to mention the value of being able to manipulate/call up states and stages in or out of practice. Not to mention an ideal of trying to be mindful as often as possible!</description> <pubDate>Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:53:44 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4394390</guid> <dc:creator>Mind over easy</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-06-15T17:53:44Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Interesting Dream... A&amp;P Happening in Dreams?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4392866</link> <description>In my experience, the A&amp;amp;P is not a sudden event but something that gradually builds up along with very strong concentration.&lt;br /&gt;I have had several A&amp;amp;P like events while dreaming/lucid dreaming post A&amp;amp;P. 2 nights ago I had a lucid dream within a dream, pretty insane where I was meditating and crazy stuff happened. My advice is to let the dreams do their thing without wasting time on contemplation.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 15 Jun 2013 11:02:45 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4392866</guid> <dc:creator>Sweet Nothing</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-06-15T11:02:45Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Interesting Dream... A&amp;P Happening in Dreams?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4392128</link> <description>Oh, there was also this...&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I got to work today and started making a mental inventory of things, since I&amp;#039;m relatively new there. I started noting all the various ingredients and tools at a very quick pace, circling around the room, and I realized that the intensity was coming on, with a lot of strong pressure between my eyebrows and an amazing exhilarating feeling in my mind. Not a bad way to start off work... ha ha.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 15 Jun 2013 07:36:43 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4392128</guid> <dc:creator>Mind over easy</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-06-15T07:36:43Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Interesting Dream... A&amp;P Happening in Dreams?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4392111</link> <description>So I had this really interesting dream last night. I went to bed, not really planning on practicing. But I still had some level of investigation going as I drifted off over the next half hour or so (which just reads watching what was going on, like what else is there to do when you&amp;#039;re awake and lying still? haha). I wasn&amp;#039;t watching for nanas or jhanas or anything, but there was definitely some motion through nanas, with bodily bliss and then some harsh itchy vibrations/feelings.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Anyways, sometime later in the night while I was asleep, I had this really fascinating dream where I was in some kind of basement with people, and there were all these doors. I saw these two girls that were trying to get my attention, and I tried to go to them, but the dream shifted and they were gone. Somewhere along the way, I realized that all the doors were leading to the places I was expecting/intending, so I went up to a door and put a ton of intention on seeing the girls who were trying to get my attention. I opened it, and the dream suddenly shifted and everything was black, there wasn&amp;#039;t any body or dream-scape, and I just felt like a mind floating. Everything felt very intense when this happened, and tons of energy and joy came surging over me. I wasn&amp;#039;t having a lucid dream, but it definitely had the distinct conscious feeling in a lucid dream. I don&amp;#039;t really remember much from the dream except that scene. I&amp;#039;ve been noticing similar dreams, where there will be a tense, climactic, anxious feeling, then a sudden shift with a lot of energy and that conscious feeling.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Besides having some emotional dreams during DN phases, I&amp;#039;ve never had much experience with how nanas and jhanas might play out in sleep/dreams. Does this sound like this description matches up to crossing the A&amp;amp;P in a dream?</description> <pubDate>Sat, 15 Jun 2013 07:25:08 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4392111</guid> <dc:creator>Mind over easy</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-06-15T07:25:08Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4190547</link> <description>Dear,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;it is me again. An Addition:&lt;br /&gt;Thinking about my last post an reading the MTCB again brings me again to the conclusion, that i might have stucked and still stuck in the dark night. But all the experiences i made, above all, that ones that lasted longer than hours or days where actings of craving from side. i think i tend to want flashy moments and when i have them, i try to enlarge them, which is definitly possible. It is a way of blowing somethins strongly up. But that does not let me improve on the way of insight meditation. Because the only progress with inside meditation is the process of equanimity and analysing the &amp;#034;sensual sensations&amp;#034;. How often will i have to learn this lesson yet? I think i got lost for a thousands and thousand times within pumping up good and bad feelings such as depression. Per definition, depression is exactly the grap of a bad mood, the being in a cylce of bad feelings, where one would naturally coming out after sometimes. But with suffering under depression, as i did, you just cannot let go. &lt;br /&gt;I think the positive spiritual moments, happenings, described in my previous post might have also been outputs from a samatha jana, maybe the second step. The feeling of concentration and delight can make me so dangerously happy that the craving process is doing its bad work.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Looking forward to your appreciations.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The best to you</description> <pubDate>Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:03:42 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4190547</guid> <dc:creator>watching out</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-04-11T14:03:42Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4189696</link> <description>Dear Community,&lt;br /&gt;i want to give you some of my experienced symptoms over the last 12 years. I was happy, if anyone can give me an appreciation of where i could possibly be.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Because now, reading the MTCB and the steps of insight, i have the feeling of knowing content of the steps one to 9/10.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Since i am able to think and reflect my life, which i sort out at the age of thirteen, i had a huge amount of spiritual happenings. Things like suddenly flowing with the moment, being totally in it, being fully conentrate, feeling the vibes of this earth. For example i can remember quiet clear a week in my life, in which every kind of fear, anxiety or any other kind of destructive emotions was blown away and i had the feeling of &amp;#034;it might come what will come, i stay&amp;#034;. With writing, listening to music or painting, i went into the &amp;#034;flow of life&amp;#034; - there was then noting more than writing and painting, being totally into it. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Another happening: i was at the sea, listening to music and seeing a very bright sunlight coming through the clouds, hitting the sea´s surface and reflecting in an amazing light. That moment something switched in my mind, and a big wave of warm and cosy golden love came over me and i was in a deep peace, wanting to do good things fort he people surrounding me. This lasted over some days.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;These incidents still happen, it never stopped. Because of this i began to meditate in the age of 15, but unfortunatly only for half a year. After this i tried several other types of concentration techniques. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Hardly one year ago i was on a retreat (noting technique) in eat asia. From that moment, meditation came back in my life and gains a very strong ground. During this retreat i had one moment of feeling a strong pressure between my eyes, most propably the opening moment of the third eye. For three days i had so much energy, that i could not sleep well. This pressure never left me, i feel it strongly during meditations but also in everyday life. This retreat pushed me into a feeling that i never had before. &lt;br /&gt;For about 4 months, i was highly concentrated, about the things that happended in my mind. I felt knowing to do what is right in every situation. I was happy tob e apart from bad feelings, but unfortunatly they came back. It was like a batterie of awareness that i charged to the fullest and with the time the energy passed away. I started reading a lot about buddhism. And with every book, with every buddhist sentence i nodded, it felt all so right. So many philosphic content that i had regocnized in my life was written down in the books.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;One year before that retreat, i had another happening that lasted over 3 months. Within concentrating on work with terra cotta, eyes closed, my whole life started to roll by in my inner eye. Fragments of my conscius life and of my dreams come up with an enormous speed. I then started to imagine as i wish just the best for all the people that i know, above all, the people that i still have trouble with. Again a huge love, peace and harmony was evoked that lasted long. I became a deep unterstanding of the necessarity to be good to me and people surrounding me to be lucky and happy.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What i saw in MTCB is the aspect of suffering in the dark night. Starting again from the age of thirteen i had hard depressions for a couple of years in my youth time. I am also very sensivite and i suffered and still sometimes suffer with many types of desires and aversion. Desires with strong feelings, with strong ideas, with strong pictures. I think my mind created these as rooms to rest from the pain, rooms of illusion or desire. With having so many dismantling happenings giving a very deep good feeling of being here, in the moment, in the flow, in love, in peace in harmony etc. over small seconds to long time periods and on the other hand knowing what deep sufferings is like, i am living in this split, in this ambivalence. This leads for me to a continous strong wish of getting released. Knowing how it feels to be free of the balast of pain, of destructive emotions and thoughts but still feeling very bad from times to times. The pain aspect and so many upcoming positive spiritual experiences lead me to the diagnose of stucking in the dark night over the last 12 years. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Other descriptions within the MTCB support this. For example to talk and thing about philosophy and psychology in a way that never stopped. I have also always been fascinated of abstinence. Blowing up things, that never had a big importance is one of my „hobbies“. The biggest permament thougt over the years, when i just think back, is just the wish of release. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A couple of weeks ago, i had a &amp;#034;crash&amp;#034;, in which i suddenly felt very very sorry for all the pain, that i pointed at myself and at people surrounding me. Feeling so sorry about letting bad emotions controll my mind, even if i do not want it. And then, after the feelings that made me sad, being to weak to let them go, i was also to weak to stopp these feelings hurting other beings. The hardest thing is to see the bad storm coming, controlling, destroying and passing away without being able to stop it. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Another meditation experience i just came across with a short time ago: I felt sensations all over my body, i observed thoughts in my mind. Everything rising and passing away. They become stronger and stronger. Then i felt a strong undertow pulling my body down to earth. At the same time, it felt like my soul/mind, whatever, went kind of out my body. I still felt the vibrations, the thoughts, the undertow, as if gravity would hold my material body down to earth, but at the same time i felt far away. It became quiet dull, the whole situations, the vibes. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;A couple of weeks ago, i had a meditation, in which i observed my thoughts so consequently, that i got into a obeservers position, that clearly saw the arising and passing away of every single thought. It gave me an unbelievable peace and strength. As if this observers position was strongly nailed into the ground. The gap between me and the stream of feelings and thoughts in my mind was so big, that i began to be amused and delighted what is going on there.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Yesterday for a small moment, i had the feeling of my body being totally alien to me. A miserable feeling come up in me. The feeling of cloth or a hand touching my body evoked a nasty feeling of this. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So as you see, there are so many symptoms, so many stages from 4 to 10 (concerning MTC&lt;img alt="emoticon" src="http://www.dharmaoverground.org/dho-theme/images/emoticons/cool.gif" &gt;, that i do not know what is going on. Where i am right now and where i was over the last 12 years. For me it feels being in stages 4 to 10 at the same time all the time. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Right now i feel a little bit fed up with hunting after getting released, with burning for a good meditation or spiritual happening after the other, with wanting this and wanting that. It is a kind of equanimity but also indifference. But feelings are so incoherent so variable, that i cannot say what comes tommorow.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Has or has had anyone made similar experience? Is anyone having a diagnose for these symptoms? &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Just the best to all of you!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Best greets</description> <pubDate>Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:46:37 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4189696</guid> <dc:creator>watching out</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-04-11T08:46:37Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Does this sound like and A&amp;P Event?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4167655</link> <description>Actually, on further reading, this would appear to be &lt;br /&gt;6. Awareness of Fearfulness&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;Awareness of Fearfulness &lt;br /&gt;When that knowledge of dissolution is mature, there will gradually arise, just by seeing the dissolution of all object-and-subject-formations, awareness of fearfulness and other (higher) knowledges, together with their respective aspects of fear, and so on.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Having seen how the dissolution of two things &amp;#x2014; that is, any object noticed and the insight-thought engaged in noticing it &amp;#x2014; takes place moment by moment, the meditator also understands by inference that in the past, too, every conditioned thing (formation) has broken up in the same way, that just so it will break up also in the future, and that at the present it breaks up, too. And just at the time of noticing any formations that are evident, these formations will appear to him in their aspect of fearfulness. Therefore, during the very act of noticing, the meditator will also come to understand: &amp;#034;These formations are indeed fearful.&amp;#034;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Such understanding of their fearfulness is called &amp;#034;knowledge of the awareness of fearfulness&amp;#034;; it has also the name &amp;#034;knowledge of fear.&amp;#034; At that time, his mind itself is gripped by fear and seems helpless.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description> <pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2013 01:02:00 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4167655</guid> <dc:creator>Dan From Virginia</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-04-04T01:02:00Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Question: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4143153</link> <description>Sure. Obviously there are many A&amp;amp;P variants, all probably worth describing, just so we know the range. Would be interesting to see if they predicted anything about what followed, resulted from specific techniques, etc.</description> <pubDate>Sat, 30 Mar 2013 04:25:04 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4143153</guid> <dc:creator>Daniel M. Ingram</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-03-30T04:25:04Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Does this sound like and A&amp;P Event?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4136417</link> <description>When I think of A&amp;amp;P, I think of what I would call (and I as recall my teacher calling) &amp;#034;Ripping The Lid Off&amp;#034; as yet another attribute for classification that sets one up to enter the dark night. The way it occurred for me, it was a period of time during which you find yourself moving through fear/terror and eventually into a state of crystal stillness.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;ul style="list-style: disc outside;"&gt;&lt;li&gt;The fear is essentially pure sensate terror. It is characterized by sweep sweats, flushed skin, a mind in abject terror for several hours (in my case and those of others I&amp;#039;ve heard). From outside appearance, you will appear to be suffering the acute onset of flu. The terror can come with no apparent object which is causing the cycling fear into terror. &lt;br /&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Hence the phenomenological narrative content of the mind during the cycle of fear to terror is &lt;br /&gt;&lt;ul style="list-style: disc outside;"&gt;&lt;li&gt;a fear initiates for any personal reason&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;b you think &amp;#034;my god this fear is terrible&amp;#034;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;li&gt;c become further frightened by the intensity of your fear [believing content], and &lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;d hence further intensify your fear. &lt;/li&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul style="list-style: disc outside;"&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;You may or may not notice the phenomenological content of the mind may drop the original object entirely it is akin to: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;ul style="list-style: disc outside;"&gt;&lt;li&gt;a You then hear yourself think a thought, &lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;b then believe the content of your thought (a), &lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;c generate more intense energy - perhaps vibration, &lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;d then become more terrified by the appearance of (c), and&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;e cycle to (c) and repeat. &lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul style="list-style: disc outside;"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Hence once fear is ignited, you induce your own blazing inferno of terror by repeatedly being frightened by the echo of your own fear in the echo chamber of your mind. As this phase of the mind ends, you may find yourself in a reciprocally calm state of which feels like &amp;#034;crystal stillness&amp;#034;. &lt;br /&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Crystal stillness is characterized by a sense that the entire world is brand new and that your yourself have just been born. Anything no matter how old, cracked or worn or &amp;#034;broken&amp;#034; has this brand new quality. The mind is now as equally silent as it was loud during the terror. You may feel the urge to change your name as you don&amp;#039;t feel like your old self. This is temporary as [going pithy here} you have yet to bring the dark night into full embrace and acceptance.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul style="list-style: disc outside;"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;To my knowledge, nobody goes through this twice at ultimate intensity, &amp;#034;ripping the lid off&amp;#034;, because in essence you exhaust and permanently break your resistance (I say resistance because its your own clinging that fanning the cycling flames of your terror. If this doesn&amp;#039;t break, it will at least crack your identity, though you may not realize this immediately. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;My experience of this was actually triggered by the observation and subsequent forms, &amp;#034;There is no going back [to the way it was before].&amp;#034;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So is this part of other people&amp;#039;s classic A&amp;amp;P experience?</description> <pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2013 19:06:49 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4136417</guid> <dc:creator>Dan From Virginia</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-03-27T19:06:49Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Question: Diagnosing the A&amp;P</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4133061</link> <description>&lt;div class="quote-title"&gt;Daniel M. Ingram:&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="quote"&gt;&lt;div class="quote-content"&gt;I had two long conversations with some Ivy League Academic Dark Night Yogis who both research meditation and some of the things we discussed inspired me to write this.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I hope you will find it interesting and useful. It was written with a slant towards how to research this stuff in some formal way, such as an NIH grant, but should have some broad appeal and applicability...and related topics.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Is this a draft pondering a proto-taxonomy, along the lines of a biological classification/taxonomy?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Dan</description> <pubDate>Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:03:33 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4133061</guid> <dc:creator>Dan From Virginia</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-03-26T21:03:33Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Does this sound like an A&amp;P event...?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4118634</link> <description>Thanks Daniel,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Well Jhana 1-4 I have done with Kenneth F together online as I was not sure in the beginning what was what. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;1st - and 2nd sit pretty close together and I find 1st pretty hard to stay in for long since the energy is really strong and &amp;#039;muscular&amp;#039; throughout the body - tending to move in fits and starts rather than smooth flow. 2nd jhana is much more flowing and consistent with rich tingling spreading throughout the body and to me seems to flow up through the back to the head and down behind the eyes circling around somewhere in the torso to complete a kind of loop which is stimulated by breath on the Anapana spot so it becomes like a perpetual cycle of varying intensities until it overflows and pulse through all of me. To intensify I move closed eye focus from looking down my nose for first to middle view for second&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;3rd Jhana has gotten better but was always a bit elusive to me. Now I move to it from 2nd by keep my closed eye view at middle but changing focus to distance. Then I become aware of the tingling on my skin and how it moves in slow waves up and down the body. There is a cool almost clammy feel to it. This is relaxing and as instructed I keep my view on the perimeter of awareness rather than centre but generally I find skin awareness better than visual for this jhana&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;4th Jhana I usually move my eye focus to upwards and my awareness to a 360 deg sweep around me at eye level and a broad dome over my head. I hold this and feel the tingling drop away and little pulses representing a step deeper into the state. At some point there is a shift where the feeling in my body below the neck diminishes either completely or to a very slight tingle in my toes. This becomes stable, the feeling is very neutral, peaceful and balanced and I can sit in this for a long time, watching sensations and noting from there. Sometimes it feels like I am deep under water, other times less so. Its a great jhana to be in&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What I have called 5th jhana is definitely new territory for me and may just be a substate of 4th or something else - so not making firm claims here. It has become available to me over the past couple of weeks since concentration got stronger after a couple of black blips I experienced (still waiting to see if it was SE) - see earlier post for description. Basically it occured by accident when I was trying to get into 4th Jhana and my mind just jumped through that and went forward and out into space from my head. It settled in a very open, light and stable state with a very expansive feel to it. This was great and I have settle in that state a few times now in preference to 4th jhana and seem to be able to watch and note sensations from there. It doesn&amp;#039;t feel as closed and &amp;#039;underwater&amp;#039; like 4th jhana.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So that&amp;#039;s my descriptions of what I understand to be jhana experiences - I am pretty new to all this stuff so not claiming any great authority on this - just experiences. So really appreciate your interest and opinions Daniel and your book/experiences made it possible for me to see how I could do practice in normal life and for that I am very grateful.&lt;br /&gt;Regards Rod</description> <pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:19:59 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4118634</guid> <dc:creator>Rod C</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-03-21T06:19:59Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Does this sound like an A&amp;P event...?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4118351</link> <description>yep&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;crazy energy stuff: basically always a&amp;amp;p&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;when you say jhana 1-5, got any more descriptions of those?</description> <pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:08:32 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4118351</guid> <dc:creator>Daniel M. Ingram</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-03-21T05:08:32Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>RE: Does this sound like an A&amp;P event...?</title> <link>http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4118162</link> <description>Thanks for the tip Dodge - I will try this except at this stage it is hard to tell which nana I am in because they always have been experienced with Shamata Jhana which seems to &amp;#039;hide&amp;#039; them. I did sit yesterday morning and had a few indications of progress through them - the most obvious was getting intense itchy spots on my face which I have been told are evidence either of 3rd Nana or 9th nana. Last night I sat and the whole sit was very dissonant - the energy was disharmonious and very erratic to the point where it was difficult to get into any stable state so after 1.5 hours, I stopped. This morning the session was really smooth and easy and I think there was a blip and a little wave of tingling directly after - the tingling was clear but the blip was so hard to confirm as it was so quick. So it seems there is movement going on. Thanks for you advice.</description> <pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:22:16 GMT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.dharmaoverground.org/c/message_boards/find_message?p_l_id=&amp;messageId=4118162</guid> <dc:creator>Rod C</dc:creator> <dc:date>2013-03-21T04:22:16Z</dc:date> </item> </channel> </rss> 