Hi Daniel!
Thanks so much for taking an interest in my post. I realized after I wrote it that the tone was a bit cold, and not at all what I wished to project. For example, I did not acknowledge the fact that this is a working hypothesis and instead sounded rather declamatory. And for some odd reason I took you as the focus of my disagreement, when in fact what we are discussing is the standard Mahasi doctrine. Perhaps I was carried away by the refreshing directness I find in the tone of these boards. At any rate, I take full responsibility, and apologize to any who might have been offended.
Now to your points:
So you are saying that my early Fruitions, including the time I attained stream entry the first time, when the whole darn thing completely vanished and reappeared, were not Fruition, but actually Nirodha Samapatti, me, with jack squat for jhanic abilities at that time, basically no experience with anything like stable formless realms, happened onto that, and managed to attain to Nirodha Samapatti multiple times in the weeks that followed while doing things like walking and eating? Really? I hardly think so.
You might be underestimating your own abilities, or overestimating how hard all this business is supposed to be. To defend my first point, let me say that all my meditation life I have experienced things that were rare for most yogis, or at least rarely recognized: jhana was (relatively) easy for me, minor siddhis arising in sankhar upekkha ñana (do you guys have an abbreviation for this? I use SUN). Also, my SUN would produce spontaneous jhanas, cycle around the seven factor, often an oceanic experience at times etc. etc. When I would ask my teacher why I never heard of others describing any of this, and everyone always seemed to progress so slowly and painfully, I was told, “you have good paramis.” Now I am not sure if I accept this model. I question it the same way I question karma and rebirth, but it is provisionally acceptable to me. Now I can see very plainly from your history that you have greater ability than I. So now I offer you the same explanation. If my “paramis” are “above average” then what must yours be? So yes, what you describe could be possible. Some people make progress in the manner that is both “fast and easy.” Lucky you!
Now my second point, as to the ease or non-ease of these things was made to me by one my western teachers, David L. (again, I am not sure he would want his name on the internet). He spent several years as a monk in the late sixties and early seventies at the Mahasi monastery in Kanduboda, in Delgoda, Sri Lanka, under the direction of Somatiphala Mahathera (now deceased). He is actually one of the few westerners that have received the teacher training, which he passed on to me. One of the things he observed was that if you can get to students before they pick up a lot of erroneous information about how hard the progress of insight is supposed to be, they will usually progress fairly quickly and easily if the teacher knows his or her stuff and the student gets daily face to face interviews. Lamentably, it is rare for either condition to be met these days. He believes that at teacher cannot properly care for more than ten students at one time on a retreat, not if you want them to make rapid progress and watch over them with vigilance. My point here is only that the process need not necessarily be difficult, or protracted, and he has the same model you have for phala. Hence my claim that we might be overestimating the difficulty involved.
Another thing I would add to this train of thought is that most yogis, as far as I can tell actually do go through the formless jhanas in SUN, although not in a reproducible or organized manner. The resulting state of “phala” or possibly nirodha that we are assessing, is usually of short duration and highly unstable in most students beginning phala training. This is consistent with the state being nirodha samapati, otherwise, quite possibly it would not be so hard to reproduce.
Now let me ask you if you have fully factored in the following possibilities, besides the issue of parami:
§ There are seven grades of sotapans. Not all maga-phala experiences are equal, apparently.
§ What you get is what you get. If you have two states, and they are subjectively identical, and the only difference is the after effect, why would you say they were different if you have no difference is the actual experience? Perhaps we can look to other factors to explain the difference in after effects, such as length of attainment, power of belief, even depth of the jhana etc.?
§ If these two states are what you say they are, then what is it that is present in terms of mind or mental factors in phala that is absent in nirodha? In otherwords, how do you account for the difference? Given the difference, would the added extra not be experientially verifiable in phala?
§ There is also the samadhi of unconsciousness to be considered. I question if even nirodha is cessation of consciousness, in the most transcendent sense of the word consciousness. Neither the scriptures nor commentaries say this. Cessation of perception and feeling could be just what it says, and not cessation of consciousness. If you remember the Visuddhi Magga image of placing a jewel in a box. If the jewel is consciousness, then it continues to exist without aggregates of mind. If there is true and complete cessation of consciousness then what we have could simply the realm of the unconscious gods.
§ Lastly, have we accounted for the power of faith + concentration? The power of the mind steeped with samadhi and energy is great. It can produce all sorts of experiences it decides it believes in. This includes in my opinion putting itself out completely. I am not convinced of any theoretical limit to the power of the human consciousness.
Now my own experience has been similar to yours (although not I am sure in quantities of repetition of these experiences) in that I have noticed two types of “going out.” One is what I have come to call hyper-sleep. It is the standard phala experience that is so close to deep sleep. Upon review, there is something very subtle present in that state, in the same way there is something present in deep sleep, only more subtle still. It is very hard to describe. I asked U Silananda about this many years ago: “Bhante, if as the Visuddhi Magga claims, bare insight workers attain to phala with first jhana, why are most yogis unaware of the mental factors of first jhana present?” His response to me was “Perhaps because they are not habituated to it. Perhaps they lack the development of pañña.” This is my paraphrase of an old memory. Now this version of phala, I don’t see it coming at all. It us only upon emergence that I say: “Oh, everything disappeared.” This state does leave behind it a condition of coolness and tranquility, but not nearly as powerful as the second one. Now this second one that I am calling nirodha S. is really zero, like being under a general anaethetic, but without the torpidity going in or coming out, and also this one, you do kind of see something coming. When it first came along, I was mistaking it for a mini-magga-phala, a category I invented to explain the intense paccavekana ñana (much more so than regular phala) but not as intense as my previous magga-phala. I eventually realized this could not be so, because I was having to many of them. If they had been magga-phala I would be an arhant several time over! This is clearly not the case. But I did not have the idea in my head that this might be nirodha, so I did simply started questioning the entire model of either magga-phala or phala, and one magga-phala “moment” as defined by Mahasi equals one stage of the path. There is nothing to my knowledge in the scriptures that supports any this. I suspect the entire condition is more flexible and the boundaries are not as defined as the scholastic fathers of the commentarial tradition would have us believe. I find myself becoming increasingly critical of this stream of thought in the Dhamma. It has imposed a lot of concepts onto the basic practice that are not organic to it.
I could of course be dead-wrong about all this. I admit it. And in a certain sense it does not matter. This model is my way of accounting for the spectrum of supermundane voidness phenomena that I have experienced. We continue developing until we are done. Yes? So who cares. The value of these things as you so rightly asked is only the influence that they have upon the mind’s development, purification and subtlety. The ashtanga yogis also have a model of nirodha and they claim that its value is to purify/cook out the samskaras, or latent tendencies within the mind. If they are correct, then it is this only the immersion in voidness that matters for destroying the unwholesome roots in the mind. All the rest of it is scaffolding.
My motives you ask: to explore and understand reality, to grow and develop in any and all ways that this exploration tells me are possible or necessary. I have had since my youth a very multi-dimensional model of awakening.
Daniel, thank you for being patient with my long windedness. In fact it is a pleasure to be able to share these reflections with a group of people who can actually understand what I mean. My path in life and practice has been a fairly isolate one.
With metta to all,
Daniel