Hi Kent

What an interesting topic! I totally get where you’re coming from. Who was the renowned Tibetan master who reportedly said of the spiritual path: ‘Best not to begin, but once begun, best to finish.’ 

The short answer would be to stick to Concentration practices only, and avoid examining your vibratory sensations, etc, because that will lead to the A&P and all the rest of the interesting but somewhat difficult aspects of Vipassana. 

If you’re enjoying meditation and feel no need to ‘overcome’ or untangle anything, then good for you. For some of us, we’ve been driven since very young to find answers to questions we didn’t fully understand, and Vipassana seemed to deliver answers, hence the need to push on and explore it, despite the challenges that come up. 

As for how contented you are with your current life, allow me to paraphrase the traditional Buddhist response to that. Firstly, can you guarantee the current state of affairs will last forever, such as that your health will continue, your loved ones will always be there, etc? And if any of that changes, what will you go through? The path to liberation was originally conceived as a way to overcome these failings of our grasping, clinging mind, our source of suffering. So, I’m not having a go at you, just reiterating what the old teachers would point out, that your experience of happiness is based on some very shaky foundations.

As for the ringing in the ears, I’m glad to read someone else gets that too! It happens to me on retreat, and I used to feel some kind of fear about what it meant about my hearing, etc. Since then I’ve noticed it only happens when Mindfulness is very strong, so now I just take it as an indicator the practice is humming along, and try not to get too freaked out by how damn loud it is. 

So to sum up, stick to Concentration practices if you want to avoid the A&P and further developments along the Vipassana path. Having said that, our minds incline their own way, and so if you’re inclined to investigation, you’re going to find all that vibratory stuff interesting and will keep looking at it. In the end, Dark Night is about coming to terms with the reality we’ve kept in our blindspot all our lives. I don’t know about you, but I prefer reality over illusions any day, so I’m all about ‘shredding’ what happens and seeing what lies beyond. Maybe you will be too once you get a taste for it ;-)

All the best, Kent!

I’m one of the least experienced meditators here, so take my advice for what it is, but I would say that if you have crossed over into fear, the so called damage is already done. I don’t know if I should congratulate you or say that I’m sorry. You may find that the road from now on is a bit bumby. There are really cool things along the way, though, and much to be learned that will hopefully make your life better in the long run. My life actually improved a lot in many ways while I was still in dark night territory (I may very well return there again, but I’m not there now), but it didn’t always feel like it when I went through the challenges. I think it was worth it.

For me it was revolutionary to read Daniel Ingram’s book MCTB2 and recognize the pattern and learn about the challenges and pitfalls and accomplishments of the different nanas. Suddenly I had a road map. If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend that you do so.

Very best wishes on your journey!

I have never needed to ask this question for myself. Because it was already answered. I go forward because I need to. There is no alternative. What about you? Do you need to?Becoming really unbalanced and starting to meditate 16 hours a day without guidance starting tomorrow might be detrimental. Having your shit together to a certain degree probably helps. There will be hard phases, you can be pretty sure of that. You can also be pretty sure that no serious problems will occur. Those are rare. You shouldn't select your practices to focus on based on the criterion of safety because no one can tell you which practices are the safe ones. Of course, there is a very small risk that this endeavour goes horribly wrong. So what? Which endeavour doesn't come with its own risk? You might as well die in a car crash tomorrow and your house could burn down. Does this fact determine your big life decisions? In your experience, meditation only does good things to your life. You won't get more positive signs than that.
Best option: get a teacher. If something goes wrong, she may be able to spot it before you do. If it does, she can assess what to do.

How so? If what you like about practice is a kind of escapism, then yeah mediation probably will probably blow up at some point and won't be an escape anymore. If what you like about practice is that you are seeing how the mind works and how you cause yourself unnecessary suffering, then yeah meditation will probably blow up at some point and you'll get even more understanding of how the mind works and how you cause yourself unnecessary suffering. 

I really don't know anyone who hasn't gone through difficult times as a result of practice. But that's really where the growth occurs. That said, it doesn't have to be a total psychological break --- and having accesses to meditation friends and teachers really helps prevent that. But it could happen, it honestly could. But for most people the difficulties are worth it because we grow beyond our past limitations. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees

Now that said, age is another interesting thing. If this is something you are really drawn to doing, then I want to be honest and say that in the same way that the body takes longer to recover from exercise when you are older, the mind is slightly slower to change when you are older. So it takes a particular dedication to see things through the older we get. Conversely, the maturity and life experience that can be brought to practice can help make things go more quickly. So both are possibilities, but I have noticed that it can be a challenge for older meditators to really see thing through --- afterall, they've gone through life without all these troubles, so why stick with it. And yet, sometimes the shortness of life really motivate people to go for it. 

So no easy answers. It really boils down to why you are practicing. 


Hope this is helpful in some way.

Hello,

I joined to take part in this thread.   You describe a very happy life, which seems a bit different to what most people describe when they first take up meditation.  It seems like most people start because life isn't quite as they'd hoped, and they want to delve deeper in order to get some answers, or escape, or get to another 'level' beyond suffering. 

All behaviours have a motive.  You made quite a strong commitment to practice and I'm very curious what drove that decision. 

You mention a fear of Dark Night and psychological breakdown.  Having read a lot of the threads here on Dho, my impression is that those unhappy occurences happen to people who are not fully integrated psychologically before they start meditation.  My impression might be incorrect, but that's how I see it.  It's very common to have painful and traumatic memories locked away and have no idea of their existence until meditation unlocks the door. 

Keen to hear your reply.

Thanks so much for all the replies! There is so much here to go through. Some super quick replies:

Paul: Thanks for sharing your experiences about the ear ringing. That is super helpful. If it's a sign I'm doing things well, that's great news. In fact, everything in Paul's reply is super helpful and I am working on processing all of it.

Shargrol brings up my age. Thanks man! I don't think of myself as being old! (Need a "pretend angry but also rueful" emoticon here.) I take your point. I feel like I'm much less "set in my ways" than most people my age ... so I'm hopeful.

Linda: I have read large chunks of MCTB2. I think I'm barely on the charts at this time. I have had strong experiences that seem very "Mind & Body" ... and in fact as I re-read that section, it's obvious that I'm doing Mind & Body stuff every time I sit these days. The "Cause & Effect" stuff, though, is pretty rudimentary in me right now. So I'm pretty sure Fear is a ways off in the future. But obviously self-diagnosis is hard!

Rhubarb asks if I need to go forward. And ... I don't know for sure but I suspect so. I kind of think by asking this question on this particular forum, I'm kind of inviting the answer "Hell YES you need to go forward." If I wanted another answer, I'd likely have asked somewhere else.  

Right on Track asks why I am so committed to practice. My first answer is what I've learned to say about a lot of things about myself: I don't know! A second answer is, I have free time and also a somewhat obsessive personality ... and also meditation is amazingly cool. I taught myself Spanish over a few years, and now I'm teaching myself meditation, and maybe this is a thing that I continue to do for the rest of my life, or maybe it gets replaced? Meditation definitely feels like a permanent thing that will be with me for the rest of my life, and I have a hard time imagining wanting to live without it ... but who knows? A third answer is: I have always been interested in religion, I did a freaking Ph.D. in Christian theology & ethics many years ago, and Buddhism was always interesting to me as well as a theoretical thing when I was in my 20s, but at that time it seemed very alien and not something that was realistic for me to even consider as a part of my own life.

Shargrol asks what is good about practice. I have had some of the typical benefits of practice: it's made me more patient, more aware, a better husband, a better friend, a nicer person to be around. I have a more accurate sense of what sort of a creature I am. When someone asks "Why did you do that unpleasant thing?" I can more honestly and realistically reflect on the question, and often the answer is not "I had a good reason you jerk!" but rather "I honestly and truly don't know" or "I was not practicing good awareness and I let my emotions run away with me" -- and in either case "I truly wish I hadn't done that and I'm sorry." I notice the world more, and find joy in it, and dwell less often in my own endless circle of boring thoughts. Things like that.

Rhubarb says: "You can also be pretty sure that no serious problems will occur." Right on Track concurs: "my impression is that those unhappy occurences happen to people who are not fully integrated psychologically before they start meditation." Well: this is what I very much want to be true! But Daniel Ingram, in various interviews, seems to say it's not true. I listened to his talk with Willoughby Britton, where the interviewers more or less said "Isn't it true that only people who bring a messed-up perspective to meditation will experience these problems?" and Willoughby said "No, it's worse than that, and here's why ..." and then Daniel said "No, it's even worse than Willoughby said, and here's why...." Basically, they both said that even people who seem pretty ordinary and with it, professional people with successful lives, can have serious problems that put their careers and relationships at risk. In another podcast, someone asks Daniel if he thinks everyone should meditate and he says, basically, hell no, because there are real risks involved. He compares it to the use of drugs in an emergency medicine context. He says (paraphrasing): "we tell patients, 'here are the ways this medicine can help you, and here are the things it can do that are bad and dangerous,' and that's why we have informed consent." (The same interviewer, earlier in the podcast, said something positive about use of hardcore psychedelic drugs, and Daniel gave basically the same answer.) Shargrol seems to agree with Willoughby & Daniel: every meditator is taking a serious risk and there are no guarantees. (Do I have that right?)

This is where the rubber hits the road. I am honestly not scared (not too scared) of going through some suffering periods, bad experiences, mental or emotional or physical pain along the way. What I'm scared of is blowing up my life: doing something that does permanent damage.

I'm hoping someone can tell me something like the following: "It is vanishingly unlikely that the insights or the painful stages of the path will cause you to toss aside your deepest commitments." But I feel like awakening is like a Forrest Gump style box of chocolates and there's no way to know what will happen.

Thanks again to all of you!

And please, anybody else with anything to share, no matter how minimal, I would be very grateful for your thoughts.

Hi, Kent, I think chapter 35 of MCTB2 has some stuff to say that seems to me relevant to what you're dealing with. You said you've read big chunks of it, so this may already be familiar to you. I'm thinking specifically of passages like



There's more further down in the chapter that may be of use to you. I hope so. I wish you well on your journey.

Tom

Daniel Ingram wrote (my emphasis in bold):


"Well, these debates go on and on and on.

A few simple points:

I still very much recommend my criteria as helpfully posted above. They have merit and value, and achieving those really shifts reality to something much better, having myself tried the before and after, I can tell you that from my point of view there is nothing more important that I achieved and attained than the total elimination of all sense of doer, watcher, controller, center point, observer, etc. True and total elimination of duality was a massive step up from the near total elimination of it: no comparison at all. It is hard to imagine that anyone else wouldn't value it the same way I do, but then tastes differ.

There are many axes of development: insight, concentration (and it has many axes within it), morality (an endless festival of axes to develop, including emotional and psychological health). Insight stands alone in that it is all basically towards one goal, and that goal does transform the relationship to all of the rest of it in ways that provide global improvement at the core sensate and paradigmatic levels of intrinsic processing. The rest are all also important, but nothing does what that does.

I really appreciate the chapter in Chögyam Trungpa's Journey Without Goal about the Five Buddha Families. This is a video of that chapter by the crazy old dead perverted but helpful genius himself: The Five Buddha Families

His embracing of the wide range of experience in all its human glory is so valuable, and that helped empower me to really take on everything that was going on in my experience. I still must warn against the limited emotional range models and what they can do to practice: beware becoming like those who follow those: so many complexities occur.

Is my emotional life transformed by my insights? Vastly transformed, no question.

Do I still manifest all the standard emotions: definitely, and some even more strongly than I did before.

Is there vastly less suffering in them as a result of their happening totally on their own just like qualities of space? Absolutely.

Is this anything like the disconnect feared by a poster above? Not in the least: there is no disconnection, because there is no longer any imagined thing to be disconnected.

The field lights up itself totally, without division, without restraint, without any barrier or gap, so disconnection is impossible. Does really honestly feeling what is going on help with emotional transformation more than models that imply that we shouldn't feel what we are feeling? I definitely think so.

Would I trade this for anything? Maybe world peace, but I would have to think about it. Until then, this totally rocks, and missing out on it would be barking crazy from my point of view.

Best wishes, and practice well,"