Hello to you all, this is my first post after lurking here for years (since 2014, when a fellow meditator asked me if I knew about the progress of insight at the end of a retreat, leading to MCTB and the Dho). A huge thanks to Daniel and to quite a few members of this forum for challenging my opinions and opening my understanding...

I have been practicing in the Goenka tradition for the last ten years (with at least a retreat a year and a couple of longer ones) and... I've been hesitating for a long while to share my views here, as it is obvious that this tradition has its shortcomings which have been thoroughly documented in various threads, and that some moderators are quite blunt about dismissing it. Well, here we are. I chose to keep on with the technique even though I was aware of the tremendous efficiency of the noting practice, through MCTB and testimonies on this forum.
It was a tough choice, based partly on the desire to attend longer retreats (for which you need to dedicate yourself exclusively to Goenka's tradition), but also on the need to check for myself. True, Nikolaï (http://thehamiltonproject.blogspot.com/2010/11/going-for-stream-entry-on-goenka-10-day.html) gives a great account and advice for reaching cessation in the course of a 10 day retreat. My purpose here is more like... "what are the benefits when you don't"?
So I decided to pursue with this practice until no further progress would be made, as I had a sense that something precious was unfolding from retreat to retreat and that some understanding was developing. I was also curious to see if I would reach stream-entry on Goenka's instructions. It prompted me into analyzing more what I was doing while body scanning and looking into the connections between this kind of noticing of the body sensations and (my limited understanding of) the noting practice. I am still at it five years later...

As it is the only (or most convenient) retreat option for a number of meditators, I believe it would still be valuable to some here (those who are acquainted with this tradition or are curious about it) to try to make the most sense of what happens during these retreats and afterwards, and maybe question their understanding. And to me as well of course, to organize my thought in a coherent whole here... We'll see about that one!

This thread is mostly meant for people who are already acquainted with the technique, as I won't go into certain details. If you don't know anything about these retreats, better read an introduction elsewhere first (sorry, no link yet)...
You are also welcome to chime in and discuss the techniques. I won't venture here into a critique of the organization (which would deserve its own thread). I would love to have some experienced old students share their own understanding, and maybe question the dogma, fully understanding it is something thoroughly discouraged in this tradition (I fear for wrong reasons. I chose to use an alias because it is heard of people getting blacklisted from further retreats for diverse mysterious motives).
So bear with me... I will try to argue why it may be interesting to spend years and numerous retreats on this technique as I did (and still do, even though I can see many here asserting that it is plain stupid!). I see it is often presented as a powerful (and dangerous) introduction to meditation, which does not deserve further deepening after the infamous A&P has been reached... I will try to explain why I think otherwise.

So let's start... with anapana. Goenka places great emphasis on sila, bringing his own cultural background (some say with a trace of Jainism) on his interpretation of it. I won't discuss it right now as it is a big subject.
I noticed that Goenka practitioners tend to parrot him when they describe their meditation practice. I take it as one of the downsides of never verbalizing your experience. Please correct me if you see this trait in myself (I will use brackets when I do it on purpose)!

(... to be continued)
                                                                                                                                           [edited for corrections on 9/6/20, like other posts below]

Anapana

My first point is that "anapana" in this tradition is not a pure concentration technique. To reach optimum concentration, it is known from the experience of seasoned practitioners and teachers, that you should not be too hard on yourself, even though intensity is needed. Here, you arrive and on Day 1, you sit for ten plus hours intending to focus "on the small area below the nostrils above the upper lip" (I call it "the zone". Ok, that's for old students, the area is a little bit larger for beginners -oups, new students, not necessarily beginners-, including the whole of the nostrils). Still, focusing on a relatively small part of the body generates some tension (until one rests effortlessly on the said area, which in my experience takes years of practice), and sitting for that long creates A LOT of physical tension. This is clearly not ideal to enter jhana territory, but it is quite a good way to start understanding how your mind-body reacts under stress. After a couple of days of doing this, you have thoroughly reduced the mental chatter and often encountered your first altered states of consciousness, but in the process you have created a good deal of physical stress that often went unnoticed (should I say subconscious) as you strove to only take into account what was happening on this small area (usually devising complex strategies to achieve this, from subtle breath control to active dissociation). For me, as I had my issues with breath control (different practitioners face different issues!), my pattern was: observe the "zone", notice any tension there, notice the subtle control, let go of it; see a deeper layer of control where you thought there was none, let go of it etc...

Also, for beginners, there is usually a lot of pain until the mind has gotten quiet enough. I would not force myself into stillness, it will come later (physical stillness involves stability of the mind, so there is some fine tuning here). You should move when you really need to, aware of how your mind loses its balance in the process, and back to it. Goenka says so, but I suspect many people can't hear it.

I believe that we spend part of the retreat from day 4 onward dealing with these tensions (the ones we "created") until we have encountered them consciously, and they have "dissolved" through concentrated and equanimous scrutiny, allowing us to feel deeper layers of sensations (there is a lot in that little sentence to comment on, I will come back to it later. What is this "dissolving"? How does it work? What are these layers of sensations?).

I would try not to aim for anything (forget about jhana for that matter, though it is our nature to want to achieve lofty goals in little time), and perform the exercise to the best of my ability noticing any tension that is the fruit of my practice (there is much more to be said about the various kinds of tension). Goenka states that "anapana is a preparation for vipassana". This is because, by day 4, you are well aware that suffering is a defining characteristic of sitting still for extended periods, and most will have started to find some connection between the calming of the mind and that of the breath (maybe also seeing, at times, how thoughts unexpectedly pop up in their concentrated mind). Now it is time to start to explore the mysterious relationship between mind and sensations in the body...

(... to be continued)

"Vipassana"

Ok, so first I apologize for the fact that this tradition has claimed ownership on the term "vipassana" and has equated it with a meditation technique where you understand the three characteristics of experience in each bodily sensation you encounter while performing the infamous "body scan" in various ways. This is why I read “Living Dharma” by Jack Kornfield back then (going through the table of contents in a secondhand bookshop), as I did not like the easy dismissal of other traditions by Goenka... I will try to stick to the term "body scanning" when discussing this technique.

After spending three and a half days focusing on the "zone", you are taught (or reminded, from your second retreat on) how to move your attention around your body in a, at first slow and ordered way, during a gruesome two hours session where Goenka's art in slow burn instructions reaches its apex. Noting the characteristic of impermanence is focused on as the main tool to cultivate dispassion. Practicing this way, you will deepen your understanding of equanimity, and you will cultivate your will (to place your awareness on the desired object, whatever it is). You may also experience intense pain or bliss...

I believe that whole body awareness is the natural follow-up to a more circumscribed concentration when time is ripe. Here, ripe or not, you have to switch to the body scan wherever you were on the concentration spectrum after 3 and a half days of concentration (1/3 of the retreat time, on longer retreats as well). Actually, as a beginner (as long as you use extra tension to help with concentration), the more concentrated you are on the "zone", the more difficult it will be, at first, to move your attention through the different body parts (and movement will tend to break your hard-acquired concentration). First, you "force" it on the "zone", then you "force" it around the body... A lot of forcing, thus tension involved where there should hardly be any in a perfect world (concentration being a kind of tension)... A tension overload might bring full dissociation that will launch you unprepared into an A&P, with all the unfortunate consequences that have been well documented here and elsewhere. That's my take on it as I did not experience an intense "dark night" myself, I guess because I let concentration build up (more) naturally after learning the hard way on my first retreat. I believe I was then mostly prepared for what has come so far (never say never!).
The "rationale" in this tradition is that there is no “you” to create any tension (or anything for that matter), that through introspection you are just revealing what is. What is constituting "you", actually. It makes sense, and working with tensions is used in many other traditions as a tool to contrast with the state of open awareness and learn from this contrast (that's an important aspect of initiations, and I tend to think that these retreats have an initiatic feel to them, although a very non-shamanic one, as the exploration of different realms is not contextualized and dismissed as "just experience").

Also, when I say "around the body", what I really mean is "around how you picture your body in your mind": never forget that all this happens in your mind. If it is not a visualization (Goenka repeats "no visualization" day in, day out), it is a thorough "feelization"!
I would posit that, if we consider the framework of the five aggregates (another traditional and interesting way to frame or make sense of our experience), there is nothing such as "bare contact". None of the aggregates exists by itself, they are all interdependent. "Rupa" is the object side of the experience, which is only knowable through "nama" and all the different parts of "nama" are a condition for it. If one truly disappears, the others cannot be. Consciousness is experience, "vedana" involves recognition, categorization, "sañña" needs some kind of volition and "sankhara" (the Beast in this tradition) exists inside viñana... They only exist together. So there is no "bare contact" in the absence of "sankhara" or any other aggregate. The extinction of one of the aggregates brings the extinction of the whole of "nama rupa". Cessation... That's paticcasamuppada one o one. I spent quite a while trying to make sense of the order of presentation of the aggregates until I realized this. This idea reflects the fact that perception is projective (see also enaction in phenomenology).

The body scan performed year after year will generate an ever changing felt map of the body (with a general tendency toward spaciousness as a baseline), where your consciousness will have its landmarks... well, a map delineating the moving boundaries of your consciousness really, with its luminosity fields and its blind spots, an emptiness (first a changing substance) within which you will find emotions and higher symbolic content. The quality of the scan will tell you a lot about the quality of your mind. Not so much about the actuality of your anatomy (that's my take on it)...
It will also deepen your understanding of the process of perception. I said in the last paragraph that perception is a projection based on our previous representation of the world that transforms it through new input. The awareness also brings all the conscious and subconscious qualities of the mind in the perception of this moment, thus giving it a color which taints the object. Actually, a big development in my practice was when I started noticing the qualities of the awareness that performs the scanning. From then on, I decided to stick with the technique, and never got bored again.

(... to be continued)

It is essential to always keep in mind that the vipassana aspect of the body scan is only present if your are aware of at least one of the three characteristics, impermanence being the tradition's choice (well, we could argue on the differences with "noting it"). If not, it remains a good concentration technique, once you got used to moving your attention (more movement at first entails more restlessness, thus tension, in an interesting feedback loop), easing on the tension that you might have created when focusing on the "zone".

One of the most common critique is that the practice only deals with the body sensations, leaving aside the mind and emotions. While it is true that you can sometimes get absorbed in full body awareness (or any other object) to the point of not recognizing emotion and not producing discursive thought (full body absorption), you are still only observing the content of your mind in this moment and my experience is that felt sensations sometimes reflect some content of the mind that eludes conscious awareness, providing a valuable window on the subconscious.
One of the most obvious manifestations of this is how our being deals with exaltation. Let's say you reach a stage for the first time where your whole body is bright bliss and quick easy vibrations. Even if you were told a thousand times not to feel elated, you will (this is our nature), and it will unbalance your mind, creating restlessness that will generate tensions (after a little while depending on the density of this layer of your mind. This is a fascinating area to explore, the latency between cause and effect, the time necessary for karma to ripen... my experience is that strong concentration greatly speeds up the process, allowing you to discover unsuspected chains of causality). These tensions will manifest as "uneasy" sensations somewhere in your body, bringing you down from this elated state. So, next time you reach this same kind of experience, you will have learnt your lesson and remember "seriously, I don't get elated this time". Well, the recurring appearance of difficult sensations will help you understand that some subconscious part of your mind did not get it yet.

This state (of perceiving subtle vibrations) will get more and more refined, more and more balanced with time and practice, but the outcome (each time it reaches its apex, a state that we never experienced before) will generally be restlessness which will trigger different reactions which will lead to solidified ("gross") sensations. So you will run repeatedly in a state you might interpret as "bangha ñana" (knowledge of dissolution). But if you try to locate your experience on the insight maps (dissolution, then a good existential angst, serious derailing, equanimity and path), you might be in for a disappointment (if it is not the time for your big ride, as I believe there are many shades of dissolution before the real deal). Here, scripting comes in the picture. Let's go back a bit: the main instructions are "just observe the reality as it is" and "the practice is to be aware and equanimous". But, after a few days of body scan at increasing speed, Goenka informs you "cautiously" about the stages you might meet in your practice: "now or in the future, you might encounter a free flow of subtle vibrations running through your entire body", followed by "do not crave for it" then "a stage where there is no solidity anywhere, inside, outside, this is bangha!", along with "beware of not clinging to these stages, they are dangerous for you might crave them etc." Well, it is natural that a student will wonder if he has reached this or that stage (free flow, bhanga), but he might develop unhealthy curiosity about it and equate too quickly his experience with that insight stage (I believe that agitating the mind -moving quickly from an object to another- will lead to A&P'ish experiences... and to restlessness, and that can lead to self delusion in the long term. It is true of any set of beliefs that has to do with spiritual development).
To be fair, Goenka always asks us (even mature practitioners) to often come back during a single session to a practice where we move "part by part, slowly and attentively", looking for blind spots or solid sensations. I believe it is to keep us balanced and learn plasticity and resilience (and because coming down in speed will help us maintain balance in practice... But maybe "losing it" is a necessary stage on the path to cessation... The scan maintains a subtle duality between subject and object when more letting go might be needed. For this particular outcome, at least. Even when we stop the scan after bangha, it is not final, and we should come back to the surface of the body regularly for further "purification".

Well, I guess it is time to say something about the stages of insight. I suspect that noting practice speeds up the mind (Daniel is a good example!), rushing the practitioner through the stages of insight with a certain lack of stability that makes insight "shallow" until full stability is achieved (4th path?). Concentration, as practiced here (with a narrow one-pointedness) slows the mind down, and the body scan, alternating a quick flow of attention with a slower "part by part" practice, prevents you from going too easily on overdrive and "lose" it, making it a long road for insight experiences.
But, by deepening your understanding of equanimity, you make this... frame of mind ("a balanced and equanimous mind") the basis on which the different insights will proceed, which seems to make sense. That's my experience anyway, no quick A&P for me. For those who hit the A&P early on, well, the tradition will be of no help to you, so... better read about the stages of insight! (Goenka says that you might run into “gross, solidified sensations” after dissolution (itself a "very high stage indeed"), but seems to keep the meaning of “adinava” or fear etc. as the fear of getting lured into the pleasures of the very subtle sensations of dissolution, which you conquer by being disgusted by it and then desire liberation).

Anyway, in order to alter your experience on purpose, your concentration needs to be strong enough. High states of concentration bend perceptions, allowing you to act on something which is usually the field of deep subconscious influence.

One of the problems with this method is that you are totally helpless when you get lost in content (when you have thoughts powerful enough to interrupt or derail your scan). Here we need a technique to help us return to our concentration. Noting seems to be really valuable when this occurs.

(... to be continued)

A note on cessation

I need to say that, even though I've had a serious practice and stuck to the instructions, I did not have a taste of nibbana yet. Well, the teachers do not consider it a likely outcome even in the long run. Goenka's description does not seem to fit perfectly with a cessation (which is why you'll likely be dismissed if you go to the assistant teacher with a cessation report). He says something like "After you've explored the whole field of vedana (and let go of it), you will reach a stage beyond mind and matter, where there is still consciousness with nibbana as its object". And also that "Nibbana is fourth jhana with awareness of impermanence". So it seems that it is not exactly "no consciousness"... More like a non-dual absorption? This has been bugging me since I heard of the Mahasi type of cessation... is it possible to have serious progress in insight without coming through this non-experience?
As I see it, noting speeds up the natural development of the mind and its outcome is the bleep. Scanning is intended to accelerate the mind in a "reasonable" way, alternating between fast and slow processing, and does not get the mind to a sufficient momentum to produce the bleep, the goal being the result of a process of endless purification, which will lead to "the end of suffering".
Does it mean this technique produces no insight? Experience is linked to insight in a complex way... in that some insights produce certain experiences, but any experience has numerous causes (apart from insight), and no experience is bound to produce insight, there has to be a movement of the mind towards it...

So, apart from that, what kind of benefits do I experience in the long term?

I believe that proficiency in attending to the felt body image in daily life is a valuable tool to monitor your emotional state and not get lost in content. It is a good anchor for concentration.
In my experience, the perception of the body as open, as a fluid field of experience, conveys the feeling of being an open void through which the winds of karma blow freely, in the best times without solidifying into suffering (so the "end of suffering" is possible in the here and now, if not forever...). It is a fruit of concentration, but goes quite a long way in transforming our worldview and reducing suffering. It is also a good point from which to practice metta (I like Analayo's take on metta: to radiate the different qualities of the brahmaviharas, the fruits of your practice, in all directions, though I can see why Goenka makes use of verbalization for this particular "technique", as he wants to provide a balm for the participants at the end of an intense retreat).

We need to make use of a set of beliefs (or a "frame of reference") to make sense of any experience. I like to use, sometimes, the idea of our awareness navigating (or being thrown around) various layers of consciousness (or realms of existence, 31 of them in the buddhist framework). With the scanning, we learn to move our awareness horizontally on one plane, but we may notice that our perception of the sensation varies, that the "distance" between our awareness and the sensation changes, increasing as we maintain equanimity, decreasing as we react with aversion. With the distance comes fluidity, then dissolution, and with mastery we achieve vertical plasticity of the awareness, meaning we can change layers effortlessly, thus accessing further layers, well the whole range of human experience, really, from the lowest hell realm to the highest brahma realm where the experience is so subtle, so subtle and the body is long gone. Each layer has its backlog of knots which will prevent us from accessing the next one. So, it is a very long, but rewarding process of "purifying" all these layers until a hypothetical final liberation. It is a path of concentration with insight as a tool to jump to the next realm. "Getting the joke" in Kenneth Folk terms, will have you make a sidestep from the wheel of existence into cessation, and get a more or less serious understanding into the nature of reality, but you will still need to get back to experience for change to take place (karmic change, purification of the mind?). I think I remember from his three talks with Michael Taft (best podcast so far, by the way) that he was advocating coming back to the physical sensations, to which I thought: "Ok, all 4th paths to Goenka retreats!". Hum... I would venture that the nature of dissociation from experience is not the same whether you work with body sensations or with mental concepts. I think that's what Goenkaji is pointing to when he demands that we stay with body sensations. Not so good for quick understanding, but useful for karmic purification. He believed in purification, and most meditators in this tradition do... For me, there is cleansing going on, but there is no end to it (in the sense that you will not get rid of your subconscious, and you will not function in life without some set of beliefs deeper than "you", that's why the concept of "paranibbana" was introduced, death will tear us apart...), so the end has to be a sidestep... which is no end, really.

I believe that Goenka had a very strong baseline concentration (he taught over 300 ten days retreats before 1990, to give you a faint idea of his sitting history), which explains why his vision of the path was highly tainted with concentration, and why his students value retreats so much, to the extent of maybe missing insight. It also makes the Goenka centers these very special places where one can achieve such concentration that will lead to progress. Quite a lot to let go of, really...

Well, I only scratched the surface of the practice and it is already a long post. I will sit on this until more development emerge from the deep...

Metta to you all, friends in dhamma

Dear SS, you’ve done an outstanding job of describing the technique and I’ve learnt some things from the telling of your more advanced practice in that tradition than I ever managed to achieve. My response will be short as I don’t have much time, plus on a tablet, this text window doesn’t scroll so I’m limited to only a dozen lines or so before I lose control of editing. 

Very briefly, I know, and everyone I’ve asked knows, of not a single case of someone who attained Stream Entry or higher paths in that tradition, and as I’ve stated before, frankly I’d say if anyone does actually fit the bill, that they probably augmented their practice with other stuff. Fact is, the G method doesn’t allow observation of all 6 sense spheres, which is (AFAIK) essential to develop total Equanimity to all formations, and thereby set up the conditions for path knowledge to occur. The Mahasi method happens to do this, hence why that method has produced countless SEs just among the people I know, let alone more widely. Second, I can think of not a single justification for holding back on attaining path & fruition as this is where the real ‘fun’ (or work) begins (nor A&P for that matter). So the belief that one should develop one’s practice over a longer time for greater benefits than ‘rushing’ to SE via Mahasi, makes zero sense to me. The Pali Canon has numerous tales of people who approached the Buddha for teachings when it was not convenient and he turned them away. They insisted with the claim they know not how long they will live, and struck by this pointed plea, he relented. As if to prove the point, said people always end up dying right after attaining liberation upon hearing his words. Anyway, point being, even the Buddha would agree that one should attain liberation as quickly as possible, as one knows not how long one has. And any work yet to be done for someone who rushed through can be done better after that stage. 

I appreciate you starting this topic, and I want to say this with absolute metta and compassion and not at all in a sectarian way, I hope you branch out and bring your apparently very strong foundational skills to a broader noting method, and thereby attain liberation as soon as possible. The world needs more considerate and compassionate meditators such as you, up there teaching and disseminating the good stuff. Thanks again, and metta to you!

Paul, if you click on ”source” you can scroll on your tablet. At least I can, on my ipad.

...

I appreciate this thread very much. Great posts! Thankyou, Smiling Stone, for starting this topic and presenting it so thoroughly!

I have been on a lot of goenka retreats, sitting and serving. I obtained stream entry after the 3rd retreat. Goenka's advice of "continuity of practice is the secret of success" being the key for me. I had no idea what happened at the time and it didn't really matter much. I know of several others who obtained stream entry. I suspect there is a considerable percentage more but it is not talked about. Stream entry isn't even mentioned in the 10 day course. Not until the satipatthana retreat which would have to be at least the 4th retreat.
Unless you are parting hairs, the technique is the same as mahasi. At least the initial mahasi instructions. Put your attention on your meditation object i.e. the abdomen. When something grabs your attention, come back to the abdomen. There are a lot of similarities. The differences are irrelevant in the big picture. Mahasi might have a larger % but I suspect it is related to the quality of retreatant. If you hop on a plane and go to Nepal for 60 days, you are more serious and, likely, more experienced than your average goenka retreatant. That said, goenka is doing volume. Even with all of the goenka shortcomings, the cumulative effect on the world will be very positive.
One sense door works. It works with fire kasina. It works with body scanning. I can vouch for both. I have heard reports of people using the ringing of the ears or smell via incense to do vipassana as well. I feel like I can easily experience subtle impermanence in the visual or tactile sense doors better than most just because of the hours put in with kasina and body scan. However, it is not possible to just focus on one sense. Mental and auditory echos show up in the body and visa versa. Trying to focus on one sense door will definitely bring a lesson in not self.

That said, I like 6 sense doors as well. I seemed to stall after SE body scanning. Body scanning plus noting thoughts then eventually just noting led to further progress for me. I am grateful for having all of the tools. Not that I am saying multiple are better than one.

The important part is getting SE. After that, progress will be inevitable and intuitive. Do that in whatever way works! I agree with Paul on branching out if scanning has not worked after all of this time.

[quote=Very briefly, I know, and everyone I’ve asked knows, of not a single case of someone who attained Stream Entry or higher paths in that tradition, and as I’ve stated before, frankly I’d say if anyone does actually fit the bill, that they probably augmented their practice....
]

If you check the link in the OP to the blog I contributed to, that blogpost has a lot of posts added towards its end from a now anonymous yogi who has been only within the Goenka tradition and by their admission, attained to stream entry via the sweeping method applied without gaps on a ten day. 

Nikolai

https://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/pdf/5-personen/analayo/development-insight.pdf

i posted this comparison by Analyo in a new thread but thought it may also fit here.  Please excuse if thats not the case.

cheers
tom

Hey Paul,

Thank you for your very kind and articulate post.

Thanks for your concern about my progress. While I do not have the nagging sense of a desire for path (I was little bit obsessed for a while after reading MCTB, and thus feel quite comfortable where I am... I am fully aware that, by posting here, I will get this kind of answer ("switch to noting ASAP"), and I acknowledge it might be my subconscious (?) query... It is perfectly fine, but I am primarily looking for ways develop the understanding of the practice in this tradition, not to switch for another one, if we admit the two methods are really different in the end. These retreats will continue to flourish and attract more people, unless Daniel, Willoughby Britton and the likes make enough noise... which would be a really good thing, to my point of view, as it would force more people in the organization to recognize the downsides of the dogma... well, I am not sure anything would actually change but one can still hope... I don't think they foresaw the impact of the internet on the (lack of) ignorance of the retreatants (which is still not so obvious on retreat).

As for reaching Stream Entry asap, I have read quite a few threads here in the past five years, as well as the practice journals of Nikolai, Chris, Noah and others (Shargrol?... it was a while back) on awakenetwork.org (plus the Hamilton Project... I wanted to thank them all for sharing their practice and insights which such generosity). I have, I believe, a fair idea (not worth much, I admit!) of the path as they are laying it before me.
I really value their insights, and I try to emulate them by making my practice as open and inclusive as possible.

As for cessations, there is something about dissociation and the path that is questioning me (it is in the air, it seems), and that I am currently trying to articulate better. Let's try: To paraphrase Freud (a dangerous game, but this line seemed to make sense to me): "Repression does not always take place through repression, but also by the disjunction of the links of causality, which is a consequence of the drawback of the affect". It seems to me it is pretty much what we are doing when we train our equanimity: "do not react to this", aka "you are not this, this is not you". Is this dissociation skillful? In psychology, they draw the line between healthy and pathological dissociation. Healthy dissociation is the result of resolving your emotions through acknowledgment and acceptance, it is a natural movement of the mind when an experience becomes habitual. The affect linked to the experience then diminishes until it disappears. It will then be written in memory with neutral affect, or forgotten. Pathological dissociation takes place through trauma: you just obliterate what you cannot stand. Bringing back to the conscious mind the body sensations through awareness, the body scan makes conscious (and first full of affect) what was till then unconscious. The practice then tends to make one familiar with all kind of sensations, thus slowly freeing them from their emotional content. When the affective load is modified, perception changes, lightens, lessens until disappearance...the sensation has been resolved (natural dissociation could take place and undo the repression that was there before)... if and only if there was no trace in practice of pathological dissociation.
Cessation, being the culmination (or perfection) of equanimity towards all formations, is total dissociation from the six senses. I think that progress on the path may hide unresolved issues. Whatever method we use, we should be careful about how we are reaching balance, so we don't bury (too much) stuff, and we don't create more than what we let go of. Also, while cessations demonstrate a capacity to touch perfect equanimity from time to time, working on baseline equanimity (meaning when some sort of concentration is involved) makes most sense to me. (Sorry for the rambling... am I trying to rationalize my fidelity to the scanning?)

PS: As the initials of Smiling Stone are loaded with historical horror, I would rather you all call me Stone, Smile, S. or whatnot... Your go !

All the best
Metta
Smiling Stone

Hi Linda,
Thanks for your encouragements, I enjoy your practice log, your healthy curiosity and your general presence on this forum.

With Metta
Stone

Hello Jason,
Thank you for your testimonial and your advice (I would not say that scanning has "not worked" after all this time, though).
I find the discrepancies between your post and that of Paul quite interesting. I hope more people will chime in.
I see you give valuable advice to people going on these retreats. Keep up the good work!

Metta
Smile

Hello Nikolai,

I said it in the reply to Paul, but thank you again for being an inspiration and one of the reasons why I got hooked on this forum in the beginning.
Any more anecdotes about your contact with Goenkaji (I would love to hear more... though I understand these were your dark night years, maybe that's why you don't talk much about it) ?
Anonymous Yogi does not seem like the average practicioner to me (very inspirational as well!). Does the pce the year before SE mean she was already in contact with Actualism or that it was posted on an actualist forum? I would love to have her take now on all this, but I gather she might not talk/write ?

Metta
S.

Hey Tom,

Thank you, no hijacking, Analayo is my hero !
Actually, I thought you were sending this:
"The Ancient Roots of the UBa Khin Vipassanā Meditation" :
https://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/pdf/5-personen/analayo/ancientroots.pdf

and realize it is a different article that I have not read yet. Bravo !
I will read that shortly and with great interest as always
and put some links to other ressources of Hamburg Uni on one of your Analayo threads (three now, if I count well?)

With Metta
Smiling Stone

Your kind words made me smile. Thankyou!

As for cessations being dissociation, that’s not my experience at all. Sure, for a very brief moment no information is being projected into consciousness, but I don’t see any problem with that. In fact, the reboot of the consciousness resulting from it enables a far more vivid experience of life and helps a lot with building a baseline equanimity.

Best wishes for your wellbeing and practice.

Interesting. My first retreat was a Goenka retreat. After that I branched off towards noting, where I actually understood what the 3Cs were. But now, after almost a decade, I'm considering going back and giving Goenka another try, because I suspect that the whole-body scanning might do something good where noting fails, because in noting it seems to be rather random where your attention ends up.

I recall that something like this is actually Goenka's argument for why his technique leads to enlightenment ("get all them sankharas, not only some of them), whereas others don't: sankharas are everywhere in your body, so you need to observe the whole body.

So my own experience is that there are many things in the mind which maybe need to be clearly seen, but when I do noting, they're simply not visible and just fade into the background.
Anyone who has a lot of experience in both approaches and can comment on this argument of Goenka?

Sorry for commenting despite lacking experience, but I find it fascinating that sankharas in the body go unnoticed for people. It is probably due to having Tourette syndrome that I often find them all too obvious. That’s a mixed blessing, I guess. My brain doesn’t have that kind of spam filter. It’s a pain in the ass to be aware of all these tensions all the time, but I have come to find it helpful with regard to purification. The body does indeed harbor a seemingly endless amount of sankharas, and every layer that is peeled off is a relief.

I just want to point out how the statement on body scans making the affect conscious is both true and untrue. In theory, it definitely should work this way, but I've also encountered enough people that seem to be perfectly able to experience sensations and yet be blind to emotions, or urges, or thoughts. So I think it's possible that, for some people, they can connect with body sensations and never quite access suppressed/repressed emotions and thoughts.

It surprised me the first time I encountered it, someone being able to tell me phenominologically what they were experiencing in terms of sensations, but when I asked them if they noticed they were adverse/angry (which was obvious) they didn't connect to it. I also remember someone who could connect to was obviously doubting, uncertain, and always mapping/comparing their practice, but couldn't report their thoughts about it. In both of these cases, they were doing a combination of body awareness and noting ---- but were not noting whole  categories of mind objects (emotions and thoughts). 

This is why I think working with a teacher helps. We all have blind spots. In both of those cases, it was clear that they need to do dedicated noting of sensations for a period of their sits. Similarly the other person needed to do dedicated noting of "practice thoughts" during their sits. My sense is that body scanning was not going to be the answer for them. But who knows?

I think the biggest factor for Equanimity and SE is actually getting good at noticing urges (pre-emotions) and thoughts-as-thoughts, especially thoughts about practice. 

But that's worth what you paid for it!

Thanks for your input Shargrol !
Actually, I totally agree with what you say. I have met enough people high as kites on retreat, convinced that the technique would solve all their issues (not unlike the actualists who "do not experience emotions"), which was so obviously off the mark.

Also, I do not think it is a reasonable goal to hope we are going to unearth and solve all our blind spots (with any technique or therapy, for that matter - maybe more with the latter than with the former, though). It has a name in Daniel's models...

I guess my last post was not that skillful, I have to learn to interact on the forum (like, answering people without thinking too much about it and without saying stupid things or getting carried away)... I wanted to talk about the ways to develop equanimity, stressing that some are leading us in a dead end (using the term pathological dissociation, I would say that is what you are talking about). It is a risk if you focus on sensations discarding emotions and thoughts (a common feature of Goenka practicioners, I admit, as it is exactly what Goenka asks us to do: "do not give it any importance"...). I guess it would be helpful to translate vedana as "experience" instead of "sensation" (maybe Analayo talks about this somewhere, have to check)

To Linda, thanks for your feedback, I did not want to imply that cessations were bad or unskillful, but that maybe there was some issue with the equanimity leading to them
I should not have used the word "dissociation"... But I am at a loss for a better one!

I take your advice Shargrol, thanks (and it comes cheap enough!)
With Metta
Smiling Stone

Hi  Raving Rhubarb,

Thanks for your feedback, it is exactly the kind of topic I hope this thread will adress.
As to "get all them sankharas", goodluck, with any method (see also Shargrol's post to ponder why I say "sometimes")!

Metta
Smiling Stone

Hey again Linda,
The fact that you find your sankharas obvious does not imply that you have access to all of them. That would mean you have no subconscious whatsoever, no blind spots etc...
Sankharas are all types of volitional formations, not only reactions. In the dogma of this tradition, they "cristalize" as body sensations and this where you can deal with them, with awareness and equanimity. When you have dealt with them all, after a short honeymoon period where you might feel you have gotten somewhere, you are granted access to a new, "deeper" layer of sensations... an opportunity to deal with a few more sankharas. I do not think it is very healthy to believe we are going to get rid of all of them. That's parinibbana -did I say that somewhere already ?-... And I would not be too quick to equate bodily sensations with sankharas...

All the best with your practice
Wish you a fruitful retreat
Metta
Smiling Stone

Hi Smiling Stone,

Thank you for your post. It's interesting to hear the perspective of someone who has been in the tradition longer than I have. I discovered Goenka 6 years ago and have only been on three retreats so far. I also would say that my daily practice has been somewhat lackluster at a steady 1hr a day for maybe 300/365 days a year. That being said, on my last retreat in late 2016 I got what was definitely A&P and believe I progressed to EQ. I've been going through a difficult transition in my day to day life (got fired and am currently looking for a job for the past few months) and today just realized how important the practice is to the day to day quality of my life.

I've never been the best with sila or continuity of practice. I tend to give into my cravings for sensual pleasures, smoke marijuana/drink socially, lie in the job search to make my resume look better, and will miss a day of practice when I have a really good streak. But the frequency of it is becoming less and less and so is the actual to desire to part take in these behaviors. I use to do all of this pleasure seeking at a much higher volume than I do now, even when it wasn't a "stressful" period in my life. According to his yardstick of if the practice is benefitting my life, I am seing slow but consistent improvement.

I've realized that I tend to devolve into craving and aversion in difficult periods and have yet to see what a "diffuclt period" in my life looks like while maintaining practice. I've spent a number of hours today reading materials for old students and it has made me realize that there is no escaping dependent originiation. Every moment I succumb to craving or aversion, I create more suffering for myself. I tend to make excuses for my practice, ie I'm looking for a job so I can't afford to take 10 days to do a retreat or I can't do two hours of meditation because it will eat into my productivity (meanwhile I just sit around watching TV  :grin What today has made me realize is that this is just doubt and aversion talking.

Continuity of practice is the key to success, and the short periods of time where I have been able to maintain it post retreat have been the most peaceful and "in tune" periods of my life. Of course, I understand the whole point of this is to not be pleasure seeking, but maintaining continuity of practice allows me to not get "absorbed" in that pleasantness. I ate some leftovers today that yesterday I was thinking man this is good stuff. Today when I ate it, I didn't not cling to the pleasant sensations. It was just food with pleasant sensations. The difference between the two days? More concentration and commitment to dhamma. I've also been practicing metta more consistently and that has been huge as far as my day to day interactions with others goes.

All this to say that I haven't given the Goenka my 100% effort yet, and it has still been very beneficial for me and moved me along the path. I'd like to give this tradition a real go with 100% commitment and see where it lands me. I suspect it will do me well given the number of people on this forum who have gotten SE and also the benefits it has had in my life up to this point. It may not be the "most efficient" way to get SE, but I think it will get me there eventually. At worst, I will be generating a wealth of good karma for my future attempts at liberation.  It has still been the most valuable thing I have discovered in my life as far as reducing my day to day suffering and "finding the truth" is concerned. As long as it continues to do that, I will follow the tradition.

Metta,
Maher

P.S. - I tend to run into newcomers in this tradition more than others. Very few people tend to stick with it from waht I've seen. Perhaps this tradition was only meant to introduce them to dhamma. Regarding the discussion about feeling different cravings, emotions, thoughts, and sensations etc I can definetely tell when they arise separate of each other and am able to distinguish them. For example, an ithcing sensation arises on my nose and a craving to itch it arises which causes a thought of moving my arm to scratch the itch to arise. If I just observe this process and do not react, I believe I am eliminating some sankharas

Hello Maher,

There are a few things that come to me reading your post:

You feel guilty about breaking your sila. This is extremely common among Goenka practitioners as there is so much emphasis on it during retreat. While it is important (the sila), I am not sure it is very constructive to add guilt to it, especially as you do not seem to harm other people in an obvious way. What you are doing is good, identifying your weaknesses and doing your best to correct them. But your post is actually full of self depreciation, like you are exposing us how you are not good enough... good enough for what? I feel it might be good to question that tendency in you...

You also feel guilty about not practicing two hours a day... Well, meditation is a difficult business, and scanning is especially hard to maintain in daily life, hence the advice to do one retreat a year, which always seemed sound to me. I see on your other post that your last retreat is 2 and 1/2 years back, that's a long time, and it is quite an achievement that you could maintain a daily practice until now. One hour is already very good (I would do my best to sit everyday, it makes a difference). Goenka asks for two hours because it enables you to maintain the momemtum of practice between retreats. With one hour, it goes down, which means it gets harder, that's all. No guilt necessary here either. Certainly frequenting this forum is a good help, as are the shorter courses (1 day and 3 day courses are very useful to give a little boost to your meditation). It might be good for you to sit a course whenever convenient. The two hours will be much easier after one. And your understanding of the practice will deepen after each course

I wish you the best with your practice and with your life.
I hope you find something useful in what I said. I would recommend that you read the interviews of Analayo I posted in Tom's thread on Satipatthana. They were quite an inspiration for me.

with metta
smiling stone

Great thread, folks! Sorry to call you that acronym, Stone ;-) 

I don’t want to get into arguments, as this part is only my opinion based on what I’ve seen/heard. I will just say in response to the 2 or so posts about people getting SE in Goenka, that as I already said, I’d doubt it was done using Goenka only, regardless of how the individual’s story pans out. Fact is, some rare people get SE never having meditated, so it’s also possible some people get SE with a modicum of practice in any tradition. That doesn’t disprove my point that as a method it is not geared to getting the average punter over the SE line. Jason’s point re one sense door is enough is very interesting and I hadn’t looked at it like that so will carry that with me for a while and see how it fits. 

And Stone, I still see absolutely no justification for delaying SE. Post SE is hands-down better than pre SE. And so in true pragmatic Dhamma style, I’d say whatever gets a yogi over the line in the shortest possible timeframe is the path to be going with all one’s energy. Be careful of letting complicated psych theories get in the way of simply advancing one’s practice. Linda is spot on about cessations being positive experiences (or at least the immediate aftermath is). I’d even advance the simplistic notion that dissociation is more likely to be a feature of the thinking of an individual struggling with the 3 poisons of Desire, Hatred, and Delusion, thus coming back around to the importance of getting SE asap. 

Thanks Linda for the source tip on scrolling - it works! Now I can ramble on as much as I like. Haha. 

Hey Paul,

I appreciate your input, and value the fact that you have had a long term involvement in this tradition, which gives you a strong basis for your analysis... And I see that you were on a serious retreat frenzy in Burma, going really deep into review and innumerable fruitions last December (and also that you were a monk for a while!). I was very impressed by your exchange with Shargrol at the time, and I understand how you could loose interest for what comes before that. My post must look like hopeless kindergarten... And I would tend to bend on your side in this argument with Jason. I would love to learn more about your practice history, and at which point you felt stuck in the Goenka tradition...
Am I intellectualizing that much, really? That bit about dissociating and meditation has been on my mind for a while, I admit. I can also see how there has been an attempt to rationalize the fact that I did not attain cessation by questioning it! By the way, if an advanced Goenka practitioner has a better rationale than me sustaining this view, may he share it, we are interested (yes, the total eradication of "sankharas" is final liberation)...

I will try to be a bit more specific about why I started this thread. Of course I wanted to test my understandings against this community, because I feel I belong here somehow, aware though that many here would be critical towards this particular practice. I also had the desire to reach other meditators in this tradition and give them the drive to write themselves (because I do not pretend to hold any truth. My comprehension of the path is ever changing, hopefully on the up slope most times but who knows when one is deluded? I just want all this to be a basis for reflection and development).

But deeper than this, what have I been doing these last five years (since I came in contact with pragmatic dharma)? reading eagerly outside of my tradition to open my mind, to get different ways of looking at the path, different angles of practice, and trying to integrate all this to my sitting practice, while keeping with the scanning. I did quite a few retreats, including long ones (by Goenka's standards) since I read Nikolai and anonymous yogi's advice on how to gather the right conditions to reach stream entry on (or off) retreat... As I said, I am happy with my progress, but I must admit: no cessation so far. So I might be a little bit thick and it will come when time is ripe, I don't have a sufficient urge for hardcore practice... Or maybe I had an unknown unknowing event years ago which I did not acknowledge at the time (there seems to be a strong bend toward this kind of "delayed insight" around here)...

So now is the time to ask myself (and maybe get feedback here): what am I doing wrong (if anything) to miss that important aspect of the path?

- The main thing I have done is let go on effort, so as to let the scan do itself when it is fluid enough. Of course, I suspect that the nature of the scan itself, even in its most passive form, makes it difficult for one to meet the level of letting go necessary for stream entry. I still slightly direct the attention one way or another. That's the thing, I did not let go of perception of body itself, because I could still feel so much tangible progress attending to it.

- And yes, I have been trying to cultivate awareness of the six sense doors on and off cushion, focusing on impermanence. I can sense the inertia brought by long term attendance to one sense door (and only a few aspects of it: before "see hear think", I was pointed towards proprioception and gravity as other fields of sensate experience I did not focus on at the time). So I am still trying to find the right balance, mainly doing it when my felt sense of the body has been pacified, meaning I do not have to ignore "body" to attend to the other doors. Well, working on it. (I guess the advice not to mix different vipassana techniques comes from the confusion it tends to produce at first. For other meditation techniques, it is more an energetic issue...)

- A good friend is deep into Douglas Harding and the Headless Way, and it seems a genuine tool to work with subject object duality in the visual field. It cuts a lot of the intellectual game of the neo advaitin I am not so comfortable with... Been playing a little with that with high concentration on retreat during the breaks from sitting, as well as in daily life.

- I have been investigating the sensations that constitute the self, which has gained quite a bit of plasticity if not disappeared (the first few layers of tension in the back of the head and chest are long gone).

- I have been trying to catch the first signs of volition. (Shargrol is always spot on, it seems, and I guess it maps me around the equanimity ñana). And I have been noting my thoughts during the scan (especially the thoughts related to practice) since I read Nikolai say something about the Goenka yogis spacing out in equanimity... After thinking "but me... I never space out! I have full on awareness 24/7". Well...

- I have met my girlfriend, who gives me thorough (and much needed) feedback on my personality and flaws (and qualities as well sometimes!), and helped me reappraise love and the deep link between two beings. I learn so much from sharing my life with her! I also see in some Goenka practitioners this strong desire for celibacy, sometimes at the expense of their current relationship, and I tend to think it is often delusion and repression, rather than a real extinction of desire. There is this tendency to put the cart before the horse when it comes to sila, which is promoted by Goenkaji and which I find detrimental to balance.

- She is also deep into bodywork and developed a very precise mapping of the body, which relies heavily on anatomy, which made me ponder my own sense of "mastery" in this field. She sometimes identifies tensions in me before I do... but is still fascinated by the kind of peculiar knowledge I am developing.

- I have been reconnecting with my emotions (yes, I got a bit disconnected at some point), recognizing I was not free of unwholesome ones (that's heavy in MCTB, and that's what Shargrol was talking about, I would say it is linked to all the beliefs we are exposed to repeatedly on retreat (see celibacy), because to believe anything solidifies the mind around it, and there is quite a bit of faith involved in this tradition about how the practice will transform us quickly and how we'll be able to resolve every emotion through monitoring our reactions to body sensations. Been there, done that. There is some truth there somehow, but many emotions act on a layer we are not yet aware of.

- I agree that there is a huge difference between ignoring something ("do not give it any importance, just ignore it and keep on attending to the sensations"), and recognizing, then letting go of it (noting it). I now try to do the latter (noticing rather than noting, so I do not feel like I introduce a new technique), as I realize the former may lead to some kind of dissociation (my belief nowadays).

- Finally, I have been letting go of the scan when I got balanced for a while in the vibratory field of consciousness (considering I was somehow in dissolution) and focused for a few minutes at a time on the small area near the heart as Goenka recommends doing so in long courses. I will come back to this soon as it is a big topic.

Hmmm, so in the end I guess I am quite attached to body awareness, and I want to see what happens while attending it, when maybe the only way be sucked into cessation is to turn away from it. And I can see there is a strong inertia in my mind from the practice all these years, which makes changes difficult... and also some pride, as I would have liked to sort all this out myself. Thoughts?

Sorry for this long post again, but I feel if we can identify together more accurately what is lacking in the scanning technique to attain path, and make some slight adjustment to make it more efficient in this regard without denaturing it (well, we will, in the Goenka sense, I am afraid), it would be of benefit... for myself first, but also for numerous practitioners who feel they have been dwelling in equanimity for long enough.


metta
smiling stone

"
So now is the time to ask myself (and maybe get feedback here): what am I doing wrong (if anything) to miss that important aspect of the path? 
"
Do you have a typical retreat pattern both in terms of MCTB progress of insight or Goenka sign posts?

What does your daily practice look like?

These are good questions, Jason, I will answer them asap.
metta

Yup, this is the key point... But it sorta begs the next question which is related to correlation between equanimity and cessation: if someone isn't able to develop equanimity to the point of cessation, are they really able to dwell in equanimity? 

Even this has to stop. Do you see how the "I" is trying to catch the "I"? 


EDIT: adding on... the real trick in EQ is first getting good at noticing sensations as sensations, urges as urges, emotions as emotions, and thoughts -- especially thoughts about practice -- as thoughts. And then radically let them be exactly as they are without avoidance or manipulation. Neither clinging to nor avoiding.

But the tendency is to always have thoughts "about it". 

Once you can watch your self have thoughts... then you are very close. 

When you can notice thoughts about the self or thoughts about thinking... then you are right on the doorstep.

When you can listen to thoughts and they becomes sounds that seem to hit the mind like little pulses... then you are stepping through the door.

And when you are sitting in meditation, meditating on the mindstream, and you step through the door, you will fall into a hole, and then you land in the place you are already sitting.

Hey shargrol,

Thanks for the post. In your opinion, what does it mean to "watch yourself have thoughts?" I experience many times where there is thinking going on. Sometimes the content is very clear, sometimes the thoughts are less clear and hard to decipher, sometimes the thoughts contain I statements, sometimes they don't, but generally "I" am aware when there is thinking going on. Sometimes the thinking is intentional, sometimes it is not. I guess, my question is, what is the difference between identifying with thoughts and just being aware of them?

My attention seems to quite naturally bounce between the six sense doors without much effort or volition. Sounds, thoughts, tastes, smells, touch, and sights are just kind of randomly chosen as a point of focus. I am also generally aware when an urge to do something arises or an urge to not do something arises. I def hit A&P on my most recent 10 day Geonka retreat 2.5 years ago and believe I was able to make it to EQ before I left. I've been practicing relatively consistently since then, but haven't been able to go on another retreat since. (looking to fix that ASAP)

Based off your experience with Goenka, do you guys think I'm in EQ?

Hi Shargrol,

I love when you chime in, that's a beautiful post! a little bit of poetry in an otherwise stern thread...
I will ponder this, not assuming that I have it integrated already. I try to catch the "I" that eludes my eye, oh my...

metta
smiling stone

Hi Maher,

re: "what is the difference between identifying with thoughts and just being aware of them?"

The thoughts you identify with, you do not label them as "thoughts", they are "you" in this moment. They escape your mindfulness practice.
The emotions you identify with, they submerge you (my way of putting it, if that makes sense for you). You dwell in anger until you realize you are angry. You lost your mindfulness.
The sensations you identify with, you do not see them as sensations, they are "you". They are off your radar.
The sensations you objectify but still react to (when scanning for example), they amplify across consciousness and feed the ego in a process of mental proliferation. To change this reacting pattern is the primary goal of the scanning practice.

re: "Based off your experience with Goenka, do you guys think I'm in EQ? "

My experience with Goenka does not make me proficient in mapping! I don't think that's how it works, though. I doubt one can maintain a retreat insight for 2,5 years without very strong daily practice, and I am not sure it is a question that will help you progress on the path... but let's see what others, well versed in this art, think...

metta
smiling stone

Hello everybody,

I wanted to try to expose a little bit more of my own practice, in order to bring different aspects of this path to the discussion.

But before I proceed, I wanted to share why I find it difficult. It has to do with the purely phenomenological approach which I dodged in my first posts (I hoped you got a feel about my practice in between lines, though): when I define a sensate experience as this or that way, gross or subtle, solidified or flowing, peaceful or vibratory, what kind of representation do you get in your mind? Does it have anything to do with what I try to express? The main idea I want to convey is that my experience of a “sensation” is everchanging through practice, that it is dependent on the content of the mind that experiences it, so that living without reifying any sensation (as existing in and of itself, as ultimate) would qualify as my most important insight so far.
Said another way, what I considered a subtle sensation a few years back, I might now label as “gross”, and I hardly remember what meant solidity on my first retreat, as I have not had access to that quality of experience for a long time. How do I convey some sense of the growing subtlety of my practice, which is a big part of what makes it different from before?

As far as insight is concerned, my take on it is that, when you are not mindful, you are nowhere on the spectrum of insight. When you become aware of the object your attention “chooses”(whether you direct it or you just witness it going somewhere, attending something, or whether non dual awareness manifests itself), only then do you enter the “maps”. Apart from that, an attainment would be the baseline quality of your consciousness which is maintained even when you are not aware. For example, my daily practice these days is suffused with peace and ease, sensations are subtle ripples in consciousness. Actually, the mapping of the body which is the fruit of my practice, which contains all the perceptions related to “body”, is just one bubble in the space of consciousness. The perceiving of the self is another bubble, which merges with the first one if I direct the attention towards the sensations related to the self in the body. If I look for the subject, I cannot find no bubble, I am still immersed in it. And if I test the felt limits of “my” consciousness, I am back within the cartography of the body, there is a limit beyond which I have no access except with the help of imagination. Hence the fractal nature of the different aspects of awareness.

So, what is left of this outside of meditation, when I forget to be aware, when the cartography of the body disappears as I identify with thoughts? I would say a quality of spaciousness in the mind and of presence to the moment, a joy in the background, a plasticity of the ego who does not take itself too seriously. This is my attainment. It is not rock solid, it gets sometimes obscured by anger, endangered by restlessness or worry, or it sinks for a moment under worldly feelings, but it is a baseline I can rely on these days. I am quite confident it would change after a while if I stopped practicing... but I don't, it is a balancing part of my life, even when I get edgy after a particularly peaceful or empty sit... it happens because you don't get highs without lows, this gets clearer and clearer in my experience. Baseline is neutral, but when you explore the confines of your inner world, nature has to restore balance. It has never failed so far...

Ok, back to retreat then... what is the apex of the practice on retreat? I will attend to the sensations on a deep layer of consciousness if anapana got me into unknown territory (sometimes it is not the case and I will enter vipassana in an already very open state). The scan will go slow at first in the substance of that layer. Then the awareness will get more and more free and flowing until I get the whole “body” (that whole layer) instantly (meaning very quickly). This quick movement of the awareness changes the nature of perception, giving it fluidity, but also creates restlessness, thus imbalance in the mind and more difficult sensations in the scan. After dealing with that and reaching the stage where there are vibrations everywhere in the body, and at times strong activity in the upper centers in and above the head (which has also become less intense, tending toward void) I have in the last couple of years directed the attention for a couple of minutes to the small spot Goenka talks about in the long courses (Nikolai and Tarin discussing it in this thread: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/93663). There is no mention of it in the ten day course.
I have to be clear here. Bangha is considered a very high and rare stage to attain in this tradition, and I would say there is more of an A&P feeling to where I am when I concentrate on that area. And I have in the past (after the years of plainly reacting so I would loose balance) felt kind of stuck there, getting a little bit tired by the intensity of the sensations (they have much more of an empty feeling nowadays), or bored by the perceived lack of change (aha)... or craving for progress...

So a few minutes around the heart area, nothing special really, a little bit of residual tension the first times I tried this, but often nothing but openness. After, back to free flow around the body (a luminous sphere at this point) alternating with attending to it part by part, “slowly and attentively”. In the half hour following the exercize, I would start to notice some kind of solidification of the substance scanned, and after the next break (maybe two, three hours later), I would notice a huge upsurge of restlessness where I would be overwhelmed for a while, fully identifying with the agitation, followed by a serious solidification of the sensations in some parts of the body. Back to the bottom of the map... and it would take me from few hours to few days to a few weeks to cycle back to free flow and spaciousness of the perception. That's really how I got a sense in this tradition of the cycles Daniel is talking at lentgh about. And each cycle brings in the end more subtlety to the perception, less room for the ego... I am cycling from solidity to fluidity, from restlessness to peace, from heat to the cool, from cohesion to dissolution... I have experienced the fading of perceptions, rarely on retreat but more often during daily practice, and I can see how you need dispassion towards all formations for it to reach its conclusion. Hmmm, that would put me below the dukkha ñanas, hence the solid good mood of the past few years !

Also, my first go at this was after twenty or so days of retreat, when concentration was at its peak. With less concentration, the latency between cause and effect will increase a great deal, so you cannot make the link between your change of mood and the focus on that spot, or you did not contact a deep enough layer to face strange consequences. What I am talking about is different from feeling pain, or unease or fear in the chest area. That's where it starts, though. I think that's one of the reasons why we use the zone “under the nostrils above the upper lip” as the point of focus during anapana: because we first release tensionsrelated to the breath in the head or in the abdomen in other traditions before attending to the deeper knots of the “heart”. That's also how I understand why Goenka retains that information and generally asks us to always move our attention. Strong energetic effects, sometimes overwhelming, thus dangerous, can be triggered from staying anywhere for a long time... maybe not anywhere, but who can tell for sure which points trigger deep reactions? Where do the knots related to repressed emotions and anger locate themselves?

“From heat to the cool” : actually that one was more of a long term process. When I started meditating, it was always “burning” after a while, I thought it was a feature of meditation practice. A few years back I was serving on a retreat and I went to meet with this young AT with a really good vibe. I felt a coolness in his presence which I associated with nibbana (the extinguishing of a fire). I had a two hour sit every morning where I would objectify the heat (that came up mainly in the second hour), which I would consider as kalapas of the fire element. The whole body was burning vibrations. After days of doing this (loosing balance at some point and working my way time and again through solidified sensations up to that unified field of... intense heat), something started to move, getting slightly subtler, but it was another couple of years before heat would recede into the absence of heat. Nowadays, extreme heat appears quite seldom in the practice, under special circumstances... same for solidity or restlessness... It is rare now that attention does not move freely around the body. It happens after the mind gets overwhelmed by a particulary deep emotion, one I could do nothing but reify for a while...

Finally, we have to understand why serious goenka students do not have interest in cycles or in this kind of disclosure of personal experience. It is because it means dwelling in the past or projecting in the future, hence proliferation of discursive thought and leaving the present moment. Also, trying to locate yourself on the maps might serve the solidification of the ego. Actually, I respect the letting go of any idea of progress which I take as a sign of maturity on the path, and in the last year I have stopped to go through that process of provoking cycles for a while, as I identified a slight dissatisfaction towards the state I was in when I chose to concentrate on that area, and a not so subtle desire for progress...

Well, I hope some of this will be of use for someone!
My opinion about all this is bound to change, so take everything with a grain of salt, and practice skillfully.

with metta
smiling stone

I didn’t mean to imply that I’m conscious of everything. Of course not. But I’m aware of enough tensions to deal with at a time. And when I have dealt with one layer, a new one opens up. I don’t have to dig for them to appear. There are enough of them at the surface to keep me busy, and enough layers to keep me busy continuosly. So no, I have no illusions of getting rid of them all.

I do not equate bodily sensations with sankharas, although I tend to somatize (I have a diagnosis of that) so pretty much of my traumas seem so have ended up in the body. Still I do not take for granted that all sankharas are available as bodily sensations. I just replied to a comment about some people being unable to notice that kind of sankharas.

I don’t think there exists any human being without blind spots, or perceptual barriers. I guess I was just trying to express my fascination about how different people’s perceptual barriers are. For me it is painfully easy to acess the top layer of bodily tensions, so my perceptual barriers are probably primarily somewhere else. I do not doubt that I have them. Maybe I just have more bodily tensions to deal with than most, wherefore more of them are accessible. I don’t know. It is a fact, though, that the basal ganglia of people with Tourette syndrome, like me, do not do their job of keeping lots of impulses from reaching the conscious mind. Other stuff still remains subconscious, of course, due to other processes.

"It is a fact, though, that the basal ganglia of people with Tourette syndrome, like me, do not do their job of keeping lots of impulses from reaching the conscious mind."  

Hi Linda,

I am really sorry if you felt like I was patronizing or something in my answer to you. It was really not my intention.
What you say is interesting. The first goal of the scanning is really to get you to the point where you can feel sensations anywhere in the body. So Tourette takes you way ahead in this regard...
I just wanted to vouch for the existence of a multiplicity of layers, which is a fact  in my experienceso far. But which I am ready to reconsider under new evidence! For me, once you cleared a layer of tension, you go through a phase where you feel like you're done -no tension anywhere-, only to find after a while that this state of “emptiness” unearthed deeper stuff you have to let go of. Or that what you felt to be “empty” was just full of sensations you were not sensitive enough to recognize. There seems to be no end to this but, as I stated in my last post, things do get clearer and clearer with time and practice, and the stuff you work on subtler and subtler. Except when it isn't!
So you say that some biological wiring do make people have really different access to sensate experience, and to different layers of perceptions. Like, on the opposite side of the spectrum, hyperactivity of the basal ganglia could really prevent people from accessing their sensate experience, and thus from following that particular insight route. Also, does a meditator reprogram his/her biological wiring (I guess they do, somehow, as the way we use our attention actually shapes our perception)?
I am really happy to get more feedback from you. The concept of layers of perceptions is still fragile as far as phenomenology is concerned, just a way for me to make sense of experience...

with metta
smiling stone

Hi again! No worries. I just wanted to express myself more clearly, because my initial formulation was obviously foggier than I realized when I wrote it. I share your experiences about the different layers. That’s a very good description.

I do think that Tourette syndrome can take someone way ahead in that specific regard, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing. It can make the experience too overwhelming for someone to be willing to work with it, so I guess it depends on a variety of circumstances whether it’s an advantage or a disadvantage. I avoided all forms of both relaxation exercises and vipassana body scanning techniques for many years, until I was able to deal with all the sensations. I know that I’m not the only one. It was Shinzen Young’s many dharma talks about equanimity that made me realize that the tics are actually an excellent opportunity for practice, especially since it worked, and that my sensitivity with regard to sensations in the body is actually sensory clarity and can be a good thing. I noticed that the tics seemed to be my mind resisting insights into the three characteristics, because if I met the impulses to tic with equanimity and let the sensations run wild, so to speak, those insights were hard to miss. Maybe this is something that Daniel could look into in his research, matching insight stages with medical diagnoses. I think there might be interesting connections between neurodivergence and insights. #research #insight stages Anyway, approaching my wiring like this is helpful for me, as it enables me to see opportunities instead of mere difficulties. I think there are some advantages to all kinds of wirings with regard to insights. One just needs to find them.

It sounds very reasonable to assume that hyperactivity in the basal gangliae (a really strong mental spam filter) would prevent someone from accessing at least some sensate experiences. That would actually explain a lot. I know some very non-impulsive people who have great difficulties in accessing sensory input, emotions and even thoughts. Of course, that’s only anecdotal. I have no idea whether that would hold up for a statistic analysis. It sure is an interesting hypothesis.

I do believe that meditation can rewire the brain. Apparently there is some scientific evidence to that, including tests on Daniel’s brain.

Metta right back at ya.

I don't know the answers to any of this. But, I will tell you that things changed for me when I realized the extent to which "emotional reactions" accompany perceptions. This became clearer after I spent a lot of time just noting "pleasant" or "unpleasant" anytime I noticed anything. 

They changed again when I stopped trying to keep my eyes in one place, and keep my body rigidly still (although, I probably wouldn't have been able to stop doing that if I had not first practiced many hours of trying to keep my body rigidly still).

I'm still trying to figure this all out. But right now, I'm feeling like there's no sankhara without bodily sensation.

It's funny that you are bringing this up... Years ago, I had a girlfriend with Tourette syndrome, and I remember some of the physical tics she had. I have been finding recently that one of the keys to getting through very difficult meditation experiences is allowing my body to contort itself in ways that really resemble what I remember seeing her do. And then those contortions get smaller and smaller, until it just feels like something that happens on the inside. I wonder to what extent they are related.

That’s interesting. I have the same experience, but that kind of surrender doesn’t feel like tics at all. I guess the compulsiveness and suffering associated with the tics are dependent on the delusion, at some levels, of a self who is in control. In those meditative experiences there is no sense of a self controlling the process. The process just occurs on its own. Maybe that’s why I actually like those purifications. Physically they are no worse than what I have gone through most of my life, and the suffering component is no longer there. It’s a great relief.

EDIT: on second thought, I don’t think the experiences I’m thinking of contain similar movements, but rather sensations of movement, as if someone were tearing parts of the body. There are probably actual tensions involved there, though, as I have come to notice. I do think that it’s important for me to let go of those eventually. The tense movements are residual resistance, related to clinging/craving and aversion. On the other hand, there are also kriyas that are more about letting go of control to get rid of blockages. Those can resemble tics quite a lot on the surface, but they are the opposite of compulsion (tics are compulsive, which is why they are so draining).

(edited again to correct poor English)

Hello everybody,
I came into this interesting article on Dhammawheel : https://archive.org/details/UThetVipassana/page/n31

This is the vipassana section of the book "A brief biography of Anagam Saya Thet Gyi and his teachings", containing an extract from "A short-cut to ditthadhamma vipassana ñanadhassana", which seems to have been used by Saya Thet Gyi (born june 27 1873) in his teachings, and maybe written by him (this is not clear at all for me) or by one of his disciples. ("written by a Forest dweller monk of Thepyu Ledi", September of 1909 or 1910 -well, my guess 1270 in the burmese calendar!-). I had never seen this before...
The Goenka tradition recognizes a line of four teachers starting with Ledi Sayadaw, then Saya Thet Gyi, Sayagyi U Ba Khin and Goenka... Before Ledi Sayadaw, an unbroken line of unknown practicioners up to the times of Buddha...
I am not aware that Saya Thet Gyi wrote anything, but it is a fascinating (if stern) read for who wants to know more about the (twentieth century's) roots of the U Ba Khin tradition. I just share some notes I took after reading it, about what resonated with the Goenka approach, so you get an idea:
Three days of anapana (for a seven day retreat). He talks quite extensively about nimittas... For Vipassana, he starts with ten minutes at the tip of the nose, followed by switching to the top of the head. After a while the warmth or cold there morphs into minute vibrations, which might expand to the rest of the head or to the whole body, just observe... He really insists on deconstructing body sensations by recognizing the elements, slowly establishing the understanding of "kanika anicca" as opposed to "samuti anicca" ("instantly disappearing" versus "staying for a while", whether minute, hour, month or year etc.). From this will naturally flow the understanding of anatta. "Santati anicca" is to take "fast moving, incessant incidents of anicca" as a single unit. His talk about the elements is interesting, they always come up together but you can focus on one aspect... He talks quite a bit about kalapas.
He also makes a point about not explaining things to the yogi beforehand so he may get an unbiased direct experience, and not spending his practice time reflecting on concepts... But he needs both knowledge and teacher afterwards to guide him carefully once he enters uddayabaya ñana. The yogi then progresses from that ñana to anuloma (-cycles between?- this is "tirana pariñna", full understanding by investigation), developing disenchantment toward the world of compounded things and longing for the deathless, until all that understanding matures into gothrabu, magga etc.
A good grasp at the vipassana ñana makes you a "cula sotapana" even if you don't enter Nibbana. Not everybody is fit to go all the way. Those who are "drunk with fun and pleasure, forgetting (the natural law of dhamma) and smiling (!)" are like the monkey who does not know how to crack open a coconut (gasp!)...
You catch the six sense viñnana by grasping that it is not the eye that sees the sense object but the eye consciousness. Do it with the other sense doors. Then you concentrate on "addhaya vattu" to understand "mano viñnana", the mind consciousness.

It took him 14 years because he was unable to get to true experiential dhamma (guidance) and fast technique (I think he did 13 years of anapanasati). But when he did (by sitting thoroughly for a week), it was then so simple and easy.
He insists on the possibility for illiterate people to gain experiential wisdom (bhavana mayapañna) without intellectual knowledge. Rings a bell? But he also says that this manual is for people with no knowledge of meditation...

So... I can clearly see the foundations of the Goenka approach here, but with a broad and open view letting quite a bit of space to the meditator for inquiry, along with the necessity of personal guidance for the higher stages which was left out of the current tradition for reasons that escape my understanding.
I believe this informs most of Goenka's theoretical teaching (he does not uses all of it and developed his own method eventually), but he is very careful not to give too much to the students. He waits for the long retreats to go (not so deeply) in certain aspects because he believes (I believe he believes!) that only students with years of practice and dedication to the path (stainless sila!) are able to integrate the part about disenchantment (the dukkha ñanas), which is steep indeed as it has to contaminate your whole being. There is something about mastering the path that brings a really serious (stern) note to the whole endeavor...
Better read the whole article if you are interested. These notes were just thrown here to give an idea. it is not a serious summary...
Hope this is of interest to someone!

With metta
Smiling Stone

Trying to make sense of the progress of insight:

First, let's list the sixteen stages as a reminder:
1- Namarupaparicheda ñana : define mind and body (*)
2- Paccayapariggaha ñana : discern cause and effect (*)
3- Sammasana ñana : understand the three characteristics (+)
4- Udayabbaya ñana : apparition and disappearance (rise & fall) (+)
5- Bhangañana : dissolution (+)
6- Bhaya ñana : fear (*+)
7- Adinava ñana : misery, danger (disadvantage of phenomena) (+)
8- Nibbida ñana : disgust, disenchantment (*+)
9- Muñcitukamyata ñana : desire for deliverance (*+)
10- Patisankha ñana : reflexion, re-observation (*+)
11 - Sankharaupekkha ñana : equanimity towards formations (+)
12- Anuloma : conformity (*+)
13- Gotrabhu : change of lineage (from worldling to noble one)
14- Magga : path
15- Phala : fruition
16- Paccavekkhana : Reviewing
The seven with a (*) do not appear in the suttas but in the atthakatas (???). Those noted (+) are found in the abidhammatthasangika.
(Unfortunately, I forgot where I copied this, I will cite the source here when I find it! It's a good one...)


Since reading MCTB, I have been looking for a way to apply the progress of insight to my experience. Because it seemed it needed a bit of stretching to conform... and I felt there was so much scripting going on... what did it mean to say "I am equanimous" or "I experienced bhanga"... The relatively linear path to stream entry of the noting practitioner (ahaha), with a few traps now well signaled on the way, seemed to make little sense to me. After all, part of the practice is being aware of dukkha from the first seat on retreat all the way through the last (and in daily life as well), be it in the form of craving, aversion, or tentative detachment (as in training my equanimity). So what is the point of isolating (or grouping) the dukkha ñanas after bangha? Same with equanimity, that we practice from the start along with awareness (which we train to direct on the object we choose).

Recently, in a retreat for old students where Goenka talked about the importance of "mastering Udayabbaya ñana" (the comprehension of the arising and passing away of phenomena), something clicked together. The path is not (only) about experiencing the ñanas, it is about mastering them.
Let us restate here that in this tradition, we work with the perception of body sensations by a moving awareness. Our perception of the contact between mind and matter directly depends on our level of comprehension, on the ñana we are "in" at this particular moment (well, the qualities of our mind in this moment, really). It might change from one sensation to the next, from one experience to the next.
From "Mind and body" to "cause and effect" to the "three characteristics", the mind learns new ways to observe phenomena (dis-embedding from it, understanding its cause and deepening the comprehension of its three characteristics), while the sensations still retain a sense of solidity. It is only at the "arising and passing away" that the experience takes on a vibratory quality, because the awareness integrates the "anicca sañna", the understanding of the impermanent nature of this experience. When this understanding matures, we then get absorbed in a free flow of unified subtle vibrations, which have certain changing qualities (Goenka calls these elemental vibrations “kalapas”). This process culminates in bangha (or a foretaste of bangha, the subtlest state we could witness without reacting in this particular moment). The sheer excitement generated by novelty throws us back to larger chunks of experience, to the lower ñanas.
Little by little, by attending these sensations, we develop our understanding of dukkha and our equanimity, navigating between the first and the sixth ñana innumerable times until the understanding of each ñana is so integrated that we do not need to go through the sensory experience corresponding to it. This would be mastery on that particular layer of mind.

The experience corresponding to the sixth ñana is "complete dissolution of the body", which leads to: no "body" left in our mind for a while. That leaves us ready to deal with the purely mental aspect of dukkha, until our equanimity has matured into "equanimity toward all formations".

So... Some things seem somehow clearer now:
Our experience is colored by the ñana we are in in each moment of consciousness. The longer the moment, the more we are identified to the experience (the stickier it gets).
The uddayabbaya ñana brings a vibratory quality to the experience (which is now arising and passing away “quickly”). It can be any experience, wide or narrow, some sensation in the hand while the arm feels solid, so we can cultivate this perception quite easily in daily life. It matures into a vibratory quality of all experience, all sensations, all consciousness and it induces a letting go (it gets un-sticky) which bends perception towards dissolution.
Experiencing a ñana is very different from mastering it (which involves experiencing it multiple times, as in “a lot”).
Body sensations can only be experienced within one of the first six ñanas. The dukkha and equanimity ñanas are mental experiences apart from the felt body sensations which oscillate between totally solid and most subtle vibrations. When even the most subtle vibration is gone, there is no more “body” in the mind (in this particular moment).
"Dissolution" could also be seen through the spectrum of the four jhanas where you retain a capacity of moving your attention and apprehending the three characteristics. How you get out of this jhana is through an imbalance of your mind (which gets more and more balanced through practice). The vibratory quality of dissolution varies greatly depending on where you are in your practice.

In Daniel's model, the definition of the A&P seems too broad, more or less every weird inner experience can be categorized this way... which is necessary as a bridge to explain why so many people are drifting in the dukkha ñanas (after the A&P, remember), from slight pain through reasonable depression to full blown psychosis. There is something deeply unsatisfying here, on the line of: "if I am suffering, it means I am close to equanimity and thus, stream-entry (or any further path)". Ah, I forgot, you can also experience dukkha in the first insight stages and mistake it for the dukkhas ñanas... All is well!
Every firework is our emotions being felt as some type of vibration in the body. These are distinctly powerful experiences, but are not so much a sign of progress on the path (well, yes, now I am able to “feel” my emotions, and I learn not to get carried away by these sensations, which are very different from the former mental image I had of my emotion).

I suspect this is because the functioning of our mind unfolds on different levels (or present different aspects). Let's consider (as a gross simplification) the intellectual, the emotional and the perceptual level and let's refrain from aggregating them (as in "all thoughts and emotions are perceptions").
There is an element of intellectual understanding (conceptualization or absence of) in the sixteen stages but...
Our mind is always tainted by a) aversion or fear b) exaltation or craving c) perfect balance of mind, untainted by either fear or exaltation. But only certain stages (the dukkhas ñanas up to conformity knowledge?) refer to the emotional content of the mind.
When it comes to perception, the mind oscillates between solidity and fluidity (appearance and disappearance at different rates), which is the exclusive realm of the first six ñanas. So, if it is perceiving, it is always in one of these ñanas.
So you can experience solidity with fear, or with pleasure, or with detachment... which ñana are you in?

Can you see my mind cycling endlessly? Time to stop, then... Let's resume developing equanimity, it seems like a winner (it induces dissolution...). Anything after it is not from this world...

Implications:
By thinking out loud, I was questioning the limitations of the scanning practice. If attending to sensations cannot get us past a certain point, well, we have to drop it when it has done its job. Next question is: when has it done its job? We can go beyond sensations (choose not to attend to them) to experience the higher part of the path, way before we have mastered dissolution. But for dissolution to mature, we have to come back again and again to our perception of body.
Equanimity regarding formations means seeing even the subtlest formations as formations, and not be moved by them (including thoughts about practice, intentions, etc. cf Shargrol), so as to go beyond feelings, emotions and thoughts. That's the last part of the path, where the last remnants of experience are let go of... So it escapes conceptualization and points to something of a different nature, otherworldly, as in "change of lineage" and "path".
Equanimity is what makes us move through the ñanas, a quality of the mind that informs perception. Any quality of the mind informs perception...
Hope this serves as a conclusion for now

Well, that was a bit of a rambling...
with metta
Smiling Stone

Edited to conclude the rambling : I first felt it was not necessary to conclude, but I added the "implications" bit, as it is why I wrote this in the first place...

Hello everybody!

Re : the Progress of insight

For those interested, I warmly recommend Nikolaï's gathering of information on the POI on the Hamilton Project blogspot:
http://thehamiltonproject.blogspot.com/2018/10/collection-of-info-progress-of-insight.html

There, you will find all the links he could gather, plus a nice post by Shargrol (again!) as an introduction.
In the last post, I just wanted to give a feeling of of the way in which the general framework of the stages nourished, and questioned me... a "work in progress"...

with metta
smiling stone

Hi again Smiling,

Nice name btw.

So, I just went through your thread and now about the POI. I'm not an expert but here is something interesting. I went through it in daily life a long time before I ever started formal meditation. When I read mctb I thought : "wow, the DN sounds scary, what i'm gonna do is hold off vipassana practice until I can do a long retreat to be sure to go through it there and not in daily life."

Little did I know that I had been in it for years and had dealt with most of it by that point, and was already quite established in equanimity.
So when I did tentatively start doing noticing practice as described in mctb, I quickly realized that I was going through kinds of stages, but they were very very mild... 

That could be your case. What if you were deeply established in EQ from all those years of practice and experienced the nanas but in such a mild form that they just don't register ?

Here is a way to get a sense of the nanas : the AP is a sense of something more, a strong sensitivity to something spiritual and beautiful, I associate it with Rilke's line "For the beautiful is but the begginning of the terrible which we can still bear." Then there is what Sartre would call a "transcendental accidental in daily life". Something cracks, some familiarity is lost, something... Then comes the desert and the dark night of the soul. Many things there...  But again, I think the easiest way to describe this is to mention Sartre's book "La nausée". It doesn't really get more clear than that... Nausea. The myth of Sysiphus by Camus also comes to mind. Then comes revolt, Shargrol's translation for the 10th ñana.  Do you remember Camus' book "The revolted man" ? Existential revolt. All this existentialist stuff. Then acceptance, space, etc. It's pretty simple.

I went through it completely unknowingly. So I got SE with seemingly almost no progression through the POI doing formal "vipassana". Vipassana just means observing, basically. People with high curiosity, strong concentration, etc., will have these events occur naturally. You can find traces everywhere, in the arts, etc., by people who have never known anything about buddhism. It has nothing to do with a technique or a tradition.

The thing is, it then happened again. But this time, in a controled environment. And that just confirms that this way of theorizing is more or less correct, because you then go through new, fresh ñanas one by one over again. And this time they feel real, although you know have a lot of knowledge on how to handle it.

Still, it's surprising : when you hit a new AP, it's incredibly amazing and you had no idea this existed or was possible or what the FFFF man ! When you hit a new baya ñana, it's really scary, and you can't get away or observe the creep from afar. It's transcendental creepiness again. When you hit a new re-observation, you're really actually really pissed. Pissed in a way you haven't been for years and thought would be impossible from the equanimous perspective which seemed to have become your baseline - more existentially pissed than since the last time that the first DN was really burning your ass, actually. And when you hit equanimity again, it might just feel normal, or spacious. But you can see the difference happening in a ridiculously clear way. "Wow, after this new level of angst, this space just litterally opened up for the first time in front of me." I observed this new obvious EQ in terms of completely pure bodily sensations based on strong retreat concentration and the transition from revolt to eq went something like "I can't see anything, where is that fucking tiny ass sensation, it hurts I'm gonna cry" to this huge, soft, fresh, comparatively enormous new bunch of movements appearing right at the center of attention again, with the sense that a balloon had been filled with air around it, a complete relaxing of all tensions, and the capacity to perceive several sensations from different sense modalities all at once with perfect ease.

It's real

It also confirmed the notion that I had experienced the ñanas in daily life prior to any real meditation practice, because when I experienced the whole new baya ñanas, for instance, I recognized events which had happened years ago. I thought it was really cool to have that confirmed, but again, I staid convinced that this was just "something" happening, not the main point.

When I said I was "moving away" from the POI, it's not that I was saying it was never true, just that I sensed there was something deeper and more fundamental, which is in everything and behind the whole POI, which has more to do, actually, now that I think about it, with the mysteriousness of how SE happens. But it does happen kind of the way it is described, and I just want to put the hypothesis I mentioned out there. I honestly would find it extremely surprising if in some way or other you didn't go through it, perhaps decades ago, who knows, and are just so deep in equanimity that it appears like nothing to you when you go through it.

This happens to many people, and my experience is probably quite common.

Metta

Wow, you were inspired here, Olivier.
I was deeply touched when reading your post. It rings so true to my ears.
So yeah, an equanimity yogi, conscious that he will loose the relative stability he's been living with in the last few years (that's the hard bit to accept, actually, that I might have been doing just that). Duly noted.
On my way.

Thanks for reviving this thread with such a consistent analysis. Time to move forward...
with metta
smiling stone

Nice, glad to be somehow helpful ! Of course it's only one perspective and I could be totally wrong !

Metta !!

Hello everybody,
I will paste here a post that came as a joke on another thread, because it is somehow strangely relevant here... Here it goes:
"I am a Bodhisattva!
You guy-irls, are pronouncing powerful vows, but it seems that all of you are somewhere AFTER first path, meaning you have at most seven more lives to serve ignorant mankind, having partly escaped the wheel yourself already.
Me, I have chosen a technique that guarantees that I will not go through the gate, however long I contemplate the scenery outside. Here is the quote from my journal (Day 21, meaning april 8th) :
Because actually I am sure that I have got something really precious from my practice, though it lies below the attainments advertised on this forum. It has to do with the "purification" of the energetic field (ok, that word "purification" seems so wrong to me, I usually try to avoid it... I mean "repeated disembeding from the perceptions of feelings on the body, which leads to change") and it seems not to be always completed (well, to lack) in the reports from some of those who witnessed a drastic change in perception (that "purification"). "
You see what I mean. Contrary to you, I did not have to take any vow, which has only ONE possible explanation: I took a vow in a past life, where I was already part of that crew (that's why I am so good at that particular technique). And Goenka is quite clear: He says we are aiming for final liberation, not for some half-baked realization, hence the endless purification. There is absolutely no risk that we reach the end of our materiality, we might have glimpses but something will always remain.
I quote a small passage of this video about this very subject:
(Brings water to my mill, doesn't it? Or maybe he just did not have the right key for that gate, and made sense of it that way...)

Hmmm... Looks like I have been channeling the collective subconscious of the Goenka gang. Make of it what you will. I was joking but I'm quite impressed with what came out... (and that typing the Bill Hart bit! It gives some credit to my rambling, no?)"

And...
When it comes to living up to this ideal of Bodhisattva, Goenka comes as a fair candidate, whatever his flaws.
I met a woman who was ironing his shirts in the eighties, and she told me : "I quit because I found it very hard. He did not let anything personal come into his relation with people. There was nothing personal about him." I find it is an interesting take on anatta as well, to really endorse a function to the point of sacrificing the ego for it. Amma comes to mind in this regard. Obviously quite a few monks of every tradition qualify (that's what you do when you are a monk), but these two had (have) a kind of special siddhi to move things on a large scale, which I would link to the Bodhisattva ideal (I am not talking about the outcome here)...

All this is just more food for thought
with metta
smiling stone

Some considerations on 'Goenka: an emissary of insight' by Daniel Stuart :
(I will paste this to the relevant thread for comments but it belongs here)


I've read (elsewhere) people say that this work was not worth considering as its publication was not authorized by the trust (well he got authorization from the family to translate and include some of Goenka's writing, and says that Goenkaji welcomed his project back in 2008). But how could one hope for any interesting new piece of information to come from within the organization? I wouldn't, for one. While there are many assumptions by the author, most of them seem quite reasonable to me, and the result of extended research. Note that he gets darker by the end of the first part, which makes it harder to defend: it becomes obvious he has an agenda. But I'll come back to that.
It proposes interpretations on numerous points that remained mysterious until now. I'll throw a few of them below, that I found most interesting...

 As a young man, Goenka was deeply involved in nationalistic ideals that were critical of the non-violent path chosen by Gandhi. It reminds me of Aurobindo, but I never heard about him in relation to Goenka...
There is also an impressive account of young father Goenka's bouts of anger by his sister Ila Agrawal, which I don't feel like reproducing here as it would give a tabloid vibe to this review (p. 45, end of chapter 2).

In addition to being a meditation teacher, U Ba Khin was a powerful healer quite renowned for his healing abilities. Goenka knew this beforehand and was cured of his migraines after visiting him at the center months before his first course. When his faith wavered (some hesitation just before the course), the migraine came back.

The whole point of maintaining the purity of the technique is to protect the powerful dhamma vibrations (dhamma datu, dhamma forces as Stuart translates 'datu' by 'forces' instead of 'elements', which I like) of U Ba Khin channeled egolessly by Goenka (and by his assistant teachers re-enforcing the subtle vibrations of the tapes? hence the utter importance of letting ego behind, a quality highly valued in the ATs???)
Also, I suspect (so let's be clear that this assumption is mine!) that these dhamma datus (metta vibrations in the subtle atmosphere of the center) are believed to protect the students from the attack of destructive forces, in other words from having them submerged in the Dark Night stages. If they are, it's because they did something wrong. This is also one of the reasons why it is so important to maintain serious daily practice (Goenka talks about 'building a fence to protect the dhamma until the dhamma protects you... from destructive forces, by connecting to the teacher's metta?)
To give meat to this assumption, in his first years in India, he attributed his inability to produce conclusive attainments in his disciples to the opposition of destructive forces in the subtle planes. Sayamagyi stopped in India on her way to London to help him with that, as she was much more advanced in this regard (she had been assisting Sayagyi in producing attainments in his disciples since the fifties -I remember reading elsewhere that she was very gifted and reached high states of concentration from her very first introduction to the practice by Sayagyi U Ba Khin). Goenka would send his more advanced students to her until the split.
The split: I always thought that Sayamagyi was the one who severed the bond with Goenka (the famous anecdote of the course in Japan) because he kept on presenting Vipassana as purely secular and not connected with buddhist religion, which she did not accept. Stuart explains really well how Goenka was embarrassed with presenting Sayamagyi, who was so obviously buddhist, to the indians, and that he needed to cut that link... Also, his deeply Hindu family had to be convinced that his teaching was secular (and not in contradiction with hindu religion). One of his brothers always opposed his teachings.
Goenka then conformed with his task of introducing the Dhamma to as many people as possible.

Him teaching the Satipatthana course is presented here as a reaction to the course of the same name by Joseph Goldstein, interesting given he notoriously insists on maintaining the same technique to access the different stratas of experience (a technique better affiliated to the Anapanasati sutta)...

When still new to Vipassana, he organized the visit of and received Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on his first tour outside India (1959). He helped organize the initiation of the Hindu community in Burma to transcendental meditation. He sat beside his wife when she received the mantra and heard it as well, having it resonate within during a deep three hours meditation afterwards. In his diary (in 'A western student's meditation experience', U Chit Tin), John Hislop says that Goenka was quite impressed by the Maharishi, fact that was obliterated into further Goenka reports.
We also learn about his meetings with the Dalaï Lama, with (and his admiration for) Jiddu Krishnamurti, and I was very pleased to find a thorough account of the special friendship that he had with Anagarika Munindra until his final years at Igatpuri. Munindra is famous as a Mahasi teacher in his own right, but took Goenka's famous course in Bodhgaya, and seems to have remained faithful to the tradition at the end of his life.

The insistence on the guru-saddhak relationship between U Ba Khin and Goenka is beyond doubt and telling. Also telling was the fact that there was a private shrine in Dhamma Giri with a statue of Buddha and a picture of Sayagyi U Ba Khin... So much for our tradition being devoid of guru figures, relying solely on a technique (also the unfortunate golden statue of U Ba Khin at the global Pagoda)...
The tension between the secular and the 'powers' (of the gurus) makes a lot of sense, and sheds a (not so new) light on some long standing discrepancies (the 'serious old students' always talking of Goenka's vibration of metta as the highest proof of his realization).

Really funny that Stuart goes on a lot about the Boddhisattva vow in a way that lines up perfectly with my intuition from last year (see last post on this thread) after hearing a couple of sentences by Bill Hart in the documentary 'from Myanmar to the world'.

There is a change of tone around page 100 after he underlined the possible lack of attainment of Goenka. The portrait then evolves to depict a somehow cynical businessman maneuvering to consolidate his position as a global teacher (that's how I took it, maybe assuming more than was written?). The organization grows in time into an inefficient cultish wizardry in service of a subtle vibration... until the clash between western and indian teachers after Goenka's death.
Although I think he raises some interesting points, he doesn't seem to do full justice to Goenka (see Braun's article in Tricycle). I first assumed he was fueled by some resentment and that he kind of betrayed the trust of his informants... but thinking twice about it, maybe some of these western teachers wanted a critic to come out, a different voice to be heard, thus breaking the omerta that us, poor meditators, are used to. Again, my assumptions on top of his! (But browsing the internet, I found other hints at the (reasonable) rebellion of Paul Fleischman advocating for change (ref. needed), and that would be good news, giving some hope for the future).
I am quite moved by the extent of the drama (as exposed in Fleischman's myterious pdf to the ATs: 'an explanation on some differences of opinion between vipassana teachers') caused by the 'brutal dismissal of some of his closest disciples leading to a series of controversial rearrangements in the authority structure of the trust', and the suspected recess of Goenka's mental faculties in his last ten years. I did not know about it, just about vague tensions between indian and western teachers.
[on browsing the internet looking for Sriprakash Goenka (a son to whom Goenka 'handed over a number of institutional responsabilities'), I bumped into the story of  Gautam Gaikwad, a police officer instrumental in introducing Vipassana in prisons, assistant teacher close to Sriprakash (I read 'his mentor' here), who to the present continues to thrive in the organization despite charges of corruption and a weird drug related arrest which I guess did not bear fruits -if anybody wondered if there were really dark politics in the tradition-]...

Also, the role of Robert Hover, first among U Ba Khin western disciples authorized to teach that was instrumental in the creation of the IMS. Salzberg, Goldstein,  and others (Ram Dass, Munindra) were present at the first 'international' course in Bodhgaya in 1970. But this part of the story (of the rise of western Dhamma) has been written several times already, quite differently each time.
I did not hold Hover in such a high esteem after reading a (not so good) book of his a long time ago ('Internal Movement Healing') about healing... through the power of concentration on body parts! But he was a therapist, so... Maybe that's why reiki practitioners and other energy healers are blacklisted from courses?

So... what would be my takeaway from this often fascinating book? To keep it simple, it would be that the circumstances (historical, cultural, psychological) that led to the ripening of Goenka's unique personality also shaped his interpretation of his guru's teachings in ways unrecognized by his students. That soup became further solidified in this tape-driven tradition, which seeks to remain the only permanent feature in an ever changing world, oblivious of the universality of anicca, although it is the essence of these teachings. The book hints at the fact that change is nevertheless under way... which would be wonderful news for the future of dhamma (I have a hard time picturing Paul Fleischman going public about it, but who knows?).

That's all for now... may this little stroll in the book be useful to some...
metta to everyone
smiling stone

From the thread named "Titmuss on (a book about) Goenka" (could be relevant here):

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GG: ...In addition, I think one needs to remember that Goenka tradition is not attainment oriented. Thus, for them, the maps and attainments are a red-herring, the real deal is how we handle challenges in the off-the-cushion life i.e. real life. I.e. if your practise helps you to not lose your equanimity in the face of challenging hardships in real life - because you can constantly see the way things really are i.e. you can easily spot how it is your mind which keeps on constantly generating cravings and aversions, then, in this view, your practise is successful.

This fits well with one of the things about Goenka which Erik Braun wrote in the article linked by Smiling Stone above:

"This was a man who was adopted by his uncle at 13 so that the uncle would have an heir, married by arrangement to a 12-year-old when he was 18, and denied by his family the university education he sought; who trekked over the mountains out of Burma with the Japanese on his heels and lost his thriving business to a government takeover."

In an extreme version of this view of practise, when not accompanied by a constant attempt to develop alertness towards one's defilements, the meditative attainments are just special experiences which happen to be labeled by fancy names in an Ancient language (Pali). 

SS: ... As to attainments being a red-herring, well, Goenka talks about the stages but interprets the dukkha ñanas as being tempted to lose oneself in the subtle realms after bhanga (I write about this somewhere here, it is not so clear in my mind now)... and there is this half-baked idea of the constitution of a Boddhisatva army (us!) that will meet at the gate to support Maitreya (hum)...

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Here's my response to the above very interesting remarks of SS:

Goenka may have made some passing remarks about dukkha nana and other stages (and may have interpreted them in some peculiar way), but it is worth noting that most of his instructions and discourses in (10 day, 1 day, 2 day, 3 day courses) aren't about those remarks. This means the at least the introductory courses are not intended to focus on those aspects (I don't know about longer courses).
In the introductory courses, his instructions and discourses are almost exclusively: 
(a) pacify your mind and develop the faculty of awareness of sensations, 
(b) observe the sensations - not just when you meditate but all the time - especially when you realise that a klesha (e.g. fear, anxiety, anger, jealousy, lust) has arisen; 
(c) while observing, remain as equanimous as you can by never forgetting that the sensation is impermanent (and hence will eventually go away); 
(d) keep continuing to practise diligently. 
In addition, his discourses involve (among other things): (i) suffering caused by self-clinging to things which are impermanent, (ii) the five aggregate model of the mind etc. Neesless to say, the experiential understanding of the five aggregate model of the mind will help us experientially observe how even the slightest sensation (whether pleasant or unpleasant) leads to suffering (in the form of desire or aversion which arise from self-clinging) if we aren't equanimous.

My understanding is that one is then expected to develop experiential wisdom rather than merely intellectual wisdom. Let me give a simple example: even when the conditions and circumstances remain completely unchanging, e.g. in the middle of a retreat, my thoughts and bodily sensations constantly keep on changing and there are associated mood swings; this happens because (a) I often forget that some transitory unpleasant thought or feeling of aversion is merely a thought / sensation, and, (b) I strongly cling to my mental picture of myself so much (e.g. "By participating in a retreat whose members worship their teacher, am I - such an educated and smart individual - joining a cult?"). Note that the disturbance arises because of a thought and an existing picture of myself.

To me, many accounts of unpleasant retreat experiences basically boil down to some variation of this. It is also noteworthy that when one observes this as a phenomenon, with perfect equanimity, there is no suffering: all kinds the thoughts, feelings and sensations still arise but one simply witnesses them objectively / dispassionately.

Given this, the experienced meditators can tell us this: if instead of constantly pursuing thoughts which arise due to self-clinging (such as "Why is this happening to ME? MY life is so full of disappointments! Everything is so disgusting, I WANT them to be different!"), someone just follows these Goenka instructions to the tee (may be out of devotion), will it even be a little helpful while going through dukkha nanas?

The maps etc are of course extremely important if one is going through such peculiar stages; in addition, even from a scientific point of view, if there are any maps, someone should figure them out. But, is there a possibility that, if one knows about the maps, the thinking-narrating module of one's mind starts expecting certain kinds of experiences and then the mind could create some experience which closely resembles what we've been reading about? If this is true (for a fair fraction of meditators), then this might explain the taboo in many cultures against discussing the maps (AFAIK, even Mahasi Sayadaw says, this shouldn't be introduced to new-comers: but welcome to internet age ! ).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Concerning Goal etc (I'm sure my views about these are pretty rudimentary):

SS: "Well if you are into pragmatic dharma, you believe that a total cessation of experience will mark the transformation, if you are into Goenka (or into the thai forest tradition), you believe you will experience something totally beyond mind and matter, which has a koan quality to it..."

GG:

Those of us who haven't attained stream-entry or Arhantship can't say what those transformations really involve and probably can't understand any description of them since the meaning of words is closely linked to an associated experience. 

 - Concerning transformations: by reading Jack Kornfield, Daniel Ingram etc, one gets an impression that (feel free to correct me), while some things will change, life would not stop bringing challenges and one has to still figure out how to operate under those conditions. Also, I got an impression that a person who is an Arahant has basically only (!) reached the highest milestone in the direction of Pragya but typically still needs to work towards other dimensions (e.g. Sila and Samadhi). 

 - Unlike other discussions of morality, ethics (which involve a lot of relativism), for an insight meditator, it seems morality has an absolute basis: "if something gets done by my body or mind with the intention which arises from self-clinging, it will eventually lead to suffering". How do I know whether I did something with the intention arising from self-clinging? Insight training (i.e. awareness of as many sensations and thoughts as possible) helps me in observing an increasing fraction of thoughts and sensations to immediately see whether an action is being performed with the intention rooted in self-clinging. 

 -  Well, I guess this might mean that any intention which doesn't originate from self-clinging is fine (and anyway won't agitate us or spoil equanimity). This could mean: get driven dispassionately by what is true (i.e. rationality, facts, evidence) or what leads to good for all others (the Brahmaviharas) rather than by unrecognised compulsive emotional / physical urges which originate from clinging to oneself. 

 - From Daniel Ingram's writings and interviews I also got an impression (correct me if I am wrong) that all of this obviously doesn't mean that an attainer of insight won't eventually do anything with the intention which arises from self-clinging ("if one is born, one is bound to suffer"), but to avoid suffering, one just needs to still constantly develop this faculty - even after one achieves the highest possible insight!

So, it seems to me that, irrepective of which stage one is in, in order to reduce suffering, one needs to constantly be aware of thoughts/intentions which originate from self-clinging and witness them dispassionately. It is possible that doing this may become far easier for an arahant than a beginner.

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Finally, let me thank SS for patiently entertaining the views of someone as inexperienced as I am.

Now a days, I'm experiencing a strong desire to get some sense of what this is all about (may be a sign of some early stage of the path?): proof of the fact that currently I constantly fail to dispassionately observe the work of some analytical module of my mind  

Hello Gaurav,

I will try to answer some of your remarks to the best of my abilities. Please note that I am not qualified to do that (but you posted here!), so everything I say might be taken with a grain of salt...
You wrote quite a dense post and I needed to extract what seemed relevant to me to comment on. Not to discard the rest! I like how you put self-clinging at the root of all evil...

"My understanding is that one is then expected to develop experiential wisdom rather than merely intellectual wisdom..."
Quite obviously, to the point of discarding intellectual wisdom to a large extent. I have found out that cultivating a little bit of the former can alter dramatically any experience. In the end, it's deeper and deeper understandings about the nature of reality that we slowly gather through experience. Nothing wrong in going for a bit of scouting with some more shallow ones that might open the way...
I agree with the rest of your paragraph. It's on more advanced courses where he goes through the stages of insight with some details.

"To me, many accounts of unpleasant retreat experiences basically boil down to some variation of this."
Well, that's not doing full justice to the wild array of crazy, strange, dangerous states that people encounter on (or off) retreat which can lead one to the ward (as a few here are aware of). Of course it is always related to some form of self-clinging (no self, no suffering)... or to an incomplete understanding of not-self... or to the sheer energy of the experience that burns someone's fuses, so to speak...

"someone just follows these Goenka instructions to the tee (may be out of devotion), will it even be a little helpful while going through dukkha nanas?"
Maintaining equanimity in front of every experience will certainly help you through the difficult bits. But there are times where you lose it, I mean get completely thrown off balance, submerged, or drowned into the experience. In these moments there is no equanimity whatsoever, nobody stirring the wheel, that's when you hit the dukkha ñanas real hard. I guess, in these cases, having integrated equanimity deep into your subconscious might help you to come back... or go forward.
A peculiarity of the insight stages is that you can't see them while you're in (that's a bold claim, but I believe there is some truth to it : we never see the full extent to which we are embedded, like a fish can't see the water he breathes, swims in, lives in -what do I know about fish?-).

"if one knows about the maps, the thinking-narrating module of one's mind starts expecting certain kinds of experiences and then the mind could create some experience which closely resembles what we've been reading about?"
That's my guess. Our expectations help model our reality always. So why not in these matters?

"Those of us who haven't attained stream-entry or Arhantship can't say what those transformations really involve and probably can't understand any description of them since the meaning of words is closely linked to an associated experience. "
Certainly, except for "cessation" which is pretty straightforward... hum... I take this back after a little tour on this forum!

"Well, I guess this might mean that any intention which doesn't originate from self-clinging is fine (and anyway won't agitate us or spoil equanimity)..."
Yep, the Brahmaviharas rock... They are, in the end, the only sensible states one can cultivate according to the buddhist tradition (again, my understanding)...

Sorry for not doing full justice to your post, I already feel out of my league...
I wish you the best with your practice... and with your reflections on the path!

with metta
smiling stone

Oups... I wanted to add a comment on this :

"A peculiarity of the insight stages is that you can't see them while you're in (that's a bold claim, but I believe there is some truth to it : we never see the full extent to which we are embedded, like a fish can't see the water he breathes, swims in, lives in -what do I know about fish?-)".

I felt that this one needed a little bit of unpacking. The present moment is all there is. Inside this mere instant, we have become experts at building bridges that connect us to past and future. These bridges are concepts which solidify "present moment" into "time" and enable our mind to work on different levels. Wonderful apparatus, really. What we do with Vipassana is that we plant a seed in our subconscious to remember to "extract" "us" from this instant to "observe" it (to develop this push from experience where sati becomes possible: the memory of what happened as something different from oneself).
That's why sati is also translated as "memory". Our whole mind is always a little bit behind the present (that's my current understanding!). The best use we can find for our mind in the buddhist framework is to develop a sati which observes whatever through the lens of the three characteristics. We thus minimize the amount of mind we do not dedicate to presence.
I admit to the strong belief that there always is a subtle degree of conceptualization in any perception... but attending the sense doors is what brings us nearest to the present moment. Perceiving, we can choose to let the attention/sati go wherever it will, or we can direct it to a certain extent. I am still fascinated by the implications of both these attitudes on practice...
(I guess I will dwell further on this on my log, as to not cluster this thread too much...)

with metta (and gratitude for following my rants!)
smiling stone

Hi Smiling Stone:

I'm sorry, I couldn't spend too much time on DhO in the last few weeks - I also didn't have any specific response to what you posted, particularly because I'm still at very early stages in my practise as compared to you.

But let me say the following: When I wrote 

"To me, many accounts of unpleasant retreat experiences basically boil down to some variation of this."

I didn't mean it in the dismissive and unfair sense in which this sentence eventually ended up sounding. I definitely do not wish to belittle the challenges the many meditators end up facing.

Regards,
GG

PS: Since you  have so much more experience with the Goenka tradition, it is very tempting to ask you various questions (such as about experiences in long courses) etc. 

Hey GG,
Feel free to ask, I'll answer to the best of my abilities... Honestly, I kind of already squeezed the juice of these retreats on this thread (and this one maybe)... but I guess it is always interesting to revisit one's understanding (and how it changes with time!)
(The post on "trying to make sense of the progress of insight", not too far upthread gives a fair idea on how I spent my time on my last long course... but I think I talked more explicitly about a 30 day course somewhere up as well? Maybe not explicitly enough... )

with metta
smiling stone

PS : [deleted]

Yes, there is a possibility that it was not explicit enough (alternatively, I may not have read it as carefully as I thought I did): I should reread this thread to make sure I haven't missed out on something important. 

I have lots of questions and I'll keep asking you my questions very slowly: because I want to carefully differentiate between my "intellectual curiosity" about all this stuff (which I have plenty) and the information which helps me in gaining actual "experiential insights" - Sometimes I do find myself spending more time reading stuff (or, writing what I "think" I learnt from some meditative experience) and relatively less time on actual practise   

Hello everybody,

A little note here to say I documented my last retreat in this tradition on my log. I generally keep any musing on my current practice there...

For those who are not so interested in my ramblings, and for anyone who wants a fresh input on this tradition, I warmly recommend chapter three of this thesis by Jagdish Vishnu Shinde, who provides a detailed and thorough exposition of Goenkaji's teaching on the various courses. It is very articulated and informed by the author's 30+ years of experience within the tradition.

It tries to root the tradition in the PAṬISAMBHIDĀMAGGA (the rest of the thesis is also interesting but not so convincing in this regard), the reading of which Daniel also recommends thoroughly. I discovered I had downloaded the pdf at some point on his advice a few years ago (but not read it!).
It comes from the university of Pune, who also hosted Daniel Stuart (he is thanked in the phd), so it's a small world really... Anyway, it's a very different voice from mine, I believe it can benefit to a (slightly) wider audience, and I was impressed, so I share it here...

with metta
smiling stone

Thanks so much for starting this thread, putting so much thought and time in the content, and staying with it for so long and hence creating a space where I felt like chiming in.  I wish I read it years ago!

Confession: I've only read about half this thread, I hope I'm not adding redundant content or spouting what is agreed on as nonsense.

I spent hundreds of hours on a sort of mental gymnastic theater arts practice that I have since come to understand was concentration practice.  I believe I AP'ed there.  Talking to a friend about the benifits of my work caused them to suggest Goenka which led to my first meditation retreat in good ol' Kaufman Texas. Looong story short, this crowd here and Awakenework helped me advance my practice greatly and various additional retreats.  My meditation friends told me I SE'ed, which I have no probelm believing, but disclaimer: two Real Famous Gurus I've met said something like "I don't get that SE vibe from you".  So take whatever I say with a grain of salt!

I just wanted to say here that I dodged around the idea that a body scanner misses out on the other sense doors.  I feel that careful pursuit of bodily sensations leads into the other sense doors in a way that seem helpful and ligit Goenka to me.

For example, perusing the bodily sensations at the tip of the nose lead to wind/temperature sensations deeper in the nasal passages and carefull attention to those sensations at some point leads to perceptions/judgement about how the air smells, and that experience of reconizing that a real *smell* exists immedeatly gives rise to vague bodily sensations which I would call vedana.  It's difuse, it's nebuouls, but/and I still feel faithful to Goenka when i'm probing those perceptions of information existing in/on my mind/body.

Careful attention to sensations on the eyelids eventually gives rise to awareness of the feeling of a moth beating against my optical nerve, or fancy hues splashing across my retina and that tingles in a way, as if each optic nerve is touching surrounding tissues.  I mean I see calling something a color is straight seeing sense door, but there is an attendant sensation that is hard not to think of as a bodily touch type sensation that G would approve of.  That too will give rise to feelings of being satisfied or impressed or proud in the greater viscera or ego-connected blush/tension muscles in the face or chest.  Those seem like legitimate 'touch' sensations that come from my body and I imagine Goenka would approve of that investigation.

Careful attention to my toe, when it happens to catch a twitch there, directly causes some kind of brain activity that feels close enough to a weird bodily sensation that deserves some attention, and the echoes of awareness/sensation of a single event in two different places in my body (toe, cranium) certainly seemed pertinent to wisdom around how the mind works.

Probing any remaining solid sensations around the face provokes impressions of self to arise that draw attention, and Goenka'ing back to the more clearly bodily sensations is obviously a helpful no-self practice.  I think G would approve of deliberately hanging in that confusing space beholding the dichotomy of mundane facial sensations and the formation of impression of self.

Similarly, perusing mundane bodily sensations on the tongue and ear leads me to more subtle awareness of mind and body that feels like good G practice to me but might sound like playing hookie off the proper Goenka campus.

My understanding is that Goenka tells us that an impression of being able to scan whole limbs or body sections at a 'glance' is legit practice.  My interpretation of that technique is that we are taking advantage of the mind's ability to package up a whole bunch of sensory neurons on the surface of the skin into a single package, a formation, so we 'get credit' for body scanning when we are really checking off a simplification of that collection of body part awareness'. I don't feel I'm cheating by being sensitive to my bodily impression of vedana and how that changes over time, I feel they are productive moments in advancing concentration and wisdom around the mind body system.

I have not researched these impressions of mine in the literature, so I can't vouch for it's concordance with Goenka or any other dogma. I do know that my non-Goenka reading has enhanced my understanding so probably I'm not a good Goenka-only test case

Hello Matt,

Nice that you felt like bringing your little stone to this fragile construction. I'm sure your take on the bridge between touch and the other sense doors might inspire some that were not touched by my #*^^*# on the subject.
Did you finish the read?

I would be interested to know more about the mental gymnastic theater arts practice that prompted your suspected A&P, maybe better on my log than on this thread that I hope will stay focused on Goenka related considerations.

with metta
smiling stone

(Edited part of that post to my log [link above], as it did not fit here!)

When Goenka first visited the US I did a retreat with him. Later on, I also did a retreat with some of his students. After those experiences I no longer did Goenka retreats.
In the mid-70's I participated in the first vipassana retreat taught by Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield. We did mahasi style noting practice as well as anapanna. I did this practice regularly for many years. In the late 70s I did a 3.5 month retreat at the IMS center in Mass. When I began the students had daily, personal interviews with the teachers. By the time of the long retreat we had group interviews. Later on, I can't say since I stopped meditating with them after that retreat. 
I also did an U ba khin retreat with Ruth Denison at IMS. During that time Mahasi Sayadaw, Munindra who btw spent time with u ba khin, and other major teachers spent time with and taught us.
From the get go, I was not comfortable with the our way or the highway, no questioning, boot camp style of the goenka retreats. The fact that I went back for more shows me that I found something of value there but the almost adversarial attitude of the staff and their worship of goenka really turned me off. It just seemed too dark and the people like some cult where they acted like control freaks. Since I have these traits I did not want to encourage them and did not find the teachers, teaching and the actual site supportive. I also know that there are a lot of very committed goenkaites. When I Google u ba khin, I find them very well organized and a major presence on the web.
Years later I discovered by chance the International Meditation Center - USA in Maryland when I was looking for a place to practice.
The actual history of this tradition, which the goenka people do not publicize in my experience , is that Mother Sayama was the number one student and appointed successor to U ba khin. There were some other people at the center who taught with her like U chit tin I believe, ( all from memory) and when I encountered them they blew my mind. When Sayama and u chit tin came to America to dedicate the pagoda in Maryland, i was there and met them. They were very sweet people with zero attitude. It was like being with nice grandparents who wanted to make sure you were happy, well fed and getting along. What's not to like?
They faithfully taught what u ba khin had taught down to the schedule and discourses. Every single student got a personal interview daily and new students twice daily. Sayama made a big deal out of pacing yourself, that you need to rest you body and mind, do exercise, eat nourishing food, be totally supported. For example, my teacher in the retreat I just completed, told me, If you need to speak with me at 3:30 am, please knock on my door.
I have never had such a sense of being loved and supported at a retreat.
The teachers are all carefully selected and have considerable background in teaching.
Every single interview, Craig would ask us, Do you need anything? Do you have any questions that are not being addressed? How could we be more supportive of you now and after the retreat? If at any time you need anything or have any questions, just ask the teacher or a staff member.
They take a max of 30 students each retreat. They do the retreats 6 times a year. The location is rural, very beautiful and except for the wind and birds, silent. The meals consist of the best vegetarian food I have ever tasted, all you want.
In short, really a pleasant experience for one who is doing the work of inquiry and calming the mind.
There is no hero, guru worship of Sayama, U ba khin. They are teachers and nothing more. And as they make it clear, they are teaching householders, not monks. They suggest that by doing the practice you will go as far as you need to go. Don't forget, when Sayama turned up to do her 10 day retreat with u ba khin, she reached sotipanna the first day, the next stage on day two and so on. 
Regarding Sayama, I will just comment that goenka, ruth denison, hover, and others in this tradition were twice removed from u ba khin. She was not only closest to him but essentially as close to him and his work  as we are going to find  possible following his death in my opinion.
All of these teachers respected her. She criticized Ruth Denison for deviating from the teachings of u ba khin and there was a split there. I do not know about the others but I can say that they are very careful to preserve his approach to teaching and practice. When I was with Ruth Denison I noticed that she was a lot more friendly, supportive and encouraging of women then men. As a Jew I was also turned off when she spoke lightly of her time in the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany. Compared to the Sayama people, she definitely had her own way and the further it got from the way u ba khin taught, the more Sayama let her know that she had to make a choice on how to teach.
For over 40 years I have never really been successful with anapanna which some people seem not to take too seriously. This last retreat I spoke repeatedly with the teacher and finally, finally got what the Buddha, according to his sutta teachings on this, intended. Then things dramatically changed for me. A lot of it involved my understanding of the three in one ( Buddha teaching us to be aware of the inbreathing, outbreathing and sensations at or near the tip of the nose) as well as ekaggata of the sensation of the breath. when I got what they were trying to teach then all the suttas made sense and my anapanna was much strengthened.  Maybe for others this is simple but it wasn't for me and for the longest time I didn't even know what questions to ask. Of course, for a long time I had no teacher who was available to dialogue with me on these things.
Also, with the vipassana I have been learning so much each sitting. I am learning how to be with the experience without injecting " my own crap" however subtly into the process or at least less so than before.
Each sitting is totally new and often I find that like much of life, sitting can become mechanical. "Oh, well, time to sit again."The sittings that I dread and really would rather not "endure" then turn out to be the most powerful.
So that is my two cents for now.
BTW, I mean no disrespect for the path or teachers of anyone else. If I have inadvertently done this, I ask your forgiveness.
Also, and this is very important, I do not consider myself a Buddhist. I am just another bundle of kalapas who sits and observes what arises and falls away. I am not interested in attaining anything. I just sit and go on with my life.

Hey Hershl,
Thank you so much for coming here so promptly and offering this precious testimony to the community. And expanding on your practice as well...
I warmly second most of your views about the U Ba Khin lineage, but I would not place Goenka on par with the western teachers, who were authorized to teach after very few retreats, when Goenka spent 14 years (more or less sporadically) learning from U Ba Khin and from Sayamagyi. Anyway...
My own bundle of kalapas rejoices reading you!
This thread, which comments on Daniel Stuart biography of Goenka, evokes Sayamagyi and might be of interest to you
much metta
smiling stone

HI, smiling stone
I spoke today with a man who just returned from the retreat at IMC-USA Maryland that I attended.
He had previously sat two retreats with Goenka students. He shared with me why he was turned off by the Goenka world. He said, It is a path that attracts type A personalities, true believers, those who are so serious and unyielding that it drives away many well intentioned students.

Our teacher, Craig, has been with Sayama since the sixties. He sat a co-taught course with Sayama and Goenka in Calcutta in the early seventies. The majority of the IMC teachers spent many years with Sayama.
Craig told me of spending time at IMC Rangoon in the sixties and of studying with Sayama and other great u ba khin teachers there.
It must be clearly understood that Goenka for all his greatness, and he was a great teacher, was secondary to Sayama. She was, as it were, his boss in the U Ba Khin hierarchy as established by U Ba Khin. Goenka had great reverence for her. He also acknowledged that she was his superior in dhamma experience. At some point, I do not know the details, there was a diverging of ways. Sayama insisted and her courses insist, that the teaching is not non-sectarian. It is Theravadin Buddhist.
Also, it is a path of compassion, love, doing everything possible to support the student.
This is not a path of pledge sittings where you must not move a muscle, where you are forbidden to ask certain questions, where you must elevate the guru. Where some students ,myself included, wondered if I had wandered into a vipassana North Korea.
Goenka was a simple man who did what all of us are doing: attempting to emulate the Buddha dhamma path. Yes, he did spend many years, sporadically as you honestly write, with U ba khin and Sayama. But in the end he changed some of the teachings and they parted ways. This does not lessen his contribution. It does put it into perspective.
None of us can know what others have truly accomplished in their lives and practices.
U Ba Khin taught Buddhism in practice. He was not non-sectarian. He welcomed all people form all backgrounds and respected all ways. However, he always spoke and taught from a Theravadin Buddhist perspective. And so did Sayama. Goenka over the years moved away from this.
​​​​​​​And by their fruits you shall know them.

Hi Hershl,
Thanks for continuing sharing stories and thoughts, it is much appreciated. I don't know what a type A personality is, but from what you say, I would not want to be one... hum... Yes, more anecdotes about Craig, he seems like a really interesting fellow and you don't tell that much besides his pedigree... The Stuart book (Goenka: an emissary of insight) goes a long way into explaining the reasons behind Goenka straying away from theravada. He needed that to establish the tradition in India, and it was not acceptable by Sayamagyi (that's the gist of it).
Believe it or not, I've seen compassionate ATs in the Goenka tradition, but the North Korea simile has some meat to it nevertheless. That's why I tried to share my ongoing understanding of the technique here, in a non confrontational way outside the borders of North Korea, for the benefit of some interested beings, hopefully... and to my own benefit of course!
" He was not non-sectarian": that line made me laugh! I get what you mean: he was a buddhist, as was Sayamagyi, steeped in their culture.
Best regards
smiling stone

Also, many people (old students or people curious about the scanning) are looking for scanning instructions. The best ones I've found are from Ayya Khema. They last one hour and are on the same pace as the Vipassana sit on day 4 of the retreat. She spent a few weeks at IMC in the sixties and probably learnt it there (my guess), so it's also connected to U Ba Khin. She has a lot of scans on dharmaseed, with very little variations (some are more geared toward shamatta, some more toward insight, but it's mainly noticeable in the explanations afterwards -which are also interesting-)
Here it is:
Sweeping Technique, Part-by-Part (Ayya Khema)

I'm appreciating having a serious thread about the Goenka tradition and practices here. This is helpful and informative, especially the history of the tradition and its acolytes.

Thanks, all.