| 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 |