Live in the nowhere that you came from, even though you have an address here.

Rumi, in Coleman Barks's rendering

edit, 4/15.2020

Welcome to the Bar of Last Resort. If you have found your way here by accident, my advice is to run for the exit door, where you will be given a complimentary beverage of your choice for the wisdom of Not Starting. 

If you have unfortunately Started, for whatever misguided reasons, then better by far to finish, and drinks are on the house until all sentient beings are saved, because as the obviously slowest sentient boat afloat, i am doomed to be the last one out of this bar, and will be tending bar at various points, or at least taking the occasional dishwashing and janitorial shifts throughout, and will be available to serve drinks at any time if i can figure out how to pour them into a receptable that doesn't leak too much, and also not poison the person through unskillful means. I personally recommend getting someone else to make your drinks, as any patron of the Bar of Last Resort is cleared to bartend, merely by being in the place, and a number of these people pour with a very slow four-count, if you know what i mean, and i think you do, wink-wink. If you don't know what i mean, i mean that some of the drinks these fuckers pour . . . well, let's just say a little dab will do ya.

Our present primary bartender is Ludwig Wittgenstein, so take your language games directly to him. 

If you have come here from a purely morbid or personally-skin-in-the-game interest in spiritual carnage and meditation-related difficulties, the free drinks are two for one.

If you have been invited here, that was irresponsible on my part, and I apologize. Have a drink. All exit doors remain wide open at all times, by order of the Fire Marshall.

If you have come here because we are in a giant fight on another thread and i have asked you to take it outside, please identify yourself to the doorman as you enter. He or she will give you as many free drinks as you are willing to drink before sending you out into the alley behind the bar, where i will continue to do my best to tear you a new asshole.

This is also my Practice Log, from 4/13/20--- at some point, i started trying to distinctly indicate practice log entries with a first line heading.

For those interested in the present Ongoing Remedial Sesshin For Pre-Vipassana noting-practice for pre-beginners, and Bonus Journal of a Descent into Manic Psychosis While Hoping to Flatten the Curve, it begins somewhere on 4/13/20 below.

If you're here, really, for any reason at all, truly, God help you.

Namaste,
tim

January, 2020


Please forgive what must look like an excessively long and self-indulgent message here. I was looking for a balance between adequate context and succinctness, and seem to have erred on the side of context. For those who find their compassion and patience overtaxed at any point, you might be able to just skip right to the last paragraph for my actual request at its most succinct.

I first encountered DhO in 2011, after finding Daniel’s MCTB (first edition, then) and being astonished, energized, and inspired by its lucidity, precision, and no-bullshit brilliance. I knew he was the real deal, in a vanishingly rare way, and the book took its place on my crucial shelf with the works of John of the Cross and Bernadette Roberts, both Catholic contemplatives whose dark night terminology and spiritual maps are in theistic language of course (though Roberts goes well beyond John X to what she calls “No-Self,” and has inspired no end of handwringing among a certain set of modern day heresy-watchers). I had actually started out with Buddhism in my teens, and then Siddha Yoga, the Muktananda lineage, and it was in a Siddha Yoga kundalini-oriented ashram that I first found my way to John X, whose phenomenology of the dark night was the only thing that rang true to me for a very long time, no matter how many names God had. The Mushroom Factor in those days was even higher than it is now, and warning labels about inevitable horrors don’t help fill the seminar seats, of course. It is so wonderful how frankly Daniel addresses the genuine dangers of the night side of the path, and does nothing to minimize the real hazards.

Anyway, I am a fairly classic Chronic Dark Night Yogi. I have been a novelist for my working adult life, weaving my prayer practice with that, and tended to basically cycle through the night to equanimity, and then do what in retrospect looks to me like a kind of judo pivot move to use whatever moved at that point to reinvest the energy in whatever I was trying to write. That was attainment enough for me, for a long time, as a miserable sonofabitch working class slob writer (who also happened to be bipolar, which is its own educational path). I have been blessed by my karmic chickens coming home to roost in recent years, a series of perfect storms in all my circumstances that drove me back to the most fundamental practice, with a desire for liberation arising so purely in the extremes that I could even say “Fuck that art shit” at the crucial moments, and just stick with meditation. So my current practice is about three hours a day, in three sits, of a kind of body-breath-word technique, saturated with the Three Characteristics (transience and suffering are straightforward, even for an apophatic theist, and no-self comes in attentive practice, as your realize the body and breath and mind are doing all the work on their own).

Again, please forgive the protracted intro. My point is that I was recently inspired to re-order MCTB because I was thinking I was in something like equanimity. (The second edition is significantly better than the already-wonderful and useful first, like well-aging wine, and thank you Daniel for taking that trouble.) It started dawning with the realization that what I often think of as the night’s hellish burning is no longer painful, at some point during meditation. I follow sensations as they arise, and it is clearly the body that has “done” this quieting; the best I can do is not try too hard to “help.” It is like a master artisan doing a craft that requires tremendous experience, skill, precision, finesse, with a four-year-old sitting on her lap, “helping.” That the artisan can get it done anyway is astonishing and awesome in itself. But somehow it happens, and I am at the hatha yogic balance in the meditation asana, feeling the crux but without the sharpness of actual pain at the edge. If I think, as the four-year-old, that I have done this, I can try to continue “doing” it with an inevitably heavy hand, and begin to hurt again. If I think I have done it by following the movement of the breath, which is synced-up now, I seize up there too, stomping along behind with the lead-footed tread of self-control. So the first necessity here is the genuine realistic humility of letting the body and breath do this precision operation in the full and clear knowledge that it is just not mine to do. I cannot express the sense of simple relief, after hell: imagine years spent in a flame that suddenly doesn’t hurt. Gratitude is very frequent here, especially after prolonged pain and mental and emotional distress; and it is possible to cultivate some bliss here, though that takes work, and the bliss is empty enough to a dark-night-adjusted vision that it is relatively easy to let go of it and continue in prayer. (“Fuck that bliss shit.”)

It is like surfing along the edge of the pain, in its way: body and breath know precisely where the threshold is, and, impossibly, stay just ahead of it. The self can hurt, at this point, magnifying sensation as an act of will, just to feel oriented; or it can let this impossible thing the breath and body are doing continue, out of its control, somehow staying “ahead of” the pain without really understanding the cues that are keeping the process on track. It is surprisingly, revealingly hard to not just go to experiencing the pain, for the reliable familiarity of that feedback, and it takes real discipline to simply note the highly mobile, incalculably dynamic field of recurrent subtle sensation that is not pain here.

It is not a “glimpse,” it is a sustainable condition, in prayer, at least. What glimpses there are come with the occasional realization that if the state had content and context, something “to do,” (a mission from God: the Blues Brothers saying, Thy will be done), then . . . it would be doable. There is an intuition in it of a viable way to live, if only blah blah blah. But it is entirely without any specifics except what it takes to simply stay with it, body, breath, and word in sync and renewing. Spacing out just seems to deepen it, when I realize and return: breath and body are still there, often quieter than before if the return is skillful, and the feedback just gets subtler, often changing qualitatively, even to purely visual with no tactile dimension apparent, like lightning without thunder, though more usually it is like a number of distinct lightning flashes, and anticipating thunder after each, but only one thunder discernible at last, and that distant, and the lightning is already several thunderless flashes ahead by then; and attention, tuning to that subtler signal, grows gentler, less lead-footed and heavy-handed, as it feels it can. It is a knack, of sorts, distinctly learnable, through an evolving array of “forms” and presentation, each susceptible to various metaphors right up until I take the metaphor as predictive or determinative and it seizes up and I let it go. There is often a sense of a field of sensation, much less localized, and the changes arise as subtler ripples propagating through the field, in a way that is slow enough to follow without any sense of urgency whatsoever. It is doable, all of it, even through transitions where it seems impossible to sustain amid a high-speed, high-tempo “demand” on the attention that I know perfectly well is impossible to sustain at such a crazy frequency, on sheer physical and concentrative grounds. And yet if I stick with it all the way through into having no idea how, it continues to be doable. But all it seems to do is itself.

So two questions, I guess, as the desperate guy at the end of his rope that I am: 1) does this ring true as equanimity; and 2) (knowing that the answer in any case is probably “Stick with the practice”) any helpful advice? In all realism, I would have to say that I have not achieved stream entry in any form that I can recognize in retrospect, when all is said and done. I have cycled through everything else up to this stage of insight from what seems like every direction and angle, and the states are replicable in the simplest sense. But I have no traction whatsoever on the good stuff. So this is the most remedial possible equanimity prior to stream entry, prior to first path, is my best guess. Help?
 
thank you for your patience, attention, and kindness, Tim F.