7th? While 8th path review mastery s truly real. It requires pinpoint renunciation of every aspect of the visual field that is stuck in gear. It's like coming to put a car in neutral to coast down a hill. 


Like I was saying though. If your micro-fractalist you may not notice 7th path review. For me it hints at the most fun you could ever have on a skateboard including the cyborg arms you get after broken bones. 

So in my activity my 7th path review was only implied.

Edit. And skateboards still seem like an edgy form of transpirtation

I am not yet at 8th path mastery

What model do you use that have more than four or five paths?

Daniel says there can be more than four paths. I don't know. Why were you asking?

Edit. I still really haven't found inner peace about the world. So I try to help any way I can. My paths are not a trophy, just one way to assess my troubles 

If we are talking about Theravada model then there are four paths and that is it.
For all intents and purposes 4th is the final enlightenment and I think it is more than safe to say almost no one attained it. I even strongly doubt that there are that many people that can possibly attain it as it requires specific attitude which not that many sentient beings have.

MCTB does portrait 4th path as eventual conclusion of hard practice but I disagree with it and rather lean toward notion found in the original teachings that say it can take one many lifetimes worth of practice and accumulating merit. In other words this is something that is available only for some people who actually need it as your average Joe does not.

What Daniel considers 4th path might actually be 1st path. How would you know? How Daniel would know? Being distracted by fancy experiences and labeling them as an "attainment" is way too easy. In the end even Daniel would agree his "4th path" is the first real attainment he had and which gave him real peace of mind. Does labeling it as 1st path removes anything from this realization and change beyond making it less marketable? Buddha kept Stream Enterers in very high regards. Having "blip"s does not justify his praise, not at all. Go figure...

My experience is that the sub concious is way more complex than most people want to admit. Paths or not 

Which original teachings? Which teachings are original?

To those that find being reborn however many times attractive, I say really get to know animals and their behavior. At the very least you will have a companion.

Traditional Buddhist schools were very strict when it comes to attainments. Most effects which are considered attainments here would be dismissed and something to be wary of rather than considered paths.

Buddha's path is a way of embracing insanity, in it's purest forms. Jesus says, "only a corrupt generation asks for a sign" yet he himself had to battle with his own demons.

Main issues that people have and do meditative practices to resolve, even if they are not aware of it, have more to do with poorly constructed mind with a lot of contradictions and ignorance regarding how to use mind, what things yield good results and what result in suffering. Demons here are these nature forces which appear to have their own mind and hide inside mind behind seemingly unpenetrable barriers which feel more like there is no more mind space on the other side and things which should not be experienced. As such they typically are completely untouchable and I would argue something we have no good way of dealing with when mind itself is in state in which it cannot deal with itself and its own organisational issues.

It's a long road to healing, demons or no. I was referencing the traditions of the desert fathers and mother's.

There is no attainer there anyway, so why bother with semantics? 

How so?

It isn't Polly's normal M.O., but it seems to be short hand for "you don't actually exist, anyway, so why are we buggering on about the details on this?"

Yet, like the zen master of the anecdote - pinch her nose, and she'll feel it. ;) 

Huh? No, I meant that there is no reason to argue whether or not somebody has attained something, because there is never any individual who attains anything anyway. It is awareness waking up to itself. 

If you have scientific mindset then getting knowledge about topic of study is the highest value and does not require additional conditions to make it so.

BTW. I do not subscribe to all this nonsense about there being no self.
Anatta means merely that nothing you can point your mental finder is the self. Ultimately there are more your selves you can possibly count. If by applied right effort even one single random atom in the universe gets to experience enlightenment then this effort is worth the highest praise.

Of course when your house is burning then you won't stop to analyze intricacies of state of matter of plasma. If your house is not on fire but you are deluded it is then you won't stop to analyze anything either.

I can respect scientists.

I am a scientist. The empirical kind.

Imho this is the being, the self/doer, that we have to work with here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZh0A-lWSmY

There are many more layers to our beings and those beings who apparently have nothing better to do in their existences than to ponder about all the intricate natures or reality will be compelled to investigate and discover them all. Even if main driving factor for this human is knowledge itself may this knowledge be beneficial to all sentient beings.

We construct a doer because we cling to a continuity and a separation that doesn't exist. The construction exists, sure, in every moment when it is constructed, but the construction can never attain awakening. It's a mirage.  Awakening isn't something that is attained. It can't be achieved or contained. 

Put me in this camp.

"No self" (I disavow that term and much prefer the more accurate "Not Self") get's interpreted in a very radical un-Buddhist-like way far too often. There is a self. There are selves. They just aren't what we typically assume them to be. They are creations of mind, impermanent, unsatisfactory, and.... not us.

I'm wondering how you would articulate what happens to us. There is very clearly awake and not-awake.

I'd say that the constructions are seen through, including the constructions of ourselves as separate and continuous entities with agency, but it's not the construction that does it. To the extent "I" have waken up, If SE counts at all, it isn't really "me" that has woken up. I just find it absurd to think of it that way, as something that I should have attained. It happened despite me and all my selfing. It's a mercy bestowed upon "me" in the midst of delusion, by noone, because for some reason or no reason it was bound to happen and all of the play of awareness intersecting with the me-construction just led up to it. 

You are all welcome to use whatever words make most sense to you, of course. They are all just approximations and we (the constructions that think they do something) do the approximations from different angles, like those monks in that parable/metaphor, the blind ones that have gotten hold of different parts of an elephant and try to describe it.

I don't think it can really be described in any accurate way, because language - any language - is based on separation. 

Daniel says in many of his interviews that his experience is that he has no agency whatsoever. I'm definitely not there yet, but I have had glimpses that have led me to question the agency that I still often subjectively experience. His wordings make sense to me. Then of course it would be ridiculously longwinded and complicated never to use pronouns or active verbs when we talk about our practice or about anything that is part of narrative experience, and the selfing continues as far as I can see. Anyway, I think Daniel would do a much better job than me in explaining agencylessness, both because he knows it so much better and because he is good with words and paradoxes/non-paradoxes and navigating between modes of understanding in a way that others can follow. 

So... I can't speak for anyone else, but I have attained nothing. 

That link kind of blew my mind.

My best day still on record was the day I saw through the illusion of Stream Entry. Better than drugs. Better than any higher path. Why? It was just a good day,

Edit: today is a pretty good day too! In general...

Something happens. That part cannot be ignored. If you can't even begin to describe it then it hasn't happened. I'm not saying it is an attainment that a constructed person achieves. 

That is something I agree with. And I think we both agree that cessations are essential to whatever happens (unlike Ni Nurta if I understood correctly from another thread).

Edited to add: However, it seems to be described differently by people who aren't familiar with what to look for according to the theravadan tradition, and therefore they didn't frame the cessation as something important. That doesn't mean that nothing happened. 

Do traditional models actually have five paths?

In Mahayana you have five paths.
This model have also ten bhumis and bhumi to path relation is:
1st bhumi - 3rd path
2nd to 7th bhumi - 4th path
8th to 10th bhumi - 5th path

Bhumis are something only Bodhisattvas need to concern themselves with.

I think I made it through some kind of a&p.

7th path seen from my current perspective seems like maybe a seventh life rather than a seventh path. We'll see how it plays out.

Edit, I also am questioning the whole notion of perfect pitch.