Tim Farrington:
Hi Bruno, and welcome to the Dharma Overground (DhO, as the shorthand here goes) sangha. I think you will be amazed at the range and depth of viewpoints on spiritual practice that you find here, and I see that you're already tapping into some of the best that I've found--- I hadn't been aware of the compilation of shargrol posts, and there's nothing better than that guy on Equanimity.
I notice that you don't mention the dark night with regard to this go-round. I'm not sure how up to speed you are on the specific vocabularies, although you seem fluent enough, and please forgive me if I belabor the obvious, until I'm more up to speed myself on your language and angles. Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (MCT) by Daniel Ingram, which is sort of the common language here at the spiritual tower of Babel for a lot of us here in DhO, with its vocabulary of the stages of insight rooted in Theravadan teachings, has the dark night as the phase preceding Equanimity (EQ). The knowledge of suffering that comes in the dark night (usually despite our best efforts to avoid it) can bee seen as a kind of fire burning up the bullshit, and we are less propelled into EQ by the night than we find ourselves watching it gently come into focus when the flames have done their work. The noise in our heads has burned up enough for us to begin to explore the quiet exquisiteness of EQ that shargrol elucidates so well. You said you had a long dark night experience following a no-self experience, so intense you "rolled up your mat," as they say. Now you are back practicing, with EQ in your sights, so I just wondered how you relate to the dark night stuff at this point.
This may be unskillful means, but I was struck by seeing your post about returning to practice at the same time that I was following someone else's thread, a guy who has pretty much decided to roll up his own mat after twelve years. The thread is at: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/19762950
I'm not trying to stir anything with a stick, but he did ask for words of wisdom, and given that you are on the other extreme of the same sine wave, i thought you might be interested.
Again, glad to have you in the mix here, amigo.
Hi Tim, thank you for your warm welcome. You're very kind.
To be honest, I wrote something for that thread before but deleted it because I thought that maybe I wasn't adding any value... but well, you encouraged me to do it so I wrote something and posted yesterday.
Yep, I read the book and I know generally the stages of insight so I'm able to speak in the same language.
Regarding Dark Night... I've been in the A&P + DN loop for a long time... I'm familiar with having spectacular no-self/unity/energetic/kundalini experiences and eventually after them feeling like shit because 'I lost' my awakening. Entering in loops of very dedicated practice, getting exhilarated by new findings and then periods of feeling worthless and depressive, sinking deep in meaninglessness.
But I think the step forward is learning not to grasp any more to any kind of experience.
I have to keep reminding me this every day and every night, because I'm so conditioned to project 'happiness' or 'enlightenment' (whatever you want to call the idealized state of consciousness) elsewhere but here & now. I now recognize all the ill will that was driving this conditioning... the ups and downs were even more agressive because of this... and now I'm into some kind of movement which is leading me to be more compassionate with myself, even with all the ups & downs and stupidity of chasing my own tail.
It's like seeing myself as a child, and being my own father, loving, kind and caring about my own faults. Restricting the child to stay quiet doesn't do any good, but letting the child wander way too far may be harmful.
So, I'm not really sure about how linear the Stages of Insight are... but I feel the time I wandered in this A&P / DN zone was way too long, and It's now moment to be more compassionate and learn to accept whatever is going on right here right now.
PD: I know my no-self experience wasn't stream entry because it wasn't preceded by equanimity. And after the no-self experience I had moments of equanimity, but generally it was just dark night and seeing how my "old self" and all my "ideas about the world" were completely fictitious and suffering like shit because of that. So yes, it was "knowledge of suffering" without any doubt.
