Once, I brought this up to U Vivekananda after a frosty encounter with U Pandita. The German monk said. “Never argue with Sayadaw. He simply can’t tolerate it.”

Yes, there is another way to explain it. The three trainings (morality, concentration, and insight) are all separate, and you can be advanced in one but not others.

The Sayadaw here was advanced in insight but perhaps not in morality. Possibly the culture he grew up in was more authority-based than reason- and debate-based, or maybe something about his upbringing led him to dislike being questioned (karma! Cause and effect!)

I think of enlightenment as being like any other skill. Like bowling. We're not surprised when a great bowler is an alcoholic abusive asshole - why should we be surprised when a great meditator is one?

You can be very "attached to self" in the psychological sense of maintaining a certain self-image, and still see no-self of all phenomena in the meditation sense. They are two completely different things.

Enlightenment is just a perceptual change. It changes things so you no longer experience sensations dualistically. But you still keep your personality, quirks, and neuroses.

For a lot more on this, see Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, by Daniel Ingram. It talks a lot about this.

J CIt does reduce emotional pain, but it doesn't eliminate it entirely.

There are many reasons someone could react poorly to being challenged. Maybe he thought Ken was being disrespectful and so it would be appropriate to be harsh with him. Maybe it was a teaching technique. Maybe it was just a habit. No one is perfect, not even fully enlightened people.

Bhante Vimalaramsi is an American monk who was ordained in Northern Thailand in 1986 at the age of 40. He left the USA to seek awakening through meditation in the early 80's and decided to let go of all of his material possessions. Before this starting in 1974 he engaged in Vipassana courses in California and even lived and worked at a meditation center in San Jose, California to 1977.

Bhante Vimalaramsi has studied with many famous teachers in Asia. Among them are Venerable U Pandita, U Lakkhana, U Silananda, U Janaka, U Dhammananda, U Dhammapia and he met Mahasi Sayadaw. He further studied with The Mingun Sayadaw, who had memorized the entire Tripitaka and Sayadaw U Thatilla. Other teachers he spent longer periods of time with were the late Most Ven K Sri Dhammananda, Venerable Punnaji, Ajahn Yanitra, Ajahn Buddhadasa, Ajahn Cha Lee, and Ajahn Santititho.

Bhante practiced Vipassana very intensely his first 20 years under an American teacher and in Burma, under U Pandita and U Janaka. Finally around 1990 he was told that he had achieved the endpoint of the practice, as it was taught by the Sayadaws, and now he should go teach. He didn't feel comfortable that he had really found the end of suffering. He felt he did not have the true personality change that awakening should bring, even after going through the 16 levels of Insight or knowledges, as outlined by Mahasi Sayadaw in Progress of Insight.

Changing Direction
From 1991 to 2000 he dedicated himself to "direct experience through study of the suttas and meditation practice". At first he stayed with K. Sri Dhammananda in Malaysia and taught Metta meditation. Then he had a real change in direction with his meeting of a Sri Lankan senior monk, Bhante Punnaji, also in Malaysia. His advice was to ‘study the suttas directly and to let go of relying on commentaries like the Visuddhi Magga'. Specifically he said, ‘Read only the suttas, then practice'. This was very significant because the commentaries were influencing how he was seeing the entirety of the Dhamma, at the time. It was suggested to put them aside while he studied the suttas as a standalone system. Nanavira in the early sixties, suggested this and then Stephen Batchelor also talked about just using only the suttas in his book "A Buddhist Atheist".

When Bhante began to do this, he discovered first hand, the interwoven nature of the Teachings. In each sutta he found the elements of the 4 Noble Truths, the 8-Fold Path, and the impersonal process of Dependent Origination. Dependent Origination or Paticcasamupada is the core of the Buddha's teachings. He realized that the word sutta literally meant "thread" and that the threads together, created a finely woven cloth, whereas, one single thread does not equal a cloth! Through his own objective first hand experience, the 8-Fold Path began to come alive. When he realized the secret of the teachings was on his doorstep he took the Majjhima Nikaya to a cave in Thailand and spent 3 months, living with a cobra as company, reading and then practicing just what the suttas said. In very little time, he said, he had gone deeper in his meditation, than ever before. What started as two weeks to study suttas turned into three months of deep practice. Out of this was born TWIM or Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation completely based on the suttas in the Majjhima Nikaya. He found the Jhanas had an entirely different explanation and experience. Nibbana was possible!

Don't argue with Daniel either, or else he will write a 24,000 word response with academic rigor. 

That said, Jim, how do you expect a perfectly awake person to behave?

I don't understand. How does that give any credibility to that guru you keep quoting?

Can you explain what his view is?

I don't have a definition of enlightenment.  I am trying to understand how other people define it so I can figure out if I want to follow their practices to get it.

The Surprising Thing I Learned From Studying My Brain With Meditation Technology For 7 Days
...
Well the scientists who developed this technology studied the brainwaves of many remarkable people. Billionaires, intuits, creatives, monks and mystics.

What they found was that when you meditate using these methods, your brain takes on the same patterns as someone who has spent 21 to 40 YEARS in Zen meditation.
...
The equipment we were hooked up to would beep different sounds based on the brainwaves we were producing. And during our sessions, we were told to increase our alpha wave production.
...
But what was most surprising was the method we were learning to increase our alpha waves.

It was just ONE thing. And we spent 7 full days focusing on it.

Forgiveness.
...

Dave Asprey says that when you start forgiving, you become “unf*ckwithable”.

He sent this to me in a text message after the training.

Well, U Pandita had forgiveness covered - if you read on, Kenneth saw the error of his ways and U Pandita forgave him!

That sounds like marketing copy - I'm skeptical that a machine could give you the equivalent of decades of meditation in a week.

As far as "nothing anyone says or does bothers you and no negativity can touch you" - that's an ideal that is not possible for a human being, and the attempt to emulate it leads to repression and shadow sides.

Besides, how do you know U Pandita was bothered by it? Maybe he just thought being "frosty" was the appropriate response. Maybe Kenneth was actually being rude and disrespectful. We only have one side of the story.

Even if nothing bothered you, that doesn't necessarily mean you'd always react in a super nice loving way. Maybe sometimes it's appropriate to throw tables around and smite fig trees like Jesus, or chop off students' fingers or hit them with sticks like Zen monks.

I haven't read the whole book yet, so I'm not sure if the author reflects on those incidents any further, but I did read the context around the quote, and I'm inclined to think I got it right, that U Pandita was just trying to get the desired effect in his student.

Enough people replied explaining that advanced stages of enlightenment don't make you a nice person or end suffering that I think the point stands on it's own without requiring U Pandita as evidnece.

No one here is arguing enlightenment cures you of unpleasant emotions. My point is that there are other forms of Buddhism that probably do a better job of easing suffering than the stages of insight. The examples I gave are Bhante V. and Zen.

I am not trying to denigrate the stages of insight or the enlightenment they produce. But I think it is useful for people to know that if you are practicing Buddhism because you want to reduce suffering, there might be better forms of practice to accomplish that.

Sterling,

I don't dispute what you are saying.

But my concern is that if a practice won't prevent someone from becoming a mean old man then I am not interested in it. There might be other people who feel the same way so I am posting here about it.

Part of the reason I want to "end suffering" is because when I am suffering, (angry etc) it affects other people too. My interest in meditation is partly easing my own discomfort, but it is also partly spiritual development - developing my personality to reflect my spiritual values such as compassion, goodwill, forgiveness, tolerance, equanimity etc.

My spiritual beliefs do not include the belief that enlightenment is necessary to end reincarnation and is also the end of all spiritual devleopment.

The way I am practicing is doing what I want it to do, if it's not Buddhism that's okay with me.

But my concern is that if a practice won't prevent someone from becoming a mean old man then I am not interested in it. There might be other people who feel the same way so I am posting here about it.

Part of the reason I want to "end suffering" is because when I am suffering, (angry etc) it affects other people too. My interest in meditation is partly easing my own discomfort, but it is also partly spiritual development - developing my personality to reflect my spiritual values such as compassion, goodwill, forgiveness, tolerance, equanimity etc.

I do agree that awakening takes away the identifying with the suffering, though - to some extent; I think most realized people would not be able to just not identify with being tortured, for instance.

Well, very simply, I reserve the right to return fire in kind and approximate degree, and much of what I have responded to with that sort of point-by-point rhetorical force typically matched in some way the approximate length and force of the original within 50% or so.

Further, if you wish to argue in long-form critical pieces with me and attempt to tear down my work, I would highly recommend doing your homework, as much of what I have responded to was laughably easy to tear down, as their rhetoric not only was typically of surprisingly poor quality, they typically don't bother to even fully read and parse things like MCTB2, which was already built to respond to much of the criticism mentioned.

Speaking of rhetoric: learn something about it beyond just the level of an internet troll on steroids. Rhetoric in the grand old sense is clearly something of a lost skill, including in those who have thought it would be easy to step into the ring with one who obsesses about this sort of thing, as I do.

I do actually enjoy something in the sport of these long-form exchanges, in the spirit of rhetorical MMA, and do appreciate those few who really are able to hold up to a few hits and return some good ones in the process, and then we both get to learn something and grow, and even come to respect each other.

In this thread

...

...

I'll add that I heard Ken McLeod, who I greatly admire, recently suggest that dukkha not be translated as "suffering", but instead as "struggle". Speaking for myself, this makes a LOT more sense. 

Hi, Martin. Glad to have piqued your interest. There's a very good book written by a long-time lay student of V. Vimalaramsi. It's called _The Path to Nibbana_. I don't think it's a perfect book, but it is very good in that it does a great job of describing the core practice. All that is needed is some provisionary belief that it could work, enough to see that it actually does work.

https://library.dhammasukha.org/uploads/1/2/8/6/12865490/the_path_to_nibbana__d_johnson_f18.pdf

The key idea is, when you are distracted from contemplation of whatever wholesome feeling is there at the moment, the distraction is due to craving, and craving manifests as physical tension. So relax. Feel the relief from having let go of the craving. Smile. Go back to the object.

Just this has changed my life.

A clarification about Nirodha Samapatti: The word "nirodha" simply means "cessation". It is used with the qualifier "samapatti" to mean "The Cessation of Perception and Feeling", a very unusual accomplishment only available to very small subset of advanced meditators, those way out past Stream Entry with full access to formless realms who are at least anagamis and who can figure out how to translate those two impressive attainments into the even more impressive attainment of nirodha samapatti. The term "nirodha" is sometimes used to refer to fruitions, which are discussed in the Abhidhamma, and here is simply means "cessation". So, if there is ambiguity, it is typical to clarify what one means, but, in the discussion of stream enterers, as they are incapable of attaining to "nirodha samapatti", by convention we generally presume that "cessation" simply means "fruition" in stream enterers' cases. Link to thread 

For Nirodha Samapatti, it is actually by far the easiest of the various experiences to identify clearly, standing out strongly from all of the rest of them as it does:

Meditator: only anagamis and arahats with mastery of the formless realms and the ability to ride a strange line between samatha and vipassana with a high degree of balanced, tranquil, easy control can even think about attempting this, so it is already a strangely small crew. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of people that I personally know that I actually believe have attained to this. If you are not an anagami or arahat with strong technical mastery of jhana and insight, you haven't attained this, so you can remove it from your differential diagnosis. In fact, if you are asking the questions you are, it is pretty much guaranteed that you haven't attained this. The chances of most meditators attained this in their lifetime are so small that it is very rarely something to seriously consider as what might have occurred.

Setup: You rise with very light, easy effort up through the jhanas to the 8th jhana while mixing in about 30% insight. You come out, and, having resolved gently to attain to NS either when you started the rise before the 1st jhana or resolving now, you chill and do nothing. NS either happens within a minute or two or it doesn't, and most of the time it doesn't.

Entrance: Thoughts, body and consciousness itself vanish rapidly in an analogue fashion over less than a second. It is a total, dramatic power failure. This is easily distinguished from the Three Doors, as it involves none of these: rapid impermanence, something falling towards you, something falling away from you, or any other Door variant.

Thing itself: No experience, time, or anything at all. To a person watching, they appear still on their cusion or laying down or whatever posture they are in and will be hard to get to come out of it by external stimuli.

Exit: Exactly like the entrance but in reverse order, like consciousness and experience powering up again in a rapid analogue fashion. This is distinct from the restart after Fruition.

After-effects: The afterglow is heavy and powerful beyond reason and oddly long-lasting, typically lingering for 5-24+ hours, like one had taken some perfect drug that was at once highly chill but also produced a great deal of stable alertness. I think of this as what people are attempting when they mix uppers and downers, but the NS afterglow is perfect version vs what people typically get when they do that, which is at once muddled and edgy, whereas the NS afterglow feels, well, sublime, divine, incredibly right. No other attainment has an afterglow this good. It takes the top prize with no close competitors.

Fruition is also easy to identify in theory, but harder in practice, as there are lots of possible mimics, and it doesn't  have the extreme marks.

Meditator: One who has at least attained to Equanimity, Conformity, Change of Lineage, and Path insight stages the first time or is at least a Stream Enterer in Review. It doesn't occur to non-noble ones. So, the entrance criteria are vastly lower than NS.

Setup: One rises through the stages of insight to Equanimity and attained to Confromity Knowledge. So, one requires much less meditative skill and technical competence than for NS.

Entrance: Through one of the Three Doors, as describe in MCTB2. These are all quite different from the entrance to NS, which is analogue and doesn't involve the rapid presentation of the Three Characteristics in the same way as the Three Doors do.

Thing itself: Again, like NS, there is no time, space, consciousness, etc. To a person viewing them, they typically have their eyelids blink and then come out of it clear and seemingly normal if it last a very short time, or, if it lasts longer, they would view them as a still mediator on their cushion without obvious response to the outside world. So, externally, during Fruition that has duration to it or NS, the meditator will appear largely the same, though their breathing may be much slower in NS.

Exit: The mind restarts very rapidly clear and clean, fresh, bright, present, satisfied, like it has been reset and refreshed.

After-effects: This bright, clear, refreshed feeling typically lasts seconds to minutes and then fades rapidly, the major exception being the first time a path, particularly stream entry, is attained, after which the after-effects can be more dramatic and longer-lasting, but are nothing like the NS afterglow, which stands out as its own thing.

dDx (medical abbreviation for "differential diagnosis", meaning things that could mimic Fruition): a momentary blip into a formless experience, any state shift between one state or stage and another, the A&P, Dissolution, and some others. It is very, very common for people to think they have attained to a Fruition when, in fact, they have not. Probably 98% of people I talk with who are trying to determine if they have them don't at all meet the criteria, IMNHO. It is true that plenty of people are relatively poor phenomenologists, making sorting this out difficult, but it is still worth attempting.

Link to the thread

"Arhats never existed", 

Forgive my language if that sounds harsh. My English skills are not that good, and I'm a bit off lately as my mother passed away last weekend and my cell-phone crashed, so I was unable to communicate with loved ones until yesterday. 

What I read from that passage is that "he achieved the final result ... he had taken it to the limit and experienced all 16 ñanas", and that's Stream Entry, not 4th Path. Not that I'm saying that Vimalaramsi hasn't later achieved 4 Path or whatever he claims to have achieved. Just pointed out the time frame. Besides, had he achieved centerlessness, agencylessness, boundarylessness, directness, naturalness and automatic self-realization of all sensate phenomena, then it seems a little bit strange that he had to go through a Metta practice in order to relax tensions in the meninges. It's not far off to think that Vimalaramsi had achieved a path or two and then switched to other practices and/or developed his own stuff to wade through third and fourth path. In fact, this is the standard pattern that accomplished meditators in Pragmatic Dharma (PDh) circles said to have went through in order to reach 4th Path. The bottom line is, if you want to achieve what Vimalaramsi achieved, then it's not unwise to stick to Mahasi/PDh tools for the first one or two paths (as IMO they have a wider palette of techniques) and then later deepen in Vimalaramsi's Metta method.

Ah, I'm very sorry for your loss, and the extra anxiety of not being able to communicate. Thank you very much for your thorough answer.

Yes, there is another way to explain it. The three trainings (morality, concentration, and insight) are all separate, and you can be advanced in one but not others.

The Sayadaw here was advanced in insight but perhaps not in morality. Possibly the culture he grew up in was more authority-based than reason- and debate-based, or maybe something about his upbringing led him to dislike being questioned (karma! Cause and effect!)

I think of enlightenment as being like any other skill. Like bowling. We're not surprised when a great bowler is an alcoholic abusive asshole - why should we be surprised when a great meditator is one?

You can be very "attached to self" in the psychological sense of maintaining a certain self-image, and still see no-self of all phenomena in the meditation sense. They are two completely different things.

Enlightenment is just a perceptual change. It changes things so you no longer experience sensations dualistically. But you still keep your personality, quirks, and neuroses.

For a lot more on this, see Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, by Daniel Ingram. It talks a lot about this.

Pure gold terry. Or should I say ... unblemished silver (as I seem to recall that is your craft)  

   Paraphrasing the matrix:


Do not try to take the fork in the road, that's impossible; only try to realize the truth.

What is the truth?

There is no fork.

   Paraphrasing the matrix:


Do not try to take the fork in the road, that's impossible; only try to realize the truth.

What is the truth?

There is no fork.

Okay, Terry, you know I love you and will put up with any amount your antics, but when you start dissing YOGI FUCKING BERRA, when you fucking one-up a quote by YOGI FUCKING BERRA, when you act like you can top the wisdom of YOGI FUCKING BERRA, i have to say: not on MY watch, you [expletives of extraordinarily graphic nature deleted, per DhO forum rules. Censor has requested time off to recover from the trauma.]

love, tim

   Yogi didn't always say what he said.

   As a native new yorker, I was a diehard dodger fan who died and went to heaven in 1955. (bronx cheer)

t

Terry, you're not that old, you bluffer. (Ebbetts Field raspberry)



to bring this back to practice: "You can observe a lot by just watching."

love, tim


How can you get a hit and think at the same time?

~yogi berra