I have thought about posting this on here for at least a year now but have been rather hesitant for a combination of reasons. I am here to say that I have finished 4th path when using the 4 path model. I feel like sharing it on here for a variety of reasons, some psychological, some as a personal reflection, and some because I’ve always wanted to share a glimpse of my story somewhere with people that may understand. I have moved through the world of meditation largely on my own for the past 7 years and would like to share my experience to a community of understanding folks. The best place to get a glimpse of what my first 5 years on the path looked like can be found at this link (my only other post on this site):
https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/6344425 I would also say with confidence that after bouncing around these meditation retreats during the spring/summer of 2017 when the above was posted, third path had been completed. The rest of this post will not make much sense without reading the link above. I do not want to go back through and reexplain what is mentioned in the previous post so I will instead add in little parts I didn’t discuss there and build from there:
1)The post was written in a very hectic mental state after just finishing a 28 day retreat at Panditarama Burma, and then a 21 day at Chom Tong, Thailand. Prior to this I was a frequent visitor to the Goenka retreats for 4 years, which were very beneficial, but became my spot of meditation more for convenience during the latter 2 years.
2)After a few years and the dust settling, what I refer to as stream entry in the post and comments may very well have been the first A&P. I sometimes wonder if this experience in my life even fits smoothly in the format of the stages outlined but that’s a different topic of conversation. Regardless, the completion of first path certainly came on the last day on a Goenka retreat in the summer of 2013.
3)For the years 2-5 I was solely focused on insight practice on and off retreat. This was after first path and before finishing third path on the multiple retreats of 2017. Everything revolved around the 3 characteristics on retreat, during at home meditations, and daily life. It was intense to say the least. I would meditate off retreat like my life depended on it. I became a renunciate of anything I found enjoyable in life because I concluded that I was not yet wise enough to handle engaging in pleasantries appropriately. I had heard others on the journey step through a phase of renunciation. I gave up on a lot: friends, family, relationships, all to fit in more time to meditate. Whenever there was time off I made an at home meditation retreat type of setup where I sat next to the boiler in my basement to drown out the noise of the family upstairs. There was almost no time given to psychological health or even metta practice for these few years and the internal world was rather dark.
4)The conclusion of third path came at the end of an intense bout of nonstop meditation for 3 days and nights straight at the request of the teacher. This point is where the story from the previous post ends and the new bits in this current post pick up.
5)I haven’t been on this page in a while but when I was I noticed people on here discuss practice in very technical terms with a strong focus on the 5 sense doors, mainly physical sensations like speed of vibrations, etc. Personally, I have always been a very thought and emotion focused person so naturally those were often the sensations that were explored in practice. I would usually hold a loose focus on an anchor like the abdomen or the pulsating near the nostrils and let the mind drift away a bit and try to follow it and see the 3 characteristics in all of it.
6)I also have never been keen to study the maps and theory of the practice any more than I needed to remain sane and give me enough to work with on retreat so I don’t have the same type of knowledge that I have seen others come here with. I have experienced quite a bit but never found any use in trying to figure out what the name or title of the thing that I experienced was.
7)After the 2017 retreats it was a very important turning point beyond that of paths because I made my psychological health a more important part of my practice after a few discussions had in the post linked above. A great resource for me was Pragmatic Morality from Noah D (thank you):
https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/63634608)I felt as if the intensity with which I practiced on retreats in the summer of 2017 gave me a lot of momentum moving forwards. I cycled more times than I can remember from the darker stages all the way to the moment where everything just cut out and time stopped.
9)I did a loving kindness retreat at the start of the summer of 2018 at IMS with Michelle McDonald which was a really great addition to the practice. I had been working on the metta part of the practice for the last year and this was exactly what I was looking for. It set me up very well for another retreat a month later…
10)Prior to going to Chom Tong in 2018 for a second time I was actually offered a dream job, if and only if I was willing to remain in the area for the period of time I was scheduled to go to Thailand. The job involved working with people from 60+ different countries on a daily basis and involved being paid to go to some of those countries. I was also able to simultaneously finish up my grad program on the side. As a testament to my commitment to the practice, without even hesitating, I turned down the job. There was no way in hell I would skip the retreat for the year even with the knowledge that I had the metta retreat that summer as well. (In the end they were either bluffing or needed the services I provided. I went on the retreat and still got the job lol)
11)I went back to Chom Tong, Thailand in the summer of 2018 and it was a completely different ball game. The focus was not on attainment but on complete and unconditional loving acceptance with an unwavering understanding of the 3 characteristics in every moment of my experience. It felt very playful like there is absolutely nothing that could arise that I could not accept. No part of the cycles through the stages shook me (I say “me” here in the practical sense for ease of description). No part of the dark night shook the unwavering acceptance. Noting liking, disliking, sadness, happiness, pain, contemplating, wondering, rising, falling, they were all on the same playing field. It was different because the understanding that striving or attaining anything else was not needed. I had often tried to attain something prior to this with occasional pauses at certain stages in cycles but this time the understanding that even within the cycles there is no need to want anything else. This understanding emanated to my very core. The acceptance was so all encompassing and even playful. It felt rather fun and like the struggles I used to experience of not accepting felt so small and childish. This kept on building over several days. Then everything cut out, no time, no self, no other, no awareness. When I came back to I knew that was it. That was the end. I’ve experienced many of these blips in consciousness over the years where it feels like everything just disappears and comes back, but the after effects after this time were different. It was 2 years ago so I could not describe it in with the same clarity as I could before. I went through the remainder of the retreat on this very neutral high.
12)Then the psychological mind kicked in and the doubts started coming. Prior to this I had built a strong belief of what the experience of reaching this point would be like. Over the years I convinced myself that it would be a stable state of accepting and a life without problems that could phase me in the day to day. A part of me always knew that this was not true and that all of life’s struggles would not magically disappear once I reached this point, but I also knew I needed to create this grand mirage to keep the motivation to practice as strong as possible. If I had known what things would be like after the fact I probably wouldn’t have been as motivated to meditate as intensely as I did or sacrifice as much as I did to get there. When I came down off of the high of that shift in perception there was a lasting change but not all my life problems were erased like I had convinced myself would happen. It was not a pill my psychological mind wanted to take. I needed to keep up this lie until this point to keep the engines going at full blast. Because of this created story line I questioned whether what I had reached had actually been the conclusion of 4th path. I told myself that there is no need to get sucked into another story line and that if it was the real deal it would stick around with time but for now it was better to just brush it off and keep practicing.
13)I kept up the practice and the next year I went to the forest refuge at IMS in the summer of 2019. The cycles picked up and there was very little about them that felt like uncharted territory. It all felt very familiar. Like I have walked the path from start to finish and now I am just walking back along the same path. I heard a quote once that practice shifts from vertical growth to horizontal growth. There was something about this that I resonated with. I kept on meditating with acceptance, cycling (but not in a way that I felt like I was being taken on a journey like before but rather just noticing it all unfolding on its own and my job was to just get out of the way and watch). I still wasn’t exactly sure what was going on so I did something I would usually never spend precious retreat time doing and that was go look at some books. I picked up a Manual of Insight by Mahasi Sayadaw and flipped through it for a bit. I came across a story of two monks who are arahats. I don’t remember all the details but the main thing I got from the story is that they both went on retreat for an extended period of time. One of them got stuck thinking about some random thing while the other did not and was able to get back to the highs of 4th path (I don’t remember the exact terminology, review maybe). Anyways the point was that THE HIGH DOES NOT LAST. Yes there is a shift but meditation does not fix all of life’s problems as I had convinced myself it would. That’s when I realized that what I had experienced the year before was fruition of 4th path as I had initially thought and a state of reviewing my whole journey began. In meeting with the teacher she used the word disorienting as a common experience around now and I couldn’t have explained it any better than that. Disorienting.
14)It has now been a year since then and I’ve done a couple smaller at home retreats and it all seems to hold water.
Note: I know I haven’t really gone into a lot of the rudimentaries of the practice like the specifics of vibrations, figure-ground reversals, etc. and that’s largely because I talked about it a bit in the post I linked to above and also because I don’t know a lot of the technical terminology. My whole philosophy was meditate, meditate, meditate. I only learned enough of the technical verbiage to keep going in the practice without losing my mind. That leaves a lot of meditative experiences that I don’t really have a name for.
Note: Also I speak in here largely as you would in day to day life. I would rather not go through an in depth discussion of non-self every time I use the word “I”. I’m not writing a book here so I’m taking the practical route for the sake of simplicity.
In sum I have spent 8 years on this journey using meditation as the tool to walk the path for 7, meditated in retreat centers for ~137 days, which does not include 10 days volunteering/meditating at a Goenka center or the days spent in at-home retreats which are too many and varied to count. I have done formal sitting (and on occasion walking) meditation off retreat on average 2-3 hours every day for the past 6 years straight (ranging from 1 hour to 9 hours per day). I have practiced in the Theravada tradition with teachers out of the Goenka tradition, Panditarama in Burma, Chom Tong in Thailand (shout out to Mohammad, a great no bullshit teacher who will put you in your place and be there for you if you start spinning out), IMS (once in the main center for a metta retreat and once in the forest refuge). I was supposed to go to IMS for another metta retreat this summer, but everything was shut down due to covid and I camped out in the woods and did the online version of the retreat instead. I also have a great deal of gratitude to the MCTB book as it was one of the best guides off retreat that I could find. I took this practice with such intensity and bounced around different teachers and centers that I have felt isolated from the different meditation communities I visited. However, it was the intensity with which MCTB leads with and a glimpse into this online community that was enough to remind myself that there are others out there who practice in the way that I do. I was never involved on here but it was enough just to know there are others out there.
I’m not all that sure where I am on the journey now and that’s ok. I’m fairly certain of where I am not.
My goals have shifted to more externally focused to spend time in areas I put off to an extent for several years like family life, friendships, relationships, working out, academics, work. I’ll be starting a PhD program in a month to become a counseling psychologist so that will certainly take some time out of my schedule. I am still meditating daily and doing some at home retreats, but it’s certainly not with the same intensity as before. That’s my story. For now, I’ll probably just fade back into the periphery of the meditation communities as I have for the majority of this journey.
