Yay! Stay safe.

I missed the Chenrezig practice group today because I had totally forgotten that Sweden had changed back to ordinary time. So much for thinking that I woke up earlier than usual, lol. However, I was doing my own practice about the same time, and that felt good, so it's okay. It's not a practice that I'm focusing on anyway. I just really like the vibes in that group. It makes me feel that I love people, and I guess I have an attachment to that feeling. Thanks to trying to be in time for that group and finding out that I wasn't, I learned about the time change, which enabled me to be in time for Lama Lena's teachings on The Flight of the Garuda (a Dzogchen text designed for a series of teachings), which I love. There is an entire playlist with those teachings on her youtube channel, if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpn8zJMg-MPS6RNulz9YBbhi5UGRRweB- After the teachings, I did my sadhana and then had a lovely sitting with rigpa available. Now I'm going to dig into the panel discussion with Daniel and a bunch of other realized people - wohoo! Feels like Christmas today. 

One of the reasons I thought I had been infected by covid too is that my body is trembling like crazy, visibly, but of course that's just the dukkha nanas. I had forgotten how tangible that can be, as it hasn't been like that since stream entry. Before that, I had it on and off for about a decade at least. So... I suppose this is one of the examples of how dukkna nanas can suddenly get more obvious again, seemingly out of the blue. Right now I'm having really jarry and chaotic vibrations, so disgust maybe? Reobservation? I need to read up on that again. Emotions aren't quite following the pattern, because I'm having fun with it. I came to remember that I'm in it for the ride, and this is a ride allright. It's easier when it gets to the vibrational level than when it manifests emotionally. I did feel like crawling out of my body for a while, though, as I was trying to sleep, which didn't go very well, but when I gave up on sleeping and played a simple word game on my tablet obsessively (one that very clearly triggers dopamine), I pretty soon got exhausted enough from trying to concentrate. Trying not to sleep as a way of getting to sleep worked well for me in the past, during that decade of endless cycling before I got myself a practice. Eventually the body just takes care of it on its own, and it does that more easily when I'm not trying to control it. Learned that the hard way. 

Oh, so that's also why my body temperature has been shifting up and down. It wasn't regular fever, but PoI cycling. Wow. Kind of cool that it has so obvious physical effects, isn't it? 

I have decided to sit very frequently today, a couple of long sits and many many brief ones, and microhits on top of that. 

Fascinating how tawa is there, right at the non-center, as the eye of the hurricane. A timeless stillness in the midst of turbulent movement. Details of ordinary life strike me as radiantly beautiful. 

I went to yoga for the first time in a while now, as I have had some health issues. I expected it to be effortful and rather unpleasant, both due to being out of shape and because of the jarring dukkha nana manifestations energetically and otherwise embodied. I was surprised to find a strong sense of calm presence with better coordination and balance than for a long time and with lots of space in the fascia and muscles. Sensations were excuisite in their subtle but very rich and nuanced simplicity. It felt like I was riding a wave of sensory experience, always on top of it in a sense of stillness while the flow of experience was doing the movement. That's rigpa, right? That's the case now as well, although I can sense a subtle shift out of synch coming up. 

Low again. My dominant dukkha nana bleadthrough seems to be procrastinating important stuff, baking cookies and indulging in escapism. Animal realm stuff (maybe it's not too late to be reborn as a mallard after all, lol). Interestingly, the ignorance associated with it doesn't seem like something that just happens out of the blue because the cycling dictates poor clarity. Not that I ever thought it was, but it felt more like it. I guess that's why in the middle paths the realms seem more relevant than the PoI cycling. The mechanisms of dependent origination leading to these tendencies become more clear. It's not that clarity isn't avaliable. It's more a question of escapism. If I look for it, it's all there. It's just that the ignorance is so very tempting. As if it would be satisfying this time although it never was before. 

There was some lucid dreaming during the night. Not screen 4, but looking at environments with no people or action in them, and/or images. I was looking at the visuals and knew that it was a dream. I was fascinated by how real it looked. That it was all just a mind creation, a more individual one than the usual consensual reality where our creations seem to overlap and interact as the default. That I knew that and it remained fairly solid anyway. I remembered that Lama Lena says not to stare at details for too long because it tends to make it collapse, so I didn't fixate my gaze but let it sweep around. I kept going back and forth to see if objects remained intact, which they did. Then I started changing them, deciding that they hadn't had those features after all, but others. The next time my gaze landed on that spot, it had sometimes changed. It didn't work every time, but several times. This went on for a while. Then I was caught up in regular dreaming for a while, until I had to go to the bathroom and thus woke up. I think I decided to wake up, because I knew from experience that peeing in dreams doesn't really solve the problem, so at some level I think there was awareness about being asleep after all. There probably always is. 

After I woke up, there were hypnopomp visuals, organizing the murk into patterns. Grainy ones, mainly in gray shades, but there were touches of color here and there. There was often an area "in the middle" that was more detailed than the rest of the visual field, like a fine-grained intricate labyrinth pattern. That pattern was more stable than the rest. The rest was moving about and rapidly shifting. Sometimes there was text there but it shifted too fast for me to read it. I went to the bathroom without switching on any lights. That way I could keep watching the visuals. In the class I had learned that I have a tendency not to notice when I push too much, and that adjustments need to get more subtle to avoid a pendular movement back and forth between extremes, so I intentionally eased back just a little. That made it possible to stay with the visuals unusually long. I kept doing so while going back to sleep again. Eventually I got caught up in dreaming again. 

Formal practice distracted by discursive thoughts today, so far, but the ground of being is available. 

The Swedish winter season darkness is tough on me this time around, it seems. Since I started a daily practice I haven't had winter depressions, but I seem to be developing one now after all. I'm already on medication, so that's a bummer. I may need to increase the dosage. Trying to get by with extra amounts of 5-htp, vitamine D, and full spectrum lights - and mid day walks if I manage to get my ass out. I don't feel motivated to do anything. The glimpses of rigpa are not common or long enough to take me through this. I'm trying to get an appointment with my psychiatrist because I recognize where this is going. I'm shutting down. Meditation doesn't help with that. 

Yesterday I did full moon practice with Ligmincha (chanting the Sa Le Ö mantra and doing visualizations), my sadhana, trekcho (a 90 minutes long group sit, among others), had a group meeting with the "Reversing the stack" class, listened to public Mandareva teachings by Lama Lena, and did a whole bunch of job applications. Then during the night I did Death Sangha Halloween Edition with Michael and SF Dharma Collective. It was at the worst possible time for me here in Sweden (2:50-6:00 am) so I hesitated to even try, as I was really tired during the day, but in the evening after I was done with the job applications it felt like it could be really fun to join it. Several class mates were going. Everybody was supposed to dress up for Halloween. I thought "What the heck!" and bought a ticket. It's only once per year, after all, and this year it coincided with full moon and everything. I do know how to do make-up that fits the occasion and almost my entire wardrobe is black anyway. Above all, for some reason I love this kind of meditation. It was very similar to the shared meditation I have done with a partner, only much more morbid. It combined a mandala visualization with a shamanic journey to hell, chöd and tantric deity practice, sort of. Very juicy stuff. I loved it! Michael was dressed up too, with make-up and huge horns on top of that long grey hair. His wife (?) played the part of the queen (of) Hell. People had really cool outfits. It added to the experience, made it feel more real. From there, visualization was suddenly so easy. It was all very vivid, with all the gory details and the theatrics. We met all classes of demonic beings and fed them our bodies, each of us on our own. It was almost like doing it in virtual reality, even though it was "just" the mind creating it. I was relieved to hear afterwards that I wasn't the only one who really enjoyed it. I thought maybe I was morbid or self destructive or something, lol. I could feel it untie several knots. Very liberating. Great peace at the end. 

Before the Death Sangha I listened to a reiki healing recording with seed syllable chanting, because I needed to make the best of the little sleep I would get. It very quickly brought me to a vibrational state and from there to stillness and - to my great surprise - to a fruition. I was just trying to fall asleep fast enough and maybe get some healing while sleeping. I did fall asleep a while after the fruition.

Today, after getting some sleep, I have done Chenrezig group practice and listened to Lama Lena's teachings on The Flight of the Garuda (Dzogchen). I'll do the sadhana and some trekcho before going to bed. 

I seem to have created myself a golden chain, a reoccurring alternative dream reality* that I will have a hard time letting go of for the sake of lucidity. It's something that there would be no point in pursuing while being lucid about it, as it involves somebody else's feelings. It's a blue pill vs red pill issue, or the classical TV series dilemma where a demon traps someone in a false reality that is better than the real one. Holding on to that is the opposite of awakening, so I really have to pop it whenever I get the chance. It's a great opportunity for getting lucid. It just hurts that I have to do it. It's so vivid in the dreams and it was awesome. 

*) A dream I had tonight kept building on one of the dreams I had the night before.

I can tell that the increased dosage of antidepressants has effect, because it makes my ADHD visible (depression masks it). Rather than regarding that as a nuisance, I'll try to approach it as lowhanging fruit for the investigation of dependent origination. (When I paused to let that sink in, spaciousness opened up in a tangible way. I'll take that as a sign.)

It is interesting to notice how the chains of actions change with changes in medication. My housing support was here and among other things I was cleaning out a space by the kitchen sink that has been crowded because of the reorganization of my home now that I have to fit in an office in the kitchen. I intended to take away the packages that I had collected there for recycling and clean the space, but I ended up planting flowers. I was aware of stepping away from the plan and acting on the impulse to take care of the seedlings, so I didn't forget the larger activity that this parenthesis was embedded within, but it was a longer chain than what has been possible for a while now. I can see the difference. Once again my actions tend to branch off in different directions. 

I also move faster, which is obvious from how much longer I have to go back when I notice that I'm still carrying some of the garbage that I had been taking out. Housing support people should really learn to avoid asking complex social questions such as "What is your book about?" in the midst of a task that requires executive functioning. The learning for me is how much energy selfing consumes and how much processing space it takes up. I wonder what that kind of interaction would look like without the dualistic sense of self. What would be said? Would it come in portions that would be easier to combine with the tasks? Would I take a break to answer and then perform the task? Would I choose to politely inform the housing support person that I need to focus on my chores? Or would the awareness be capable of replying and doing the chores at the same time? Since my functioning is hardwired conditioning (the kind of karma that constitutes hardware rather than software), I suspect that the last alternative would be unrealistic. This might be worth experimenting with, that is, being more mindful with regard to chains of dependent prigination in daily life and notice how selfing complicates them. I used to do noting in daily life routinely a while back when I was doing vipassana as my main practice. Now that trekcho is my main practice on the cushion, I'm mainly focusing on finding the ground of being also off the cushion. I think I need to do both trekcho and vipassana, because there's stuff to work with here. 

So how do I do that? How do I build a routine for integrating both trekcho and vipassana in my daily life? Maybe it would be a good idea to start out with smaller portions of one of the practices at a time, with rest inbetween, and at times when I'm not interacting with other people socially. When that routine has been established, I could switch back and forth more rapidly between the methods. After that, maybe I could try out if it's possible to be flexible with the practices depending on what comes up. I think trekcho eventually becomes second nature so vipassana would then happen from that base even in daily life (I suppose that's what called vipashyana?), but I'm not there yet. Sounds like a plan to me. 

Afternoon: 45 minutes of zhine, reclining. I alternated between gazing towards the ceiling without focusing on it on the one hand and on the other hand doing the same thing with the murk with eyes closed. As dullness came up, I tried to explore the awakened nature of it instead of either getting caught up in it or trying to get rid of it. That was interesting. I don't think dullness really exists. It's just space being resisted. 

When the resistance falls away, there's sort of a little pop or poof. 

I did the sadhana in the morning. I think I like the ritual of starting and ending the day with it. It provides a framework for the mind. 

Currently in the "Reversing the stack" course, we are doing Vipashyana from the ground of being, evoking emotions from the different realms of being, one at a time, to increase our awareness of our tendencies for those realms in daily life. I have noticed that while sitting in a relaxed position, sort of embodying peace, I have a hard time evoking feelings like anger and envy for the realms practice. Whatever reasons for those feelings I can think of don’t have that hook in them that triggers the emotions. If I enact the feelings with my body, however, as in a theatric play, those emotions become available, and with them, the ”reasons” become available too.

I just realized that I may have been misinterpreting some stuff lately. I have treated attention as an enemy to the spaciousness. I have felt strong aversion towards shamatha with an object because it felt like it ruined what I was trying to develop, like it caused a dualistic split. On some level I must have been assuming that I couldn't access the ground of being while actively paying attention to stuff. I knew that it was still there, but I thought that I was backlashing into a more dualistic mindset. Today I realized that I actually do have sharp attention on narrow stuff while at the same time being aware of a wider awareness. I just didn’t like it when it became strong, because of the perceived tension between the two. A while back I was devastated because breathing suddenly involved so much friction again that it hurt. The hurt was the attention as it was drawn to the nose. Too much power on a very small area. And when the focus of attention got wider, that’s what felt like an octopus clinging to my face (as I was also complaining about). I was so certain that it was a dualistic split that I made it into one. Actually it’s just the very normal play between emptiness and form, with attention bringing stuff into form. It just bulldozed the crap out of my kinesthetic sensations, and so I neglected to recognize the ground of being that was still there, maybe more available than I thought. That way of looking at it was probably related to lack of serotonine as I thought, but I’m no longer so sure that it was actually shut off. For all practical purposes I guess it was, but I get the feeling that it’s not as mechanical as the metaphor makes it sound like, and realizing the implications of that makes a difference.

The thing is, I just now had the very same sensations in my nostrils and at the tip of the nose. This time, instead of noticing the friction from the air and how much it hurt and thinking ”Oh no, breathing is difficult - my central channels have closed up!”, I thought ”Hm, I guess I have a sharp focus in the very center of attention again. That’s the first time for a long time now”. And then I thought ”Is that true? What about that phase recently when the tip of the nose hurt so much? Oh, right, I’ve actually had these sensations recently!”

I really need to remember that there never was any doer there to begin with, so I don’t need to get rid of it. That’s just sensations too, and I don’t have to believe that the attention is me, or that it is not-me. It’s just sensations in the field, a play of form. It’s not a problem. It’s not either - or. I knew that, but subconsciously I think parts of me thought differently.

I had forgotten how much sharp attention can hurt. I don’t have to feed that loop. I can ease up on it a bit. After all, the entire field is still there too. It’s not like the whole world goes away just because I focus on my breath, so there is more there to let in. I don’t need a lazer beam focus to maintain concentration. I really do need to refine my adjustments, just like Michael has been talking about on the course. Maybe now that my neurotransmittors are getting back to normal I can do that. For a while there I felt like my old refrigerator. The landlord had said for years that I just needed to have the right settings, but the normal functioning span was just getting smaller and smaller. In the end, there was either a flood of water on the floor or lots of ice in the refrigerator, and nothing inbetween. Eventually they admitted that it was simply too old.

Doing shamatha while functioning like a too old refrigerator is very frustrating.  It doesn’t exactly make it easy to learn to do the adjustments. I think that just maybe it’s getting less black and white now, gradually. We’ll see. 

I seem to be cycling the lower nanas now. On what path, I don't know. I'm not going to assume anything. All I know is that there is so much left to work with. Anyway, the last few days I have had both realizations and quirks having to do with mind and body and cause and effect, and the attention seems to want to go narrow for a change, and now I'm having these weird cramps all over the place, so typical for the 3C nana. Maybe the dark abyss I fell into was the 3C nana then, or maybe they just coincided. I did feel exactly like what Daniel says about it in MCTB2: there wasn't anything wrong with the clarity - I just really didn't like what I saw. I don't know why people fear the dukkha nanas so much. I don't think they are any worse than the 3C nana. 

The notion of four paths seems very arbitrary to me. Nobody seems to know how to distinguish between previous path fruitions and current path fruitions, and apparently there are an unknown amount of full insight cycles between starting the second path and finishing the fourth path. Why even bother counting? The process doesn't even seem linear.

The inside of my head is ticking like a clock. It's not the pulse. It seems to be related to respiratory tracts and paranasal cavities and energy channels. There has been a lot of tick-tocking lately, together with loud nada sound. That seems to be a common pattern for the phase around fruitions and starting to cycle the lower nanas. I'm hesitant to call it review, though. It doesn't feel that full of possibilities. Maybe the clear review phases are what really marks a new path. That would imply that this is not it, which makes sense to me. There was a brief phase - VERY brief phase - of reoccurring fruitions, though, and some very rapid cycling, and then rapid cycling that was overlapping with elements from the lower nanas. Well, whatever it is, I'm not overly impressed. 

Yesterday's yoga class was a mild form of Kundalini yoga. Among other things, we did the asana that my first Kundalini yoga teacher referred to as the ego killer. I don't believe in killing the ego - I think that is nonsense, as the ego is just a bunch of sensations that arise and that sort of have a name tag to them. Yesterday I did have an experience that could perhaps be described as having the name tags dissolve, though. It was very interesting. The asana involves stretching the arms to the sides and about 45 degrees upward, palms facing the skye, while sitting. We sat like that for a long time. The beefy guy next to me gave up pretty soon as the position was very static and made the arms first feel really heavy and then numb. I usually get very cranky but keep up the struggle in a very egoic way, because of pride. This time something else happened. I visualized stretching out my energy channels, as adviced by Lama Lena while stretching the arms the same way. I thought that since I was doing the position anyway, I might as well give that a shot. The weird thing is that at the point where the asana usually feels unbearable, instead this time it became extremely easy. The selfing of the pain fell away. It wasn't dissociation. I know how that feels. I was very present. I didn't escape from my body. It was like the hook in the struggle dissolved and suddenly there was no struggle. It felt like there had never really been a struggle in the first place. That's probably what the name refers to. 

I just came home from today's yoga class, a vinyasa. It went more smoothly than I thought it would. No 3C nana stiffness, no cause and effect quirks. There was space and precision. Even my balance was okay (for me; that's not my strong suit). Reading up on the lower nanas, I think it's the mind and body nana. I have been wondering about the phase that feels good but without the oomph of either A&P (being on top of the world) or EQ (being at peace). Of course it's mind and body. I think this is the stage where I usually very easily see waves in all "solid" matter and have my face melt away. I used to misdiagnose this as something more advanced than it was. 

During the night I have over and over been drawn into some kind of absorption that hurt, pyhisically. That hasn't happened for a long time so I was a bit surprised. Parts of it were still pleasant, especially when I surrendered to it. It felt like something was showering down from the back of my brain. The pain was also sort of showering down in a way that made it no problem. First it was the heart chakra that hurt. It felt like there was a chord from it, rooting me down. I was lying on my back. It was so heavy and dense. I could sort of melt into the pain and the tightness, and then there was a spaciousness within it. However, it felt like too much energy was assembled at one point so I suspected that my spine wasn't straight. In one of the pauses inbetween getting sucked in, I thus changed position to lying on my side. That was better. I noticed that my entire spine hurt. My body was cold. Soon the spine heated up, though. For a while it went back and forth between heated spine and freezing. My pillow got wet from the sweat. Eventually I fell into nonlucid sleep with dreaming. Now my back and neck are stiff and sore and my fascia is contracted all over the body. I guess it's the old Kundalini stuff happening again. Classical 3C nana. I have a feeling that it will be fine, though. The pain and the stiffness are managable, and I have a yin yoga class today. 

Notes from my 15 minutes consultation with Michael Taft, for me to remember:

Trust my intuition, don't take in lots of new information, just do what works for me. I already have the information that I need. 

If vipassana is what works for me regardless of circumstances, then routinely start the sessions with that and let that take me down the stack (that happens very fast anyway). For instance, work with "gone" (which got me to stream entry). That takes me into nonduality. Find what works in daily life and make it stable. Make the practice my own. Don't listen too much to advice from others about the order of doing things, qualities that are needed and other stuff. Basically, any practice if done right is Dzogchen. 

Don't lead with the mind. It only makes it spin. Let the practice be embodied. The body needs to integrate all this. That's the slow part of the path. Have patience!

What I'm going through now, with instability of pace, is very common at this stage and nothing to worry about. It's an ongoing negotiation with life. Very small things in life make huge differences. Learn how to live, integrate, go up the stack. Find out how I can live the practice. 

My intuition is good enough. I may doubt myself, but he does not. He has full confidence in me. I'm good at this. (Sorry for bragging, but I need this at this point.) Also, he really doesn't seem to think that I'm a pain in the ass, even though I think I am, so stop self-bashing internally! Lama Lena would say that's bad namlam (I have no idea how to spell that). 

November 11th

I set an intention for the day: to engage in the investigation question ”What’s it like to be me right now?” and the inquiry question ”What the fuck?”. I felt good, because it meant that I couldn’t fail. It opened up to more presence. Less escapism, and not because escapism would be wrong but because I actually didn’t feel like it. It released energy that manifested as piti. Michael says that the tiniest things make a huge difference for the practice, and this tiny thing made me feel liberated in the moment, because of a slight change in wordings. That’s intimacy with the practice, Michael commented.

In the spirit of making the techniques my own, I made my own version of mandala based on five elements. I had been wanting to do that for a long time but lacked the drive to do it.

The questions I brought with me during the day released so much energy that I find that they need to be combined with embodiment and spaciousness. Otherwise my mind starts spinning like crazy.

At the end of the day, I did this guided meditation: https://youtu.be/S9u74tI0Owc, resting in the natural mind. Interestingly, now shamatha with an object felt right. I used the space element as object. Ni Nurta’s advice helped. I also had much more energy going today thanks to the intention that I set, so dullness was not an issue even though I did reclining meditation late in the evening. I kept being alert with hypnagogics and dream images. My nose, which had been swollen due to allergies, popped completely open, together with the paranasal cavities. Lovely spacious feeling with boundaries between my body and the rest of the world sort of fell way in a very pleasant way. During dropping the ball I was at first totally flooded with images flashing by, mainly nature images, probably because of the mandala I made. Eventually the image flood turned into a vibrational flow that did not develop fully into images. External sounds also partly turned into something not fully manifested. Lots of nada sound. For a while the nada sound zoomed in to a clear tone in my left ear. Tensions of the mind fell away. Most of the time they kept arising and falling away, but there were moments where new arisings were on pause to a relatively large extent. There was a sense of free-falling in all directions at once. When new tensions arose, thanks to the intention I had set for the day, I could notice that without needing to manipulate it.

I like the combination of releasing mind tentions during the day to get more energy and channeling that into a tranquil and letting go type of formal practice that allows the mind to disentangle and come to stillness as it organically finds peace after unrestricted dancing around. I think I need to integrate more dzogchen-like formal practice during the day, though, because I became hyper from all the presence and paradoxically lost presence because of that.


November 12th

I checked in both with the Dharmakaya nature of mind and with what it was like to be me at that very moment many times during the day and managed to maintain something rigpa-like, definitely not all the time but relatively much for being me at this point in my practice. It was my birthday and I celebrated it together with loved ones and by going to a lake and merging with all the elements. I did a cople of very short formal sits in the morning, with the sadhana inbetween them. I attempted to do one of Michael’s Thursday night guided meditations while reclining in the evening. I started out alert, dropped into vibrations and awareness very fast, had some strong centered flashes in the visual field. Then I wobbled back and forth between alertness and dullness for a while, got too relaxed and fell asleep.


November 13th

In the afternoon I did Michael’s lates guided meditation, also reclining against my better judgement. It went through a similar development but with less dramatic changes. I didn’t fall asleep. Then I went to a yoga class where I set the intention of being really present and managed to live up to that relatively well.

Since there had been repeated experiences of wobbling inbetween strong alterness and gross dullness, I did an evening session where I investigated how I can make adjustments that are subtle enough. I started with my sadhana for the extraordinary ngöndro that I’m doing with Lama Lena. I did it slowly and mindfully, especially the prostrations. It is such a pleasure to do them like that, really feeling the wave movement of them and how it stretches out and contracts different muscles on the way. It gave me some piti and opened up to empty awareness. After the sadhana I rested in tawa as tawa for a while, as instructed. That’s basically just dropping right into the empty awareness, the Dharmakaya nature of mind. When that started to feel less available, I tuned into what it was like to be me at that moment. That made me alert. There was a cat fight in front of me, so I switched to chanting Om mani padme hung for a little while. For some reason that works. Almost immediately, my bossy cat Morpheus stopped attacking nervous little Ezekiel and instead lay down to sleep. That mantra does miracles. Then I went back to investigating what it was like to be me. After a while I noticed that it speeded me up in a way that was beginning to make my mind spin, so I switched to focusing on spaciousness. That calmed me down. After some time, I tried to switch to dropping the ball, but it made me dull in a way that made my brain engage in distractions to wake itself up. I switched to opening up to everything that was happening in all sense gates, with eyes open. It was both pleasant and interesting to be with the shifting between emptiness and form. There was a waviness to it and a sense of dissolving going on right before form fully manifested. I kept doing this for a while. When the brain started to look for distractions again, I switched to my Chenrezig practice, which is basically a Brahmaviharas practice involving multiple sense gates in a simple way. That felt like a good way of ending the session. Finally I dedicated merit, chanting in Tibetan. The entire session was about 75 minutes long.


November 14th

Short morning sit switching back and forth between vipassana and trekcho.

45 minutes afternoon sit including the sadhana. In order to stay alert after a brunch I needed to switch back and forth between approaches often. My brain wants rest.

And later in the afternoon Shinzen’s one day retreat started, which I attended.


November 15th

I woke up with brainfog so on my way to yoga class I practiced basic noting. That showed to mej a sequence of occurrances that was very clearly cycling in the lower nanas. I haven’t been goid at recognizing those in the past. I know that there are people here that really don’t like mapping, and that is all good. You do you. In my case, the maps give me perspective on stuff that I’m otherwise prone to believing. I’m not using the maps to find something but to remember how it is all so dependent on conditioning, and to remember the three characteristics. It helps me not to take stuff too seriously.

The same thing kept happening in the yoga class and on the way home. I won’t go into the phenomenology of the different nanas as I don’t want to impose the maps on anybody else. I’ll just mention that I personally find it liberating to notice the nanas move through awareness just like all other arisings. A bunch of impermanent conditions that arise together, all with name tags on them as they think they are inherently ”me”, but those name tags are just impermanent arisings too. They dissolve, and a new bunch of impermanent conditions arise, with similar name tags that are also just impermanent arisings. The cycling isn’t entirely restricted to the lower nanas yet but will soon be for a while, as a new insight cycle begins (not a new path, just one of those many smaller insight cycles in this part of the terrain). When that happens, I will do my best to welcome it instead of reacting with aversion.

Some instances of energetic occurrings inside and around the head and a sense of spaciousness inside the head making its way out through the ears and the eyes.

Chenrezig group practice in the evening.


November 16th

morning: 20 minutes of sadhana, 20 minutes of sitting. The latter went back and forth between trekcho and acknowledging reality as it presented itself in the here and now.

I think what is most solid for me involves beliefs that constitute hindrances:
• not being worthy, guilt, shame
• Wanting to get away from stuff - overwhelming stuff, boring stuff
• Lack of time and energy, sense of inevitable failure (with built-in reactions to that having to do with pride, and in-built reactions to that having to do with aversion to the pride)
For some reason this slips through my investigations and I tend to believe it. Theoretically I know what to do with it: see it, be with it, have compassion for it. I just don’t like it. I guess I need to see and be with and have compassion for that too. It all just arises and dissolves. I have seen that happen, and still I get caught up in it. I thought I had worked this through, more than once, but new layers of it just keep coming to the surface. When I sit with it I do get a sense of reality here and now having much more to it than just being boring, but for some reason ignorance can be so seductive. There are cravings both for entertainment and for oblivion. Then there is aversion to that, having to do with self-grasping, which leeds to thoughts and feelings of overwhelm and failure, which in turn feeds the cravings for entertainment and oblivion, which makes me feel shame and guilt, and so forth. Earlier in my practice this didn’t happen with meditation. It was my refuge from these patterns, or so I thought. I was inflated with the practice. It was the entertainment. I guess I need to find a balance between making the practice interesting and coming to peace with it ”just” being life.

I wrote something really depressing earlier in the afternoon but didn’t post it here just because it was so depressing. Since then I have had an opening, so I think I’ll just paste all of it. It illustrates very clearly how fast things change for me.

16:01
I think this is old traumas coming to the surface in this part of the process and in this depression or whatever it is that I’m going through. It seems to be a burnout. I guess it’s time to deal with this stuff. I have done it before so I can probably do it again, even though at times it doesn’t feel like it at all. Baby steps with meditation to ground myself. Anyway, meditation is not the problem. Meditation is what has been holding me above the surface for quite some time. I’ll try to get therapy. In case they can’t offer me any within the public system, I know how it is done. [Here I stopped and thought there is no way I’ll post this rant.]

16:19
I chatted with a friend with severe illnesses and disabilities and far too little support, whom I have been helping according to my own abilities, which is like a drop in the ocean. I feel like I’m constantly letting him down because there is so much I can’t do due to my own difficulties. I have been procrastinating the current paper work for a long time and it just seems impossible to find the energy and concentration to do it, even though it’s important. My executive funstioning is on strike. I think I have a burnout. Again. Anyway, he does not share my view of myself as selfish and lazy for not doing more. He thinks that I have been under too much pressure for a long time, and he reminded me that being autistic also means being extra sensitive to stress. He described me in wordings that I do not feel worthy of. It’s what I would wish to be. The conversation stirred up emotions, in a somewhat healing way, and also energetic sensations in and around my head. Again there was that sense of lots of space inside my head and seeping out through the ears. It sort of feels like there’s a whole universe in there. Weird. I think I need to meditate.

18:20
Late afternoon/early evening:

25 minutes of Sadhana
45 minutes of just sitting

I ritually offered my body, speech and mind - form, intent, awareness - to the Buddhas of all times in the Sadhana. It felt like a catharsis. Sitting was surprisingly pleasant. Not boring. Easy. I just let go. I didn’t do anything, really. Well, there was a short while in the beginning where I thought I had to decide about a method. I started with trekcho but I’m not sure if it counts as it. It probably does, actually, but after a little while I noticed my mind wondering and I thought that maybe it was time to apply another method. The mind went to both pleasant sensations and to thoughts and feelings. I couldn’t decide whether to do shamatha on the pleasant sensations or being with whatever came up or dropping the ball. I tested the thought of dropping the ball for a while but noticed that I for some reason have this tendency to treat thoughts as burning charcoal rather than soap bubbles, so I decided to do what psychologically feels like the opposite even though it really is very close to dropping the ball. I did choiceless awareness, or didn’t do anything really. That went well. There were some dreamy moments, but clarity most of the time. It felt light and effortless. I spent most of the time balancing between vibrational mode and empty awareness mode. I had a number of impermanence fruitions with the mind very suddenly restarting itself. Five maybe? I had not expected that. I suppose I’m still in review. I wonder how many insight cycles there are between second and third path. Maybe that depends on how much you have to work through. I seem to have lots to work through. This does not match any criteria of third path. This was a much needed healing session. It was a grace.

I think this is what I need to do: work with trauma-related seemingly solid stuff. Bring it out in the open, find a way to be compassionate about it with help from others if needed, and then meditate when the process tells me to. There are some energetic markers for it, hard to explain. I just know that it tells me to surrender in meditation.

20:09
On my way home from yoga class (texting while walking). I almost missed it but made a rush and made it. It was lovely. Lots of space in muscles, fascia and joints. An impermanence door fruition while moving between threelegged dog and knee between arms back and forth. 

Lucid dreaming. I was sitting in a kitchen with my grandmother and uncle on dad's side. I told them about how I had seen a man that looked so much like my uncle that it was spooky. He had been moving the same way, his face covered by an umbrella. It had been on my way to work - in the dream I was arranging a festivity for people with dementia. When he looked out from under the umbrella, hos face reminded me of my dad. He could have been a sibling to all of them. It had stirred up emotion since both my dad and my uncle are dead. I stopped myself from saying that because I remembered that I was telling the story to my uncle and to my grandmother who is also dead. "Dream signs", I thought. "Lucid dreaming." I looked around and appreciated how real it all seemed. I said to my grandmother and uncle that I really appreciated being there with them. Then I felt pulled away from that dream. I dreamed that I was being woken up by a partner who said that it was time to get up. I muttered "lucid dreaming" and said that I needed my sleep. No, wait, that was later. The first time I just felt the presence of my partner on my right side and a friend of ours on my left side, for some reason. They both seemed to want to cuddle. We were all holding hands. I wanted to go back to lucid dreaming so I just let my hands be limp, relaxed, and tried to fall back into sleep. Of course I was already/still asleep (the only one next to me was one of my cats). I had just lost lucidity. Unsure about the order here. Lots of images flashing by, changing fast. A tower with text on it, shifting text. I thought about visiting Lama Lena to get teachings, tried to go there by inclining my intention towards it. At the same time I wasn't sure it would be such a good idea to waste her time by visiting her before lucid dreaming was stable. My thoughts influenced the text on the tower (or was it a skyscraper? A tall building). The text "Lama Lena" appeared on it for a while. Maybe this was when I lost lucidity again and dreamed that my partner was waking me up? Went back into images that were changing rapidly, environmental features that were changing rapidly before my eyes. Also instances of telling about my lucid dreams - lost lucidity there. Then there was some kind of adventure in the future (?). There was this huge electrical cord that didn't reach its other end entirely, rendering electricity a rare thing. We were trying to get it together, which was risky business, but it wouldn't stay that way. All bees were dead. Somebody found a way to get some flowers to pollinate themselves. I watched the flowers reach out tendrils to do that and was amazed by how my mind had come up with all this and made it seem so real (lucidity for a while). Then somebody said that all you needed to do was to present the flowers to their right match. They all had (symbolical) names so you could guess which names belonged together. There was a huge board with names. I engaged in the match-making and lost lucidity. 

I felt the need to just lay down and surrender into meditation. There was an unknowing event that I think was a fruition, but it wasn't quite as clearly demarcated. Whatever it was, it felt good. Still does. 

I went to a lake today, a small forest lake that feels very much alive. I brought a singing bowl and played it there. I chanted Om mani padme hung to the mallards in order for them to stop bickering about the sun flower seeds I had brought for them. That seemed to calm them down. When the sun set I just sat there, merging with the lake. Visual effects: the whole view flattened. First it had sort of a shimmering surface, like a water surface but vertical and including the air and the forest. It looked like a portal. It came closer. Space fell apart in different ways. It was flat and hovered right in front of my face. It was shattered with different forms of depth. Parts of the lake seemed to levitate. Sometimes like the lake was everywhere. Sometimes like small islands of water floating up in the air. Sometimes like a wave wall rising upwards. Sometimes like the whole lake tilted. Sometimes... you know what happens to the water surface in a singing bowl filled with water when you play it? Symmetric patterns of vibrations on the surface and water drops shooting up into the air? It was like that, but with the dark flickerings on the surface of the lake. They sort of morphed upwards and looked like dark beings dancing there in symmetric patterns. In case they were actual beings, I did metta on them.

70 minutes of just embracing whatever wanted to happen. It soon got very flowy. It felt like I was floating on waves in the air (it’s very windy today and I had just returned home from a walk). It was all flow. Suddenly the whole world came towards me and sort of collapsed with me. Then it was all back.

75 minutes of yoga. Many of the asanas and the shifts between asanas require effort because I need to check critical points so that I do it right (in order to not hurt my knees or something). However, sometimes I get into a flow that makes it easier to feel very relaxed and spacious while working hard. It’s basically a very wide-focused shamatha with an object that sometimes tips over into spontaneity for a while.

40 minutes of sadhana + trekcho. I like it. It’s beautiful. I think doing the same sadhana for quite some time helps with integrating awareness of awareness with more complex tasks, gradually. It’s chanting, visualization, ”feelization”, and physical movements, so all senses are involved and there is a lot of multitasking. The prostrations feels good for the body - muscles and fascia - and psychologically because of the symbolism, and they give me piti and pop my sinuses open. They naturally leed to trekcho (which is basically awareness of awareness practice).

Now I’ll try to do Michael’s latest Thursday night meditation before I go to sleep. I’ll do it sitting, in case I’m more tired than I realize. If I find it hard to let go, maybe I’ll shift to reclining after a while. I sometimes have a very narrow span of working posture with regard to both alertness vs dullness and restlessness vs relaxation. It’s easiest at times when I’m very alert, because then I can do reclining meditation with great alertness and get the full relaxation. In those phases sitting is useless because it makes my mind racey. I think I’m somewhere inbetween now, so sitting might work.
—

I like letting the mind dissolve.

I did shift to reclining about halfway due to cramp in my butt/hip. I managed to stay alert while reclining.

Yesterday I had a hard time doing my practice. I had pms and was annoyed and uncomfortable. I still endured a 90 minutes sit with the trekcho group. It was a bit weird, because I could sense parallell versions of reality. There was spaciousness and okayness there too, at the same time that I just wanted out of there. 

Later I listened to live teachings by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche as invited by Lama Lena, about dream yoga. At the end of the teachings, the Rinpoche led a short guided meditation in which we from the space of empty awareness got to work with some reoccurring dream, with spaciousness and luminosity and warmth. I often have nightmares about logistics - being on my way to something important and missing buses/trains, getting on the wrong ones, forgetting to bring stuff that I need (occasionally even forgetting a kid or some cats) - so I tried to work with that. Interestingly, then I had a dream that seemed to be about the same stuff but I had friends to ask who were waiting for me and it turned out that I had an extra day for travelling so the stress went away.

The Rinpoche also adviced to at least take some time to visualize warmth filling our heart before going to sleep every night. I did that when I was about to sleep. When I was completely relaxed, I had one those unknowing events that may or may not be an impermanence door fruition. It wasn't clear enough for me to count it, but it wasn't fuzzy enough for me to totally discard it either. 

When I woke up this morning, the murk was alive. It went through some changes. I don't remember all of it, but I know that statics was one of the modes, and another mode was a black disc, and then the disc brightened up gradually and got smaller and turned into a tiny very bright dot. I spent the morning just being aware without engaging in anything for quite a while. That was nice. Then I did my sadhana. The rest of the day went by in confusion. In the evening I met with my Chenrezig practice group, which is led by this really warm and down-to-earth grandmother figure who always manages to bring back perspective for me. She has that warmth going on in a very natural way with no prestige in it whatsoever and without covering up negative sides. The meeting was exactly what I needed today. It sort of brought me back to where the day started, before I closed it down with all the things I thought I had to decide and plan. It made it easier to breath again, to just be. 

In the group there was a woman who very suddenly realized how selfing was limiting her life. She was thinking out loud about how she keeps doing it because it somehow makes her feel bigger, and she couldn't stop laughing. She saw that making herself bigger didn't serve anything. She just laughed and laughed and laughed, and it was such a free laughter. It gave me goosebumps. Writing this, hours later, I get goosebumps again. 

During the practice my neighbors started drilling in the walls with a noise that made my cats fly. Earlier in life, that kind of noice would totally incapacitate me. I would dissociate and almost lose my ability to communicate or even protect myself from it. The sound would pierce into me in a painful way and close all options. Now I just tuned into the energy of it and enjoyed the ride. 

There was about a half an hour earlier today that I was back to not tolerating sounds (after being stressed out by stuff - decisions to make, economy, social obligations, my own cravings and how they collide with what I believe in...). I just stopped doing anything at that point and rested in awareness. That helped. 

I was going to sleep (or so I thought) after reading a chapter in one of Tim's monk novels, all filled up with bodhicitta from the compassion with which he describes people's limitations and finds the strength in them. I was drawn into jhana. I could clearly identify first, second and third. In first jhana I was sort of swirling around among color waves. My focus was drawn to breath sensations in my face. For some reason they appeared so delicious that I just couldn't help anchoring myself into them. In second jhana that anchor pulled so hard that there wasn't any room for swirling around. Being anchored in itself was so pleasant to just sink into. I could feel my eye balls pushing themselves back into their sockets. In third jhana I was deep down in the water, where everything was still and pleasantly cool. From there I tilted over from shamatha jhana to vipassana jhana as curiosity took over. So that's why I so rarely get to fourth! Shifting from third shamatha jhana to third vipassana jhana made that attention octopus come out to play. Instead of panicking about it, I just took notice of what happened and how it happened. It's actually fascinating. Without the struggle, the octopus softened. There was a series of little poofs that felt like reboots (the kind of unknowing event that may be fruitions but aren't as clearly demarcated as the ones that I'm sure about). There was a moment or two of fourth jhana being glimpsed, with that profound chrystal feeling, but I was too eager to investigate it for it to stabilize. There was also a moment of some kind of activation of the crown. Like static electricity moving around or something. 

I am space.
All is fluid.
Rigpa rocks.



Will reply to interesting comments later. Meanwhile, speaking of rainbow bodies, my altar Buddha has one. Hopefully I managed to attach an image. 

Something weird energetic just happened. I found a stash of stones that I have kept from vacation trips. I just can't help it but collecting stones. I feel connected to them. Anyway, I had forgotten about these stones and was happy to find them. I delved into the different piles and touched them, and Gosh, there was so much energy there. Different energies in the different piles. One little bag of glittering grey flaky slate made me shake. I mean really shake. What's up with that? Some kind of element thing? I put all stone piles on my grounding altar. I hope that wasn't a bad move, considering that shaking like that doesn't feel very grounding. 

Edited to add: It just dawned on me that the stone piles that had a particularly strong effect on me were all picked while I was pregnant with my child, so it was probably that energy that came back to me. The power of loving creation. Wow. 

The last few days I have felt the need to focus my practice on just noticing being aware of everything going on, regardless of what senses or whether or not those manifest as separate. Sometimes I use the note "aware". 

Sometimes there is a distinct ticking sound/kinesthetic sensation going on inside my head, which seems to correspond with my sinuses opening up and spaciousness developing. I think it clears the passage in the central channel(s). 

Sometimes it's like my hearing consciousness is moving out from my head. That can feel pretty weird if I keep thinking that I'm in the head, but if I just abandon that idea and embrace being all the space, it doesn't feel weird at all. 

Phenomenology just doesn’t add up if I apply one single logic. There seem to be different modes of experience with different internal logics.

One mode operates according to the logic of a brain processing data from separate sense gates which in turn gain their data from an assumed external world. This can be divided into two separate modes, one where sensations are little bips at a specific location, and one where they are waves. The waves seem to have several layers to them, like fractals.

There is one mode where sensations appear from nowhere at a specific point and ripple outward in all directions of the three dimensions, like little explosions, and as they fade away, they go back to nowhere. This doesn’t seem to go well with the notion of brain processing, because if two ”sides” of the body touch each other, at least some of the little explosion seem to come from the very meeting rather than from one of the sides sensing the other side. That dualism isn’t there.

There is one mode where reality synchs up in a way that makes everything seem aware in itself, also at a grosser level. There is a very effortless simplicity to it. Everything is effortlessly known on its own. There is no this knowing that. There can be a brief moment when it feels like this knows that and that knows this at the same time, and then it feels so obvious that everything is just aware without anything sensing anything else.
- I think that the notion of being at both sides at the same time used to last longer earlier in my practice. I think I used it as a landmark before even recognizing it as being on two sides at the same time. I called it ”backward hands”. It felt like touch sensations somehow turned inside out, and the mental image accompanying it was that my hands were turned backwards. This was followed by similar experiences with all senses, first one at a time before stream entry and then all at the same time during the review phase.
- Nowadays this just collapses. What it collapses into is so hard to describe. It’s not stable in my subjective experience most of the time, but when it does feel stable for a while, it just feels right. So much tension is just gone, tension that I wasn’t aware of feeling, brcause outside this mode, it’s impossible to imagine that tension not being there. There’s a simplicity to this mode and yet so much richness, so much aliveness. It seems so clear that the observer is just a tag that follows with the sensations that are already aware. Those sensations sort of form into one mindstream according to the tag, but it doesn’t turn the tag into an observer. ”I” don’t have access to somebody else’s thoughts or sensations most of the time, not because they aren’t accessible to ”my” brain, but because they don’t contain the tag of ”me” thinking that they are mine. That just doesn’t seem comprehensible when written out like this, but when in that mode, it’s somehow self-explanatory.

There is also another mode of synch, which sort of glimpses the above non-dual mode but seems to be the subjectively dualistic version of it. That’s where sensations come as whole packages without having the shallowness of being reduced to a concept in the sense of a label without substance, whereas the sense of observing it still remains on some level (the extent of which varies). I recognize this from equanimity in my early practice. There’s a spacious richness to it, and a synesthetic quality. This is compatible with the notion of a brain processing sensory data if I buy Culadasa’s distinction between attention and awareness, with awareness being much wider and working to send selected processed info to attention. Or I guess you could just assume that what’s going on is photoshopping from memory and resigning to accept that, as has been suggested to me. Somehow I’m not buying that. The quality of sensory experience just seems richer than in failing to see how attention jumps around in a mode where that is what seems to be what is mainly going on.

Walking to yoga class, during yoga class, and walking home, I applied "dropping the ball" on those little eye movements that scan the visual field and focus the gaze, inspired by the thread about saccades. Oh my goodness, it works! That's how I get into effortless panoramic vision (about 280 degrees if it's not too close to the body). It's in that state that it has felt like some part of the consciousness sneaks out from the head, through the third eye. It's also in that state that it looks like the ground moves to meet me rather than the other way around. In yoga, it's like the floor tilts to meet me. In walking, it's like the ground bounces in a somewhat rolling movement. Being in that state with regard to vision makes it easier to also not react to those little impulses to get back to a subject-object relationship in touch. I have noticed that those impulses are what causes my tics (I have Tourette's). They sort of scream out that it will feel horrible if I don't tense up, but I have learned that it's just a false alarm. At the end of the class, in letting the palms touch, it was very clear that the whole palms knew the touch and that the space where they met knew the warmth and the contraction, all at the same time, if time is even relevant. There was no need for me to scan anything. People can tell me as much as they want that all of that self-aware richness is only a concept, but it tastes like freedom. 

I have continued practicing letting go of the little eye movements that create the subject-object split during the day while interacting with people on video - a loved one, a group of autistic friends (we are writing a book together), and people in the Chenrezig practice group. I have also done the Chenrezig practice and my extraordinary ngöndro sadhana, ending with some trekcho before the dedication of merit. It feels good. I think I reduced a lot of stress today. I even managed to do three job applications without much anxiety. I look forward to going through all the great pointers in the thread I started today, asking for phenomenological pointers to don-dual perception. Lots of great stuff there. 

There is an exquisite taste of silence right now, which I'm savoring. It feels like I could float on it. 

Yesterday I practiced letting go of the eyes' little focusing and scanning movements while walking to and from the court where I was called to witness about human trafficking, and I can therefore confirm that the tech leads to panoramic vision even when stressed out. That's good to know. Not much to report about the rest of my practice. There was something unusual going on as I was about to fall asleep, though. I had done a pure land monlam (Dewachen) and was then listening to the Vajrasattva mantra after chanting along for awhile. Some new concentration territory stuff happened, but I find it hard to describe. It happened a few times but didn't last more than very brief moments. It was almost as if I left my body and levitated above it on some wave. I think I really do need to give shamatha a new chance, because with proper concentration that could have become interesting. 

Today: In order to investigate the sensations that lead to a more solidly dualistic perception, I played a couple of rounds of a simple word game on my tablet. It's a game that triggers attachment for me and very noticably makes me tense, as it increases my tics. So I played it very mindfully to investigate all those little impulses. Gosh, they were so many. That game really enforces the subject-object duality, as it seems to require a doer looking for words using selective attention. I managed to let go of a relatively large proportion of impulses with regard to both saccade and tics, but definitely not all of them, and even now in retrospect I notice a greater tendensy to tense up. Interestingly, the letting go that I managed to (not-)do was enough to make it obvious how meaningless the game is. I mean, I already knew that, but still it's a game that continues to pull me in, against my will (depending on how you define will). This time, however, a lot of that hook was gone. The very thing that makes the game "fun" is what causes suffering. 

Are there skillful ways to have fun that do not in themselves lead to suffering? Can there be enjoyment without attachment? Or does the trap only get more subtle, as implied in wordings such as golden chains? Is enjoyment, or meaning, worth some amount of suffering? 

I just attended a zoom research seminar about a book project at my former working place. As I entered the zoom room, I noticed that spaciousness and relatively nondual vision was readily accessible, just as I often find when I attend meetings with meditation groups and with the partner with whom I shared a morning practice routine for a while. I do feel safe in that group, so the connection to safety mentioned in my thread asking about pointers to nondual perception is interesting. What kind of shift in my approach to daily life would make me feel safe enough to let go more? I can't really wait for my life to provide safe circumstances, because it doesn't seem to work that way. Safe enough will have to suffice, and even though I'm unemployed and disabled and don't know what to do with the rest of my life, people do awaken living in caves in countries where poverty is a great problem and where fatal diseases and dangerous wild animals are common. The historical Buddha basically did, although he was poor only by choice. So I don't think that "external" safety is what does it. Having basic safety definitely makes it easier, though, because survival instincts trigger the ego. That's what it's for, after all. I think that it might be helpful to remember the difference between abundance perspective and scarcity perspective - not in a way that legitimates inequality (I can see how it can be twisted to imply that although my personal conclusions are about sharing instead of greedily holding on to possessions); in this context, I'm not talking about it as a theory about society at all, but as an approach for myself. To crave and cling less. Very basic Buddhist points. Like with regard to this seminar - I can focus on what a loss it is to no longer work in this incredible context, or I can focus on the blessing of still being part of the group as I'm welcome to the seminars and to workshops they will organize and they are all supportive of me writing my book and want to help with feedback and contacts with publishers and contribute to the analysis if I have data sessions. That's amazing. 

After a while the focus on spaciousness faded, for two reasons. One was that I wanted to take notes, because it's all both really interesting and relevant for my own book project, and my attention deficit is tangible. Maybe open awareness can be great for taking notes, but if so, I have yet to work on that skill. This reminded me that regardless of how much I subjectively prefer a broader awareness to directed attention, experiencewise, in order to function in this society I still really need to develop my attention skills. Tough shit. 

The other reason was that I was superfascinated by the discussion --> ADHD super focus, because - oh my Golly - we basically did vipassana on social interaction. As the empirical researchers of social interaction that we are, we jointly came to the conclusion that agency is a construct that can't actually be pinpointed anywhere if we look closely at what happens in social interaction. It's empty. We can talk about it as a formation that has relevance for other concepts that people value, with regard to autonomy, integrity, morality, social changes and so forth, but you can't define it in any consistent way or find it in the data. So instead of arguing that people with dementia do have agency, under sufficiently supportive conditions, we might as well just skip the concept altogether. Either that or make the point that whereas people often think of people with dementia as lacking agency, the truth is that nobody really has agency. It's not something that you have. It's conditioned, always, and really not of any use as an analytical concept. The professor of this group has previously rather aggressively deconstructed models for communication that assume that there is an independent doer, and I remember a manuscript in which he addressed all the ways people construct a self in social interaction (for the purpose of dementia research focusing on how everything is dependently arising, although he didn't call it that). I have been working with this professor for 19 years, in different constellations, and without knowing it, we have actually been doing empirical research on dependent origination all this time. He was actually one of the first person to introduce me to the dharma, even though he isn't into Buddhism at all. I probably should include him in lineage prayers. 

I find this relevant to the ongoing discussion here on DhO on realizations in Buddhism versus other traditions. Despite my background in research, I don't think that the scientific paradigm will ever be able to incorporate all planes of existance and all functioning modes of understanding reality. I think science needs to stick to its internal logic in order to accomplish what it indeed does accomplish, and that means that it needs to presuppose some kind of reference point that is beyond questioning. Like Archimedes said (translating the way I remember it in Swedish, so not a proper qoutation): give me a fixed point and I'll move the world. The fixed points may vary, but science can't operate without one (well, maybe quantum physics can - I don't know - but I have yet to see quantum physics, the actual physics rather than new age versions of it claiming to be based in it, have any significant impact on how people approach human sociality, morality, welfare politics etc, let alone spirituality in a more substantial way than anecdotal inspiration). If we want to get to the "ultimate" truth of reality, we can't just assume things like that. Like the existence of a material world (my opinion - YMWV). And STILL: I have been part of empirical research that really comes to conclusions that match the dharma incredibly well. It just isn't taken to any conclusions about samsara, which is of course a huge difference. 

Before the seminar, inbetween errands and chores, I took a break to just lay down and let go. Oh, that felt soooo good. I want to do this many many times in a day. It is great for practice momentum to do it often. My poor executive function makes it difficult for me. It is such a struggle for me just to manage to fit the basics into the hours of the day: meals, medications, feeding cats, medicating cats, doing the most necessary errands and chores, my formal practice sessions, exercise, going out during the few hours of daylight, and sleep. Somehow I must find my way back to a routine that gives enough space for my practice. It seems to me that it used to be easier, even though I had a job to do too then. The job was in several ways much less complicated than navigating the society as unemployed, but maybe I also needed less practice then? I don't know. I definitely feel like I need more practice now. Anyway, what I was going to write was a reminder to myself that jhanas actually are available now, if I can just make the time to let go. Jhanas can happen almost instantly. So maybe I just need to let go of some idea of having to do it in a specific way that needs more undivided time. It is possible to fit jhanas into a quick break, at least first jhana and maybe second. It doesn't have to be a big deal. 

(Oh, the Papancha...) 

Just noticing, as so many times before, how comically conditioned any manifestation of personality is. This is super-obvious when wiggling on the threshold to depression while at the same time balancing a number of other neurocognitive diagnoses and some weird contested illnesses and trying to balance medications - while also dealing with changing hormones and stuff due to age and a life situation that is in several ways unstable (not in one-sidedly negative ways). I have so many déjà vus these days. It's like "Oh, yeah... I remember this" and "Oh no, not this again" and "Wait a minute... when did this stop and how come I never noticed it was gone until it came back?!" and "Wait, did I just say that? Where did that come from?" and "Didn't I just say the exact opposite a moment ago?" and "Wow... I thought this side/tendency/ability/annoying habit/personal quirk was lost forever" all the time. It's exhausting and interesting and sort of funny. At least I don't need to search long for anything to investigate in my practice. 

Edited to add: Haha! I just had a very pleasant experience of spatially deconstructing a cat litter box while peeing. Under those seconds, there were visual vibrations of the image with fractal levels, flattening, hyper-3D, pleasant waves (also with fractals), a sense of it all being me, a sense of emptiness, a sense of form and emptiness at the same time, and a sense of it all being beautiful just as it is. 

The attention octopus clinging to my face doesn’t feel like a problem any more. It’s actually no different from the cute soft puppy I had there before, or the silk veils, or the soft carressing sensations, or the great force of the process turning my senses inside out in such a wonderfully fierceful way. Entering jhanas, at least in some phases when attention wants to go narrow, focus is inevitably drawn to my nose and areas close to it, as that is how I learned jhanas. I think I have now realized that this focus does not mean that I am trapped there. I can still be the entire space. That focus is just something that goes on in the space.

Adapted from another thread, to keep track:

I was just lying down contemplating "outside" sounds, as I have been adviced to search for the sensations that make it appear as if the sounds reach me ears. I really can't find any such sensations. The sound seems to happen "out there" where the traffic is, and there are touch sensations of ears meeting pillows, but I can't even find any sensations that say that the ears are "here". It all just seems to be thoughts at a taken-for-granted level, applying logic to mental representations mimicking senses, that say that if "you" can feel touch sensations, then those sensations must be "here", and if the traffic sound is that low, compared to some other mental representation, then it must be "over there", and if the sound is "over there", then it needs to reach the ears "over here" because those are supposedly what we hear with, and there are mental representations of loud sounds hurting ears and of swollen ears together with impaired hearing, and very brief sensations of contractions around what mental representations tag as the heart, together with thoughts saying that this confirms that it "must" be so, and other thoughts that sceptically say that those sensations actually do not in themselves say anything more than the actual sensations - 
and I can't place those thoughts anywhere. I was pondering the possibility of being the entire space, but realized that I can't actually find the space either, and of course I can't, because that would require a position outside of space (as Archimedes supposedly pointed to). The space is just assumed, and there's a whole lot going on that can't be located at all. 

Reposting here to keep track:

I think what I have been trying to figure out is how dualistic sensations of something "other" are possible, and it seems like actually they aren't. I can't find anything in any sensation per se that proves that it refers to anything other. So I really don't need to prove that non-dualistic sensations are possible, because there is no way to find any other that can look at that problem to begin with (I thought I already knew that, but apparently I couldn't see the implications). The whole question is based on dualism to begin with, so it doesn't compute. The question is asked within one internal logic but aspires to adress an entirely different internal logic, and to my knowledge, there is no compiler anywhere that can work around that paradox.