I think this is equanimity. Can't say i'm sure if it's high yet, but some weird things keep happening that feel like I'm paying too much attention and near-missing fruition. Mahasi Sayadaw's descriptions are extremely familiar for what I'm going through right now. Thoughts?

History: I powered up concentration first doing nostril-anapana, fell into the first 2 jhanas and the sheer power of concentration gave me a spontaneous A&P. I gave myself a crash course in Mahasi noting and broader mindfulness, and stabilized the progress of insight I'd already had; but after that whole weird meditating-into-dreams phase with the waves of obsession with practice and the intense sexuality and the "I am so powerful, I turn everything into shimmering pinpricks when I want", things got scary and lonely and impermanent and dissociatey--hello Dark Night. Spent some confused time during Dissolution (visuals never have stopped shimmering ever since, and I've had the damnedest "3rd eye" and eyeball and crown vibrating tensions ever since.) trying to develop concentration and insight both at once, but soon figured out 3rd and 4th samatha jhanas, with a taste of Infinite Space just once. They didn't hold, so I did vast amounts of noting. Started getting the fear wave in the middle of practice after a&p. Not surprisingly, it wasn't long after that I had major posture problems after that--nothing seemed quite right, and concentrating was a nightmare. The only consolation was discovering randomly at a meditation group that doing Mudita practice would directly turn my headache into fierce rapture. Brahma-viharas are far cleverer than people give them credit for.

Anyway, after a total bear of a sit, in agony AND falling asleep and just tired of all of this and wondering if there's any point and if this does any good at all, I had a long night's sleep and the next day was different. Of all things, I was reading the Sutra of Hui-Neng, which is early enough in the history of Zen to still talk about it as a vipasyana practice, and found myself spontaneously getting wildly concentrated in a choiceless-awareness mode (which I've never, ever done before, because normally I get too distracted by content). I figured I should get on the cushion, so I did. Planned a 45 minute sit, but it ended up going an hour and a half and only hurt a little after I finished.

During the sit, I integrated some things from the Four Foundations I've been working on, and something SHIFTED. Been working on getting all the sense-doors integrated into a wide panorama, and this time that was almost effortless. Spent the effort to note feeling-tone pairs, and THAT became effortless, and all the gross sensations I had were breaking apart into these rich braids of complex vibrations of pleasant/unpleasant/neutral all intermixed---nothing was purely just one, and everything vibrated and changed through mixes of them all. I added in attraction/aversion/inattention/attention and suddenly got another shift, this one leading to a truly choiceless, labelless feedback loop of concentrated insight--and a non-self feeling that I can only call equanimity; unpleasant sensations would either dissolve into feeling clusters or would remain but weren't something I had to worry about, because they were just this THING over there (not-self). Sights were wrapped around in total globe of 4th jhana but the vibration/impermanence was obvious. Feelings were that same interbraiding of shimmering tones, but the cognition of those feelings seemed to have echo-vibes in the back of my neck and in my chest and stomach, and I noticed those, and noticed the noticing, and got all kinds of thought-echoes. Then spontaneously thoughts bubbling in and out became an object (but moved so fast their content was invisible, just the rise and fall of them). All of this was feeding back on one another, the seeing and the seeing-the-seeing and the noticing and the thrill of noticing and the noticing-the-thrill-of-noticing. Pressure on the forehead finally broke open into a cloud of pleasant/unpleasant/neutral vibes for the remainder of practice, and I could watch the echo attraction-aversion vibrations, and watch the watching. But no matter how much I kept spontaneously asking "where am I?", I couldn't find "me", though those individual cognition-echo subtle physical feelings were noticeable either between my ears or in my spine or chest or forehead or behind the eyes, and asking would often change my eye-focus--thus setting off ANOTHER round of feedback between noticing and noticing-the-noticing.

In the middle of all this, every once in a while I'd get really in the zone noticing sensations and feelings etc, and following the feedback loops, trying to follow the winking-out in between the visual flickers, and suddenly there would be this rising thrill, but it would turn quickly into deep bodily too-much-energy and thrill/anxiety. Huge effort required to retain equanimity, noticing the aversion and attraction, and would hold it for a while and reality would really seem to shake, then my body would get too excited and I'd find myself pulling back to calm it down. There were a couple of moments that genuinely felt like I was going to fall in between the frames of something but the burst of adrenaline stopped it cold.

Today, basically the same practice happened, but with more familiarity, and therefore more not-self when these feedback loops happened. There was a moment when all visuals dissolved outward and I think I spontaneously pushed into Infinite Space again, and my insight was taking apart the subtle vibrations left, when again a major feedback loop of adrenaline welled up--yes, it was a bunch of unpleasant (and some pleasant/neutral) hot pinprick vibrations through the chest and stomach, and I could watch the aversion as well and it disembedded. . . but ultimately something became too much. (Checking later, nothing was weirdly too fast about my heart rate or anything. it just. . . happened.)

At peak experiences, I'm going to quote Dan Ingram on the quality of my choiceless awareness insight. I'm swerving in and out between 7 and 8:



Is this what Equanimity feels like? There's very much the seeing and the seer in a curious disjunct that still vibrates in interference. Sometimes sensations just vanish even on a subtle level and I chase the subtlest waves beneath. And some part is always chasing the "I" doing the chasing, and getting a little stymied at the recursion level. Every once in a while I might detect a tiny blip in attention, a wee bit of missed time, but not carefully enough to be drawn in.

Anything I should be doing? Lately my practice involves a half-hour mostly concentration power-up in the morning, followed by some metta and a pinch of other immeasurables, some walking meditation and general mindfulness mid-day, and insight work in the evenings --an hour or more a night, since this shift. Any advice working with the adrenaline-spike? Also, should I just let my awareness roam and tear things apart, or should I be actively trying to widen it further?


Thanks in advance.

Ok. It's done. THAT was quick.

Was posting something on Ron Crouch's website (alohadharma.wordpress.com), and since his descriptions of the map really gelled with my experience, he offered to talk me through Equanimity via e-mail. I took him up, and the advice TOTALLY WORKED the very next sit. Mentioning him here in gratitude.

Anyway: the "I", at least on the gross level, it is seen through. That thing popped. A flash pop, then a burst of non-seeing, then time skipped forward (tiny slice. barely discontinuous.) without me in it. In the "what was that?", a huge bliss-giggle wave. All four jhanas suddenly accessible in any order on instant cue. The whole shebang. Self-words feel a little like an inside joke now, or like the funny tingling of a long-healed scar. A little uncertain and silly. Lot more reviewing to do.

I sat down for what was supposed to be half an hour, let the timer go silent, and kept going. 15 or 20 minutes later, it happened. Word to the wise. If something wants to keep sitting, sometimes it's best to let it.

In a little more detail:

Advice from Ron went as follows: Make a resolution to let things be and really let the awareness be choiceless without grasping at it, and to give myself permission to for-real awaken. He pointed out that there's a part of the self that was really afraid of dying or falling into nothing, and one has to be very open and accepting of that thing so the grasping will release. It really, really worked, and it gave me the space to let the investigation really burn through the anticipation-anxiety wave mentioned above, especially with a little Four Immeasurables practice ahead of time. One last piece of advice I used will show up in a few.

Took the seat, resolved to let this be, enlightenment or no, but resolved to awaken for all living beings.

As normal, I started eyes open till they naturally drop into concentration state. Open awareness, totally choiceless, only noting when something was going to send me off track. All 5 sense-doors. Momentary rapture-bliss. Eyes shut. Note a couple vedanas, and in they pop, and then come aversions/attractions (by now, 3rd jhana.), and mind goes into the picture. Everything's a sea of little bubbles and tingles and waves made of pinpricks that themselves vibrate. I remember the resolution, noting it. "Who am I" arises, and becomes a series of wobbling feedback loops. The sense data and the "observer" locations (slightly different depending which sense was being observed) were being conceptualized like a rubber band or a worm (yes, I got that one from DhO) or something, and as soon as the thought-image of the relation came in, those overlapping cords that cord started to wobble nauseously. So far, still in familiar territory. Calm it down, 4th Jhana wraps it all around, and it wobbles itself.

Very naturally, the vibration in everything becomes the object, irrespective of input. Especially with the observing-observed-metaobserving-thinking resonation causing massive interference.

As that happens, suddenly the anxiety feedback arises, humming like wild in the stomach-into-chest area. But this time, I bring a little metta and equanimity (and even a little balancing joy and compassion, all explicitly) and really just let it arise and be investigated. Pops into feeling-tones, then in the aversion suddenly the thoughts of fearing-oblivion become apparent, as well as an old ADD-related fear of losing track of what I'm doing, and the content becomes form again. Acknowledging them, it just got a little easier and more selfless every time things opened out and buzzed through.

Still, the energy of it all was getting pretty fierce, like reality was about to tear itself apart, and it was still hard to keep the body and mind from tensing themselves. But that's where the last bit of advice from Ron came in, a very sharp bit of the 4 Foundations I'd never gotten into: noting "Liberated" every time things felt open and free vs. "Unliberated" every time I saw tensing or grasping (such as that anxiety). The samatha aspect of 4th Jhana got a lot of "liberated" for practice. The anxiety wave got "un-liberated". The finally-subsiding of narrative anxiety got "liberated." And of course the speaking and hearing themselves added to the feedback loops.

When the shaking sped up and things started to get blippy and chunky and falling apart, and some basic "Falling into the abyss!" reaction started to kick in, I switched to high-speed noting: Since everything was vibrating so hard, I could always find some tiny "liberated", free, unanxious space in between the anxiety waves, and just alternated between the two as fast as possible. Worked REALLY POWERFULLY to get attraction and aversion to stay put. Almost like a "Mahamudra noting" technique, but slightly more choiceless. It also made clear a last wave or two of doubt.

Finally: I think it was something like anatta and/or dukkha door--i didn't pop in between the spaces in the flicker, more like "liberated/unliberated" kicked in, crossed with the "where is my self?" feedback slow loop-wobble. When I and it kind of ruled out all possibilities of self, while the hum turned up to max, then didn't get caught up in anxious stomach vibes, it kept going and there was the "pop"--flash, there was a seeing nothing (black-blank) for a split-second, and then there was total discontinuity immediately after. I think it was a very short fruition. In the middle of "what was that?"-- wave of bliss and laughter. Experimenting, the Four Jhanas are easy-peasy now; INSTANT. And in those 2 minutes of trying, I got back to the verge of Infinite Space--before now, I'd get form dissolving into spaciousness, and the falling-reflex would kind of pull me back, but there's just nothing to fear, nothing to disorient.

Poking around at what it did, it seems that on some level The "who am I?" or "seeing-knowing" attention shift suddenly just doesn't have any charge to it; It doesn't make me woozy/vertiginous any more because it's just two things moving. It's all just stuff. And the word "I" has this uneasy jokey feel to it, or a kind of numb tingle like a long-healed scar. It's way more diffuse. I tried to go right back through to another fruition, and the body was getting cranky because it has a sinus infection and needed some soup, so I didn't get all the way. What did happen, though, is that the anxiety of falling through that total-reality-hum was totally-seen-through, no feedback loop at all, just more buzzing and wobbling. Who cares what blinks out into what?

If you look at my first thread, this all went SO ABSURDLY FAST. Sit practice started in March, my A&P was in September, and I've never been on retreat. For anyone who thinks they might be able to get concentration states, I highly recommend them to power you through Dark Night. Whenever insight felt overwhelmed, I just started pushing on concentration again; whenever it hurt too much to concentrate, I just worked on noting and noticing more sophisticatedly. See-sawed me right through, even if it was a little disorienting at the time. They finally merged at 4th, and that itself WAS Equanimity.

Somehow all that speed would seem really scary if this weren't such a simple thing.It feels absurdly normal. But there's a quietness, and a humorousness about it all. The Heart Sutra is funnier than ever, but not as funny as saying "I".

Excuse me while I start playing with jhanas, slowly piecing out what the hell actually is different now, see if I can call up fruitions, and start learning not to hold onto the "stink of enlightenment."

Nice!

Awesome!

Beautiful, thank you.

Regarding it all having happened absurdly fast, I don't remember exactly which book it was, but I think it was U Pandita Sayadaw who wrote something like, Stream entry may not happen the first time you sit. It may take 2 or 3 or even 16 days or longer.

Can I ask you something: Have your insights mostly been what you expected, or have they mostly been different from what you expected?

I'll say that it's a curious mix. A&P was a shock, but very much fits the model; the surprise was more, "this actually HAPPENS to people? The Pali Canon isn't just saying this works?" . Didn't realize that dissolution meant I'd be staring at the sky and trees and wondering if I could ever enjoy them again.
Also, not everyone experiences "energy" as such. For me, it always just feels like high speed muscle tension dissected. Via insight into vibrations. That said, Dark Night's vibrations are indeed deeply irkirksome

One of the little worldly, relative insights over this whole path is how even very milquetoast-seeming beginner dharma books tend to have very clear mentioning of strong jhanic or insight states, just very mildly worded so as not to scare off the mushroom factor. I definitely see why Dan Ingram got irked by this trend, though in my position I can just find it funny.

But as for the rest, it really never made sense how one could ever experientially just SEE impermanence or dukkha or not-self, but it unfolded SO naturally over time.

As for the final insight, it is as totally anticlimactic, and yet awesome, as everyone says. And as for me, you know you're close when people's descriptions of the three doors suddenly start to make more sense.

Congrats!!

Hah, awesome descriptions! Whatever your attitude to practice is, keep it up, as it seems to be working great. Not everybody sees when they enter the stream so clearly... for me it was one of three days, most likely, but no idea which.

Congrats! And thanks for a very informative post. This adds some missing pieces to my understanding, and matches my own experience very well. I believe I have once gotten to the point where you need to let go of the "part that's really afraid of dying", and just couldn't do it.

Fuckin' A. I totally missed this thread!

Thanks for writing up such a detailed and well described report.

Thanks everybody for all the congrats!

I'll probably calm this down and mess with concentration practice and have nothing to report, but I figured the next-day update's worth having:

This is a slightly odd experience going through with a major head-cold or possibly flu, but equanimity techniques sure have helped.

Things are less raw today, and for a while I was sort of imagining I'd made all this up. Those first few hours yesterday, there was really this major space between thoughts and like an enhanced cut-up-into-discrete-moments quality to reality. I spent a few hours lying around delirious and reading all the books I had that wittingly-or-unwittingly described this, from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets to some Hakuin on the experience of kensho (CLEARLY SAME MAP) to John Crowley's "Engine Summer". Then took forever trying to go to sleep, but kept hitting high rupa jhanas instead. Had a few minutes bumping into weak Infinite Space, and maybe 1 second of what felt like Infinite Consciousness before I twitched out of it.

"Self" doesn't feel so weird anymore. Just a tiny bit more, uh, detachable. And less identified with those body sensations that pop up when you try to locate the various watchers. They slide around a little more, and the dissonance is just a little less awe-inspiring than when I was on the track to First Path. I can see why this ultimately slides back into Mind/Body, since there's a little bit of that quality to the insight itself: ("oh. this stuff is also an object. perspective shift. Thanks, Galileo, the earth is NOT the center of the universe.").

Starting to notice the cycling. Every once in a while, there's a blip (just like a microscopic tape-skip) and then the engine of my brain kind of surges into high-energy, A&P again, usually with a bit of a silly feeling. Then a plain old space-out, and then I ache more. Then I sort of decide to be a little mindful and equanimous, and it opens out a bit. Then either another blip into that surge, or a blip into mellow panoramic quiet clarity. Order is not always this precise, but I'm also really out of it today on a physical level. The Ken Folk Dharma page about getting repeat fruitions had some advice that seems to work: zooming into third-eye buzzing and that current of vibrating tension from there up the skull and down the back to the chest-spine seems to get this cycle rolling all on its own.

These kinds of unknowing blips were around since I first got to Equanimity, but now seem to have the charge of actually sometimes hitting that "reset button". Before, they just seemed like the tiny muddle of attention in the moments your eyes involuntarily refocus.


Rereading the MCTB chapter 3 doors, my fruition yesterday was definitely Dukha door, possibly with a dash of emptiness. Falling sensation, a little bit of a spinning-open-aperture feeling, then a flash and unnerving POP with wrongness-sensation. I know we're trying to get to the end of suffering, but next time, I think I want to try one of the mellower ones!


[EDIT: Whoa. I just had my biggest and most obviously real one yet: so sudden and almost painful that it was like an electric shock. HARD restart--came back still unnerved. Some of these light ones I start to understand are just state transitions, but THIS was full-blown nothing-there discontinuity just by accidentally focusing in on the right spot at the base of my skull. I was so surprised when I came back that I didn't even get the bliss-wave. Definitely going to try out various doors to see if I can find one a little mellower.]

-M

Michael, we talked in the past about alternative noting techniques for those who have attentional issues, and you wrote:



If you don't mind, would you share how effective you found techniques such as these (noting the visual field) in terms of how your practice has unfolded? I would like to refine my suggestions for the benefit of other meditators, so getting accurate feedback on this will be helpful to me (and them).

EDIT: Also, can you describe what you mean by "echo-vibes" more precisely?

Something to try: remember well this experience. The shift in perspective about the 'self'. You have shattered one of the fetters... later on, when struggling with issues of the 'self' (which I suppose we will all do until we're done), it might be helpful to reflect on this experience in particular and what it has shown you about the self. A kind of a review of the fetters you have broken. Might help with equanimity in later times of trouble.



Try just sitting and noti(ci)ng the impermanence and no-self of everything. Or any two-combination of the 3 doors. I think what you are noticing up to fruition determines the door.

I definitely recall that conversation. Gladly. Hope any of this helps someone.

Noting random points was very powerful during A&P (though few things aren't, then), but as soon as I got to late Dissolution, it turned into a blind alley: it just seemed to get me wound up and my attention would fall apart. The broader shimmer of the visual field, however, was one of my lifelines through the Dark Night. It was really the piece of impermanence I could always hold onto (however amusingly paradoxical that formulation sounds), even when I was feeling very blunt about noting bodily sensations. Any time I was falling into doubt and feeling like a fraud to myself, I'd look over at the wall or the sky or a tree and focus on rapid-noting the broad shimmering visual field for a couple minutes, followed by rapid-noticing it, and that tended both to strengthen my concentration and my resolve. By Equanimity, that practice made the visual field one of my quickest ways to tune into impermanence and subtle vibrations. I tend to think of the jhanas as strongly a function of eye-focus, so for warm-up to a sit I tend to use the Tibetan technique of picking a spot in vision and widening attention to a broader region that frames it, then the full visual oval. (Though since yesterday I can usually go straight there.) When I see that pointillistic phosphene shimmer, I know I can shut my eyes and integrate the rest of the sense doors.

As for "Echo-vibes": my noting from Reobservation into low Equanimity was especially focused on making feeling-tones and associated thought-images and moods apparent. Usually, high enough panoramic concentration combined with broad enough Four Foundations noting would bring something of a "mind-body" or "cause-and-effect" experience, where I would suddenly notice a physical counterpart/reaction to the moods and attraction/aversion and thoughts--tensing around the skull or spine or chest or throat. One even a first-timer might know is the stomach-pit feeling of anxiety. But again, with that 4th Vipassana Jhana kicked in, those tensings and feelings would THEMSELVES dissolve into vibrations and pinpoints. (Those being the "echo-vibes" to the so-called original sensation.)

And in the spaciousness of 4th jhana, especially as it got more choiceless, the very noticing would be noticed as a thought, which in turn tended to have a physical counterpart somewhere, which was also vibrations. MCTB and the Abhidhamma seems to call this phenomenon "sankharas", though I think of it as "panoramic integration of all 5 skandhas". It started to become clear that this process never ended, and there were no utterly clear dividing lines (or as Avalokitesvara says, looking down on them and seeing they're empty). This led to a slow, wobbly nauseating feedback with itself like a series of overlapping standing waves. Very much the same tihng as MCTB's description of High Equanimity when he talks about 3 points (mind, body, observer) trying to synchronize with themselves. Mine just seemed to sometimes have more than 3 points because I couldn't find an ultimate observer.

[And the weirdest practice or experience I never mentioned here was in early Dark Night, when I started waving my arm around post-sit and tried to hyperspeed-force-note "intendingMOVINGKNOWINGFEELINGseeingKNOWINGintendingFEELING", while looking at it just on the fuzzy edge of the visual field, so the mental image and the sense data didn't all quite match. Doing so got me my very first taste of body images skipping around queasily (in a couple sense doors), plus weird nauseous crown and neck tension, but it became very clear I wasn't going to break through to anything. Once, though, it got me to a very strange version of Cause and Effect where anything I subvocalized would be weakly performed by my gross motor system, right down to "clap your hands" or "pick up the dish" or "hold the pen. scribble on the paper". After that, the whole thing seemed to exhaust itself, but I sort of feel like my fruition came about by letting "reality" rip apart the very tensions I had tried to consciously pull apart before.]

I keep wondering about that one. Did Eliot have any paths, or was he just writing from a conceptual understanding? It certainly stinks of enlightenment. Great poetry either way.

Thanks for the follow-up info.



As the "shimmer" of the visual field is extraordinarily distinctive to me, and yet I cannot recall hearing anyone having mentioned it, I wonder if this is a symptom of some kind of attention issue, or a natural outcome of using the visual field as an object to note, or simply something that is obvious but goes unmentioned by those who haven't used the visual field in this way. Have you always noticed this feature of it?

As your attainment settles down, it will be interesting to hear whether your attention issues change. (I found stream entry quite impressive in that regard and have wondered whether the changes I experienced were idiosyncratic or something that can be expected by others.) Please keep us posted.

This map of the stages of insight I found on Google once specifically puts the shimmer of the sky in "bhanga nana", Dissolution. That's precisely when it, and the visual field shimmer that went along with it, became really pervasive for me.

I will be very curious to see what happens with my attention as well!

Thanks.

If the shimmer becomes very distinct for you, you may be able to use the way it varies in different nanas to determine which you are in (not just in the case of dissolution).