Darn! I was just putting the finishing touches on a nice introduction to formally de-lurk, went to Google something from the search bar but neglected to switch tabs first, hit the back button in my browser, and everything I had written was erased. Phooey. Hello anyway.

--Tarver

Let's try this again.

I would like to review what could be considered my "Dark Night Wanderings" and ask for suggestions about how to proceed.

Before I get into it, let me just say that this community is really inspiring and the quality of the conversations is simply incredible. Part of the reason I have lurked for so long is that every time I have had a question it has been easy to find a thread intelligently discussing it. Thank you, all of you, and especially thank you Daniel for hosting this site, writing MCTB, and most recently appearing in the videos referenced in the "Books and Websites" section. Making this information and the conversation about it accessible is profoundly valuable to me, and I believe to humanity. Namaste.

Now that I know what to call it, I have obviously crossed the A&P many times since my late teens. I won't go over the all circumstances except to mention one thing: a certain professor from the University of Toronto named Leslie Dewart published a book in 1989 called Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature. I had the great good fortune of studying briefly with Professor Dewart shortly before he retired. I remain utterly convinced that his book contains something of profound importance for the very survival and success of our species, but unfortunately nobody gets it and even I can't explain it clearly, even though I actually started a PhD with the intention of doing just that. I feel like if I could do one important thing in my life, it would be to retrieve the golden key buried in that book and make it available to the world. Now I wonder whether my unshakable feeling really points to something important, or whether it's simply a side effect of having been exposed to Leslie Dewart and his book when I happened to hit an A&P episode. Perhaps both are true, and maybe even one caused the other.

About ten years ago I hit a crisis from which I emerged sober and attending LOTS of meetings. I have since managed to cut back from a dozen a week to about two, and I have become known in the local recovery community as something of an "atheist/Buddhist" resource guy. I started sustained meditation practice with Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). I practiced daily for many years. For some time I sat with the wonderful crazy-in-a-good-way folk at Shambhala, attended a number of courses there, and formally took Refuge. The Vajrayana stuff did not attract me, but the sincere basic goodness of the community certainly did. I have attended five Levels of workshops by the Human Awareness Institute (HAI) which have been profoundly helpful in sorting out issues of love, intimacy, and sexuality. And in the last year I have been tightening up what you might call the first training in morality by getting very active in the ManKind Project (MKP) with palpably good results. AHO!

To sort out what was happening to me when things got hairy I turned to doctors for help and I have tried on for size a large wardrobe of psychiatric diagnoses, none of which quite fit right. For over a decade I took an astounding variety of drugs. A year and a half ago I read Peter Breggin, thought better of it, and under supervision tapered off completely. Notwithstanding one intervening skull-crushing depression (which may have been an extended withdrawal effect -- but they don't study that, do they?) I have been fine. My only complaint now is that my sleep patterns are seldom stable, but I have resolved to stop dissecting what might be wrong with me and start cultivating and celebrating what might be right, and there seems to be enough to work with.

I have attended three 10-day Goenka Vipassana courses. My experience of the first was like drinking from the Fire-Hose of Truth. The second was like sifting through the cold soggy ashes of every defilement and defect of character that had ever afflicted me. The third course was vastly more pleasant; insofar as it was on the far side of the yucky stuff, I wonder if I may have attained the stage of Equanimity (?) but the dominant theme of the third course was a veritable monsoon of creativity that would not stop. I emerged from that course with a design for a fully adjustable meditation bench and a scheme for making it available for free to newcomers to meditation. I have made and tested prototypes and taken steps to start a business based on this (see DanaBench) but I am more of a designer and fabricator than a business dude so between that and generally dealing with the Dark Night I don't have any benches ready to offer yet.

Under the ideal conditions of a course I have been able (but only twice ever) to maintain continuous mindful contact with my breath for an entire hour with no lapses. Body-scanning as I have learned it, however, is another matter: I find it brutally hard going, even after three courses, so much so that when I sit at home I seldom even attempt it. I am thinking of maybe going back for a fourth course in a few months, and trying to punch through to stream entry -- maybe I will have some luck on "the sixth day of my fourth course" too -- but something isn't quite right. Am I missing something idiot simple, or am I trying to do a technique that works for others but will never work for me for whatever reason? What could I do instead? I want to attain stream entry. I believe that some of you guys have done it, and that with the right technique and right effort, I can do it too.

I would be most grateful for pointers and feedback, thank you.

Cheers,
--Tarver

Hi Tarver,

Thanks for all of that detail. There are other experienced Goenka people here (I am not one of them).

I regularly look at "Dark Night" threads (insight stages 5-10) from, first, a physical perspective.

1) Do you get regular and intense exercise (i.e., 20 minutes on an elliptical machine, where 5 minutes are warm up and each minute thereafter is an escalation of effort, with a max exertion at the 10-minute mark, a recovering pace is at 11 minutes, re-escalation effort is from 12-16 minutes (escalating with each minute), and another max effort is made at the 17-minute mark. Minutes 18 and 19 are for a recovery pace and preparing to stop (at 20-minute mark). This is a dripping-wet 20 minutes, by the way).

2) Do you regularly do long, slow, deep breathing while stretching (with stretches lasting about 2 minutes each and being dedicated to mindfulness in the stretch and gentleness with oneself)?

If you do not do 1 and 2 above currently, and do decide to do something like this for a week (without any aggressive, punitive or demoting self-reflection whatsoever, or should such self-reflective criticism arise, then immediately letting go of those thoughts like a hot coal) how is your body scanning and/or other practice?

Annica! Dukkha! There they are again...

I remain open to input, suggestions, and/or encouragement; I am logging my progress daily in my practice thread.

It is very hard to tease apart what caused what, but taking a few brisk walks, sitting two hours daily, and having incorporated just a handful of sessions of quasi-yogic stretching and "Authentic Movement" work with my friend G. into my practice has utterly transformed it. I can scarcely recognize myself from what I was writing five weeks ago. I was having trouble scanning the body? No problem now!

Reflecting back to the beginning, however, I also recall being flatly repelled by the yoga component of the MBSR course that started me on the path of meditation, and I have always resisted exercise and found it somehow unpleasant.

So your suggestions, Katy, seem to be spot on even though I still find them a bit hard to hear. I have devoted years of my life to resisting the likes of them.

Maybe part of what is shifting is that I have been very deliberate and specific about developing a modicum of concentration, part of that has been cultivating the feeling of joy in the attempt to access the first jhana, and that in turn has made it somehow "safe" to access the sensations of my own body? Just a guess. What I think about it is secondary to the fact that something is working, so thank you.

I am glad to read your experience, and that you are finding ways to tune into your body to assist your mental faculty.

I am getting ready to exercise because I just added three chocolate donuts to my empty, hungry stomach. The mind is getting sleepy and dull. Maybe eight months ago, this moment would have been a seam through which negatively affective use of the mental faculty would have entered. Now, it is just a moment of sleepiness with sugary causality and knowing that exercise will be a great use of the energy (versus sleeping). So I am off for some meditative cardiovascular interest.

I understand. It takes repetition, sincere effort, perseverance, re-effort, relaxation, quitting, re-newing, honesty, kindness, openness, utter newness, etc...and then there is just seeing oneself, one's feelings, one's stories about oneself. That is insightful, because seeing oneself and ones habit can result usefully in blowing out the walls. It's not something to be rushed, but sincerity (aka pure intention) and willingness to experience is a sort of nitro. I continue to be surprised by my ineptitude (from stale views) as well as new aptitude.

Maybe you'll continue to post what you learn about this. Thank you for your posts.