Achieved Stream-Entry in 2 Months - Discussion
Hey guys,
I achieved stream-entry yesterday after only 2 months of formal insight practice. My perception completely changed but life seems to be the same. Most shocking to me is how fast things progressed. I wrote a huge post yesterday morning but the draft seems to be lost, so I'm rewriting this again. Let's start from the beginning:
I grew up a video game/internet addict. My brain seems to perceive gaming and the internet as the same thing, so I'll use those terms interchangeably. I spent my whole childhood playing video games, and have over 15000 hours, not including internet use which probably clocks in at over 20000 hours also. I spent 6-12 hours a day on a PC since I was 6 years old. I am 19. My life goal was earning achievements, and I felt pure bliss when I earned them.
In 2018 someone in class mentioned that they want to earn a certain grade to get into university. Since then, I had this idea that I should start studying. However, studying was painful. Extremely painful. I couldn't study for more than 5 minutes without excruciating pain and burn out setting in. I rationalised this as just normal. I tried quitting for 1 day, and would have a 100% failure rate. Even if I did succeed in going 6 hours with no internet, it would actually make things worse because I would get back to where I started, with the added learned helplessness. It's like trying to put your hand in a fire. You might have the courage to do it once, but after you get burnt then you will not want to do it again.
My parents would gaslight me, saying "It's not that bad, it's all in your head, just start studying and it will get easier". It never became easier. The more I studied the more pain I received. It's like the longer you sit in a fire, the more you get burnt. Studying and going without the internet for n + 1 minutes is always more painful than n minutes, without exception. I distinctly remember studying intensively for 2 hours and then ending up avoiding studying for 2 months afterwards. The idea of going through the pain terrified me so much that I would do anything, anything to not go through the pain, even if I became homeless and had to starve to death.
In 2021, as my exams came around, pressure built up to start studying but I couldn't do anything. I couldn't study with no pressure, and trying to study with pressure just made things harder. So, when exams came closer and closer I ended up actually studying less until one day I realised I had no time to study for everything and I would completely give up. I failed my exams. Not only is the withdrawal horrifying, but now every time I relapsed it would kill me on the inside knowing I am doing something that I promised I would not do 6 hours earlier, that would trigger more pain, more suffering.
At some point after a few years of trying I ended up realising that I never even felt any bliss any more during my screen time. Whereas in my childhood, I would play video games, feel good, stop, feel good knowing that I played, and then look forward to playing again. Now it was the opposite. I would be in excruciating pain 24/7, and when I relapsed it would just give me more pain. My brain skipped the dopamine hit. As I'm writing this, I realise this was me realising unsatisfactoriness.
On September 12th 2021, I started a 4.5 month streak. Sounds extreme, but actually I had no choice. "Moderation" never worked, ever. It's like trying to shoot heroin in moderation. Bull shit, doesn't work, never worked, never will. Seeing 5 seconds of news coverage would give me such horrible pain that I would relapse and binge for 12 hours. Same thing goes for notifications, memes my mom sent, etc. All it takes is one moment of exposure to anything, even if someone says something in a public place about something new, to completely derail all progress. During this streak, all I did was follow my schedule of working out, eating, cold exposure, sauna, and then just sit for the rest of time. Just don't relapse. It doesn't matter what happened, all I wanted was to sit on a couch and wait. Anything more gave me such pain that I just couldn't do it. I was clueless about meditation at the time.
At the 3.5 month mark I went on holiday with my father to the Maldives. The weather was amazing, the ocean was beautiful and the hammocks were nice to lay on. From an outsider's perspective, I was in heaven. However, I ended up literally being in completely misery and at some point just started crying because it was so painful. The pain progressed gradually day by day, and it never subsided. My father, of course, is confused and looks at me like a dumbass, which was not helpful.
At the 4.5 month mark on the 1st of February 2022 I relapsed because I saw a picture of a game I used to play on my PC. I browsed everything for 1 hour, had to go to bed but I couldn't fall asleep. Laid down with my eyes open for the whole night. Like someone shot me with a copious amount of drugs. The high was something that I never felt in my entire life before. For reference, sugar and porn for me wasn't even 1% the high that I felt. I quit those easily. But I am dumbfounded as how some people can quit using video games at their own volition just like that. Ingram comes to mind. The next day I finished browsing everything I didn't see, being sleep deep deprived and crashing after the high made me cry again.
Important to note, that at this point I was already eating healthy for 1.5 years. My diet, as far as I was and am concerned, is as good as I think it could be. Any external health factors were not the cause of my withdrawal/depression. I am not getting into specifics, but I felt and feel physically amazing, but mentally I was crushed. After this for the next few months I was fighting my addiction on and off, go for 2 weeks, relapse, etc.
Around July 2022 a thought came to me. I remembered watching this Veritasium video where the person said that asteroids could land at anytime, and we have no defence for them. This made me really scared of asteroids for 2 days. After, I thought, why am I scared? Because if this event happens, I will die. But in this lifetime, my chance of death is 100%. This put me in a completely different existential dread independent of anything I felt before. I felt this dread only once before as a kid for a few seconds but I ignored it completely.
For the next 2-3 weeks I have this dread 24/7. I got nightmares. I had dreams where I would be on a very tall, wobbly building above the clouds. It would collapse and I would fall and die. I had dreams where I would be below a very tall building, it falls and crushes me. I had dreams where a dark figure comes by my bedside, stabs me in the throat and I die. I had dreams where a monster crawls out of my window, jumps on me and eats me. I had dreams where asteroids fall on me and I die. I had dreams where a black hole sucks the whole planet and I die. I had dreams where I see a frame of my estate. Then the frame moves closer to where I live, one frame at a time. It shows my house. Then I wake up. This is mortality coming to kill me.
I continued like this until one day I thought, why does it matter if I die? The world doesn't revolve around me, and if I die things will still continue on. Thousands of people die each day, why do I care if I die? This put me at ease. In retrospect I realise this is an intellectual understanding of no-self without realising it was no-self. In September my exam results don't put me into university as I thought the grades would fall after COVID. After relapsing back and forth for a few months I am now put in a position where I need to study, and I actually manage to do one hour a day without feeling much pain.
On October 9th 2022 I read Joseph Everett's Substack newsletter (What I've Learned). He mentions jhanas, interviewing Daniel Ingram and MCTB2. I am convinced this is 100% true and start reading MCTB2 . I read the whole thing in 1 month. I feel completely burned out and I don't care about any theory. I just want to practice. I read literally nothing else because I felt like I knew enough theory. The idea of the Dark Night scared me shitless. Having to grow through all the hard parts of my withdrawal again, even though I am recovering, terrified me to the core. I thought that shamatha before vipassana would be easier and made more sense to me, so I start doing shamatha. However, since I am pressured to study and I can manage to do 2 hours a day without much pain, I literally do no on-the-cushion practice. The only thing I do is try to focus on my breath while doing my daily activities.
As you can guess, this didn't work. I got nowhere for 6 months. During this time if I looked something up online that I wanted to look up, as long as I only looked at things that I searched for and not anything else, the pain would be minor and I could do this once every 2 weeks and still function. However, this was still a fix and the withdrawal got too much, and I fully crash. I browse everything for 3 weeks for 15 hours a day. I stop doing my daily routine and do absolutely nothing. It destroys my progress and I feel helpless again. My exams are in 1.5 months and the idea of not sitting for 15 hours a day, yet alone 0, terrifies me to the core. My fix now has to be all day, otherwise I am terrified. Sleep, everything, doesn't matter in the face of withdrawal.
I realise studying or doing anything is impossible, and the best I can do is just sit in pain for as long as possible. I say fuck it, and start doing vipassana in May 2023. I am already at rock bottom, and I am willing to progress as fast as possible, even if it means even more pain and the Dark Night. I sit 8 hours a day, only taking breaks for eating and exercise. 2.5 hours in the morning, 2.5 hours in the afternoon, and 3 hours in the evening. But this is just a general guide, not a rule, if I sat for only 1 hour because I woke up late for whatever reason then whatever. Obviously I don't set alarms, I don't want to feel worse than I already feel with sleep deprivation.
I meditate without noting. Notes feel like they slow me down and require me to think about what to mediate, and a chore. I don't do them at all. Just focus on the rise rise rise, fall fall fall of the breath. I do this all day. To my surprise everything feels so easy. I am no longer lost in content, and anytime I get lost it doesn't suck me in deeply, so the pain is never bad. On May 20th I meditate for 5 hours, ate and then had a thought of wanting to decide to check where I am. I remember reading about this thing called the A&P event and I was expecting it but I had no idea what stages were before then. I remember Daniel talking about this great guy called Mahasi Sayadaw. I decide to read Progress of Insight. I read for 1.5 hours and reach the end of the section on Knowledge of Mind and Body.
The author states:
"Understanding it thus in these and other instances, he knows and sees for himself by noticing thus: "There is here only that pair: a material process as object, and a mental process of knowing it; and it is to that pair alone that the terms of conventional usage 'being,' 'person' or 'soul,' 'I' or 'another,' 'man' or 'woman' refer. But apart from that dual process there is no separate person or being, I or another, man or woman."
I read the last word and suddenly, a surge of joy, happiness, and excitement occurs. The whole day I felt basically nothing, so this is a surprise. However, there are no bright lights, shaking, trembling, visions, powers. It feels like just a normal, joyish feeling. Noticing no longer follows each breath, and I feel 5-6 sensations per second. I get it. When this happens, I am meditating, when I am not, I am not. Holy shit, this is it. However, due to the mildness of my joy, I don't even know if this is what I think it is. I tell my mom that this is a big event and I am happy. I continue with my day until the next when I realise the joyish feeling hasn't gone away. Usually this feeling would be gone in a few minutes with anything else.
As I said prior, with any dopamine hit I received, my brain reached a point where it would just skip the happy part and just give me pain. Here I genuinely feel good. This ascertains at this point with relative confidence that this is the A&P event. I keep in mind the 10 Corruptions of Insight and stop reacting to the happiness and keep noticing. I no longer notice my breath, and try to notice all 6 sense doors, alternating between vision, hearing, body, thoughts and mind.
The next 3 weeks I feel basically nothing. I just continue meditating. Sensations feel less clear but the intellectual understanding of how to mediate never went away, so I just incline my brain to notice anyway. After 3 weeks sensations feel slightly clearer, but again mostly nothing. I am confused as to what is happening. As with Daniel Ingram's advice, I just keep practicing and see what happens. I know logically that I should be in the Dark Night, so I just perceive the 3C at the 6 sense doors.
I gain a few key insights: I realise there is just a giant lump of pain in the neck area, where my emotions are. It's there always, no matter if I feel positive or negative. On the surface level, I feel the stages of Insight, but deep down the negative emotional pain is always there, no matter what. This was so profound, because in the past before meditation where I tried to "do nothing", my mind would feel this negative lump of feeling, but since I perceived it to be "me", I ignored it and my mind would get lost in content, as the feelings were not perceived to be an observable object. I know this is not the case and now I can't ignore it. This pain is always there, and it enters my consciousness like 80% of the time no matter what I try to pay attention to. I decide to just notice this area over and over again.
Around 12-14th June I have a few negative feelings arise a few times, but they feel so mild compared to this lump of emotional pain that they only suck me in a few times for a few minutes but then I just carry on. On the 15th of June I have my 4th exam that I was taking that I expected to fail as I of course stopped studying. I take it and know absolutely everything. My other exams were good as well. I come home joyful. The next day sensations again feel somewhat less clear.
On the 31st of June, after feeling a few negative emotions a few days prior that felt extremely mild and irrelevant, I no longer feel these negative thoughts. However, I have no happy thoughts either. Sensations still feel clear, not like in Dissolution. I don't think much of it. On the 1st of July, I binge for 2 hours and feel good due to the fix but it's not a full binge and I manage to close and go to eat and then sleep. The next day 2nd of July, I feel like sensations are less clear again.
It hits me. Woah. That was it? Did I just hit Re-Observation, Equanimity and now I am back in Dissolution? I realise what those negative feelings around the 13th were. I am dumbfounded. Where are the negativity I read so much about? Where is the months/years of destruction to my personal life that I expected to happen due to my chronic Dark Night yogi mind? Literally nothing happened that I expected to happen. All the stages were mild. Even the negative thoughts that happened in Re-Observation were nothing compared to the aforementioned huge unignorable pain area in my neck. Equanimity felt okay, but again, the emotional pain was still always there, so it really didn't feel that Equanimous at all.
I am now turbo optimistic. I remember the 3 month figure that Daniel Ingram mentioned, but I was not on retreat, nor were my sessions flawless. My mind wandered maybe 20% of the time and every time that happened I felt like my session was wasted. I realise I can just learn from Dissolution and just see how it feels without reacting. I sit in Dissolution and in 2 days sensations become clearer again. A few days of this pass.
On the 6th of July I have an insight so huge and profound I literally just sit there shook as to how crazy this is. In the past, when I meditated, I would look for an object in my reality, notice the object, and then have a thought about the object to keep my attention on the object and re-affirm that yes, I infact noticed the object. This would happen for every noticing that I did. But, when you notice, you notice reality. You can't notice something that isn't reality, because reality is always present. Not only that, but you don't need to look through reality to see an object to meditate, because you meditate on your current reality as is without changing it. Trying to look for an object is trying to change reality, which is aversion.
What this means for my practice, is that instead of looking for an object through reality, noticing it, and thinking that I noticed that said object through reality, I just notice. If you notice, that means you noticed reality, since no matter what you do, consciousness will still have sensations coming in whether you like it or not. So you don't need to look for anything, since reality will happen by itself. Again, I have no words to describe how profound this insight was. I notice so quickly that there is no mental impression of what I noticed and I don't get sucked into anything because there was nothing to get sucked into. There are only physical sensations, the mental impression gets skipped. I literally just sit and notice and now I really get it. I understand now that this was me discovering choiceless awareness.
On the 10th of July, yesterday, I woke up at 1 AM due to the heat. It's so hot there is no chance of me falling asleep and I get irritated and go to pee. My leg touches the toilet seat and I got annoyed that there is bleach residue that burns my leg (I sit, it's likely cleaner that way). I accidentally drop my nightlight into a bucket full of washed clothes with washing detergent. I get super mad. I have a thought "Mexican sombreros are so stupid" and I get disgusted. Wait, this is Re-Observation, those thoughts are empty and I can just notice them. I get back to my room and meditate for 2 minutes. Negativity doesn't return.
I continue meditating for 6 hours while laying down. One of the recurring thoughts I had was "Holy shit, this is so easy, so intuitive, so clean, I am going to get stream-entry this week. Nay, I want it now." I didn't take the now part seriously because in the back of my mind I still expected stream-entry to take years. I meditate and when my mind wanders for a few seconds it's only because of the awe at the insight I gained on the 6th. I'm happy but not because Equanimity feels good, it doesn't. The negative lump of emotional pain is always there, and by default my consciousness receives this pain, but that's only when I think about what I feel, most of the time I don't intentionally try to think about what I feel so I don't notice that it's painful, only empty. I just continue noticing.
At 06:51 I get up to pee again. As I sit down I think, "lol what if I get stream-entry like that one dude on the toilet" (@stop). I start slowly closing my eyes. Instantly, I feel that the fan in my room is quieter. My eyelids are closed. "Was that it? No fucking way." I notice instantly that I feel slightly good but I dismiss it as maybe just Equanimity. I get up and go to walk into my living room to find out what's up. The first thing I notice as I start walking out of the bathroom is that everything is in sync. There is no delay between looking at things and feeling it. Before when I feel a sensation, I instantly grab it for a moment, then let go and grab another one. This would translate as basically having 3 FPS. Now my brain stopped doing that. So I feel every sensation without delay by default. So it's like I went from choppy reality to infinity FPS. The "meditation with no mental impression" that I described now is doing itself with no impression.
I notice that the pain I feel is basically gone and I feel bliss. The aforementioned emotional pain is no longer there. Before it would be concentrated in my head and diffuse outwards everywhere. Now outside my head I feel nothing and those pain sensations are reduced in my head by 90%. Everything around me as I walk is like 3D. Before I was looking outwards from my head in a 2D way and "3D" was constructed from said 2D. Now it feels like everything around my head is spacious, broad and diffuse. Combined with infinity FPS (or as many sensations as in my consciousness) it feels like I am walking in some 3D smooth movie. I, of course, as I realise this am joyful beyond belief.
A great word to describe what I feel now is detachment. What I perceive as my hand, and the sensations of the hand, have a small distance between them. This feels most pronounced in my vision. Everything looks further away, even things 5 CM in front of me, and they all look equally far away from each other. This instantly reminded me of what Shinzen Young said as "God's arrow" - he sees everything normally, but also sees into infinity. I see a bit further away, but not into infinity. It's like a mini version of what he was describing. I woke up my mom and started talking and it's like the sound of my voice wasn't booming in my head, it was silent and was broad everywhere diffusely. Most of my life I hated talking because it would give me a huge headache if I talked too much, and now there is no headache. It's like they leave no imprint whatsoever on how I feel or drag me anywhere. I can observe a thought and have it disappear despite paying attention to it, when this happened for the first time as I observed it blew me away.
First thing I want to do is write thank you letters to everyone who helped me out. I start writing a draft of this post but one thing I notice: I can meditate "broadly", and this happens quickly like before. However, I realised if I focus on the area of where my emotional negative lump of pain was, there is a smaller, less noticeable pain that I haven't felt before. I didn't pay attention initially but later on in the day I realised I could meditate on this pain and the sensations that make it up are extremely slow, hard to pay attention to, like every time I do one notice it's like putting hand in a viscous liquid that you need to take out before putting back in again, once a second. And as I pay attention to this pain, this pain spreads to entire reality and now I feel even more pain than before. I realise instantly that the "broad" meditation is Review, and the pain in my neck is 2nd Path territory.
Later in the day when I walked outside it's like everything is super spacious. It's mind blowing that I could feel this. I was talking about this cessation thing for 2 weeks with my mom but she never took it seriously. She literally laughed a day before stream entry when I told her I will not leave my house to do anything until I get enlightened. I had a cessation at around 21:30 yesterday as I was re-reading the section on Review in MCTB2. It felt like the frame after the cessation was like 1 blank frame of what I saw in my vision with nothing else but then instantly I started feeling "normal" again. I'll try to investigate this re-boot further, but still somewhat excited so can't meditate well.
That is all.
Here is a list of all the resources I used (in chronological order):
What I've Learned (Joseph Everett's) Substack series (Thank you again!)
MCTB2 (#1 resource, thank you @danielmingram!)
r/streamentry (surprisingly useless, found nothing there)
A couple of posts on dharmaoverground.org
Frank Yang (legendary enlightenment video, a few of his interviews)
A couple of Shinzen Young's videos on Do Nothing, God's Arrow
Literally nothing else.
Any questions or corrections are welcome.
EDIT: Just had another cessation while re-reading this post. I "zoned out" and then I heard a noise like warp that sounds like a doorbell but there was no doorbell ringing. This was my fan. After the cessation for a split second I felt frozen and then only after I thought. "Was that a cessation?" Just like the simulations.
I achieved stream-entry yesterday after only 2 months of formal insight practice. My perception completely changed but life seems to be the same. Most shocking to me is how fast things progressed. I wrote a huge post yesterday morning but the draft seems to be lost, so I'm rewriting this again. Let's start from the beginning:
I grew up a video game/internet addict. My brain seems to perceive gaming and the internet as the same thing, so I'll use those terms interchangeably. I spent my whole childhood playing video games, and have over 15000 hours, not including internet use which probably clocks in at over 20000 hours also. I spent 6-12 hours a day on a PC since I was 6 years old. I am 19. My life goal was earning achievements, and I felt pure bliss when I earned them.
In 2018 someone in class mentioned that they want to earn a certain grade to get into university. Since then, I had this idea that I should start studying. However, studying was painful. Extremely painful. I couldn't study for more than 5 minutes without excruciating pain and burn out setting in. I rationalised this as just normal. I tried quitting for 1 day, and would have a 100% failure rate. Even if I did succeed in going 6 hours with no internet, it would actually make things worse because I would get back to where I started, with the added learned helplessness. It's like trying to put your hand in a fire. You might have the courage to do it once, but after you get burnt then you will not want to do it again.
My parents would gaslight me, saying "It's not that bad, it's all in your head, just start studying and it will get easier". It never became easier. The more I studied the more pain I received. It's like the longer you sit in a fire, the more you get burnt. Studying and going without the internet for n + 1 minutes is always more painful than n minutes, without exception. I distinctly remember studying intensively for 2 hours and then ending up avoiding studying for 2 months afterwards. The idea of going through the pain terrified me so much that I would do anything, anything to not go through the pain, even if I became homeless and had to starve to death.
In 2021, as my exams came around, pressure built up to start studying but I couldn't do anything. I couldn't study with no pressure, and trying to study with pressure just made things harder. So, when exams came closer and closer I ended up actually studying less until one day I realised I had no time to study for everything and I would completely give up. I failed my exams. Not only is the withdrawal horrifying, but now every time I relapsed it would kill me on the inside knowing I am doing something that I promised I would not do 6 hours earlier, that would trigger more pain, more suffering.
At some point after a few years of trying I ended up realising that I never even felt any bliss any more during my screen time. Whereas in my childhood, I would play video games, feel good, stop, feel good knowing that I played, and then look forward to playing again. Now it was the opposite. I would be in excruciating pain 24/7, and when I relapsed it would just give me more pain. My brain skipped the dopamine hit. As I'm writing this, I realise this was me realising unsatisfactoriness.
On September 12th 2021, I started a 4.5 month streak. Sounds extreme, but actually I had no choice. "Moderation" never worked, ever. It's like trying to shoot heroin in moderation. Bull shit, doesn't work, never worked, never will. Seeing 5 seconds of news coverage would give me such horrible pain that I would relapse and binge for 12 hours. Same thing goes for notifications, memes my mom sent, etc. All it takes is one moment of exposure to anything, even if someone says something in a public place about something new, to completely derail all progress. During this streak, all I did was follow my schedule of working out, eating, cold exposure, sauna, and then just sit for the rest of time. Just don't relapse. It doesn't matter what happened, all I wanted was to sit on a couch and wait. Anything more gave me such pain that I just couldn't do it. I was clueless about meditation at the time.
At the 3.5 month mark I went on holiday with my father to the Maldives. The weather was amazing, the ocean was beautiful and the hammocks were nice to lay on. From an outsider's perspective, I was in heaven. However, I ended up literally being in completely misery and at some point just started crying because it was so painful. The pain progressed gradually day by day, and it never subsided. My father, of course, is confused and looks at me like a dumbass, which was not helpful.
At the 4.5 month mark on the 1st of February 2022 I relapsed because I saw a picture of a game I used to play on my PC. I browsed everything for 1 hour, had to go to bed but I couldn't fall asleep. Laid down with my eyes open for the whole night. Like someone shot me with a copious amount of drugs. The high was something that I never felt in my entire life before. For reference, sugar and porn for me wasn't even 1% the high that I felt. I quit those easily. But I am dumbfounded as how some people can quit using video games at their own volition just like that. Ingram comes to mind. The next day I finished browsing everything I didn't see, being sleep deep deprived and crashing after the high made me cry again.
Important to note, that at this point I was already eating healthy for 1.5 years. My diet, as far as I was and am concerned, is as good as I think it could be. Any external health factors were not the cause of my withdrawal/depression. I am not getting into specifics, but I felt and feel physically amazing, but mentally I was crushed. After this for the next few months I was fighting my addiction on and off, go for 2 weeks, relapse, etc.
Around July 2022 a thought came to me. I remembered watching this Veritasium video where the person said that asteroids could land at anytime, and we have no defence for them. This made me really scared of asteroids for 2 days. After, I thought, why am I scared? Because if this event happens, I will die. But in this lifetime, my chance of death is 100%. This put me in a completely different existential dread independent of anything I felt before. I felt this dread only once before as a kid for a few seconds but I ignored it completely.
For the next 2-3 weeks I have this dread 24/7. I got nightmares. I had dreams where I would be on a very tall, wobbly building above the clouds. It would collapse and I would fall and die. I had dreams where I would be below a very tall building, it falls and crushes me. I had dreams where a dark figure comes by my bedside, stabs me in the throat and I die. I had dreams where a monster crawls out of my window, jumps on me and eats me. I had dreams where asteroids fall on me and I die. I had dreams where a black hole sucks the whole planet and I die. I had dreams where I see a frame of my estate. Then the frame moves closer to where I live, one frame at a time. It shows my house. Then I wake up. This is mortality coming to kill me.
I continued like this until one day I thought, why does it matter if I die? The world doesn't revolve around me, and if I die things will still continue on. Thousands of people die each day, why do I care if I die? This put me at ease. In retrospect I realise this is an intellectual understanding of no-self without realising it was no-self. In September my exam results don't put me into university as I thought the grades would fall after COVID. After relapsing back and forth for a few months I am now put in a position where I need to study, and I actually manage to do one hour a day without feeling much pain.
On October 9th 2022 I read Joseph Everett's Substack newsletter (What I've Learned). He mentions jhanas, interviewing Daniel Ingram and MCTB2. I am convinced this is 100% true and start reading MCTB2 . I read the whole thing in 1 month. I feel completely burned out and I don't care about any theory. I just want to practice. I read literally nothing else because I felt like I knew enough theory. The idea of the Dark Night scared me shitless. Having to grow through all the hard parts of my withdrawal again, even though I am recovering, terrified me to the core. I thought that shamatha before vipassana would be easier and made more sense to me, so I start doing shamatha. However, since I am pressured to study and I can manage to do 2 hours a day without much pain, I literally do no on-the-cushion practice. The only thing I do is try to focus on my breath while doing my daily activities.
As you can guess, this didn't work. I got nowhere for 6 months. During this time if I looked something up online that I wanted to look up, as long as I only looked at things that I searched for and not anything else, the pain would be minor and I could do this once every 2 weeks and still function. However, this was still a fix and the withdrawal got too much, and I fully crash. I browse everything for 3 weeks for 15 hours a day. I stop doing my daily routine and do absolutely nothing. It destroys my progress and I feel helpless again. My exams are in 1.5 months and the idea of not sitting for 15 hours a day, yet alone 0, terrifies me to the core. My fix now has to be all day, otherwise I am terrified. Sleep, everything, doesn't matter in the face of withdrawal.
I realise studying or doing anything is impossible, and the best I can do is just sit in pain for as long as possible. I say fuck it, and start doing vipassana in May 2023. I am already at rock bottom, and I am willing to progress as fast as possible, even if it means even more pain and the Dark Night. I sit 8 hours a day, only taking breaks for eating and exercise. 2.5 hours in the morning, 2.5 hours in the afternoon, and 3 hours in the evening. But this is just a general guide, not a rule, if I sat for only 1 hour because I woke up late for whatever reason then whatever. Obviously I don't set alarms, I don't want to feel worse than I already feel with sleep deprivation.
I meditate without noting. Notes feel like they slow me down and require me to think about what to mediate, and a chore. I don't do them at all. Just focus on the rise rise rise, fall fall fall of the breath. I do this all day. To my surprise everything feels so easy. I am no longer lost in content, and anytime I get lost it doesn't suck me in deeply, so the pain is never bad. On May 20th I meditate for 5 hours, ate and then had a thought of wanting to decide to check where I am. I remember reading about this thing called the A&P event and I was expecting it but I had no idea what stages were before then. I remember Daniel talking about this great guy called Mahasi Sayadaw. I decide to read Progress of Insight. I read for 1.5 hours and reach the end of the section on Knowledge of Mind and Body.
The author states:
"Understanding it thus in these and other instances, he knows and sees for himself by noticing thus: "There is here only that pair: a material process as object, and a mental process of knowing it; and it is to that pair alone that the terms of conventional usage 'being,' 'person' or 'soul,' 'I' or 'another,' 'man' or 'woman' refer. But apart from that dual process there is no separate person or being, I or another, man or woman."
I read the last word and suddenly, a surge of joy, happiness, and excitement occurs. The whole day I felt basically nothing, so this is a surprise. However, there are no bright lights, shaking, trembling, visions, powers. It feels like just a normal, joyish feeling. Noticing no longer follows each breath, and I feel 5-6 sensations per second. I get it. When this happens, I am meditating, when I am not, I am not. Holy shit, this is it. However, due to the mildness of my joy, I don't even know if this is what I think it is. I tell my mom that this is a big event and I am happy. I continue with my day until the next when I realise the joyish feeling hasn't gone away. Usually this feeling would be gone in a few minutes with anything else.
As I said prior, with any dopamine hit I received, my brain reached a point where it would just skip the happy part and just give me pain. Here I genuinely feel good. This ascertains at this point with relative confidence that this is the A&P event. I keep in mind the 10 Corruptions of Insight and stop reacting to the happiness and keep noticing. I no longer notice my breath, and try to notice all 6 sense doors, alternating between vision, hearing, body, thoughts and mind.
The next 3 weeks I feel basically nothing. I just continue meditating. Sensations feel less clear but the intellectual understanding of how to mediate never went away, so I just incline my brain to notice anyway. After 3 weeks sensations feel slightly clearer, but again mostly nothing. I am confused as to what is happening. As with Daniel Ingram's advice, I just keep practicing and see what happens. I know logically that I should be in the Dark Night, so I just perceive the 3C at the 6 sense doors.
I gain a few key insights: I realise there is just a giant lump of pain in the neck area, where my emotions are. It's there always, no matter if I feel positive or negative. On the surface level, I feel the stages of Insight, but deep down the negative emotional pain is always there, no matter what. This was so profound, because in the past before meditation where I tried to "do nothing", my mind would feel this negative lump of feeling, but since I perceived it to be "me", I ignored it and my mind would get lost in content, as the feelings were not perceived to be an observable object. I know this is not the case and now I can't ignore it. This pain is always there, and it enters my consciousness like 80% of the time no matter what I try to pay attention to. I decide to just notice this area over and over again.
Around 12-14th June I have a few negative feelings arise a few times, but they feel so mild compared to this lump of emotional pain that they only suck me in a few times for a few minutes but then I just carry on. On the 15th of June I have my 4th exam that I was taking that I expected to fail as I of course stopped studying. I take it and know absolutely everything. My other exams were good as well. I come home joyful. The next day sensations again feel somewhat less clear.
On the 31st of June, after feeling a few negative emotions a few days prior that felt extremely mild and irrelevant, I no longer feel these negative thoughts. However, I have no happy thoughts either. Sensations still feel clear, not like in Dissolution. I don't think much of it. On the 1st of July, I binge for 2 hours and feel good due to the fix but it's not a full binge and I manage to close and go to eat and then sleep. The next day 2nd of July, I feel like sensations are less clear again.
It hits me. Woah. That was it? Did I just hit Re-Observation, Equanimity and now I am back in Dissolution? I realise what those negative feelings around the 13th were. I am dumbfounded. Where are the negativity I read so much about? Where is the months/years of destruction to my personal life that I expected to happen due to my chronic Dark Night yogi mind? Literally nothing happened that I expected to happen. All the stages were mild. Even the negative thoughts that happened in Re-Observation were nothing compared to the aforementioned huge unignorable pain area in my neck. Equanimity felt okay, but again, the emotional pain was still always there, so it really didn't feel that Equanimous at all.
I am now turbo optimistic. I remember the 3 month figure that Daniel Ingram mentioned, but I was not on retreat, nor were my sessions flawless. My mind wandered maybe 20% of the time and every time that happened I felt like my session was wasted. I realise I can just learn from Dissolution and just see how it feels without reacting. I sit in Dissolution and in 2 days sensations become clearer again. A few days of this pass.
On the 6th of July I have an insight so huge and profound I literally just sit there shook as to how crazy this is. In the past, when I meditated, I would look for an object in my reality, notice the object, and then have a thought about the object to keep my attention on the object and re-affirm that yes, I infact noticed the object. This would happen for every noticing that I did. But, when you notice, you notice reality. You can't notice something that isn't reality, because reality is always present. Not only that, but you don't need to look through reality to see an object to meditate, because you meditate on your current reality as is without changing it. Trying to look for an object is trying to change reality, which is aversion.
What this means for my practice, is that instead of looking for an object through reality, noticing it, and thinking that I noticed that said object through reality, I just notice. If you notice, that means you noticed reality, since no matter what you do, consciousness will still have sensations coming in whether you like it or not. So you don't need to look for anything, since reality will happen by itself. Again, I have no words to describe how profound this insight was. I notice so quickly that there is no mental impression of what I noticed and I don't get sucked into anything because there was nothing to get sucked into. There are only physical sensations, the mental impression gets skipped. I literally just sit and notice and now I really get it. I understand now that this was me discovering choiceless awareness.
On the 10th of July, yesterday, I woke up at 1 AM due to the heat. It's so hot there is no chance of me falling asleep and I get irritated and go to pee. My leg touches the toilet seat and I got annoyed that there is bleach residue that burns my leg (I sit, it's likely cleaner that way). I accidentally drop my nightlight into a bucket full of washed clothes with washing detergent. I get super mad. I have a thought "Mexican sombreros are so stupid" and I get disgusted. Wait, this is Re-Observation, those thoughts are empty and I can just notice them. I get back to my room and meditate for 2 minutes. Negativity doesn't return.
I continue meditating for 6 hours while laying down. One of the recurring thoughts I had was "Holy shit, this is so easy, so intuitive, so clean, I am going to get stream-entry this week. Nay, I want it now." I didn't take the now part seriously because in the back of my mind I still expected stream-entry to take years. I meditate and when my mind wanders for a few seconds it's only because of the awe at the insight I gained on the 6th. I'm happy but not because Equanimity feels good, it doesn't. The negative lump of emotional pain is always there, and by default my consciousness receives this pain, but that's only when I think about what I feel, most of the time I don't intentionally try to think about what I feel so I don't notice that it's painful, only empty. I just continue noticing.
At 06:51 I get up to pee again. As I sit down I think, "lol what if I get stream-entry like that one dude on the toilet" (@stop). I start slowly closing my eyes. Instantly, I feel that the fan in my room is quieter. My eyelids are closed. "Was that it? No fucking way." I notice instantly that I feel slightly good but I dismiss it as maybe just Equanimity. I get up and go to walk into my living room to find out what's up. The first thing I notice as I start walking out of the bathroom is that everything is in sync. There is no delay between looking at things and feeling it. Before when I feel a sensation, I instantly grab it for a moment, then let go and grab another one. This would translate as basically having 3 FPS. Now my brain stopped doing that. So I feel every sensation without delay by default. So it's like I went from choppy reality to infinity FPS. The "meditation with no mental impression" that I described now is doing itself with no impression.
I notice that the pain I feel is basically gone and I feel bliss. The aforementioned emotional pain is no longer there. Before it would be concentrated in my head and diffuse outwards everywhere. Now outside my head I feel nothing and those pain sensations are reduced in my head by 90%. Everything around me as I walk is like 3D. Before I was looking outwards from my head in a 2D way and "3D" was constructed from said 2D. Now it feels like everything around my head is spacious, broad and diffuse. Combined with infinity FPS (or as many sensations as in my consciousness) it feels like I am walking in some 3D smooth movie. I, of course, as I realise this am joyful beyond belief.
A great word to describe what I feel now is detachment. What I perceive as my hand, and the sensations of the hand, have a small distance between them. This feels most pronounced in my vision. Everything looks further away, even things 5 CM in front of me, and they all look equally far away from each other. This instantly reminded me of what Shinzen Young said as "God's arrow" - he sees everything normally, but also sees into infinity. I see a bit further away, but not into infinity. It's like a mini version of what he was describing. I woke up my mom and started talking and it's like the sound of my voice wasn't booming in my head, it was silent and was broad everywhere diffusely. Most of my life I hated talking because it would give me a huge headache if I talked too much, and now there is no headache. It's like they leave no imprint whatsoever on how I feel or drag me anywhere. I can observe a thought and have it disappear despite paying attention to it, when this happened for the first time as I observed it blew me away.
First thing I want to do is write thank you letters to everyone who helped me out. I start writing a draft of this post but one thing I notice: I can meditate "broadly", and this happens quickly like before. However, I realised if I focus on the area of where my emotional negative lump of pain was, there is a smaller, less noticeable pain that I haven't felt before. I didn't pay attention initially but later on in the day I realised I could meditate on this pain and the sensations that make it up are extremely slow, hard to pay attention to, like every time I do one notice it's like putting hand in a viscous liquid that you need to take out before putting back in again, once a second. And as I pay attention to this pain, this pain spreads to entire reality and now I feel even more pain than before. I realise instantly that the "broad" meditation is Review, and the pain in my neck is 2nd Path territory.
Later in the day when I walked outside it's like everything is super spacious. It's mind blowing that I could feel this. I was talking about this cessation thing for 2 weeks with my mom but she never took it seriously. She literally laughed a day before stream entry when I told her I will not leave my house to do anything until I get enlightened. I had a cessation at around 21:30 yesterday as I was re-reading the section on Review in MCTB2. It felt like the frame after the cessation was like 1 blank frame of what I saw in my vision with nothing else but then instantly I started feeling "normal" again. I'll try to investigate this re-boot further, but still somewhat excited so can't meditate well.
That is all.
Here is a list of all the resources I used (in chronological order):
What I've Learned (Joseph Everett's) Substack series (Thank you again!)
MCTB2 (#1 resource, thank you @danielmingram!)
r/streamentry (surprisingly useless, found nothing there)
A couple of posts on dharmaoverground.org
Frank Yang (legendary enlightenment video, a few of his interviews)
A couple of Shinzen Young's videos on Do Nothing, God's Arrow
Literally nothing else.
Any questions or corrections are welcome.
EDIT: Just had another cessation while re-reading this post. I "zoned out" and then I heard a noise like warp that sounds like a doorbell but there was no doorbell ringing. This was my fan. After the cessation for a split second I felt frozen and then only after I thought. "Was that a cessation?" Just like the simulations.
Hey, just wanted to say a hello/welcome and congratulate you on your hard work, sounds promising! It sounds like you put in a lot of consistent work and effort, often a great recipe for results! I'm not going to try to diagnose you or try to tell you what you experienced, but hope you don't mind if I regale you with little bits of my own experiences with vipassana and generally how it fit into my own life...
On my road to stream entry, there were ups and downs, lots of "aha's" and "uh-oh's"... specifically, once practice had matured a bit, there were a few experiences I mistook for stream entry, and even actual stream entry that I still had doubts on, even for years later after being reasonably sure some of the changes and signs were there, including cessations and changes to perception, etc...
One thing that helped me a lot was the realization that whether or not it was really "it", "stream entry", there was still simply more work to do, and happily, the fundamentals of practice are largely the same (attention to the 3 characteristics, weeding out attachment/aversion, balancing energy with relaxation, consistency of practice, attending to my "daily life" skillfully). So in that sense, it takes some of the pressure off since wherever we're at, the direction remains the same: forwards
I can relate to a lot of the relief you describe post SE! Things were more spacious, especially in my head, and one change I hear a lot of people describe, which I can relate to, is the sense that the mind is less "sticky". Thoughts and feelings come and go a bit more naturally, there is a lot less spiraling out in compelling trains of thoughts and emotions, the mentals were just more centered... all very good and well!
Something that can come up a little though, is what I'd honestly describe as negatives, challenging/unskillful things that resulted from SE. These were just my experience, but hopefully sharing could be of some benefit.
I honestly became kind of evangelical around my friends and family. I had cracked this huge thing, I was so enlightened, I was feeling so cool in my new mental powers and nonchalance. On one hand I had put in this huge heroic effort to accomplish something mysterious and significant, and on the other hand I had this mystical sense of everything being chill, nothing being a big deal, feeling like problems in my life were not actually a problem. So I was super eager to tell people they should do vipassana and look at all the cool stuff that happens and its so hard but so worth it, etc... honestly I was overbearing and not really feeling my audience in my ramblings.
The side I regret the most was... I got into vipassana in search of relief from my problems, my stress, my depression and anxiety, my traumas, etc... and I do feel like the path has helped in so many ways! But after stream entry, there was again, this sense of problems not being problems. Family issues? All just sensations. Depression, anxiety? Just sensations I could blast away with my holy enlightened gigabrain. While there may be some truth to how awakening helps, many years later (before I even started to work on 2nd path), I had a much more important "awakening"...
That "awakening" was that despite my efforts to make my life better through SE/awakening/meditation, my problems such as depression, relationship issues, issues with socialization, etc... just all of it really, it was all still there. And I realized that blasting the sensations of that stuff away with vipassana was actually a cover-up for the really important truth: I'm still a human, with human needs and emotions, with all the regular development needs of a human. Where I thought I could supercede my human problems with meditation, I realized I left messy relationships, uncontended depression and anxiety and trauma, elements of natural human growth I thought I had sidestepped, etc...
So my realization was, I need to continue to commit to my regular life, commit to examining my emotions and thoughts, issues I deal with and have dealt with in my life, and not with vipassana, but with therapy, regular introspection, healthier habit-building, honesty, maturity, deepening my own self-love and appreciation, and not just through vipassana blasting. This has been and continues to be extremely important to me, and I guess my point is that while awakening is undoubtedly huge and beneficial, I wish I had been more honestly working towards having the best regular life and developing in the regular human ways, with the same zeal I had started vipassana with.
My experiences in life, my fleeting emotions, these passing moments with those I love, they may consist of sensations, and it's okay to work towards understanding the nature of those sensations... but I feel that there's beauty, maturity, healing, growth, deep fulfillment in being able to acknowledge the importance of vipassana and those truths, while also fully honoring the beauty of your life, the beauty of our vulnerability and human nature, our basic needs to grow in emotion and maturity, in realizing that life is to be enjoyed, relationships and memories are to be cherished, and that even if sensations make all these things up, it's not wrong to appreciate the picture they paint. And most importantly, that it's important to not get in the habit of side-stepping the regular axis of emotional and mental health development!
Again, I'm not trying to diagnose you or telling you what you need to do or even that I have any idea where you're at with things... I'm really happy and excited for you in your development! I just felt like recounting a little bit of my own experience from the time of my life when I was working towards and past stream entry in the hopes that you might find it encouraging or find some bits that could be worth reflecting on. Again, congratulations and welcome to DhO, hope to see ya around!
On my road to stream entry, there were ups and downs, lots of "aha's" and "uh-oh's"... specifically, once practice had matured a bit, there were a few experiences I mistook for stream entry, and even actual stream entry that I still had doubts on, even for years later after being reasonably sure some of the changes and signs were there, including cessations and changes to perception, etc...
One thing that helped me a lot was the realization that whether or not it was really "it", "stream entry", there was still simply more work to do, and happily, the fundamentals of practice are largely the same (attention to the 3 characteristics, weeding out attachment/aversion, balancing energy with relaxation, consistency of practice, attending to my "daily life" skillfully). So in that sense, it takes some of the pressure off since wherever we're at, the direction remains the same: forwards
I can relate to a lot of the relief you describe post SE! Things were more spacious, especially in my head, and one change I hear a lot of people describe, which I can relate to, is the sense that the mind is less "sticky". Thoughts and feelings come and go a bit more naturally, there is a lot less spiraling out in compelling trains of thoughts and emotions, the mentals were just more centered... all very good and well!
Something that can come up a little though, is what I'd honestly describe as negatives, challenging/unskillful things that resulted from SE. These were just my experience, but hopefully sharing could be of some benefit.
I honestly became kind of evangelical around my friends and family. I had cracked this huge thing, I was so enlightened, I was feeling so cool in my new mental powers and nonchalance. On one hand I had put in this huge heroic effort to accomplish something mysterious and significant, and on the other hand I had this mystical sense of everything being chill, nothing being a big deal, feeling like problems in my life were not actually a problem. So I was super eager to tell people they should do vipassana and look at all the cool stuff that happens and its so hard but so worth it, etc... honestly I was overbearing and not really feeling my audience in my ramblings.
The side I regret the most was... I got into vipassana in search of relief from my problems, my stress, my depression and anxiety, my traumas, etc... and I do feel like the path has helped in so many ways! But after stream entry, there was again, this sense of problems not being problems. Family issues? All just sensations. Depression, anxiety? Just sensations I could blast away with my holy enlightened gigabrain. While there may be some truth to how awakening helps, many years later (before I even started to work on 2nd path), I had a much more important "awakening"...
That "awakening" was that despite my efforts to make my life better through SE/awakening/meditation, my problems such as depression, relationship issues, issues with socialization, etc... just all of it really, it was all still there. And I realized that blasting the sensations of that stuff away with vipassana was actually a cover-up for the really important truth: I'm still a human, with human needs and emotions, with all the regular development needs of a human. Where I thought I could supercede my human problems with meditation, I realized I left messy relationships, uncontended depression and anxiety and trauma, elements of natural human growth I thought I had sidestepped, etc...
So my realization was, I need to continue to commit to my regular life, commit to examining my emotions and thoughts, issues I deal with and have dealt with in my life, and not with vipassana, but with therapy, regular introspection, healthier habit-building, honesty, maturity, deepening my own self-love and appreciation, and not just through vipassana blasting. This has been and continues to be extremely important to me, and I guess my point is that while awakening is undoubtedly huge and beneficial, I wish I had been more honestly working towards having the best regular life and developing in the regular human ways, with the same zeal I had started vipassana with.
My experiences in life, my fleeting emotions, these passing moments with those I love, they may consist of sensations, and it's okay to work towards understanding the nature of those sensations... but I feel that there's beauty, maturity, healing, growth, deep fulfillment in being able to acknowledge the importance of vipassana and those truths, while also fully honoring the beauty of your life, the beauty of our vulnerability and human nature, our basic needs to grow in emotion and maturity, in realizing that life is to be enjoyed, relationships and memories are to be cherished, and that even if sensations make all these things up, it's not wrong to appreciate the picture they paint. And most importantly, that it's important to not get in the habit of side-stepping the regular axis of emotional and mental health development!
Again, I'm not trying to diagnose you or telling you what you need to do or even that I have any idea where you're at with things... I'm really happy and excited for you in your development! I just felt like recounting a little bit of my own experience from the time of my life when I was working towards and past stream entry in the hopes that you might find it encouraging or find some bits that could be worth reflecting on. Again, congratulations and welcome to DhO, hope to see ya around!
