I can observe the sensations of the breath in my nostrils without much problem, I don't experience distracting mind wandering or falling asleep during my meditation. I'm familiar with the book The Mind Illuminated and I'm not sure if what I experience is subtle dullness. If a loud sound happens, I basically never jerk upward (I occasionally do in daily life when some very loud sound goes off like a firework), I'm not sure what inwardly startled means. The meditation object however is never more clear after a loud sound.

I meditate sitting either on a chair or a sofa with or without back support, all tho I prefer back support because I tend to have more pain without it. I don't notice any significant change in the vividness of sensation whether I sit with back support, without back support, or even standing up with my eyes open.

I can't feel breath sensations in other parts of the body like hands or feet, like I'm supposed to in a body scan but can feel normal sensations like pressure from sitting or rubbing against clothes etc.

Another thing is that I don't even need to use any effort to observe the sensations. When I do use effort, sensations seem to be slightly more vivid but I'm not sure if it's not because my breathing rate and tension in my nostril go up. When I try to use a lot of effort, I can only do it for like 10 minutes because it tires me so much, but still, I'm not sure if there's a significant difference in the vividness of the sensation. I don't quite understand how it may be possible to make a sensation more vivid, like intuitively it seems to me that my physiology is simply a cap that without some superphysiological state like added adrenaline it just can't happen. I've been meditating for up to 4 hours a day with the same result, just felt the same.
With regards to noting, I don't get why would noting hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, seeing... be transformative, or again I'm doing it wrong. Why would it be any challenge to notice that I'm seeing or hearing something? That is like the most obvious thing in the world

I wouldn't call my meditations hypnagogic or especially pleasant, but it does seem to me that I might be the "chronic yogi" described there, given that I don't notice any transformative experiences or any difference in my daily life really. Either I meditate in the wrong way or there's something wrong with my physiology preventing further progress

Any help appreciated

Yes, probably a chronic yogi. 

Noting works because it has a built in feedback mechanism that indicates whether you have slipped into too much dullness or into a mental trance --- you stop noting. And it has a built in learning process that allows you to learn how you get distracted --- when you realize you've stopped noting, you look at your mind and see what was the distraction. So it's basically impossible to have any confusion about whether you are developing mindfulness or not and it's basically impossible not to learn more about yourself and the types of things that make you lose mindfulness. That's why it works.

It can be very revealing. There should be no problem to just note one thing in the present moment on every outbreath. That's about one note every 10 to 12 seconds. But everyone has a challenge doing this for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour.

(Why? That is the interesting thing you discover very directly by doing this practice.   )

The fact that noting works is both it's benefit and it's downside. Do you really want to meditate and go through the challenges of this kind of development? Or is it more important to work on other things in your life? (Job, education, relationships, exercise, diet, etc. etc. etc.) Sometimes people are fine with having a boring meditation practice -- it gives a nice break from the busyiness of life.  Which is totally fine.

Not everyone should/must become an expert meditator. As the saying goes "better not to start at all, but if you have started then it's best to finish." And finishing can involve a lot of time/effort/difficulty. While there are many teachers/traditions that say meditation should be an easy, peaceful, and enjoyable practice... they are basically lying. There will always be times when it is difficult, disruptive, and not fun. And when things go wrong, these teachers/traditions often blame the meditator "you must have done it wrong"  and things like that. So be very careful about choosing your teachers/traditions.

It's important to make a really well informed decision about serious meditation practice. 

Hope this is helpful in some way. Feel free to disregard, too. It's important that you decide and "own" your decision. 

Sensations are obvious in what way? That's one question to ask yourself. The point of noting as a way to investigate is to cause the mind to examine the nature of sensations. Not what you have always assumed they are, but what they're made of, how they're built, and what causes them to appear as they do. This requires a curiosity that goes beyond seeing what you have always seen, hearing what you have always heard, and so on. It might help to introduce a bit of mystery into your meditation: Can you observe any deviation from the norm in your perception of a common, easily perceived object? What small, discrete parts of perceiving that object can you discern? Objects are not one thing, one big perception. They're made of smaller bits, components, and parts. Can you observe any of those parts?

Get curious! There's a whole world of discovery and insight available to you.

Oh, and IMHO, you should read Daniel Ingram's "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha." It's online, and it's free. 

Noting can have different effects (relaxing or stressful, insightful or suppressing) or no effect depending on the details of how you actually do it. In my experience how you do a technique is more important than the actual technique. You can use a technique to quiet the mind, you can use it to help you observe the activity of the mind, you can use it to suppress thoughts and feelings (not good). Traditionally Buddhist practice involves calming the mind and body and then observing the mind - noticing the three characteristics and dependent origination. Often the real action is not in the technique itself but when you get distracted, studying the distractions (attachments and aversions). The technique can be a blank background to make activity of the mind easier to see.

According to Shinzen Young, most of his students awaken gradually without any particular noteworthy event to mark a transition. They recognize something has changed when faced with difficult life conditions and find themselves handling it with equinimity. Meditation over years and decades has its effect but it is so gradual you don't really notice anything unusual happening on any particular day.

https://www.lionsroar.com/on-enlightenment-an-interview-with-shinzen-young/

So if you are waiting for something to happen in meditation to tell you you are making progress, that might never happen, but it doesn't mean you aren't making progress.

Jack Kornfield also recognizes the "gateless gate" also where nothing spectacular ever happens.

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2701_w_kornfield-enlightenments/

In my opinion, you should not measure progress by what happens during meditation. You should measure progress by what happens in daily life.

If you are suffering less, if are you acting less selfishly and less self-centeredly in daily life, then you are making progress.

Another good description of why noting works: How to Get Enlightened – Kenneth Folk Dharma

excerpt:

You are unenlightened to the extent that you are embedded in your experiences. You think that your experiences are you. You must dis-embed. Do that by taking each aspect of experience as object (looking at it and recognizing it) in a systematic way.

[...]

1) Objectify body sensations. If you can name them, you aren’t embedded there. Notice sensations and note to yourself: “Pressure, tightness, tension, release, coolness, warmth, softness, hardness, tingling, itching, burning, stinging, pulsing, throbbing.” If I am looking at something, it is not “I”.

2) Objectify feeling-tone. Are sensations pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? If you can sit there for five minutes and note pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral every few seconds, you are not embedded at that layer of mind.

3) Objectify mind states. Investigation, curiosity, happiness, anxiety, amusement, sadness, joy, anger, frustration, annoyance, irritation, aversion, desire, disgust, fear, worry, calm, embarrassment, shame, self-pity, compassion, love, contentment, dullness, sleepiness, bliss, exhilaration, triumph, self-loathing. Name them and be free of them. These mind states are not “you;” we know this because if there is a “you” it is the one who is looking, not what is being looked at. Below, we will challenge the notion that there is any “you” at all.

4) Objectify thoughts. Categorize them: planning thought, anticipating thought, worrying thought, imaging thought, remembering thought, rehearsing thought, scenario spinning thought, fantasy thought, self-recrimination thought. Come up with your own vocabulary and see your thoughts as though they belong to someone else. The content of your thoughts is not relevant except to the extent that it helps you to label and therefore objectify them.

​​​​​​​[...]

I'd also recommend reading, or listening to Shinzen Young's"The Science of Enlightement," in which he describes many of the quite notable things that happen to dedicated meditators along the path to awakening.

So it's impossible to note in subtle dullness? I heard people are expieriencing A&P even in their dreams when they're asleep. I think I would be able to note in a lucid dream
Am I supossed to note the fact that I'm seeing something or conceptualize the exact thing that I'm seeing like "seeing a green wall" "hearing a bird chipping"? If it's about noting the fact that I'm currently feeling, tasting, touching, seeing, or hearing, how is that not super obvious stuff? Like does it require some effort or special mental approach for people usually? Since I'm seeing or hearing something almost all the time, I'm just stating the fact of it happening, what's so big deal about it? It's just as obvious to me as the fact that I'm concious, that there's an expierience of being me
Yea that makes sense to me, it has to be more then just noting

That's the thing, nothing is happening in my daily life either. Still same level of suffering and clarity

When a bird chirps, and I'm observing in meditation --

- hear a raw sound
- mind interprets this sound, assigning a name to it - "bird" or "chirp"
- mind presents an image of a bird (not very detailed, a sort of "typical bird" mental image)
- mind judges and likes, dislikes, or doesn't care about this experience
- mind anticipates another chirp, or another object that is presented through my senses

This series of things happens very fast, but I can, by paying close attention (my attention muscles having been built up by my noting practice) get a glimpse of each of these discrete steps in the process of perceiving what I thought was a simple object. In fact, now I can see it's actually a process. I can start to draw insights and inferences about all my experience and how it works, what governs it, and so on.

Helpful? If not, we can talk more.

One more thing- insight most often happens during or very soon after a meditation session. That means that you can judge your progress, in some measure, by what happens in meditation. 

​​​​​​​I believe Chogyam Trungpa is the source of this aphorism, in a speech at Berkeley reported by Jack Kornfield somewhere. Hopefully my obsession with detail doesn't derail this worthwhile thread.

If you can scan the surface of the body and it does not contain any juice left, its time to squeeze a little deeper.&nbsp;<br /><br />This can happen by doing more of your concentration meditation (whether you look at breath, flame or any other object)<br /><br />If this is already tried, then you need to do kriyas. They will open up the door like never before.&nbsp;

How strong is your base in concentration meditation? 

I can maintain focus on sensation of the breath for 45 minutes with only minimal distraction. No mind wandering, completly forgetting the breath or strong/gross dullness at all.

You can execute meditative method seemingly perfectly but still have zero changes while someone else might do much less much worse and seemingly effortlessly hit all the milestones. This happens because of rarely mentioned quality/effect of "learning rate" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_rate) which is as much relevant in meditation as in machine learning because meditation is biological version of machine learning.

Usually person who manages to increase learning rate will have lots of changes but unstable mind. Usually once person attains what they think 4th path they stop practices and intuitively shift learning rate to very low values and with it locking their changes. This concept might be intuitively known enough to use it or not known at all but still any periods when it is high enough to allow changes happening will facilitate these changes. For some people just doing lots of meditation with manic mindset is enough, some people need change of environment and best to some kind of retreats.

Personally I read article about machine learning years ago while I was in my teens (back then these topics were relatively not popular - in article I read they taught very small models using single core Pentium processors ) and assumed effort spent recognizing how low/high learning rate feels like and learning to control it will be the best practice I could do. It took some time to figure it out - especially lowering learning rate as increasing it was somehow easier for me - and I therefore could induce state where changes would happen maybe too easily and with it anything done seemed ephemeral because brain could seemingly reconfigure itself on a whim. Learning how to decrease learning rate allowed more meaningful practices with targeted changes which would then be locked down by reducing learning rate. Experience of high learning rate is slightly electric and feels 'lively' and there often happen effects like experience of electric fluid flowing in the brain. Low learning rate feels very normal, kinda dry and solid. Inducing is like inducing any qualities - it is pretty much enough to try to find sensations with given quality and over time most/all sensations will arise with this quality. Trying to induce qualities in places which are active is possible - though because of how blurry internal perception is there might be impression it is possible to induce qualities in-place - just with better resolution of internal perception it is clearly visible consciousnesses arise with given quality and the fastest way to induce qualities is to have lots of consciousnesses arise and existing consciousnesses are left to just fade away - trying to dwell in them will help induce their qualities which is in this case not what is wanted.

Related to the same learning rate thing - within Mahasi Noting trying to execute practice correctly as it is described will keep learning rate low. The way to increase it is doing noticing faster than it is possible to notice while having nicely formed sense of self in the experience of noticing. Then mind will feel what it is supposed to be doing a lot is done with lacking qualities - pressure for improvement will be bigger and with it learning rate will increase. It is what I at least noticed when checking how my learning rate changes with changes in how practice is done. 

How so, Ni Nurta? (Being serious here as this is a bold claim)

Coincidentally, I was just reading a post by meditation teacher Nik Grabovac and at one point he says: "The idea is to maintain a sufficient quality of attention so that it feels challenging, but doable. (...) Another interesting aside is that studies of how people learn skills seems to indicate that learning is deepest and most efficient when you’re working in the zone where you can just manage to correctly execute the skill - it’s challenging, but doable. (See the book Peak, by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool for more details)."

You were talking about the same thing, right?

This is also directly related to the concept of flow:

Try a concentration excersise without back support with zero movement for 1.5h. No checking clock etc.

​​​​​​That should guarantee you'll train your wakefulness.

After a few days of that it won't be hard anymore. The time will start to go by very fast while also very focused on the present.

Your experience level doesn't matter, anyone with balls (metaphorically - women can do it too ) will be able to do it. And it will have benefits for almost anyone since this kind off non-redistance fades fast.

​​​​​​​If this makes you extremely tired you need a retreat.

When you're focusing on a sensation, should it feel like looking at it/gazing at it? Similar to looking intensely with the eyes at something, or does proper use of attention in meditation feel different/not really related to what's like to be looking at something?

When meditating on sensations produced by the breath in the nose is it important to constantly sort of recreate the sense of "nose" to know that this is where I'm reading the sensation from? Or should I just close my eyes and focus on whatever sensation is there already happening, no matter how far it appears, or whether its position with regards to the sense of "nose" is correct? I can meditate in a way so that sensation appears close or far away, and I'm not sure if it's important

Also, is it important to, in addition to focusing on sensation, keep conceptual knowledge of whether I'm breathing in or out right now?

No, there is no need to have a conceptual spatial model of where "you are" and "where the sensation is". Just an experience of the sensation itself is enough. So if there is a sense of tingling somewhere, you just note "tingling". You don't need to be perfectly aware of where the tingling is, what body part is tinging, etc. etc.  Noting a sensation is very simple.No, no need to create the sense of "nose". Just close your eyes and sense the sensation of the sensation.   Could you say more about why you are asking this question? My guess is that you are using the breath as "meditation anchor" and keeping your attention on the sensations of breathing? If that's the case, you don't need to know if you are breathing in or out, you just need to be aware of the sensations themselves and note them. There are some forms of meditation where people will focus on the breath and note inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale but as you say that's sort of conceptual. It's an okay method for initially calming down the mind.

​​​​​​​But noting practice can allow the attention to go anywhere in the body/mind, any sensation, emotions, or thought is a perfectly okay object to note -- it doesn't need to stay on the breathing sensations.

Having mental images of the objects in your attention is part of the normal processing of your experiences. It's something to note. It's a part of what's called "dependent origination."

The idea is to simplify acts of noticing to basics and do it faster. After some time if your noting gets better you will notice things like sensations which imply location but at this time you will notice them as separate phenomena arising at different time* than the sensation arises and relations between them will also be separate sensation.

It is maybe hard to imagine but doing it like that breaks solidity of normal perception allowing greater flexibility for brain to avoid dukkha hence the improvement. Flexibility like switching which parts of brain are used to indicate location or even drop it completely.

Personally I didn't even bother constructing whole experiences of noticing for too long and just assumed brain has to decompose experience to simplest components which can be then noticed without really having to do noticing - practice was to just at random pick sensation and if it didn't have 'already noticed' quality I would indicate it wasn't noticed correctly and maybe focus more on how this noticing should be done on next sensation so mind knows what its references are, then quickly go to expecting mind to do it correctly by itself.

Not sure how people do it but it worked for me and I was able to use acquired skills to decompose sensations. Anything which felt like it was composite experience could be treated by the same method to decompose further and qualities extracted using it used to add to other experiences. Inducing sensations when sensations arise is done by checking if given quality arises along with sensation which causes activation of parts of the brain related to this quality at the time sensations arise and thus they arise together - and what arises together is more likely to arise together in the future.

Likewise qualities which I wanted gone I would suppress by doing momentary cessations at the moment given sensation would arise - in this game the trick is feeling rhythm of sensations... well, not quite rhythm but usually things arise similarly between sensations and there is moment where activity would happen in given part of brain as part of sensation arising which happens after moment similar to how it happened previous time for similar sensation so it is possible to guestimate when to apply cessation... and even this is not it because trigger is applied before it all happens - experience-wise it does look like (for me at least - not sure what other people are doing when they are practicing) like action of cessation happens due to feeling rhythm of arising, like when you play instrument and have to play note at right moment. Anyways, this cessation/suppression is just like slipstreaming another quality, just requiring a bit more precision* as it relates directly to some sensation - here it is quality of suppression - neurons have sites for activation and suppression and all qualities use both. Cessation like the momentary cessation is no different and it is called cessation because it suppresses activity. It will feel funny when activity is suppressed like that but brain will optimize all this suppressed activity away fairly quickly so it can be treated as already gone as it feels suppressed.

One type of sensations which can be suppressed are all these sense of self sensations. Really technically the only thing to suppress are triggers making sense of self always arise so you can get this presumably amazing 4th path experience without slightest hint of sense of self ever arising. If you do not overdo suppression in sense of self itself and just suppress triggers you will be able to not have sense of self ever but when you want it you could easily have it for as long as you want. Maybe if that feels too normal when sense of self arise you can add some fancy qualities eg. golden light and some kind of jhanic bliss when you make sense of self arise to have it like the Advaita guys do when they have their True Self Enlightenment...

...or maybe not. I did it like that because I had something to proove - all dharmas are empty and mind states visualized ;)

<br /><br />Well, I thought maybe I'm taking for granted some things in meditation that I've always done (perhaps incorrectly) which for others are super obvious and intuitive, so I started questioning even things like that.<br /><br />



Thank you guys. It seems like you recommend doing noting. For now, I will abandon focusing on the sensations of the breath, try noting instead and see how it goes.