Okay I want to start a thread on the phenomenology of attachment and suffering, because my impression is that these correspond to well define phenomena, and I think clear phenomenological definitions would clear stuff up in terms of how to think about Enlightenment and Insight. But I would like to get other people's perspective. FWIW these observations come from my experience crossing the A&P, crossing DN to EQ, and getting to HEQ, but I am not a SE.

So basically how I would define attachment is "psychic gripping/solidity", and suffering is the "felt sense of suckiness" (which is different from unpleasantness).

The first inkling I got from this was the moment I crossed the A&P. This was on my first retreat, and the day before I had had an intense Kundalini awakening, and the next morning I was terrified. The terror was full body, and felt solid like a brick wall. When I used the terror as an object, eventually in a split second my mind realized it was dumping psychic energy to "hold onto" the feeling, and it stopped doing it, and the solidity immediately vanished and suddenly emotions felt like they took up maybe 1/100 or 1/500th the space, and suddenly they had a lava lampy feeling to them.

The second inkling I got was when I crossed from the DN to EQ, where the notable thing for this model was up until then my head had always felt "solid and permanent" (to a large extent), but I had a very clear deep jhana experience, and when I came back from that my head had disappeared! I was able to see the world in 0 person perspective, and eventually my head solidly would come back - but now it would cycle through 1. not being there 2. being solid 3. being lavalampy (a lot of people on DhO talk about head oozing during this phase and I can relate 100% to this)

Then I recently went on a 2-month Mashasi retreat that got me from low eq to high eq, and I sent my logs to one of my good dhamma friends and he asked me why at the end I thought I might be close to SE and if I had any more insight into the four noble truths, and this is how I summarized what had happened.

So the thing that seems more apparent is that when you examine objects in experience they have components - the sensation itself, a vedana, (sometimes) a "psychic gripping", and (sometimes) a felt sense of bad (that's separate from unpleasant vedana). What meditation is generally seems to be doing is you'll get to points where this "psychic gripping" seems to permanently drop out, then the felt sense of bad goes away (like the felt sense of bad is a result of gripping not a result of the unpleasantness). To clarify this term "psychic gripping" term, it's most obvious with body/head sensations where it feels like it's being squeezed (and this squeezing seems to create a sense of permanence and the squeezing/permanence seems to be what the mind takes as a self), but there are similar things going on with things like audio thoughts (where I saw the shift from them sounding like they are almost a part of space itself, to the current perception of them where they are much quieter and come from a source "in my head") and similarly the same thing that happened with craving on retreat. So then the jump that I made near the end of the retreat was that the most of the gripping feels like its basically gone (and moment to moment experience is very peaceful and chill right now), and the gripping that's left/obviously visible (mostly these occasional bubbles in my head) seems very mild (especially compared to the start of the retreat), so my hunch is that with more practice those will release itself, and that's when you get into fruition territory. 

That's good!

And what is the cause of the psychic gripping? My experience is that suffering is caused by the illusory perception that all the things, the objects that we perceive, are separate entities. In Buddhism, this is typically called "ignorance." We give our mental constructions (illusions) lots of credence, and we habitually give in to these impressions - we crave good objects and we avoid bad objects. If we focus on this process, really study it (meditation), we can get to a point where we see this happening in real time and thus reduce the suffering our old habits (our ignorance) cause. Then we can also see that the worst of our illusions is the I/me/mine, that we (a separate subject that perceives all the other separate objects) and that is the source of most of our suffering and dissatisfaction. 

I explain how I define suffering here: 
https://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2023/07/how-i-define-dukkha-suffering.html#dukkha_def_ease_def

The cause of suffering in my opinion is resisting/rejecting emotions and facts of reality that cause emotions, this is often accompanied by some type of physical tension in the body and the ego is almost always involved. When you relax and acknowledge reactive emotions and and the facts that triggered them and see how your ego is involved, they pass quickly.  But it is not easy to do that. You have to learn to realx and learn to observe the activity of the mind in meditation and in mindfulness in daily life. You have to notice mental activity arising and fading, including emotions and the physical sensations in the body that accompany them, notice dukkha arising and passing, notice the role of the ego in dukkha arising, notice how the sense of self changes from situation to situation, notice the components of the aggregates that we usually think of as "self" arising and fading - thoughts, emotions, impulses, and sensory experience, including concepts of self and concepts of no-self. 

When you observe the mind this way you learn about the three characteristics. When you remain relaxed in the present moment, you are interrupting the sequence of dependent origination.

Clinging, when you can't let go of a reactive emotion, in my experience often happens because you are not aware of the emotion and its cause in the first place. You know you are suffering, something is not quiet right, but you don't really understand why. You have to watch the mind carefully and gain experience in recognizing and unraveling your emotions, and how the ego is involved and then letting go is much easier.

Okay so I'll admit, I've always had trouble with the idea of ignorance. On one level (and this is biased from my noting practice) because there doesn't seem to be something in experience I can point to and note "ignorance ignorance" (but I can note "anger, rumination, more anger"), and on another level because it seems to give the practice a flavor of "why are you hitting yourself?" to which the only appropriate response is "im not trying to hit myself!" haha. Also, this psychic gripping seems causeless to an extent, like why did my body feel solid and persistent for so long? It just did, that's how it was, and now it's different. But it does seem to create the notion of a separate thing. Like why a sound feels like "not me" and my body used to feel like "me" or why it used to be that "i am a little dude in my head" really does seem to be caused by this feeling of solidity.

I'm not a huge fan of this definition. I find it weird to segment things into mental vs physical or "real" vs "fake" suffering. Like if it sucks it sucks, no? Plus we could put on our scientific materialist hats, and say well everything we experience is a result of having a body and a brain, so all suffering is biological. Or we could put on our vendanta/yogacara hats and say "well all that exists is consciousness and its contents", so then all suffering is mental no?

I'd say that if you can mindfully see the clinging, you're also seeing the emotion (albeit in an obscured way) + the clinging. I think it's also important to highlight the idea that enlightenment isn't doing away with negative emotions, like if the Buddha didn't sleep for a week he would surely be tired and if you gave him 20 cups of coffee he would surely be energized and a bit agitated (some might say, restless), but rather it changes how these unpleasant things are perceived (and they will still be unpleasant). I would say you should try to notice things that seem unpleasant but "fine" (like the obnoxious construction noise outside my room right now), and things that seem unpleasant but "sucky" and ask yourself "is it actually the unpleasantness causing the suckiness, or is it something else?"

"Ignorance" might not be a very good word for what 's really a habitual focus on, "Hey! Look at that shiny object over there!" that then prevents us from seeing our own experience with more accuracy. Illusion is probably a better word. I used the word "ignorance" from convention.
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Did you have a question or just wanted to vent?
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Well Dreamwalker, you'll notice in the first two sentences of the post I actually outline the intended purpose of the whole thing

But now I do have a question and that's - how do you view ignorance, attachment, and suffering? And are you higher path? I'm curious to because I'd like to hear what the "physic gripping" might be like later on, since it seems like just working on SE clears a lot of it out.

If you ask my wife neither the 2nd Path nor SE changed me a bit!  

Maybe it's not about becoming an angel that's calm and lovely but just seeing more clearly the reactive patterns and stuff leading to such is? 

Bahiya Sutta clearly teaches us that karma still unfolds in this human realm, Arahat or not! What happened to Bahiya after he awakened? Why did he approach a cow with a calf? Hm ... 

Why does Ingaram go for a massage of his stiff body? (Heard in an interview). How come his body doesn't just feel like milk and honey? After all he is an Arahat!!! or is "he" ?