Finally getting around to updating. Over 2 months have passed since my last post at the end of the retreat. I haven't stopped practicing. I'm not sure if I'd say I'm making continual progress, as my perspective on a lot of things has changed, but I'll get into all that.
Quick recap of the retreat, crib notes version. If there is interest in an accurate retelling I'll dig up the notes I took immediately after. I think it was 6 days. Mostly alternating between walking/sitting, and reclining when my back/knees started to give. Averaged 10+hrs a day, but it varied from 8-20.
-24-48 hours of building momentum, at times extremely frustrating and effortful.
-Continues, along with lots of vibratory stuff phasing in and out, believing I was in equanimity. I remember naming these fast and slow periods in my head.
-The most intense feeling of rapture, like being pulled backwards out of my cushion by skyhook. Lasted 5-10 minutes, in 2-3 minute bursts. Say, 2-3 minutes of flying backwards, a minute of slowing down, repeat. Slept less than 4 hours that night and locked right back in to practice mode the instant I woke up. Resolved to try to keep doing that, and I feel the attitude was helpful (good mindset to have in daily life too).
-The most intense feeling of fear, lasting probably an hour the first time, but I bounced around to this a fear times afterwards. Featured vivid imagery (grotesque faces, stuff from horror films) I don't normally find particularly scary, but the experience of being extremely afraid was there. I took this and the rapture as a probable fast transition from A&P into Dissolution.
-The rest of (an assumed) dark night more of an uncomfortable, not-fun blur than anything I could separate into some kind of narrative. Some interesting stuff.
-Calm and peaceful (very, very peaceful) periods during which I started to feel lost, and most likely struggled to practice well.
Did more walking practice. I remember using my laptop for the first time somewhere around here, just to login to the DhO and look for help with what I thought was equanimity. I thought Yadid Dee(sp?)'s thread, where someone (I think Beoman) links to an older thread, quite helpful. Daniel was giving some advice about how one is standing in a pond right after a storm (so there are ripples), and the kind of effort you should be applying in eq is such that the bottom of your hand stays yet while the top stays dry. You're destined to fail at this over and over again, but that's the goal.
-This continues, attention widens, perceptual abilities expand. I find it much easier to keep going in eyes open mode, during transitions and walking especially. Some really interesting stuff happens but I don't have a lot of time to write. Like not needing to blink or move at all for 1-2 hours after a sit is over, just quietly and effortlessly watching a stream of rapidly occurring vibrations, thoughts, sounds. This whole time I'm experimenting with different levels of effort, blinking rapidly at times to stay at a moment-by-moment level (TJ Broccoli in Yadid's thread, I think), which as she points out, may or may not have done anything.
-Possible path moment where I clearly perceive two bulbous forms in this 3rd eye space that isn't my visual center, but clearly is 'seen'. Kind of like 3D models of interactions between cells in lower level biology, where each bulbous form is a cell wall. Something moves from the left form to the right one. Visual fades to this kind of very simplistic monochromic tunnel vision, but I don't get the sense I am moving. Perception/"everything" strobes a couple times, 2-4, I'm not sure. There is a gap, and the first sense door to come back is hearing (slight ringing).
This is kind of ballooning into a huge post, and I wish I had more time, as this retreat seems so long ago and I have so many questions/thoughts about more recent stuff.
The 2-3 days after the retreat are sort of this stable period of extreme contentment. I don't talk to anyone but my roommates, and even then briefly. I don't feel up to any kind of work (which put me behind when school started, but that was the last thing on my mind). I would go for long walks, eat alone, listen to music, or just lie in bed for hours at a time, feeling like everything was perfect and somewhat amazed at it all, as I wasn't doing anything I would conventionally call productive.
That will be it for the retreat. I'll post more if there's interest.
I find I keep putting off posting because every time I feel like I need some guidance, I browse through the archives or google some similar terms and sort of follow the breadcrumbs. I feel like anytime I could take an hour or two to type out some thoughts like I'm doing now, I could look a little closer on places like this board and find lots of good advice, or better yet, just sit for an hour. That's the main reason why nobody has really heard from me as of late. I'm more or less a full time student now, with various demands on my time outside of that. Sitting time is scant enough, and I feel I've done a very poor job of utilizing it well. Being 'in the world' (off retreat) and doing stuff in general has had this effect of pushing the priority level of meditative stuff way back (in the moment, like immediately after coming home, perhaps when I'm a little tired or hungry), which I think is common and to be expected, but necessary to compensate for.
recent stuff:
I've been reading a lot of EiS's stuff (his concentration thread is awesome...redefining access concentration, haha), and S. Dunning's advice (lots of it old/archived) in various AF-inspired threads have been really helpful. There have been lots of others, but these are the two that came to mind.
Posts by EiS (and many others) gave me the feeling of observing the progress someone who was really taking this seriously, kind of day in day out incremental improvement that made me examine what I was doing, for the better I think. At times made me question why I wasn't taking more time off to actually learn some useful things. In the things I consider myself better than most people at, all of them have involved this continual cycle of being "on the grind": learning something, experimenting, putting in work to refine it, finding a new perspective from the new abilities, getting a sense of where to go next, and doing it again. Seems like a fair number of people on here are doing that, and it's inspiring.
Partially as a result of managing my time poorly, I've done way more informal than formal sitting as of late.
My daily commute has been amazing, and I'm happy I decided to commit those to practice early on. I wear earplugs, and from the moment I leave the door to the moment I step off the last bus, I'm paying close attention to my experience. Been leaning more towards concentration type stuff, and have some questions related to that I'm going to make a thread about.
I'll say I'm still not sure if I have stream entry. I consistently have gaps I could call fruitions, but have no sense of being able to incline towards specific sense doors. They're just gaps, and the tiny tiny tiny differences in my experience of the moments before and after those gaps, are just that, really tiny. This being able to distinguish and incline towards sense doors is supposed to be really important and normal for a stream enterer, and I can confidently say, I don't have that ability, or if I do, I don't notice/understand it the same way.
I may post more if I have time, but that's what's been happening with me in a nutshell.
Questions/thoughts I was hoping to get some comments on, along with anything you notice in my wording (if someone is kind enough to read so carefully for my benefit) that points towards slight misunderstandings and such:
I mentioned after the retreat there were 2-3 days of blissfulness. Thought I'd mention a bit about the qualities of that.
On distinguishing between degrees and types of perfectness:
There's the A&P-esque "Oh man this is so awesome! It's just PERFECT!". The image in my head is a snowboarder with dreads talking to you immediately after a sick run. "That was gnarly, man!" Kind of too-much pleasure, at times overwhelming, that reminds me a lot of the basic dopamine-heavy orgasm most people are used to.
This is worlds apart from what I was experiencing at the end of my retreat, which has stuck with me, and actually gotten stronger/better understood since. It's like the perfection is so complete, it's not even there. Quiet. Or silent. There is no declarative statement you could or would want to make about it, and to continue to try to search for words would seem somewhat silly, as the searching /mental effort so clearly detracts from the experience. It's like, there is nothing to say, not even that there is nothing to say (which makes describing it near impossible, but I imagine that's the whole damn point). I thought this had a lot of similarities with descriptions of EE, so lately I have been cultivating this and getting better at "letting go" of the tendency to analyze, improve, or funny enough, cultivating it (again pointing out how anything you do, even trying to cultivate, doesn't seem to be of much help with this).
And at that point I stop calling it perfection. Naturally I want to call it something else, so I write a whole paragraph about how it isn't perfection and seemingly this other thing. It should become clear now I'm going in circles, so I'll stop. =p
That's pretty much what I've been doing. I'll note that the A&P-esque version of perfection I describe earlier seems terrible by contrast.
My intuition is that the direction to head is to get the reigns on the part of me that instinctively says "man, this is such a perfect, nice moment". That narration. That removal from the object to admire experience. Following the attention wave seems to help, as if you make the rapid flittering of the mind your object (instead of something solid the mind can flitter away from), sticky sensations seem easier to un-stick...
(In between, I noticed the pleasant qualities of low E are also a little different in their own way, in that the qualities of DN were so close by you feel more relief than anything. Like you're expecting unpleasantness, check for it, maybe wince, and are happy nothing bad is happening. At some point I suppose this deepens into what I'm describing above. Of course, I might just be overthinking the mental noise.)
Finally, I'll note I'm not really sure what the hell I'm doing, haha. I suppose it's not AF as I'm not constantly asking myself haetmoba. It doesn't seem like dry mctb-style insight. I'm just inclining the mind in certain ways as inspired by various people on this board, and the last two months have definitely, permanently (I hope, but it seems like it), improved my life for the better.
