Thank you

Sean Lindsay, modified 14 Years ago at 12/7/09 5:28 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 12/7/09 5:28 PM

Thank you

Posts: 46 Join Date: 11/3/09 Recent Posts
Just a note to the founder and regulars here to say thank you for your guidance. Following it led me from a several-years-long meditation process that had not reached beyond mid-Three Characteristics to stream entry several weeks ago. I have no good words for the experience, but I am strongly aware that without your guidance, it could have been many more years of wandering around before such a realization could have happened, and it might never have occurred at all.

Thank you.

Namaste.
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Daniel M Ingram, modified 14 Years ago at 12/9/09 7:56 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 12/9/09 7:56 PM

RE: Thank you

Posts: 3268 Join Date: 4/20/09 Recent Posts
Glad you got something out of the place. That's what makes it worthwhile for us, I think.

Could you say more about what you are calling stream entry and what happened, what it has been like since, how you got whatever you got, and anything else you would like to comment on?

If you got it, then everyone benefits from hearing that it can be done and by getting on more data point on how it happened, and if you just crossed the A&P or hit Equanimity or any of the the other common mimics, then it is good to know that also.

One way or the other, thanks for participating here and being a part of this open dharma experiment.

Daniel
Sean Lindsay, modified 14 Years ago at 12/12/09 10:17 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 12/12/09 6:55 PM

RE: Thank you

Posts: 46 Join Date: 11/3/09 Recent Posts
Daniel, thank you for your offering. I've tried to write up the sequence of experiences, and I'm afraid I've made the mistake of starting too far back -- the narrative turned out longer than expected. Please feel free to skip toward the end, as the particulars of the specific experience I referred to are detailed there -- but the extended lead-up seemed to be a part of the larger picture, so I offer it, as well, for whatever it may be worth:

In the earlier post, I indicated that stream entry had been realized – but I acknowledge here, as Daniel has gently suggested, that I may have been mistaken, and I appreciate the opportunity to examine that experience with the assistance and in the context of your collective experience.

Here is an attempt at a narrative of my meditative experiences. Please let me know which ones, if any, should be detailed more closely:

I am a student of yoga for the past ten years. I started that practice at a professional conference where one of the coordinators said he practiced yoga each morning, and we were welcome to join him if we wanted to. Over the course of about three days, he taught us the basics of a sun salutation. As an aikido instructor, he emphasized awareness of the center of balance of each pose. At one point, he showed us Tree Pose, and instructed us to keep the awareness on that physical location as we tipped over in one direction, then in another. The next day, we repeated the exercise, but this time while standing in a circle, so that we could, as we tipped over, lean on the person next to us. As I tipped, of course, the center of balance shifted from inside my body to inside the body of the person next to me. But what I perceived was that we were one and the same person – my sense of proprioception had somehow included the body of another person.

That was enough to cause me to incorporate a steady yoga practice in my life. Doing that, in turn, allowed me to experience the flows of energy and awareness, and the hypnagogic states between waking and sleep that arise often enough in yoga practices. I began to experiment with meditation, and like my early experience with yoga, it, too, was accompanied by fireworks-style initial experiences of at-that-point unimagined bliss states that opened briefly, then closed off again, not reopening. As I pursued my yoga practice, I found dharma teachings making better sense of the daily awareness realizations that I was experiencing than the western psychological or religious models I’d learned previously. I had a clear sense that there was more to the path than I had been able to access through the hit-and-miss experiences I’d had through yoga, so I began studying meditation practices.

About eight years ago and after reading Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart, I began a fits-and-starts sitting practice, initially about 15 minutes at a time 2-3x per week, mostly using the noting practice I had gleaned from the book. As a sitting space, I used my closet or the basement. For the first few months, it was difficult to concentrate, and I found myself frequently distracted, but I saw some value in the basic awareness of what was going on in my head and body. Occasionally, things seemed to align well enough that for a few seconds – sometimes a minute or two – my awareness seemed to “shift” from mechanically noting one sensation, then another, then a thought, then another sensation to a kind of flow state where the awareness seemed to rest somewhere, just watching the sequence of sensations and thoughts. I came to think of that state as the “witness” state that I’d read other authors talk about occurring. Then, typically, the mind would get snagged on a particular thought, and I’d be off on a distraction trip. I developed a reasonable stable ability to reach that “witness state,” and that became the core of my sitting practice for the next couple of years.

During the next several years, that “witness state” became very important to me for a number of reasons. For years previously, I’d been diagnosed with and medicated to treat chronic depression. The “witness state” awareness enabled me to see the ingrained patterns of thought that my mind followed, and further provided me a place to rest outside those depressive circuits. I forget where I read it, but an author’s point succinctly described my situation: while all my thoughts were depressive, I saw that the part of my mind that noticed those thoughts was not, itself, depressed. It just witnessed. I used that recognition and the witness mind state as a tool to manage my experience with depression. And doing that over time diminished both the depth of the depressive episodes, as well as their duration. Over time, I no longer needed medication to manage my condition. Seeing the mind-patterning of depression made it easier to see mind-patterning in many other aspects of life, as well, and with time, this technique to deal with depression became a springboard for the beginning of my understanding of karma (to the extent I understand it).

At any rate, my meditation practice stayed at about that same level a couple of years. I don’t have a particular recollection of my practice being characterized by any surprising experiences. Occasionally, odd and shifting masses of color would appear behind my closed eyelids, but they seemed to sustain for a few minutes and then subside, and I didn’t think more of them than something that closed eyes did in relatively dim lighting. I did notice, however, that I was becoming more conscious of aspects of my personality and life that had largely been unconscious previously. Instead of realizing I’d made a mistake days after doing something bone-headed, I’d realize it only hours later. As time went by, I’d realize it a few minutes later. Then a few seconds. And every now and again, I’d realize I was about to do something bone-headed, and I’d stop myself. That kind of thing.

About four years ago, I felt myself at a kind of tipping point. My deepening experiences though yoga and meditation brought me to a kind of belief crisis. Conceptually, I realized that the things I’d previously believed about existence (individuality, self-determination, etc.) were more awkward concepts than realities, and I had been contorting my mind to keep them on life-support in various ways. Once I saw those mind-contortions, I began to relax them, though it took me months and months, and it was far from painless, both for me and for my loved ones, as I disassembled various parts of my life and ways of living. As a part of that shift, I found motivation to deepen both my yoga and my meditation practices, and I began practicing both daily. My meditation periods extended to thirty minutes per sitting. I continued to practice my understanding of Kornfield’s noting practice. Body aches and pains began manifesting themselves, most of which would subside when I got up from the sitting.

I attended a couple of weekend yoga-and-meditation retreats at Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado, led by teachers in the lineage of Trungpa Rinpoche. While I appreciated the teachers, I found meditation easier and freer in the hills around the meditation center than in the teacher-led meditations themselves. Still, the snippets of peacefulness that I found in those weekends sustained my practice and persuaded me that the path was worth pursuing with more effort and attention. I completed a yoga teacher training regimen and began teaching yoga three years ago.

My meditation practice continued, though I extended the sitting periods to 45 minutes at a time, usually once per day, sometimes twice.

That was where it stayed until I ran across a web link to Daniel’s MCTB. When I read the section where he described the noticing practice running at 1-10 noticings per second, I thought, “No way – I can’t imagine noticing more than two or three things per second. But, of course, I had to try to speed up. I’d already found that a formal labeling practice was too slow for the sequence of perceptions that I was having, and I found I could relax my mind into the noticing more rapidly – perhaps 4-6x/second. At that level, I began to notice unpleasant sensations arising – twitching fingers in my right hand in particular. My back and neck would cramp, sometimes very painfully. Occasionally, I’d feel tiny electric shocks – like the sort of thing you get from scuffing your feet on a carpet and then touching something metal. For several consecutive sitting sessions, my lower face would contort itself into strange and uncomfortable positions, and I couldn’t seem to relax it without exiting the meditative state altogether – that is, the contortion would end when I got up off my cushion, but while meditating, even when I tried, I couldn’t untwist my face. For several weeks, my practice was all about these weird physical sensations and experiences, interspersed very occasionally with seemingly spontaneous insights about the interconnectedness of things.

With time and more practice, the uncomfortable twitchiness would often subside into a kind of trembling or vibration. Over time, that began to include energy sensations that would shoot up my spine, straightening my posture. Usually, the energy sensation would stop when they reached about the level of my heart, though sometimes they’d extend down my arms and into my hands. I became more aware of how energy moved through various hand mudras, though I didn't have (nor today do I have) any particular understanding of what that might mean in particular. I thought of those spinal energy rises as what I’d read of kundalini manifestations. For several months, meditation was a bit of a carnival ride. I was also, though I didn’t recognize it as related at the time, sexually much more interested and able than I had been in previous years and times. Sometimes, following the energetic manifestations would come a kind of quiet, somewhat exhausted, peace, and even the vibrations themselves would subside.

So about a year ago, I did a five-day vipassana retreat at Spirit Rock, in California. I found much of my time there to be distinctly unpleasant, dealing with distractions, body discomforts, self-absorbed suffering, and the like. Still, in the midst of all my self-absorbed discomfort, moments of grace arose. As I noted on a different thread (I’m still not good at finding threads from the prior board format), I experienced something one morning that was more than interesting. While walking down a path from the meditation center to the dining hall – I (there was still an “I” perceiving things) saw Sean – my “self” – from a perspective that included not only the “inside” of Sean’s experience, but also much else. I’m inclined to describe it in spatial terms though that's really a metaphor for whatever the relationship was between Sean and the viewer, as there was a clear separation between the perceiver and all that was going on in Sean’s mind and in the earth/space around him, but it wasn’t what I understand “out-of-body” experiences to usually entail. (Note: I know next to nothing about OBEs.) At any rate, all of Sean’s karmic twistings and twinings and their accompanying sufferings were there in that seeing, but it was like seeing Sean’s experience through some much more wider and more knowing mind’s eye than Sean’s. Then, like other experiences, it passed, and I went and ate breakfast. The retreat ended, and I returned to my daily sitting practice.

With time, I got pretty quick about moving through the twitchiness and into the kundalini experiences. That led eventually to more quiet periods following the kundalini experiences. But the fireworks became shorter and shorter, and the peace began to feel not so peaceful and a lot more unsatisfying. I couldn’t always get “back” to the kundalini fireworks, and I began to feel that I didn’t really want to get back to them. They were physically tiring and while especially early on, I really liked “getting” to what I thought of as a level of “real” meditation experience, once I was there and the novelty had worn off, it seemed pretty pointless and vapid. But during the honeymoon with those experiences, I found that off the cushion, especially while teaching yoga classes, experiences of deep and quiet joy would arise, and I’d see all the oddities and flaws of my students, but at the same time, I’d sense the sheer beauty of their individual practices.

That, and much else, then subsided into a kind of unhappy darkness. I couldn’t re-“get” the fireworks, as they’d come to seem like the emperor’s new clothes, and even when I wanted to get back to them and made the effort, when energy experiences arose, they weren’t as strong, and it felt kind of pathetic to be chasing them. Off the cushion, I became increasingly unhappy with my family, my boss, my job, my body, and my yoga students. So I sat in a kind of darkness for a while.

But it wasn’t all bad, for several reasons. First, I’d read MCTB, and I knew that Dark Night was going to come at some point or another. Granted that for a while during the earlier “fireworks” phase, I’d persuaded myself that perhaps the years of depression I’d lived with were “my” dark night, and I could skip over it, but that delusion didn’t live very long. Second, just knowing that it was a step along the path was some comfort – that it wasn’t going to be permanent, and it was normal to think that the whole business was a waste of time, life, and happiness. Third, the actually depressing parts of it were still manageable by using the same techniques that I’d learned years earlier for dealing with depression – try to get to and hang out in the witness space to the extent possible, notice that the witnessing (it had, by then, become less a “witness” (noun) than a witnessing (“verb”) process, but the same technique seemed to work ok) wasn’t, itself, depressed, and let go of the thoughts and desires and aversion and failings that were arising in each sitting. Fourth and finally, I began to see that I’d wanted meditation to make me (to borrow a line from Robin Williams in Disney’s Alladdin movie) an “All Powerful Genie” – that is, I wanted the meditation path to save me from life.

And when I realized how attached I was to the notion of progression and how much I had projected onto it, I began to think of the sitting practice as a kind of cod liver oil that was in no way pleasant, but hopefully was useful at de-illusioning me, nonetheless. At times, I found myself both miserable and kind of comically pathetic. I felt I had to get past this somehow, so I signed up for a 10 day meditation retreat, also at Spirit Rock, for the end of October. I intended to use that period and the support of live (rather than book) teachers to try to get past the mess I was in. That incentive gave me enough impetus to keep practicing (no point in back-sliding before the retreat, and have to repeat prior efforts). By June of this year (2009), that was where I found myself during most meditation sessions. My basic practice continued to be a vipassana-style noticing, starting with sensations and thoughts. I felt “stuck,” but continued the work. It began to dawn on me that maybe that was just the way things were. Part of me was ok with that, but another part kept wanting a step-by-step path to liberation to work.

Then around the beginning of August, I began to perceive a little more clearly how many “noticings” seemed to include a sense of attachment (or aversion) to the things noticed. I began to expand the noticing practice to include those aspects.
Around the end of August I was sitting as usual early one morning – noticing sensations and thoughts, then noticing the mind-response to those sensations and thoughts. And I then I perceived a kind of subtle attachment to the seeing of the mind-response itself. The thought arose in my mind at that point, “Finally!! – maybe seeing this way is how to make progress in meditation.” And at that moment, a phrase-mantra came into my mind quite distinctly: “There is nowhere to go – There is no way to get there.” As that thought arose, the self-notion comprised of the clinging to the “maybe this is how to progress” thought became apparent. And as I let go of that clinging, a new “maybe this is how to progress” thought arose with respect to that letting go, and the mantra-phrase repeated, and that clinging self dissipated. The same process repeated itself two or three more times. Then there was a brief sense of spatial distance (a bit like the prior experience at Spirit Rock from the year prior) increasing from the self that was Sean.

Then nothing.

There were no thoughts. There was no sense of self, whether Sean's or someone/thing else's. There was no sense of time. There was no sense of object or subject. Words don’t really help here. Not sure how to describe the (non) experience more than this.

Then there was awareness of a sound from next door, and "I" was back. From that point, the day went on its usual course. Yoga students arrived, I played teacher; I went to work, I played lawyer; I went home, I played husband/father.
And it’s been largely that way ever since. There were a couple of subsequent experiences of profound nondualism that seemed to echo the emptiness of that (non)experience – once when I was thinking about how to reduce some conflict at work. “I” dropped out and there was a kind of perception of nonseparation between my own thoughts about the conflict and the outside conflict itself. I came “out” of that experience with an entirely different understanding of Gandhi’s teaching that we must become the change we seek to make in the world. A similar “drop” into a kind of nondual perception occurred a day or two later, as well.

Since then, though, things have become more stable – more “normal.” I don’t seem to have ready access to the complete nothing experience, but life seems much easier now – not that the challenges of life are any different, but rather that the “me” that sees them is empty. I'd had intimations of that before, so this isn't a radically new way of thinking about "self," but it seems more real. Notions of life and death appear in an entirely different perspective. I still find myself reacting to situations, but the reactions themselves seem more readily apparent as reactions. I find my days filled much more with compassion.

And I began reading more by Kornfield and Adyashanti about initial awakening experiences. What they say about the kinds of changes that result from those experiences largely mirror the changes in my own life, following mine. And from that, I’ve come to think of that experience as stream entry – at least of a sort. I recognize that one of MCTB’s stream-entry criteria is repeatable access – that is, the ability to drop into the state presumably at will. That has not occurred to me, and if I am actually (once again) off on a detour, I’d appreciate guidance to help me get off the detour.

But whether stream entry or not, there is a perception of freedom and lightness. There’s a sense of seeing through not only the often translucent parts of life, but even seeing through the parts of life that were usually more opaque and constricted – the aches and pains and discomforts and conflicts and suffering of life. And while the pains continue, the suffering seems more of an echo of suffering felt by an echo of a person-knot of karma than it does actual suffering of the sort Sean previously experienced. A number of the teachings of the dharma that were previously impenetrable and nonsensical from a conceptual perspective are no longer puzzles – just like I can see how I’d previously misconstrued the Gandhi teaching as a kind of “think globally, act locally” nostrum. One of the realizations, however, is how impossible it is to put into conceptual thought and words anything about such experience.

So with that too-too long narrative, I would welcome your questions and assistance.