Heya everyone,

I'm curious about doing more with mantras than I historically have, and I've recently been toying around with 'Om Mani Padme Hum'. I was told by a teacher once (who shrugged before answering) that it would at least up my concentration, though his tone of voice implied then that as far as insight-practice goes, mantras (of any tradition) aren't as potent. I dunno if I'm as doubtful about it as he seemed (hence my curiosity), but what're some experiences you guys have had with that?

On a completely separate (but yet related) note (feel free to move this part of the post), I'm trying to figure out what the fact that I'm still toying around with techniques and haven't really settled on one or another as being very preferable, well, means. There doesn't seem to be any technique or tradition in particular that I'm actually very interested in consistently doing, and during meditation I even have to struggle against the impulse to switch techniques in the middle of a sitting. I've never been under the impression that meditation of any kind should be 'easy', but it should be definitely more interesting. I mean, I know what all of this means in the sense of 'yes, I know it at least has somewhat to do with my Dark-Nighting', but what to do about it practically speaking still has me stumped. Like I said, it just doesn't seem intuitively right that meditation should be characterized by this kind of grim struggling with even the technique itself and horrible problems with the posture and limbs constantly falling asleep and the mind just refusing at a certain point to stay on task. It just seems there's something flawed about my basic assumptions about what my attention and concentration should be like, optimally speaking. I do all kinds of practices actually, maybe too many, almost every day: Yoga, Tai-Chi, Karate again (which is also somewhat the same deal), and formal meditation. And all of them definitely have benefits, and I really enjoy Karate for example...but there's this kind of passionlessness that being in the Dark Night just seems to unavoidably engender. Something has to *stand out*, and that quality of standing out just seems to have left the boat at the A+P. I want to find technique or practice that I really *click* with, because it seems like that's the only way to inspire real progress, and yet that isn't possible it seems. I don't find it acceptable that the whole rest of my journey should be this uninspired and difficult, and that implies I'm working from a wrong-basis.

I've touched upon Choiceless Awareness, but in practice it makes literally no sense to me. Choiceless Awareness, as in taking any object as those objects rise and fall, would just mean everyday-waking-experience, right? Choiceless Awareness is, well, not meditating. I simply can't actually *think* a thought or sense things in general for long and maintain the kind of aloofness from it all, the simple observational quality, that's apparently needed, and I can't loving figure out why.

Well, no, cause you aren't noticing those things. They're just happening and you're kind of ignoring them. Though sometimes you can peep your head out and be like 'oh that happened!', but usually it's just a non-stop torrent of mindlessness (as opposed to mindfulness).

Why not investigate why, directly? Try to just be aware of stuff. And, when you notice you stopped being aware of stuff, figure out what happened that distracted you, and why it distracted you. And just do that for your entire waking experience.

A few ideals you seem to present might be part of the issue, so this is just a few thoughts that might help:

1) The ideal that the ordinary wandering mind isn't a good object should be questioned. Watch what it does on its own, see where it goes, see where it arises. Giving up the sense of control is part of the thing.

2) Objectifying everything only works to a point. At some point, everything that seems to be you, subject, watcher, observer, doer, controller, practicer, etc, also needs to be included, and those things can't actually be objectified in a normal way, with them "out there" as they are "in here". It is not about constantly finding some reference point that makes everything objects, and instead is seeing how all the things through space are just where they are. This is a very strange thing to explain when you are used to making everything observed, but at some point it doesn't work anymore, and you just have to figure out how to notice that things that you take to be you, through the space in what appears to be your head, neck, chest, abdomen, back, skull, nose, eyes, etc is all just fluxing stuff where it is, and it is the motion of attention that reveals the fluxing, as they are the same thing.

Thus: flux attention through the thing, which is to say the thing is the fluxing attention and there is no attention, just the fluxing stuff as it arises and changes. Notice this. It sounds mystical-mumbo-jumboish until it is not.

I like the following exercise. While sitting with eyes open, imagine that your arms contain bo staffs and you are twirling them in patterns that would be peacefully and painlessly cutting through your body, through your head, through your chest, through your back, through your sides. Really feel the imaginary arms moving the attention bo staffs through everything, feeling things gently synchronizing with the moving attention bo staffs as they slice through space, and in fact are part of space, which is to say they are attention, which is the same as space, and the moving attention space synchronizes with itself and the whole thing vanishes just like that and reappears. See if that helps.

Daniel

Oh, yes, mantras.

Try them with the spinning bo staffs at the same time, and let the mantras and the spinning and the rest synchronize, realizing that, as things get higher into 4th vipassana jhana territory, the mantra may get diffuse and may even get silent and may even disappear and don't worry about that, so long as the whole thing synchronizes and is allowed to disappear then it is all ok.

Daniel

Thank you both for your kind help, I will apply it. I do want to further question/clarify one or two points which you address, Daniel.

1) Your point that the wandering mind itself, i.e. watching INstability, makes very much sense and the idea has seemed cogent to me for a long time actually. Actually giving up the sense of control is paradoxical in the extreme to me, and that's my issue with this up till now, since I think I need some degree of control present at all times, constantly, during meditation. Otherwise, it's just normal awareness, hopping from thing to thing to thing, forgetting I'm meditating for just a split second, coming back, and so on. This superimposed view of meditation obviously doesn't hold up well, otherwise I wouldn't be asking about it, but it seems hard to imagine how otherwise just being alive and conscious isn't meditation. When I consider how my mind hops from thing to thing to thing normally throughout the day, I actually don't understand what the qualitative difference is anymore; how is that normal-awareness NOT meditation itself then?

If I'm reciting a mantra and my attention's on that, and then my attention shifts to the individual movements of me walking, and then away again to an intrusive thought, and then I notice the original thought and the thoughts that follow it pretty close to when they arise and then watch them vanish quickly into renewed focus-awareness on the mantra, is that what's meant by Choiceless Awareness?

I'll try the bo-staff exercise. )

Yeah, the control thing is a tricky point.

Here's the 4 vipassana jhanas to help us with that. The trick is to avoid using the perspective that worked in an earlier jhana as the solution to the higher one.

First vipassana jhana, namely first 3 insight stages (Mind and Body through Three Characteristics): effort works well, gets you somewhere, makes the difference, is a great plan.

Second vipassana jhana, namely the A&P: usually you notice that you see things a lot more clearly with less effort and finally the A&P takes over and there is no effort, just the A&P doing its thing.

Then there is the first subjhana part of the 3rd vipassana jhana, in which it actually does make some sense to apply effort, but the third jhana is wide and complicated and that is its nature, and so you have to get used to complexity, used to the wide open nature of attention, very soon the width and complexity give way to the dreaded 2nd-early 4th subjhana parts of the 3rd vipassana jhana, namely the Dark Night, and it is here that allowing a wide field to manifest on its own in all its complexity while staying present to how unpleasant that can be and how bad practice can feel, particularly in comparison to now nice and narrow and linear and straightforward practice seemed in the early jhanas, is the key.

So, can you just let the complexity and the chaos and the unpleasant things happen while noticing them widely, all around, as they attempt to come into the territory you think of as you, as that is part of what needs to happen.

The 4th jhana is the through and through one, the all the way through the center one, the space-realted one, the fluxy one. It is different from the early ones in that it is more integrated, yet more vague for most, more open and yet more subtle in some ways, more boring, such that many miss it and have no idea they got into it, more easy and yet we long for something to do out of habit and the feeling that we should be doing something, when actually the thing we want happens when we are doing nothing at all except naturally, effortlessly paying attention just because of a natural fascination, like in a daydream, and getting to this point requires a lot of fine tuning for most, learning to just let things happen while simultaneously just being there with them and then let this happen all the way through the core of everything: attention itself, wanting itself, effort itself, asking itself, looking itself, subtle things about fear and expectation and analysis, all of that. This has to be done gently and with finesse, and at points up in the 4th vipassana jhana things can feel really ordinary and not special or different or particularly meditative or altered at all.

Hi,

A couple of points, responses inline.



Why does this have to be dark night related? It would seem to fall under the hindrances of sloth-torpor/restlessness from my view. Sitting and meditating is _hard_, the mind is being forced to do something it isn't at all used to doing. Getting bored when sitting feels like a very common problem and hardly unique to the dark night. For me, switching technique in the middle of a sit has always had to do with boredom/lack of focus.

I recently listened to a talk by a teacher that was adamant that you needed to pick a technique and stick with it or there simply wouldn't be much in the way of progress.



I to have/had this problem, which i imagine is fairly common, and have simply decided to go with a technique with more emphasis on relaxing the mind, which has done a lot for relaxing the entire meditation process for me.



This, to me, sounds like perfectly ordinary boredom. I have picked up plenty of hobbies in my life that from the outside seemed really fun, and i really really wanted to enjoy them because i enjoyed the _thought_ of me practicing the hobby, but when it came down to it i simply didn't enjoy it. Finding a hobby, or anything really, that really stands out, that you 'click' with, is _hard_, it's not something that happens every day. None of this is particularly unique to the dark night in my eyes. I'm not saying that meditation is a 'hobby' by the way, just using hobbies as a basis for comparison.

I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't meditate, or stop looking for a particular technique that will *click* for you, but perhaps try to find other reasons to meditate than that it must be fun. Look at the benefits it brings your life off the cushion, perhaps you can find motivation there rather than in the process of meditating itself.

Disclaimer: I've only been doing this for a year, please don't give my opinions any more weight than that.

SO, this part of Daniel's post is what I'm yet still having trouble with:

"So, can you just let the complexity and the chaos and the unpleasant things happen while noticing them widely, all around, as they attempt to come into the territory you think of as you, as that is part of what needs to happen."

I just don't know how to accept these unpleasant things; I sure do notice them and notice how unhappy they make me and how obsessive they make my thinking, how generally detrimental they are, but the problem is I consider my thoughts RIGHT for all that they make me unhappy. I know this is a dark night post and it's not especially relevant to insight-techniques, I know it's content. But the content is seriously screwing me up still, and I haven't found any really good answer yet. I really do try over the years here to hold back my content from spilling out into my life, but it's difficult when the people around me (my co-workers in my grad. program for example) are intent on drawing my stuff out, on "correcting" me.