Unknowing Events?

mjk 10 93, modified 14 Years ago at 12/21/09 9:04 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 12/21/09 6:01 PM

Unknowing Events?

Posts: 20 Join Date: 12/13/09 Recent Posts
Several times in Daniel's book he talks about "Unknowing Events." What are these, exactly? I cannot find reference to this term elsewhere.
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J S S, modified 14 Years ago at 12/21/09 9:14 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 12/21/09 9:14 PM

RE: Unknowing Events?

Posts: 11 Join Date: 11/15/09 Recent Posts
Whenever I experience an A&P event under strong concentration I always have a sudden moment where I come back to reality and some of my short term memory is wiped clean. I don't remember ever leaving reality, and I believe it is just a spontaneous event in one small fraction of time, not something that happens slowly. This always seemed to match Daniels description of an unknowing event. It doesn't always happen, but when it does it's a good sign that something happened.
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robert thomas hindmarch, modified 14 Years ago at 12/22/09 3:48 AM
Created 14 Years ago at 12/22/09 3:48 AM

RE: Unknowing Events?

Posts: 12 Join Date: 11/3/09 Recent Posts
in my own experience of fruition, which I believe is like the mother of unknowing events, for just a very quick split second conciousness is lost or skipped over or something like that. its hard to say because I know what happened right before and right after Im like " oh wow that was quick and discontinuos" but I have to have strong concentration to really be able to describe this. Ive found noticing doesnt take as strong concentration, but describing it or proving it to yourself does take some degree of clarity
mjk 10 93, modified 14 Years ago at 12/22/09 9:10 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 12/22/09 9:10 PM

RE: Unknowing Events?

Posts: 20 Join Date: 12/13/09 Recent Posts
I have not experienced anything like that yet, unless falling asleep counts... So far in my practice my main "insight" has been that real moment-to-moment impermanence is necessary for any kind of perception. That is, if something really was permanent, and our attention on it was also permanent, we wouldn't experience it at all.
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Daniel M Ingram, modified 14 Years ago at 1/3/10 1:21 AM
Created 14 Years ago at 1/3/10 1:21 AM

RE: Unknowing Events?

Posts: 3279 Join Date: 4/20/09 Recent Posts
Unknowing events are those for which you have no idea what happened for that brief or long period of time, as you have very little or nothing to go on and must make sense of the thing by context, or what are sometimes loosely called the "aroundums", meaning those things you do know about the things that came before and after it, as well as its broader context in practice. Basically, the key is sorting out what are the big ones, Fruitions, 8th Jhana, Nirodha Samapatti, from what are just ordinary state shifts, the A&P, falling asleep, and just spacing out.

There is a list in the section of my book called "Was that Emptiness?" that is a good place to start.

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