ReformedSlackersGuideThanks to the way back machine...internet archive
ReformedSlackersGuide
A Reformed Slacker's Guide to
Stream Entrywritten by
Tarin Greco
for Daniel and Carol
& Pete(written February-April 09, unfinished draft. feedback welcome)
Welcome to my first, and possibly only (time will tell), Dharma
publication. The material I present here is drawn from my own
experience and from inferences made on its basis. It is written for a
readership already clued-in to the basic mental exercises that
constitute
insight meditation, the maps and models designed to describe its progress (particularly the
four-path model derived from Theravadan Buddhism, to which this text will refer), as
well as some of the vocabulary that is commonly used to describe those
things, and its meaning and significance may elude readers outside this
group. For example, if you don't know what
stream-entry (or first
awakening)
is, or why you would want it, this text may only serve to pique your
curiosity, or it may be a boring or confusing read. On the other hand,
if you're part of an orthodoxy that holds,
in one way or another, that
nirvana is beyond a practitioner's realistic reach and may as well be mythical,
given its practical unattainability, this text may annoy you and you
probably wouldn't believe me anyway so, whatever, it doesn't matter.
This text is meant to be read as a companion volume to
Daniel M. Ingram'sMastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha,
to which it will frequently refer, for while this essay may be
insightful as stand-alone writing, and may indeed prove to be key
reading for those whose temperaments and styles of practise (and habits
of shortcoming) are similar enough to my own, it does not offer a
thorough enough treatment of either the
insight meditation theory or practical instruction that a novice (or anyone sufficiently
doubting their skill) will need. What this text does offer is an
exposition on the way to hit a
retreat properly and the right attitude to have in order to
attain a path. Its primary functions are
- to serve as an exposition of how path can be achieved through insight practice by someone who is willing to give it all they've got (and how, if that's you, that means you can do it), as well as
- to offer a few tips on what you might be doing wrong if you've
been working at it for a while already and it just hasn't happened yet.
As best I've been able to determine, most people who have completed at least one
path of insight have done so while on intensive
retreat, particularly that
first path.
First path, otherwise known as
stream-entry,
is reputed to be particularly tricky in that it requires the mind's
entire field of experience to do something it's never done before:
completely disappear.
To arise, and then pass totally, without remainder. What this takes in
order to happen for the first time is not entirely clear to me; perhaps
it's focus, perhaps concentration, perhaps timing; and in support of all
those things, perhaps a kind of sheer willingness at a deep, deep
level. These are my guesses. Regardless, whatever it is mostly tends to
occur on
retreat, so I've heard, and that's been my personal experience
as well. Therefore, this book will be about going on
retreat.
You can either retreat at a
meditation centre or you can retreat on your own. If doing the former, there will be
rules to follow and a schedule to keep up. If doing the latter, make
your own timetable and stick to it. If retreat at a
centre,
the basic needs are taken care of. Someone cooks you food, there is a
place you can sleep when it's time to rest, and a bunch of people are
all doing the same thing at the same time around you to remind you to
stay disciplined. If doing a solo
retreat,
you will have the benefit of stark isolation, which can turn into very
powerful focus, but you may have to prepare your own food and be your
own motivation, in which case it will greatly pay to keep food and other
routines simple. Both centre retreats and solo retreats have advantages
and drawbacks, but either way, you should have the same attitude, which
is to say a
hard-working and independent one. Don't drift through your
retreat! Pay attention to each and every bit of it. Practise even when there doesn't seem to be any point.
I should probably mention, for those unfamiliar with
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, that my expectations of
retreats and retreatants are heavily influenced by the
Mahasi Sayadaw tradition. That means non-stop, second-by-second attention to, and utmost engagement with, the
insight practice from the moment you wake up to the moment you're out for the night...
and then some. Seriously, we aren't fooling around here. If you're not
sometimes buzzy and occasionally neurotic that you're not putting in
enough moment-to-moment effort, you probably really aren't. While
insight practice requires a balance of
effort and
tranquillity, an
arahant friend of mine is convinced that 99% of meditators err on the side of
laxity. If you're convinced that you're in the other 1%, this probably
isn't the guide for you. And while there are
traditionsthat retreat in a more laid-back way, perhaps by not utilising all the minutes in a day for
insight practice, or by alternating between periods of formal, heavily focused
insight practice and gently mindful 'rest periods' or 'activity periods', this book is
about what I know, and what I know is that working my ass off in a
non-stop way, as recommended, worked. Overkill? Perhaps, but see how
good you feel coming out of
retreat, still unenlightened, and wondering if maybe you simply didn't try hard enough.
So, enough lead up. What is this all about, what is needed? Down to the heart of the matter.
If you would like a successful
retreat, you should probably:
1- Start by
believing that you can do it. This part is crucial. However you do it, make sure you know that your
goal is possible.
Sceptical that it's possible? Why? People have done it, people do it. Talk to
people who have done it, there's enough of them around. Don't know them
in person? Can't find some who will talk openly? Not meeting them at
your favourite health food store? Come online, there's a bunch of people
who get it on the Internet. A wiki-based web community called
The Dharma Overground has a decent collection of practitioners from a variety of
mystical traditions, Buddhist as well as otherwise, who are attained,
insight and otherwise, and open about it.. a collection which is growing as more of the current members tune in and
get it done,
and more people who've already done it, and so get it, find their way
to the group. Anyway, wherever you can find people willing to talk about
it, take advantage of it. Make sure it sinks in that
enlightenment,
where it occurs, is an everyday reality.. not divorced from the realm
of ordinary experience in which you are living right now.
It's important to know it's actually, seriously, possible so that you don't compartmentalise your expectation of
enlightenment away from your direct experience of being alive here and now. Don't pigeonhole
enlightenment into an 'it will magically drop out of the sky' mental category. You'd think that simply because you've been dogging it,
retreat for
retreat,
you wouldn't be treating the possibility of actually seriously getting
enlightened like fantasyland stuff, wouldn't you? Believe me, this is a
habit that's hard to not form and once formed, hard to break. 9 years
steady on the trail, with even some time in the monkhood, and I was
still doing it to no end. Are you assuming this yourself? Do you find
yourself thinking of
enlightenment in the form of an unattached daydream, similar to winning the lottery? Investigate yourself
seriously and if you find that you are, take a good look at what you're doing. It is solidly
disempowering for your mind to assume
enlightenment can only exist in the stories you tell about your future at best, your
maybe-future at worst. Start looking for it right here and now, right
around you and right through you. What does it mean to look for it? It
means to:
2-
Follow the retreat instructions ruthlessly.
Following retreat instructions means doing the exercises they tell you to. This should mean doing
insight practices that cause you to pay attention to things as they are.
In the
Mahasi tradition, and in much of the Theravadan Buddhist world, insight
insight practice means paying attention to any or all of the
Three Characteristics that can be found in any instance of sense experience; they are the characteristics of
impermanence (momentariness),
suffering (fundamental tension, displacement and discomfort), and
no-self (hardest to explain, it has to do with an illusion that never clearly
existed anyway, so perhaps best it's understood for now as the
spontaneous and out-of-anyone's-control aspect of how sensations just
happen on their own).
Ingram makes much fuss about this subject, which is a perspective I have
benefitted from to no end and heartily endorse but will also proceed to
contradict later on. For now, however, if you're going to take on
noting practice, assume that seeing some aspect of the
Three Characteristics at this very moment is the only way you're going to get anywhere. Keep at it! Remember, in general, you should:
3- Put more
effort in than you think you need. It can feel unnatural to work so hard, but the
progession of insight can feel pretty unnatural too. Will you overshoot it by working too
hard? Theoretically I guess that's possible. Heck, it took me almost 9
days on
retreat to do it.. maybe if I had mellowed out a bit, it wouldn't have taken so long! Haha, unlikely.
Stream-entry is essentially a shot in the dark.. it's your destiny to miss over and
over again until your mind finally lands its rhythm and figures out how
to rhyme on time (and
disappear on time with the rhyme).
This is a trial and error process and a classic example of procedural
learning. While you're not going to be able to force it to happen, you
can pretty much take away all the other options. This is a gradual
process, and every moment of contribution helps tremendously. Therefore:
4- Keep going, don't stop. Not for a moment, not for a second, don't slack, don't allow
yourself to do things you think will cause you to unintentionally slack
in the next moment. The whole world in a grain of sand. The whole world
in this one moment. If you work like this, with this kind of intensity,
whether you
land a path or not you will gain
insight like nothing else, which will heavily contribute to your life being
better. Work with the kind of immediacy that is focused on what is right
here, right now, and that highlights the relationship and engagement
you have with it. And at times you slip from it, and can't seem to find
your way back to the
cutting edge:
5- Notice the times you're probably making things harder for yourself. Artificial
dualities,
nonsensical problems. Should I do this, or should I try that? Will this
work, or will it only get in the way of that working? The
subject/object out-of-focus makes things that don't actually contradict
each other look like they do, and as you pay increasing attention to the
out-of-focus, you may become kind of loopy and start seeing problems
that wouldn't exist if you didn't think they did. The 3rd
stage of insight (
Comprehension of the Three Characteristics) and the late
Dark Night stages can magnify this tendency a great deal. The way to deal with it
is to keep practising as best you can. Sometimes, absolutely nothing
works. So note the
suffering,
note the anxiety, note the confusion, note the discontent, note the
restlessness, etc. Get acquainted with the way your mind flinches
around to try and
avoid
suffering, and get comfortable with it.
Suffering is a part of your world and it does not have to be a hindrance, so pay attention to it. What is the experience of
suffering?
This is a very real question, and the answer is something like 'the
whole world in this moment'. Nothing outside of this moment is going to
deliver this particular answer for you, because you are looking to
understand something about this moment itself.
Suffering is often a clear indicator about where to look in order to see this,
and as such, the hard times are some of the best opportunities to
internalise this very necessary understanding. So embrace them when they
arise and make best use of them. The more comfortable you are in your
own
suffering, the more clearly you will see what you've got to work with, and there is no better position you can be in, in order to:
6- Figure it out for yourself. If you're halfway up a mountain and the way you think you're
supposed to be taking is blocked, it's up to you to figure out how to
get up the rest of it. At this point, it's purely between you and
reality.. and this isn't a point you can locate on a
map,
this is a point that happens whenever you realise that it's got to be
this way. This is the sense that reality isn't something that's
happening in a story somewhere else, it's happening right here, right
now. You don't need an intermediary in order to perceive it, it's
something no technique, no teaching, no teacher, no matter how useful,
can do for you. The relevance of all those things waxes and wanes; what
remains relevant is the part you're experiencing it with. So get
comfortable with going it on your own! I can't stress enough how
important this is, and I conjecture that some lack in this spirit of the
solo adventurer may be what keeps many people from
attaining the greatness for which they have already cultivated the
faculties required. Don't be a lacker in this spirit, don't slack on
adventure. Therefore:
7- Learn to have fun. I know this may sound out-of-place given that the above
instructions are about working hard non-stop and through all
difficulties, but yeah, it's like that. Don't forget to have fun.
Things change, roll with the punches, especially since in a sense what
you're working with is all you've got at that moment. Make sure to have
a good time doing what you're doing.. since you're doing this for you!
Going on
retreat is about coming out of needless
suffering and making a better life for yourself, so if there isn't a part of you
that's having a good time doing it, or at least that understands it as
good somehow, you might be missing something. Admittedly, there can be
times where it's no fun and you have no clue how anyone, least of all
yourself, could be benefitting from this process in any way. Those times
are good opportunities to just stay with the visceral experience of
things as they
are. They don't tend to last forever though, so you can get back to
having fun in no time if you so incline yourself... and I strongly
recommend that you do.
It is a wide, rich and varied
territory you are navigating and you may lose your purpose or direction often.
Getting it right and taking that next step forward will, in some ways,
always involve a trial and error process on the most primitive and most
basic levels. Your mind may do funny, seemingly unrelated and useless
stuff. This is a natural side effect of being alive and learning new
things. Stay engaged with reality, and learn to see the lighter side of
these things. Be comfortable with
mood swings. Get used to conflicting urges. And start feeling at home in the bevy of
mapping, theorising, predicting, wondering, wanting, etc, and all the other neurotic
intellectual activity that's gonna happen anyway whether or not you think it's useful. These
things are not signs of regress so don't be disheartened and take them
as signals that you lack focus
or control, or whatever seems to be the bad guy this time.
Expectations or attempts to predict the next step, or whatever else shows up, are
just part of the process your mind needs to go through, are part of this
same reality you are attempting to investigate, and are not at all
hindrances when you have
insight into how they're being experienced. Just like any other sensations,
they are all causal, empty, happening on their own, and sufficient
material for penetrative
insight to develop in. Keeping a
sense of humour to face the surprises that turn up along the way, and staying
inquisitive when the going gets dull and you've exhausted all known
options, will take you far.
On that front, here's something bizarre that, while it is not
necessary to see – indeed, some people may simply never see it this way –
I think may help some: understand that you can't imagine a
fruition,
but don't exclude the parts of your experience you think of as
'imaginary' from practice. Indeed, there is something imaginary about
all this. I have strong reservations saying this sort of stuff because
it can be so easily misconstrued, but if you haven't gotten path yet, a
fruition is what you're looking for, the entrance to a fruition arises out of the
4th vipassana jhana (equanimity regarding formations), and 4th jhana is hella imaginary. I
personally thought I must be crazy thinking things like this until I
noticed that a quite-realised Dharma friend of mine's email address
contains the phrase 'imaginationrealization'. It sanks into place that
very moment. I'm
at a loss for a better way to explain what I mean and have considered
removing this section entirely, but opted to include it for people who
might benefit from having it addressed, however many or few there are.
If this paragraph seems strange or irrelevant to you, just skip it over.
Then again, if it strangely was just what you needed to hear.. there
you are.
Ok, so, remember how earlier I said that if you're doing this
Mahasi-style you should cling to seeing the
Three Characteristics like it's the only thing that's going to get you anywhere? Well, here's
where I change my tune a bit. A time comes, deep enough into
equanimity territory,
perhaps after having come up to it and fallen back countless times,
when it doesn't matter how you're practising, or labelling your
practice.. you are just seeing things as they are. This means you might
not be seeing things as
characteristics, or
vibrations,
or whatever else has indicated to you up to this point that you're on
the right track. You might not even be paying attention to anything in
particular about what you're seeing. Should such a time come, and you
realise that you're here, just keep staying with whatever you're staying
with, doing whatever it is you're doing. It won't really matter at this
point. No instruction is necessary here really.. anything can happen,
taking any length of time, or nothing could happen at all. From here
on, you're really on your own.. I mean, you've actually been on your own
all along, but this might be the part where you finally really notice
it. And on that note, the end. Practice well and good luck.
As a short appendix, I've attached some practical material that
may be useful to have for referring to and helpful for getting started.
A good example schedule to follow:
- 4.30 awaken
- 5.00 walk
- 6.00 sit
- 7.00 breakfast
- 7.30 walk
- 8.00 sit
- 9.00 walk
- 10.00 sit
- 11.00 walk
- 12.00 lunch, shower, rest, sit, etc
- 13.00 walk
- 14.00 sit
- 15.00 walk
- 16.00 sit
- 17.00 walk
- 18.00 sit
- 19.00 walk
- 20.00 sit
- 21.00 walk
- 22.00 sit
- 22.30 recline
And an example set of reminders to have stuck on the wall:
- Don't indulge in your crap!
- When in doubt or struggling: note/hit and accept pain.
- If you have a question, the answer is in the Three Characteristics.
- Be mindful during transitions between activities.
- Analysis is not the same as practice.
- Practice at all times when awake.
- Stick to the schedule!
- Remember how precious these moments are and how much the Dark Night sucks.
- When alone, practice just as hard; this is for you.
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