Post Stream Entry/Attainment Emotions and Cycling? - Discussion
Jacob,
I think it's called waking up for a reason, meaning tings will get noticed sooner or later, and it's also said for good reason that "best not to start, but once started, better to finish."
As Kenneth Folk quotes Bill Hamilton, "after all, there are four paths, so how good can the first one be? Stream Entry is only a quarter of the way there." Likely, you'll continue pulling at the thread that Stream Entry has now made very obvious and put in your hand. When SE happens, you're obviously changed in some way, but it'll become quite obvious that you've merely got into secondary school, a lowly fifth grader
, and are still very far from getting your diploma. But then again, some seem to be ok with what SE does and it doesn't progress much after that, or doesn't for a long time, because it didn't light a fire under their assses as it did to most of the people who get SE. Individual temperament and proclivities matter much in this.
"While I view stream entry as a permanent shift in how the field of perception is processed, the principles of causality still apply, and a minor step in integration does not even come close to dealing with the root of the dualistic split."
(I wrote down the above quote from the DhO around the time SE happened for me, but I did unfortunately not note down who wrote it.)
Although these practices can be said, from a certain perspective, to do roughly the same thing to human brains, human brains are highly variable. Variation is really the norm once evolution comes up with highly complex bodymind systems like these fur reduced monkey creatures we seem to be.
So you seem to be asking an equivalent to what the outcome will be in a general way concerning mental health development when people drop a tab of acid. Weird question, huh? Because suddenly it's obviously about all kinds of personal (trauma) history, personality traits, and ultimately, you'll just be sort of shrugging your shoulders, because "how the hell would I know what happens to person XYZ on acid?" There seem to be some greater avenues this TENDS to go down, but again, variation is the norm.
One thing to consider here: The "dark night" is something related to how perceptual development seems to take place for many practitioners. Psychological issues are NOT the same. Both can be, haha, psychological challenging, and these two aspects of life can show up at the same time and intertwine, but still. Strictly speaking, DN is a recurring phase in attention development, and daily life cycling is a result of having had certain changes to how the mind works as a result of such development. Your personality issues are their own plants in the garden of your life.
Generally, what path attainments seem to bring is higher granularity of the generative model. Meaning, it will become more obvious in certain parts of experience that experience is made up of sensations. As a long term teacher within Shinzen Young's system said in an interview, often after Stream Entry there now is effortless perception of sensory flux in the somatic field, or the visual, or the auditory, etc.
(In the latter part of this interview: Ep88: Saints and Psychopaths - Har Prakash Khalsa )
So generally, experience will get more HD over time in the four path model. At 2nd path there will be greater peceptual capability than at 1st, etc. This will inevitably mean that all your stuff will show up in HD at some point of the journey, depending on where or how deeply it is buried. How you are gonna deal with it is as highly variable as wether it is even problematic enough to have to be dealt with.
Might well be that Stream Entry, while usually associated with feeling about 20% better all the time at baseline, will make your reactive patterns show up in greater contrast, the cognitive dissonance being far greater now. Wich, given your individual personality structure, might either be a reason to be happy because "oh, I never saw it that way, thanks for highlighting this", or make you worry more, because "holy shit, how infantile and destructive is this?" Etc. Maybe you got into practice because you where a complete basket case and Stream Entry eased something around that for the time being, only to become a bigger theme again later on. Maybe SE did resolve something, and that is that. Maybe you know you've got issues, but you have trouble getting at them, and they will show up much later on the path. Maybe you where a happy camper with cool and balanced parents who got into this out of sheer fascination, and you don't really have all that much stuff to come up other that the prolonged existential crisis that is the mediation development path itself. Development in terms of pushing perceptual threshold and what it does to the practitioner will of course look different in all those cases.
As for cycling, the technical tradition view is that after Stream Entry, you cycle, and will keep on cycling. All through the day, every day.
"In that same vein, the cycles of insight from stage four to eleven (and then fifteen for those who can get further Fruitions in Review) always influence the life of those who are awakened. They are inescapable. They occur as soon as we sit down to meditate. Much more than this, they cycle endlessly in waking hours and even when dreaming. This subtle or overt cycling colors mood, energy level, and perception of phenomena. As soon as a Fruition is attained, the cycle starts again and proceeds, though the timing and obviousness of this fact varies depending on how much we are practicing, what is going on in our lives, and how skilled we are at noticing the qualities of these stages." - MCTB2
So there will be cycles in the big frame of the four path model, review phase, seeming reconsolidation when the 2nd path growth cycle comes about, etc, but you'll also cycle through nana 4 to 11 over the day, maybe in a matter of hours, sometimes more overtly noticeable, sometimes less so. So things get fractal with cycles within cycles after Stream Entry. Up to 2nd path and up to 3rd, there can be appreciation of sub stages and sub sub stages, where the growth cycle stages seem like they have their own mini nana cycles that they go through, etc. This will likely become less interesting the more the path becomes about resolving the dualistic split in the here and now. And as quoted above, all of that also depends on your skill in noticing these tings.
Read up on that in MCTB2, where its stressed that while getting good at review practice and learning the vibratory signatures of the stages can be super, super helpful, ultimately, the path is about understanding something about the phenomena that make them and all other experiences up. It's always about understanding the three characteristics.
Wrote Kenneth Folk in his work Contemplative Fitness:
"(...) the ñanas will continue to cycle throughout a yogi’s lifetime and it’s very empowering to be able to identify them as they arise. This ability to see sensations, thoughts, and mind states as process rather than identifying with them is part of the larger process of awakening. When we objectify (take as the object of attention) something that was previously seen as self, we move to more and more subtle forms of identification and ultimately come to the place where everything in experience can be seen as process, impersonal and ever-changing.
(...)
The cycles continue to occur whether or not the meditator pays attention to them. They become a natural part of life, like the breath, or the sleep cycle, or the seasons and the year. Just as one doesn’t get tired of breathing or sleeping, but surrenders to the natural rhythms of life, someone who has continued to practice beyond stream entry has integrated the cycles into his or her daily rhythms. And although we may get tired of the seasons, as we do when it is very hot in the summer or very cold in the winter, we are deeply confident that they will soon change."
In closing, I think it's notewhorty that most of the traditions and modern teachers seem to converge on yes, awakening is a huge upgrade, but personality/therapy/psychology work will always be a super important part of human existence and awakening itself will likely only make it more obvious that one needs to continue working on becoming a more functional human being. Even in classical Theravada, with their weird ten fetter emotional perfection model of awakening, the training in ethical behaviour is considered to be the "first and last training."
I think it's called waking up for a reason, meaning tings will get noticed sooner or later, and it's also said for good reason that "best not to start, but once started, better to finish."
As Kenneth Folk quotes Bill Hamilton, "after all, there are four paths, so how good can the first one be? Stream Entry is only a quarter of the way there." Likely, you'll continue pulling at the thread that Stream Entry has now made very obvious and put in your hand. When SE happens, you're obviously changed in some way, but it'll become quite obvious that you've merely got into secondary school, a lowly fifth grader
, and are still very far from getting your diploma. But then again, some seem to be ok with what SE does and it doesn't progress much after that, or doesn't for a long time, because it didn't light a fire under their assses as it did to most of the people who get SE. Individual temperament and proclivities matter much in this. "While I view stream entry as a permanent shift in how the field of perception is processed, the principles of causality still apply, and a minor step in integration does not even come close to dealing with the root of the dualistic split."
(I wrote down the above quote from the DhO around the time SE happened for me, but I did unfortunately not note down who wrote it.)
Although these practices can be said, from a certain perspective, to do roughly the same thing to human brains, human brains are highly variable. Variation is really the norm once evolution comes up with highly complex bodymind systems like these fur reduced monkey creatures we seem to be.
So you seem to be asking an equivalent to what the outcome will be in a general way concerning mental health development when people drop a tab of acid. Weird question, huh? Because suddenly it's obviously about all kinds of personal (trauma) history, personality traits, and ultimately, you'll just be sort of shrugging your shoulders, because "how the hell would I know what happens to person XYZ on acid?" There seem to be some greater avenues this TENDS to go down, but again, variation is the norm.
One thing to consider here: The "dark night" is something related to how perceptual development seems to take place for many practitioners. Psychological issues are NOT the same. Both can be, haha, psychological challenging, and these two aspects of life can show up at the same time and intertwine, but still. Strictly speaking, DN is a recurring phase in attention development, and daily life cycling is a result of having had certain changes to how the mind works as a result of such development. Your personality issues are their own plants in the garden of your life.
Generally, what path attainments seem to bring is higher granularity of the generative model. Meaning, it will become more obvious in certain parts of experience that experience is made up of sensations. As a long term teacher within Shinzen Young's system said in an interview, often after Stream Entry there now is effortless perception of sensory flux in the somatic field, or the visual, or the auditory, etc.
(In the latter part of this interview: Ep88: Saints and Psychopaths - Har Prakash Khalsa )
So generally, experience will get more HD over time in the four path model. At 2nd path there will be greater peceptual capability than at 1st, etc. This will inevitably mean that all your stuff will show up in HD at some point of the journey, depending on where or how deeply it is buried. How you are gonna deal with it is as highly variable as wether it is even problematic enough to have to be dealt with.
Might well be that Stream Entry, while usually associated with feeling about 20% better all the time at baseline, will make your reactive patterns show up in greater contrast, the cognitive dissonance being far greater now. Wich, given your individual personality structure, might either be a reason to be happy because "oh, I never saw it that way, thanks for highlighting this", or make you worry more, because "holy shit, how infantile and destructive is this?" Etc. Maybe you got into practice because you where a complete basket case and Stream Entry eased something around that for the time being, only to become a bigger theme again later on. Maybe SE did resolve something, and that is that. Maybe you know you've got issues, but you have trouble getting at them, and they will show up much later on the path. Maybe you where a happy camper with cool and balanced parents who got into this out of sheer fascination, and you don't really have all that much stuff to come up other that the prolonged existential crisis that is the mediation development path itself. Development in terms of pushing perceptual threshold and what it does to the practitioner will of course look different in all those cases.
As for cycling, the technical tradition view is that after Stream Entry, you cycle, and will keep on cycling. All through the day, every day.
"In that same vein, the cycles of insight from stage four to eleven (and then fifteen for those who can get further Fruitions in Review) always influence the life of those who are awakened. They are inescapable. They occur as soon as we sit down to meditate. Much more than this, they cycle endlessly in waking hours and even when dreaming. This subtle or overt cycling colors mood, energy level, and perception of phenomena. As soon as a Fruition is attained, the cycle starts again and proceeds, though the timing and obviousness of this fact varies depending on how much we are practicing, what is going on in our lives, and how skilled we are at noticing the qualities of these stages." - MCTB2
So there will be cycles in the big frame of the four path model, review phase, seeming reconsolidation when the 2nd path growth cycle comes about, etc, but you'll also cycle through nana 4 to 11 over the day, maybe in a matter of hours, sometimes more overtly noticeable, sometimes less so. So things get fractal with cycles within cycles after Stream Entry. Up to 2nd path and up to 3rd, there can be appreciation of sub stages and sub sub stages, where the growth cycle stages seem like they have their own mini nana cycles that they go through, etc. This will likely become less interesting the more the path becomes about resolving the dualistic split in the here and now. And as quoted above, all of that also depends on your skill in noticing these tings.
Read up on that in MCTB2, where its stressed that while getting good at review practice and learning the vibratory signatures of the stages can be super, super helpful, ultimately, the path is about understanding something about the phenomena that make them and all other experiences up. It's always about understanding the three characteristics.
Wrote Kenneth Folk in his work Contemplative Fitness:
"(...) the ñanas will continue to cycle throughout a yogi’s lifetime and it’s very empowering to be able to identify them as they arise. This ability to see sensations, thoughts, and mind states as process rather than identifying with them is part of the larger process of awakening. When we objectify (take as the object of attention) something that was previously seen as self, we move to more and more subtle forms of identification and ultimately come to the place where everything in experience can be seen as process, impersonal and ever-changing.
(...)
The cycles continue to occur whether or not the meditator pays attention to them. They become a natural part of life, like the breath, or the sleep cycle, or the seasons and the year. Just as one doesn’t get tired of breathing or sleeping, but surrenders to the natural rhythms of life, someone who has continued to practice beyond stream entry has integrated the cycles into his or her daily rhythms. And although we may get tired of the seasons, as we do when it is very hot in the summer or very cold in the winter, we are deeply confident that they will soon change."
In closing, I think it's notewhorty that most of the traditions and modern teachers seem to converge on yes, awakening is a huge upgrade, but personality/therapy/psychology work will always be a super important part of human existence and awakening itself will likely only make it more obvious that one needs to continue working on becoming a more functional human being. Even in classical Theravada, with their weird ten fetter emotional perfection model of awakening, the training in ethical behaviour is considered to be the "first and last training."
Post SE for me felt like a relief. As if me being lost has completed in at last being at home and all was just good
Im not talking post cessation moments but rather weeks and months after SE.
Already the next few days I could not recognise my usual meditation. Initial Nanas were there and it felt new. I decided to resolve and remain in Review and stopped meditating for a year or two I think. Then later began meditation I experienced many a jhanic a Nana cycles within cycles on and on. I even believed I cracked the cycling code.
Just to end up cycling again Oh shit!
Best wishes!
Im not talking post cessation moments but rather weeks and months after SE.
Already the next few days I could not recognise my usual meditation. Initial Nanas were there and it felt new. I decided to resolve and remain in Review and stopped meditating for a year or two I think. Then later began meditation I experienced many a jhanic a Nana cycles within cycles on and on. I even believed I cracked the cycling code.
Just to end up cycling again Oh shit! Best wishes!
What you write makes sense. If you had addiction issues, which really are manifestation of a deeper pain (not the booze itself) then those will be more visible afterwards — you entered the stream: lot of the compartmentalization vanishes and you are more exposed. It can be a huge relief, but the relief tends to wear out and the vulnerability might be more pronounced.
It is better not to go into "regular life issues" vs. "insight aspect": the practice is to bring the insight aspect into regular life issues. Suicidal thoughts and the anguish one might ascribe to muncitukamayata-ñana (ñ9, "Get me outta here!!!") are no different from suicidal thoughts a non-meditator would be experiencing. The difference is in the ñ, ñana: light of insight one is painfully learning to bring in there.
If you have a chance to have continuous counseling/therapy support, use it. I found in my case that especially in relational/social area, insight practices had much lesser impact than I had hoped. I wish now I had been less one-dimensional, but that's how the stubborn ones have to learn
It is better not to go into "regular life issues" vs. "insight aspect": the practice is to bring the insight aspect into regular life issues. Suicidal thoughts and the anguish one might ascribe to muncitukamayata-ñana (ñ9, "Get me outta here!!!") are no different from suicidal thoughts a non-meditator would be experiencing. The difference is in the ñ, ñana: light of insight one is painfully learning to bring in there.
If you have a chance to have continuous counseling/therapy support, use it. I found in my case that especially in relational/social area, insight practices had much lesser impact than I had hoped. I wish now I had been less one-dimensional, but that's how the stubborn ones have to learn