Hi everyone! My
last log spanned from cold start to mature third path, including losing the sense of being able to focus or control attention at all. I've been doing non-meditation practice for seven months, in which my mind wanders with no technique, goal, or focus. When I attempt more effortful practices like self-inquiry or noting, they feel like an uncomfortable, unnecessary tension, and they fall away. If I try to do Michael Taft's dropping the ball practice, there isn't a ball for me to drop besides the painful feeling of looking for a ball.
I still feel subtle, peripheral clinging and restlessness. Sometimes it's exhausting.
Between first and third path, I was quite impressed with how fast I was moving, as I traversed that territory in the span of a few months, and I had high expectations for being able to complete this project quickly. But life has a way of disappointing you. I've mellowed out a little, and I've begun to see it more as a lifestyle than a mission.
My practice isn't as regular as I'd like, but I take what I can get. When I take the bus to school, I sit in the gardens for 10 or 20 minutes and then walk an hour home in silence. It's a pretty good dose. But on other days, it's more of a toss-up. I'd love to form a nice proper habit, but so goes the tides of life.
April 2, 2025
Feeling sad and restless. Is that the "one taste" those old guys were talking about?
Drinking up the sorrows of the world.
April 7, 2025Letting go feels like you’re perpetually on the verge of becoming Bartleby the Scrivener, dropping out of society like a rock.
April 10, 2025May all beings know meditation as easy as this.
April 16, 2025I’m getting a weird rapture where I feel like I’m tasting everything with my tongue. Even sights and sounds. It’s a weird, sex-like, pleasurable intimacy with the world.
April 22, 2025Shame.
April 24, 2025
I was reading
Will G's great yarn when he reminded me of my own experience:
I still had some conceptual hang-ups over wether or not the senses were “fabricated”, which seemed relevant given that more often than not my entire experience would kind of “fade” as Rob Burbea describes as happening when things are seen as empty, and as is described in some of the old texts (one in particular that ends with “the monks didn’t rejoice,” can’t find it now). Culadasa’s framing of fabrication in TMI helped clear this up for me conceptually: all sensory information goes through the unconscious mind and some degree of processing before it reaches consciousness, and as such, is “fabricated”. Following this model, the way I think about the “fading” phenomenon is that things mostly remain in the unconscious when the attention faculty isn’t particularizing as frequently. So my theory is that this phase involved a kind of more consistent pacification of attention in daily life whenever possible, but only because it was still a subtle bearer of inherency, which was perceived as suffering. I think I easily could have gotten stuck here, because the ‘agent’ had been seen through, making any remaining effort of directing attention towards opportunities for insight seem unwarranted, and yet my default experience of the world was felt as a kind disappearance, and this didn’t sit right with me…
4th Path
…Gradually, over about two weeks of contemplation, a shift occurred in which no-mind experiences were no longer felt as a disappearance, because the flavour of presence had sort of become refined enough to permeate every sensation, and eventually completely merge with them.
When meditating, there's a cycle where I feel more present, and things are heavier and sharper. But then things will fade away, thin out, and there's no sense of presence. But there is still sensory perception — seeing, feeling, hearing — and non-verbal wandering thought. And then eventually stuff feels heavier and more substantial and reification returns.
Now that I think about it, this is the latest version of the focused-diffuse cycle I've been feeling since day one. When I first started meditating, I'd focus on my object, and then pretty quickly my mind would wander and give way to an unpleasant, tense, diffuse fog. In the diffuse state, it felt like there was a subtle, peripheral, disempowered "me" that was struggling and squirming to try to refocus the mind. After stream entry, the diffuse state became much softer, and once I loosened my clinging to attention, it became very pleasant, more pleasant than the focused state. And now, with non-meditation, there's no cultivation of the focused state at all. But! — I'm realizing now — there's still cycling between subtle focus and diffuse attention. And the diffuse state has gotten really thin, really peaceful, really minimal, only a few neither-perceived-nor-non-perceived paintbrush strokes away from being dead.
The wrong move here would be to say that the sharp is better than the diffuse, and then use effort or technique to try to defeat the diffuse once and for all.
