I have a question but first some background. When I was about 12 I discovered a concentration practice from a book on psychic development and followed it as assiduously as only a teen can, for 10 years or so. I had many cases of feeling like floating, stretching, light, clarity, losing awareness and such. I had no knowledge of the progress of insight or insight meditation at all. No knowledge of the states and stages to hang my hat on so to speak. Life then interfered as it will and I dropped meditation for 30 years. In the past 5-6 years I've read MCTB and several other good dharma books, done a retreat and practice daily now. If I attained stream entry back when but forgot it, can I 'get it' again?
Many thanks.

Stream Entry is not lost. It is a direct experience and in some way alters us once and for all. I suppose you could forget the actual experience - through dementia or something like that - but short of something like alzheimer's I doubt you would forget it. According to the suttas, it is not something that is lost at death either (can't speak to that from personal experience though). As I experienced it, it would stand out as a very deep and profound moment or shift in your understanding/experience of who/what you are and how the sense of a separate self is created (and I mean really deep and really profound). Lots of words to describe something that is purely experiential.

If you are engaged in the noting practice that Daniel describes then I think there are other indicators for stream entry and someone else can describe those for you. It has not been my practice and I don't experience these things.


If you can still call up these experiences there are ways of using them to develop insight and concentration.

-Chuck

Thank you.
I'll keep working on it then!

Good question.

While it is true that people who get stream entry and higher paths outside of a good tradition with good diagnostic criteria and support and the like can 1) not know they did anything special, 2) not know what the thing is, 3) not understand the range of abilities and perspectives that gives them, and 4) not know what to do next, it is also true that, given good criteria, good theory, good techniques and then having played around a little with those, they should be able to do the standard things, perceive Fruitions, understand that they cycle, call up ñanas and often jhanas, etc, see what it is, and see how it changed their lives.

Once you got it, you got it, known or otherwise.