I don't know what 4th path will feel like once it's done, but what I do know is what I experienced post-SE, and it upended every belief and/or expectation I had ever had. It was emptiness, for about 8 days. I remember thinking, there's no way anyone can teach this to anyone else, not just because it's indescribable, but because it's logically impossible. The person doing all the work, going to all the retreats, sitting and noting diligently, then watching stuff happen, undergoing Dark Night, kriyas, vibrations, what-have-you, talking about stages, wondering about attainments, getting into slug-fests about AF or whatever--that person is just plain gone, gone, gone. There's no one there now to experience the outcome. The outcome is you're gone. You can't experience something like that because when it hits you're just plain not there any more.

For me, it was alternately hysterically funny (I laughed a lot), terrifying, and peaceful. The rest of the time it was just plain weird. I didn't know whether I'd ever come back again (and please understand the nonsensical nature of that sentence--something or someone, I don't know who, was wondering this). Stuff was manifesting around and within, but there was no one experiencing it. I tried explaining it to my husband, and he said something like "O-Kay? . . . " All "I" (whoever it was) wanted (there was a wanting something there) was to come back. And eventually I did. And it was a big relief.

What also came back was desire, aversion, delusion, and a higher level of awareness of all of that stuff, plus a lot of mind-chatter about WTF had happened and how I didn't want it to happen again. There was a yogi on KFD who had had the same post-SE experience and he helped me a lot. And so eventually I, all of me, in one room at the same time, calmed down. And then, a few months later, it happened again, and it was dramatically different: it felt natural, perfect, complete, unforced. I just watched things come and go. I was driving. There was no danger (I didn't suddenly black out and crash the car), I just realized that sensations were manifesting and everything was happening just fine on its own without the person with the perpetually running mouth trying to control everything.

I had similar experiences for the following couple of months (once in a meeting; it was fine), then got second path. I had another afternoon and evening of emptiness about a month later, and since then I've been firmly in residence, no more emptiness for awhile. So I don't know anything about how these experiences line up with the path attainments we're discussing here. Sometimes it seems I've regressed. I gather this is typical of 3rd path. I do know that way back pre-SE, when I was like a kid with her nose plastered against the picture window to the candy store, I wondered whether one or maybe two paths would be enough. Now I can say that they're not, at least for me. But pre-SE, I was alternately fascinated and repelled by what advanced yogis had to say. Plus I couldn't make heads nor tails out of any of it. My understanding, such as it was, followed the discussion up to a point and then dropped off. What I can say now is that I see far more clearly than before just what samsara is like. I want to go to sleep again a lot of the time, but I can't do that for long without realizing how unsatisfactory it is.

Another point: I can't say that my experience of emptiness is "it," because I don't really know. I don't know how others experience this state (although it's absurd to put it that way) in comparison to me. The shift in some ways is very subtle, in other ways it's like an abyss opening up. It's not necessarily pleasant, because questions of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral become moot. I also don't know how it lines up with other religious traditions, or other kinds of mystical experience. If I could have my druthers, I'd be the kind of mystic who got to experience heaven-on-earth and melt into ecstasy and talk to God. I'd like that a lot. But those people also had to come down to earth and try to function, and it wasn't necessarily easy. Emptiness can feel kind of lonely when it hits. For example, in my most recent experience, I was doing walking meditation and getting annoyed with mind-chatter, and I told myself, shut up please, you're missing the beauty of this natural setting here. And then it all stopped. And there was the natural setting, presumably as beautiful as it had been before when I was chattering about it, except it no longer registered as beautiful; it didn't register as anything, because it had nothing to do with me making judgments about it. It was just happening and my commentary (which by then had stopped) was utterly irrelevant.

One last thing I wonder about is the intersection between this process and the life-cycle. I'm coming at this business in my late 50's. I have a certain level of maturity, but I also have decades of habit energy that's accumulated, which drags me down. I also have the advantage that a lot of my life's questions have been answered, for better or worse. I know who I'm married to, what size family I have; I know what my work is, where I live, and how much money I'm making. There are issues ahead, of course: how long I'm going to live, how healthy I'll be (some of that up to me), who's going to die first, my husband or me, what our son will be like as an adult, what my future may hold. But the big questions that plague people in their twenties are answered. I wonder what it would be like to go through most of one's life-cycle after having awakened. In my case, that's moot. But for the sake of research--and these forums are, if nothing else, an opportunity to collect a wider body of information than has been collected before, as far as I know--it would be interesting to take the age-vector into account.

This is my report, a necessary supplement to my earlier one on this thread. I'm putting it out here in the hopes that it will contribute to our collective understanding of this business.

Well I've read the Kenneth Folk stages and I'm more confused than I have ever been...



Keep in mind this is two whole stages after 4th path - yet he is talking about physical sensations around the face that seem to be self? Isn't that, like, practically kindergarten stuff? How can you talk of even having a decent A&P much less stream entry much less 6th path without a good idea of physical sensations on your head and face that are habitually taken as self?

Personally I can identify a lot of the time with his description of Stage 8, the last stage, except that just seems like MCTB equanimity... I have never had fruitions or formless jhanas so that seems more reasonable to me.

Starting to lose faith in this whole maps business. Except inasmuch that your head blows up open once in a while which is presumably the psychoenergetic circuit opening or whatever.

Here's the N A simplified maps model: attention powers up (A&P) and synchronizes (Equanimity); the rest is mystic cruft. For better results keep repeating the process, the more you work out the more you can lift.

What I've noticed is that some people who have gotten up to 4th path have now gotten to places "beyond" or to the side of or whatever, and sometimes there are words for it, and sometimes not, and sometimes people are struggling with the words, and sometimes they're not. And I accept that there are various motivations for this. Some people are not strongly rooted in a phenomenological perspective - just like some people are not strongly rooted in a religious perspective. Some people have greater facility with language than others (look at the numerous, colorful metaphors Kenneth gives for areas that are very difficult to describe). Maybe some are running up against the limits of language itself (I think this is more common, even in ordinary experience, than most people realize, yet it's not an excuse to stop trying). And some people probably just don't care! And I think that's fine if they don't care - just so long as they don't take a 'tude when I and others do.

As for the translation of "dukkha", I feel there are a lot of problems with the word "suffering". Partly it's an intellectual interest in getting the right word to describe the right experience. I think we should argue about the descriptions of our experiences. No one is obligated to participate in them or to use words the way I want them to use them, but I probably won't shut up about it. :-)

But I think a lot of things worth looking at are concealed behind this dogma of suffering, as I've called it. We're going to cast doubt on states and stages and "intellectualizing", but never on the idea that existence itself is suffering. Really? It's very easy to use that term to deflect questions about the motivation for practice, all while solidifying those things. This was the point I tried to make at the end of the post on dukkha (I edited it about 15 mins after posting it, because I hate Jesus).

And yeah, I am going to stir up controversy by saying this. I don't think you're suffering. :-) Rather, I doubt it. More specifically, I would bet you're carrying a heavy personal weight right at this moment. I tend to assume that of everyone I interact with, because it's usually true. We're all struggling. Each of us has things in our lives that are radically not the way we want them to be.

But if we're going to be really honest with ourselves: how much of that - what percent of it - is really "suffering", and how much of it is just incredibly annoying? I'm talking about on a basic sensate level.

Yeah, "semantics", but just imagine for a moment that you're wrong about this. When I reflect upon things, I'm in a lot of physical pain right now. I know someone who's slowly dying of cancer - it's heartbreaking to watch. I have a train of emotional baggage extending back over the horizon. I have serious doubts about my ability to do anything worthwhile with my life. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of things in my experience or that could enter my experience that will cause me (extreme) emotional distress.

But the vast majority of things in my life, in my experience on a moment-to-moment basis, don't even come close to being bad let alone being something anyone would call "suffering". And yeah, here it does make sense to think about how bad things really could be - like if I lived 200 years ago, or if I lived a century ago, or if I were just unlucky enough to be born today in Somalia, where there isn't even a government, or Botswana, where health and wealth are equal to what they were in Britain in 1800.

Or for that matter, who knows what the hell will happen to me tomorrow? When I look around me, when I reflect on my experience, when I feel what's going on inside my body, when I think about where I've been and what I might be doing later, there's no shortage of pretty lousy stuff, but I have to admit that there's a whole lot to be grateful for, and it really minimizes the word when I try to refer to much (or any) of this as "suffering".

Maybe your experience is very different from mine. As I'm writing this, I'm thinking, "You know, maybe Jason has something really monstrous going on right now. His response sounded kind of ticked off." And so I hope I'm understood when I say that I don't want to diminish anything that's real for you. I think it's fine to say that life is not the way we want it to be. But to call the whole thing a heap of "suffering" is over the top. I think that kind of generalization and overuse is not helpful. It minimizes actual suffering, and it makes our lives out to be much worse than they are.