I'd like to propose that for people who have done insight meditation for quite a while, a re-examination of their "stuff" might be what is needed in order to make further progress or get the most out of the progress that has already been made. I'm going to describe what I mean by that and report my own experience with this (and it’s going to be a long post, so be warned ;) ).

One of the great revelations that the MCTB brought to my practice was the instruction to focus attention away from the content and apparent meaning of experience and instead have a close look at the raw data out of which various experiences, events and their meaning etc. are made up. I use the term "stuff" (as it is used by many on this forum) for the layers of content of experience, the philosophcal, psychological, cultural, moral, personality-related etc. issues and problems that play a major roll in shaping people's everyday experience. Looking away from that, or rather, beyond and through that, at the raw sense data that imply those things, is for me the essence of vipassana.

I have done vipassana in this sense quite diligently for about three years now. A few months ago I realized that nothing much was happening or changing anymore through my practice, although I had experienced quite dramatic shifts and changes before, especially in the first twelve to eighteen months after reading the MCTB. I had the feeling that I was stuck and not making any progress, and I became very dissatisfied with my practice. For a while I even thought about giving it up completely, but that wouldn't work because of a nagging desire to get it done and over with. So I tried different things, especially more pure concentration practice, with kasina and yantras etc. Around that time I stumbled upon Jed McKenna and his method of “spiritual autolysis”, and although I had mixed feelings about McKenna himself, I decided to give autolysis a try.

Spiritual autolysis has already been mentioned on the DhO, but for those who haven't heard about it, is a writing or journaling technique where you either try to "write something true" (by first writing down something that appears to be true and then unraveling it) or answer the question "why shouldn't I kill myself right now". The second assignment seemed pretty intense, so I decided to go with the first.

I started a journal and wrote every day for about six weeks, and I must say that it's just amazing what kind of effects this had. The autolysis method brought a breakthrough that I found very surprising, because I firmly believed that any further progress would have to be achieved by doing more and getting better at vipassana.

For me, the main result of practicing autolysis is the realization that my investment in questions of philosophy, morals, ideals, politics, psychological and personality-related stuff etc. had vanished almost completely during the last years. I see now that in the past I have always hoped to find the one right way of viewing, explaining and justifying my life and the choices I made, the one idea or framework that would enable me to feel secure and stable in the face of everyday issues etc. I'm astonished as to how deeply my attitude towards these things has changed. Autolysis forced me to seriously look at these things, and in that process it has become obvious how absurd and ridiculous this kind of “serious” engagement actually is. I have found that I feel no drive or urge to find or provide answers to philosophical and moral problems anymore, or at least, the tendency to pursue such matters and expect satisfying results has almost completely vanished.

To be clear, I don't think that philosophical and moral theorizing or inquiry into one's personality or history etc. is pointless, but I have found that I do no longer believe that dealing with this stuff by thinking or talking about it will eventually solve anything. It's something I sometimes do, a habit like any other, like whistling while climbing down a staircase - which can be great fun, but won't ultimately save me.

I find that the emotional attachment concerning my stuff has diminished, and autolysis has helped me to realize how deeply this affects my life. This is the reason why I think that autolysis could be a useful method for some people here: It helps to integrate the experiences from meditation into daily life, and it shows where exactly attachments have been loosened or destroyed.

In order to fully benefit from the experiences gained in meditation, it may be worthwhile to re-try sorting out the world by thinking about it. (You may find that you no longer feel the urge to succeed at this.)


A few more words about the method:

In retrospect, the value of the autolysis method seems to lie in the fact that it forced me to deal with my stuff in a very intense way. If you really try to write something that is true, you quickly arrive at the taken-for-granted beliefs and ideas that structure your world view, the concepts and ideas you're not prepared to let go of, and the method forces you to make them explicit, to examine them and doubt them and try to find ways to falsify them etc. As you apply the method, you are forced to acknowledge that you can't coherently explain or justify the way you see the world and yourself, but that instead, these views are ultimately random and are held in place only by emotional charges, which in turn have no other support than the amount of identification that is invested in them.

I think that engaging in such an exercise would have led me nowhere a few years ago, and I suppose that, contrary to Jed McKenna's claims, a fair amount of experience in insight meditation is necessary in order to make progress through this kind of inquiry (I guess one would have to be at least beyond second path). If I had started autolysis earlyer, I would probably have gotten all excited about the (seemingly) profound philosophical notions I was dealing with and would have been quite proud at myself for daring to ask all these questions and coming up with all these oh-so-clever answers etc.

It seems to me that the ability to have a good hard look at my stuff was for a long time hindered by the fact that I tended to leave the emotional charges that go with that stuff unexamined, as if they were some unrelated and unimportant byproduct. Through autolysis I have found that the habitual disembedding from feelings that comes with insight meditation reduces this tendency. I can see my stuff more clearly now, because I see the emotional investments and the identification that stabilize the ideas. Being convinced by or attracted to a concept or ideal, or feeling that the world or myself should be so and so is ultimately nothing more than another feeling in the gut. And the less I identify with that feeling, and the more I see it as arising on its own accord, without essence and with nothing much to offer, the easier it is to see the absurdity of “serious” conceptual, philosophical, moral etc. pursuits and debates.

This understanding has carried over into my practice and made me realize that taking meditation very seriously and doing it order to “get it done” is in a way just as absurd as trying to think or theorize your way out of suffering. Although the technical / pragmatic approach is of great value for me, I think that there is a point at which it can be hard to make further progress in this way. I find that insight disease is gone (for now). I still sit, in fact I sit more often than I did before I took up autolysis, but I do it with a more playful attitude, not in order to get something (done), but out of curiosity, for the sake of exploration, and for fun. I also find that I have more interest in things not directly related to insight, like lucid dreaming or even magick as presented by Alan Chapman and Duncan Bradford, which I wouldn’t have permitted myself to look at a year ago ;)

If you think about it in scientific terms, the instruction to turn away from your stuff and look at the data seems straightforward: We only learn new things by getting new experiences. But in every scientific study, there is the point where you take the (new) data and try to fit it into the theory and paradigm you started out with. In science, this may result in confirming or doubting and expanding or refining the paradigm etc. In the context of insight, I guess the effect will largely be a realization about the actual absurdity and misguided-ness of the questions and motivations one started out with, and maybe a new attitude towards and/or freedom from these motives and perspectives.

Others have reported insights concerning the absurdity of one’s ideas about enlightenment and the motives and perspectives one practices with as crucial parts of their development, and I suppose this may even be a part of “getting it done” eventually (see links below).

I hope this will be of interest for anyone.

Christian



Alan Chapman reporting about his fourth path experience:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cziYLJwTGy8

One of Florian’s threads, also mentioning autolysis:
http://bit.ly/SatPu7

[edited for clarity]

Hi,

Can you give some examples of how you did the autolysis?

Use any of these 'true statements' if you wish:

I live in a house
I drive a car to work
2+2=4
The sun is shining
There are people on planet earth.

How does one progress past obvious truths like these? (Jed never mentions how he does it, so I'm wondering how the process looks).

Hi CCC,

I think you have a point there, because doing autolysis on the statements you listed seems kind of awkward. That's because the truths you have listed are "banal truths", statements that are true, but don't really help you or me, statements that are only corollaries of the actual truths we build our world view on.
I struggled with this for a while, and there is a way of getting beyond these statements by asking: is that really important? How do I know that? How would it affect me if that wasn't the case? Etc.

But more to the point, the instruction for autolysis could be specified to say "write something that's true and important" or "true and valuable", "skillful", etc.

I started my autolysis with the statement "I believe that insight will eventually completely destroy the subject/object divide". That's a recurring theme in my practice notes, and as I took up autolysis out of frustration with my practice, I thought i'd examine the central thoughts I had concerning meditation and insight. This has proved very effective for me, and the inquiry spiraled from there to various issues:

What do I believe enlightenment will actually be like?
Why do I practice? For my benefit and / or the benefit of others?
How can others benefit from me making progress?
Do I really benefit?
How important is making progress compared to other goals I have?
How do I deal with conflicts between practice goals and other things?
What is the value/standard against which these things can be compared regarding their importance?
(That last one was the hardest ;) )

Some of these questions are rather basic, but examining them by writing about them, and being able to see and reexamine what I had written a day or a week ago makes autolysis more intense and revealing than simply reflecting on these things.

Christian

Also, there is this game children play that can help get past the truths you listed, by repeatedly asking "Why?", as in:

The sun is shining
Why?
Because there is some chemical reaction going on out in space that generates light and my eyes are sensitive to this...
Why?
...

But still, I think it's better to start with something you actually care about, because that provides more intensity and motivation.
If you start with "I love my girlfriend/boyfriend/dog/cat/guitar/computer ..." and then ask "why?", you instantly have all the intensity you need to keep you going.

Christian

I hadn't heard of this as a structured deliberate practice, exactly, but it seems to be not uncommon for it to be naturally occurring at times when one becomes particularly aware of clinging to beliefs about self, reality and practice that are revealing themselves to be built on sand. I do think it's valuable to pursue such tendencies when they come up (or, as you suggest, perhaps instigate the process deliberately), rather than resist by hunkering down and hanging on more tightly to preconceptions. Thanks for sharing the various links and references.

Well, the practice isn't as structured as it could be, and the instruction "write something true" is indeed quite sketchy.

Maybe if there were somebody else interested in pursuing this and/or would like to share their experience, something more structured & skillful could evolve over time.

It does seem it needs to be rather personal, since each person has their own particular baggage, and the question that is most meaningful will derive from that. I recall for example having a fear that I might cease to exist, which led to ponders along the lines of:

fear of not existing? where did that originate? who gave me that idea? why is it so strong?
have I ever experienced non-existence?
can one even experience non-existence?
if I cannot even actually imagine non-existence, then what the hell am i imagining????
you cannot experience non-existence, only thoughts about non-existence.
where is the evidence for this belief?


or, from a colleague struggling with the gradual recognition that self-judging thoughts are just thoughts:

I realize I have an expectation that I should experience things a a certain way, that I should hold certain beliefs. Why is this meditation not good enough? Who says so? Against what standard am I comparing my experience? What does good enough mean? Enough of what? What beliefs do I found that idea of enough on? Where did I learn those? Why are they true? Are they true? How do I know? How would this moment of meditation be if I just let it be as it is? Why is that not enough? Who is judging this? Who believes this? Who is thinking this?

And so on.

It could be interesting to come up with some potential starter questions, but the questions that are best are the ones that feel like an arrow in the heart, I think, or that are brought up by current struggles or recent life situations, etc. Still, having some suggestions might help people explore the idea further on their own.

Thoughts?

I'll try to sum up what we've got already and develop a few suggestions from there.

Autolysis is no stand-alone method, but something one might take up to support and deepen insight practice and integrate the progress made there into daily life. The method seeks to structure, focus and deepen reflective processes that sometimes spring up on their own during insight practice (thank you Ona for pointing this out).

The goal of the method is to discover and examine the core statements upon which the practitioner's world view / self-image is built. By inducing the practitioner to give reasonable explanations for statements he/she regards as true and important, the (usually unexamined) emotional charges that hold these views in place are brought to light. These can then be examined in the course of insight practice.

Autolysis supports insight practice in two ways:

1. By revealing that the axioms of one's world view are held in place by unexamined emotional attachments and allowing these to be examined via vipassana.
2. By revealing the degree to which previous emotional charges concerning views and truths have vanished (if practiced at different points along the path).

I agree, the starting point for autolysis needs to be something of personal importance, but I'm not sure whether the "arrow in the heart" is always best. There are issues that are very personal and important for me, but still I can't really hold myself responsible for them. Imagine a loved one has recently died in an accident or is diagnosed with a lethal disease. If I take truths about tragedies such as these as starting points for autolysis, it's very likely I'd spiral down into grief without benefitting at all from the practice. The reason for this seems to be that "arrows to the heart" often concern things that I don't really feel responsible for. Thats why i'd suggest to begin with a statement that is true, of personal importance and that the practitioner feels responsible for.

By "responsible" I mean that the practitioner should feel an obligation to provide an explanation for the statement. Something like this happens in zen when a koan is given by the teacher. Maybe the student himself isn't interested in the sound of one hand clapping, but the social obligation toward the teacher provides a motivation to earnestly consider the issue.
Because in autolysis one doesn't have the external support of social obligation, it may be skillful to pick a "truth" one feels obligated to understand, explain and defend.

That's why I believe beginning with "I love xy" or "I hate xy" is a good idea: it's personal and important and most people probably feel that they should be able to explain why they love what they love and defend it against criticism.

Good points. A practice is not helpful if it overwhelms, particularly when one is prone to entanglement in strong emotions. One needs to maintain motivation and be encouraged, even while being challenged.

The love/hate inquiry could be based on things which are generally believed/held, such as liking/disliking certain foods, styles of dress, sports, weather conditions, etc. Or they could be selected from things which were triggered that day, such as encountering people who brought up angry, judgmental or anxious thoughts. If one was pissed off at a store clerk, for example, one could explore beliefs about responsibility, fairness, what one deserves, manners, work, and all sorts of other things. If the inquiry is selected based on an event of the day that triggers strong emotions (avoiding, perhaps, very overwhelming situations as noted earlier in the post), then there is more to explore than if one simply inquires as to why one likes or dislikes bluegrass music.

However it might make more sense of beginners (or people in a sensitive moment, dark night, etc.) to stick with less fraught things.

A bit of personal judgment is going to have to play into choosing the subject, so that it suits ones abilities and current conditions.

Interesting topic, thanks for exploring it.