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, 2025
Letting go feels like you’re perpetually on the verge of becoming Bartleby the Scrivener, dropping out of society like a rock.

April 10, 2025
May all beings know meditation as easy as this.

April 16, 2025
I’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, 2025
Shame.

April 24, 2025
I was reading Will G's great yarn when he reminded me of my own experience:


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. 

It is sometimes useful to consult the Bhumi model (to add a little humility to ones humility). A traditional take would be that an Arhat is 8th Bhumi. 4th Bhumi being ceaseless compassion and non-duality. (I think generally 4th Bhumi lines up with how people talk about 4th path but only if one has very high standards for 4th path)

I'm going to say something kind of arrogant, so please forgive me, but, the training wheels don't even come off the bike until after third path. The previous paths are sprints compared to this. Not to undermine their significance but like post third is really a different ball game. So I feel that disappointment. I went from hotshot meditator to just another dharma bum pretty darn quick lol. 

(The shifts of previous paths are obviously hugely significant for people but in terms of "meditative fitness" post third requires one to be a different kind of beast. Not necessarily more technical but much, much more soft. )

Yeah, Bahiya, I'm glad we can relate on this. After third, the path forward is much less obvious, and progress becomes slower. I can see how someone can get stuck here by insisting on a corralled and yoked mind. Progress gets more personal, less technical, as you need to confront your attachments and kiss them goodbye. And apparently there's a long stretch where there's nothing much to do, no obvious technical deficiencies, and you're forced to live your life like a normal human being for a while. 

When I first heard of people spending five or six years on third path, I assumed they had done something patently wrong, like they just never discovered the secret technique. I still think approach is a big factor, but I also think it can be totally necessary to spend that long cooking. 

April 27, 2025
I had a classic Fear entrance today. I was turning a corner in my apartment when I half-visualized a bunch of bugs crawling all over my vision and my attention morphed toward the periphery. But I didn't get the thick, peripheral Fear hum that I used to.

April 27, 2025
I’m noticing a wax and wane in how panoramic my vision is during practice. Feels like backsliding, or maybe just another layer.

April 27, 2025
It's really funny: I used to experience random convulsions all the time, often as soon as I started to meditate. But over the past half year, these spasms have become rare. And yet, when I experience something stressful, like my assignment that was due today, I'll convulse for a while once the stress is over. It feels like I'm letting loose and shaking it off — it's great. I guess I had a couple of decades of tension to convulse through, and now that that's shaken out, I can convulse away new tension as it arises.

April 28, 2025
I've been feeling a sense of surrender and rest that comes from a sort of transpersonal and transtemporal identity, a recognition of the eternal recurrence of it all.

April 29, 2025
And now that prior entry feels silly.

April 30, 2025
Lots of cessations today. About seven so far.

I frequently have this experience where I’m absentmindedly looking at something, and then this reversal occurs between me and the thing, such that I feel like I’m looking back on myself. It’s a little jarring. Sometimes there’s a darker, complicated visual image overlaid onto the thing I’m looking at. But I’m just realizing that that’s probably a no-self door cessation. I’m pretty slow on the uptake of this phenomenology stuff, lol.

April 30, 2025
My big conclusion these days is this: whatever you’re doing, you’re more effective at it when you’re enjoying yourself. And enjoyment comes from an unreasonable surrender of all management. [Inspired by Joe Hudson.]

April 30, 2025
It’s finals, it’s absolutely go time, and I’m just chilling pretty hard, luxuriously hard. Starting to get the yips about it!

April 30, 2025
Had an intense bout of meditation today after eating my pasta. I went spontaneously nonverbal at the dining table and had several cessations. Girlfriend walked in and stood beside me and I didn’t react. Usual sessions feel like “I’m just chilling here” but this one feels like I was a headless chicken, zero willfulness behind it all. I flinched in connection with some of the cessations. 
 
I'm not sure if this was a cessation, but I think it was: I moved to the couch, and I had my feet up where I could see them. Attention concentrated on a single point on my big toe, and then I felt awareness rip itself apart, with the ripping emanating from my big toe. And then awareness returned from being ripped apart. 

If anyone ever finds a way to force themselves to do something, please let me know.

May 1, 2025
"How can I enjoy this more?" is a fun inquiry question. 

May 4, 2025
I’ve downshifted from non-meditation to Dropping the Ball because of finals procrastination stress. That technique become accessible again, all the sudden. It wasn't a conscious choice to change the technique; it just happened.

May 5, 2025
It's nice to be back in Dropping the Ball land; it makes me feel like I'm "getting somewhere." Hm…

May 5, 2025
Anatta got me into this mess, anatta will get me out of it.

May 7, 2025 
Lots of difficult fear in the process of procrastinating about, and then studying for, these exams. But I reckon it’s as insightful as any meditation retreat. Being able to “not lift a finger” throughout this process, and instead just continuously relax, is really nice and really insightful. 

When I lean in and say, you know, this is me, this is how I study for these exams, and I totally own that, it feels great. It feels like I love myself, like all these tendencies are totally adorable. Taking my exam today was an ecstatic experience, because I just loved what was happening. Not because I was doing it perfectly, but because I was doing it in a way that was totally me. 

Love and acceptance seem like approximately the same thing! Now it makes sense why metta is so insightful. 

May 7, 2025 
If someone criticizes me, there’s an impulse to either immediately reject the criticism to avoid feeling shame, or to immediately agree with the criticism to fix myself and return to grace.  

But there’s a third option: non-clinging; relaxing in the face of criticism. This is scary, since you think if you relax, you’ll either not learn, or you’ll have to feel painful emotion. I think this fear is unfounded, though. Remaining relaxed and open is the best way to learn and the best way to be happy amid the complexity. And if you’re avoiding shame, you’re already in shame. 

If you want to do something more, or do something better, find a way to do it while happy and relaxed. If you are happy and relaxed amid criticism, you will be better at taking criticism. 

Moreover, there’s often no ultimately true answer about whether what you did is right or wrong. It’s less about objective truth and more about the social dynamics of the situation. It calls for emotional attunement, and not so much for logical decisiveness.

May 12, 2025
It’s been a couple days since finals ended. It was a nail-biter, but I guess that’s my style. I’m mostly back to non-meditation, but sometimes I’ll still feel a tension ball drop. Formal practice hasn’t resumed but that’s not my problem.

Watching a movie and eating fast food today to recuperate. When I placed my order, my voice sounded as alien as someone else’s.

May 14, 2025
Back in no-technique territory. It feels very ordinary. Sometimes it feels like I never meditated at all, just because of how plain it is.

The mundanity is scary at times. The fear is that I’m just spinning my wheels, and l’ll be stuck with this tiresome perception forever. Case in point, when I was thinking the words for this post, I lurched upright in bed and gasped so loud that I woke up my girlfriend.

May 15, 2025
Emerged from my slumber for some walking meditation. I'm inquiring about whether my perception really is tiresome, and if so, when and why.

The cause seems to be resistance and my expectations about how the world should be arranged. So the situation seems to call for further relaxation, acceptance, and unadorned being, rather than some mind-cracking practice. In truth, I feel like there is no alternative to this relaxation; I don't think my mind will tolerate anything else.

May 16, 2025
I think this is what I’ve been digesting: there is no deeper seeing that needs to occur during meditation than during the rest of life.

May 16, 2025
I no longer notice any cycling between particularized and faded attention.

Expectations... yeah. The room we awaken to is the same room we've lived in all along. 

And the realisation that the room needs cleaning! Dirty laundry, floor, bed linen, dishes, toilet ... 

May 19, 2025
Today my heart has felt super uncomfortable in my chest. I was scared it was an emergency. But my heart rate is normal, so I think it’s a psychosomatic thing.

Tons of socializing today; first day at a summer legal job, and my first time doing business travel.

[The chest discomfort lingered for the next few days. Upon reflection, a subtle version of it has been with me throughout my life.]

May 20, 2025
Salt, fat, acid, and heat make a meal. Sadness, fear, anger, and shame make a human.

June 9, 2025
Practicing dropping the ball full time and adjusting to law firm life. It'd be a much bumpier ride without the ease of surrender. Even so… I'm upset right now because I have to stay up late due to some self-sabotage. I guess I'll take this moment to remark, in case I ever forget: despite my many blessings, life thus far has been worrisome and restless.

You can make the dharma about whatever you want. If you're Daniel Ingram, it's about effort and phenomenology. If you're the Buddha, it's about renouncing desire. If you're Thich Nhat Hanh, it's about love and the mundane. If you're Ajahn Maha Bua, it's about asceticism and determination. If you're a Tibetan guy, it's about devotion. If you're @meditationstuff, it's about problem-solving and optimization. If you're a Zen guy, it's about simplicity. If you're Joe Hudson, it's about emotions and connection. If you're an advaita guy, it's about seeing through illusion. 

Personally, I like to make it about surrender and relaxation. 

June 28, 2025
Man, arhats must be able to read sotopannas, sakadagamis, and anagamis like a book. I reckon the typical thought is, "I see the grasping that remains in you, and yes, you will be safe without it." 

June 28, 2025
Past experience taught me to surrender to laziness, but now I'm learning to surrender to busyness. Not much time for formal practice besides my 3x/week train commute.

Wednesday, July 2, 2025
I’m getting a ton of cessations after not noticing them for a while. I guess that’s either Review or Equanimity? 

Friday, July 4, 2025
If you treat the workplace like it's a monastery, you can be face-to-face with the dharma all day long.

Sunday, July 6, 2025
The main thing I’m digesting now is to not resist shame or failure. 

Wednesday, July 9 
It’s fun to passively glance at a wall or a window and get a cessation off it. There was a cool moment where I looked at the mirror and when I locked eyes with my reflection things collapsed. 

August Retreat
Retreat time! Inspired by Andrew Holecek, I wanted to spend this retreat in darkness as much as possible. I used the Manta sleep mask, which was surprisingly comfortable for all-day wear. I took off the mask to eat and sleep, so my experience wasn't as trippy as a fully dark retreat would probably be. I covered some of the light sources with aluminum foil, but I wasn't able to create a space that was both pitch black and well-ventilated. 

I found myself being really attracted to the darkness. It felt more restful than having open eyes. I think that was partly because a lot of my craving is based on visuals, including the visual of being stuck in the same place. Since Holecek talked about dark retreat blurring the distinction between sleeping and waking, I let myself drift into sleep at will, which felt nice and freeing.

I planned the retreat for thirteen days, but after day 7 it went off the rails and I was only meditating half the time or less. Still, I'll take what I can get. I was staying alone at my mom's house while she was away. I spent most of it in the bathroom, where my meditation setup was. 

For food, I brought vegetable soup (shredded brussel sprouts, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, beans, carrots, potatoes), thirteen burritos (tofu, beans, bell peppers), cooked chickpeas, leafy greens, noodles, pasta, and some canned and frozen food. Disposable plates helped minimize clean-up. 

I pieced together the following notes from voice memos:

Day 3
This has been very calm compared to my last retreat, which was theatrical with emotion. I've felt the Fear ñana a few times, and I've gotten angry at the heatwave, but otherwise, not much emotional content. I think I'll be disappointed if I feel this retreat doesn't change anything about my practice, but that's okay. 

I'm feeling some doubt about whether this is really accomplishing anything, just because it's so quiet. It's like nothing happens. At times, there's even a sense that it's not happening. A sort of non-orientation in time. But I think I'm on the right path.

The one indicator of progress that I notice is moments where I say, like, "No," and feel some fear, and maybe have a muscle tremor. Not much is going on in terms of increasing spaciousness; a few hints of that, but not much. 

A lot of laying down. Very nice, I recommend. If you do this, bring something to lay on; I'm using some towels. Sitting formally is painful, since my hips aren't flexible, so I'm doing some pigeon pose stretches to make it easier. 

Some moments of slight restlessness, but not much. An ordinary amount of visualization. Some strobing between light-dark and dark-dark, and some small white-and-black-stripe hynotic vortex-y visuals. 

Day 4
I've developed a mild cold. Perhaps it's my body seizing the opportunity to do a deep-clean.

Strong craving for non-duality today. Quite painful. It abated once I resolved to let it go. Still not much emotion; just wandering thoughts.  

Day 5
I just did Michael Taft's guided meditation, The Simplest Nondual Meditation Possible. I'm confused, because I followed his instruction to "let everything be without changing or relaxing anything," and it was a super cool experience. I felt the richness and the tenderness of the cranium sensations; it was really remarkable and different. I wonder if that's somehow a superior technique to Dropping the Ball. Perhaps part of my problem is there's identification with doing the dropping/relaxing, and if I stop doing that, things will be better somehow. 

[One hour passes.] I've decided to stick with Dropping the Ball, since there's too much uncomfortable doing-controlling-monitoring-grabbiness tied up with the other technique, where there's a sense of monitoring experience for errancy. That's not there for Dropping the Ball, which is its main elegance.

The rumbling muscles in my ear are going through some meditation muscle tremors. Really weird. It feels like a rising scale of rumbles in my right ear, repeating every couple seconds.

[Later on.] Anger at the fore. Still, this retreat, I think craving is the emphasis rather than emotions. 

Day 6
I can feel my sense of the dimensionality of this room shifting around. Sometimes I'm implicitly modeling myself as being in some other bathroom. Not having visuals makes it clearer when I'm in a more spacious mode.

I've been drinking a can of soda a day, primarily for the caffeine content. I'm noticing that my attraction to soda is mostly visual, and without that, drinking it is underwhelming. 

Able to sit for longer today.

Yesterday, I was getting annoyed with my experience of my body, so I spent 30 minutes on YouTube.

If you're going to do a partially dark retreat, definitely pack sunglasses; my eyes have started to hurt from the transitions out of darkness.

I had a strange experience where I was sitting still, things started feeling pleasant, and my body schema started distorting itself. Like, it felt like my head had slid away from my body and was rotating in weird directions. That was uncomfortable, but it was against a backdrop of pleasant settledness. I figure this is something jhanic, but I'm not sure. [This experience repeated itself later.]

Day 7
I feel quite happy right now, which is unusual. There was an ant attack this morning, so I had to kill a bunch of ants, and then I went on my phone for a while. But the phone stuff was just good; it was what was happening. I wasn't taking a stance against it, really. In the past, I've felt a need to kinda allow it to happen, but maintain a posture against it (so it wasn't really an allowance). It's the worry of, I should be condemning this, so I can maintain my intentions about how I'm going to live my life. But I wasn't doing that; I was just enjoying it. And then I got back to meditating.

I watched a few of the Michael Taft guided meditations, which are so good. His routine is to have a warm-up, like a manta, or visualization, or stretching, and then he gets into a do nothing meditation, and then he starts pointing out spaciousness. Like, vast, still, silent space. Before, I could never really see what he was pointing to, but I'm getting a better sense. I think the idea is that the space isn't something you need to look at or find; rather, it's just what you're like when you're not doing stuff. 

Sitting through these meditations and hearing him point out space has really accentuated it for me, at least for now. So I think it's very helpful.

It's interesting how putting on these guided meditations are sort of soothing a fear I feel of being alone in this big dark house. There are all kinds of noises; I feel like I'm being home invaded like three times a day. And sometimes I lock the room I'm in. 

If you're doing dark retreat, don't bring any food near your meditation space! Or you may start feeling itchy in the middle of a sit... I'd eat a banana while sitting in the morning, and then pick it up a few hours later, but even that was enough to summon a horde of ants later in the day.

Day 8
Used my phone for a little bit while eating breakfast. But then I started sitting, and it was very nice. I think this is the happiest I've been. Very peaceful. I'm very calm about the phone use. 

My goal has become to sit as long as possible on the cushion. I'm gentle about it; I'm not doing anything or forcing anything. I'm just relaxing, and when the body gets off of it, it gets off of it. There's just an intention to sit for longer and develop that beautiful, noble capacity to sit for hours — when, in the past, I've been so resistant to sitting.

The spaciousness that Taft talks about has become much clearer to me. I don't know if that's a shift in my experience, or me noticing something that was there already. But it's been really nice to notice it, and to be doing something spaciously, and knowing that. 

The lack of regimentation in my practice (i.e. a reliably daily sitting routine) has been implicitly founded on a belief that I don't need regimentation to progress. I think that belief is changing. But it was a good experiment to run — to see if I could be loose and still progress — so I don't regret it, and I understand why the mind decided to go that way for a while. I also think it was developmentally necessary to let myself be free of routines and aspirations for a time. Who knows if I'll actually regimentize going forward, but this is how I'm feeling.

My practice was super consistent when it was just beginning, because I needed to practice every day to maintain a sense of sanity. It was really clear: "do I want to practice today?" was the same as "do I want to be sane today?" That falls apart when you get more realized and how you feel doesn't relate to your practice dosage. So that's where the complacency can set in. And even if you're a stream enterer who doesn't need daily practice to feel good, there's still the motivation of how quickly you're progressing. But when you're an anagami, you don't need to practice to feel good, and you don't see much unequivocal progress, so it all just falls into the pooper. And there's an ambiguity about whether you even need to practice regularly, because you always feel like you're on the verge of non-duality. But this retreat is showing me that I didn't need, like, just one more retreat and I'm done. It feels more like I need to get consistent, get real. And even so, it totally feels possible to me that I could pop off tomorrow. 

Day 9
No practice today. Watched Guardians of the Galaxy. 

Day 10
I did some good practice this day, but lost the plot halfway through. I think having the retreat as a time to focus on meditation is still quite valuable, even if it doesn't end up being perfect, continuous meditation. I'm still learning to accept when I disobey myself ... so I think there's insight in these moments, even though they can be so frustrating. I'm gonna blame "deadbeat anagami syndrome." 

Day 11
A lot of shaking, recently. Shaking it out. It's interesting how, in practice, the mind flips through its scrapbook of potent emotional moments throughout your entire life. Stuff you haven't thought about in so long. Or stuff that was so intense in the moment that it felt overwhelming, and like you couldn't fully bear it, and how that comes back to you, and it's like the mind is trying to bear it fully now with the benefit of time and distance and spaciousness.

I have a weird thing where I have a couple friends I admire, but I'm not as close to them as I'd like to be, and there's a lot of strange sadness and shame around that. And also shame about how I comport myself around them, just because I admire them so much. I've been aware of these emotions, but was never quite able to articulate what exactly was going on, but for the first time today I was able to articulate what I was feeling and why.

Day 12
In my life and on this retreat, there's a distraction reflex, where if I'm feeling something I don't like, I try to switch the channel on it. Sometimes I'm distracting myself from something, but other times I'm distracting myself from nothing at all. I tend to reach a point on retreat where the mind really, really doesn't want to be open. And so it tries to continuously fill itself with stuff to avoid the openness. When this happens, I go from being able to meditate all day long in silence, to not being able to fall asleep without something in my ear. It's interesting. Over time, meditation has greatly increased my capacity for silence, but I think that process is still ongoing. 

Often, what fills the space is just junk, just inane shit on my phone. And I've always beaten myself up for that. While there are ways to structure your environment to reduce consumption, I think it's also about how comfortable you are with openness. With meditation, I think you can heal this discomfort, and instead of consuming junk to drown out the silence, you can do the stuff you really enjoy. 

Thursday, August 21
I heard Michael Taft and Adyashanti describing their respective shifts into non-duality, and how they didn't recognize it until hours or days later. This is really inspiring to me. It suggests that the way forward is just accepting this present experience more deeply, and that there's no need for some sort of qualitative shift that modifies and improves upon perception. Losing yourself in the ordinariness. 

In the end, there was no clear breakthrough on my retreat, but I'm feeling calm. Going in, I had an edginess around feeling the need to progress, but that's softened out. I think it's become clear to me that the feeling of insufficiency, of "nope, this isn't it," is precisely the leading edge of progress, and that it's about relaxing that and settling into this.  

Friday, August 22, 2025
I have a few days off until school starts. It's been pleasant. While walking today, I experimented with a non-dualistic concentration technique. Instead of manually following the breath, I placed attention on the breath, and then did dropping the ball practice. So any time it felt like I was controlling attention or focusing or managing the experience, I relaxed that sense. This was a very broad, inclusive, relaxed mode. If attention strayed from the breath for a while, I would gently re-place attention, and then go back to dropping all doing. It was really nice; it didn't have the management aspect that's made me stray from concentration practice. 

Wednesday, August 27, 2025
I've been trying out a phassa-vedana-tanha meditation that Shargrol recommended me a year ago (If you're reading this, I never properly thanked you for these awesome posts — so, thank you!). I've only tried this today, so this account is very provisional, and I may be misunderstanding it. To summarize, the technique is to let attention go where it wants, and then notice how there's a step-by-step, super-quick-yet-chronological chain of events that occur in response to perception. First, there's phassa (i.e. contact; the initial, minimal perception of the stimulus), then there's vedana (the implicit classification of the stimulus as positive, negative, or neutral), then there's tanha (craving and clinging). 

Initial observations: 

• Before vedana arises, it’s kinda like you don’t know what the thing is; you don’t understand what you’re looking at. Phassa feels like a very minimal, backgrounded, far-corner sense of perception. And then vedana feels like understanding it... Once it's categorized as good or bad, it feels like you now know what it is. Tanha feels like making it into a solid object and trying to manipulate it, or pushing/pulling on it; it's uncomfortable.
• Neutral vedana seems more like no classification , rather than a classification of “I neither like it nor dislike it.” It's an absentmindedness. A non-response.
• Sometimes it feels like there’s a mixed-feelings classification, where it has both positive and negative aspects; it’s simultaneously kinda ugly and kinda beautiful. I guess this could be called negative vedana. 
• It’s clear that the vedana and tanha happen in the location of the stimulus, rather than the cranium; so the whole process is decentralized and moves around.
• Vedana, positive and negative, is subtle; it’s only at the tanha step that this process starts to have a big effect on experience.
• When clinging is in full swing (in particular, the sense of "I need to do this meditation right"), it's hard to notice the phassa-vedana process. 

 

​​​​​​​Hi John, thank you for sharing — I really appreciate your openness. I want to read through your log from the start, but for now your mention of “one taste” caught my attention, and I’d love to ask a question about it if you don’t mind.

My current understanding of “one taste” is that it doesn’t mean all experiences are literally identical (like a plate of shit tasting the same as a five-star meal). Rather, it points to how, whether it’s sadness or happiness, joy or restlessness, the essence is the same — empty, luminous, impermanent. The distinctions don’t vanish, but the underlying “taste” of awareness is the same.

Is that a fair way to understand it, or is it close to what you were pointing to?

Hey Tyler, thanks for chiming in. Yup, you've got an accurate sense of that teaching. I was being flippant; feeling estranged from the kind of profound perception that that teaching points to, I made fun of it. 

Ahh, gotcha, thank you! I'm still learning a lot of things like that and can't always tell, lol. It's a good joke now that I get it >.< 

September 2, 2025
Phassa and vedana are mostly clear to me, but I'm still figuring out what exactly tanha is.

Mistakenly, I used to assume that tanha did not appear through the six sense doors, but rather some off-the-map channel that was impossible to pin down. But obviously, the sensations of clinging are constructed like any other sensation; they go through those same six sense doors. Indeed, it seems like the entire reason clinging is such a problem is because we elevate it to some special status distinct from other sensations.

So what exactly is clinging? I'm trying to figure out whether a given sensation is tanha in reaction to phassa/vedana, or instead an entirely new phassa. If a sensation feels like manipulating/identifying, or pushing/pulling, or it feels like the boot-up of a new identity in reaction to a sensation, i.e. "birth", then I'm tentatively calling that tanha.

Also, if tanha persists after realization per Shargrol, then what exactly changes with realization? I've been wondering that for a while. If realization is about suddenly having *less* tanha, rather than having *no* tanha, why would such a quantitative reduction result in a qualitative shift in perception? (I.e., "non-duality," the disappearance of the subject and the objects.)

On that point, I've been wondering whether there really isn't a qualitative shift in perception, but rather just a sudden reduction in clinging paired with an update in one's *beliefs*. In other words, a change in beliefs, rather than a change in the nature of perception. (This aligns with the "already awake" neo-advaita message.) Perhaps believing that perception would change is part of the problem. Perhaps this is too speculative now. 

September 2, 2025
I've been examining whether vedana has inherent enjoyment value, such that a moment with positive vedana is hedonically superior to a moment without it. 

Vedana is quick to come and go. There's no solidity to it. That's part of why it's so hard to study and make conclusions about; it's too slippery. Rather than being the basis for enjoyment, it seems more like a wiggle of the mind, a mental hit of information that something is good for you and worth pursuing. It's a reaction, a categorization, a gossamer gloss. It feels too insubstantial to meaningfully improve experience.

At the same time, it's definitely true that it has the feeling of "liking" something. So it's reasonable to say that we're enjoying the stimulus, even though, if you look closely, the whole transaction is composed of insubstantial, fluxing, contracted textures. This is a sense of enjoyment that's all about our reaction to, and appreciation of, a stimulus, rather than something inherent in the stimulus itself. 

In the end, you get to have your cake, and eat it too. When positive vedana is present, you get to "enjoy" experiences. And when positive vedana is absent, you aren't burdened by the sense that experience could somehow be improved upon.

I think SN 22.95 put this incredibly beautifully. In short:

"Form is like a lump of foam;
feeling is like a bubble;
perception seems like a mirage;
choices like a banana tree;
and consciousness like a magic trick:
so taught the kinsman of the Sun."

John, it might help for you to think of your dependent origination dilemma as what I'd call an "ignorance problem." (Ignorance as in "misinformed.") If you didn't know the planets, even the earth itself, orbit the sun, then you would have a different mental concept of the nature of the relationship between these celestial bodies, and misperceive the fundamental cause/effect that they have on each other. This misperception would be the result of a surface-level understanding based only on partial, or misleading, information. Likewise, when you finally discover deep insight about the process of human perception that was previously conceived of by relying on misinformation (buddhists tend to call this "ignorance," right?), that new knowledge might change even your innate, unstated, and hidden misconceptions about how that process works. A fundamental revolution in wisdom! This would change your world view entirely, relieving you of all previous misconceptions about what is going in in the mind moment by moment. 

My experience is that when this realization occurs, there's no going back. What's done is done, as someone once said.

One way of looking at it is to say that there are sensations, which are there when contact happens. With that as a condition, there can be a feeling to those sensations. That feeling (vedena) is not just a sensation in a vacuum, it's a mental phenomenon particular to the already existing sensation. So it is a compound. Now, if you want more of that sensation, if the attention stays there, and there is a marshalling of the mind's resources towards the possibility of getting more of it, this is craving. Craving, likewise, is not just a sensation; already, it's a whole symphony of mental goings on, which , at the very least, depend on contact + vedena. It's a state, or a posture of mind, or what-have-you. 

When it comes to explaining how these can change with insight, it can be useful to make a distinction between craving (tanha) and clinging (upadana). The words aren't important (for example, in my mind, I call these "pull" and "stuck") but looking at the two as separate states is useful because, if you experiment, you may find that craving something, which is to say, being pulled toward it (having a thirst for it, in the original language) is not much of a problem, but clinging to something, which is to say, being attached to it in such a way that you cannot let go, is the basis for suffering. See a beautiful person walk by, and life is nice, hear yourself saying that you must have that person, and life sucks. 

For me, the difference in my experience now is that, although the attraction (tahna) to something that has a pleasant feel still arises, the link between craving and clinging is broken. The craving arises, is seen as another passing mental phenomenon, and doesn't get grabbed onto and identified with. It doesn't create a new sense of self caught up in an inescapable moment. It's the difference between feeling a pull and being pulled under.

Just a drive by comment. This paragraph really hit me in a good way Martin. I don't know why but I had sort of combined craving/clinging in my head as the same phenomena. For me the link between them is not broken but there is sometimes a sense of being unstuck or somewhat "unstuckable" (temporarily) which I can connect to. 

Ahh yeah, wow. That's really helpful, Martin. I've also been conflating craving and clinging — but the distinction is very useful. I should read something that properly explains dependent origination in full. 

Chris, it sounds like: once the mind samples enough of natural experience, there's a tipping point where the mind updates its explicit and implicit understanding of how experience is constructed. Reading your post now, I realize that the duality I was trying to draw between a change in perception and a change in understanding wasn't that meaningful. It also seems like the quantitative amount of craving isn't the salient threshold for non-duality -- rather, it's more about an insight into fabrication. 

Wednesday, September 3, 2025
Anicca is best translated as “impermanence,” but I think “insubstantiality” is also a good word. We assume that sensations had a real substantiality to them — a solidity, durability, and endurance in space and time. But if we look closely, we see that there is no solidity, there is no persistence, and there is no substantiality. No central core or essence. Nothing firm, nothing graspable. Like a lump of foam, a bubble, a mirage.

Ajahn Chah translates anicca as “uncertainty,” which I also like, since it emphasizes the feeling of being confronted with and internalizing anicca.

Thursday, September 4, 2025
I experience more and less obvious forms of clinging. Sometimes it can be very subtle, and I don't notice it until the mind autonomously relaxes it. Other times, there's clearly a hit of tanha and then a brief hooking onto that tanha.

I think a big conceptual error of my past practice is assuming that tanha and upadana are, for anagamis, always backgrounded and unlocatable, hidden away behind the subject of experience. But really, it's visible, and it's something you should be aiming to see in real time.

I think it's unfortunate that some parts of dependent origination are religious and abstract, while others are immediate, phenomenological, literal, and chronologically sequential; i.e., some of it is really good stuff. Same goes for the aggregates, as far as I can tell. Like, the existence of vedana as a phenomenon separate from sense stimulus is a great observation. But why exactly does the Buddha bother to define the consciousness aggregate when there's really no such consciousness/knowing aspect independent from sensations themselves? Some of this stuff you can see firsthand, some of it you can't.

Thursday, September 4, 2025
Practice consistency has been really nice; hitting at least an hour a day, between formal sitting and walking. I try to sit in the morning, even if it's only for twenty seconds. While I think walking practice is great and glorious, and, I speculate, sufficient for realization, I am struck by the sense that sitting practice is way more valuable for me at this point in time. It zeroes in on restlessness.

I'm also noticing a purification in my behavior. I'm still a rascal of a procrastinator, but my downtime is spent in much more enjoyable ways, like reading books and practicing. By purification, I mean a shift towards enjoyable activities, and away from unenjoyable ones — rather than a shift towards unenjoyable-yet-prestigous, regimented, "disciplined" stuff. Also, generally speaking, I'm calm and equanimous, whereas a couple semesters ago I often felt like I was living in a nightmare. I haven't reached contentment, though.

Although I've been exploring these conceptual frameworks, my practice is still fundamentally dropping the ball.

I would say this describes the term "emptiness" pretty well.

I suspect the idea was (is?) to make it clear that there can be no experience without consciousness of a thing. We could call this awareness, too, I suppose. A sensation alone, by itself, can't be an experience. We need all five aggregates to have personal experiences of things.

 
I agree that some parts of dependent origination are religious and abstract and generally not so useful. There has been quite a bit of debate about how much of the 12 link formulation was actually described by the Buddha and how much was tacked on later. You never really know with these things. I take what works for me at any given time and don't worry about the rest. 

The problem with consciousness can be one of language (it was for me). As Chris says, consciousness (Vinnana/Vijnana) can also be translated as awareness, and this might be a better translation because it avoids confusion with "consciousness" in the sense used by Western philosophers and scientists, which is an almost magical space where things like thinking happen. When Uncle Syd talks about consciousness, he says it together with the sensory organ that it comes from. So you have eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, body-consciousness, nose-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, and mind-consciousness. These specific sense-consciousnesses are not something that is there all the time, waiting to be used, but rather are fleeting phenomena that arise depending on other things. Just as you say, there's really no such consciousness/knowing aspect independent from sensations themselves. There is actually a whole sutta agreeing with you very explicitly. It starts with the Buddha rejecting the idea that consciousness has independent existence. He is taking a strip off an unfortunate monk who, like me, thought that the Buddha meant an independent and continuing capacity for knowing. https://suttacentral.net/mn38/en/bodhi?lang=en

What he actually means is, for example, when you have sound and an ear to hear it, ear-consciousness can arise. To fit this to a modern analogy, if you have a microphone attached to a processor, and a noise occurs, there will be a signal output from the microphone and received by the processor.

Putting this back in the context of dependent origination, when you have the sound and the ear, then you can have ear-consciousness. Contact requires all three things: the sound, the ear, and ear-consciousness (the sound signal being processed). Once you have that set up, other processing can build on it. You can now have vedena. If you have vedena, then, and only then, can you have attraction or repulsion. That attraction or repulsion is, in turn, a situation that can be clung to, or appropriated. With clinging/appropriation, you can have the state of becoming/continuing, and that state is what allows for the birth of a person saying, "Here I am, and that is what I want!"

Here's a little ditty that I use to remember this stuff, which I sing in my head to the tune of Big Rock Candy Mountain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6F0IhdaaWI). 


With the coming together of eye and light, eye-consciousness arises,
These three conditions are contact,
and contact allows for feel.
Feel allows for pull, pull allows for stuck, stuck allows for state, state allows for birth,
And with birth comes age and dying.

With the coming together of ear and sound, ear-consciousness arises,
These three conditions are contact,
and contact allows for feel.
Feel allows for pull, pull allows for stuck, stuck allows for state, state allows for birth,
And with birth comes age and dying.

With the coming together of mind and thought, mind-consciousness arises,
These three conditions are contact,
and contact allows for feel.
Feel allows for pull, pull allows for stuck, stuck allows for state, state allows for birth,
And with birth comes age and dying.

etc.

Sorry for the massive ramble, mostly covering stuff you already know. By the way, you might enjoy this even longer ramble on the subject (it's actually kind of a book) by Leigh Brassigton https://leighb.com/sodapi/
 

I am putting together some of my thoughts in case you find it helpful. If you find it unhelpful then please feel free to ignore.

The entirety of Uncle Sid's conceptual explanations and detailing in terms of terminology and language are an attempt made by a very intelligent man to put into words that  which is deeply experiential. He used the words that were available to him often using them in specific ways and what he intended becomes clear only when we couple the words with the experiential understanding that emerges from doing meditation exercises.

With that acknowledged, the next thing to do is to provisionally accept any meaning that we understand today trusting that the meaning of the words will get refined and perhaps even change radically once meditation experiences start stacking up.

One particular way of understanding uncle Sid's terminology that has helped me immensely is the following:

Sunnata
The construct nature of the dyad of experience and experiencing (Nama-Rupa)
Our ongoing experience is such that we have developed a belief that it is solid in a sense. But through meditation practice sunnata becomes apparent. There's always a dyad that gets put together or assembled - moment by experienced moment. This is the dyad of Nama-Rupa, or named appearances, or the experiencing of experienced. Within this Rupa is a construct and nama is also a construct. Both have facets.

Anicca
This is the unreliability of the dyad of experience and experiencing. That which is put together or assembled gets assembled in unpredictable ways and falls apart when we least expect it

Anatta
This is the autonomous or rule governed behaviour of the Nama-Rupa dyad. The dyad operates according  to some rules which can be intuited by looking at the patterns in which is shifts and moves. We cant 'own' the dyad and we cant own the rules that govern the dyad. If we have a premise that I exist and am witnessing the Nama-Rupa dyad this too is a form of ownership. A view that emerges through meditation is there are rules and they govern the Nama-Rupa dyad and the sense of an 'I' that owns the Nama-Rupa dyad is one of the emergent properties of the Nama-Rupa dyad's rule based functioning

Dukkha
We have a preverbal preconceptual atavistic intelligence. This intelligence knows that the Nama-Rupa dyad is Sunna, Anicca, and isnt Atta
At the same time we have heavily practiced mental habits that try to find solidity, reliability and ownership within the Nama-Rupa dyad. These two mechanisms are at odds with each other and when both are active there's cognitive and affective friction.

Accepting this conceptual framework for me helped me build a practice program that involved the following:

1. Building observation skills as elaborated in the model of the 7 factors of awakening
2. Consistently exposing the mind to the characteristics of Sunnata, Anicca, Anatta
3. Resolving Dukkha whenever it happened by relaxing the heart so that the bad habits are deprived of the fuel they need to express themselves and survive

Hmm, interesting. That's a helpful pointer.


That makes a lot of sense. It's a good insight to point to.

Adi, there were several things I liked about your post, but I won't detail them all, to avoid recreating it.  As I read the suttas, I am struck by how much of a miraculous genius the Buddha was. 


Can you say a little more about what nama and rupa are? Are you referring to dualistic perception? Or mental perceptions and physical perceptions? 

Martin, thanks for the ramble, and thanks for linking to Leigh Braisington's longer ramble, which was a joy to read, and the closest thing I've seen to MCTB in terms of being a pure mind-download of useful stuff. It helped me gain a better understanding of emptiness. It was nice to see how the suttas talked about non-duality; the "no coming, no going, no persisting, no passing away" testimony from Udana 8.1 has stuck with me. I also found Braisington's articulation of four common definitions of emptiness (as employed between the Buddha and Nagarjuna) to be helpful: "empty of self," "empty of reified things," "empty of essence," and "dependently originated." In particular, "empty of essence" feels much more alive to me than the more common "empty of inherent existence." 

The sutta where the Buddha rips Sati a new one for believing that a continuous consciousness wanders samsara blew my mind. It makes the rebirth material much deeper to me, since I always assumed that there'd be a continuity of consciousness between rebirths, and that just made no sense to me in light of my practice. But even without continuity through rebirths, the Buddha still posits a religious sense of causality, where actions in this life cause new lives to arise and be of a specific quality. 

I disagreed with a few of Braisington's points, namely:

1. His dismissal of the three-lives interpretation of the twelve links, and
2. His understanding that the dukkha characteristic refers to sensations failing to provide "lasting" satisfaction — seemingly reducing the dukkha characteristic to anicca — and his translation of dukkha as "being bummed out," instead of "suffering." 
   
   • In my estimation, this misses the seriousness and profundity of when the Buddha says stuff like:
     
     • "He sees the eye as suffering … he sees as suffering whatever feeling arises with mind-contact as condition, whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant. This, monks, is the way that is suitable for attaining Nibbāna," 
     • "Bhikkhus, there are these three feelings. What three? Pleasant feeling, painful feeling, neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling. Pleasant feeling, bhikkhus, should be seen as painful; painful feeling should be seen as a dart; neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling should be seen as impermanent," or
     • “So too, Māgandiya, in the past sensual pleasures were painful to touch, hot, and scorching; in the future sensual pleasures will be painful to touch, hot, and scorching; and now at present sensual pleasures are painful to touch, hot, and scorching. But these beings who are not free from lust for sensual pleasures, who are devoured by craving for sensual pleasures, who burn with fever for sensual pleasures, have faculties that are impaired; thus, though sensual pleasures are actually painful to touch, they acquire a mistaken perception of them as pleasant."
   • I know that the Buddha often explains dukkha via anicca in the suttas, or says that things are painful because they inspire clinging, as in the Fire Sermon. So I think Braisington's interpretation of dukkha and the dukkha characteristic is reasonable. Moreover, "see pleasure as pain" could be a practice instruction rather than a statement on the nature of experience. But I also think the Buddha was referring to something more than just ephemerality, or clinging, or a practice instruction: I think he was pointing to the contractedness (i.e. dukkha) inherent in any fabrication. And, to drive it home, he makes sure to say that all sensations are painful even after arhatship. But I'm no scholar, just a guy who has been very biased by his own groping of the elephant.

Braisington's claim that a hallmark of non-duality is the disappearance of sañña (his translation: "conceptualization") is interesting, and I imagine, controversial. He thinks the mind sense door remains fully intact, and so conceptual thought continues accordingly, but beyond that, there isn't another layer of sañña/conceptualization sitting atop experience, and that's part of what non-duality is. I think I agree with the thrust of his point, but I do think a better word would be "reification" rather than "conceptualization." We don't want people to try to murder their thinking mind one sit at a time. 

Braisington helped hammer home for me that the links are about necessary conditionality, rather than causality. I was confused about why consciousness and mind-and-body were separate links, even though they seem like they co-arise and are codependent. But the Buddha wasn't saying that mind-and-body arises only after consciousness, as in a chronological sequence. He was merely saying that consciousness is necessary for mind-and-body. Which is obviously true; those two things are codependent, and codependence is about A and B being necessary for each other. 

His four-level gradient of reification, which tracks levels of lower and lower reification of self and other, eventually culminating in non-duality, is a nice alternative to the fruition-focused MCTB map.

Anyway, someone whack me with a keisaku.

Friday, September 5, 2025
Lots of buzzing, restless energy in my sitting. It's like the mind is trying to kick up dirt to avoid the silence and the non-orientation. But the strategy doesn't really work — because the silence and the buzzing, the restlessness and the non-orientation, do not exclude each other.

Sunday, September 7, 2025
Distressing procrastination spell. Strapped into the rollercoaster.

It's like it's happening and it isn't happening.

Monday, September 8, 2025
These days, my coursework piles up into a total jam Monday through Thursday, and then I chill the rest of the time. I'm experimenting with insisting on formal sitting practice even during my scary days, in hopes that it'll lead me to spreading out my work more, or at least practicing more.

Sunday, September 8, 2025
Here's how I currently think about it:

Anatta = empty of control, empty of essence
Anicca = empty of persistence, empty of substantiality
Dukkha = empty of satisfaction, empty of hedonic superiority

Tuesday, September 9, 2025
I’ve been noticing how everything and everyone around me is made from the ink of awareness.

Wednesday, September 10, 2025
Slumbered for a long time after a few nights of curtailed sleep. Got up and sat to meditate, and then fell asleep again. Now I'm at school, and I've been noticing a sense of unbounded space. It's a really nice day out.

Wednesday, September 10, 2025
At risk of repeating myself, here's another way to look at the enjoyment/pleasure/hedonic superiority stuff. Before we're born, or after we die, or in the midst of cessation, there "is" only a boundless, imperceptible nothingness (forgive my reification). This boundless nothingness is free from any suffering, inadequacy, or disturbance. To have any kind of experience at all, the mind must create contractions within that boundlessness. No matter what kind of experience we're having, pleasant or painful, winning or losing, this mechanism is the same. We may cherish certain perceptions, and grasp after them, but they are ultimately just contractions in boundlessness. We assume that certain perceptions have a special property of improving upon experience, or making that experience superior to its absence, but this ain't so; it's just a contraction. When we look closely, or when we have become familiar with this property of experience (i.e., the dukkha characteristic), this becomes clear.

Wednesday, September 10, 2025
Feeling some clinging to these cool perceptual effects.

Too bad we can't have the experience of boundless nothingness!

BTW - that's where this idea of compassion for all beings comes from - we're all stuck here, outside nirvana, no matter what we do, no matter how enlightened we think we are. This can sometimes make you want to cry.

All of us! We are all in it! Together! Awakened or not awakened! "awakened" can see the "nibbanaing" of this-ness and the not-awakened can not! But we are all in it! 

​​​​​​​Cheers! 

 I'm so glad you got so much out of the sutta and Brassington's book! That sutta shifted the way I was seeing everything. 

I agree that Leigh is pretty quick to dismiss the three-lifetimes model. Sometimes it seems like people want to imagine a Buddha who wears jeans and has university degrees in science and psychology. My take is that the Buddha had an understanding of the world that included rebirth across multiple physical bodies. Cool. It's not my understanding, but the Buddha and I disagree on lots of things. I don't think early Buddhist teachings have to align with all of my thinking to be useful. 

Dukkha is hard to define, but, like pornography, I know it when I see it :-)

I have driven in the non-dual state, and if sanna (whether it's perception, conceptualization, or reification) had been lacking, I doubt I would be here to talk about it. It's possible that the impediment to the non-dual experience is not sanna itself, but rather appropriating it, clinging to it, being fueled by it, so we take birth as the guy doing the sanna. It's also possible that entry into states that get labeled (there's that sanna again :-)) as non-dual requires multiple factors and/or the absence of multiple factors. Oddly, I notice that I am in a non-dual state many times a day these days, and the more frequently it happens, the less important it seems. It's very beautiful and it makes me feel lucky to be alive. But it's secondary. It is the result of something and/or it points to something. I'm not trying to badmouth non-duality or emptiness, but I think it's safe to hold it loosely, without homing in on exactly how it works. I wouldn't say the same about dukkha, which is one of the things I've come to agree with Uncle Syd on. But that's just me at this particular point. I've held other opinions, and I wouldn't be surprised to find I am wrong now too :-)

Cheers!!!

Martin, well put. I've struggled to define non-duality, or figure out what causes it, but really, I'm wholly unqualified for the task, and we don't need a grand theory of non-duality to see it for ourselves. 

I wrote up some practice instructions for my two favorite meditation techniques, dropping the ball and noting. It's called "An introduction to surrender." I've wanted to do some dharma writing for a while, but I've been clogged by what I now recognize as a fear of failure.

Saturday, September 20, 2025
1.5hr sit. Heavy on the discursive thinking. A little bit of shaking. Noticing the apartment sounds as simple textures. Some whimpering, but not really any fear.

I had a cool experience while driving in stop-and-go traffic. It suddenly felt like I was watching a movie, and I didn't have any involvement in the process of driving at all. So it felt very still, even though I was breaking and accelerating. The experience felt kind of geometrically flat, like my vision was a flat plane. I don't remember it ending, but I think it lasted for about a minute. 

Ah, what are those silly little glimpses worth, anyway? Not much more than Papa Che's hemmorhoids… 

I think it's less like "I'm 95% awake," and more like "95% of me is 100% awake, and 5% of me is 100% delusional." A little part of me is always identified and struggling. 

It must be pretty tired by now. 

In sitting, the restlessness has softened out, for the time being. 

It's amazing to me that people can live an entire life with the drama of the mind at full blast. Y'know, I guess that's actually a big hint at timelessness and no-self — because a true self, responsible for all and riding through time, would never be able to keep it together!

Neat driving experience!  It can be fun to explore alternating the the flat view to the three dimensional view and back again. If you can have it go three dimensional and feel both intimate and beyond you... well it another interesting experience.

It's interesting that depth perception can be responsive to intention. I can sort of modulate it, but it feels like I'm creating new shapes of contractions, rather than really changing the depth of things. Maybe I need to fiddle with it more.

September 24, 2025
I’m in a proper dark night for the first time in a while. I’ve been feeling exhausted and depressive, and also very annoyed: at life, the path, my stale thoughts and emotions, everything.

September 29, 2025
Daily practice has been going well. Ordinary mind. Superior mind, needy mind, greedy mind, endangered mind. Relaxing craving. I’m pretty wiggly, so I think I’ll experiment with staying very still.

I hung out at a monastery for the day, and I was disappointed that the dharma talk, from a Zen monastic, was 100% Western psychology and 0% dharma. Either they’re hiding the substance from the laypeople, or there’s no substance to begin with. I’ve long had the mischievous fantasy of putting a copy of MCTB in the monastery library.

That said, listening to the talk was a nice look at my own crudities: identifying as knowledgeableness, clinging to superiority, and yet self-consciously squirming away from arrogance. Lots of balls to drop.  

September 29, 2025
I think I just noticed, for the first time, the A&P event that resembles cessation. It was a momentary loss of vision and body—so, a retreat into formlessness—followed by rapid, electric buzzing and pingponging. About six seconds total.

October 2, 2025
Self-inquiry has lost its effect on me, at least for now. Four months ago, it'd momentarily induce panoramic vision, a loss of resistance, and a loss of sense of the watcher. These days, none of those changes happen, but sometimes there's some muscle relaxation.

October 3, 2025
Sensations without an experiencer, a la Bahiya, can pop up momentarily, and it feels dead. It’s a little ghastly. It’s like I’ve died and I don’t know it yet, like the world is continuing on without me.

October 13, 2025
Feeling depressed. Slacking off in school and practice. I imagined myself crying and crying until I fill the room.

October 14, 2025
Insecure. Fearing criticism, desiring praise.

October 15, 2025
Non-separation with "I'm dumb, wasteful, and very lazy."

Trusting that my body will respond to incentives. 

Recognizing all as awareness, it feels like the world could take any arbitrary arrangement of colors, shapes, and tones, and nothing would ever really change.

I hate paying taxes! Especially if they ask me to pay more at the end of the year!!! That just kills my day!!!

Re: the deathliness of non-dual perception… Maybe that's why some practitioners can seem so terrifying? Walking annihilation! From Chris:

Digging into the archives, eh?

​​​​​​​

There's good stuff in there!

October 18, 2025 
There are days where the mind doesn’t want to be alone with itself. I sat on the cushion fully intending to meditate and then within seconds said “Nope” and went back to the computer.

October 21, 2025 
I had the thought, “It’s not about stopping craving, it’s about seeing craving as not-self,” and that felt helpful.

October 21, 2025
Life update: situation normal, all fucked up.

There's no escaping the eternal SNAFU, so I better get comfortable. 

Not much cushion time to report. But I've been doing my walking. 

October 22, 2025
I noticed the suicide impulse a few times in the past couple days. It's transparent these days; not a big deal. It has a brittle, fragile texture. It's tied up with feeling like a failure. Maybe I would've made a good samurai.

It's identity-clinging. Preferring to die than to live a disappointment. Oh, how I loathe being a disappointment… Running from that is at the heart of all I do, it seems. 

I’m an ignorant young lad, but from what I gather, worldly success isn’t about being perfect; it’s about staying in the ring. This dharma process I’m in, where I’m learning to get comfortable with being an errant, wasteful, impotent, procrastinating, underperforming failure, seems key to staying in the ring, and thus worldly success.

I think Theodore Roosevelt is relevant here. For my tenth birthday, I was given the following quote in a frame by a beloved family member who has since passed:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

October 23, 2025
After this latest go-around, suicidality feels like a wave that washes over me when I inevitably hit rough waters, rather than a condemnation.

Fresh off my really insightful conversation with Malcolm, I’m noticing how clinging concocts various feelings like heft, solidity, realness, stakes, burden, continuity, drama, and duration. As I let go of clinging, I let go of these dense mental concoctions.

It's a great time to deconstruct drama, since it's been an embarrassing, nail-biting week, and it looks like I've got a similar week up ahead.

October 23, 2025
“Clinging onto what you could never have” has been bouncing through my head.

October 24, 2025
This new view, which is not just "relax clinging" but also "notice how clinging builds up and hardens the world," feels very helpful.

October 25, 2025
The freefall metaphor of practice is a good one. If you run into some solid concern like "time" or "loss" or "need," don't land on it, just continue falling. That's how sitting felt today.

Sitting practice still feels way more valuable than walking practice, since I think I'm better able to notice and feel into the contractions.

Really good stuff. (Some of my fastest progress and deepest insights came during insane periods at work.)

Thanks for the encouragement, shargrol.


October 26, 2025
I started my sit while unusually angry, and I noticed that the idea of taking retributive action had positive vedana and craving attached to it. Now I get why people say anger can be pleasurable.

October 28, 2025 — Keisaku Alert
My experience feels clear and expanded. But I think there is subtle witness orientation going on, since it’s like the clarity and expandedness is forward-facing only. Occasionally I have glimpses where the forward-facing orientation goes away, and all the vast space that’s behind me gets included in experience so it becomes more-or-less the boundless centerless totality of space. It’s pleasurable, and it’s also comical, since it feels like I’m a puppet dancing on center stage. To quote Frank Yang, it’s like going from 4k video to 360° video.

I'm unconfidently guessing these are glimpses of natural mind per Malcolm’s map (see below). I’m really interested in this map, and I feel like I have some questions brewing about the diagnostic criteria and how we can map advanced practice, but they’re not fully formed yet.

I can manually include the space behind me in awareness, but it feels uncomfortably clingy.



Here’s one question: I’ve previously experienced cycling, on the scale of seconds and minutes, between experience being particularized and faded. This sense of cycling gradually disappeared. Can we use that process as a landmark for a map? Maybe this is what Malcolm would call the transition from non-duality to rigpa (end of particularized-faded cycling ≈ "absorption in the senses")? To clarify, this particularized-faded cycle is distinct from, and is much subtler than, the focus-distraction cycle. Even after the disappearance of distraction, which for me dovetailed with the disappearance of effortful focusing, the particularized-faded cycle operates for a while. Neither particularization nor fadedness are the truth. 

Another aspect I’m contemplating: the emptiness and non-duality attainments don’t seem like obvious, self-diagnosable events for a meditator. I can’t think of a point in my path where I’d place these attainments.

​​​​​​​The landmarks for me have been, in order: (1) the ñanas leading up to stream entry; (2) the clarity and quietude of stream entry; (3) increases in clarity, quietude, lightness, and agencylessness that came with the next two insight cycle fruitions; (4) realization that the focus-distraction cycle does itself; (5) the disappearance of the focus-distraction cycle; (6) internal monologue mostly stopping; (7) conviction that manual intention-setting and trying are pointless clinging; (8) disappearance of the particularized-faded cycle; (9) self-inquiry no longer working; and (10) recognizing solidity as clinging.

(My log is really helping me remember how this all worked. If you’re waking up, record it! Or you’ll forget it, or worse, misremember it. Humanity needs more info on this stuff.) 

"Another aspect I’m contemplating: the emptiness and non-duality attainments don’t seem like obvious, self-diagnosable events for a meditator. I can’t think of a point in my path where I’d place these attainments."

So they are probably next.  You probably already get useful light intellectual versions, giving a minor appreciation of these factors.  But next is the oh wow this is so different BAM fully experiential versions. The Insight versions. Those bigger versions first appear partially, or as hints.  You seem to be getting hints.  Keep doing whatever gives rise to that - you come at them indirectly, not directly ....  Keep doing whatever you are doing.  :-)

Also, a tiny suggestion for the map, for Rigpa. Rather than Absoprtion in the senses I think Luminous absorption in the senses is better.  You'll recognise that luminosity when you see it, either in glimpses that can occur at any time, or in the dwelling in the fully matured wonderland of the ground of being. (And by definition the senses are the ground of being - another bit of buddhist doctrine that is semi-forgotten yet hiding in plain sight). The natural mind doesn't have that luminosity in my schema, although you can easily switch back and forth to the luminous absoprtion once you have the 'attainments'.

​​​​​​​:-)

Rats! These 'attainments' are more elusive than I thought.  

I've updated the chart; I welcome any other edits you think up.

Number 6 is missing! And number 12!!! 

Do you want the #12 with a drink and a side, or à la carte?

Sat in a woodsy area on campus. Expansive awareness, but limited to the front half of experience; no rear-view spaciousness besides 30 seconds of it near the start. I noticed some concept-based solidities, but they were subtle, peripheral, and ephemeral. Vivid vision, but no wow-factor. Stillness was primary; no major emotion or thought action. Short spritz of fear connected with a quick chop into formlessness. Nearby chatter and squirrel rustling processed as vibrations.

School is still crazy, but at this point the heart understands it has no control over it. That’s a huge achievement; it’s something I would’ve cried and begged for a year ago. The experience is still somewhat difficult, though, due to conceptual/temporal/narrative/pride-based solidities that make it a bumpy ride. Part of the system still believes in gain and loss.

I wonder if this front-only spaciousness vs front-and-rear spaciousness distinction can be used in map. Or, in other words, the transition between 4k experience and 360° experience.

Here's some of my history with vividness and spaciousness: At some point, I began glimpsing a perceptual mode that was more vivid than I ever thought possible. I first mentioned this in my log in April 2024. It'd be a seconds-long shift into bright, panoramic, extremely vivid, extremely detailed, extremely beautiful vision, usually kicking in while I was on a walk. In time, this reliably began showing up every time I walked, and increased in duration, eventually (if I'm remembering correctly—it's a little hazy) stabilizing throughout entire sessions, maybe barring some dips back into thought-narrowness. The wow-factor went away at some point, maybe around or before June 2025. 

My glimpses during that period were marked by panoramicity, vividness, and a wow-factor; I don't get those kinds of glimpses anymore. Glimpses are now primarily about greater spaciousness, particularly rear-view spaciousness. 

The wow factor (unfortunately) can go away a bit -- in other words, a perpetual wow esperience is unlikely. The spaceousness and beautiful luminosity can still be there.

Just for fun... this might be a way to evoke 360 degree. Close your eyes and think of the word "here" and how that has a whole-body meaning. Really feel how the word "here" means something tangible. Then open your eyes and try the spaceous view again and say "here, I am here" outloud. Know the truth of it. "I really am here. Right here in this life, amazing."

You can also try going "into" here, it the same way that you go "into" sensations during vipassina. Look at the world like you are looking at a fish tank. Then imagine swiming through the glass and into the fish tank.

(If any of this causes more tension and stress, then just don't bother. Either it happens or not. And every experience is ultimately impermenant so clinging to anything too intensely or too long just causes suffering. Be kind to yourself - that's the ultimate wisdom that is learned along the path.)

One other thing that you might explore... when you become established in sitting, simply ask/inquire "resistance?" and see what happens. You are asking your deepest sense of self "is there a resistance I can be shown?"  Be very patient and don't expect anything.

Another version of this is "superior? inferior?". People in this stage tend to become like devas -- prideful and wanting to maintain what they've "got" -- or they become like asura -- ambitious and wanting to achieve "more". When you sit are you a deva or an asura?

Thank you, shargrol. Interesting tech. That last sit was definitely deva-ish and prideful, and I've been flipping between animal, deva, and asura with work. 

(I relate to an animal at work - "I must endure" )