A brand new thread for me to talk about myself! I am my favourite topic!

See season 1 (20 July - 15 October 2025) here! https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/38648284

(Semi-serious note: There is something ironic about writing a practice log detailing and analysing my progress towards a less conceptualised, more immediate experience of reality. And carefully curating an online persona of myself as a practitioner trying to deconstruct personal selfhood and reduce ego-driven reactions along the way.   But it seems to be helpful for keeping me motivated and getting useful advice! As long as it's helpful, I'll probably keep logging and posting.)

The thread title basically captures how I feel about my practice:

• I have a core set of techniques that I have some skill in, though they don't seem like discrete techniques and are more like a spectrum of skills at various levels that sort of blend into each other, and each skill is sometimes but not always accessible.
• I sort of know the core principles that make for "good practice" and can use them to rebalance my practice when needed, but they're also kind of fuzzy, and sometimes I just forget them and do something laughably naive.
• I've learned several traditional and contemporary maps for meditation experience (mindstate, progress, phenomenology) and can apply them to describe my experience, but I also have relatively low confidence in my self-diagnoses, as well as low-ish confidence in how useful such diagnoses are.
• I have some understanding of anatta, emptiness, and dependent arising, but don't know how much of this "understanding" is genuine direct insight and how much are regurgitated dogma or misconceptions (I don't know what I don't know).

...in short, skill and insight is all over the place. But despite the chaos, I seem to be making progress in some holistic sense. I've experienced a number of discrete openings since I began logging 3 months ago - things that have palpably brought relief to something that was previously contracted or confused, things that have given me new tools or new confidence. To put it simply, they feel like upgrades to how I was before.

So, I don't know what I'm doing, but stuff seems to be happening. May stuff continue to happen. Amen. 

2025-10-15 (Wed)

A gentle, off-cushion "stuff happening": I think I've just reached another level of comfort (or reduced discomfort) about no self.

Apparently, I had some embedded assumption that no self meant... idk, disowning your needs and preferences? Well, the assumption is not nearly as caricatured as that, but there was some flavour of self-denial involved.

But just then, while I was on the plane, it occurred to me that I'm feeling a bit chilly. Hm, feels like a cold wind is blowing on me. I looked up, realised the A/C was on full power. I turned it off. Ahhh, that feels better.

In that chain of entirely ordinary experience, there was NO NEED to involve any concept of a self. I wasn't aware of any thoughts about "me" or "mine". (I used lots of personal pronouns to describe the experience, but that's just because English is structured that way, not because it actually felt like there was a thing called me.) This is experienced, that is experienced. Sometimes the experience is pleasant, sometimes not. If an experience is not pleasant, it tends to be followed by a series of actions that might make it stop.

Preferences can arise, pleasant/unpleasant experiences can arise, reactions to them can arise. They don't need to be attributed to me to be allowed to arise.

That realisation didn't land with any fireworks - no piti-baths, no teary-eyed highs. It felt like a simple factual statement. But there was some subtle mental knot that palpably released, and that moment of release was like aaaaaaahhhhh.

It's interesting. We stumble on moments of having no greed, aversion, or indifference/ignoring and it FEELS better... which over time leads us to drop the automatic habit of reacting with G,A,and I to everything all the time. Life becomes much more vivid and textured and less needless suffering for sure...

It would be great if we could just "decide" to have this happen, but what seems to be required is many many many many experiences which retrain the nearly unconscious mental habits. Meditation seems to work because it gives us many moments of conscious moments of noticing "oh additional suffering follows greed, oh additional suffering follows aversion, oh additional suffering follows indifference/ignoring" and so training moments add up quicker if we have a meditation practice. 

Here's another thing that seems to have shifted subtly - this is very recent, it happened at some point on my retreat over the last couple of weeks, and I think it was the result of working so much on the question of what is "imagination", and realising that this term (as I intuitively understand it) spans to include so much stuff that I used to assume was more or less grounded in present-moment reality.

I recognise, with more gut-level conviction than before, that my projections of other people's interiority ("when they said that, was there a certain subtext embedded in there?", "Why did they do that? is it because they are feeling a certain way?") are acts of the imagination, and that these acts are often not useful or necessary. These thoughts still show up frequently, but they are now more likely to be soon followed by a thought like "oh, that's just an imagined thing, I have no access to what they are really thinking", and that thought tends to land with sufficient conviction that the projection falls away or at least has less emotional charge.

I also noticed how much weight I've placed on guessing at the contents of someone's mind, much more weight than I place on guessing at the contents of other things that I have no access to. For example, I don't typically go around guessing at the physical composition of physical objects I see around me ("what kind of wood is this table made of", "how about that fabric") - my mind just recognises that, most of the time, it is not necessary to guess or find out, and so it doesn't bother. But somehow my mind didn't know that it's mostly unnecessary to guess at the contents of people's minds, and it is running all these useless, energy-sucking, soul-sucking cycles trying to read people's minds. Now, it seems to know the uselessness of this, just a little better than before.

There's something that wasn't captured in my description above, and that is related to a blurring of distinctions between imagination and reality (an "all is mind" sort of thing), which did not contradict but enhanced the ability to view acts of the imagination a bit more lightly.

"There's something that wasn't captured in my description above, and that is related to a blurring of distinctions between imagination and reality"

OK friend! ;) 

2025-10-16 (Thu)

1h, resting in the energy body, noting discursive thoughts when they arose: During the first half hour, I felt a subtle, diffuse, very sweet bloom of sukha that seemed to expand 30-50cm beyond my body in front of me. When a discursive thought or mental image arose (mostly also quite diffuse and dreamlike, almost hypnagogic), I noted it (without a word label, just a "hmm" acknowledgement), then returned to the energetics. Attention was broad and somewhat drifty, and I had a number of head drops along the way, as well as an unusually dry throat - don't know if this is fatigue or insight stage related. In the second half, I became more restless; the thoughts became more high energy planning/analysis type thoughts, and the subtle sukha fell away.

Off-cushion: I was in high pressure, restless, tense mode for most of the work day, with lots of self-critical thoughts which were noticed and cut off and came back and noticed, ad infinitum. On the drive home, I started thought labelling. A few minutes in, a thought dropped in about Stephen Proctor's MIDL system (which starts by teaching relaxing into the body), which led me to recall that I knew how to relax into the body, and that it might be a good idea to do that now. So I decided to do that, and a mild piti-sukha bath arose almost instantaneously. The thoughts became slower-paced and gentler as well.
 

2025-10-17 (Fri)

Hmm I need to rethink some of my jhana labelling.

I was listening to Rob Burbea's 2019 Practising the Jhanas series. His talk on 3rd jhana mentioned a slightly dull, "satellite non-jhanic state of peacefulness" (quoting his words) that can be mistaken for j3. It can arise from doing letting-go style practices and making piti subtle, but without correspondingly making the attention more subtle as well.

That looks a lot like the state that I've been reporting spontaneously dropping into, and that I've been calling soft j3. It feels lovely, peaceful and unnaturally still and silent, almost like being alone in a mausoleum (even if I'm sitting in the middle of a busy airport - I drop into this state, and it's like putting a silencer on the world). I often enter this state while doing a letting go style practice, like drop the ball.

But my recent experiences with more refined sukha (sweet, silky, blooming, billowing in, through, and above the body - could be subtle but still veeeeeeery pleasurable) has raised the bar for a nicely developed sukha could feel like. And so I recognised that my "unnaturally still j3" of the past didn't have this kind of sweetness in it, and therefore probably wasn't j3 at all, but this lookalike thing.
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Back to the cushion to learn to distinguish j3 from its peaceful, dull-ish lookalikes!

Also, I have a fairly packed week-and-a-half ahead of me. Includes having to meet and interact with large quantities of humans in real life, which is not my strong suit, and is likely to trigger all kinds of neurotic thoughts.

So my practice plan for this period will be cultivating pleasant stuff, mostly cultivating jhanic qualities off cushion. I'm now sometimes able to keep mild piti-sukha circulating when driving or walking.

Jetlag + culture shock + getting caught in multi-layered interpersonal drama = hell realm

The story-spinning machine is working hard, picking up the barest threads of memories and trying to turn them into grand narratives about Life Itself.

"Humanity is a nest of vipers" -- ok friend
"Nobody can be trusted" -- ok friend
"I wish I had never said anything" -- ok friend
"Remember that unpleasant conversation from 5 months ago? Let's notice how it mirrored that other, unrelated unpleasant conversation from 2 years ago" -- ok friend
"How did I not see this coming?" -- ok friend
"This stuff keeps happening around me because I don't know how to deal with conflict" -- ok friend
"God I'm so tired, please just let me have some sleep" -- ok friend

2025-10-18 (Sat)

Spent the entirety of a 5 hour flight doing an "ok friend" session that falls somewhere between objectless meditation and "just sitting around not really doing much".

"Urgh I didn't get enough sleep, now feel like shit" -- ok friend
"Let's brush some piti through the body" -- ok friend
"I can't believe so-and-so did that, I would never have done that to them" -- ok friend
"People in the row in front of me are talking annoyingly loud" -- ok friend
"Hmm, ok friend is reducing my overall aversiveness, that's cool" -- ok friend 
"Let's turn this into a witty post on DhO to show how smart and enlightened I am" -- ok friend
"Hey I forgot to ok friend for a while" -- ok friend

This appears to be a less analytical, more metta-ish version of slow noting.

By comparing it to my previous noting technique, I realised that a kind of aggressiveness had been creeping into my noting. I was noting things to make them stop happening or make them reveal something to me.

"[I'm calling you out, you] anxious thought [you annoying solid clumpy thing, I'm gonna make you show me how empty you are]"

But just ok friending the stuff that shows up is less techniquey, more just noticing and allowing, like "oh look, all these things running around trying to find peace".

Metta to all the arising things, pax vobiscum!

2025-10-19 (Sun)

I'm in a foreign city and have the day off. Went travelling alone, doing low-key stuff (walking around, eating food, visiting a museum, walking around some more). Still getting over jetlag and possibly a head cold. I continued a background investigation of perceptions, mindstate, etc for much of the day, including a lot of ok friending.

Hmm. There's a weird bundle of moods happening today. Simultaneously thinking/feeling (or perhaps rapidly cycling between):

- all is mind, there is no external reality, the world is just mental projection (the perceptual feeling is simultaneously of less distance *and* mild dissociation; the emotional tone wobbled between mildly pleasant and mildly
mildly weird/disliked)

- recognising a bunch of habitual thought patterns that I used to run deliberately and thought were good or necessary, but which I can now see are just ego-gratifying stuff or suffering-creating stuff (and feeling nostalgia or grief or relief upon this recognition - I don't know which? maybe all of them?)

- if all this is beyond meaningfulness and meaninglessness, what do I do? what do I want to do? (feeling: lost? alone? ungrounded? scared? action/attitude: moving and thinking in a rather perfunctory, automatic manner)

- where is home? what is home? (feeling: like a refugee)

All this was felt/sensed in a rather dampened, suppressed, mildly dissociated kind of way.

On the train on the way back to the hotel, as I was still observing the mindstream, a chance memory triggered a burst of sadness that nearly sent me crying. That was the strongest emotion I've had all day. A bunch of thoughts then jumped in to try to figure out what this sadness was (loneliness? confusion? physical exhaustion? masked anxiety about tomorrow's activities?). Couldn't tell why I was sad, and realised that this attempt to figure it out isn't really helping things.
​​​​​​​It's like holding a crying baby and not knowing why it's crying. Do you want milk? Diaper change? Are you cold? Baby can't tell you, it just keeps crying. Ehhhhh.

I ok friended the sadness and the trying-to-figure-it-outness, and watched them hang around together for the rest of the train ride.
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Such a weird bundle of moods.

""Hey I forgot to ok friend for a while" -- ok friend"

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Mind is compulsively looking for the meaning of things!
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Mind is compulsively trying to fix things that ain't broken!

Feeling weird feelings, because all this is phantoms feeding phantoms. It's all maddening spin over nothing.

Ok friend

Hahahahahahaha YouTube has me figured out. First video recommendation: https://youtu.be/vI4seVg0xjk?si=YB50e5ucYJxtq0rj

Shinzen: "When the mind fails to find meaning... spinning to no avail..."

Can you observe and investigate this "spinning"?  

Its of benefit to do 15-20 minutes of the whole sit as faster noting. Note every 1-2 seconds is fine just to keep the interest going. 
What is that sense of spinning? Seems to go through time? Look!

Btw what Shinzen is saying is aboutism. Trying to convey stuff so nebulous that words fail but we try. And sure thing he is right ... and wrong ... or not. Dunno. 

Best to sink into this sense of spinning with honest acceptance and see it for what it is directly. 

2025-10-20 (Mon)

Approx 3h while lying awake at night, observing the spinning mind (first noting, later noticing without labels)

Mind spinning explanations, stories, defensive arguments, blah blah blah. I knew that they were "just thoughts", and they dissipated as soon as direct attention was placed on them. But once attention fell off (which was often, as I was sleepy) the thoughts snuck in again.

This brought on meta-thoughts trying to describe or explain those thoughts. I had thoughts about realising how this is the mind wanting to find closure, not being willing to sit with uncertainty. Thoughts about hidden aggression creeping into my investigation again - my practice is being fuelled by annoyance that I'm not in that innocent and open state that I was in a couple of weeks ago, annoyance that I'm supposed to have seen through these thoughts and yet they still keep happening.

Then came meta-meta-thoughts that try to derive insight from those thoughts. Thoughts about how compassion towards phenomena means allowing them to be, means not fighting or trying to change things that are arising. Thoughts about how practice is about knowing what is actually happening, not trying to make something else happen.

Words, words, too many words, all crowding in, tripping over each other in their attempt to make sense of stuff!

I spent several periods trying to note my way through this stuff, but it seems like noting (with verbal labels) is encouraging the proliferation of words and even encouraging the aggressiveness. The labelling act itself is trying to find or create meaning, trying to figure out the reason for something: "A thought happened. What is this thought? 'Storifying'. What's it storifying and why? What is it trying to achieve? Oh, 'questioning'. Why is it questioning?..." It felt a bit heavy-handed and interfering.

So I later dropped the labelling and just went about noticing everything that's happening, across all senses, including thoughts. This felt slightly gentler towards the thoughts than what was happening before. I'm not really sure what I noticed in this period, but also not really wanting to explain it with words, because to explain it with words is to lose the game!!

During another period tonight: mental image type thoughts were especially vivid, to the point where it felt like I was in immersive scenes with things and people who were moving about autonomously and interacting with me. Almost like being in a lucid dream, except the visuals were rather ghostly, and I maintained a clear awareness that I'm lying awake in bed. "Awake" vs "dreamy visuals" could slip between foreground and background of awareness.

Maybe this is a consequence of me intending to lucid dream (specifically: on nights that I remember to, I say to myself, "if I dream, may I know the dream as dream"). I started doing this recently, as Rinpoche was taking about dream yoga at the retreat.

2025-10-21 (Tue)

Off-cushion, throughout the day

"Can you observe and investigate this "spinning"? ... Seems to go through time? Look!"

My recent practice hasn't done much to the sense of time, so today I decided to work on time explicitly. Throughout the day, whenever I could (or remembered to), I went noting stuff at a pace of one label per 1-2 seconds, strictly using one of four time labels:

- past (i.e. stuff that seem to refer to past things, like memories)
- now
- future
- other (for stuff that doesn't have a strong time quality)

I liked it - the structured labelling increased sensate clarity and helped keep me away from analysing content, or from trying to "claw back" sensations that have already passed to look at them again.

It appears that the sense of time shows up *after* the thought that it relates to (whatever "after" means when talking about the construction of time...!)

mental image or verbal thought -> follow-on feeling that this is about a situation that has already happened or could happen later -> tag the thought as past/future

Which means that if the labelling jumps in early enough, at the noticing of the mental image or words, it's just an image or words that float in atemporal space.

So, the longer I went time-labelling and the faster I started catching thoughts, the more the labels became "other, other, other, other..." because they just feel like a bunch of words and images without much sense of time. But if I stop labelling, time sense quickly re-solidifies.

​​​​​​​A bunch of narrative thoughts were also showing up, trying to explain the sense of atemporality in terms of time. It's kind of hilarious to see its explanations. "You see, if you catch a thought early enough in the meta-timeline of The Observer, then it doesn't enter into the regular timeline of The Conventional Self..."

On the psychological front: the sense of withdrawal, homelessness, lostness that I've recently been feeling is related to what I experienced at/after the retreat, when I realised more deeply than before that my projections of other people's thinking, including their thinking about me, is "imaginary".

Which then leads me to realise that so much of what I do, the way I behave and live my life, is done for social acceptance. I act like this to feel liked, to be praised, to feel like I belong. But this is just the mind spinning its wheels - it's fantasising that it knows what other people think, and planning certain actions designed to make other people think one way or another about me, so that I can feel good about how they think about me... But this is all just mind-stuff, inventing people and thoughts all over the place! What a crazy way to seek happiness.
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Now, it seems like that foundation is a bit shaken, and it's left me wondering: if I'm not doing this thing, whatever it is, for social acceptance, why am I doing it? What other reason is there for me to do it? And often it seems like there's no answer. It's almost like... If I remove from my life all the things I do to make other people like me, there might as well be nothing left.

I like that spot where noting gets to “other, other, other, other.” I got a lot of mileage out of that spot. It can get faster and faster, to say: m,m,m,m, and then faster until it almost feels like gently (very gently) suppressing or limiting thoughts all together for a time, because none are forming (or fully forming). Not that there’s anything wrong with thoughts per se, but the seeing how the mechanism works is useful. 

Why would you want to suppress thoughts? What is wrong wth thoughts? I'm yet to find something bad with thoughts, except the "aversion" towards them. 

In order to "see" more clearly how the whole mechanism works. In truth, that's what you are also doing when noting or noticing. You are seeing more and more clearly how the entire mechanism is working. You can do noting or noticing like a rote exercise, but that's like doing pull-ups. Sure it builds muscle, but in this game you also have to know why. As you say, nothing wrong with thoughts, per se, unless we believe in them, or believe we are them. 

Interesting! I don't think I got anywhere near fast enough to observe that (I was just noting in daily life off cushion, whenever I had a minute or two to spare, so it was hard to build up momentum). I'll see what happens when I next do a formal sit and abbreviate my notes.

2025-10-23 (Thu)

45m, noting time sense: My first formal sit in about a week. I was mentally fatigued after two big days, and attention was very scattered and drifty, so my labelling was sporadic.
But it seems that, even when the noticing of thoughts was so sporadic and "slow", there wasn't much time sense to thoughts. A thought doesn't come tagged with past/present/future when it is being noticed as a thought, even if it had sent me into a trance for a while. It's just a mental image and/or mental words. It's only if I'm trying to "think about the thought" (as in, attempt to analyse its content) that I would mentally describe the thought as relating to past, present, future.
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So it seems like time-sense has been slightly dislodged from thoughts in general, even when thoughts are not labelled with any rapidity.

Also, this slight dislodging of time sense has produced immediate benefits for psychological well-being.

Many (perhaps even the vast majority) of my thoughts that cause emotional suffering have a strong time sense embedded in them. eg anxiety and despair are about future stuff. Regret is about past stuff and how they impact the present and future.
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But whenever I remember to notice that the time sense is an add-on, the thought gets noticed as just being a thought. It no longer creates an extension of time into the past or future, which also means there is nothing pointing back to the present as a reference point. It's just a thought that is arising. Most, if not all, of the emotional suffering associated with the thought disappears upon noticing this.

"You are seeing more and more clearly how the entire mechanism is working"

Describe this mechanism you talk about, please. Minute details appreciated!  

The mechanism is the self structure, both felt and believed. At first it feels like a single you. In reality it’s a collection of thoughts and beliefs, both conscious and unconscious. Thoughts about feelings and sensations which arise in response to both external and internal stimuli. You can think of this as layers of conditioning, but that sort of implies a linear sense of time which doesn’t really exist—so as a model, this idea works, but it’s not really that way. Basically, using this model, the idea is to unwind or peel off layers of this conditioning. The way that’s done is by seeing it for what it is, but the complication is that the “thing” or tool we have for seeing it, is also the “thing” so the trick is to put the thing in a position to see itself. So, the thing has to see that it itself is the problem. That’s how it seems anyway (until it doesn’t.) Again, this is only a model. It’s not what actually is. There are a bunch of ways and systems to accomplish this goal, the most detailed and thought out ones being some of the Buddhist and vedantic traditions, but there are others, including no specific system at all. There are people that wake up or shed layers of conditioning seemingly spontaneously, and people that never fully form these conditioned layers at all (or don’t fully form them for some reason.) until I bumped into Daniel Ingram and read MCTB2 I didn’t realize how much the Buddhists had mapped/mathed out the process, or how much they knew about it. Since A and P I’ve kind of known the general direction I was going, and haven’t really had much doubt about where it would end. As far as describing the mechanism in minute detail, that’s difficult because it would be MY mechanism, and might not make much sense to anybody else. 

Hmm, do you really think that each human has a different mechanism? (Maybe different content, but probably not different mechanism?)

Yes, different content, same mechanism. So it's like someone asking you to describe your car in "minute detail." The question itself perpetuates the illusion. The "process" goes from seemingly infinitely complex, to very simple, which is counterintuitive. The layers of conditioning are complex, seemingly infinitely so at times, but at the end it's simple. What stops, unobscures what was already there. 

The split-off new thread can be found at https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/view_message/40294163.

2025-10-24 (Fri)

So, I remembered that I had intended to do jhana / energy body exploration this week. Heh. I often have an intention to practise jhanas, but as soon as I get "stuck" on something, I switch to a more insight approach... which then turns my sit/day/week into an insight-dominant thing. It's not bad, because I can always use more insight work, but it also means I never really get to do serious work on jhanas.

I might need to sign myself up to a jhana retreat at some point to actually get to work on jhanas specifically. (Like a proper group retreat with structure, set expectations and teacher interviews to keep me accountable)

​​​​​​​--

45m concentration on the energetics of the breath: Very restless, with lots of unskilful thoughts arising. Whenever they were noticed, I would switch back to attending to energetics, but within seconds I'd find myself back in unskilful thoughts. Some of those thoughts were "let's switch to insight because mind is restless!!" which I deliberately did not follow, as I didn't want to keep indulging the habit of switching from concentration to insight whenever things got difficult.

Off cushion: Meh. Seems like I have a head cold again, or maybe it's general sick feels from several days of accumulated stress and tiredness? I ducked out of the main activities and sat alone for an hour, doing some lowkey practice (something like drop the ball, or perceive all sense doors in a passive/receptive way). That was soothing, as ambient voices became a surround-sound hum that had an almost lullaby effect, and tension was beginning to melt, and I could just drift in a semi meditation, semi nap mode.

2025-10-25 (Sat)

I have 30+ hours of flights and airport layovers to get back home. Thankfully no longer sick, but still rather tired and fuzz-brained, with naturally broad but somewhat dull and drifty attention.

On the plane, 5h of fuzz-brained self inquiry: Started with a couple of Michael Taft's self inquiry guided meditations. Then some general open awareness, just getting into a state of relative calm and ease, and then looking inwards and around and all over the space of experience. Where am I? Who am I? What is awareness? What/where is the source of awareness?

When I look for the sense of self, it is very slippery. Is it in the here-space? Maybe, but when I sense into "here" I just get somatic sensations. Is it awareness itself? That can't be it, because sense of awareness comes and goes and changes all the time. Is it the sense of vibration/impermanence itself? But that also falls away at times, like when I fall into a trance.

But even though the self-sense is so hard to pin down, it feels really obviously present...

At the airport, 6h of slightly less fuzz-brained open awareness concentration: Off the flight, I leaned more heavily towards shamatha. Took the sense of awareness itself as concentration object (as opposed to concentrating on things arising in awareness). I largely did this by broadening attention to all sights, sounds, somatics, and mental stuff, and then amplified the sense of "I am aware of.." or "these sensations are known". This was quite pleasant and energising, and I developed a pretty gentle and diffuse breath-based sukha while focusing on the fact of being aware of all this happening. I was sitting open eyed at the airport terminal, and found that the constantly changing hubbub of sights and sounds was actually quite supportive of an open awareness based concentration.
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Felt more refreshed afterwards.

2025-10-26 (Sun)

A few more hours, at airport and on connecting flight: Brain is less fuzzed now, so I switched back to exploring the sense of time. Did some past-now-future-other labelling.

Also deliberately investigated: What distinguishes a memory from an imagined scenario?

I called up various memories and concocted various imagined scenes that could have been memories, to see how they differ. Hmm. I'm struggling to distinguish them phenomenologically. They look and feel the same; the only difference was that the real memories were tagged with the thought "this is something that really happened in the past".

Then I tried coming up with imagined future scenarios. Ehh, both past and future scenarios play out phenomenologically in the present. If they come associated with emotions, the emotions play out right now, as if the thing is happening right now.

And how do I "know" how long something has lasted? How do I know I've sat in this chair for about an hour?

(I'm starting to suspect that "sense of time" will be as elusive as "sense of control", which has bamboozled me for months)

Later on in the flight, I was getting increasingly sleepy (but not quite fully falling asleep). I drifted many times into that liminal territory between sleep and wakefulness, with experiences that were somewhere in between very hazy lucid dreams that were overlaid on top of waking experience and that I could wake up from at any time, and very immersive visual daydreams that seemed to take on a life of their own.
 

Hope your travel is going well!

"Also deliberately investigated: What distinguishes a memory from an imagined scenario?"

I have not done this in a while but I vaguely recall one day noticing that the future models and memories showed up in a distinct location within the conscious space. IIRC that is the only thing I have ever noticed as a pretty clear phenomenological difference. Not sure if that helps but it might be worth investigating.

2025-10-27 (Mon)

Returned home!

After unpacking, showering, etc, I went on a bit of a MIDL binge. I'm not following its full curriculum, just using its principles as I learn them (it's something like: shamatha-vipassana, emphasis on relaxing into the body, letting go of distractions/hindrances, and allowing insight to arise from repeated instances of letting go).

40m guided meditation, MIDL: Mild piti and a tinge of sukha in the first half while relaxing into the body. Noticing that distraction is anatta, returning to mindfulness is also anatta. If an "I did..." or "I forgot to do..." narrative thought arose, I ok friended it, and returned to the body. All of this felt quite natural and somewhat enjoyable.

But body was a bit stiff (probably from the long flights), and breathing felt a bit unnatural. I started trying to adjust posture to relieve physical tension, which I suspect also contributed to growing mental restlessness - distracting thoughts increased in the second half, and towards the end I was almost entirely in distracted thoughts.

40m unguided, MIDL: Gentle, relaxing, mildly pleasant. Started to get quite sleepy, with the body abruptly swaying/dropping to one side several times. Ended the meditation to take a nap!

During the nap: I had a vividly realistic multisensory dream (eg at one point in the dream, I was with an injured animal, and I could feel the combination of body heat and cold sweat on its fur, could smell the blood and saliva...). Upon waking, I realised that there wasn't a thought tagging it as a dream that occurred during naptime, I could easily have mistaken it for a memory.

30m MIDL: Quite a bit of body stiffness, especially at the shoulders. In my attempt to hold the spine tall, the breathing also stiffened. A lot of physical straining and mind wandering. Even when attempting to apply GOSS (ground - observe - soften - smile, the MIDL formula for returning from a distraction or hindrance), I would be attempting to apply it with some tension in the intension.

Middle of the night, MIDL: Woke up middle of the night (jetlag) and couldn't fall asleep again, so I lay in bed meditating. This was a surprisingly pleasant meditation. Fairly good grounding in the pleasantness of body relaxation with increasingly refined pleasantness, and lots of little preverbal noticings of impermanence and no self.

I eventually must have fallen asleep again. Had a long dream about being at some Buddhist retreat centre. In the dream, I was meditating, MIDL style wordless insight practice, and occasionally gently noticing various mind movements as anatta, anatta...

It was a lovely dream, and I woke up really wanting to do more MIDL style meditation...!

(There is a small part of me wondering if I am slowly, methodically driving myself mad by deliberately blurring boundaries between waking experience, daydreams/imagination, hypnagogic imagery, and dreams. But this is a pretty small part and I am mostly undaunted.)

Intriguing! I played around a little with spatial location but hadn't found anything particularly noteworthy (the memories and imagined scenes seem to play out in various locations, mostly based on what visual perspective I was imagining seeing them from). But I'll do a bit more exploring with location when I get back to this topic.

2025-10-28 (Tue)

30m MIDL, seated: Stiff neck/shoulders distracted me for much of the sit, with lots of strategising about how to find relief, then trying to mentally relax into the discomfort, etc.

45m MIDL, lying down: Switched to lying down for more ease. Still lots of strategic body scanning for comfort (ie not following the intended technique!!), but it generated some relaxation. Got sleepy, may have dozed off briefly. Came back to a headache, sore throat, slightly blocked nose, and other overtly "sick feelings".

30m MIDL, lying down: Physical discomfort is increasingly evident. It's like there is big solid lumpy stuff in my body. A lumpy headache covering most of the head and the front of the face, lumpy stiffness in the shoulders, lumpy nauseous thing clogging the throat and chest, etc. Lots of aversion to them, plus some resentment that very minimal piti-sukha is being generated. Placing slightly stronger attention on one area of lumpiness would eventually help it to quieten down or partially dissolve, but then some other kind of lumpiness would show up. I asked, why do I assume these sensations are unpleasant, what specifically makes them unpleasant? Did some fine-grained investigation into the physical sensations, which partially broke down the assumption of unpleasantness. I'm still feeling lots of striving and instrumentalising though - it's like I'm thinking, if the nasty feelings won't go away, at least they should reveal something to me!

Hum. MIDLy relaxation is all well and good when things feel pleasant, but in the face of such obvious and growing aversion, such a gentle technique feels a bit floppy and underpowered. I may need to go back to noting.

Wait, no, I don't want to switch from shamatha to dry insight yet again just because the pleasantness isn't coming readily!

I'm going to spend the rest of today figuring out how to access jhana in the face of physical discomfort.

2025-10-28 (Tue) (continued)

Strong determination jhana, here I go!

2h kitchen sink jhana, semi reclining: Started with quite noticeable body discomfort. I threw in everything I knew about generating piti-sukha: calling piti, brushing the breath through the body, leaning into chakras, doing metta and devotional visualisations. A moderate piti was running, simultaneous with the discomfort. When metta was added, the piti increased slightly, then I briefly felt something like a somatic rainbow coursing through me (I almost had a visualisation of a rainbow running through the body) - extremely pleasurable, though lasting less than a second.

I rested for a while in this 1st jhana type state, which co-existed with a headache, nausea, and other sick feelings. Later, I soaked the piti into the body, which got me into the j3-ish state (very still and quiet).

Afterwards, I was feeling fatigued, so I took a nap. Upon waking up, I realised I could quite easily dissolve physical tension by placing attention on the tension spot. Ahhhhhh.

1h body scan / energy body stuff, reclining: Riding on the wave of easily accessible somatic release, I continued working with body relaxation. Lots of little releases continued to occur.

1h attempting direct to 3rd jhana, reclining: Attempted to drop directly into the feeling of peace and stillness. After some minutes, I suddenly started feeling waves and waves of discomfort surging through the left side of the body, especially around the neck, shoulder, left arm area. It was a strange set of feelings, like feeling overly warm and pressed down, but also feeling like I really needed to shift position to ease the discomfort. My body and my thoughts were screaming at me to move. The thoughts were running wild, saying that I was going to die if I didn't move. This didn't make any sense, because the actual sensations of discomfort weren't that strong.

I didn't want to feed whatever this strange aversion was, so I decided to stay still and just observe it. The thought "I'm going to die if I don't move!" kept repeating. I noted the physical sensations, noted the urges to move, noted the thoughts about dying, noted the whole freak-out sequence over and over, while also telling myself that nothing is actualy wrong, the actual physical discomfort is mild and harmless, I can breathe just fine, there's no emergency here, I'm not going to die. Later on, I shifted gear from noting the freak-out to stepping backwards into the sense of awareness, resting in awareness of the freak-out. Made it to the 1h bell and ended the meditation there, then moved.

I never found out what this feeling was about. I wonder if it came about because I was deliberately being still and trying to induce stillness - perhaps the mind interpreted the stillness (and slightly too warm environment) as thinking I'm trapped? Perhaps this is what claustrophobia feels like?

Oh! This might be what Shinzen calls "relaxation pain"!

(Thanks to shargrol, who referenced Shinzen's article in Ryan's log. The description matches so precisely - "It is an icky, sticky, creepy, crawly, jump-out-of-your-skin quality, a subtle cringing that may affect part or all of the body. The body may even move, shake or twitch as though it were in extreme agony, but there is little actual pain. It seems unbearable, yet it doesn't actually hurt. The worst part is that the more you relax, the "yuckier" you feel. When this phenomenon arises, it seems that the last thing you would want to do is to keep still for even a moment.")

To finish this story, Shinzen advises feeling and accepting the relaxation pain until it breaks up. "If you have made an effort to try to accept it, when it does break up, you will have released one "quantum packet" of poison and pain from the deep reaches of the unconscious mind.".

Excellent synchronicity!

Its far easier to see this as the 3rd Stage of Insight, the 3 Characteristics. Lots of body aches and changing postures to get relief etc ... Read on this in MTCB

Jhana Banana! Its overrated! Its utterly fragile! The most fragile flower in this meditative universe! Let go of it Kailin  

Shinzen this Shinzen that! I want to hear more of Kailin this Kailin that!

A little tip: "plan" is futile! A fool's hope so to speak  

But we still need to plan a daily meditation sit of course!  

It's Three Characteristics! Duh! I had apparently forgotten this insight stage existed :p That makes so much sense. Lots of little physical discomforts, but unlike the dukkha ñanas, there's not much psychological stuff happening (apart from somewhat overblown annoyance about the physical discomfort).

2025-10-29 (Wed)

Reshuffling and streamlining my practice somewhat. Realised that I had been quite interested and engaged in self-inquiry type practices a month or two ago, and wanted to get back into it. Decided to spend some time (perhaps the next couple of weeks?) working with a protocol like:

1. First 30 minutes of the sit: attention on central object, while noting or noticing broadly (to develop calm and encourage broad awareness)
2. Rest of the sit: if mind is reasonably calm and bright, switch to a self-inquiry question; if not, continue noting

Off cushion, I would continue encouraging seeing no-self by gentle means like ok friend, or just noticing when stuff happen autonomously.

50m guided meditation, working with peripheral awareness, Roger Thisdell: Starting with a guided meditation to ease my way into the "attention on central object and note broadly" technique. I think I was rapidly shifting attention between the designated anchor object and peripheral sensations, rather than actually using peripheral awareness to notice peripheral sensations. In the second half, tension on the neck/shoulders became increasingly evident and distracting, and I was carried off into long discursive thoughts.

1h open eye kasina -> self inquiry: I picked a kasina (an oval vase-like thing in the living room, about 4 metres away from me and set at a comfortable eye level) for my anchor object. Placed strong attention on seeing the kasina while noting peripheral sensations using Shinzen labels See-Hear-Feel. Again, it felt like I wasn't using peripheral awareness, but that direct attention was bouncing to these objects to note them then bouncing back to the kasina. After a while, I dropped the labelling and switching to wordless noticing, as I suspected that the effort of labelling was encouraging attention to switch away from the primary object. It still felt to me like attention was flickering, but not quite as overtly as before.

In this sit, the visual field quickly turned weird, as it typically does with open eye kasina - shifting, warping, swimming, over-patterning, hallucinating, depth distortions, clouding over, disappearing. Shifting of attentional breadth was surprisingly noticeable and followed the vipassana jhana progression - at first, it was just the primary object going weird (vj1), then it was a central region encompassing the primary object in about a 1.5m diameter area (vj2), then the entire visual field was going weird (vj3?).

At the half-hour bell, I switched to self inquiry. I asked "who is seeing?" while maintaining a strong sense that I was seeing the kasina. I sometimes even said "I am seeing, I AM SEEING" to really bring out the sense of the seer. After a while, this produced a very mild somatic hollowness, nausea, uncertainty-like wobbles in the gut and groin region. Later, this feeling spread upwards to the heart and chest region as well, but remained very mild. There was also a continous sensation of tingling and moderately rapid pulsation around the eye region.

At the end of the sit, I dropped in the thought, "what if all this is self arising? what would that be like?" and just let the thought stew for about a minute before coming out.

Also - during the early part of the sit, when I was labelling peripheral sensations, head piti developed - the rapid floaty type that tends to indicate strong, narrow attention. When I dropped the labelling, the piti grew faint, and very mild sukha appeared instead. During the self inquiry section, the body sense was a bit broader, more spacious, more diffuse.

50m, the same: Attention was much more drifty. I only felt that somatic hollowness/uncertainty during the first few minutes of the self-inquiry segment. Later, feeling body discomfort, starting with unexplained itching at various places, then a bit of that really uncomfortable "relaxation pain" of yesterday, though the urge to move was nowhere near as strong. I switched focus from the kasina to total acceptance of these sensations, which produced body relaxation, but also sleepiness. Was struggling to keep eyes open towards the end.

2025-10-30 (Thu)

Continued to have sniffles/sneezes, big lumpy stiffness in the neck and shoulders, and my face scrunched up into a rigid grin or squint.

1h kasina with religious image: Switched to using a religious image to see if that encouraged absorption and affective comfort. The sick feels were very noticeable, which generated physical restlessness and aversion, and also lots of mental restlessness (mostly practice-related thoughts, like striving). This was simultaneous with gentle but deepening body relaxation and sense of physical wellbeing, like a soft combination of sukha and metta. I didn't switch to self inquiry, as attention was so scattered.

30m, the same: Eyes felt very dry and tired. Closed the eyes, which led me to drift into some vague, barely-conscious state which was mildly restful.

1h kasina with candle flame / fire kasina: Switched to an open eye candle flame kasina, as that would allow me to close my eyes (ie switch to closed eye fire kasina, looking at the dot) whenever my eyes felt too tired to stay open. Stlil physically uncomfortable, lots of restlessness. Attention wasn't playing ball, so I switched from noticing peripheral sensatoins to just labelling whatever was happening. Closed my eyes, which again led me to drift into some vague, barely-conscious state. Lots of little bubbling somatic releases. Came out to that pre-sukha mildly restful state again.

--

Feeling a moderate tension headache, some dryness in the throat and lips, just feeling like I need to drink lots and lots of liquids. Sore throat. Eyes very dry, as if seeing takes too much effort.

1h candle flame kasina -> self inquiry: After re-reading MCTB2 on the Three Characteristics insight stage (thanks Papa Che for the recommendation), I realised that I had been noticing discomfort (ie the physical sensations and the unpleasant vedana), but not particularly noticing the annoyance and other reactions to the discomfort! So I decided to REALLY focus on the 3Cs in this sit, by actually using the 3Cs as labels - dukkha, anicca, anatta. I mostly labelled dukkha (because dukkha is so blindingly obvious in every blippin' sensation right now!!), but sometimes added anatta/anicca when those became particularly prominent.

This was really effective! I could stabilise noting at a rate of 1 label every 1-2 seconds for the entirety of the first 30 minutes. It produced some mental clarity, and even the physical tension faded a little.

So, in the second half, I returned to self inquiry: "Who is suffering?" Sometimes this question lit up a collection of sensations, with a non-verbal recognition that they are not me. eg Who is suffering? -> a bunch of thoughts -> those aren't me!

At other times, it again produced that very mild sense of queasiness or nausea. I rested in that sense of nausea while continuing to look at the flame. And it felt a bit as if the flame and I were looking at each other, like they were two focus points of attention. 

2025-10-30 (Thu) (continued)

1h candle flame kasina -> self inquiry: Lots of discursive thoughts at the start, so I went with labelling thoughts while looking at the candle. Felt a bit calmer at the half-hour mark, so I switched to self inquiry: "Who is seeing?" and resting in that somatic hollowness. A bit of boredom, impatience, doubt about the usefulness of this technique began to creep into the background. So I slightly tweaked the question to keep interest going, eg "Where am I seeing from?" "Who is here?" The visual field started to look quite crisp and 3D and increasingly broad.

For my next sit, I'll try it with my glasses off, so that the frames of my glasses don't create false boundaries for the visual field.

--

Off-cushion musing: Noticing a pattern about what kinds of thought feel more like me/mine. The more subtle a thought-sensation is, the more likely it is to get hidden in the me-space.

The big, fully formed verbal thoughts are less likely to be identified with me. They're big and obvious, so they easily pop out of the me-space. I can quite confidently say "I am not this thought".

But something like a pre-verbal intention that flickers in and out of existence briefly is much more likely to be missed. So it stays within me, creating the sense that I AM this stream of intentions.

(If I generalise on this, perhaps this means I can disidentify from each type of sensation by picking them out to notice clearly, such as via targeted noting exercises? eg do a bunch of sits specifically looking for and tagging intentions only, until intentions are no longer hidden)

I also realised I need to refine my description of my sense of identification with thoughts. I had been thinking that, at times, I identify strongly with thoughts - especially when a train of emotionally charged thoughts is running amok. But I don't think that's entirely right. In those moments, I don't think I AM my thoughts. It's more like the thoughts feel so strong and sticky that I forget thoughts are impermanent. They feel solid and real and therefore threatening, and I become convinced that I need to do something to push them away. So it's not a mistake of personal selfing, it's a mistake of phenomenal selfing.

2025-10-30 (Thu) (continued)

1h blurry glowy thing kasina -> self inquiry: Left my glasses off, so I was looking at a very blurry, circular-ish, glowing object instead of a candle flame. Really struggling with attention, so eventually I went with strong labelling "seeing, seeing, seeing" just to keep attention on the kasina. Interestingly, this also enabled me to occasionally observe peripheral sensations using peripheral awareness, which happened for very short bursts here and there.

For self inquiry, asked, "Where is all this experienced from?" Got somewhat distracted by body discomfort.

1h 30m reclining guided meditation by Michael Taft: Lay down with a rolled-up towel beneath the back of my neck, trying to get some comfort. I was feeling into the lumpy stiffness in my left shoulder. Upon trying to focus on the sensations, I realised there was actually very little that is unpleasant about it - it's more a relative absence or blockage of sensation, rather than a presence of unpleasant sensation. I had to go hunting and moving attention around the wider shoulder blade area to pick out bits of unpleasantness, which would quickly shift or dissipate upon being attended to.

After a while, the "relaxation pain" came back, as strong as yesterday ("noooo! I'm gonna die!!!!"). This time, I simultaneously relaxed into the body and tried to pick out what exactly are the sensations I'm feeling. It felt like a bit of uncomfortable tingly warmth around the shoulders and arms, a bit of heaviness pressing against the front of the torso. But what was the most prominent (and most mentally distressing) were waves of squeamish wobbliness that seemed to run down the spine and into the groin. *That* was what made me really really want to squirm, and made stillness feel impossibly difficult. I stayed with it for as long as it lasted, feeling and relaxing into it. After about 20-30 minutes, the relaxation pain dissipated.

(I wonder if the pressure of the rolled towel behind the back of my neck had something to do with this particlar kind of pain? Pressure at the cervical spine, triggering discomfort down the length of the spine? But that wouldn't explain why the pain eventually dissipated without me making any physical adjustments.)

2025-10-31 (Fri)

It occurred to me that, despite my stated intention to broaden awareness, I had actually been quite constricted in my approach yesterday.

I thought I was applying effort and mindfulness and investigation, but it was really just bumping up unnecessary processes masquerading as mindfulness, like a sense of agentic attention ("I am focusing on this object"), or an urge to surface things to intellectual understanding or recursively conscious perception ("I notice the fact that I notice sensations, and I notice that this noticing has implications about how experience is construed").

So today I'll try to chill out a bit. "Investigate" more like a curious child, and less like a detective looking for stuff with a magnifying glass.

Or, perhaps to say this with less words, "ok friend"!!

Shargrol gave me a good tip: "Look at the mind as if looking at a wild animal from behind a tree, just with the edge of your eye, not to scare it!" or something like it!  

2025-10-31 (Fri) (continued)

Feeling less sick than yesterday - just headache and body stiffness, and a bit of a sore throat. Mindstate is more at ease than yesterday, with less of that desperate striving feel.

Morning, a few hours of semi-formal meditation, standing, walking and sitting outside: Broad awareness and just playful curiosity, no set technique. Explored whatever seemed interesting, again using a broad inclusive awareness as much as possible, including the "this side" sensations, the sensations that I normally disregard as irrelevant, like how "the sense of looking" involves not only visual sensations but also somatic sensations around the head/eye region.

This exploration produced the following observations:

1) On intentions. Noticed how "the intention to look" manifests as a micro-act of starting to look, then micro-contracting to cut off the looking so that it doesn't actually take place. Other intentions seem similar - somatically they manifest as "act as if I'm just about to do this thing, then don't".

2) On dependent origination. My recent work with body discomfort (how a somatic sensation comes to be interpreted as pleasant or unpleasant) has led me to question the sequence of links in dependent origination.

It doesn't feel like I go straight from contact -> vedana. Contact itself doesn't generate vedana. Contact generates a mental act interpreting what that sensation is, what it implies. Based on that interpretation, a feeling forms as to whether it is a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, then further contractions can form based on that feeling-judgement.

So it feels like... idk, sensation -> name and form (if that's the right link for what I'm trying to describe) -> vedana?

3) On time. It occurred to me that I may have never directly perceived a sensation arising or passing away?! To say that something "arises" is to imply (a) there was a time before it had arisen, (b) there will be a time after the arising has completed, and (c) an act of arising is occurring right now, a surging movement from non-being into being. But all this is inferred, not directly perceived. What *is* perceived is simply "there is a sensation". There may also be mental impressions whose contents refer to the persistence (or non-persistence) of a sensation across time, and confusion of the two is what creates the sense that I can perceive a sensation arising and passing away.

This morning's less structured stuff left me feeling really quite good.

Afternoon, 1h 20m, semi reclining, more exploratory stuff: Began by brushing sukha through the body with the breath, intending to generate some concentration. Then asked some inquiry questions, felt the visceral reaction to it. When mixed with sukha, those reactions were surprisingly pleasant, though in a slightly weird way. So I was enjoying the pleasantness in the body. Every now and then, a much stronger, almost violent wave of weird pleasure would run through the body very rapidly. 

Later, I again explored different stuff, like what it felt like to "expand awareness", what seeing felt like, looking for the location of The Observer, and testing how far I can get the sukha to expand beyond the apparent boundaries of my body.

1h, semi-reclining, the same: Again, began with sukha, then used intention to sink into the stillness of a proto-j3, then broadened awareness into a proto-j4. Hung out there for a while, with a gentle background noticing of other sensations.

Then I realised that I was adding that pseudo-mindfulness process to the noticing ("I am here, noticing those sensations over there") which was both interfering with concentration and strengthening the self-sense. So I stopped feeding with attention that obvious sense of "I am doing x". That led me to drift into a more dreamy, still very jhanically flavoured zone, though very vibratory and no longer clear which jhana was involved.

Then tuned into hearing - attending to sounds, then asking "where is hearing coming from?" then seeing, "where is seeing coming from?" This produced fairly rapid (5-10Hz?) oscillations, almost like pulsations or rocking front to back or side to side, in the central-ish area of the head region, almost a mechanical engine rumbling kind of movement.

Hmm, I've been trying to do something like that, especially by broadening awareness and trying to tune into peripheral awareness. Occasionally it seems to work - every so often, I would "catch" something surprising happen out of the corner of my eye. (That's how my musings of today came about - eg about time and intention)

But the few times I catch them, they are so rapid and so blurry that I wonder if I actually saw them play out in real time, or if I'm just constructing a memory...!

This is a good sign...

Okay, so I assume Stream Entry is your goal? If not, definitely disregard all of this. It isn't essential for a good life -- honestly.

You have to realize that you have all the skills needed to get there, and yet it is nothing that you can make happen. However, there is an accidendent prone zone that you can cultivate. You're getting there already. But here's some ideas... don't take this as metaphysics, see if you can get the experiential feel for these ideas.

Nibbana is what occurs all the time between mind moments. It's the nothing that allows for all the somethings to change between mind moments. It's always closer than close. Closer than your own mind, your own self. (This should produce a sense of optimism.)

But we keep blinking it out. What our conscious mind does is "grab" on to mind object after mind object after mind object. It can and will do this until the end of time. It feels like survival. Why wouldn't it? (This should produce a sense of dread if you think about it right. A sense of SE being impossible.)

But the mind also has a natural intelligence and this has been working the entire time. It's what leads us into the insights, what carries us through the nanas, it's what crystalizes the jhanas. There is no way to figure out how to "do" most of what we experience in meditation. We need to have the intention to sit and then sit... but the rest is mostly the natural intelligence teaching itself. 

Meditation works because we sit with the actual experience of awareness of mind objects and we grow more and more sensitive to the subtle errors and friction of our "view". Basically the mind is an efficiency machine. It does not change unless it experiences discomfort, experiences some mismatch or incongruity in our perception of reality. Sometimes the learning is practical, like how the body learns to sit with good posture. But A LOT of what is learned is the apparent solidity of our emotions and concepts is a source of suffering. We learn how to have the experience without resisting it and without over-solidifying it, even difficult things like fear, misery, disgust, desire for deliverance, and reactivity. 

Soon we learn that regardless of the experience, there is a kind of meta-equanimity that is possible. Intimate participation and equanimity is possible, regardless of the mind object. This blossoms into access to equanimity that allows people to go on retreats, drop excessive reactivity in their real life, to go back and re-explore the contents of the dukka nanas with a new resilency and sensitivity...

Equanimity feels like the answer, and it is in a way. But what separates psychology from meditation is the awareness that EQ is also a STATE. It is another experience that can be experienced... which if you think about leads to the ultimate question: what on earth is experiencing equanimity? 

There is an answer and that answer comes from radical settling down. The remaining survival urge needs to soften. The remaining resistances need to be dropped. And all of this is done in the meditation way, the meta-experience way, by allowing survival urges and resistances to display themselves and to become intimate with them just as they are, in a kind of radical equanimity. A kind of equanimity that doesn't even require "the equanimity feeling" to be present. 

So the first strong experiences of equanimity is the nana. The classic spacious, easy, peaceful, calm, simple, good state. But then equanimity grows to encompass the entire progress of insight. It's basically a fractal. Within the EQ nana is all of the sub-nanas that correspond to mind and body (first jhana), cause and effect, three characteristics, A&P (second jhana), dissolution (third jhana), fear, misery, disgust, desire for deliverance, and even reobservation/reactivity. And then there is a new equanimity - an equanimity with equanimity, which is barely anything at all. It's a drifty almost intangible equanimity if it is anything at all...

There can be a fleeting worry about going insane at some point. This is the survival urge feeling like it will die if it lets go of grabbing mind objects one after the other. 

But the mind/body knows. It knows that allowing mind objects to pass as soon as they arise is the actual nature of mind objects. The "self" that tries to "hold on" experiences the friction and suffering of resisting reality.

Now is not the time for "vipassanizing", that is too intellectual, forceful, intentional. Now is the time to go another level of meta and to notice how attention itself moves itself from mind object to mind object. Now is the time to notice how no effort is needed for experience to occur. Now is the time to notice how knowing is inherent within the experience itself.

One way to say it is that "yang" meditation needs to become "yin".  Emphasis on receptivity and intimacy, not penetration and objectivity.

I feel that it is very beneficial to practice at night time during this stage. Dimly lit rooms are fine. Darkness, too. 

Allow the mind to settle down and settle in. Use whatever techniques make sense that day. At this point, pretty much just sitting down for 20 minutes will allow the heart/mind to naturally do what it needs to do to become settled. This comes naturally to someone at this stage...

Then get curious about experience. Get curious about the nature of mind objects, how they arise, where they arise, where they stay, where they go. It might be that this is unfindable, but use your natural and easy curiousity to "search". Sensations and the knowing of sensations will appear where they appear. Where they go is... oddly unfindable, yet sensed in some way. Thoughts and meaning arise somewhere in the head space. The more natural and easy curiousity is directed to the "sound" of thoughts... the more thoughts become more like sounds, partial words and partial meanings, more like a barely tuned radio barely being discernable. Trace the "mindstream" upstream.

Sometimes the mindstream is like the "sound" of a bubbling thought stream, sometimes it's like a vibrating osscilation, sometimes is like a pulsing sense of space... something it's barely anything in particular...

The training here is learning how little effort is needed. Learning how to let go. And it happens little by little, by growing more and more comfortable with letting go. We think we need to control and direct our mind... but it turns out mind does itself by itself... mind is already mind...

It should feel like you are a satellite spinning around the earth, kept in orbit by the speed of grabbing onto mind objects... but as the mind learns that grabbing isn't needed, the momentum slows, the satellite loses altitude, the air becomes thicker, the speed becomes slower and slower... and now the satellite is gliding and falling into the pull of the earth. You are simultaneously letting go of mind objects and getting pulled deeper to the mind... and into nibbana.

Or you are like a star, burning with nuclear heat, radiating light. This is your survival mechanism, that sense of needing to fight or control or manipulate to be alive. And you are hot from the friction of all the dukka that goes with needing to survive. But equanimity grows and you cool and become cooler. As you let seeking relax and allow attention to go where it wants, the intensity of striving relaxes more and more, the needing and clinging relaxes more and more. You stop identifying with activity and you start to simply sense your mass. The star cools and shrinks, heavier and heavier, and the star collapses into a black hole and you fall into nibbana.

This isn't anything you can do. You can't know how to do it ahead of time. You won't know it happened until afterwards. So there is no pressure at all. Might happen today, next year, or on your deathbed. You can't control when. So there is no pressure at all. Meditation is a lifetime art, so you just do your artwork each day, maybe go to the artist colony for a week (i.e. retreat), whatever seems to make sense for your art.

I always liked the scene in Harry Potter when he goes back in time and sees a powerful patronas spell... and then later when he is in that situation he realizes that he was the one that cast the spell and even though he's never done it before, he knows that he can do it because he's ALREADY DONE IT. That's the kind of confidence that is needed. You need to have confidence that the heart/mind already knows nibbana. It already knows it enough to be able to blink it out every second of your life. Now you just need to develop enough intimacy and equanimity to fall into the nibbana non-experience naturally.

The pull into nibbana is the same pull that has been happening all along. Dropping clinging, dropping reactivity, allowing things to be as they are, moving through nanas, experiencing the perfume of jhanas... these are all the same pull as the pull into nibbana.

Hope this is helpful in some way. Enjoy the adventure and realize that there is nothing you can "try" to do, so the pressure is completely off.


 

Thanks for taking the time to write this post - it is both useful and confidence boosting!

Reading this, I had some questions bubbling away at the back of my mind, like "how to effort less" and "how to get better at letting go". But I see what I did there , so instead of asking, I'll just do more sitting and see if the answer emerges.

PS - "We think we need to control and direct our mind... but it turns out mind does itself by itself... mind is already mind..." -- this struck me with some power! It had never quite occurred to me that I often have thoughts like "I will make my mind do X", and that these thoughts seemed totally reasonable to me until right now, when I asked what on earth is this "I" and this "making" that can lord over the rest of the mind...?

2025-10-31 (Fri) (continued)

1h 20m semi reclining: It took me some minutes to get going, as I was wondering what technique I should do. Eventually went for noting See-Hear-Feel - figured I'd just train in noting peripheral stuff. After a couple of minutes of noting, I found that generating the word labels took more mental effort than I wanted to expend. The noticing was still happening - eg sounds were heard and clearly clocked as heard in a non-verbal way - but the mind was a couch potato, it just really didn't want to exert the additional effort to translate that experience into the word "hear".

So I allowed the labelling to fall away and just allowed noticing to keep happening. And that's when I discovered that I was in a mindstate that I rarely get into - a state that is surprisingly "quiet" (as in, far less discursive mental activity than usual) and not getting caught up in any particular foregrounding sensation, and slightly lethargic, but also not drifting towards overt dreamyness or sleepiness. In fact, the sense that some particular sensation is foregrounded more than others had become a lot softer. So the mindstate was stable, relatively still, relatively broad, slightly dull, and rather detached.

Sometimes a verbal thought would arise, but it would be so "small" that I could barely catch the words - like only two or three tiny words would pop up, or the words are only half-formed. But I understood what was "meant" even though the words weren't fully present.

Sometimes it's vedana, craving, resistance etc that would be momentarily noticed (like a bit of annoyance at a body discomfort or at hearing a loud sound), but again they would be noticed and dropped without further reactivity.

I was quietly fascinated by this state, mostly because I rarely experience it. I do get into "quiet mind" states at times, but those tend to be *very* vague and dreamy, drifting off towards sleep (and sometimes into sleep!). Being in this state while staying relatively awake and open is new to me.

Later on, eyes started feeling dry, so I closed the eyes. This led to discursive thoughts being slightly more prominent (sometimes fully formed words, running for maybe a few seconds, before being noticed and dropped upon noticing).

Mild full body piti throughout the sit.

1h 30m, reclining: The slight dullness of earlier drifted towards more overt sleepiness, and the sense of detachment began to fade. A more "usual" mindstate.

2025-11-01 (Sat)

1h, backless seated: A rather meandering and aversive sit. I started by trying to brush sukha, but was easily distracted, so switched to noting, but physical discomfort and aversion to it became increasingly obvious, so switched to body scanning to get some physical comfort... etc. Also lots of thoughts popping up about practice, evaluating my practice, history of my practice, etc.

It feels like there is a little person frantically running around, trying to fix things, trying to tweak or improve this meditation, trying to grasp at things that have already passed (like yesterday's nice sits) or generate stories to make me feel good (like telling myself that my next sit will be better than this one).

A good part of the sit was spent noticing this little contracted thing running about. This contracted thing would sometimes pop out to observe itself and get resentful about its existence, and then notice that the observation and resentment is still part of the contracted thing, and that this meta-noticing is still part of the contracted thing...

2025-11-01 (Sat) (continued)

Mid-morning, combination of formal sitting and off-cushion noticing: Mind went back to its habit of story-spinning. I spent quite some time trying to characterise the mindstates I was going through. At first, the stories were self-justifying and self-gratifying, then later they were anxious stories about bad things happening, then later nihilist-tinged stories about the meaninglessness of life. Each shift in content was precipitated by a shift in external circumstances/activity. It was like, no matter what circumstances presented themselves to me, I just found a way to be unhappy about it. Cue frustration and wanting to fix it with practice: "This equanimity lasted all of 1 day and then I'm back to the dark night?! What do I have to do to get back to Eq? Someone please tell me how to make thoughts suck less!"

And then, as I was washing the dishes, an analogy struck me. Imagine if someone went on a retreat, then spent all their time reading about the history of the retreat centre, writing reviews about the cooking, rearranging the decor in their bedroom to their exact liking... but never got around to meditating and looking into their mind!

I realised that's basically what I've been doing all morning, except with mental objects rather than physical objects. "What are the deep psychological reasons for these mental objects that are arising? How can I tell a story about these objects? How can I shuffle these objects around so that they make me feel better..." (and not looking into the nature of the objects!)

Oh Kailin you silly thing, quit shuffling around and start meditating already!

Funnily enough, when this thought landed, the heaviness, lostness, I-don't-know-what-to-do-ness also disappeared. Now I'm just in a neutral mindstate, ready to get back to meditating.
 

2025-11-01 (Sat) (continued)

1h semi reclining, where is hearing coming from? Tried to reduce effort, but resulted in a fair bit of discursive mind wandering, alongside nice ticklish piti. There were periods of noticing subtle peripheral sensations that occur "around" a major action (like thoughts and body movements that accompany an act of looking). Had moments of that rocking, rumbly feeling inside the head again.

50m seated outside: Meant to explore peripheral awareness by alternating between central visual attention and peripheral visual attention, but even more distracted by thoughts than before.

40m reclining, what is effort? Decided to take the bull by the horns - if I want to know what it means to "effort less", let's directly ask! Dropped in the question "what is effort" at regular intervals, once every 5-15 seconds. And after an activity is noticed (like a physical contraction, noticing a distraction, recalling the technique), asking "is this effort?" Noticed that a lot of things, when looked at like this, doesn't really seem to be effort. So now I'm a bit confused about what effort actually means. Still low concentration, and just very mild piti.

50m, where am I? Settled in with some energy body relaxation, then looked for the sense of where "I" am spatially located. I started with the middle-of-the-head area that had been rumbling in the earlier sit, and hunted around there for a while. Then I imagined that the space around my body was like one of those old CRT TV screens where, when you turn off the TV, the screen would shrink into a centre point then the point vanishes. I imagined space shrinking towards the centre then vanishing, and then looked for where that point of vanishing was. It seemed located somewhere just below the central part of the head, perhaps a little above the back of the throat. Alternated between placing attention on the spot and doing the TV screen imagination to keep getting clarity on the location. Cycled through a few light and fuzzy jhanas - started with dropping into j3, then j2, then later something that was aerated and spacious, like j4 but with a more feather-light feel.

20m, observing the natural movement of attention: Decided to watch how attention moves about on its own. I used See Hear Feel noting, but deliberately avoided hunting for sensations to note. Instead, I sat back (metaphorically speaking), with absolutely minimised effort, and just waited until a sensation floated into the centre of attention, then noted it. Then waited for another sensation to float up, noted it. If no sensation was strongly foregrounded, I chilled out and didn't note anything. So it was fairly slow noting, perhaps one label every 2-5 seconds.

1h 40m, semi reclining, natural movement of attention: Began by playing with peripheral vision again, and using that along with the breath to stabilise the mind. Spent some time feeling into the waves of expansion and contraction of the visual field + breath + energetic effects. Then moved into See Hear Feel labelling of objects arising in attention. After a while, closed my eyes, which led me to drift into a very dreamy, dimly aware state. Came back to feeling very airy, lightweight and refreshed, with the body doing lots of satisfying little somatic releases.

1h backless seated, relaxation: Used breath and intention to find ease and relaxation in the body. Moderate success. Some physical restlessness, but not nearly as much as this morning's backless sit. It helped that the mind had started off in that clear, bright, refreshed state of the last sit.

20m reclining, natural movement of attention: Quite a lot of striving for greater physical relaxation. Noticed that "striving" largely feels like a somatic quality of subtle full-body tension. This might be an interesting avenue for future exploration - the subtle somatic qualities of various mental movements (intention, effort, striving, looking, etc).

--

I'm starting to suspect there is a two-way connection between visual breadth and the psychological sense of expansiveness.

When I'm in a more open, free, comfortable mindstate, the visual field naturally appears broader, more 3D, more panoramic. Now that's a fairly obvious observation - when I feel more spacious, things look more spacious.

But it seems that if I intentionally broaden visual perspective by inclining to seeing peripheral vision, that can also have the effect of broadening the mindstate - leaving me in a mindstate that feels more spacious, calm, and quiet. Or perhaps it's just that maintaining attention on expanding into the peripheral field generates concentration?

"especially by broadening awareness and trying to tune into peripheral awareness."

look at this aspect aslo as if looking at a wild animal behind a tree ... so not to scare it! 

2025-11-02 (Sun)


20m, somatic release, reclining: Inspired by a talk by Peter Levine about releasing the "three diaphragms" (thoracic inlet/outlet, resipratory, pelvic floor), I sent breath vibrations into the three locations, which produced many subtle but soothing little releases.

--

I noticed yet another way in which I was "practising" to suppress or reject unwanted sensations, rather than to let sensations reveal themselves. When I meditate - especially when exploring anatta, I would go in knowing that I'm "supposed" to discover that there is no self. So I would prematurely conclude that this sensation isn't self, that sensation isn't self... without having properly explored those sensations to discover whether or not there is, in fact, some sense of self embedded in there (and if so, what that sense is made up of).

Thus practice becomes a suppressive act rather than an investigatory act.

This realisation came from reflecting on the self inquiry practice I've recently been doing, plus reading some resources on self inquiry (including Angelo Dilullo and Awakening to Reality).

--

1h reclining, natural movement of attention -> inquiry: Slipped into See Hear Feel labelling of sensations in attention quite easily. This time, the labelling was faster than yesterday, about 1-2 labels per second. I guess I had naturally lowered my threshold for what counted as "a sensation floating to the centre of attention". I seemed rather inclined to noticing the sensations associated with an action that felt selfy, felt "this side". My predominant label for these was Feel or Feel+Hear (hear = mental talk like "I"m going to...", "I just did...")

It seems that using this very simple labelling structure helps to reveal the more basic sensory components that make up the "this side" sensations, which might have been obscured if I had used more natural language (and more conceptual) labels like "intending" or "narrating".

Switching to self inquiry ("who is experiencing this?") sometimes produced a sense of awareness growing a little more spacious and easeful than before, and occasionally produced a gentle version of that rapid rocking/rumbling feeling either in the head or the torso.

Slipped towards sleepiness many times - I'd "wake up" to a somatic+auditory jolt. Upon piecing together my memory of what had just passed, I would realise that the eyelids had drooped almost closed, awareness had slid into a very small and dim state, being aware of not much more than some extremely vague mental verbal talk (could barely catch what was being said). So I guess this sit became an observation of the sensations associated with falling towards sleep and being jolted alert again

Cycled through many jhanic qualities messily. One rather memorable one was when I slipped into what I think is a true j3. I was noting noting noting, mind fairly quiet, then suddenly noticed the involuntary release of a very small contraction in the middle of the pelvic floor. A fraction of a second after that release, the entire sense of experience (predominantly somatic, but the feeling was not bounded to the limits of the body/skin) fell into a very still and silent state, but it was a radiant silence rather than a muffled silence. It had the quality of a subtle and refined pleasure, coolly glowing. It faded after some seconds.
 

Kailin, you do claim Stream Entry, don't you? If I remember well from our Zoom talk? 

Haha yes I claim Stream Entry, but I'm not super confident about my claim. And for practical purposes (ie to help me tailor my practice and get targeted practice advice), I don't think it matters too much.

I *think* I have SE if we use the phenomenological criteria. In late 2024 while on retreat, I reached Equanimity, saw a clear Fruition entry, exited into a high-powered and rapid-cycling state that looked like Review. Found that my nervous system had gotten cool and slightly weird upgrades, which hold up to this day. Between late 2024 and early 2025, I saw what looked like several more cycles and fruitions, some of which had classic Three Doors presentations.

But I wouldn't stake my life on that claim. It's possible that what I had experienced was a near miss, followed by a powerful A&P that I mistook for Review, and that the upgrades are just normal skills progression still in pre-SE territory.

And if we use other criteria, such as the Ten Fetters model or depth of insight into no-self, I would withhold from making any attainment claims, as I don't think I have very deep insight...

But either way, I don't think it actually matters that much to get a "correct" path diagnosis. For tailoring my practice, it seems more useful to review my skills and developmental edge at a granular level (eg what is my actual experience on and off cushion? what have I discovered, and what am I overlooking? where am I pushing too hard or pushing in the wrong direction? what skills seem underdeveloped compared to others?) rather than picking techniques based on what path I think I'm on. I'll just try to keep working at my cutting edge, wherever that is, day by day, sit by sit, until I reach arahantship.

PS It's also worth adding that I haven't seen a clear fruition since January 2025, and that my periods in equanimity tend to be brief and fragile, with lots of backsliding into DN. So whether I'm pre- or post-SE, I'm evidently not very skilled at this part of the PoI... so shargrol's advice for what to do in equanimity and inclining towards fruition is helpful

2025-11-02 (Sun) (continued)

1h 40m, restless attempts at self inquiry: Started backless sitting, but body very uncomfortable and restless. Switched to reclining again. Looked for something that felt like "me" in a thought, then asked "who am I?" Did that for a while, but still restless. Starting to doubt whether or not I should continue with this technique.

30m, looking for agency: Switched up to one of my old questions, looking for the sense of agency. Trying to see where and when the sense of agency arises.

While doing this, it occurred to me that the emptiness of time cuts through the apparent reality of all kinds of stuff, including agency, the idea that I can choose. So I ended up looking for agency in terms of past/present/future. Can I make a choice about something that will happen in the future? No, choices occur now, I can't choose something that hasn't occurred yet. Can I make a choice about something in the past? No, the past obviously cannot be changed, and in any case, the past is just a thought.

What about the present, can I choose something in the present? What is arising right now is what is already arising right now, and therefore cannot be changed by an act of choice. What is arising in the next moment is not in the present, has not yet happened, so I cannot choose it. Can I make a choice in this moment that would set up the causes and conditions for something to arise in the next moment? No, I've already said I can't change the present by an act of choice. Can I have chosen something in the preceding moment that would have affected what is happening in this moment? No, I've already said that I can't choose in the past.

So where is choice, when time gets dissected away?!

50m, what does it mean to get lost in thought? I wanted to find out what actually happens in that baffling and often frustrating phenomenon of getting sucked into thoughts - ie when a discursive thought takes up so much attention that I lose track of the external environment and whatever I was supposed to be doing. So for this meditation, I deliberate chilled out and just waited for my mind to wander, waited for thoughts to show up. I set an intention to notice the thought as soon as possible upon its arising, notice it as it falls away, and compare how it feels to be lost in thought vs other mindstates.

Of course, because I was deliberately waiting for thoughts to arise, no thoughts arose for quite a long time... (the ones that did arise were small wispy things that barely caught my attention, not "lost in thought" type thoughts) I was helplessly mindful!

Eventually, thoughts started to show up. The intention setting worked, somewhat to my surprise. The thoughts were as big and attention-sucking as ever, blocking out external stimuli, *but* there was just a tiny thread of detachment that allowed me to process those thoughts on a sensory level, splitting them into See Hear Feel. Noticed how these thoughts were often a rich combination of detailed mental talk, vague or detailed mental image, physical somatic shifts, and somatic emotional tone, all occurring in a fairly small spatial location in and around the head and chest. The multisensory richness and close location seems to be what makes them so attention-catching and feel so real and intimate, and therefore so captivating (when pleasant) or threatening (when unpleasant).

I also noticed that, when thoughts are looked at on a sensory level, they lose the sense that they can "carry me away" or "steal my attention". I'm fine and my attention is fine. Thoughts are just certain kinds of sensations being strongly present and spatially clustered together, no big deal.

Interestingly, during the early part of the sit when I was hanging around waiting for thoughts to show up, I felt piti around the third eye region - a location where I rarely feel piti. I had not made any attempt to point attention at any spatial location, and in fact had tried to keep attention neutral and broad-ish to encourage mind wandering. The piti was just naturally arising at the third eye. 

My motto of the moment: Know everything. Reject nothing. Trust my experience.

(also the Three Characteristics, apparently that's important)

2025-11-03 (Mon)

Haha, woke up this morning and mind is in full story spinning mode again. That chill I had yesterday - to borrow Shinzen's words again - Just Note it GONE!

Mind is also spinning stories to explain to itself *why* I fell off from chill mode into spin mode (it's because of anxiety of X upcoming event... it's because of resentment about X recent event... blah blah), but I recognise that this stream of discursive thinking is basically just a word generator. It's like ChatGPT inventing responses that sound convincing and validating, but that have no foothold in experiential reality.

There's a part of me that wants to resolve to stop using meditation to "work on" bad emotions, because that's what gets me all confused, produces fantasies about what practice is supposed to get me (and thus resentment when those fantasies fall apart), and leads me to instrumentalise meditation to make myself feel good. I was re-reading parts of MCTB2 last night, and quite liked this resolution:

"Thus, my distinct preference when practicing and when motivation and discipline are sufficient to motivate real practice is to assume that “enlightenment” is completely impractical, produces changes that are very limited in scope, carefully defined, and circumscribed, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the scopes of the other two trainings of morality and concentration. This means that I take it as a working hypothesis that it will not make me a better person in any way, create any beneficial mental qualities, produce any states of happiness or peace, and provide no additional clarity into any of the issues concerning how to live my ordinary life. I have experimented with adopting other views and found that they nearly always get in the way of my insight practice, which is perceiving the sensations that occur now, however they are, as well as ideals about them, which are just more transient sensations. Thus, it is not that this particularly pragmatic view is entirely true, as it obviously isn’t, but it really does work well when practicing, and practice that attains results is what I care about."

Yeah, am a bit lost and confused at the moment. I no longer want to run away from "bad emotions", let alone use meditation to make them go away. I'd rather question the assumptions behind that urge to run away - why do I even call these emotions bad? What's wrong with these sensations anyway? Hadn't I discovered that they're just sights and sounds and body feelings happening in a localised space, that they're not me, that they don't bother whoever or whatever "I" am? Why do they suddenly seem like such a big deal again? 

Spotted an attempt at rejecting experience in this very message: I apparently think that I need to vipassanise big chunky thoughts into individual sense door perceptions (or even better, into vibratory nonsense) to feel ok about them.

I link this essay a lot, but it really is a great approach for "bad" emotions: https://www.aroterlineage.org/en/teachings/embracing-emotions-as-the-path/

Thanks shargrol, great read. It resonates with some of the emotional release techniques I'd been playing with, but also made me realise what had been "off" about my previous attempts - I had been trying to *observe* my emotions very hard! Trying to stare them into submission! Increasing distance and duality!

Pasting the key practice instructions here, for my own future reference:

...we let go of the conceptual scaffolding and wordlessly gaze into the physical sensation of the emotion... finding the presence of awareness in the dimension of the sensation of the emotion we are experiencing. Simply speaking, we find the location of the emotion within the body (it may be localised or pervasive). This is where we feel the emotion as a physical sensation. We then allow that sensation to expand and pervade us. We become the emotion. We cease to be observers of our emotions. We stare into the face of the arising emotion with such completeness that all sense of division between ‘experience’ and ‘experiencer’ dissolve... In the language of trèk-chöd it is said: ‘of itself – it liberates itself’, and ‘it enters into its own condition’. In order to use meditation in this way, we need to have developed the experience of letting go of obsessive attachment to the intellectual/conceptual process as the crucial reference point on which our sense of being relies.

2025-11-03 (Mon) (continued)

Off-cushion during the day: Continued to test the idea that deliberately expanding visual attentional breadth could produce a more relaxed, expansive mindstate. Also dropped in a self-inquiry question here and there, especially when a contracted, strongly self-referential thought arose - "who is this thought about?"

While walking from the office to the carpark, I was testing the visual breadth again. Expanded attention to the very edges of peripheral vision AND THEN expanded a bit more (so attention was slightly wrapping towards the back of the head). Suddenly I dropped into a soft, flowy, expansive, very lovely state. Don't know how to categorise it in jhanic terms - I would have called it j4, but there was obvious (though subtle) pleasure, not a clean neutrality.

This state persisted through the drive home, and made me so chill and carefree that it was hard to pay close attention to the traffic, and danger recognition/reaction speed was slower than usual. There was a repeated gentle tug towards deepening into the state, which I resisted, because I didn't want to cause a car crash...

When I got home, I got on the cushion to try to explore the state further. I was probably trying too hard, as I lost access to it. Dropped into a nice soft j2 though.

--

2025-11-04 (Tue)

1h seated in the park, experimenting with visual attentional shapes: Switching back and forth between narrow central visual focus, a moderately broad central focus, peripheral focus, then panoramic vision, to see how they affected thoughts and emotions. Also continued trying the "wrap vision towards the back of the head" game again. The lumpy, stiff shoulders that have been bothering me for the past couple of weeks fixed themselves in the course of this sit - the stiffness released bit by bit, then eventually enough released that it felt ready to crack. I got out a satisfying chiropractor-level neck/shoulder CRACK! A whole load of stiffness fell away. Ooooooh.

For a short while after the sit, I noticed that the visual field remained broad and 3D and encompassing me.

Off-cushion: During the day, whenever I remembered to, I would do the visual game again. It was incredibly relaxing for the body - the body is very lightweight, almost floating through space, and a gentle ticklish piti suffuses it, especially around the back of the body. The body also seems to be more included in the rest of space, rather than standing outside as an observation platform. Mood would clarify and brighten to a nice kind of neutral.

40m seated in the park, then on the drive home, still exploring the shape of visual attention: I know that when I fall into ruminations, visual attention would shrink into a very tight spot directly in front of my face, a few cm in front of my mouth. I wondered if there is a two-way causation here - if I deliberately narrowed visual attention to that spot, would rumination arise? So I tested different attentional breadths to see what "encouraged" ruminations. No clear observations yet.

--

2025-11-05 (Wed)

Off-cushion: More testing of visual attentional shapes, and sometimes dropping in self inquiry questions. I'd pick out the sense of "me" in a thought, then ask, "who is this?"

Due to work pressures, I'd been carrying some background anxiety for the last couple of days, which peaked into foreground anxiety today. By afternoon, it had subsided into a kind of emotional fatigue that left me more easily triggered than usual, so a chance memory sent me into a sudden bout of some sad emotion which had a strong somatic presence. I tried to "become the emotion" (per the Aro gTer article), but I think I only achieved a much simpler lookalike version, something like feeling into the somatic sensations of the emotion without engaging in stories. Regardless, the sensations were actually kind of ok to feel into, maybe even pleasant. After a while, the somatics subsided and the emotion left as well. 

Addendum: In the last few days, I've also been exploring the sense of "effort", and noticing what a weird thing it is. It seems to mostly consist of actions that pretend to be helpful, but are actually quite pointless and just produce discomfort or distraction.

I think the pseudo-mindfulness process, aka the observer, is a subset of "effort".

 Very nice! and all of these pieces go together...

Yes!! Emotions need to be fully and directly experienced AS sensate experiences themselves. This means directly experiencing the actual tonality of both yucky and pleasurable and neutral stuff. This is the key to everything, really. All of the nanas, jhanas, and paths are about finding more and more subtle-yet-pervasive emotional-sensational energies  to become intimate with. A simple way to say it: we have thoughts because we're afraid of emotions and we have "psychological" emotions because we are afraid of "emotional" sensations. And when we experience sensations directly, we see that the self is instinctually created moment by moment by resisting some sensations and pushing them there and "having" some sensations and holding them here. This last part is able to be "seen" by noticing how attention directs itself to objects, creating a sense of other and indirectly the self. Using more effort, just obscures the way attention already moves itself and creates an apparent self. All we need to to is watch it do its thing. 

J4 has a kind of subtle pleasure to it. It isn't sterile neutrality. It is the simple pleasure of a young child, sitting in the shade, watching his farming father methodically till the field. (Buddha's personal example, when he realized that austerity wasn't the solution, but maybe wholesome non-resistance was.) So welcome pleasures born of isolation and meditation, those kind of pleasures only go deeper. Letting yourself go deeper into meditation pleasure is the way.

The way through all of this is to settle INTO the experience in a very intimate and participatory way. It isn't wrong to call it joy and love (!) Joy and love is basically the opposite of effort. So ironic, we humans crave joy and love yet we think the solution is more and more effort.   So we need to paradoxicallyset an intention to use less effort and then allow the natural intelligence of the heart/mind to practice that during our sits. Through trial and error the natural intelligence learns, but we have to give it the clear intention and opportunity.

By the way, I think this classic might also be helpful: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/dharma-wiki/-/wiki/Main/Jhana+and+%c3%91ana+/en

The important part:

How does a yogi know whether to practice samatha or vipassana?There are two very different instructions, depending on whether a yogi is pre- or post- fourth ñana. A pre- fourth ñana yogi, i.e. one who has not attained to the level of the Arising and Passing Away of Phenomena, must put his focus on penetrating the object. A post- fourth ñana yogi must concentrate. It's that simple. And the reason, in my opinion, that the western dharma scene has been so spectacularly unsuccessful in producing high levels of attainment in its students is that western dharma teachers give beginning instruction to intermediate and advanced students; they tell post- fourth ñana students to ratchet up the intensity of their vipassana, when they should be telling them to concentrate their behinds off.

​​​​​​​This, in my opinion tragic situation, is due to a misunderstanding that arose out of a cultural difference. The western vipassana scene, as exemplified by Insight Meditation Society, is influenced primarily by Burmese Mahasi-style vipassana. It seems that Burmese people, by and large, concentrate so well that it is difficult for them to learn vipassana. This, at least, is the conventional wisdom, and my experience in Burma in the early and mid-'90's led me to believe that it is, although a stereotype, generally accurate. Burmese yogis very quickly attain a deeply concentrated state and it is all the teachers can do to get them to look clearly at an object. Westerners, on the other hand, have no concentration whatsoever. We watch television, drink coffee, and obsess endlessly about our careers and our relationships. We are so goal-oriented that if you so much as suggest to us that there is something to gain by striving we will strive from here to eternity. When Burmese monks give instructions that were designed for Burmese yogis to American yogis, the result is too much effort and too little concentration. Without concentration, the strata of mind that contain advanced insight are never reached. This leads to the chronic achiever, as Bill Hamilton put it, the yogi that has attained to the all important fourth ñana, but is unable, year after year, to attain to the Paths.

Once a yogi, whether American, Asian, or otherwise, reaches the fourth ñana, it is imperative that the teacher recognize this and change the instruction from effort to concentration. A post 4th ñana yogi is in no danger of becoming "lost in concentration." He or she has all the tools to deconstruct whatever object presents itself to the mind. The important thing now is to access the relevant mental strata. 

The only thing I would caution is that language above implies "concentration" is like working really hard or thinking really hard or striving really intently. For most people, it's much better to use "centering" as the right translation of samadhi. So the idea is relaxing and becoming more and more centered.  Maybe the word should be "centration"?

In any case, not the typical efforting-flavor of the english word "concentration".  It's the centering that naturally happens when you are filled with joy and love.   It's hard to trust it, but it is the way.

What about "central-de-centration" ?

2025-11-06 (Thu)

30m, quarter lotus, what does it mean to minimise effort while stabilising attention? I just sat down, dropped in the intention to minimise effort, and waited to see what happened. In the beginning, noticing attention slipping from one activity to another, almost like it is wordlessly asking, "is this activity effort?" "is that activity effort?" it was actually kind of fun. Later, slipped into increasingly long trances, and later still, physical tension from the posture began to show itself. In the final minutes, I was restlessly waiting for the bell to ring.

(I suppose what was missing was the "stabilising attention" part. Like, maybe it would have helped if I had chosen a concentration object. :p )

--

Seems like I'm on a Shinzen roll. An email came in advertising a virtual retreat happening this weekend, apparently the last one to be led by Shinzen Young personally. I've actually done very minimal practice in his system, and basically only know of him from his Youtube talks and from reading some of his booklets. On a whim, I signed up for this virtual retreat, to check out what it would be like to actually do a series of proper Shinzen style sits - and perhaps work with him live for the first and last time.

I decided to dedicate my sits from now until retreat time to working in his style, to get a feel for it.

--

10m auto walk: Learned it from a Shinzen video, tested it, and wow! It worked right away! It actually felt really natural and spontaneous. Walking was doing itself, but not the way I mindlessly walk when I'm lost in a trance. My mind was clear, but I wasn't pseudo-mindfully thinking about the walking or making the walking happen - the walking did itself. The *feeling* of the walking was also really different from my normal mindless walk. It felt light and flowy, like the walking moves itself, like space itself is moving. I recognise it as similar to the way I walk when I'm in jhana.

The body felt more relaxed and took on a bit of a carefree bounce. A chronically tight part of my body bloomed into a big lumpy ache, which lasted for a while, then reduced in severity. I guess there was some kind of somatic release that wanted to (but didn't quite manage to) happen.

I need to auto walk more! This is so cool!

--

2025-11-07 (Fri)

30m quarter lotus, See In / Hear In / Feel In drills: Set a recurring 10 minute bell, meant to do 10 minutes each of see in (only), hear in (only), feel in (only) to familiarise with these labels. But it seems that the mind really didn't want to be constricted this way. It was getting confused, lost, wandering, trying to find things to tag, not knowing what to tag.

30m reclining, just notice what's happening with minimal effort: Yeah, letting go of effort again, because effort clearly ain't working. I set an intention to find stability and pleasantness in the body, but they weren't coming easily, and even the intention itself was hard to set and hard to remember. All I could do was lie there and be sort of relaxed. I'm actually struggling to remember what happened during this sit... there were lots of little bits of thinking, but I don't remember what the texture of the thoughtstream was?? I think there was bits of self-talk judging the sit as too diffuse and wandering, starting to doubt the techinque, etc. But each time something that felt like judgement started to float up, I clocked it and it floated away again. I didn't use any word labels, that would have been way more effort than I was capable of expending.

Note: I was *not* sleepy in this sit, I had a good night's rest and was feeling refreshed. So this couch potato effect is not physiological.

--

Felt confused and lost, so I re-read some of the advice on this thread. Especially decided to explore the meaning of this line:

we have thoughts because we're afraid of emotions and we have "psychological" emotions because we are afraid of "emotional" sensations

10m, reclining, exploring the sensations of the emotion: Hm. I'm evidently in some slightly confused, slightly diffused, slightly doubtful, slightly unhappy state. But it's too subtle for me to detect how it presents in terms of body sensations. The thing seems to sit somewhere between the intellectual and psychological layers, as a background hubbub of mild dissatisfaction...

...then I had a lightbulb moment. This is Dissolution!!!

Duh. Just earlier, I was searching and searching for the right word to describe my mindstate. I went, "distracted"? Not quite right. "Diffuse"? Getting there. "Disoriented"? Hmm maybe. Di... di... di... the word kept slipping away from me.

Hahahahaha this is so brilliant! The insight stage is manifesting itself in the way its very name falls away from me!

Clocking the insight stage came with a sense of relief. There is still some feeling of confusion going on, including not quite knowing what I ought to do, but a cloud has lifted just from recognising what is happening, and realising that this is normal.

I went outside, saw a thick mist covering the tops of tree-covered hills - beautiful. Later that day, I was back on the plane, looking over the horizon, seeing sea and sky and land masses merging into a hazy blue - hazy and glorious. Dissolution can be quite pleasant, even take on a sublime aesthetic, when I'm not trying to wrangle it into doing something it's not suited for.

This may have shifted my understanding again. I had been thinking of "an emotion" as a fairly distinct, definable set of sensations (eg sadness = burning in the eyes, lump in the throat, ache in the heart). But that meant only emotions that grew strong enough to have an obvious, locatable somatic presence get "observed" as emotions. Subtle, pervasive energies tend to get overlooked, or rejected as being unmindful, rather than being seen as subtle pervasive energy. But (as I realised in this morning's dissolution-heavy sit) a background energy colouring the entire mindstate *is* also something that can be known...

Question, what to do when the "emotion" is so background that its only manifestation is that thoughts are coloured a certain way? Say mild absentmindedness, or a background mental tension that produces slightly pressurised thinking? These mindstates are so subtle that they're not really felt somatically or even emotionally.

...or is this when (con)centration comes in handy - getting enough stability of mind to notice the sensations making up even these very lowkey emotions...?

Or go full Sanskrit and call it samadhi?

Every time I read this word, I hear it in Rob Burbea's inculpably gentle voice. His voice is an instant antidote to efforting

Also, I've been mulling over the idea of less efforting - trying to see how it can make sense or even seem desirable to me (a chronic overachiever) rather than just fill me with a sense of helplessness.

What seemed to click for me (recording this for myself and perhaps for any other overachievers reading this log) is comparing it to learning other skills, like ear training in music, or fluency in a foreign language.

Effortful study can help, especially at the start (eg learning music theory, doing vocab drills), but the real learning doesn't happen through conscious, planned effort. Grinding vocab flashcards and grammar patterns will not produce language mastery. The absorption of the language into one's psyche, getting into easy flowing communication, or even a simple mental act like recalling the right word at the right time - none of this comes about by conscious effort. It's an intuitive, natural intelligence that does all that. These skills cannot be forcibly trained, only allowed and encouraged to develop.

And then I went, oh, I *have* done ear training, and learned a language, so I know for a fact that this works! And haven't we all learned a bunch of skills (that we totally take for granted) by some mysterious innate way? Isn't it how we all learned to walk, to talk, to socialise?

There *is* some kind of intelligence at work, it's shown itself to work throughout my whole life, so maybe I can chill out a bit and trust it to do its thing...

Hmm. Why is it that, when I felt the dissolution-fog, it was annoying, then when I found a label for it ("aha! It's insight stage Dissolution!") suddenly I'm happy again?

I had clearly perceived the nature of the mindstate *before* I found a word to describe it. And yet I wasn't satisfied until I had found the right word.

Do I need to put words on things, fit experiences into frameworks?

Does a mindstate need to fit into the PoI in order to be acceptable?

Can I let the thing be itself?

Who is it that needs to know?

(Inquiry questions to drift off to sleep to)

 Interesting how once you accepted the dissolution state the problemness went away.

Dissolution can be relaxing!
Fear can be exciting!
Misery can be oddly comforting!
Disgust can be motivating!
Desire for deliverance can be very creative!
Reobservation can be like watching mind fireworks and getting a body vibration massage!

Practice methods and maps are like training wheels, it gets us into the right zone to practice. Eventually you don't need training wheels, but all of us have problems seeing the dukka nanas as impersonal mindstates at first, that's why maps are helpful. 

Most of meditation practice is getting used to experiences and learning not to make them into problems but rather experience them completely.


 

Go directly into the "color" and be curious about it. This is vipassina.

Don't create concentration separate from lowkey emotional states and then try to go back to the lowkey emotional state, center yourself within the lowkey emotional state that is already there. This is vipassina jhanas.

Learn to appreciate the skill it takes to be with something subtle. Make "you" as subtle as "it". It's not unlike jhana practice. It takes non-resistance, bravery, appreciation, curiousity, sensitivity, intimacy, and a very very gentle touch. Frankly, a lot of the time, vipassina of subltle mind states leads to jhana... and jhana leads to the discovery and vipassina of sublte mind states, organically moving back and forth. This is mature practice.
 

Thanks

2025-11-08 (Sat)

30m quarter lotus, note everything: Doing another Shinzen prep exercise. I was going at a fairly even and comfortable pace, 1 label every 1-2 seconds, with no drifting away from the technique. Mind was fairly bright, alert, relaxed; body felt calm as well.

After a while, it occurred to me that I was applying the noting technique in a way that constrained attention to specific, fairly narrow objects and drawing sharp distinctions between object and background - a specific sight, a specific sound, etc. So I attempted to relax that distinguishing impulse, allowed awareness to be broader and gentler. Felt good, but eventually I started drifting into discursive thinking. So the rest of the sit became a search for a happy medium where attention wasn't being constrained to make the technique work, but also not growing so slack that I completely drifted off. By the end of the sit, the labels had fallen away, and I was in something that had a "drop the ball" vibe to it.

Body felt surprisingly ok, with occasional mild frisson-like piti, otherwise no noticeable jhanic factors.

1h quarter lotus, enjoy sitting with low effort: Set an intention for a broad awareness across the senses, while testing: what is the least effort that can produce/maintain this state?

More mind wandering than the last sit. Each time the mind fell out of trance, the calm awareness state would restore itself, though with less breadth than before, and I would need to make another intention to broaden it again.

At the half-hour bell, I started occasionally dropping in a self inquiry question: "Where is seeing coming from?" "Who is aware?" This produced something that felt like sleepiness - dimming awareness, struggling to keep eyes open. By contrast, whenever I fell into a mind wandering trance, I was quite awake and alert and energised. So this sleepiness seems to be triggered specifically by asking inquiry questions. Perhaps it's an instinctual attempt to avoid the question or avoid the answer?

Body still feeling quite good.

20m, j4 + auto walk, walking outside on a small straight path: I experimented until I figured out a repeatable step-by-step procedure to "turn on" the j4 and auto walk that I had discovered this week. It goes something like this (it sounds laborious when written out, but the whole thing only takes 5-10 seconds to do):

1. Get a j4 feel going:
   
   1. Stand still, relax the body, relax the gaze, especially muscles around the face and eyes
   2. Tune into peripheral vision, especially on the sides - try to expand to 180 degrees
   3. Bring central vision back in to even out the visual field, lessening the sense of foreground/background between centre/periphery
   4. Check for any physical/mental tension that had been produced in the course of doing this, and relax the tension
   5. Tune into the sense of 3D space created by the panoramic visual field, and send peripheral vision even further back behind the ears to get a sense of space behind the body as well
   6. Allow the body to relax into the space in which it resides within this 3D space bubble. It should feel like the body has somewhat merged into this 3D field of sensation
2. Auto walk:
   
   1. While maintaining this state, gently set an intention to walk
   2. Lightly tilt the body forward until I almost tip over
   3. Lift one foot just before I tip over
   4. Auto walk should begin

Whenever I noticed I had dropped out of this state, either by losing the sense of 3D space or by starting to think consciously about the fact of walking, I would pause walking and tune in again.

It seems that the most common place for me to drop out is when I make a 180 degree turn at the end of the path. I suspect it's because in the motion of turning, I forget the metaphor of inclusive flowing space, and revert to my default metaphor that space stands still while my body moves within it.

​​​​​​​I might find a longer path for my future auto walks, ones with fewer/no sharp turns.

Also: during the first few minutes as I was auto walking, every few seconds I would suddenly get a somatic sense of fear, like a jump scare, along with a thought that I was about to walk into an obstacle and faceplant on it. (I could *almost* see a pane of glass in front of me, so clean and transparent that I don't know it's there until I faceplant.) This happened a number of times, but each time the walking continued - I mean, the jump scare crops up too late for me to consciously stop the walking. So I just walked through these invisible barriers. After a few minutes, the jump scares stopped happening. Maybe something in me is a bit afraid of "walking without thinking" and thinks I'm going to get into an accident doing this?

1h semi reclining: I meant to stabilise with the energetics of the breath / broad visual field (some messy blend of techniques that get me feeling pleasant and concentrated) then perhaps do some self inquiry after that. The breath immediately got some cloudy sukha going, but sleepiness started settling in again. I closed my eyes. That sent me into a very vague, dim, surreal mindstate where, every now and then, a single image (partly mental, partly on the closed eye screen) would drift up. Most images produced an immersive sense of 3D space opening out into the distance, or of space moving through and past me. eg one was a long narrow tunnel hurtling into the distance. Another time, scenery and road signs were passing by me as if I was driving. Occasionally, a tiny snippet of mental talk would drift in, but also vague and surreal in content.

In between these, every now and then, I would let out a single audible gasp, as if I was falling or drowning, and suddenly surfacing to gasp for air. There was some kind of momentary anxiety involved in it. Then I would drift straight back into the vague state.

Dropping in a self-inquiry question created the rumbling sensation in the head.

Body was bathed in background piti and other nice feelings throughout.
 

2025-11-08 (Sat) (continued)

After doing some life admin, I realised I had slipped into some lowkey emotional state. There was a slight mental "grumbling", a slight not wanting to do stuff, slight hesitancy about future stuff and slight regret about past stuff. In other words, it's a perfect opportunity to test

"Go directly into the "color" and be curious about it"

45m semi-reclining, exploring this lowkey mood: Started by trying to characterise the full body-mind state with as much clarity as possible. The overall flavour was a slightly oppressive, slightly too warm/heavy kind of feeling. The mind was a bit thick and sludgy. A few times, this manifested itself visually - with eyes closed, the whole visual field would make a single slow ripple movement, like ripples in a lake but slower and asymmetrical. The breath was short, ragged, and the in-breath a little more forceful than necessary. When I fell into thought trances, the thoughts were about random, unrelated things, mostly mundane stuff that is kind of boring and grey - like boring work stuff. Whenever I checked my facial muscles, they were in a very mild grimace - I've slightly scrunched up my face.

After a while, I let go of the deliberate attempt to dissect the mindstate, and just lightly anchored on that strange little ragged breath, intending to immerse in that state. I hung out in that slightly sludgy zone, with occasional mind wandering. Every now and then, there'd be a single breath that sends a mini-wave of refined ticklish piti through the body. Not through the whole body - it would just be one part, and the piti would traverse it in an asymmetrical, wavy manner, such as curlicuing up one leg, or sliding diagonally from one shoulder to the opposite hip. As soon as the wave was gone, I was back to sludge zone. I have no idea what triggers this occasional piti, except that it always happens on a breath (I can't recall whether it was in-breath or out-breath, start or end). Occasionally, I'd get a sudden single gasp for air.

--

Shinzen Young's Home Practice Program started this afternoon! I've signed up to 4 out of 5 sessions.

2h guided meditation by Shinzen Young - Focus In: This was my first time doing the Focus In (noting mental talk, mental images, emotional body sensations) technique for a sustained period. It was really interesting, and I suspect it would be really useful for doing the subtle emotion investigation that currently interests me, as well as for noticing how I habitually separate/reject certain internal sensations in favour of others. So I've written an enthusiastically long log.

Anyway, to narrate the sit chronologically:

For the first round (perhaps first 30-45 minutes?), I was keeping pace, labelling very consistently, 1 label every 1-3 seconds, only occasionally drifting off and usually for no more than a few seconds at a time. Labelled See - Hear - Feel - Rest, individually and together, per the guided instructions. Nothing remarkable to report. Occasionaly noticed very short (1-2 second) periods of Rest, when there were no presenting internal sensations.

At the second round, things got interesting. Mental talk and mental images popped out to "that side". They popped out spatially - into a virtual space that surrounds my head - like I was wearing VR goggles which projected a virtual space in which I could see and hear things that appear to be at varying distances from me. I call it a virtual space, because I recognise that this space does not map onto consensus reality space - it's like another dimension altogether.

They also popped out agentically - the voices no longer sounded like my voice, didn't feel like they were under my control or initiative, didn't involve any subvocalisation (which normally happens when I talk to myself, even in meditation). They were "out there", proper auditory hallucinations. Most commonly, they appeared to the top left or top right of "me", though they could appear anywhere in that virtual space. They could be different voices, and I could almost profile the person by how they sounded and the topic of conversation, eg "middle aged professional woman", "argumentative man". The contents were mostly mundane stuff. Sometimes the inner sounds weren't talk but chanting, or ambient noises.

Mental images were similarly "over there", typically 3D and quite convincingly real, and mostly mundane content. Emotional body sensations tended to be triggered only on rare occasions when the talk/image was about some emotionally charged thing (like someone glaring at me).

At the third round, I felt I had gotten enough into the flow of things that I could drop the labelling and just notice stuff. So I just let the inner talk, image, and emotional sensations run freely. They flowed naturally and almost continuously, sometimes chaotically, sometimes so fast that they became gibberish and I could only notice a kind of hubbub of colours, shapes, and sounds filling the thought-space.

After a while, it occurred to me that, while mental image and mental talk had long since popped out to "that side" and were doing their own thing, the body sensations were still on "this side" and also didn't really get noticed unless I deliberately tuned into the body. So, I'd be watching the images and talk bubbling along, and every now and then it would occur to me to check whether or not any emotional sensations were occurring, and I'd had to flip attention over to the body space to feel for it. Towards the end, I tried to reverse this habit by deliberately anchoring into body sensations, and reaching out to check for associated images and talk.

I was also surprised by how absorbed I was. I had slipped into a state that almost felt like lucid dreaming - the images/talk were so immersive that I almost bought into that world, despite being sensorially minimalist, and sometimes only barely remembered I'm actually sitting here meditating. But despite the absorption, I was still pretty consistently labelling/noticing the whole way through.

No pleasurable jhanic factors (perhaps because I was seated backless the whole time, which took a bit of my attention to maintain, and I would sometimes pause to stretch or shift position), though the hallucinatory stuff is clearly a concentration-related phenomenon.

I'd love to keep exploring this technique, especially to use it to explore how the internal thought-space is created and plot its coordinates.

(About an hour after the sit ended, it occurred to me that the end of the sit, when I was still in that giddy concentrated mode, would have been the PERFECT time to whammy myself with a self inquiry question - "Who was observing all that inner talk/image/sensation?" Derp. I'll do this next time.)

Aha, the low key mood is probably the disgust nana! -- the face scrunch (and usually hot body) is diagnostic for me. (In the same way, subtle frowny face and a warm softness, like a baby crying itself to sleep, is indicative of the misery nana).

I really like your J4 protocol. Seems like that could work with eyes closed, too. Worth experimenting!

Auto walk is great. I also find that there are flash moments of fear that came up as I began letting go more. (I would do a form of "look at it" meditation, as in: look at it walk, look at it brush his teeth, look at it type - basically noticing how "auto" shows up throughout the day.)

The "very vague, dim, surreal mindstate" has been a very very very valuable "domain" for me to be in, especially during evening sits. (Don't make the mistake that "mindfullness" needs to be bright, clear, shiny -- if you are aware that things are vague, dim, and surreal when things are vague, dim, and surreal... then you are mindful. How vague and dim can things get?)

That sounds about right, I had mentally tagged that sit as "Hmmm Misery?? Disgust??"

Your Misery diagnostic is interesting. Every now and then, I'd get something like - feeling small and exposed, with an urge to hug a big warm pillow for comfort ("sad baby wants mummy" vibe). Hadn't thought to check if it's PoI related.

And good tips!

2025-11-09 (Sun)

Overnight: Struggled to sleep overnight. Normally, if I get insomnia, I would listen to an audiobook or talk to lull me to sleep (and to prevent me from tipping into thought spirals, as is prone to happen when I'm alone with my thoughts). But I wanted to stop distracting my mind from having to face itself. I resolved not to listen to anything, and just use this as practice time. Soon enough, thoughts were turning to stuff that triggered annoyance, anger, indignation. Sometimes, swimming among these anger/aversion type thoughts, there'd be a softer thing that feels more like sadness, and the anger is just a protective covering. I noted them whenever I remembered to ("arguing", "frustration", "anxious", "sad", etc)

Fell asleep after a couple of hours, had a very creepy dream, one that shook me awake with a visceral shiver.

Looks like the dukkha nanas are throwing a party in my mind!

--

4h, Shinzen Young HPP, Focus on Rest (instructions / guided meditation / Q&A): Well, this sit was a right mess! For the entirety of the first hour, I was almost continuously in "chatty mind" - pressured and tense mental talk, mostly on pleasant or neutral topics but with an uncomfortably high energy perkiness. This was accompanied by a *very* rigid, scrunched up face - scrunched enough that facial muscles were aching. Extremely hard to stick to the technique for more than a few seconds at a time.

After an hour, I switched from quarter lotus to semi-reclining to see if a more relaxed posture could reduce that high energy feel. That led quickly towards heavy sleepiness.

So during the break period, I lay down in bed to actually try to take a nap. But (of course :\ ) once I was lying down, sleep wouldn't come. The high pressure mental talk resumed, and my throat suddenly became dry and I started coughing.

In the final 30 minutes of this program, I thought I'd at least attempt to produce some kind of restful state. I made a mental move that instantly turns off all discursive thinking - something like tuning into that layer of mind where words happen, and hushing it by intention, using the breath as anchor/aid for the hushing. (I guess a more neurosciency person would describe it as turning off the default mode network.) This produced a sterile kind of silence, a rather anaesthetised feeling. I hung out in this state for the rest of the sit. It was quite restful, as the mental spinning ceased and the body was able to relax, but it feels kind of artificial and suppressive. I wouldn't want to do this except as an emergency measure ("in case of fire, TURN THOUGHTS OFF here").

(I suspect it feels "anaesthetised" because the mental talk hasn't truly disappeared. If I pay close attention, there are barely perceptible whisperings, like the first stirrings of thought, lurking beneath the artificial silence. Like sharks swimming silently beneath the waves.)

1h 30m Shinzen Young HPP, Cross Training (rotating between see hear feel, expand-contract, auto move, feel good, 15 minutes each): Attention still feels quite jagged and pulling in different directions, with some tense chattiness, uncomfortable stuff rattling in the body, ache from gripping muscles, etc. I barely followed any of the instructions.

Heading outdoors for auto walk had a positive effect. I think partly just from being outside and seeing some greenery and distance, and partly from attempting j4. It wasn't nearly as smooth as yesterday - the j4 was very weak, and the walk either didn't feel very auto, or had a heavy, "plodding elephant" feel to it. But I noticed that the j4 move also had the effect of quieting the tense chattering voice, but without the heavy suppressive silence that is created by my THOUGHTS OFF emergency switch.

Later, back in my seat, I allowed the technique to fall away, and just observed what the whole body-mind is doing. Realised that there was a constant tug towards tensing the facial muscles, and when the tensing reached a certain level, the chatty voice would start. So I placed attention on the face, on noticing what the muscles were doing. I could feel them starting to tense even with full attention on them. But with continuous intention to relax, they don't tense up to the point where they ache and the chattering begins.

After a while, I drifted again into a very dim awareness with a rumbling/rocking motion in the head and body, this time less like an engine rumble, and more like a jar full of marbles being shaken and all the marbles rattling about.
 

Hmm... forum problems again? It's not letting me post my next log. Let's try doing this in chunks.

2025-11-09 (Sun) (continued)

Looks like I had slipped into DfD last night (when I decided to practise through the insomnia, noting all the thoughts no matter how nasty they were) and ReObs this morning (tense, hyperactive thinking).

I got back into Eq this afternoon - more chilled out, and there's more curiosity about experience again.

Ok, posting in chunks seems to be working.

--

Random musing 1: the metaphor you use for your practice technique makes huge a difference to the practice. Couple of recent examples:

1) Staring into the face of the emotion. Previously, I had taken that literally to mean "I am here, the emotion is there, and we're in a staring contest". So I was trying to process emotions by observing them in a deliberately dualistic manner, safely quarantining myself from it.  Now I realise it's more like BE the emotion.

2) The panoramic nature of 4th jhana. Previously, the word "panoramic" led me to form a mental image of an ultra wide screen TV, or perhaps a panoramic photo, and me as the spectator looking at the panoramic view in front of me. So I'd expand vision as far as it can go, but it was always "out there", always stopped before reaching "here". It still produced something that had a slight j4 flavour, but it's a lot staler compared to the version I discovered once I started including "here".

Hm, I don't seem to be able to post my second musing, even after cutting it down to 2 paragraphs (it was an 8 paragraph wall of text). I've already removed any special characters I could find in there, but it still seems to trip up the system.

Anyone else having issues with posting? When I press publish, it sends me back to the thread but the post doesn't appear.

"as is prone to happen when I'm alone with my thoughts"

Hey this is happening to me too!  

What about that "when I am alone with my" (this or that)? 
Who is alone? Sink your teeth into this aspect! Also, alone with what exactly??? I would suggest calm-abiding before bed time! 30minutes will do. Calming the body with each inbreath, calming the body with each outbreath. No noting or strategizing! 

This could also be a good first thing as you wake up in the morning, practice. 

"Anyone else having issues with posting?"

Yeah, me too! Karma is such a biatch! I see it as a sign to not post what I was intending to post! Maybe its better for all the beings if I did't post what I wanted to post? Or not? Or maybe? 

I thought DhO was trying to politely tell me I'm writing too much

I'm going to give it some time to cool down before I try to submit another big post.

This idea occurred to me today as well! I realised that instead of noting, I could have turned it into a self inquiry practice. Who is having these thoughts? Who are these thoughts about? What are these things I'm calling thoughts? etc.

I'll do this the next time thoughts start crowding in on me.

(Will posting work now?)

Random musing 2: I feel there is a paradigm shift brewing in the way I'm processing sensations. It comes out of simultaneously 1) locating sensations in space, and 2) recalling that sensations contain their own awareness.

The most immediate, psychological benefit I'm seeing is that thoughts become much less of a problem. Once I notice how much space there is, how many other sensations are present that are *not* thoughts, and how awareness is not stuck in the place where thoughts arise, thoughts just... matter a lot less!

To illustrate:

While doing yoga today, and sensing into the body, I discovered a top-heavy body map in which sensations clustered around the head were much more prominent than sensations elsewhere. So I tried to "spread awareness more evenly" throughout the body and also across other sensations, like the sight of the room. I tried to meet the sensations where they were, rather than referencing them back to the head region.

Soon, a thought popped up saying, "I'm tired, I want to stop doing yoga." Normally, a thought like that would sound convincing, and then I'd have to plead or cajole or threaten myself into continuing yoga.

But today, I decided to check what the rest of the sensations were saying, like I was conducting a poll. The legs said they're not tired, they're ok and can keep going. The feet said they're ok. The hands said they're ok. The torso said it's ok. The yoga mat said it's definitely ok. The room said it's ok too.

How curious! There are words floating around the head region saying "I'm tired", but because awareness was spread somewhat more evenly, these words only counted as one "vote" in the poll of whether or not I am actually tired. In this case, it was outvoted by the overwhelming sensory evidence that there wasn't actually any tiredness occurring.

This repeated many times through the session - a thought pops up complaining about this and that, and it sounds convincing. But when I consult other sensations, they're fine. There might be sensations of warmth, pressure, pulling, burning, etc around the body, but they're not unpleasant. In fact, it seems as though the unpleasantness, as well as the urge to stop, is constructed somewhere in the thought-space around the head.

Amazing! Thoughts are shrinking down to their proper size and location, rather than dominating or interpreting the rest of experience! Body sensations are distinguished from judgements about them and interpretations formed from them! The tapestry of sensory experience is so much richer, so much more alive, so much more ALL HAPPENING RIGHT HERE, than some lonely narrator voice in my head telling me what's going on!

(I suspect that off cushion practice, with activities that involve movement and sensory integration, would be really useful for deepening this feeling. I just came out of washing the dishes and was marvelling at how rich the experience of washing dishes was.)

(I also suspect this is the type of thing that more athletic or body-aware people would have discovered long ago. I'm, like, just starting to appreciate the importance of having an embodied practice.)

 Haha! Posting is working again! The rambling can continue!

2025-11-10 (Mon)

During off-cushion j4 + auto move + "look at it": I realised that some actions I had previously thought of as "mindless actions" are not mindless, they're mindfully happening in the periphery of attention. I guess I had assumed that mindfulness = direct central attention, but my recent playing with peripheral awareness is blowing that assumption apart. eg When I intended to put food in the fridge, and my hand shoots out to open the fridge door with no further thinking, I wasn't being mindless, I wasn't lost in a trance. The hand movement was an automatic action that was fully present in peripheral awareness.

1h 30m Shinzen Young guided meditation, "Don't Know" (note the sensations of not knowing something - develop equanimity with not knowing):  This was a clean, refreshing, quietly fascinating meditation.

In the first half, the meditation structured itself like a very wordy Q&A type inquiry practice. A little narrative voice would pop up to note something in experience that I didn't know about, then answer "don't know". "What was that sound outside the door?" Don't know. "What does so-and-so think about me?" Don't know. "Am I doing this technique right?" Don't know. Despite the wordy narration, the meditation stayed very anchored to the technique thoughout, labelling something as Don't Know at a rate of 1 label per 0.5 - 10 seconds.

I began to realise that so much of my frantic thinking and searching in daily life comes out of an unacknowledged fear of not knowing. I saw the compulsive certainty seeking in real time: "don't know" -> anxious thought -> planning thought -> anxious thought about plans going wrong -> ... a whole project designed itself inside my head, unasked for, in a matter of seconds! All because I felt one moment of uncertainty (the don't know at the start) and I couldn't bear that sense of uncertainty.

This looks like a powerful practice. Seems like it is identifying and targeting a very deep-seated urge (the need for certainty, and thinking certainty = safety), whose untangling would shake the foundations of a lot of my emotional suffering.

In the second half, I experimented with a different way of doing Don't Know. I dropped the verbal questions, and instead tried to search for the somatic sensations of not knowing. It was a very quiet, simple, pseudo-drop-the-ball meditation where I waited for a thought or emotion or somatic sensation that indicated Don't Know to arise, then tried to feel what it felt like. Sometimes there would be a faint sensation of queasiness or wobbliness deep in the gut and groin, feeling like I'm standing on shaky ground. But the overall feeling in the body and mind was clean and clear and fresh and bright. 

30m, j4 + auto walk, outdoors: As it was raining, I didn't go to the park, and instead continued using a short corridor and making 180 degree turns. At each turn, I placed particular attention on the sides and back of the head and body, which helped the j4 to stay on.

I also realised my reliance on the visual system (which feels so much like it "comes out of my eyes") to do the j4 trick meant that awareness remained strongly tied to the eye/head region. "I am in my head, noticing that my legs are walking on their own." So I attempted to put awareness in the legs themselves. But perhaps they were too distant from my eyes, it felt like attention was just switching back and forth between head and legs. Then I tried going for the middle ground, placing attention on the navel chakra / lower dantian region. That seemed to work slightly better, and also made the body feel significantly more grounded and unified, with less sense of separation between the head and the rest of the body. 

Glad to hear the rambling may continue!

Drive by comment:
On retreat this was one of the main ways that I really started to get nonself going. It was in noticing the sense of self being in the head and behind the eyes, but then also noticing that these particular sensations kept disappearing from the conscious space when attention would shoot off to different locations in the conscious space and sort of forget that area. It was like: "Damn, how can this thing which isn't there all the time be a self."

Not sure if that is useful, I suspect you have a deeper sense of nonself that I do (I'm still pretty new to it as a direct experience). But this part of your log got me reflecting on this.

Thanks Ryan, that was a cool tip! I dropped it into my sits today, which led me to notice that I am confused about whether something feels like it is "the centre of attention" vs "the centre of ME". The confusion is probably a good sign that I've found something to keep poking at. (I suppose I was exploring how much I identify myself with attention...)

Also, I have very little idea how far along my nonself realisation is! I don't know if there is any good "objective" marker, except maybe by describing which perceptual upgrades I do or don't have, as clearly and honestly as I'm able to... which, come to think of it, might be a fun (and potentially elucidating) activity to do at some point.

2025-11-11 (Tue)

Morning, 30m walking, then 40m seated, in the park: Attempting j4 + auto walk again. The mind was bright and relatively steady, but j4 didn't seem to take. I could broaden awareness using the outdoors visuals, sounds, and body sensations, but no "concentration feeling" (like a remarkable smoothness, stillness, etc) arose. It just felt like clean, simple, broad mindfulness. Sometimes I slipped into thought trances, but usually only for a matter of seconds before awareness broadened again. The auto walk didn't really take either.

At the half-hour bell, I switched from walking to seated, to see if a more jhanic-style experience would arise in seated position, but no luck. I shrugged and started doing inquiry questions ("where am I?"), which sometimes triggered that mild wobbliness in the gut again. I think it's the same feeling that happened with the Don't Know practice. Perhaps my somatic response to self-inquiry questions is "don't know".

Also checked where attention had landed in that moment, checked whether attention felt dualistic or non-dual, checked whether or not there was a sense of effort, and if so what made up that sense of effort.

Afternoon, 1h seated, then 20 minutes walking, in the park: j4 still wasn't showing up, so I just went for a broad awareness of centre and periphery, of all types of sensations - visuals, sounds, body sensations, thoughts, emotions, mental impressions about all of these, and especially anything that felt like "me" - just letting them show up within a very broad and inclusive awareness.

Mind was clean and non-sticky, and awareness was naturally pretty broad. Even when attention honed in on a specific object, it didn't stick for long before it unlatched and zoomed out again. Sometimes a thought dropped in that had an emotional charge; when that happened, attention would naturally switch to attending to the somatic sensation of the emotion. I wanted to really soak in the emotion and get to know it from the inside out, but the emotions wouldn't last for more than a matter of seconds before fading away, and mind returned itself to broad awareness and a neutral emotional state.

At times, there was a mindstate that felt almost like a mild boredom, but at other times, paradoxically, there was a> pervasive (as in, it coloured the entirety of experience) yearning that felt almost like desperation. But desperation for what? To know if I'm doing meditation right? To make progress? To answer the big questions of life? Hard to tell. But the most prominent self-inquiry question that asked itself was just, "What is this? What is all this?" And by "this", I mean everything in experience. "What is all this, really???" "Don't know." The not knowing sometimes felt a bit scary, sometimes surprising, sometimes just provoked a mild somatic feeling, and sometimes felt bland.

At one point during the sit, while attempting "broad inclusive awareness" of all phenomena, I tried to ask the flipside question: "What is being rejected? What is being excluded?" That was a surprisingly poignant way of exploring awareness - like extending kindness and care to phenomena. (Slogan for equanimity: "No phenomenon left behind!")

Off cushion: Tried a number of times to activate j4 - eyes open, eyes closed, in a small room, in a wide open area. It wasn't really accessible. So later I switched to exploring peripheral awareness and inclusive awareness in other aspects of daily life - eg when I'm reading during lunch, can I read while also maintaining some awareness of the taste of the food? When I'm thinking while walking, can I think while still having some awareness of the surroundings?

Also off cushion: Continued to notice how much of the things I do (which I used to think is "my personality" or "my choice") are actually fear-based reactions to not knowing - automatic attempts to avoid dwelling in uncertainty. This reaction manifested itself in various places.

2025-11-12 (Wed)

20m guided meditation, syncing with the waves of attention: Trying a new technique for concentration! Generating some piti, then feeling into the subtle waves of sukha underlying / making up the more overt piti (something like that... idk how well I understood the instructions). I found the subtle waves, which were faint and small in size, and seemingly located somewhere in the top right quadrant of the somatic field (I don't know how, or whether, it maps onto the felt physical location of the body). Felt nice. I tried to really be with the waves, "lose myself" in the waves. After a few minutes, mind zoned out into a dreamy discursive memory, then later zoned back in to feel the waves, then zoned out to discursive memory, then zoned in... entirely autonomously, attention went in and out and in and out, between being with the piti and being obliviously mind wandering. It felt really hazy/diffuse, and it was kind of fascinating to see attention oscillating back and forth of its own will. Then I zoned back in to feel the rattle-tattle of "marbles in a jar" inside my head.

*Very* fascinating technique, must try this more. I suspect I had slipped from 2nd -> 3rd -> 4th vipassana jhana over the course of these 20 minutes.

35m walk in the park: Attention drifted about all over the place, mostly between broad and narrow, broad and narrow. I flipped between various techniques, because I literally kept forgetting which technique I meant to do. Was it supposed to have been j4 + auto walk? Self inquiry? See Hear Feel? Ehhh can't remember. This wasn't unpleasant - I was pretty chill with the fact that attention was slipping about.

Did an inquiry question in the last few minutes. "Where am I?" Answer: "I am in the middle of my head." So I placed attention in the middle of the head, trying to feel the sensations there, then asked again, "Where am I? Am I here? Does it feel like I AM HERE?" (i.e. testing if "I" am identified with attention and/or with the middle of the head)

The answer was an unnerving full-body shiver that ran vertically down the body, and simultaneously, the perspective of awareness did an inside out flip. By that, I mean perception flipped from "I am in my head, sending awareness out to the world around me" to "I am the world, looking inwards at this point in the centre". That sense of me being the world, looking at that spot in the middle of the head, faded within a few seconds. But in the aftermath, there was a slight weirdness, a very mild unreality to the environment - like things were just a little ghostly. I think the ghostliness was exacerbated as it was a windy day, and the wind made the world feel a bit more alive and strange and morphing than usual.

Damn, self inquiry does some weird (and cool) stuff!

Off-cushion: There were various constricted, emotionally-charged thoughts that showed up through the day, but I was unruffled by them. They would feel painful for maybe 1-2 seconds, then I would notice that the unpleasant sensations only made up a small fraction of all the sensations that were happening, and that they were vanishing even as I noticed them. A few times, they lasted longer than 1-2 seconds, so I asked, "Who is this thought about?" and of course the answer was ".........", so the thought also vanished. What problem? No problem!

Also off-cushion: I stuck brightly coloured post-it notes on my car windows, designed to be just barely visible at the far peripheries of my vision, to remind myself to keep vision broad when driving

*gulp* I have, on a whim, decided to join a ngondro retreat next weekend. Two full days of repetitive chanting, prostrations, etc.

Someone had asked if I wanted to join, and some part of me said "yeah let's go!!!" before the rest of me had the chance to think of the ramifications.

I suspect this is one of those things that would be rapturously fun in the A&P, please-kill-me-now boring in the Dark Night, and cool vibing along in Equanimity.

Please may the Lord Buddha not send me into the Dark Night next weekend.

(Why does present Kailin keep signing up future Kailin for shit like this )

Interesting. Do you have a link to that? I think the diaphragm is the place where most of my "energy blockages" are. I'd love to find better ways of working with that.

​​​​​​​This one, I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlyY7t0B9-o

2025-11-13 (Thu)

Today's sits were inspired by yesterday's meditation on "syncing with the waves of attention", discussion about jhana and its role in insight in Boris' log, as well as shargrol's earlier comments about falling into nibbana.

I'm trying to get a feel for absorption, synchronisation, intimacy, letting go - what do these feel like, and to what extent are they the same mental move, just expressed in different language?

While sitting, there are occasionally moments where a very specific kind of "letting go" wants to happen. It feels like tipping towards losing myself into something, merging into something. It feels like falling towards the unknowingness of sleep, except that it retains some feeling of fascination, so there is a kind of mental brightness that persists (even if awareness grows very thin) rather than the heavy, switch-off-the-world drowsiness of sleep.

This kind of letting go has a feeling of "being attracted to", like a magnetising pull. As if I'm searching for *just* the right location, that has just the right magnetic force field, that can suck me right in. Sometimes it feels like I'm getting pretty close, I just haven't hit precisely the right spot yet.

If I can get sucked into this thing, where would it land me - in [hard] jhanic absorption? cessation? some kind of nondual state? I don't know, but I want to find out!

1h 20m, semi reclining, syncing with the waves of attention: During the early minutes, attention was passively gliding along with the breath in a lazy sort of way, without me really intending for that. Mild piti and background waves of piti started to show up. There were sometimes different kinds of waves at the same time, like different frequencies, and sometimes they criss-crossed and interfered with each other. Sinking attention into the waves produced a pretty dramatic side-to-side rocking sensation, almost felt like my body was trying to shake itself apart. But alongside that was a feeling of simultaneous excitement and fear, and then the sensation dissipated. From there, I slipped into a mind-drifty state, then into a very clean and fresh mindstate. After that, mind floated about in hazily pleasant discursive thinking, and it was hard to focus on anything.

A migraine was also growing over the course of the sit.

1h, reclining, the same: The migraine was fully coming on, so I took some meds and lay down for maximal comfort. Lots of chopped up discursive thoughts (as in: a few words drop in, then silence, then another few words or a single mental image - most of these relate to a work project with a looming milestone), even though the breath felt clean and clear. After a while, I added See Hear Feel noting for a bit of anchoring. That settled things a bit. The meds started working, the pain in the head began to lift,  and I was more able to feel into the waves, though that also meant feeling more keenly into the nausea that remained!

After the sit, I noticed that I had become more attuned than usual to auditory vibrations - like distinctly hearing multiple frequencies in a single bell chime, each one going wong-wong-wong-wong-wong... Open eye visuals have also become a bit more glitchy than usual.

40m, reclining, the same: Attention extremely scattered and low energy. Forgetting the technique, forgetting I was even meditating.

50m, semi-reclining, the same: Attention still quite diffuse. I allowed the low energy, and just sunk right into the body sensations, as if I was sinking towards sleep, and just kept awareness broad enough so that there was some sinking into other sensations too (like the sensations of the room around me). At times, there was a lightly intended looking for anything that felt like effort or doing, then noticing that it seemed extraneous to the meditation, then letting it calm down. Felt very close to being drawn into something... AND THEN that blasted "meditation cough" came in again!! A ticklish throat and a single cough, out of nowhere, which shook me right out of that mindstate.

Just in case I get hit by a meteor today, here's something to file away. I found it really inspiring for searching for the thing that I was apparently searching for but didn't know what it was yet... You have to trust the heart/mind's inner intelligence, the bird so to speak, and give it the opportunity to find nibbana through practice, it needs to be taken on the boat so to speak.

bp503s_Mahasi_Practical-Insight-Meditation.pdf

...As soon as the five faculties (indriya) of faith,
energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom are
developed in an even manner, he will soon reach the path
and fruit and realize Nibbána.

How Nibbána is Realized
Path Knowledge

The ups and downs of insight knowledge occurring in the
aforesaid manner are comparable to a bird let loose from a
sea-going ship. In ancient times the captain of a sea-going
ship, finding it difficult to know whether the ship was
approaching land, released a bird that he had taken with
him. The bird flew in all four directions to look for the shore.
Whenever it could not find any land, it came back to the
ship. So long as insight knowledge is not mature enough
to grow into path and fruition knowledge and thereby attain
to the realization of Nibbána, it becomes lax and retarded,
just as the bird returns to the ship.

When the bird sees land, it flies on in that direction
without returning to the ship. Similarly, when insight
knowledge is mature, having become keen, strong, and
lucid, it will understand one of the formations at one of the
six sense doors as being impermanent or painful or without
self. That act of noticing any one characteristic out of the
three, which has a higher degree of lucidity and strength
in its perfect understanding, becomes faster, and manifests
itself three or four times in rapid succession. Immediately
after the last consciousness in this series of accelerated
noticing has ceased, path and fruition (magga-phala) arises
realizing Nibbána, the cessation of all formations.

Thanks!

​​​​​​​(May you be safe from meteors)

2025-11-13 (Thu) (continued)

1h reclining, guided meditation, Michael Taft, Who is having this experience? (self inquiry): Reasonably bright and clear mind. Able to re-expand awareness to feel sensations arising in space. Could unlatch fairly cleanly and with minimal residue from thoughts. I got  a really vague sense that I am observing from somewhere behind where my body is - as in, the sensations of my back feel like they are in *front* of me.

I wonder if the "observer me" has slid somewhere further back than usual?

--

2025-11-14 (Fri)

Morning, 1h walking in the park, "look at it" / noticing the movement of attention: I can feel yesterday's migraine wanting to sneak back in, so I wanted to be extra gentle today. Went for a very slow, relaxed walk, and a very light touch effort to notice spaciousness all around, including inside and behind me; sink into all the sensations and all this space; notice the knowingness contained within the sensations - but in a very very gentle way. I sometimes did some "look at it..." stuff:

- look at it noticing spaciousness
- look at it enjoying parallax effect
- look at it thinking ducks are cute
- look at it shielding its eyes from the sun

which seem to help loosen the connection between attention and agency.

At other times, "look at it" slipped off, and I was just noticing attention expanding and contracting (between broad and narrow objects, between sights/sounds and thoughts, etc). Attention was naturally, seamlessly gliding from one type of sensation to nother. Felt nice. The budding migraine-feeling only took up like 5% of space, so it was barely a problem.

Afternoon, 1h walking in the park, j4 + auto walk + space/boundlessness: Switched on j4 and auto walk gently, then did a bit of freestyle noting to check how the mind was. Mind was fairly stable, non-sticky and alert, and feeling pretty good again (migraine feels were gone). After a while, I let the noting fade away, and just allowed whatever wanted to show up to show up. Mostly, I found myself being classically mindful - that is, taking in the sensory richness of walking in the park. At times, an inquiry question drops in, or I slip into a train of thought and then slip out again. The overall feeling was neutral and wide, with a slight tilt towards pleasantness. The world was flowing along, and there was this hazy shifting object that felt like "me" that was flowing along with it.

I got interested in the feeling of space and the boundlessness of space. Noticed that different sense doors constructed different flavours of space. The visual sense constructs the most recognisable sense of visual space. The somatic field has its own space that is alive with pulsating sensations, and which doesn't really map onto "the sense of the physical body"; it feels much bigger than the body and isn't constrained by it. Auditory space is a rich, raucous cloud that somewhat blends with somatic space. The thought-space (the space created by mental objects) is a surreal shifting little dimension unto itself.

What fascinated me was that the auditory and thought-space felt effortlessly boundless in every direction - there's no inside and outside, there's no limit. But some combination of somatic and visual space created a sense of boundary beneath me. The ground looks and feels very solid! So I spent the rest of the walk deliberately noticing moments of non-solidity beneath me, such as by tuning into the sensations of feet walking, but especially tuning into the times when the foot is lifted off the ground, and also tuning into times when I'm lost in a train of thoughts and not really feeling my feet. Both help to loosen up solidity beneath me. 

Duh - I just realised why! My j4 protocol involves noticing space in front of me, above me, to the sides of me, behind me, even inside me... but not beneath me.

The protocol is getting an update

2025-11-15 (Sat)

Feeling pretty calm, neutral, and okay today, so I might try to explore subtle stuff.

2h semi reclining, guided meditation, Shinzen Young, Focus In: I reused the audio recording of the Focus In session from last week's virtual retreat. This time, there were no rapidly proliferating hallucination-like phenomena. It was much more simple. Attention was more diffuse, so the labelling would drift in and out. But attention also seemed more hands-off, a bit more subtle, like it was trying to be very quiet so as "not to scare the wild animal". I noticed, a number of times, a feeling of expectation - "when is this sit going to get interesting, like last time?" Managed to catch this feeling basically in real time, so could notice that this sense of expectation was made up of mild body tensing, almost a forward leaning of the body sensations.

The shape of the thought-space was a lot hazier than last time, perhaps because the internal sensations were also vague and hazy. Body was at times quite still, breath very small - barely perceptible.

--

After lunch, I slipped into one of those low-key bad moods again. So I tried to sink into it and really feel what it is. Mostly it just coloured the thoughts that showed up - they were mostly oppositional thoughts, recalling something that made me angry, then angrily responding to it. Angry thoughts fighting each other. When I switched attention to body sensations, I found mild sensations that felt like anger. And when *that* wore out, what remained was a fairly subtle full-body tension, and a slightly warm, thuddy body - slightly uncomfortable with some kind of inner energy. It came with an instinct to push stuff away:

How do I feel? -- bad
Do I want to meditate? -- no
Do I want to read a book? -- no
Some housework? -- no
What do I want to do? -- nothing, everything sucks
What do you mean by everything sucks? -- [no answer]

Disgust again, maybe?

30m semi reclining, sinking into the emotion: Wanted to keep feeling into this subtle emotional state. There was a mild lump in my heart, as well as that oppositional tendency in thoughts. I think I was a bit too forceful in feeling for the somatic sensations, because that tends to silence the thoughts, which means I don't really get to see what is giving rise to those oppositional thoughts.

I then tried a few different approaches to coax out the emotion. The closest I came to getting a feel for it was when a mental image of a vast barren wasteland showed up, as a metaphor for how I was feeling. But when I tried to look in immediate sensations for what was creating that feeling of vast barrenness, I couldn't find the sensations.

Then a different flavour of thought dropped in: I recalled someone who was kind to me when I was at a particularly low point in my life. That triggered a mini burst of tears. When the tears faded, the lump in the heart was gone, and instead I had a lump in the throat. I slipped from the higher energy "push the world away" mood into a much more low energy "switch off the world" mood.

--

It occurred to me, shortly after this sit, that thoughts are sensations too, and mental images are sensations too! I didn't need to reject them to feel just the somatic sensations.

--

1h, semi-reclining, the same: Kept feeling into the whole emotion. This time, I didn't try to push through mental talk and images to get to the somatic sensations, but just allowed the whole thing to show up. Also dropped in some inquiry questions. Weirdly, I don't remember what happened for most of this sit. Not that I had zoned out - I know that stuff had happened during the sit, but for some reason, I just can't recall what had happened.

What I do remember was that there would be sudden momentary aches on the inner thighs - at the edge where the top of the thigh meets the groin. There would be a sudden pang of pain on one leg, fade away, then later the same pain but on the other leg, fade, then back to the first leg... This was unusual, I don't recall that particular spot ever being achy for me until today, and can't imagine what caused it.

2025-11-15 (Sat) (continued)

35m reclining, attempt at concentration using breath energetics: Made an attempt at concentration, but mind was low energy, and attention kept slipping off into random thoughts and the like.

--

Off-cushion, basically stream-of-consciousness musing, with a morbid fascination about today's mindstate: It's kind of curious, how permanent a mental state feels when it's happening. When I was in that easy, spacious, things-are-flowing equanimity, it felt like I had solved the problem of emotional suffering. "Oh look, emotions show up for a few seconds and then they're gone. What is there to worry about?"

And then today, with the mood dampened and the mind sluggish like this, the earlier equanimity-feeling now feels inaccessible. The techniques I was using then now feel inaccessible. There was actually a kind of embarrassment as I read through my last couple of days' logs. Like, who is this person speaking with such bravado about how nice everything feels? I don't recognise this person. Was I exaggerating, was I showing off?

Wait, actually... I don't know if "dampened" and "sluggish" are accurate descriptions of the current mental state. Those descriptions are true only if I take a really narrow view of "mind" as referring to thoughts, emotions, etc. If I take seriously the idea that ALL of experience is mental, then mind is actually processing pretty complex stuff with speed and clarity. I mean, right now, I am simultaneously perceiving multiple types of vibrations in the full visual field, as well as various pulsing somatic vibrations, as well as sounds all around. There are also questions dropping in (often autonomously) about who is observing all this, and a soft noticing of which stuff is foregrounding at each point (and noticing that the foregrounding element is often the hazy sensations that make up "this side / self" rather than an object). Seems like mental processing power is actually going pretty strong.

What *does* feel sluggish right now is the thing that forms words - "the narrator". I can sort of blankly hang out in spce, without attention strongly falling onto any one thing for long, and without any words forming, for periods of seconds at a time. I'm not focusing on anything, I'm not doing a techinque, words aren't really running, and all this gives me the feeling that mind is being sluggish and lazy. But in fact, there's some kind of high-speed perception going on, which I'm not used to thinking of as mental activity, because I'm so used to privileging the narrative voice as "the mind".

--

Anyway, enough musing. I'm going to test the "exposure to wide open spaces and do panoramic vision to shift mindstate" thing again.

25m walking in the garden: Huh, j4 and auto walk switched on rather easily, though in a very soft and rather lazy fashion. I was noticing the impermanence of sensations at the feet, to help reduce the sense of solidity there. Narrative thoughts were slipping back in, mostly neutral vedana. It felt fairly easy to "drain awareness out of the head" and into other things, like the feet sensations. I'm not talking about any fancy mental move, I mean literally just more noticing occurring at feet sensations and less at the head.

Mostly, this session felt ordinary and natural. I wasn't trying hard to concentrate, wasn't trying hard to be mindful. I was just walking, and sometimes there was an impulse to make a meditation-like move (like noticing where "I" am, or noticing whether or not an action was agentic) and that move happened without further comment, and it all seemed kind of normal and ok.

Unsure whether this was a good, minimal-effort, sensitive, nonself-oriented meditation, or if this is terrible lazy practice

(In general, I've been wondering about the value of the meditations I've been doing recently. I suppose I'm trying to explore boundlessness, luminosity and naturalness, and to that end, I've done a lot of walking meditations, a lot off-cushion noticing, and even when sitting it's often very ordinary stuff in very ordinary mindstates. And it's kind of interesting, but it also feels so ordinary, and makes me wonder if I'm just flaffing around. I have some assumption that good meditation involves getting into a concentration-induced altered-consciousness mindstate, so when things feels so ordinary, I'm like... wtf am I even doing???)

2025-11-16 (Sun)

1h quarter lotus, breath energetics: Intended to develop concentration on the breath. If possible, attempt a closed eye j4; if not, then just keep working on concentration and perhaps do some inquiry questions.

There was quite a lot of high-energy discursive thinking, accompanied by a scrunched-up face and tension at the shoulders. But the breath was fairly clean and refined. At times, sinking attention into the breath produced a momentary, dizzy-woozy, head-drop-like thing. But I suspect it wasn't a physical head drop; I think it was a mental "almost got sucked into it, but didn't quite make it".

25m quarter lotus, the same: A lot more physical and mental restlessness than the last sit. Shoulders increasingly stiffening. Felt like it took a lot of effort to bring up the slightest bit of pleasure from the breath. And as soon as strong effort dropped, or was distracted by something, the pleasure dropped as well. In the background, there's a maddening search for the one who is trying to steer or control or effort through the meditation.

--

More existential angsty thoughts are cropping up, with a vaguely dharma flavour. I'm starting to suspect that the surfacing of existential angsty thoughts is diagnostic of some insight stage (DfD? ReObs?)