I suspect there may be no one-size-fits-all answer to this, but is there any approximate guide to how many hours of focused meditation it tends to take to get through the Dark Night from beginning to end and to enter Equanimity?

For me it lasted one year. For some people it lasts longer. In an intense retreat setting, it might last only a few days. I think that part of the process that happens during the longer dark nights really needs time to happen. Stuff is changing in the nervous system.

Thanks for your reply. I had read in another thread that full-body dissolution/ bhanga was a sign of entering the Dark Night. If I haven't yet experienced this, is it unlikely that I have yet entered the Dark Night?

I'm not sure what you mean by "full-body dissolution." The Dissolution stage of insight meditation is what happens after the A&P and it's easier to see the endings of sensations rather than the beginnings or middles. It can contain a range of feeling-tones, but it's usually mostly neutral to mildly negative stuff. That said, early to mid Dissolution might include some pleasant post-A&P afterglow that feels like a cool, calm, equanimous bliss. This would, in fact, be the third vipassana jhana.

Dissolution is commonly associated with feelings of laziness or sloth. Dissolution might feel like Dante Alighieri's description of Limbo from the Divine Comedy -- untormented sighing.

No matter how Dissolution shows itself, you are probably a dark night yogi if you have had A&P stuff and after it, you found that it seemed harder to focus during meditation.

When I finally pushed through to equanimity the dark night had only lasted a few weeks. But before that cycles arising and passing I had been in the Dark Night for years.... so... hard to say. Its a natural process, coming to grips with the nature of reality is really scary sometimes... be vigilant, but don't beat yourself up for feeling bad during the DN just (As daniel says) watch for the bleed through

I see great variability in reports of how many hours of focused meditation it takes to get through the Dark Night and into Equanimity.

A number of factors at play here, but much hinges on the words focused and meditation.

As to focused: strangely, it takes somewhat diffuse attention to navigate the Dark Night well, as it is 3rd jhana territory, which is wide.

Second: as to meditation: those who actually can be very precisely mindful, accepting, and yet open and more spacious, as well as keep a lid on their crap or just see it as it is, second after rapid and complex second, those people can make progress really fast. In fact, those who can do this can typically power through from A&P through Dark Night in a few days, usually.

However, this is a small group. Most flounder, are sporadic, get blindsided by their crap, frustrated when the A&P fades, can't phase-adjust their attention and modulate its width to properly sync with the 3rd vipassana jhana, and thus flounder, careen around, stumble, and make a mess of things. For most, it is only after some number of failed attempts, frustration, debunking various personal bugaboos, and the like, that they are able to practice as in the paragraph above. Sad but true.

Helpful?

Daniel

What types of things can one do to cultivate skill with third jhana type diffuse attention? Other than solidifying Dissolution into 3rd shamatha jhana to develop more familiarity with how the third jhana feels. It doesn't seem skillful to cultivate Dissolution when the idea is to go past Dissolution into the no-man's land between third and fourth jhana territory. Then again, 3rd jhana's ease can become rather non-fun at some point, and even distasteful to the point where equanimity starts to seem like a much better place to reside.

Is that a trap for a meditator who wants to believe he's making more progress than he really is, and just needs to stop asking questions and start looking for things to note that haven't been getting noted? Like the desire to note new things?

then it would be much better to try to solidify late dark night (desire for deliverance/reobservation) vibrations into 4th jhana. it's slippery but possible to do, not too difficult, and a concentration exercise directly applicable to the progress of insight. see florian's idling helicoptor vibes thread for more on the subject: http://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/436443

...which conversation was prompted by a comment he made on an earlier thread:

The post that was previously here was overly long. It can be ignored. Here's a shorter version which cuts out all the subjectivity and "I'm going to talk about this simply because it happened to me." However, I'm going to read the helicopter vibes threads that Tarin linked me to, so if they contain answers to this post or the old version of it, then by all means -- ignore this, and help somebody else who doesn't already know how to find the answers to their questions. I think what I'm doing is working, so really I'm just wondering about ways to make it more skillful.

When in Dissolution as a result of vipassana practice, I solidified it into a soft third jhana. Then I dropped down to the first shamatha jhana and got it going pretty strong. Since it was unsatisfactory, I moved to the second jhana. This state was unsatisfactory too, so I moved back up to the third jhana. The third jhana was now medium in strength.

After dwelling in this state for a bit, it became pretty unsatisfactory too. I'm calling this occurrence Misery, and the subsequent desire to get rid of 3rd jhana Disgust. Then I really really wanted equanimity because I felt like it would be satisfactory. I considered that Desire for Deliverance. Around this point, inclining the mind to notice the equanimity aspect of the third jhana (which was still present softly) caused it to move "towards" equanimity feelings and away from bliss feelings.

As I got more and more tired of the bliss feelings and the equanimity feelings which were now becoming stronger didn't seem much better, I became more and more fed up with them. After that fed-up-ness reached a peak, I had the feeling of "fuck it, everything is just going to suck, I get it." After a few minutes, I found myself in a calmer state where I just watched sensations arise, and they weren't particularly doing much of anything aside from existing. All of the dukkha was still there, but it seemed less bothersome.

This new stage seemed more stable than what I'm considering to be the Dark Night proper, but not as stable as M&B, A&P, or Dissolution bliss. So my working hypothesis has been that this is late Reobservation and maybe an inkling of early Equanimity. I've seen nothing that so much as resembles a formation, and it seems like I would have to go more towards the "everything is just okay" aspect of this and away from the "I guess I just have to accept that everything sucks" aspect in order to solidify it. However, maybe I'm just saying that because of my familiarity with the insight stages, and I'm just telling myself that I felt that way during practice. I don't THINK that's what happened, but memory is unbelievably deceptive and rife with self-serving biases.

What are the big pitfalls that I need to watch out here, either because they are common at wherever you believe I'm at, or especially because I've demonstrated that I'm falling victim to those pitfalls? Can it be skillful to use some shamatha to "lube up" the dark night so it's less painful? (Sorry to those people who always have mental images of things people say. I didn't have a better metaphor.)

It seems like noticing the equanimity aspect of the third jhana gives my mind something to shoot for in vipassana practice. I'm aware that to use shamatha states for insight, the blips that make them up have to be watched closely, and this is what I do to un-solidify the shamatha sates. But am I fooling myself to think that the fourth shamatha jhana characteristics can help me find the fourth vipassana jhana?

it sounds to me like you're stumbling around in the dark night, which would mean some things worth looking out for are, off the top of my head:

- indulging in psychological content, particularly that which is heavily conditioned by feeling crappy. (the 'blah blah this sucks' pitfall)
- indulging in a resentful attitude which engenders apathy toward progress; the relative peace of feeling that there is no point in practice is only desirable when it is up against the despair that practice will not lead to betterment. (the 'what's the point' pitfall)
- indulging in laziness by deeming that what progress is possible now can happen just as readily later so there's no point in making it immediately (the procrastination pitfall)
- not attending to the sensations which are actually occuring, and instead wishing for more pleasant ones. (the 'avoiding pain' pitfall)
- assuming that your experience of the dark night is worse than it really is. (the pitfall pitfall)



going through the transition from 3rd to 4th vipassana jhana again and again is how i learnt to 'find' the latter; from a certain point on, i was able to 'find' it simply by inclining my mind that way. i wouldn't say that you're necessarily fooling yourself in thinking that tuning into the 4th samatha jhana characteristics will help you get into equanimity regarding formations, no. why not give solidifying the late dark night a try, see if you are able to get into a pretty solid 4th samatha jhana from it, and if so, then start investigating again from there? pehaps you could start a new thread to tell the rest of us what happens.

tarin