tom moylan:
the solution for me is a "calming" practice. this entails noticing the energetic sensations and deliberately broadening my scope of attention to the entire physical spectrum while thinkig "calm" and directing my attention to the more sublte sensations.
i have no idea whether this will be helpful to you but its has had good effects for me in weaning me away from being a bliss junkie.
High EQ advice is really paradoxical, most advice seems like a contradiction... It's because fruition isn't caused by anything, so really there is nothing you can "do". And remember the EQ state has to happen on it's own during a sit, you can't jump to it, even though you may have been "there" in previous sits. Your meditation will take you where you need to go, to what you need to experience. If you are spending time in earlier stages, there is a reason for that. Those are the stages you need to become intimate with. You can't force progress. The stage of EQ requires a foundation of an EQ-like acceptance of all those earlier stages. Even the dark night nanas can be experienced fully, yet with EQ. Fear is scary but also slightly thrilling despite being scary, for example. Misery is sad and awful but also kinda heartfelt despite being miserable. Etc.
But here's advice anyway, for what it is worth:
It's good not to pursue bliss, although it helps to have spent enough time drenched in it that bliss so it is understood, appreciated, but also seen as not "it" yet not a problem either. For people who tend to be adverse, the best advice is to really drench yourself in the bliss rather than being puritanical about it. You don't get any bonus points from denying naturally arising bliss. Plus, bliss sorta works behind the scenes to soften the kind of petty ambitions and control mechanisms that are still running. It would be ideal, but not necessary, to be able to get into a fairly calm, mildly blissful state where you don't care what will happen, yet you are very interested and intimate with the actual body sensations and mindstream that are appearing. Just letting the groovy field of experience do it's thing, wonderous all by itself.
In High EQ it's sometimes good to spend sometime looking at the mindstream -- thoughts coming and going, even noticing how there are proto-thinking-urges that are sort of subtle incomplete thoughts and assessments of your experience that are very subtle and very elusive. This is a weird no-man's land state that is hard to describe, but it is very interesting. You can "see" thoughts before they become complete thoughts. You can "feel" sensations before they become a discrete, definable sensation.
It's especially interesting to get so close to all these half-formed thoughts and barely registering sensations, so subtle, so difficult to pin down, kinda timeless, kinda positionless, even seeing little piece of experience that have the flavor of "my body" "my mind" but it's more like looking in the mirror and seeing it "over there".... and you have to wonder, what is noticing all of this?
