So I am pre-1st path, and I've been doing mainly noting practice for awhile now. When I first got into noting and vipassana, it seemed like every sit was some clearly distinct stage, with a sense of awe at the dizzying changes and profundity of all these new perspectives. I definitely started hitting equanimity consistently, maybe a little less than a year ago.

Something is odd to me though, which is that even, say, at the 10-day Goenka retreat I went on, the nanas were not so clear. In my earlier days, it was like the A&P was always obviously crossed within 10 minutes, with the spinal shaking, joy, and vacuum feeling between the eyes. However, it seems like as time has gone by, the A&P sometimes extremely subtle and almost easy to pass over without seeing. In fact, it feels like this for most of the stages now. I'm confident that I'm still going through the nanas, as the feelings of the nanas in the 3rd VJ are sometimes the most pronounced (thinking of the lethargy of dissolution, the desperate feeling of wanting to finish off the thing in desire for deliverance, the feeling like your head is a beehive with uncontrollable, looping, chaotic thoughts in re-ob). It is really throwing my practice for a loop though, since I feel like I used to sense the vipassana jhanas very clearly.

I wonder, after climbing the pre-1st nanas long enough, if one could become slightly desensitized to the stage-ness of the various stages. I think this is a good hypothesis, because sometimes I'll be off the cushion, and suddenly I'll realize that the content and emotion of my experience is basically a watered down experience of some nana, or at least, a particular VJ. Right after crossing the A&P, I distinctly remember the day when I felt dissolution clearly for the first time. Everything was so oddly colorless and diffuse, and I got a massively strong sense of depersonalization the whole day. Everything was flickering in a lazy way too. But the main point is that the progression through the nanas was fairly clear, both on and off the cushion.

I've also, for some reason, found it extremely hard to perceive vibrations in meditation as time has gone on. At first, I remember how the A&P was so strong, vibratory, and so orderly, and dropping into dissolution, the vibrations would sort of scatter outwards, become less intense, and form a drowsy, hypnotizing, washing pattern. Then I could watch these vibrations get oddly scattered and messed up, seeing vibrations choke out as I tried to look. The point is that I could follow vibrations specifically, and maybe even give a particular Hz for some of the more pronounced patterns. Now, I have a lot of trouble tuning into specific vibrations. I've used my intuition to re-examine impermanence, and now, I tend to do less noting, and more pure, careful watching of things shifting around, without trying to tamper at all (which I feel noting can sometimes do). It intuitively feels right, and I still get the sense that I'm observing impermanence, but I still have the creeping feeling of missing something when I re-read MCTB, with all the obsession over seeing vibrations in real time.

So, has anyone had this experience pre-1st path? (I would probably find responses from people post SE most helpful, since I'm wondering if I'm still making progress towards SE, or if I'm slipping). I've found that vipassana practice feels much more pendulum-like than linear, so I'm hoping that this shift in experiencing the nanas is not a sign of falling backwards.

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Side story: Yesterday morning, I was outside. I've been dabbling with magick, and I basically improvised a ritual/meditation based off of a Native American story I read. I basically took a deep breath and exhaled towards each cardinal direction, then the earth, then the sky. I tried to expand my sense of awareness into each direction. Nothing about it felt incredible or compelling, but when I got to the sky, I crossed the A&P. I was definitely not consciously trying to do any sort of insight practice, so I was a bit taken aback by how suddenly and instantly I crossed the A&P.

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Saying go with brighter stars above or below today. Thx for you patience, that was a lot of ketchup work in last few daze. Hopefully done and doner, threads totaled, resting easy for now, thx again over 2 other U's. And welcome to R University in the Stars. Done with Venus & Mars. 3b.
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Goes all kinds of ways, inflows, outflows,
attend
attend to
what can you do
your in the same boat as me
"some days walk on flowers
some days walk on stone"
days go on for hours
I'll keep watching 'til its home

Sorry, can't be more specific
answer later with a mind
thing went off and left me lonely
with the old behind

czech 4 something in this space
So now I've said I wood
I'll be back
build something better
when the wood is good
-triplethx

- likely be handled by me betters by then tho......
going back to Bob Marley for now so so reeee

My Stars 2 Knights!
turning to another then who offered this to me

had a wise Sona say once
"it starts with a man alone in a room
breathing
it ends with a man alone in a room
breathing"

As far as my experience goes, vibrations seems to be created by that specific way of putting attention that is trying to fix attention on a point and not moving for awhile. If you use you attention in another way, I don't see anything strange in not seeing vibrations.

Don't know about nanas becoming less clear; what about the microscopic-donut-wide attention thing? Is that clear?

Hey Mario. Sorry, but for the portions I underlined, I have no idea what you mean. Could you try to explain your post in more... experiential terms? Phenomenology? I might know what you're saying but I'm really not sure. I'm especially confused at how you describe a one-pointed spot of concentration, since vibrations have really only manifest clearly when I do vipassana (noting), and vipassana is really not a one-pointed or fixed-on-one-spot-for-awhile kind of practice, as I understand it.

Microscopic-donut-wide attention thing... Please describe this experientially; I have no idea what that could possibly mean.

As I said, I've been using noting 95% of the time throughout my career in vipassana. I didn't change the technique, things just stopped being as clearly vibratory as before, so I took to a lighter, less neurotic version of noticing impermanence, where I just observe things shifting, arising and passing away.

why it is asked to watch breath. That when you become aware of breath at the same time you become freed from a state of forgetfullness.
If you get it whats the point there you are streamentry.
That breath is not you, you are stand alone system, always same no matter of what, when you first time discover its then pathmoment.

Microscopic-donut-wide attention thing: just a way to say vipassana jhanas 2-3-4, the second being condcuve to concentration on a small spot, the third being peripherical, the fourth being panoramic.

If I focus attention on a part of the body, say my shoulders, and taking my attention fixated in that place without moving, then vibrations will arise; if I do nothing and I just let attention move as it wishes, they probably won't.

Edit
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By one-pointed, I mean trying to fix attention on an object, wich might also be the whole of the body, wich is a bit different from doing nothing and letting things shift

Oh, yes, I understand you now! I've never really used the donut metaphor but I do know what you're saying. The way I've experienced them basically lines up with that.
VJ's-
1: Just working, building up, mindfulness is usually not consistent and takes a lot of manual effort, Mind & Body being the first sign of progress, with the flavors of 1st jhana mildly present
2: Easy access to jhanas, high mindfulness, energy manipulation, synchronicity becomes common (off the cushion) focusing on any spot is easy. This is the one place where I definitely perceive vibrations clearly
3: Everything winds down, then sucks, negative mind states, overwhelming inability to examine "internal" sensations, content takes on a hounding nature, like a bunch of mosquitos that you know are surrounding and swarming you, but you can't ever pinpoint one, and you certainly can't just flail wildly and kill them. You just get bit and move on...
4: At first, profound calm and clarity, which can easily solidify into jhana (1-4 all seem easily accessible here), with potential for a lot of bliss. Then, winding down further, the whole thing seems like a vast dream with a sense of someone in the middle of it, physical boundaries can get fuzzy, sense of being in a room or on a floor can vanish. There is also the potential for feeling nothing special/enlightening/insightful whatsoever, and it seems to happen after what would be low equanimity.

I can map a lot of meditation experience into these VJ's, which are theoretically very clear cut, but I'm basically trying to say that they don't feel so clear cut anymore, and sits are getting less and less textbook, in regards to the above description. My experience of vibrations is a bit different. I got my start doing fast noting without an object, but rather, noting sense doors. The experience was that after ramping up my noting, there would be a clear tingling, vibratory quality to the whole body (seemingly what Goenka calls Bhanga or Dissolution, although I don't know if he's really referring to the specific nana... he didn't really give much technical information for the first retreat). The field of vision would be flickering, the body would be flickering, hearing would get choppy, etc... These things are still present to some extent, but very much less so.

Contrast that to now, where in my practice, impermanence is more about watching things as they appear in the field, and watching them flux, shift, move around, change, and disappear. It isn't quite in line with how Daniel stresses fast noting and perceiving ever quicker vibrations, but hey, not everyone works in the same way, and not everyone was doing fast noting or focusing on vibrations when they got path. In fact, I feel that fast noting has the potential to make the mind less calm and hence less sharp, whereas this new approach allows me to also "reserve my interaction with sensations", sitting back and making a point of watching without getting involved, which then allows me to examine how my mind is naturally lunging out at these things (unsatisfactoriness), and how when I don't do anything except watch with a bare minimum of involvement, it's clear that there isn't anything I did to make the things appear, flux, or disappear (no-self). There is definitely a point in equanimity where everything seems super ordinary and not meditative/insightful, and another one of my theories is that if one's baseline approaches this point, going through the nanas will have the qualities of ordinariness. Under this hypothesis, it seems that not only do we have to go through each of the nanas, we have to travel up and down the nanas from the viewpoint of each nana. Now there's a sub-jhana/sub-nana thing to think about...

I think I understand what you're saying about one-pointedness too, although I disagree. I've really only understood one-pointedness in a more classical sense, and that is in the context of jhana practice. Especially clear in the 4th jhana, one-pointedness, to me, means/feels like the stable, fabricated, non-wavering, seemingly solid absorption of the mind to the field. But as I understand it and practice, vipassana is about disrupting solidity and stability in the field, releasing and seeing through fabrications, and especially scrutinizing and deconstructing jhanic factors if they do arise. In fact, I've never really heard anyone suggest that one-pointedness is specifically necessary for seeing vibrations, asides from the related notion that one can practice jhana and use the clarity from jhana to proceed with vipassana. One-pointedness is fabricated and allows one to solidify the field for jhanic absorptions and their factors, and vipassana deconstructs fabrication, without mercy for good or bad patterns of sensations; that's basically the premise I'm disagreeing from. This is sort of a sidetrack from the original topic, but it's still an interesting and useful topic to discuss.