Meditations on disgust/fear/horror [Not Tao]


Not Tao - 2014-05-02 22:14:07 - Meditations on disgust/fear/horror

I'm just wondering how many other people practice this, and what kind of results they've gotten from it.  The Buddha suggested meditating on corpses in various stages of decomposition to help sever our attachments to our bodies, and I watched a video by Shinzen Young yesterday where he said strong determination sitting is probably the quickest way to enlightenment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYSSf71Vo7w

I was thinking these things could be combined to make a kind of "horror meditation".  I tried it today for twenty minutes or so, and it seemed to create a lovely sense of freedom by then end.  I basically just sat there and visualized being hacked apart by knives and chainsaws, getting into car accidents, having spiders and snakes crawl under my skin, etc.  Oddly, the most difficult thing to develop equanimity towards was getting paper cuts on sensitive areas, haha.

Anyway, just putting this out there.  Would you guys consider this a kind of tranquility meditation, or could it eventually lead to the paths?

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Nikolai . - 2014-05-02 23:08:17 - RE: Meditations on disgust/fear/horror



I think it may be helpful as an antidote to some other attachment. And if you don't have such an attachment, then it wont be helpful.

In the past, I would experiment with perception/sanna concerning sexual attraction. Walking down the street, there would be a very strong urge to look at the woman walking opposite, The strong urge would co-arise with  the notion of "sexy, beuatiful woman". And this would co-arise with a strong feeling of sexual attraction which would trigger thoughts of fantasy. When I observed it continuously, it become obvious how dukkha-fied this process is.

So i played with changing perception as it initially arose to trigger all that sexual frustration. The woman would be seen opposite. I would then at the point of contact of this perception wilfully flip it to the imagine image of the woman sitting on a toilet doing this biggest, smelliest, most foul turds I could think of. With a grimacing face and dishevelled appearance. Sometimes I would shift the image to old and saggy. The result was quite interesting.

It showed my I could interfere with these usually very habitual blind processes. I would generate an image of disgust over the image that would automatically trigger lust. It worked in interfering with the process and taught me a lot about haccking perception/sanna. I started being able to do this quite easily with other perceptions and in reverse as well. Seeing a usually disgust designated object as not disgusting but its opposite.

A more pliant and malleable mind not subject to being a slave of its own content/perceptions can do more good, me thinks.

Nick

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B B - 2014-05-02 23:23:08 - RE: Meditations on disgust/fear/horror

I spent a few weeks doing body contemplation, as described here by Ajahn Maha Bua, over the Christmas, though I didn't try to generate feelings of disgust as they weren't coming naturally and so IIRC I decided that my time would be misspent trying to force them to arise. 

I have down in my log that it went successfully in that there were many ìmajor drop-offs in I-makingî, each preceded by cessations. Looking back though I don't recall progress being especially fast around then, and very often for me I get impressive fruitions which ultimately amount to only further incremental reductions in self (the most sensitive and easily accessible measure of progress in my experience), which admittedly shouldn't be dismissed. 

My practice context was post-SE, post dozens of cycles and incremental shifts, post a major dismantling of a ìknotî of selfing in the head, and where I felt the main obstacle was a pretty strong feeling of ìI amî not located in any specific body part. At that time, this technique worked well for me. 

Apparently, I stopped after a ìpretty incapacitating DN spellî, which ended after I gained a deeper appreciation of interdependence and subsequently contemplating that theme took up my time (until moving on to something else after a few days or weeks ñ this is the way my practice tends to unfold). I find it pretty heavy-going, so I was probably getting tired of it for that reason too.

Some notes on technique from that period: 
ìI deconstructed the head and brain into parts, asserting [a sense of complete objectivity], and contemplated how awareness was being created by the brain, which brought it to a much more central location. I asked myself when would 'I' stop being my 'self' if the face was slowly shredded and the brain broken up one cell at a time. I realised that by visualizing it as decaying, I was assuming that 'I' had already died, so instead I switched to visualising the body being cut into pieces as opposed to rotting. At the end of this at least two 'major' fruitions occurred.î
ìI realised that the combination of visualizing the body and the sensations of the head was creating a sense of a self that was doing the 3rd-person observing. I discovered that it can be effective to integrate the 1st-person perspective into the 3rd-person bodily deconstruction when it gets to the head, so that there is less chance of believing that the deconstruction is only relevant for another body and not this body. I obtained pictures of human anatomy, including of the back of the body, that helped with visualising. I performed 20+ deconstructions of the body, and there must have been 50+ fruitions during the session.î
ì[...]Then attention turned to body deconstruction once more, and eventually it occurred to investigate the feeling of being alive itself. It seems that much I-making can be bound up in any sort of sense of the whole being more than the sum of its parts (regarding the mind and body). I followed the sense of movement and charge that I took to be blood flow (though it may have just been vibrations), there was a sense of 'aliveness' breaking up and the body being seen for what it is - a mass of various organic parts. Following this, a very strong sense of a weight having been removed was apparent, very similar to NS, but much stronger. There was a renewed appreciation of the general technique of breaking up larger entities, such as the body and mind, into their individual components. I'll investigate 'aliveness' and 'being' again in future as there is undoubtedly more still to see through. Also, further understanding was gained of how sensations of the body are mistaken for a sense of self visualising the body from a 3rd-person perspective.î
ìI've spent some more time on body contemplation, and seem to have arrived at a realization of how the characteristics of most things are mentally imputed onto them, just as disgust is imputed onto asubha images ñ this stripping of perceived inherent attributes is contributing to a deeper sense of emptiness.î

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Dream Walker - 2014-05-04 00:35:28 - RE: Meditations on disgust/fear/horror

Um, how did your significant other feel about this?
~D

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Nikolai . - 2014-05-04 02:21:10 - RE: Meditations on disgust/fear/horror



I did say "in the past". I was a dharma bum for over ten years before i got married.