Jake WM:
Anyway, is Goenkas technique enough to progress through the DN?
In my experience yes. But if you don't know what to do when you get into 11th nana territory, you could, like I did, cycle the dukkha nanas for a long time. If noting is not your thing, see
here and
read this quote by Jill, a former poster at the DhO who used only the Goenka technique.
Thus happened for me:
before 1999: no experience of 'spiritual phenomena' or funky energetic stuff of any kind
summer 1999: full-on pce after too much emotional and mental tension forced the mind to let go due to sheer exhaustion
fall 1999 to fall 2000: year of dark night existential angst
nov. 2000: stream entry on 9th day of 1st goenka course (and 1st meditation training of any kind)
as far as my understanding of goenka's meaning of "not mixing techniques" goes, what i practiced to get stream entry was nothing but following the 10-day retreat instructions to the best of my ability. any minor 'adjusting' or 'tweaking' or 'going against instructions' that i did was all for the purpose of being able to better get back to following instructions when i was struggling to, or to be able to follow them more effectively. an example of a 'minor adjustment' was keeping my eyes open at times when it seemed obvious that having them closed made it easier to drift off into daydreams, while keeping them open made my attention much more present and attentive to sensations (the instructions say keep the eyes closed). another example is not narrowing down the anapana spot if doing so obviously led to more daydreams and losing awareness, but spending sometime on the whole breath for a few minutes until concentration became stable enough to handle a tiny spot. (the instructions say keep attention at the spot above the upper lip, under the nostrils.) i'm sure goenka himself would support such 'adjustments' because he gives a few such tips himself, such as meditating standing up for a while or getting up to wash your face and come back if you're sleepy, or even holding the breath! at times the practice demanded an urgent ripping apart of beliefs or mental habits that got in the way of following instructions. so yeh, for me it was a matter of using intuition in practice, and doing what worked by honing the self-adjusting feedback mechanism.
i can't ignore the importance of that pce experience a year prior to the course--having seen from actual experience what conditions to aim for really helped guide the practice. however, the pce insights did not show me how to alter the instructions in any way. as the days went on, the deeper i got into the practice, the more i felt that those exact instructions showed the fastest way possible for taking my life at that point closer to the pce ('fastest' at times also meant most unpleasant). what those pce insights showed me was exactly 'how little' or 'how much' application was necessary in every aspect of practice (given my specific mental/emotional/physical conditions)--how much effort, how much forcing of the mind, of attention, of the physical body, when to relax and let go, how literally or metaphorically to take goenka's different pieces of advice, or whether to follow a certain instruction very seriously every second possible as long as i still found myself alive and breathing, or whether to take it lightly as a gentle helpful tip and sometimes ignore it, like the case with 'keep your eyes closed'.
the path moment for me happened on a lunch break during the course, while sitting next to a lily pond trying to maintain continuity of attention. when high eq came, i wasn't doing any scanning in sequence, but just staying aware of breathing and whatever random sensations were interesting. what caught my interest was the weird new perfection of equanimity (even the swarm of fruit flies that buzzed around me and landed on my face and eyelids were entertaining and richly interesting instead of annoying), the changes in the perceptions of will, intention, physical body, perceiver, space, peace, stillness, and then the moment happened. so technically, i did not actually experience the path moment while doing scanning practice, but i was still following goenka's advice to stay aware (of breathing and some sensation or another) and equanimous at every moment. speaking from my experience only, i see no reason that this sort of "chilling in the present" should be included in his sitting instructions, because it's what the attention ends up learning to do anyway during rest periods and daily life after all the tough scanning work. what i don't know is if the path moment opportunity would likely be missed if one is intently focused on moving attention up and down the arms when high eq comes. (this is also why i've encouraged other goenka meditators, like btg, to have some aware chilling time after home sits to get the mind used to maintaining and enjoying heightened awareness in a natural way.)
so to me, "goenka-style vipassana" goes beyond those initial instructions to sit and scan and sweep. the practice for me includes building on whatever is learned from results of applying that technique and further applying those insights and new perceptual skills in both sitting and daily life. after several years of retreats, practice, and clear progress under only one tradition, one might end up with a personally-catered practice that could be called "mixing techniques" by a good stretch of the definition.
that balancing act of knowing how much/how little seems really important; it's finding your groove of optimal practice in real time, as it happens, and knowing how to make big or subtle adjustments every minute. i think this personal "recognizing what's just right" should get refined with some solid practice effort (retreat experience is invaluable), trial and error, sincere interest and self-examination, and perhaps access to more specific advice and useful information, as is available on this forum.
So, my question is: are there any case reports of yogis actually attaining stream entry using "pure" Goenka technique, without doing any of the above? Another yogi
i just hung out with one such suspect a couple weeks ago: no prior experience with other techniques or strange energetic phenomena (wife made him try first retreat), demonstrates experiential understanding of insights that came to me at the path moment and equivalent freedom from suffering in daily life, no evidence of pre-path perspective or fixed logic or insight confusion, but no recall of "disappearing"(fruitions), no knowledge of stages of insight (before talking to me), and not much urge to seek more information on how to practice or reach new attainments, as his (goenka-style) practice is going fine, still bringing progress, and he's totally content with the incredible life change it has brought him.
My working hypothesis is that pure Goenka Vipassana rarely leads to stream entry. I would love to see this falsified. Maybe there is another discussion forum somewhere else where large numbers of Goenka practitioners have attained stream entry using the "pure" Vipassana technique exactly as taught, but they just aren't showing up here? If someone is aware of such a forum, a link would be appreciated. Another yogi
i have no idea how rare or common it is, but i wouldn't have shown up here or on any web forum myself had a goenka yogi friend not persuaded me to read mctb. i actually lost all interest in reading anything about spirituality and enlightenment after finding a practice that clearly worked for me. from goenka's vague descriptions of attainments but high praise of the "totally changed person" as a "saintly person, a noble person" who has experienced "the first dip of nibhanna"(which is something "beyond mind and matter"--a total mystery to goenka students), it wouldn't be surprising if many stream enterers in this tradition have no idea what their life-changing relief was according to the suttas. in my case, i only found out nine years after the event, and i would probably not be out about it had i not been convinced by daniel ingram's arguments about the potential benefits of sharing this openly.
jill
