Hi all, 

just recently been learning Noting, after coming from a scanning background and myself and a friend have been discussing, trialing and trying to learn the best noting techniques over the last couple of months. 

Weve mainly been learning, trialling and comparing notes on the effectiveness of some of Kenneth Folks videos that discribe the methods very clearly (and am grateful for these). 

Weve been discussing: 

1. the effectiveness the basic noting technique (labelling the 5 sense doors and thinking as touching, hearing, thinking, etc) and wondering how far down the path this can take oneself.. 
2. Whether the more advanced techniques (i.e - noting and labelling feeling tones, noting emotional states resting behind sensations, noting thought types, and noting the shapes and start and end points of thoughts) are required to reach Stream Entry, as they seem to have a tendency to make it harder not to get sucked into thoughts. 

My question there fore is this:

1. What are your thoughts on points 1 and 2 ?
2. What techniques did you yourself find that you needed to reach Stream Entry?

Thanks, 

Will

I'm no expert on meditation techniques, but here's the story: http://internetconnect.co.uk/

There is more subtlety. I can point to some good stuff from Rob Burbea that points to certain perceptions and thinking sensations that can be missed (his book would have lots to work with). I think the downfall of too much labelling in noting is if it's too mechanical and mantra like (overly conceptual). This might solidify what is being labeled as something that inherently exists (being that our perceptions like to believe objects exist without cause and effect) when in fact everything is independent. You can zoom in on any sensations and lose a demarcation line of one "thing" or another "thing".

Gil Fronsdal Noting
http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/articles/mental-noting/

Noting is also a problem if the intention to note (intention to pay attention) isn't noticed as well. If you let your attention span move on it's own to different sense doors you should notice that your habits are showing up there. When noticing this you can move your intention to pay attention to objects of your real goals instead of letting it go in the same direction as the past. You can notice that when the attention flits from one place to another there's a subtle sense of "like or dislike". It's a perception to be like calipers to already start clinging onto objects. This is why the "resting in consciousness" practices can bring relief but there's still lots of doing going on with your amygdala. All it needs is some kind of colour, shape, location, perception to measure and "like or dislike".

http://www.dharmaseed.org/talks/audio_player/210/9553.html
38:12

http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/9547/

The ultimate goal for practice with everyone is having equanimity towards all experiences, holy disinterest, relaxing the push and pull to all experiences, or as Nick said to have specific neutrality to all experiences. You need to sustain this for ALL experiences until you basically go into nirvana which is a non-experience. Chasing after experiences goes in the opposite direction. Noting is a feedback loop to keep you aware because the habit to slide into rumination, or bliss out in any jhana you bump into, is quite easy.

Good luck!

I was breathing really hard into a pillow, using the pain from the 'fear' stage of the dark night as a focus object with the help of psychedelics. By holding my attention really hard on the pain and the breathing I only had to develop equanimity to that one thing which is easier. The slight restriction of breath is very fear generating which makes the whole thing very engaging. Equanimity was experienced as the pain first becomeing very sharp, hot and stabby, so I became interested in 'heat' and 'sharpness', after a while it transformed into quite a pleasurable diffuse sensation of heat.

The equanimity phase passed really quickly (a couple of minutes at most, just long enough for me to think "flipping hell, this must be equanimity I'm really close, keep going!") and was marked by my whole field of attention flickering smoothly between light and dark, then i noticed a brighter area down toward where the pain had been coming from, I 'looked' down (eyes closed) and the pain from earlier appeared in my visual field as a solid ball which I moved to being the centre of attention. Bands of light and dark moved across the background and the ball and at some point one of the bands covered the ball completely and then I woke up with a jolt in a timeless place of infinite greyness which I hung out in for a while develping the most amzing sense of the interconnectedness of things .

Don't know much about points 1 and 2. But assuming I have reached SE (about 1 year ago, about 90% confidence), this is what I thought contributed, in no particular order:

- Meditating all the time (was unemployed, lots of free time).

- Some basic shamata.

- Self inquiry. Breaking down the sense of I.

- Metta. Breaking down defenses regarding others.

- Walking vipassana-ish.

At the moment I had my first big noticeable cessation (I didn't know what it was at the time), I was sitting, trying to incessantly realize anatta by following the I-sense. After pushing through some discomfort, I came back from an instant went-away blackout. 

.

Hi Richard, 

thanks for the info. Just wondering how this "sustaining" is best acheived. I read once (I think in MTCB that 100 hours of practice is better done in one go than spread out, which would lead one to believe that doing those 100 hours on a ten day retreat would be more effetive than meditating at home for short periods over a 6 month period, say.

Obviously the ideal is to build up a good daily practice and then go on retreat for the final push. 

How important is the act of meditating every day, in your opinion?- (I have read it a number of times from people on this board that they didnt really begin to see results until they started doing this dillegently)

I think the best way to judge this is to practice in daily life and to understand how preferences cause stress. As long as one holds tightly (with fixated thoughts), and this even includes preferring meditation to real life, then there is no benefit. It's easy to feel good on the cushion and have habits return as soon as you leave the cushion. I agree that momentum and straight forward practice on a retreat would be the most ideal but understanding the insights conceptually needs to be there with the experience or else we might chase experiences instead of learn from them. 

Ultimately the practice has to make it easier to be a more moral person or else it's nihilism. This is a danger as many teachers have attested to seeing people gain insight into emptiness with no improvement in behaviour. Insight and experience work hand in hand. As long as you condition yourself in healthy, moral, and positive ways you are going in the right direction regardless of attainments. The attainments are just to make it easier to be a better person and to satisfy curiosity about the sense of self and it's interdependence.

this is something I have been thinking about in regards to my job, which is running projects, which by thier inherent nature require a lot of things to line up to work out as intended. the cause and effect of one part of the puzzle being late or incorrect can have knock on effects to everything else. Its hard to let go and to not want things to fall into place as they "should"! I guess if you flip it around its actually a great lesson in learning to let go, every day, perhaps. I wonder how many others find that its easier to let go of preferences in our private lives but professionally its tougher? I also wonder if a radical job change might eventually come with continued practice.



could you expand more on this?



yep fair point. thats where I think some of Jack Kornfields books shine: in bringing it all back to a human perspective.

Exactly. Nirvana is a non-experience and unless you're dead you're still dealing with normal experience just like everybody else. That's why some people like Brahmaviharas practice to develop good conditioning. I would also suggest CBT imagery for goal orientation. It's particularly good because visualization is what advertisers use to get us to release dopamine and follow their suggestions. Why not release dopamine for your own goals and direct it yourself with vivid imagery?

There are many motivating chemicals and people need to know them really well:

http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5005983

Have fun!

After recent indulgence in a rather inane and frustrating discussion thread, here's a breath of fresh air in this one – a series of points  triggering coalescing of insight and practice.

For instance:

re: Richard Zen (3/6/15 7:19 PM as a reply to b man.)

"... understanding the insights conceptually needs to be there with the experience or else we might chase experiences instead of learn from them. "

This fits nicely into what I call a "pariyatti practice" (one which involves a scholarly approach), which I currently use to characterize what works for me, and fits within a traditiona l(Theravada) template for overall structuring of path practice:
(1) learning the wording of thedoctrine (pariyatti),
(2) practising it (patipatti),
(3) penetrating it (pativedha)and realising its goal.

And translates neatly into another framework that I find practical: investigating the phenomena (insight/vipassana on sensations) of experience, with a view towards applying phenomenology as the process of learning from it.

Sounds quite abstract, and differs from Richard Zen's own commentary ("What they should learn is:…") on his statement (cited above). It works, however, in at least one case. In studying Theravada suttas, abhidhamma and commentaries, there's a framework gradually formed in the back of the mind, which then s/t lights up here or there when a meditative (or daily-life vipassana) experience plays-out. It may, or may not, be an accurate match (one has to test it closely), or prove durable, but provides a basis for comparison and investigation. When it does match, associated aspects in the framework may then provide further leads for appreciating the insight and pushing it (or letting it unfold) further.

Other frameworks from modern secular teachers, like MCTB, add valuable practical hints, but, so far, the modern pragmatist schemes tend to lack the consistency and depth -- they're still works-in-progress -- I find in tradition. Not so much the writings themselves, but in the elucidations provided by those modern teachers who dedicate their lives to living it out – the Ayya Khemas, Than-Geofs, Nyanaponikas, Mahasis etc. This all may seem borderline in this context (Dho). So just ignore it.

(more on this all when I open a "practice thread", "REAL SOON NOW!!!" – Any geeks here recognize that expression? Jerry Pournelle used to use it to refer to it as the mantra of hardware or software developers under pressure to get a product out the door, but behind schedule.)

So thanks, folks. This kind of thread gives me that concrete sense of 'sangha' that I have grown to associate with DhO at its best.

thanks for the reply. This part resonates with me at the moment as it ties in with my own practice over the last week which I have been making some breakthroughs literally noting every sensation or object of attention as the three Cs - labelling in my mind and saying "not me" "not pleasant" "not perminent" but then realised that I kind of had inheriently learnt the last two already: ("not pleasant" "not perminent") as in I had deeply learned and focused on both of them during practice for a while, but the No Self characteristic I had been missing, or it wasnt as hammered home in my psyche as the other two.

I get a feeling, that being able to really understand this final Characteristic is the key to unlocking a big door. I find it hard though (as I am sure many do!).

I did an 80 min session this week getting into a really good state of a few samatha Jhanas  (which I hadnt done for a while, as I had taken from MTCB that they wernt really worth spending much time on due to not being essential for the path, and spent some time in what I think were Jhanas 2 and 3 exploring once the Jhanas were solid and didnt require as much concerntarion to maintain and did some noting of sensations and thoughts and this time tried to focus on  labelling everything as "No-self, Not mine" and it was quite powerful. I felt some big physical release that I had been associating with as being "my problem area", and identifing it repleatedly as "not mine" seemed to shift something significantly - Almost in the same dramatic way that it shifted when I first recognised the impermennce (annica) of the hard blockage in that area of my body a few years ago, when a teacher had told me to pay attention to the annica of it during a retreat.  I could feel the ownership of it releasing and it felt like a real weight of my shoulders!

So I have been focusing more on the no-selfness of meditation this week and its felt like a corner has been turned. Had a few big releases in my body last night which woke me up and it felt like I had been meditating for hours in my sleep. (which seems to happen sometimes when momentum is strong). I havent really been woken up by body energy releases before so that was new and indicitive of how powerful recognising the no-selfness of things and working hard to really focus on them dillegently, had seemed to start to shift things again. 

My inital thoughts about it after doing a semi-self retreat this week are that its one of the hardest 3Cs to keep up. I litterally have to almost repeat the phrase "not me, not mine" in my head when resting my attention on what is in my experience during sessions. It also seems almost impossible to do unless concerntration is strong, which has made me consider the importance of doing some anapana at the beginning of every vipassana sit, kind of like they do on a ten day course. 

Is this something that is quite common for people to do - i.e Break up the meditation time into say 15 mins anapana, 20 mins vipassana, 5 mins metta? (or some other ratio?)

was there something that anyone would like to share or can pass on that really helped to nail the "no Self" understanding? Am I on the right track with noting it like that?

Who is the one noticing "no Self"?
Who is the one paying attention?
Concentrate. Keep concentrating, keep asking. No fear.

-Kyle

Take a look at the notion of an "I" who supposedly is on the right track. Examine the three characteristics of this "I," the one you think is going to get somewhere.

As I pointed out before. Notice the intention to pay attention. Any action (including paying attention) has an intention related to it. Note "intention" when your spotlight of attention moves anywhere. That spolight is already habitually going "like"/"dislike" before any major thinking has happened yet. There is no meditator that controls the meditation. It's "thinking", "intending", "rehearsing", "analyzing", "strategizing", "meditating", "following breath" etc. All these actions are impermanent. Maintain an attitude of equanimity toward all experiences (including meditation experiences). You can note "equanimity" as well. Let go of rumination towards preferences (including preferences for nirvana) because preferences will keep you from the goal. It's counter-intuitive but that's why it's so hard. Then sustain no matter what experience until a non-experience happens. This is most easily done on retreat so you have enough time. A lot of people need a couple of weeks or more.