Jenny:
Blue Jay,
Do you have a practice journal here? Could you link to it? You mentioned not even practicing in quite a while. In my experience, someone past stream entry generally has his or her proverbial "hair on fire" to attain enlightenment, which translates into steady practice usually.
Realize that strangers on a forum cannot help you with diagnosis without knowing more about your practice, such as
- Calendar time spent with a regular practice
- Usual length of daily sits
- Variety of techniques used
- Your meditative "cutting" edge (decribed)
- Retreat experiences
- History of insight stages you've moved through, such as phenomenology of A&P and Dark Nights
- Varieties of objects taken in meditation (and whether that includes taking the jhanas themselves as objects)
- Whether you still experience a clear distinction between jhana practice and vipassana
- And what persistent changes in perception you now have (described in detail)
If you don't have these details, then I urge you to start keeping a practice journal here so that experienced practictioners can follow the patterns and trends and give you the weigh-in you are asking for.
Please clarify which model you are using to provisionally make your claims.
If you are making any MCTB model claims, please address each of Daniel's new third path criteria as listed above. If you have luminosity, please describe it as experience. If you have agencylessness, please explain what that is like, providing examples. If you've attained to Nirodha Samapatti, please describe what happened and when, in detail.
Thanks! And best wishes!
Jenny
Hi, Jenny.
Sorry for the long post, but here it goes.
I don't have a meditation journal.
My hair has in fact been on fire. Plus I have other pressing reasons to have a lot of spiritual urgency. I have practiced almost everyday, actually, but not sitting meditation. The regular practice has been walking meditation.
There are two things I see as being major causes for my innaction. One is my inclination for self sabotaging behaviour. The other I am just confirming now. Given my self sabotaging behaviour I was prescribed Ritalin to be productive. There was a period when it worked well. But it hasn't worked in a while. I stopped taking it about 20 days ago. I went back to doing the things I have to do. And I don't get angry and agitated when I'm not on Ritalin. But I took 3 Ritalin pills in these last 3 days. I bought more medication yesterday, after going to the doctor, and took a pill about 3 hours ago. And I can tell a big difference in thoughts and behaviour. There's persisting anger and frustration, coupled with innaction. This is more tollerable now, but it is happening. I think this Ritalin business intensified the DNs far more than what would be normal. I won't take it anymore. I'll wait a few days without ritalin and see if I can figure this out better.
The practice has not been regular since christmass. Almost everyday I've been taking long walks and I do meditation in several ways, but I would say an average of 1h15m of unstructured practice a day.
- I would focus the mind steadily and continuously on the sensations on the feet while walking, which was more samatha than vipassana.
- I would also do vipassana like this: I started focusing on the sensations on the feet. After being fairly focused I would focus on changing sensations. Then I would ask myself "Is there any permanent sensation in the feet?" and I would perceive impermanence clearly. And finally I would focus on watching sensations rise and fall due to contact with the ground and due to mindful attention.
- I would also try to do walking meditation focusing on developing mental states of equanimity. So I would walk around relaxin the feet, then abandoning the feet, then releasing control of the feet. Thing like these.
- I did some sitting meditation during all these months. But it wasn't regular. I would do a bit of sitting meditation, get to a place of
emotional equanimity and I would be happy with that and become lazy again. This was how my cycling worked in this period. I would do enough meditation to reach emotional equanimity and drop the practice. And then I would start again. This happened probably 30+ times, without exageration. Of course, the problem was that this equanimity was emotional, and not wise equanimity.
- The two things that changed everything was to contemplate every experince as having a cause. This allowed me to see clearly what were the things I had to be equanimous of. It's hard to pigeonhole them into a single word. But it's essentially clinging and controlling things in every way these can manifest themselves.
- The other thing that allowed me to see clearly was realising that every instance of clinging and control is characterised by a movement of the mind either to push the sensations away, or to grab them. The mind moves around trying to force things to be different. So I tried o become aware of sensations without forceful mental movement. The culmination of this is, I think, the undirected mind. Meaning the door of nibbana related to the absence of suffering. I tried to mature this mental attitude of an undirected mind, because it brought (and brings) me peace and detatchment.
- In the last 10 days, or so, I started applying this technique of watching sensations with an undirected mind, to the three things that Dream Walker and Daniel Ingram had advised to focus on: to vipassanise the "personal bubble", the boundaries of the body, and the center of "me". I continued perceiving these three things with an undirected mind, thus releasing attatchment and aversion to them.
- I eventually started perceiving everything as unsatisfactory and took more and more time abiding with in an undirected mind. After that came the event I am trying to figure out.
I went to two retreats this year, both one day long Goenka retreats. I can't describe persistent changes in perception yet, because I need to be out of Ritalin and have a few days off to better understand what's going on.
I see the ten fetter model, and the MCTB model of the paths as being the same. I think the differences are better explained when you take into account the radical difference between a lay life and a monastic life.
I don't feel agencylessness. I said yesterday that aversion was in the head and craving is in the heart. I feel I am liberated from aversion, but not from craving. I was doing my long meditation walk yesterday trying to vipassanise the heart area with the undirected mind. There comes a point when even
trying to do anything is seen as stressful. So, in the second half of the walk, when I droped most of
trying I saw how things can become without an agent. When you drop all desire for anything, you stop trying anything. When that happens, you feel as though things are happening without any involvement from you. But this change in perception wasn't permanent, because I am not done with craving yet. It feels weakened, but not gone.
The experiences of luminosity, or that metta is all around me arise in dependence of jhana, as far as I can tell. Regarding separation, I don't have reliable insights to say anything about this yet.
Thanks!