I hope this can serve as a good place to discuss what different people's theories are as to how a person effectively moves from Equanimity to Stream Entry.

The reason I write this is because I feel I need some sort of conceptual framework to keep me motivated practicing. This is admitedly quite selfish, but I have a feeling I'm not the only one on this site who's motivated by knowing how things work before doing said thing. I have a feeling that everyone probably has, at least, a slightly different theory as to how the transition goes into Stream Entry. This is by no means a substitute for practice, but I feel it might help guide some people like me to keep going and pushing their cutting edge.

I'm definitely not an authority on this as I haven't reached Stream Entry, but I can give some perspective into the workings of someone who (seemingly) has been transition from Dark nights to Equanimity for months.

My interpretation of what goes on when I'm in the dark night: Mind starts being aware of all types of shitty sensations, mostly felt sensations, but also some negative thoughts or thought loops. Mind "grabs onto" these things in a way that either says (in a nonverbal way), "I enjoy this, it feels good to have attention resting on this", or more commonly "This feels uncomfortable, I wish it would go away. I interpret this "grabbing onto" like the image of a bubble of some sort enveloping whatever sensation it feels is pleasant or unpleasant. This enveloping is inherently tight, like a fist being clenched around a walnut.

Interpretation of the transition from Dark Night (Reobservation) to Equanimity: This enveloping bubble in the Dark Night is my attention, but is also correlated with a bodily feeling of tightness. I relax this tightness by almost imagining myself holding whatever is in my attention, in a soft way, like if you had metal gloves and you were holding an egg. Or another way to say it is I imagine my attention widens like a baloon getting bigger. Wider, Soft. Too tight and you get more agitated, too loose (which is not much of a problem for me much) and I forget what I was doing. I do this with every sensation. As I do this, tensions begin to release in the body (and mind) and various painful sensations stop coming up.

Transition into a higher Equanimity: Things are quiet, relatively. The sense of attention is there. The sense of wonder is there. The sense of attention moving is there. Sometimes things get daydreamy in a pleasant way. I locate a lot of these feeling in the 3rd eye area, so I do my best to relax whatever is being observed even if it's in the 3rd eye area. I start getting daydreamy at times. I forget that I'm practicing because I'm so relxed at times.

Transition from High Equanimity to Stream Entry: I have no experiential evidence, so this is just a guess. I have a feeling that the more time I spend in the daydreamy state, the less the sense of watcher comes up. When the sense of the watcher finally gets let go of either Stream Entry happens or an insight closer to Stream Entry happens. This sense of watcher, in many ways is the cause of suffering (imo and observation)


So there's my theory. I hope you guys give some responses to this. I don't want to sound silly, but I have a feeling it will help many people who think like me. There's no substitute for actual practice, but there's no substitute for this community's knowledge either.

Hi, Gerry,

Does this apply?

"So much emphasis is put on attaining stream entry that we imagine there is some secret to it; surely there is some special bit of knowledge or some extra bit of effort required to 'get us over this last hump.'"

It's from http://awakenetwork.org/forum/kfd-public/13497-the-progress-of-insight-by-kenneth-folk

Being on the cushion with complete letting go, no expectations, not fishing around for something special to happen (e.g., cessations, jhana).
Just gently bringing the mind to stabilization with its object (for example, the breath) and just this, friendly, relaxed practice of returning the mind to the breath.
Letting go of muscle tension.
Letting go of "big long sit" expectation/conceits. 
Letting go and gradually cultivating relaxed alert attention.
Compassion when all of this may not happen and one 'slides back'


The accepting and letting go of frustration with "no progess" as one experience no progress. 
If frustration is lingering time after time, day after day, just attention to the breath, relaxing the body (exercise, cold shower, yoga, whathave you) and not fighting the frustrations, just practice, sharing the experience with a  just-listening friend.


Daily life "off cushion": focusing of creating causes of relaxation: giving, listening/quietude, and sharing (not following false equanimity (conceit, smug remove)) ;
Developing a golden rule ethic and acting on it increasingly.
Letting go of the expectations and results.
Cultivating bodily causes of relaxation: long slow deep breathing, stretching, being in natura; areas, taking care of natural areas (picking up trash, growing pollinators species,), quietude, exercise, volunteering.
Letting go and cultivating relaxed alert attention.
Compassion when all of this may not happen and one 'slides back'.


Letting go, staying attentive, cultivating pleasant habits (in Buddhist terms orienting on the paramitas and brahmaviharas and refrainings).
Compassion: Knowing beings are learning, including self, with sometimes selfish or helpful rolemodels-peers, trying to practice reliable causes of well-being.
Sharing relaxedness and alertness, letting go of tensions, expectations.
Trying again and again to sharing what would foster well-being in a sitatuation: quiet? laughter? giving? receiving?


So a person can remove themselves from causes of suffering on and off the cushion in steady, daily practices that cultivate alert attention, relaxedness and pleasantness.
Not developing perfectionist conceit; knowing this is a continuous iterative practice in changing conditions. Everyone is practicing. =]

This is a bit redundant to what has already been written, but here's how I say it, based on the advise/reading I had and my experience:

I don't believe in 'letting go', beause I believe SE is not 'not trying', it's better trying, subtler and deeper and easier trying. I never stopped trying, I tried more and more, in the sense of assuming there are always more subtle things to see.  Instead of letting go, I believe in clearer seeing of the thing one might think needs to be released.

I suppose the way I would say 'letting go' is that it's easy to be embedded in a goal such that the expeience of grabbing on is not observed, it is obscuring itself.  So when there is awareness of a goal, turn attention onto the sensations that the goal sets up inside of you.

I think I'm getting circular and confusing, so I'll just stop.

Edit: not stopping yet!  Some advise I got, that 'good practice' sets in place good habits that carry you along through high equanimity with very little conscious effort.

Also, the 'fuck it' urge you wrote about, while sitting, does that produce sensations, gross or subtle, that you can be aware of, dis-embed from?

That definitely applies Derek. Thank you for the reply. One of the reasons why I posted this was to see how different people described this process towards SE. I have a feeling different people have different ways of saying things that might resonate differently with different people.

Wow. This is great Katy. Thank you. I will re-read this whenever I get confused as to what to do next in practice. I can relate to holding onto expectations and results. I like how you said that it's a continuous process. I can see that in myself. Everyday brings a new "challenge". A new tension comes up, or an old one comes up that I thought I'd dealt with. Even habits like sleeping well, being around nice people, eating nutritious food, etc. help. In the end, all of those things are not substitutes for practice, but without them being a positive influence then practice can be very difficult. I can see why people go on retreats. 

P.S. I've gone back to following the breath as of late partly because that's how I believe I intitially crossed the A&P (so I'm used to it), but also partly because of posts you've made, so thank you.

Thank you for the post Matthew. 

I agree, this is redundant in some ways, but then again everything under the sun has been done, so everything can be said to be redundant in a way. I think the value of this is that practicitioners can describe their experiences in different ways. For example, in an interview with Tarin Greco and Willoughby Britton, Tarin explains how when he was on retreat under Daniel Ingram, Daniel would get upset at him when he wouldn't explain what was going on in his practice in the terms that Daniel used. Tarin described his Equanimity experience in a sort of simple way and Daniel expected him to describe frequency patterns and other ways that Tarin just didn't resonate with. In the end, Tarin ended up getting to Stream Entry (and beyond I'm quite sure), and the way he might describe it might be way different than the way Daniel describes it. 

I agree that SE is not "not trying" too, I've tried than in practice and by just plain old not practicing and it's yet to work. To me it feels like I'm aware of a "big" sensation. The more I pay attention to it in a relaxed way, the more likely it is to fade away or to change. When it "goes away", another "smaller" or "subtler" sensation comes up and I repeat the process. My frustration comes when something new keeps popping up. I think to myself "when will I reach the end of this?". I know this is not the right attitude to have, but at times it's hard not to think like that. When that happens I notice where or how I feel when that thought comes up but it almost feels like an infinite amount of things that pop up. I have a feeling that it's not infinite, but at  times it sure does feel like that. It's not like Equanimity is unpleasant, but Reobservation sure isn't fun. It almost feels like the way I imagine some people with Bipolar disorder feel. 

What you said is true though, I need to keep attending to WHATEVER comes up. Having a goal is a subtle form of "grabbing on". I have a feeling that the way forward is to just pay attention to anything that comes up regardless of whatever I think. Don't leave anything unturned, then when the time gets close, I won't even be thinking of a goal, and then it'll happen. 

I also don't want to give the impression that I obsess over this all day, especially when I sit. I don't, this was just a post inspired by a curiousity that comes up at times which I think might be helpful to myself and others.

Thank you for the reply Matthew, I will keep everything you wrote in mind. Hope all is well with you.

Effectively move from Equanimity to Stream Entry? It does it itself. And that doesn't help a bit now does it?
So lets create some framework....as I do so love me some framework. Even if it is wrong, it lets me hang stuff out there for me to see...all dangling from some structure.
(Disclaimer : This is a psychological model not a strict buddhist model, It allows an alternative view to the standard and as such may not be correct or complete: use at your own risk) 

All the work you do to get to the moments before SE is the work that gets it done...Just like lifting weights and exercise and what not leads up to the moment of some sport performance....they are not thinking about the wieghts and exercises while doing the sport...they are relying on that foundation stuff to just do its thing when the moment comes... So in a way you are just getting out of the way to let the training do the rest.
The rest of what? - sliding down into your preconscious and doing some rewiring of how you experience reality

What rewiring? The identification of the 5 senses as "yours". The shutting down of the selfing process of identification/entanglement with sensations. The selfing process runs constantly in the subconscious and makes all the sensations of the 5 senses "mine, mine, mine" "me, me,me"

All the training of suggesting impermanence applies here to shut down this "permanent/constant" thing...as obviously, after the shift, it is gone
All the training of suggesting No-self also points the way to rewire the way we identify with sensations as "ours"
After the shift you will have a grater understanding about the nature of dukkha, but for now just getting dispassionate towards sensations that seem to be "me" is all that is really needed.
So work those 3 characteristics...think about them, philosophize them, but more than anything apply them and see if you can rub your nose in the actual moment by moment sensations and the applications thereof.
LOOK- sensations arise and pass....then another...impermanently....
LOOK - attentions wanders from one sensation to the next, never stopping.
LOOK - Is there something/anything that is permanent??? If so look very very hard at this...stick on it....stay with it...see what happens
LOOK - Is this sensation me? is that vibration within the sensation me? what part of this experience of reality is me? any? all? none? parts and pieces? sometimes? never? can a self be found?Where?what size?shape?does it stay?move around? Investigate til you know all this.
LOOK at what delights you and what causes suffering....what sensation is truly satisfying? how about that control portion? do you delight in controlling the nature of the phenomenon? does it comfort  you to cling to something safe and permanent even though its all changing and there is no safe place to rest your "self"
If you can, you might wish to try investigating the 3C's of sensations in each and every nana...methodically, including the  predominate nature of each nana. I did this once and something kinda shook loose and clicked....like I had missed something, and now had it. Funny enough, It was in nana 3 - the three characteristics.

SOOOOoooooooo.... you have done all that and you're just hanging in high EQ.....then just get out of the way and let it happen.
(trust in the training young padawan)
Best of luck,
~D

No, you don't.
Let's try to solve your problem by quoting MCTB2-draft. Here we go:

Yeah, this is why I love this site: peer-to-peer learning and self-learning through writing to each other.

I think each "path" (if we apply a path model) has this same requirement to release, just with a new tension. I think the tension of conceit raised in the fetter model is an awesome consideration in daily life and as well as treating it with a deliberate shift and an ego-defeated drop into apperception on the cushion: consciousness of the senses.

Tonight a friend and I from this site were catching up in person and talking about the quality of path releases being a letting go that feels like, to the ego -- to the identity (me) -- a defeat and a resignation: One truly cannot figure out what do to next to break through some "path release", to deeply let go, and so the letting go becomes so thorough that one day one feels finally dejected, defeated, resigned to 'nothing happening' in terms of path nor releasing insights. And then one just sits with the breath out of habit and the ego subsides and body consciousnesses (apperception) becomes the "voices" of attention

This is the sitting that is let-go completely, "defeat" "resignation to nothing happening" that, in my experience, combined with the prior training in attention to the breath, can result in egoless equanimity and sometimes a) a deeply restful sit and/or b) sometimes informative insight bubbling up from the mind and into-'path'-release (a release insight that cannot seemingly be undone).

And retreats, yeah, I agree: So useful as the aspiration deepens and as overstriving fails more and more and a person can just show up and simply do the work. We met up with another DhO friend tonight as well and, between them, they shared their wonderful experience with Leigh B and Craig S. (International meditation centre in Maryland), two very different teaching styles, two very different cost structures, both friends feelings helped and grateful. These friends have retreated often and in that quiet deep no-expectation stage. It also makes me realize how nice it is also to meet in person, eat together, but how that came to be due to the Dho... I digressed =]

Thanks for sharing. I love the breath as object, too; it's calming and a great road into and out of alert meditation.

edit x1: clarity ?

edit x2: I can also appreciate the way Matthew expresses it, even though it seems we are offering opposite considerations. Yet, his reply to you focuses on the senses and this is also "apperception", the perception of the sense bases. When we start to see what our identities are crafting in meditation and see that that story-making/chasing is not helping and is a redundant looping around some egoic narrative, then the ego-identity starts to slough off in meditation, simply because we finally have conviction that for those practice minutes there is no reward in ego-identity's constant ownership/characterization of mental phenomena. 

Edit 3: So once that identity view is natively dropped in meditation as a useless drain creating fairly redundant stories, the sense consciousnesses  become apparent (apperception); we can start to notice and sustain apperceptive attention (which is stressless until the ego toggles back in to own the experience in some store-making way-- that's natural, habitual), and one can begin the training of toggling less and less back into ego awareness and more and more in apperception, which has no center location feeling like ego, relaxing the mind and the body, developing alertness. Then sometimes reliable insights bubble up as well as exposure to deep rest outside of the eog-identity narration loops.

Edit 4: just my two cents. Really I think we are "triggering" learning moments for each other here, so I imagine you will have your own way of explaing the experience, too. If someone strives to have another person's experience, that's just the ego again story-making. 

So to really simplfy: just breathing, alert relaxed attention, and transitioning from ego-attention to apperceptive attention (the sense-base consciousnesses/perceptions)... this is probably too much blahblahblah =]

Hey Dreamwalker. Nice to hear from you.

First off, I wanna say thank you. It's very clear what you're saying to me. I actually read an old post of yours a few weeks back theorizing what attachments get "turned off" at each path. 1st path 5 senses, 2nd path thoughts (I think?), 3rd something else I can't remember at the moment, 4th the rest of it all. I was very interested for some reason. I grew up pretty intellectually inclined, I got A's and B's in High school math, Geometry, Algebra, Algebra 2 (until I got into bad things), while the rest of my classes weren't as great. Seems a bit off topic, but my point is that these kind of things resonate with me. I know it won't get me over the hump. I truly do understand it, but it inspires me. Like when I see a great basketball player dunk a ball, it inspires me to go practice jumping. Or when I understand how muscle hypertrophy works, so I know that if I do 5 sets of 8 to 15+ reps, that will induce the most hypertrophy. I understand that in the end, this is not an intellectual thing that you think about then BOOM, you're enlightened, but knowing these things about what happens at different paths, or theories of what actually happens to the brain when insights arise intrigue me and most importantly, motivate me. I'll be honest. If it weren't for this website, I'd probably either be in some deep shit, or dead to be completely blunt. Knowing about the maps motivated greatly. In the beginning, I looked for sign posts of progress by comparing my experience to MCTB, but nowadays I really don't. Although, as you can see, I still have questions.

Ok, so now to what you said in the post. I can  see now why you empasize LOOK. I don't want to say I never looked at things head on. I did. In the beginning, I think that's what made me cross the A&P, but then I got into some really painful shit. I looked at these things too, but I had no conceptual framework to tell me, "Hey, it's ok, these feelings are normal, don't fight them, soften around these and just observe". Instead, I fought them (unknowingly), suppressed them, or tried to avoid them as well I could with bad behaviors. As of lately, my capacity to be with painful things has increased. This helps because without resistance, most of these sensations eventually pass. 

Thank you for the write up Dreamwalker, this is all very helpful to me. I will continue practice and come back to this if I ever get discouraged.

I don't understand. Are you saying that I don't get motivation from posts like these? Because if you are, then I disagree with you. I definitely do get motivated to practice with posts like these. I'd say in fact that if it weren't for things like these I wouldn't have picked up the habit of meditating.

If you're saying that I shouldn't be motivated by posts like these, then I somewhat agree with you. In theory, everyone should just sit and not worry about mapping or theories of how the switch from EQ to SE happens. It's not necessary for progress to be made. This site isn't even necessary for progress. Teachers aren't necessary either, good practice is necessary. My issue with this is that although none of it is necessary, for people like me who actually supressed their thinking by incorrect understandings of Buddhist teachings, it is actually quite helpful and motivational. I've repressed my thought process in the past. tried to stop it in it's tracks and this led to some really weird negative shit. Not to get too into it, but basically what I'm trying to say is that it is helpful. If you're saying that I'm obsessing over maps or theories then I disagree. I don't think about this all day. Most importantly, I don't think about this when I sit. I just observe sensations in the body-mind and relax around them. If a thought comes up, I observe it like I would a painful, pleasurable, or neutral sensation. I'm quite honest with myself (sometimes too honest), so I hope you take my word when I say I'm not even close to being obsessed about these matters. Even if someone were obsessed, as long as they let those things go during sits then I see no problem with it. As long as it leads to motivation or wisdom then that's cool with me.

Thanks Katy.

I actually always wondered what apperception meant, and it's cool that I've been doing it all along. Now that I've restarted my sits again, I can see why I should be doing them again. Sitting in equanimity feels healing, almost. So at the very least, I'm relaxing my body and maybe releasing some holding patterns I may have developed in the past.

It's very cool that you can meet up with people in person just by an onliine forum. People who have a lot to offer. Really cool.

I can see how narratives are not helpful and I truly am getting tired of being frustrated at times. I think that's why I took 2 weeks off. Months of striving with no results, that can wear a person down. Fortunately I feel rejuvinated and with a new perspective. Like I've said in many ways in this post, although I am interested in the original question, I don't obsess. I read posts before or after I sit just to see if things resonate with me. It's quite helpful many times.

Thank you Katy. Although you say it might be too much blahblah, I think that blahblah can be helpful. Too little blahblah leaves me feeling like I don't understand things thoroughly at times. Like if I describe what basketball is, and what the goal is. The goal of basketball is to score more point than your opponents. That might leave one thinking, "wow, so simple". But then you start explaining 3 point shots, free throws, player positions, time outs, etc. And then one can go even more in depth by explaining zone defenses, and triangle offenses. I think different people need more thorough explanations sometimes, and less thorough other times (just score some baskets!). So there's my blahblah in support of blahblah

Hi Gerry V,

Try becoming curious about endings. The ending of sensations, the gap between the inbreath and outbreath, when the sound of a jet overhead disappears, stuff like that. You can do it in daily life and in meditation too. If you can slow down your awareness in meditation, examine the endings more closely to see what is there before the next sensation arises.

 

Gerry: "Sitting in equanimity feels healing, almost."
I absolutely agree with you. And I feel that ceasing the gratification of the "single mind" of identity's point of view (ego) by willingly ceding attention to the "minds" of the sense bases (apperception*) is the way to "trigger" that Equanimity and the reliable releases (the irreversible 'paths', if you will).

I fully credit Tarin Greco for bringing to this community and others this immense value of shifting from identity's attentional view to attentional 'views' of the sense apperceptions. 

It was very hard to "get" the Bahiya and Kayagatastai Suttas in a modern day, and yet I feel that is their point: what ceding to apperception can show about identity view and eventually about conceit.

In fact, after about 5 weeks of continously shifting awareness to the senses' apperception with Tarin's instructions and presence here, is when fourth jhana first happened to "my" mind just while listening to a teacher give a class-- this equanimity was absolutely harmless and clearly seeing, somehow healing or unintrusive and sharp.  It was absolulely not though striving on the cushion from the vantage of the egoic, identity's view, "I will do this..":. It was just in weeks of completely sincere displacing my own identity's point of view in everything and always going back to the apperceptive attentions.


Your thread is timely as I was meeting up in-person and we were noting the reliable shifts ('paths' if you will) occurence with the willingness to go to the sense apperceptions. And we've long agreed that apperception is the de-stressing, the deep letting go, that occurs when awareness is allowed to leave one's identity-viewing of experience and one deliberately keeps letting attention be suffusive in sense-base apperceptions.

(...)

Thanks, Gerry. 

Edit x2,5: blahblahblah ;)

Edit x3-4: des typos..

Edit 6: mega-prune  

*this is not shunning mental consciousness in favor of sense apperception; it's just seeing that mental consciousness is also a sense, but can be the foundation for stressful dominance, exclusivity and conceit.

Oh, lordy, I'm gonna take a page from Matthew's book again: "not stopping!"

Apperception: (redacted, point is earlier made; too much blahdityblah..

And I agree with svmonk, too: in my words, I would say focusing on the exhales perhaps. Without falling asleep, attending to the exhales closely, the pause at the bottom of the exhales, and then attending to the inhales. Exhales seem to be natural places of mental slowing, even mental stillness, and inhaling seem to be more natural places of idea generation/impulse--  but see for yourself; I doubt it's a universal law =]


edited x1: redacted redundant stuff, correcting typos.

Just wanted to add, as was hinted at by Katy in saying 'creating learning moments' and by you (Gerry) in emphasizing your need to understand, that "figuring it out" intellectually is probably a very important process in your practice, as it is for me.

The best psychotherapist I've ever had saw this in me and did not try to suppress it or dismiss it as 'obsessing.'  The best mediation teacher I've ever had (Ron), also acknowledges the importance of the intellectual component to my practice.

I think that 'Right Thought' is necessary for people like us to progress through the nanas.

Also, there might be 20 different, objectively valid, conceptual frameworks that explain each step of the progress of insight in naturalistic terms.  What is important is that you find the one that works for you, and also that you have some understanding of the type of practitioner that you are (which it seems you do).

At the risk of being a little bit off topic, posts like these are what make the difficulty of maintaining a place like the DhO worth it, in the sense that it acts as an intelligent database for meditation, that is, intelligent in the sense it is maintained by people, and a database of information that is stored, accessible to people days, months, and years after the fact. To have such high level discussions freely accessible is unheard of before the 2000s. Also, this post says much of how I instinctively feel, but it'll probably be a few months before my thoughts are clear enough to write them on this topic myself, nice post.

Thank you svmonk. I'll keep that in mind. I'd read that advice before, but never really applied it as I didn't really understand what it meant. Makes sense to me when you speak of the gap between the in and out breath.

This a major point that I've been wrestling with throughout my meditation "career". When times are easy-going, it's quite easy to stay at the sensate level. When times are tough and painful is when it's easy to convince oneself to turn away from the sensate and try and ignore. As of late I've found my capacity to be with things regardless of how bad or good they may feel, increased. This body is what must be felt in it's raw form. Even thoughts or mind movements (like attention itself) are felt if you quiet down enough to feel them. This might sound obvious to many here, but to others it might be a revelation. To me it was moreso a going back and forth between being with what I'm feeling or just ignoring it because my capacity to be with it was seemingly not there.

Also, I see what you mean by going with the exhales. I've definitely noticed that whenever I attend to the in breath, it's more of an acceleration or speeding up of experience, and when I exhale it's like a slowing down of experience, like time slows down. Being with the transition between the out and in breath is also interesting. I'll stick with it and just keep looking, as Dreamwalker advised.

Yes Noah. Very much this. I think this is why I relate to posts you make. Even though you are well more advanced than I am, I can see a similarity in the fascination with the conceptual and intellectual. I think I've always been like that, but reading Buddhist teachings on the net back in the day when I had no reference to what they meant, made me think that not thinking was the way to go, so for years I repressed the intellect. If anyone is reading this, and you do this. STOP. please. It doesn't lead to anything positive. I used to think Buddhism was a philosophy first and foremost, so I interpreted things the way I found most fit without actually asking others if it was correct. Now that I have this forum to ask and see different people's thoughts, I can make way better judgements on things than years back.

I also agree with there probably being many conceptual frameworks which are valid. At different times, different ones fit, which is a big reason I posted this. To see different people's ideas on the subject. All of the ideas and frameworks are valid. Just that some resonate with other people more than others.

Good resonance here, Gerry.  I'm just gonna ride this energy and freestyle some more thoughts.  Feel free to read/respond or not.

I feel that the strict reporting of direct experience only, with no analysis or reflection, is the best method for mass production.  But the truth is that everyone's different.  This is one absolute truth.

Another one, at least in my opinion, is that intuition can never be wrong.  If it is wrong, it is not intuition.  Intution=intellect+instinct.  You can't always access your intuition, but it might be more accessible than you first expect.

To me, this means that it is possible to correctively interpret one's own meditation by using intuition.  Also, the correct balance of the 2 intuition factors might involve a lot of intellectualizing for certain people.  That is OK.  Other people might be disguisted with excess thought and want to always 'feel it out' or simply trust a certain external guiding resource (a teacher's advice).  That is OK.

I also believe in the law of averages.  I trust a study of many meditators.  That is why I like Ron's teaching model of bimonthly skype sessions that involve noting, discussion, and reccomended changes.  I trust Ron's opinion that many of the experiences along the path (nanas, jhanas, fruitions, changes to baseline perception, etc.) are not nearly as pronounced as certain traditional or well-known descriptions would have us believe.  Demistifying these events completely (even moreso than what I got from various pragmatic dharma resources) has helped me move through them quickly by not putting them on a pedastal or getting stuck. 

Note: I don't think I have much hero worship for Ron.  I just think he is very good at what he does.  In the future, there will be meditation teachers from many different traditions doing similar work.

Also, it is obviously true that many people do the whole thing without a regular teacher.  It is the juice of the fruit that matters, not the skin or the rinds.

ditto. I am realising this is massive, recently.

Well... I created such a long and well thought out response and I accidently deleted it .. *sigh*... (it would be cool for the server to save what one writes every few words so just in cae one accidently backs out of the page, if one reloads it, most of what you wrote is still there, but it might not be possibe. Just a thought)

Let me try and paraphrase what I said. 

I agree with everything you wrote. The intuition=intellect+instinct is very cool and I've never seen it put that way. When I'm in what I call Equanimity mor synchronicities happen. I think it's due to the mind quieting down enugh to see the synchronicities which are already happening all the time. We just don't notice them due to being attached to various things. I can't remember what the context was for why I wrote this, but I think it had to do with intuition so I'll just leave it lol. I agree that intuition can be trusted.

I also agree with having a teacher or at the very least a community like this, although I can see the benefit of having a one on one with a teacher on a regular basis. I think this site is a great resource for people who don't feel like they're ready for a teacher just yet. Although from most of what I've heard, having a teacher is beneficial.

Demystifing experiences is also cool. In a way, things are pretty mystical, but if one relies on that aspect, then things can seem too "out there" and unattainable. Hearing people put attainments in a down to earth way. Explaining what it means to be an Arahat or to be a Stream Enterer is very encouraging. There will always be debate, I think, about what exactly it means to be whatever one claims due to the sheer difference in conditioning and biology of each person. I think the difference in people is a big reason why having a forum like this is important.

There are many people who do it with a teacher and many who do it without, I think the important thing is to do it. Whichever way necessary. There's no right or wrong just different.

Dooo it.


(agreed with all the above)

You can read my account if you want an ordinary person's story in ordinary language:

http://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5731465

Not sure if this is a Shia LeBouf reference or not lol. But duly noted

Very cool Derek. I downloaded it, and I will give it a read sometime this week. Thank you.

Also, when times are really easy, it's easy to not want to practice since thing are relatively "ok". Working on it though.