Hey!
Sheldon Frith Nicholson:
Is it really possible to stay in fruition for a prolonged period of time?
I have been thinking about this myself. One possibility is that Mahasi Sayadaw was distinguishing the cessation part of the event (nirodha) from the fruit that follows it (phala), and the practice is about lengthening the afterglow. However, this 2012 quote by Dan here
http://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5527861
implies that it is about lengthening the actual duration of the "blip":
Daniel M. Ingram:
Daniel M. Ingram - 2012-08-31 05:35:29 - RE: Mahasi Sayadaw's Fruition training practice
Bill used to talk about extended Fruition duration. I chased it for years and totally failed to have Fruitions that I could be certain had any external duration of any appreciable timeframe except this one time long ago (circa 1997) where I thought maybe...
There seems to be individual variation on how Fruitions happen for people. Some can get multiples, some can only get one/day max, some seem to describe duration by external time measures but the gap for them is the same, meaning there is just the in, the out, and nothing in between beyond the sense on retrospect that there was a discontinuity, like some frames of reality were edited out and the thing was spliced back together. Some can get Fruitions only after long practice on a cushion, others in daily life sometimes, others in daily life easily, others by mere brief inclination, and this may vary by the phase of their practice.
Bill used to really strive for duration, and apparently would spend hours calming and restraining and stabilizing the mind to achieve it. Kenneth Folk would know more about his practice and might be worth asking about it.
I wish I could add more,
Sheldon Frith Nicholson:
2. Have any studies been done on the brain during a fruition? Has anyone looked into the brain activity during those moments?
It's been done.
I am not an expert at all, but there are some technical problems to look into fruitions specifically. MRI scans have a time resolution of several seconds (because they measure blood flow essentially, not electric activity), which is much longer than a "bli"p (except, well, see above), so a fruition is effectively invisible to MRI. EEGs, on the other hand, have good time resolution (because they measure electrical activity directly) but an extremely poor spatial resolution.
Of course one could use an MRI scan to investigate Nirodha Samapatti. I think I remember Daniel was subject to an MRI scan and talked about it somewhere here on this forum.
