This has been a subject I've been thinking a lot about lately and about which there seems to be little consensus. Here's the basic outline of my thinking: 

1) The term "dark night yogi" as it is usually used seems to imply that it's a perpetual condition: once you cross the A&P you're a "dark night yogi" until you get over the hill and hit stream entry. 

2) The above implies that the A&P is a door that only opens one way: once you cross it, there's no going back. 

3) But of course 2) isn't exactly true, at least according to Daniel and according to some anecdotal reports I've seen on this board. Here's Daniel on the "Standard Pattern" following the A&P: 

“The Standard Pattern”
What I call “The Standard Pattern” is that people cross the A&P under whatever circumstances, hit the Dark Night, get swamped by it, finally barely touch some weak version of Equanimity, fall back, feel somewhat normal but are living again with the after-effects of the A&P and the Dark Night, being now past the point of no return. They will then tend to cross it again with some degree of frequency from months to decades, re-enter a more full-on Dark Night, and cycle this way until they may finally get stream entry or just die before that part of the process completes itself. 

http://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/1509672

So "fall[ing back]" and "feel somewhat normal" here would seem to correspond to falling back to some point below the A&P (though not, I gather, necessarily all the way to the bottom). This is a "point of no return" in the sense that you "can't unsee what you've seen," perhaps, or you might be traumatized by the experience. But the fact remains that one ends up back at some point prior to the A&P, but then is likely to cross it again. Also implied but not stated directly here is that the A&P crosser in the above example stops practice, though I could be wrong about that. 

4) So it would seem that there are two types of dark night yogis: 

a) Yogis who cross the A&P and then for whatever reason take a long time to get over the hump and hit SE (and so bounce back and forth between DN and equanimity), and

b) People who are, for whatever reason, simply prone to crossing the A&P, accidentally or otherwise, and then hitting dark night territory whether they know that's what's happening or not. 

Incidentally, I would guess that most people involved in communities like this are people who are prone to crossing the A&P, whether accidentally or as the result of rather moderate meditation practice. 

*

Am I off-base here? I bring this up because I'm pretty sure I've crossed the A&P and hit dark night territory myself (and I'm also pretty sure it's happened to me before, in different contexts). I'm sure the standard advice would be to bear down and meditate through it, and I can see the value in that, though I'm not sure it's logistically feasible at the moment (to aggressively go for SE, I mean). So I'm also tempted, as an experiment, to stop practice for a while and watch how things settle, and then after "feeling normal" see if there isn't a way to approach practice (other than dry / dryish vipassana) that produces a less harsh experience of the DN (Culadasa's maybe, or any other practice that prioritizes samatha). 

Incidentally, on a very basic level it makes sense to me that stopping practice would cause the average person to fall below the A&P and return to a more "normal" baseline. Insofar as what one is doing in vipassana practice is expanding one's perceptual threshold, then makes sense that letting those "muscles" atrophy would, overtime, return one to a more normal baseline

Let us know how stopping "cold turkey" works for you. I am a bit skeptical that it is the best choice but then everyone is different.

Just one thing I would like to debunk: even without stream entry, DN cycles should probably get more bearable and manageable with good practice and a skillfull lifestyle  

Mike:



This.  

I'm sure that if you stop practicing, AND stop thinking (obsessing) about meditation, AND have lots of other things in your life to properly distract you, then you will not be consciously aware of the dukha nanas fucking with you.  Its not that big of a deal, ya know?  We make it into too big of a thing on the DhO, which is a useful cultural counterpoint to the mushroom culture... but as with all things, the objective truth is somewhere in the middle.  It is in that spirit that I say, "its not that big of a deal."

I personally suspect once you cross a&p, there's no going back. At that point, your mind is fundamentally changed, sure you may feel almost normal at times but you are not the same person you were before.  The door shuts behind you and new doors open in front of you.  At this  next level of the video game, the challenges will be somewhat similar to the previous level but also somewhat different and more challenging.  Different people will get stuck more on different parts of this new level, not all will have big probs with dark night.  IMo, dark night yogi just means someone who has been stuck for a long time at dark night, but it does not mean everyone will get stuck for a long time there.  I do think everyone will have to deal with that territory, just that some will get through it without too much fuss and muss and some won't.
-Eva     

On one level I agree with this, though I wonder whether someone who's crossed it multiple times is fundamentally "changed" in some ways after subsequent crossings. Perhaps they are, or perhaps the first instance "did the damage" and falling back to below the A&P would actually feel quite "normal" to them. I guess my sense is that a lot of alarmism has grown up around this topic. 

I really do think that some aspects of the dark night experience must have to do with (rapidly) expanding perceptual thresholds and subsequent attentional effects. This leads to insights, naturally, but it seems like it also necessarily leads to a lot of perceptual disturbance / distortion, which seems like it should abate if one were to stop practicing for a while. 

Right? I've yet to see a report here of someone who hit the dark night, freakd out or decided they just weren't ready to tackle SE at exactly this point in their lives, stopped practice and just kind of let things fade. But I have a sense that it probably does happen fairly often (i.e. not everyone who hits the "rolling up the mat stage" and quits for a while is deeply haunted by the experience)--you just don't hear about it on the internet. 

dark night or suffering is no different from waiting till you get sober after drinking. Your body itself purifies.

what makes it difficult is to reach to the point of suffering. Once you suffer its you already burning away impurities. Maybe somehow it is possible to kill the fire and stop the process but don't think so: if you come unconcious like losing whole range of attention to some activity but when you come out of it then you also come aware of the "cruel reality". Its also waking up in the morning the dream seemed sweet compared to this reality, you will awake with impurities ready to be burned.

Overtime you grow more sensitive. The enlightening factor can cause lots of pain. Eventually everything is suffering. Body is pile of impurities, rare happy moments are deluded moments.

Its not easy to get the inner fire burning, if its not burning it can cause illness, cold feeling, even in normally heated room its cold, it can broke your teeth, damage your eyes... The inner fire this point is still weak, overtime the up and down processes come faster and the lower levels will get made this way that you won't able to fall lower because the speed of purification is more faster.

The changes each time are probably not huge, but think about it, who goes through life not changing at all even a bit?  Change is going to happen. If you stop putting effort in to help yourself, sure the dust may settle and change may get much slower but IMO you are not going back to the past either.  Even if you try to forget and some skills get rusty and change is slow, you are still not going back to what you were in the past.  IMO, sooner or later, you will eventually have to deal with your crap, trying to avoid it is like procrastinating and putting it off till later, to some extent probably doable but long term not a good plan anyway.  IMO, better to plod along slowly than the try to hide from it!  ;-P