Finally! After 15 years of practice I attained to stream entry one month ago. I read Daniel's MCTB first time back in 2004, was ordained as a buddhist monk for 2 years (1 year as an 8 precept aspirant and 1 year as fully ordained), disrobed in 2009, and since then I have periodically been doing skype sessions with Kenneth Folk. Despite his tremendous help I have been "on / off" with the practice and stuck sliding back and forth between Dark Night and Equanimity for 8 years, and when I would get momentum in my practice and get up to Equanimity I would often get a lot of manic energy and loose focus on my practice somehow and eventually slide back down to Dark Night again. I think what did it was when I realized I needed some thorough psychotherapeutic work. I had symptoms similar to disorders like ADHD, PTSD and manic-depressive tendencies. Working through my psychological history with gestalttherapy over 1,5 year created more psychological stability and made it easier to keep it up with the practice. I was able to see the suffering in the pleasent sensations in Equanimity, instead of getting attached and manic by them, and that took me deeper into Equanimity and into Fruition. I've been close to loosing hope many times, and it is sort of ironic to see how close I've been, but fortunately now after a really great stream entry afterglow experience my confidence in the practice is recharged, and I'm eager for more.

It seems like stream entry honeymoon is getting close to its end after 4 weeks, and now I'm keen on working towards 2nd Path. I think I'm in some sort of transition phase now where it seems like Equanimity from the previous path is mixed together with first vipassana jhana on the new path.

Thanks for sharing your experience. It's motivating. I'm still working for stream-entry and I've been practicing since 1998! Although it's only two years ago (started working with Kenneth Folk as well on Skype and reading on this site) that I gainned the attitude that awakening is a realistic goal for me Looking forward to reading your 2nd path journey!

Thanks for sharing, Chris. Very inspiring.

Good to hear Ben V and Mettafore :-)

Today I sat for one hour, and it was still that sense of Equanimity from first path mixed together with first vipassana jhana on the new path. In the stream entry afterglow I had the sense of some sort energetic ceiling I was bumping up against was gone, and there was full circulation, but now that feeling of bumping up against a ceiling was back again. There was some sort of hardness in the center of my being, hard to describe, I think it is related to what is remaining of the dualistic split, made me irritated and aversive, but I tried my best to do vipassana on this hardness, and that was pretty satisfying, made me feel even more grounded in my body, and it felt good to have found something specific to work with. The momentum was stronger than ususal, but no Fruition that usually comes when I get the momentum running like that, so I takes that to mean this is new territory I'm working on.

Congrats on stream entry Chris!

Good idea to use your momentum to push on for second now you have the impetus. 

I too struggled for years bumping into high EQ many times before finally getting Stream Entry. And after the honeymoon it felt natural to more or less do it all over again, to get second not long after.

Good luck!

Thanks Adam, good to hear :-)

Sat for 1,5 hour today, primarily in 4th Jhana, but used it as a foundation for exploring whatever I could find of the self-contraction. I think this is some kind of fusion between concentration and insight. Last night I had a new fruition. Started speculating if that was 2nd Path fruition already, since I had worked myself through a lot of that hardness I described in the previous post, but I haven't noticed any baseline changes so far. Also I've started thinking that it seems pretty frustrating to try to map ones progress towards 2nd and 3rd Path, and perhaps there is only two really significant shifts, and that is being able to cycle through the whole progress that comes with stream entry, and the sense of "getting off the ride" that they say comes with arahantship. Anyways, I'll keep it up and see what happens :-)

Edit: I'll defently add "speculating" to my noting vocabulary.

Sometimes, like right now, it feels like there is some really radical melting going in my heart. So much bitterness, cynicism, and judgements about people easing up. Soothing is the word. This is really soothing to my heart. I'm still in process, and at times it is still confusing, but there is like this whole new level to this ability of just letting emotions ride themselves out. Today I've been through some pretty dry patches, but the focus more easily stays with just letting reality sync up with itself without that old panic and fear I had about loosing momentum. Gratitude and metta to you all :-)

Other than the fact that 2nd for many has some more emotional aspects to it, that and the increased ability to appreciate subparts of stages for those inclined to those sorts of things, the cool thing about 2nd is that you can basically do the same sort of things that got you first and it should largely work for 2nd. Just learn the same lessons, apply the same advice to the hard stages, avoid the standard traps, investigate the three characteristics, work to learn to navigate the stages, be present to what is happening, incorporate more and more of the senses into the practice along with space, balance the seven factors, that sort of thing.

Third path tends to be more complex, but, for most, 2nd is a pretty straight shot.

Enjoy!

Daniel

Thank you, Daniel! Good to hear your take on this :-)

It makes sense, or it is some kind of great relief, that 2nd Path would just be some repetition in which the mind becomes even further more powerful, before it starts to embark on solving much more complex parts of the last part of the journey. And actually I think 2nd Path has already happened, and I think it was that incident I described two posts ago, because suddenly fruitions started coming back again much more frequently, and the chill bliss wave that follows is yet again interesting and significant, and now it feels like I'm in a new honeymoon. There is much more energetic stuff going on in my body, especially in the 3rd eye, and in the spine, and my whole generel feeling of what vipassana did to me in terms of "penetrating the object," seeing the vibrations of phenomena, etc, which I would all relate to getting the Qi energy in the body to flow, all that was not so different before and after stream-entry, but now it has a really new quality to it, it is much more total and much more plasma like. It feels like my whole reality has gotten much less static, and much more flowing and plasma like.

I did a really awesome skype-session with Kenneth F, yesterday, in the midst of all this, and mostly we were doing some kind of rigorous scientific-like exploration of my decriptions of fruitions, jhanas and progress of insight cycling trying to keep it as close to my direct experience and phenomenological as possible.  He wouldn't validate nor discredit my claims, but seemed to want to give me the best possible tools to deal with my experience no matter what is going on. I also felt that he was sort of testing to see if I would become cocky or insecure about any of this, in the sense of building some kind of conceptual identity around "being enlightened" that I needed to defend in any sort of immature way, and that was pretty cool and also a bit intimidating, but end result was, as it seems now, is that I'm becoming even more confident about these experiences, and I think also the need for validation around it all is much less, because who cares anyway? It is all just "working hypothesis."

This even more grounded confidence in my own experience became the gateway today when I spoke on the phone today with a really good friend of mine that claims arahantship. He is also a psychologist in training, and he is particulary interested in to what extent therapy can be used to coach people into the increase in perceptual abilities that the progress of insight is about. I haven't really been interested in what practice that leads to arahantship is before now, but suddenly I wanted him to coach me to see if it was possible to explore the experience of already being an arahant and he did his very best to try to coach me into his experience. It didn't last, but I was getting a really strong experience of arahantship being just totally surrendering to or syncing up with "this is it." There is probably a lot of nuances to that experience, but for 3 hours we were really grokking on this all having to do with some kind of total and uncompromising landing in some kind of permanent confidence in ones experience of "this being it," and everything preventing one from being landed in that experience is just some kind of doubt or some kind of seeking for something outside of this moment that needs to be washed out with further practice until one is finally ready to land completely in this. At one point it was even getting extremly psychedelic, as if my friend who tried to coach me into this was just an aspect of myself (in the sense of we are all one organism evolving and exploring itself in this eternal present moment that we all share) reminding me of some age old wisdom I had really already known and it was just funny that somehow I had forgotten about it. Whether that has any validity or whether it was just some kind of psychedelic interpretation caused by the intensity of the moment I won't speculate about, but it was pretty cool.

So anyways, it has been two really awesome days, and now I'm much more curious about those sorts of practices being described as being outside of the cycling and seeing it in real time all the time, but I'm not quite sure what that actually means although I think I'm getting some sense of it.

Congratulation, Chris. I know you have been working at it for a long time. How has reaching
first path changed your life off the cushion? Are you now better able to deal
with the vicissitudes of life?  Relationships with others? Etc. 

I don't mean to imply you were bad at them before first path.

Thank you, Jack :-)

There has certainly been some positive changes, but at the same time I've also been a bit like a "video game addict" lately, being nerdy and introverted, walking around all day long obsessing about dharma theory and my own phenomenology, so perhaps I've gotten stranger as well... hehe :-) I find it hard to pinpoint how this translates into daily life, and I think psychotherapy was probably more specific in improving well-being in my relationships, etc.

Sat for 2 hours today. Did an open awareness practice and at the same time staying with the suffering of the self-contraction. I hold it as an open question as to whether 2nd Path has already been attained. Seems a bit unrealistic if it happened that quickly. At the same time there seems to be some kind of baseline change that has happened. My field of attention just seems much more spacious than what I associated with stream entry. The sense of the self-contraction also seems to be much less edgy in some kind of way. More chillness.

Started this day with 1 hour meditation. Went deeply into the self-contraction, and I've never been able to feel it that deeply before. It felt like some giant wedge that had been driven into the core of my being, and it was really yucky and annoying. However is was also pretty satisfying to perceive it this clearly, and after approximately 50 min it sort of just faded out without any fuzz, and there was a new more open and relaxed circulation going on in my system. Had planned to do an extensive meditation this morning, but felt done already after some 10 min after this, went into the shower, and went on about my day. Gradually over the course of the day it just dawned on me more and more how complete and landed I felt, and later in the evening I did another hour of meditation, and I couldn't find the self-contraction, and I just sat there and enjoyed this open and full circulation going on. Perhaps it will close again, or perhaps I'll discover some more subtle parts of this self-contraction I haven't yet been able to perceive, but right now things feel open and complete.

Last post is the only time in 15 years of meditating that I have ever felt as if the process was completed. It did close again, and now it is kind of open, but not completely open.

My "working hypothesis" is that this thing is close to finishing itself up.

But only time will tell... :-)

It feels like the self-contraction, which was a cluster of painful sensations at the center of my being, has been partly dissolved, but now there are fragmented pieces left of this contraction spread out all over the place, but they are much more subtle, not as painful anymore, but still painful, and perhaps the most frustrating part is to be able to perceive the suffering still left. It feels like I'm in some sensitivisation process regarding being able to adjust to the sublety of what remains. I also have to remember to see the frustration in this as part of the remaining suffering. And also I have to remember to enjoy the well-being that has already dramatically increased as there is a clear reduction in suffering and try not to strive too much for further results.

I think this is probably at least 2nd Path, but probably not 3rd Path as I imagine my concentration would have been better if it was. I don't have fluency in the jhanas yet, but all 8th of them do occasionally appear (well except for the first 3 ones which I have never been able to identify, don't know why that is so, but I've been spending so much time going back and forth between Dark Night and Equanimity so that whenever I've been doing jhana practice I've usually only solidified Equanmity into 4th jhana and therefore I haven't been identifying the first 3.)

My practice is now most of the time an open awareness "just sitting" kind of type, where I just try to go into and relax with whatever kind of suffering I can find.

The afterglow/honeymoon from both 1st and 2nd Path are definitly over now. It almost feels like it never really happened at all, because I feel so ordinary again. However there is a lot of fundamental suffering that seems to be gone in combination with this sense of ordinariness being much stronger than before, as if I'm more integrated into my experience than I can remember having felt before. Even not much speculation about this, just plain ordinariness and life going on. However, I'm clearly not done, and also I have gotten complacent again because life feels so OK, only meditating approximately every other day. So I will make an effort in order to establish a strong daily practice again. Sat for 1,5 hour today. Interesting thing is this feels like progress compared to the honeymoon periods, because the intensity of the honeymoons, even though it was a lot of fun and inspiration, it also had an intensity to it that was a bit tiring. So it feels good to feel more integrated again, however the complacency part I got to do something about.

Is 3rd more complex in terms of method of getting there? or just in terms of being less linear and clear in terms of stages?

B

Chris,

Can you talk more about your time as a monk? What tradition? Were you doing Mahasi noting then too? Was it your psychological conditions that kept you from reaching SE while a monk? How hard were you practicing then?

Sure :-)

I spent two years in a monastery in the thai forest tradition. One year as an 8 precept aspirant, and one year as a fully ordained monk. Meditated approximately 4-5 hours per day for these two years. The technique I did was breath meditation, using the breath as an object for cultivating both samatha and vipassana. It was partly successful because I was able to get quite some energy and pleasure out of focusing on the breath, however all this energy was hijacked by my thought-process, so a lot of the time it was just fuel for my obsessive thought-patterns, it was like I had a parallell thing going where my attention was divided 50/50 between my breath and my thoughts running like a constant jet-engine. I think I was getting some purification out of this process, but not much stillness, except sometimes. The primary reason I disrobed was because Daniel Ingram published his MCTB in 2009 and I was yet again inspired by his approach (read it first time as an internet publication in 2004 but tried to forget about it as somehow I wanted to buy into the whole religious trip with buddhism). Did the mahasi noting technique for a month or two before I disrobed, and it was obvious that that was a much more efficient way for me to short-circuit my obsessive thinking. However it took some solid psychotherapeutic work, as mentioned in the first post, before I was really able to keep the process going through to completion, because in Equanimity I would always get lazy about practice and at the same time manic about resolving my other issues out in the world, and then I would eventually slide back down into Dark Night again.

Still find motivation is not so strong, but I've been reading as many aiming for 3rd path threads I can find, and I'm getting some more interest in the subtlety of whatever is left of the self-contraction. Especially this thread was helpful: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3529941 I still have frustrations in my life, but they seem pretty unrelated to whatever is left of the self-contraction, and because overall life is really good it seems easy to get complacent at this point. Sat for 1 hour this morning trying to comprehend the totalitiy of my experience and I was getting more motivated by the groove I was getting into.

Enthusiasm for the practice is coming back. Much more curiosity about trying to discover all the different ways reality is still in conflict with itself, and intending to vipassanize that. Sat for 45 min today.

Still convinced I have 2nd Path (but that is mostly just practice notes for myself for understanding my own experience). However all sense of afterglow is totally gone and I can't remember last time I saw any of the jhanas. I do get a lot of strenght and inspiration out of meditating, though, and when I forget about this whole meditation project, which I often do, life and reality becomes really really horrible in the sense of pretty extreme hopelessness (though my sense of humour about feeling like that is still intact). Also I think what I described earlier as having the "wisdom eye" opened (not sure if I used those terms but the experience was one of full circulation, openness and completeness), actually was the real deal, but it closed again pretty hard, and I feel pretty far away from that experience these day. It still feels like "insight disease" has been dramatically reduced in a way that is paradoxically hard to pinpoint, but even though hopelessness can be extreme something is still much better than it was pre-stream entry. There is a strong longing for that openness and completeness described earlier but at the same time I often forget that such a thing exists at all. Mostly writing this as a reminder to myself to keep up the practice, because inspiration and courage is so much stronger when I do. Been meditating for 4 days now, 45 min or more each day.

Glad to have a steady practice of 45 min per day going again. There has been some pretty rough Dark Night cycles. Personally I believe Dark Night is only therapeutic material that is being released. My psychologist friend who claims arahantship says "the observer" is basically only a psychological defense mechanism, splitting us off from what is being experienced in an attempt to not experience it fully because it is perceived as too painful. Personally I'm speculating about what kind of correaltion there is between arahantship and having fully worked through ones psychological history. My ambition is to become done with both. I think when I experience that "the observer" has been reduced to a large extent and there is more intimacy with experience, and also less ability to split off from experience, it only makes sense that whatever therapeutic material/processes that is still not finished will be intensified.

Spoke with a close friend this morning who thinks he is an anagami, and I actually think what I described earlier in this thread when the self-contraction dissolved to such a degree that I felt like this process was done, that that made me an anagami as well. I felt like being completely done, ie being an arahant, but then the thing closed and I went back to what is probably anagami. Seems like the first fruition I had created a chain-reaction that wiped out the blockages to the higher paths with the extremly strong honeymoon I had making it easy at that period to make new progress into the higher paths. And for now, what I'm left with, is like a huuuuuge chunk of "karma." My theory is that for many people the gap between anagami and arahant is a huge karmic cleansing. It is impossible at this phase to seperate oneself off, ie hide as the observer, from all of ones stuff / karma / trauma, etc that is stored in the body, so it has to be cleansed out.

Interesting thing is, at this point, I'm a social worker, and I have just started on an education to also become a gestalttherapist, and as part of that education we have to go into a lot of therapy ourselves. In gestalttherapy there is a lot of exercises for self-therapy, so at this point my interest in meditation is more about making these self-therapy exercises into a daily practice.

One exercise is just identifying whatever you feel that you might not have clearly acknowledged yet, and speak it out mindfully, for instance to day I said: "I'm fed up with life being so challenging." These feelings are often stuff we don't like to acknowledge about ourselves, and when I admitted this feeling, something inside me really cleared up, and I started to breathe really deeply.

Another thing I do a lot is a well-known chair exercise, where you project your image of someone you have unresolved stuff with over into a chair sitting in front of you. And then your tell your projected image of that person whatever you want to bring up, and you try to get a hold of your most rawest and unfiltered emotions about that person. And then you go over to that other chair, sit down in the "energy" of your own projection as that person, and answer to the accusations. Usually it leads to some kind of resolution between the two of you, where at the end you get more into the warm feelings you share for each other that is there under the harsher feelings. In the gestalt-language this is called "clearing the felt between you." I was getting in touch with some self-hate here the other day, so I created a projection of myself and put in the projection chair and told myself pretty unfiltered what a disgusting person I was, and then I went over to sit in my own projection, and I was really surprised at how much understanding and space I had to receive these accusations about myself, and it really quickly generated a lot of warm feelings for myself where I encouraged myself for being so brave to bring up these feelings unfiltered, and just more and more I was getting into giving myself self-love.

I'm pretty curious about what a fusion between these kinds of self-therapy exercises with the type of meditation practice that is informed by the progress of insight would have been. And I imagine at some point psychotherapists with an understanding of the progress of insight could do some really awesome meditation coaching.

At this point it feels like whatever I do is my practice, whether it is yoga, other physical exercises, these therapeutic practices described, singing mantras, artistic expression through drawing, silent meditation, dancing, journaling, etc.

Hi Chris, thank you for such honest sharing. I can relate to your issues and especially with the struggles that you face. I face the seeming paradox of the path that we undertake to become enlightened. The problem is that there is no one to be enlightened but yet it seems that there is much to do, doesn’t it?

I face being attracted to pleasant sensations, wanting them more. I face painful buzzing, wishing they will go away. Irritation, boredom, confusion, distraction, the list is long. When we are assaulted by them, it is not easy to simply observe with equanimity, which is all we are supposed to do, instead we will find our own sneaky ways to change things, good or bad. I keep failing to see and act with complete acceptance, letting go of this will-to-change mindset and this could all link back to ‘someone being enlightened’ in the sense that ‘someone’ is a special ‘I am’ that perhaps is also a special conceit that should be let go of?

‘I am’ similarly in the region of what they call the middle paths, specifically (1.01 to 2.99). I see that it is important to not see myself attracted to the notion of ‘being’ nearer to the end of that scale. That ‘being’ itself is the blockage to 3.00, but it isn’t easy. I must let go of ‘being’ and the constant search to change, to be better; I should simply observe impermanence not so much with physical sensations but with those of the mind and comprehend that by accepting and letting go, is progress…

Hey Yilun :-) Good to hear your practice is going well. Thanks for your comment. I can relate, especially with this balance between effort and surrender. I think for me there is still some issues about trusting the process, and whenever I get caught up in solidyfing "almost being done," or the opposite "oh my god, what if I'm not close to being done at all," that takes me out of just surrendering more and more into whatever this is.

Hi fellow (ex-)monk Chris! Once you have complete faith in the process it will all happen naturally. And complete faith means dropping most of the thoughts/desires/aversions with regards to attainments and life, accepting whatever comes as it comes... 

P.S. I found it helpful to wear  "oh my god, what if I'm not close to being done at all" and getting all comfortable with it and life at the moment. Worth a try!


I wish you all the best sincerely with many smiles,
Yilun

Experimenting with just being done. Not claiming to be done, but experimenting with trying to settle down with the attitude that there is nothing more to be done on this path, that "insight disease" is over. Had a conversation with my psychologist friend who claims to be an arahant, and he said at some point the fascination with the process actually becomes an obstacle, ie it feeds into this dualistic split that there is something that has to be done in order to be complete. I have prematurely claimed to be done (primarily only to myself) 7-8 years ago when I was deeply into Mooji/Adyashanti/Gangaji etc, and had some kind of awakening the way they describe it, but obviously I wasn't done at all. Lets see how it goes this time. I think of this experiment as saying to myself "ok, enough of this, lets move on."

Cool. Now there is actually "full circulation" in my system again. What I wrote in the previous post was more from an intellectual level I see now, but it came out of my system "warming up" to this full circulation again. This is the second time after stream-entry I'm having this experience. Will be interesting to see if it stays like this when I go to sleep now and wake up tomorrow. Probaby not, but this process is defently cooking again (of course it was all the time, but heavy amounts of dark night material since last time I had "full circulation" going). Interesting side-note is my therapist was just a few days ago working with blockages in my third eye area, just like he did very close up to the point where I attained stream-entry. I was also doing a lot of formal meditation at that point, which I haven't been doing this time.

It is still open, and I can only say I hope it stays that way.

This is what I have been looking for in my meditation practice.

There is nothing unusual or spectacular about this at this point, but finally my phenomenological experience of the present moment feels right, even when I'm daydreaming or going through difficulties.