FEBRUARY 15TH - FEBRUARY 20TH, 2018Practice is all over the place still. I've been working with some interesting/trippy insight techniques that have gone pretty deep. Cycling has become much more regular, and some transitory states with no "doer" apparent anywhere have been hard to deal with off-cushion. I think I may have had a second path fruition, but am not really sure and will continue to evaluate. Regardless, I'm planning to try to rebalance my practice back towards metta by listening to the
guided metta meditations from the r/streamentry Beginner's Guide.
I've been playing around with what Nikolai Halay writes about in
this blog post about volition, where there's a seemingly irresistable urge to complete a thought/spoken sequence once it's started. So being really aware of that quality of an irresistible need for it to continue. It would probably work well to just observe it, but it's really interesting if you actively interrupt it and switch between several sequences associated with different things. For example: "Old McDonald had a / Super-cal-i-frag-i / They're taking the hobbits to / I take refuge in the / farm, E-I, E-I / -list-ic-ex-pi / isengard, they're / Buddha and / etc.." I've been saying the phrases aloud rather than thinking them, since stream entry partially deleted my sense of ownership of what I'm saying -- the intention to say something is still usually mine, but the resulting sounds aren't. So saying it loud adds an extra not-self kick to it.
I've been doing an Inception style thing recently where I'll set up nested imaginal scenarios, with the start of them based loosely on how Ken McLeod starts his 5 Elements / 5 Dakinis meditations:
So just take a few moments, let the attention rest. And after your mind and body are somewhat settled, then rest in the sense that everything you experience, including your own body, is like a dream, like a rainbow. That is, everything appears vividly, but nothing has any actual substance to it, particularly your own body. Normally we associate solidity with body but now we’re going to feel, imagine that it is simply an appearance, like a rainbow, like a dream.
When I'm doing it, I'll get to the end and then start over again "And in your dream, you let your mind and body settle. In your dream, you rest in the sense that everything you experience is like a dream or like a rainbow..." and then start over a few more times. This gets pretty deep fairly fast, and I feel at the end like I'm just a hair's breadth away from recognizing that there's essentially no difference between my nested imagining of myself and what it feels like to be myself in the first place.
I've also been occasionally just trying to focus on predicting what I'd do in the current situation. What actions would I feel right now? How would I be feeling? What would I think? What would my body feel like? What would I see? And then whatever arises, I then think "Oh yeah, that's exactly what I would be experiencing." So allowing it to seem really important to model myself completely and to simulate how I'd feel. This and the prior nested scenario thing are both inspired by a deep glimpse I got when trying to
"persistence hunt" myself back in October. There's a
good review of a book called Surfing Uncertainty which discusses how most brain systems even for stuff like movement operate by making predictions and changing the state of the body to make the predictions come true. This somehow seems very wrong from the perspective of an untrained person since they have the sense of doing/thinking/controlling/etc. But I feel reasonably confident that the sense of self/doer/controller/thinker is just a prediction/simulation of what it would be like to be you making decisions and experiencing things, along with a
huge UGH FIELD around looking at the actual nature of that experience. Tanha is the built-in desire for your what it would be like to be you experience to be a what it is really like to be you experience, and dukkha is the unpleasant cognitive dissonance that's triggered since those can't consistently line up.
I've been doing about 15 minutes of kundalini yoga exercises to start my session. They're pretty intense, but I can see why they're effective -- they seem to mainly be targeting movements and eye positions that directly demonstrate the impermanence/not-selfness of the centerpoint and spine with stuff like clenching the palate, gazing with eyes closed at places you'd never normally look at, etc.
I've also been noticing some stuff around muscle tension both while I'm exercising and when I'm resting. If I go for a long-ish run and try to just generally observe what's happening, I seem to vaguely cycle up through the nanas to Equanimity. And when I'm doing strength training, if I just rest right after doing something hard, it's much easier to just relax into awareness. I've also been making the water extra hot at the end of my showers and running it over my face and shoulder muscles, which seems to again help with relaxing into awareness.
So all those practices have been putting me fairly deep into High Equanimity of second path when I sit. Sometimes all sense of possibility of doing/controlling/etc. seems to drop away and I'm just there with everything being fine. And then I get up to start my day and I run from that mode for the first few minutes, and that's particularly freaky -- because nothing has changed at all, all the sensations are the same, and the subjective experience seems the same except for some unnameable quality that's completely different. I had a big A&P a week ago, and started cycling up to High Equanimity on Friday. On Saturday I did a long trail run and cycled up very strongly to High Equanimity over the course of it. I got home to take a shower and things seemed to settle out into being normal for a few minutes. I was relaxing deeply at the end of a shower when I noticed a sudden discontinuity -- everything sounded different, it felt like I'd moved a bit, and it just seemed different. I didn't have a bliss wave right afterwards, but a few minutes later I was almost manically happy about something. Since then cycling has been pretty rapid with some unpleasant states, and I've had a couple bursts of static just as I'm falling asleep. Not sure if these are actual fruitions or just near misses. Whatever they are, I feel like my level of insight is definitely outrunning my tranquility, compassion, and acceptance -- so I'm going to be rebalancing towards metta by doing the guided Rob Burbea meditations instead of more trippy stuff for at least the next few weeks.