stream entry mechanics - Discussion
Hi Lukas,
Your history and approach matches mine (a couple 10 day retreats, a couple hours per day of formal practice and a resolution to practice something all the time). My experience of the world changed delightlfully and dramatically over the course of my first two years of that practice in a way that my 'pragmatic' friends say was reasonable to call 'stream entry'. That said, my 'traditional' aquaintances might think it's pretentious and uninformed to say that someone with my background and experience is a sotapana, so it's a jumbled space to figure out how to label the results of practice. But I'll stipulate that you want what I have and go from there. Much of what I say here is rephrasing of what others have told to me, mixed in with the way I feel like describing things based on my unique nature and nurture.
My approach was to not worry about where I was at on the path, rather to worry about how I was practicing. But 'right practice' (what to notice, how to recognise that something new has been seen, how/when to leave that recognition behind and return to just noticing) changes depending on where you are, so for that I depend on frequent 'check-in' with other experienced meditators, my teachers, fine tuning things as my location on the maps changed was crucial for me.
In a sense though, the practice never changes, it's always just to see things as they are without preservating over what to do. But since the conditions changes over time, so will our awareness of changing conditions change, because our job is wire our brain to be comfortable with current expeience as opposed to thinking about how it was 5 seconds ago or how it might be in 5 seconds. It's perfetly natural to be curious about how what just happend fits into a map, so we just have to have those experiences enough times that we get board with those experiences to the point that we loose the habbit of noticing that we are on a new point of the map, but deepen the habbit of noticing what is happening. Familiarity breeds acceptance, and that takes time and repetitive experience to happen.
I recognise that I'm sort of chasing my tail in this descprition, but I'm just gonna let it flow!
A word about insight. Our practice of equanimous awareness of present moment sense events rewires the brain to be comfortable with awareness of events instead of evaluating events. That is simply rewiring, rewiring, rewiring. As that goes along, we notice moments of the brain starting to go down an evaluating loop, but vearing off that cycle of thought back into awareness of present moment events. In that moment of droping the loop might be an 'ah ha!' experience where we conciously think, oh yeah, that's what that pithly phrase or instruction meant. It's impossible not to enjoy that moment a bit. But that moment is an evaluating loop in itself, it can feel like that itself is the rewiring, but really it's just recognising and labeling the rewireing that's already happenend over the course of hours/days/weeks of practice. When those moments can be described simply with words, I call them moments of 'realization', because we realize/*know* that something we have heard before is true in a way that is completely different than beliveing that something we have heard is true.
I think a 'game like' approach is helpful. The game is to, at any point of our day, see how we are thinking about things as opposed to noticing things. Actions follow thoughts, so that game is to notice our how our actions are based on old data as opposed to fresh-off-the-nerve response to events. I accidentally did a lot of sports-like practice, literally ball-in-the-air and catch it, as a way to force myself to keep seeing the ball as opposed to thinking about the ball. When I got good at moment to moment attention to the flying ball, it was easier to feel/translate that practice to other venues like dishes, cooking, walking, thinking, talking, meditating etc.
Re-reading your post.... the frustration you experience is a natural byproduct of the way your brain works, you read, imagine, try, notice, 'fail', notice, read, imagine, try, notice, 'fail', arg this is frustrating. That shift from doing a thing to negatively obsessing over what is happening (being frustrated) is a thing to notice in itself, the frustration comes from expectations not being met, noticing they are not being met. What is the personal assumption that leads to thinking things are not working right? Maybe turning that moment into a learning moment is too advanced, maybe not. If the practice just leads to a lot of thinking and doubt and writing and asking, maybe it's not a helpful practice to pursue at that moment.
The thing to do is follow practices that are simple enough (at that time) that success and failure etc don't spin off in to excessive rumination of results, rather you want to believe that getting back on the horse in the next second is the right thing to do, that you don't need to wait and find someone to talk to about the situation. Sports was my way of stumbling into hundreds of hours of noticing I was thinking about sh*t and then turning away from the thinking and back towards "where is the dang ball, what does it look like now?". In real life, I walked on a lot of hand railings and raised curbs as way to turn a minute of preoccupied locomotion into a minute of beneficial practice (not because I knew about and was pursuing enlightenment, just be cause I didn't want to be bored at that moment). Finding ways to do that off the cushinon, for me means, "what sense door am I hanging on at this moment?". When the elevator door is about to open, it's sight. When walking around, it's sight. When sitting it's the very narrow sight, or sound, or feeling of a point on the body.
At every possible moment it's might be good to notice "oh, I'm not aware of what I'm dong right now, I'm actually doing something different than I intended to do". (sort of 'noting' on a macro scale) Usually it's that some sense event triggered monkey-mind rumination. It might be helpful to pause in that moment and notice what sense event triggered the rumination? It might be impossible to think back that far, in that case just noticing the rumination is perfectly adequate for that situation. For me, 20 years ago it might have been an event on Monday that has me still ruminating on Friday. After all my growth and practice, I feel like triggering events are recognized in half a second as opposed to 5 days. In a sense, I feel that's a good score card to know where you are on the map: how long does it take to recognize the sense event that bumped you off of your intended practice? It literally starts out as days and can end up being milliseconds.
Desire to attain is very usefull when it impels us to find out better ways to practice. I'm reminded of a fictional characters line, something like "skepticism is a helpful watchdog, you just have to know when to let it off the leash". I have no idea how that line helps, but it came to me so I'm dishing it out.
Your history and approach matches mine (a couple 10 day retreats, a couple hours per day of formal practice and a resolution to practice something all the time). My experience of the world changed delightlfully and dramatically over the course of my first two years of that practice in a way that my 'pragmatic' friends say was reasonable to call 'stream entry'. That said, my 'traditional' aquaintances might think it's pretentious and uninformed to say that someone with my background and experience is a sotapana, so it's a jumbled space to figure out how to label the results of practice. But I'll stipulate that you want what I have and go from there. Much of what I say here is rephrasing of what others have told to me, mixed in with the way I feel like describing things based on my unique nature and nurture.
My approach was to not worry about where I was at on the path, rather to worry about how I was practicing. But 'right practice' (what to notice, how to recognise that something new has been seen, how/when to leave that recognition behind and return to just noticing) changes depending on where you are, so for that I depend on frequent 'check-in' with other experienced meditators, my teachers, fine tuning things as my location on the maps changed was crucial for me.
In a sense though, the practice never changes, it's always just to see things as they are without preservating over what to do. But since the conditions changes over time, so will our awareness of changing conditions change, because our job is wire our brain to be comfortable with current expeience as opposed to thinking about how it was 5 seconds ago or how it might be in 5 seconds. It's perfetly natural to be curious about how what just happend fits into a map, so we just have to have those experiences enough times that we get board with those experiences to the point that we loose the habbit of noticing that we are on a new point of the map, but deepen the habbit of noticing what is happening. Familiarity breeds acceptance, and that takes time and repetitive experience to happen.
I recognise that I'm sort of chasing my tail in this descprition, but I'm just gonna let it flow!
A word about insight. Our practice of equanimous awareness of present moment sense events rewires the brain to be comfortable with awareness of events instead of evaluating events. That is simply rewiring, rewiring, rewiring. As that goes along, we notice moments of the brain starting to go down an evaluating loop, but vearing off that cycle of thought back into awareness of present moment events. In that moment of droping the loop might be an 'ah ha!' experience where we conciously think, oh yeah, that's what that pithly phrase or instruction meant. It's impossible not to enjoy that moment a bit. But that moment is an evaluating loop in itself, it can feel like that itself is the rewiring, but really it's just recognising and labeling the rewireing that's already happenend over the course of hours/days/weeks of practice. When those moments can be described simply with words, I call them moments of 'realization', because we realize/*know* that something we have heard before is true in a way that is completely different than beliveing that something we have heard is true.
I think a 'game like' approach is helpful. The game is to, at any point of our day, see how we are thinking about things as opposed to noticing things. Actions follow thoughts, so that game is to notice our how our actions are based on old data as opposed to fresh-off-the-nerve response to events. I accidentally did a lot of sports-like practice, literally ball-in-the-air and catch it, as a way to force myself to keep seeing the ball as opposed to thinking about the ball. When I got good at moment to moment attention to the flying ball, it was easier to feel/translate that practice to other venues like dishes, cooking, walking, thinking, talking, meditating etc.
Re-reading your post.... the frustration you experience is a natural byproduct of the way your brain works, you read, imagine, try, notice, 'fail', notice, read, imagine, try, notice, 'fail', arg this is frustrating. That shift from doing a thing to negatively obsessing over what is happening (being frustrated) is a thing to notice in itself, the frustration comes from expectations not being met, noticing they are not being met. What is the personal assumption that leads to thinking things are not working right? Maybe turning that moment into a learning moment is too advanced, maybe not. If the practice just leads to a lot of thinking and doubt and writing and asking, maybe it's not a helpful practice to pursue at that moment.
The thing to do is follow practices that are simple enough (at that time) that success and failure etc don't spin off in to excessive rumination of results, rather you want to believe that getting back on the horse in the next second is the right thing to do, that you don't need to wait and find someone to talk to about the situation. Sports was my way of stumbling into hundreds of hours of noticing I was thinking about sh*t and then turning away from the thinking and back towards "where is the dang ball, what does it look like now?". In real life, I walked on a lot of hand railings and raised curbs as way to turn a minute of preoccupied locomotion into a minute of beneficial practice (not because I knew about and was pursuing enlightenment, just be cause I didn't want to be bored at that moment). Finding ways to do that off the cushinon, for me means, "what sense door am I hanging on at this moment?". When the elevator door is about to open, it's sight. When walking around, it's sight. When sitting it's the very narrow sight, or sound, or feeling of a point on the body.
At every possible moment it's might be good to notice "oh, I'm not aware of what I'm dong right now, I'm actually doing something different than I intended to do". (sort of 'noting' on a macro scale) Usually it's that some sense event triggered monkey-mind rumination. It might be helpful to pause in that moment and notice what sense event triggered the rumination? It might be impossible to think back that far, in that case just noticing the rumination is perfectly adequate for that situation. For me, 20 years ago it might have been an event on Monday that has me still ruminating on Friday. After all my growth and practice, I feel like triggering events are recognized in half a second as opposed to 5 days. In a sense, I feel that's a good score card to know where you are on the map: how long does it take to recognize the sense event that bumped you off of your intended practice? It literally starts out as days and can end up being milliseconds.
Desire to attain is very usefull when it impels us to find out better ways to practice. I'm reminded of a fictional characters line, something like "skepticism is a helpful watchdog, you just have to know when to let it off the leash". I have no idea how that line helps, but it came to me so I'm dishing it out.
