Starting to get a lot more serious about practice again now that second path insights are starting to show up in force, after deliberately holding off on making much progress for a while after landing stream entry in order to deal with daily life householder morality stuff.

After a long period of instability in my life (in the process of moving abroad to live with my partner) things look like they'll be a lot more stable for a while soon, so I'm finally looking into going on retreat for the first time - I'm one of those rare people that managed to hit first path without a retreat, I guess, though I also first crossed the A&P when I was probably around 5 or 6 years old, so it's not a path I would necessarily recommend, not like there is a choice.
I've been looking at Gaia House since I've heard good things about that retreat center and since they're within Europe (for some definition of Europe) it would help keep the cost down a lot. They offer a 70% discount rate for people up to 25 years old and I turn 26 this summer, so I might see if I can make use of that still since money is tight, but you have to call them for it and I have terrible phone anxiety :/. I'd have to find out which of their retreats would be most suitable too since not all are open to first time retreatants and I'd like to go for at least a week to really get some momentum going.

In terms of actual practice I've managed to stabilize on having high quality daily sits again. I feel like I stand to gain a lot from finally really powering the daily life practice a lot too, so I've been working on that, which has gotten much easier post-Stream Entry.
In formal sitting practice I'm trying to work up towards longer sits but not making very much progress, I've hit a wall pretty hard. I can do 30 minute sits without much trouble but that has been my sit duration for a while now and going much beyond it in a way that's useful practice and not just forcing myself to sit still is really difficult. I'd like to be able to reliably do 45 minute sits for the time being.

To help make my sits a bit longer I've started adding more steps to my sits and taking some more time with each, so my current routine now looks like this:
- Reflect on motivation; why am I doing this? What do I expect to happen, why is that beneficial, why do I expect these techniques to work?
- Reflect on gratitude; notice how fortunate I am to have access to these teachings and techniques, how much of a miracle it is that all this was discovered and preserved for thousands of years; reflect on how fortunate I am to have life circumstances that allow for serious practice.
- Make a formal resolution to practice using my intended techniques for the duration of the sit for the benefit of all beings.
- Cultivate metta, mostly directed either at myself or towards someone who I know is suffering. I use this to cultivate tranquility and access concentration too.
- (Optional) if I feel my concentration is too diffuse or sensations related to metta start to get vague I briefly redirect my attention to sensations of the breath at the nostrils since that helps to solidify concentration.
- Once sensations of piti start getting strong enough to be distracting I switch to focussing on them, trying to stabilize first jhana.
- Once sensations of piti start feeling tiresome and irritating I let it fade more towards the background and try and put sukha in the foreground instead, encouraging the mind to shift into second jhana, though that's very much still a work in progress.
- (Optional) Either before attempting the shift to second jhana or when coming out of jhana sometimes I send out wishes/intentions in a magickal kind of way, supported by the metta cultivated earlier.
- After coming out of jhana I switch to gentle noting for the duration of the sit.

I find that I really need the increased tranquility and concentration now to make progress; I need a mind that's pretty still to really be able to penetrate the deeper subtler layers of stuff. Metta has been really helpful in allowing me to relax into seclusion and feeling good, something which is still really tricky for me. I feel like the really fast, sharp, dissecting kind of concentration/investigation I used before would probably still work at this point but that's not where I want to go right now.

Mapping stuff feels much less useful right now as now there's just too many levels of "fractals" visible. I've gotten really good at making the first path cycles progress just by recalling what each nana feels like, but now both first path nanas and second path nanas are occuring at the same time, and inclining the mind too much towards mapping the second path nanas tends to just call up the first path nanas instead. I'm fairly confident I'm starting to run into early dark night stuff in second path though, but I don't really find it fruitful to map "what stage I am in" at any given specific moment.

I feel pretty silly over getting smug after landing first path for a while since I can see clearly now that not all that much was accomplished. For what it's worth I knew it was silly at the time too and didn't really let it impact my actions too much.

I think fruitions have gotten significantly less common, though I had a really satisfying one a couple days ago. Mind that I've never been able to "make fruitions happen" in any sense and they've always been things that catch me by surprise, most often just walking around mindfully or lying in bed and only occasionally when still on the cushion when I'm just daydreaming and not practicing anymore. If they stop occurring for a while I don't think I'll really miss them now that I've confirmed the last bits of phenomenology I wanted to confirm about them (the bit about "fruitions always happen at the end of the out breath" especially I really wanted to confirm), they're not "all that" though the rush and sense of refreshment is nice.

Welcome !!!

What a journey, welcome indeed!

Thank you, friends.

I took a pretty big dose of edibles (weed) earlier today as a belated celebration of 4/20.
Weed tends to work wonders on my concentration, it's rather psychedelic for me and something about the relaxation really works out.
I was discussing the difficulty of teaching the dhamma with my boyfriend and then I turned that towards magick, as the ability to teach well is very magickal.
I commented on magickal effects being something I really wanted to learn more about as I naturally get them in high enough doses that it feels like a significant issue in how I relate to other people, and also in making it very hard for me to relax into deeper states of concentration
This led me to contemplate how malleable my perception of the world and my mind are, which started giving my phenomenology very formless characteristics Which has happened before.

I remembered reading Daniel writing about how it's not true formless realms unless the body completely vanished, which I really wanted to see, so I sat down and inclined the mind towards spaciousness, thinking "it's so big, it's so big"
That definitely amplified the sense of spaciousness but I couldn't push it far enough on a pinch
I went back down to 4th jhana stuff but there was too much excitement now
I tried going back to 3th jhana but it was very chaotic there, then going down to 2nd I suddenly had an insight about the interaction of vippassana and samatha, seeing how 3th vippassana jhana was changing the experience of 2nd samatha jhana as they are very different and the effect is really silly
I went back to 1st jhana stuff and suddenly I noticed that the there was no "I" that was "shifting jhanas"
The jhanas were just coming up and the mind was shifting towards them automatically as was necessary
Then I realized the same thing was true for the meditation object too, the meditation object was shifting around more to the body for a while
I had been trying to stabilize concentration using metta which didn't really work, very briefly the breath but that seemed too much of a jump from the boundless formless things I'd been trying to do just before, then the body which is always really good and I was able to work through a lot of the weird body posture issues I'd been having
Anyhow then I realized that the body was just posturing itself as well and then I just felt like getting up, noticed that the getting up was also just happening by itself, and just let that happen and went to write this here
When I focus on it I can tune into it pretty well but it's a bit destabilizing if I do and makes it hard to think

This feels very clearly A&P to me while I also notice that dark night stuff is very nearby
I think I should focus on stabilizing this stuff more though, I can't afford to stop practicing now and that itself would be pointless, but I feel like I should really resolve to analyze this A&P territory for all it's worth since I haven't done it enough justice
For some definition of "I"... I feel pretty humbled now, I was definitely thinking myself a fair bit smarter than I was, though to my credit I was also aware of that issue and was giving it a fair bit of attention
it's just intertwined with self-esteem issues elsewhere, and I'm definitely better off overcorrecting towards "arrogant" for a while; the two are very linked

My relationship to this plant have grown pretty complicated, huh. I don't have much issues with other drugs anymore and am much happier with my relationship to them, but weed does so much for me. It's hard decisionmaking when the benefits and shadowsides are both big and very evenly matched. This was after a month-long break which has been really good.
Edibles feel a lot less toxic and more healing to me, and being a bigger commitment is good since it discourages impulsive use. Taking longer to kick in also just always helps a ton with anything potentially addictive, I feel. Something like today at a non-degenerate rate would not be bad for me at all. I understand that the vast majority of my gains today though are because I've gotten my daily life morality very well in order, getting more exercise and eating and living healthier than ever and few obligations, as well as deliberately training in concentration and cultivating metta and such. And just doing meditation in high enough doses.

In hindsight I don't know how to feel about what I did during stream entry review. I think I was definitely overly cautious, I'm towards the tail end of a complicated multi-year process of moving abroad to live with my partner so I just figured all my effort should be going into not rocking the boat on that and making it all go smoothly. I did succeed in making everything go very smoothly but I feel like with more mindfulness and concentration and such it would've been significantly easier. I did need to meditate pretty regularly, but overall it was maybe every other day or even less and at points of it it was absent most days. I did make tiem to attend some 4-hour online mini-retreats and I got quite a bit out of that in terms of technique, but I never really got my concentration up high enough nor did I power on the daily life practice pretty much at all.

I think I could've gotten it done using strong resolutions not to progress too far and review deeper instead, and that toning down the practice probably caused more problems than it solved
Then again I did also review quite well, but mostly on the cycles, I learned to go through them quickly when they come up and I did some practicing with calling them up in purpose, slowing them down, going out of order etcetera because I just couldn't help myself
But that felt like a bit too much magickal power at the time, being able to tune my mind to that extent felt like biting off a bit more than I trusted myself to chew even though it would've been fine, but it was a hard-learned caution.
I guess that ultimately is very related to the insights I had today, so going there probably would've actually progressed things to an extent I didn't want. It's amazing that the mind seems like it already knows what the insights are, otherwise how could it stop you from having them
I guess if you follow this train of thought enough it leads towards the weird intriguing "you are already enlightened" stuff, but I think I'll enjoy the rest of my drug trip with my partner rather than go down that rabbit hole ^_^)

I would apologize for the ramble but I guess it's my practice log

It is your practice log indeed : ) keep up the good work! I recently started a log as well and I'm finding it useful in developing momentum and also playing with effort and ease. Blessings to you

Thank you Louise.

Attention feels extremely out of phase at the moment. Sitting is quite possible as there's a lot of stillness, but trying to direct the mind towards anything is hardly possible now. It's weird to realize that I can be in a state where mindfulness and concentration are quite high and the mind is still, and yet everything is very vague and fleeting, leading to a clear experience of vagueness.

I wonder how I can best utilize this particular mindspace. For now I think I'll just relax into it and try my best to at least maintain the regular rhythm of my everyday life. I'm not particularly thrilled about what is likely to come in the practice in the forseeable future, since I don't really want my daily life to be disturbed too much, but it is how it is, I guess.

Occasionally I have interesting insights or interesting things to say, but I can't really muster the will and concentration to write them out, so they're just kind of stewing in the back of my mind somewhere, and that's pretty draining in its own right.

At least going through these experiences with a much higher level of clarity now makes them feel a lot more useful and meaningful. This definitely feels like new territory, but at least now I can see a point to what's happening, I still feel like I could really be getting a lot more practice in. In principle my life circumstances allow for it, but it's hard to really settle into it, living in this tiny run-down apartment with two people while we search for a new place. The lack of privacy is an issue as well since between work from home and the weekend, my partner is home most days.

The new meditation territory seems much more centered around craving and aversion. Craving especially feels more like a thorn every day; it's something I feel glad to let go of. I feel deeply for all beings that are tied up in this. I notice just how much time I spend ruminating on various desires and fantasies.

I definitely notice insight stages occurring, but there's many layers of it and they interact in strange and interesting ways. There's interactions between the new territory and the old territory, between stages and their substages, and between vippassanic and jhanic modes of attention.

Unfortunately I can't say I'm doing a very good job of controlling bleedthrough into my interactions with other people right now. I really try my best, but I'm bad at controlling my emotions.

I'm starting to think more about how I can gear my practice towards my personal inclinations. I generally learn best if I can learn something in a way that's very integrated with everything else in my life, getting very regular but small doses with lots of breaks over a long time, with a lot of theorizing and discursive thought. I also get a lot out of being able to utilize my creativity as well. I think it'll be good to let go of normative ideas of what good practice should be for a while and just do what I think will work, which I feel much more empowered to do post-Stream Entry.

Writing this practice log has been good. There's something super powerful about actually writing/speaking out ideas and sharing them with another person; it really helps drive them home.

A lot of emotional shadow stuff has been coming to the foreground. Proximally it manifests mostly as envy but there's also aspects regarding expectations, bits of vanity and obsession with the body -- I think my hair is definitely thinning, lol. It's all stuff that's very tied up in imagining there's a "self", and feelings of conceit and entitlement that come with that. A lot of it is triggered by becoming a lot more social again and facing tricky sexuality/gender related questions again. This mirrors what happened during my last major A&P-through-Dark-Night cycle before SE.

Karma really is a bitch, huh? Having naturally strong but very fickle and poorly controlled concentration abilities is a massive footgun. I still feel the effects daily of lots of very strong and dark ill will, resentment and general "dark jhana" stuff I fostered close to a decade ago, even though I now totally disavow that stuff. Likewise I'm very burdened by similar mental stuff I did riding very high A&P concentration into dark night stuff in the cycle I mentioned last paragraph -- an affair involving an ill-considered relationship and then a very painful breakup. I am immeasurably grateful I was able to find MCTB and through it the dharma around that time.

All of this has kind of left me in a bind, because years of having this stuff happen has made me very aware of how much of a double-edged sword strong concentration is and how many dumpster fires I have left in my wake because of it, which makes it very hard to actually allow strong concentration to arise and cultivate itself. The effect is very scattering and depressing. There's a lot to be said for training well in morality before training in strong concentration, as not only is strong concentration a potentially very dangerous power tool, it's also the case that strong concentration really has to be allowed to arise, and the system will try and prevent that from happening if it doesn't trust itself.

The flip side of that of course is that concentration is a skill like any other and has to be actively practiced to be mastered, and strong concentration can arise naturally without training. It's a similar story for insight, which is greatly helped by strong concentration, but insights significant enough to really mess your stuff up can also arise unintentionally quite easily.

I do strongly feel like I really, really need to get my concentration trip in order at this point, but it's hard to get a foothold on it. As I said, I naturally enter deep concentration states easily, but doing it on demand, sustaining it, sustaining or changing the object of concentration and growing or shrinking the breadth of the concentration object are much harder. It'll be a work in progress for a while.

On a higher level, I'm not sure what to prioritize; with the sense field being as erratic as it is with intrusive "stuff" coming up in high quantities and general energy levels, concentration levels and such fluctuating wildly it seems hard to practice the kind of consistency and finesse necessary to master concentration; I also don't want to amplify difficult stuff to beyond what I can handle. Right now morality stuff is still top priority. Concentration itself can act very stabilizing as well, and resolving strongly to focus on concentration and not investigate too hard might slow down the destabilizing phenomena. On the other hand, at this point I really don't think I can hold insights back anymore.

Working hard on insight and gunning for calmer waters is also an option. I definitely feel like I am a lot more on top of things now than I would've been in the past, and so far what's been going on has been a healthy level of challenge rather than the being way in over my head it was before. I'm also cautiously optimistic about what's the come, but it's hard to know. On the other hand, I feel like getting a handle on the concentration thing is 20 years overdue by now, and it might be irresponsible cranking the insight engine looking for the kind of stability that's very hard to come by in this inconstant world. I also just really don't want to bite off more than I can chew.

It's very liberating to realize that as long as I can control the bleed-through there's just really nothing bad about what's occuring. In fact, it's very healing, and I can tell it's necessary. That by itself helps a lot to muster the kind of equanimity and faith necessary to let it all happen. Getting my morality trip in order has also been a massive support; the benefits of a healthy diet, stable sleep schedule and regular exercise can hardly be overstated.

In terms of actual practice I think I will give up on extending my sits to 45 minutes for the time being, especially since I've stopped using a clock. I'll dedicate my usual 30 minute morning sit to morality and concentration, and pepper insight throughout my day. I'll focus more on the joyful appreciation and equanimity brahma viharas, as those are a very good antidote to the specific troublesome "stuff" I am encountering; currently I neglect these and focus on metta and compassion since those are much easier to generate for me.

I'm always impressed by how much more productive it is to do a short period of very high concentration, high commitment insight meditation compared to a longer period where my heart isn't in it as much. Cultivating skillful mindstates first really pays off, even if that's most of what I end up doing during a sit.

I'm getting better at not just recognizing unskillful states when they arise, but also bringing enough equanimity to them to actually work with them. Living skillfully takes a lot of mental agility, since mindstates can switch very rapidly and be very different from each other. I'm getting better at finding the right tools to apply at the right times. A related important insight that has started hitting home hard recently is the fact that there is no "self" on the medium term, either. I was aware that everything fluxes second-to-second, and also that there's no stable "self" that persists across years, but I somehow still imagined that at least on an hour-to-hour basis things were pretty stable, even though this is very much not the case.

My work on concentration has been very fruitful. I'm learning a lot from switching between shamatha and vipassana within a sit, and trying to balance higher levels of both at the same time. I think this suits me pretty well and I will keep going down that path, but I'm glad I prioritized vipassana in my early practice, as the rebound that can come from high levels of concentration is very real.

Actual consistency in daily sitting has been so-so. I definitely need a healthy dose of "nothing to do, nowhere to go" from time to time as I tend to skew rather ambitious and goal-oriented. Smoothly transitioning between that and high intensity bursts of practice is part of the mental agility I mentioned earlier, so it's a work in progress with good prospects.

I was rather sick for two days at the end of last week and that really helped drive home how nice it is to just be able to be here, to breathe freely and move around and have energy and just appreciate life itself, which really helped to chill out my frenetic and compulsive side a bit again, but it's very much a case of continuously picking the bean bags back up, so to speak. Increased levels of equanimity and keeping good humor have been a great help.

Patience seems to be a big theme right now, though progress itself is fast as long as I can muster patience, which has been getting a lot easier. This extends beyond the practice into daily life as well. My practice and daily life have supported each other very well recently. I've really caught the excercise bug now; my general energy levels have never been higher.

"Us versus them" goes so much deeper than just elementary "I am a dude, this is who I am" stuff
This is a really stupid way of perceiving anything, it's gutting and confusing. I am constantly fascinated by the question of why perception does stuff like this, and it's always really rewarding to wonder, even if at different times I come to very different-sounding answers that seem very grounded and obviously true and yet seem very orthogonal to each other. It's very intellectually satisfying. I wish I could get more of a handle on the neuroscience part of all this, but while there's very interesting stuff there it's all incredibly speculative. I'm very interested in the science of cognition and computation (having a computer science degree myself).

There's a very real hazard in asking the question of "why is it like this?" though, which is that now you're pressing some "this" for "it" to be onto the very thing you don't understand and are trying to study, so it's very important to balance any kind of reasoning with very dilligent direct observation. The question of "how are things?" is dangerously tied up in "who am I?" when really it shouldn't matter. This continues recursively into all the fine details.

Right, identifying these sorts of core dualities can be painful, sort of suck, be infuriating.  These worldviews are often rooted in trauma. You have to seperate things to make dualities. Seperation is a sort of escapism.

It's been a little while, but no time like the present to make another post here, I guess~

I've mostly finished moving house now, which is to say, my partner and I are now settled into the new apartment and renovations are done, but since it's ultimately a move abroad I will still have to return to my home country and settle affairs there, which I will do in October/November.

Very much trying to get everything stable on the road again, since you know... new place, new neighborhood, still in a foreign country where I still don't speak the language (eek! lots of aversion to be mined when it comes to the whole "learning French" thing...), still don't have a lot of my personal stuff here, not to mention I have bad ADHD as it is already... still, things are getting a lot calmer.

We both put an absolute ton of effort into this move and the new apartment is beyond comfy! A good chance to experience just... being a householder in the most literal sense, having (or renting) a house somewhere that you have to take care of, and how burdensome that is in its own way. Plus of course lots to think of in terms of family, career, "identity" in the conventional "I'm immigrating for love and now have to integrate into this society that I never gave much thought to" sense -- maybe something for another time.

I turned 26 last week, so that's a thing, I guess! I think... hope... I'm finally starting to leave the worst of the quarter-life crisis behind now. About damn time, lol.

Practice wise I really fell off the whole "formal practice" train again, but lately have been getting much much better at getting daily life practice in. The tone of my practice has shifted much more towards the "true self" lens of things as opposed to the "no self" lens, and that has been very fruitful I think. I read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a book that wasn't very easy to get through but ended up doing quite a bit of good in that impossible to pinpoint, somewhat trollishly frustrating way that Zen teachers specialize in.

I started reaching Loch Kelly's Shift Into Freedom and that kind of more direct pointing approach has been super helpful. Because of that my practice is now once again in much calmer, more spacious, more equanimous territory, after really struggling integrating an absolute storm of constantly shifting perspectives for a long time. I can imagine this kind of thing could be quite a footgun if you were to teach it to beginners though, because I can see how someone might read a book like this and think it's pointing at fourth shamatha jhana or formless jhana stuff, and sorting out the difference between that and genuine insight practice is subtle and tricky business.

Working from that kind of integrative, spacious, luminous perspective has reminded me of an exercise I taught myself to do at some point in the past before I knew about formal meditation practices, which is to pose the question "how would I feel if I had no name?". I've been picking that up again and it's been working well for me, it's very similar to a question Kelly teaches you to ask, which is "what would there be if there was no problem to solve?". Also similar in flavor to "what was your original face?" stuff.

I'm pretty interested to learn more about Zen and Tibetan practices and such since they do strike a chord with me in important ways that counterbalance some of the shadow sides of the more "pragmatic dharma" Mahasi-adjacent practices, but I know that Zen for instance is very heavy on the teacher-student relationship end, and that makes it seem very inaccesible to me.

I'm very eager to try and meet some good dharma friends and mentor figures soon. I'm just generally a very skittish, socially anxious person, so it's not easy. I'll post on DhO more to start. That's kind of daunting in its own right! It's an old forum with a lot of different subsections in various levels of disuse. I'm also quite young to be here and the forum software itself is, ahem, pretty fuckin' shit, though I understand that you can't just migrate an old establised community like this and there doesn't really seem to be anyone around to spearhead such a move.

Curious to see how many people actually read these so if you're reading this, feel free to chime in and say hello! I think there might also be an introductions section somewhere, maybe I should find that and make a post there...

Yo dude! Welcome to thee DhO man!  

I would suggest something Shargrol cooked up for me and it was called S-meditation where I would split the sit in three parts;

(btw, very Tibetan and Mahasi but not zen unless radical allowing is just sitting) 
1. Concentration 10 minutes ( I used White Tara mantra)
2. Active Noting 20 minutes ( I used noting aloud)
3. Radical Allowing (just let stuff do what it does)
( then gently return to the normal stuff and log the sit)

Please give us some juicy details instead of a rather general description. Ya know bra sensations and urges, and that sort of junk!  

Cheers Papa, I will try that some time.

Yeah I'd love to write some more phenomenological stuff some time, but I feel like I'd have to do it pretty quickly after a sit to keep it fresh, and I'm usually not really in a writing mood as I come out of a sit. I'll try, though.

Indeed, I would write immediately after the sit hence more details would be still fresh in memory. 

Here's a more phenomenological report:

I was working on my to-do list for today when I started feeling really distractible and my experience became very muddled and vague. I figured I might just be hungry since it was around dinner time so I started cooking dinner. While cooking I felt a lot of free-floating anxiety and impatience, constantly checking the oven and pacing around the kitchen. After dinner I decided to lie down a bit but I couldn't find any rest, so I got up to take a walk outside. As I was getting ready to step out I started feeling very dejected and mopey for no valid reason, though my mind kept trying to find reasons for it such as blaming it on not getting enough done today even though today was a very productive day for me.

As I started walking outside I made an effort to unhook from thoughts in my head and keep a broad, spacious awareness. My field of awareness became extremely panoramic, clearly being able to see almost a full 180 degree field of vision in front of me while also easily perceiving sounds all around. I walked like this for a while and some frustration set in, feeling like there was too much rumbling energy and discomfort to settle down, but it was all too vague and subdued to take it apart through aggressive observation while walking around, and I felt too wired to sit down. I acknowledged that this is just how it is, that sensations can always be accepted and worked with regardless of what form they take, and a sense of galvanisation set in, like steeling my heart and summoning bravery, and things briefly settled down a bit.

Around this time my mental talk, which had been very quiet when I'd just started walking and had the extremely panoramic experience, started up very fast and aggressively, thinking about how I should write this log entry afterwards and what I would write in this.
Reading Shift Into Freedom it recommended to try and experience both the wide panoramic view and the everyday "I am a guy with thoughts in my head" everyday view at the same time, something which I hadn't really tried before, so I tried that for a while, and it was challenging but doable. When I try that it feels like there's some subtle tension or barrier "between" the two perspectives, that has the same flavor as the separation that it feels like there is between the body and the rest of the world when taking just the panoramic view, and it feels "wrong" and like it wants to "resolve".

Anyhow, having now changed my technique things sped up, then calmed down for a while, then sped up again, feeling like perspectives and viewpoints were coming in far faster than they could be processed. Sensations like sounds, sights and the feeling of the wind started feeling very sharp and violating. Mental images and mental touch sensations got a lot stronger and took even more of the character of cutting into my bones, extreme cold, the body turning inside out, the sense field turning inside out, grinding gears, eyes popping out of my sockets and so on. I actually welcomed this, because at that point the sensations stopped being subtle and became very in-my-face, making it much easier to concentrate on them.

I decided to sit down on the sidewalk in a quiet place under a tree and fully surrender to the sensations and the uncontrollability of it all, until eventually there was a sense of being "done" and things being alright as they were. The sensations calmed down and I opened my eyes and started writing this report.

Right now there is a sense of instability, like things might easily fall back to unpleasant chaos, yet at the same time there is a sense that this is just fine and not a problem. I'm going home now and expect if I can sit or lie down quietly for a bit that things will stabilise more.

" I'm going home now and expect if I can sit or lie down quietly for a bit that things will stabilise more."

Why the need to "stabilize" anything? Which wants what to be stable?

Im still not seeing much of the phenomenological reporting ... but I might be off so ... don't mind me  

By stabilize I meant... There's some different "modes" of awareness there -- pretty obviously dancing around some map theory since I understand that's not what you want to hear for understandable reasons -- one of which tends to present sensations that are rapidly shifting, generally unpleasant, and attention tends to want to jerk around aggressively, trains of thoughts get repetitive and intrusive and run partially in parallel and go unfinished, there's more of a tendency of awareness to contract into a smaller regions of space. The other mode of awareness is more spacious, more equanimous, less forceful and seems less distorted, giving physical sensations and emotions more metered importance. When I say "stabilize" I am referring to the fact that these modes tend to occur in a linear progression -- first the first is prevalent, then the second -- and there can be a tendency to move in both directions along that line.

When I say stabilize I really mean "I, as a conventional person, would rather be in the second mode of perception than the first right now, because it is already past 8pm on a friday night and I still have some normal everyday things that need doing for normal everyday reasons, and one mode of perception makes that much easier than the other"

In terms of phenomenology, if I had to bring it back to the levels of sense doors -- though personally I describe these things not in terms of "six sense doors" but in terms of inner/outer sight, inner/outer sound and inner/outer "feel" (Shinzen Young system) -- I think there's a decent amount there? I can make certain parts of it explicitly sensorial:

- Talk about "vagueness": this is pretty tricky to explain, but mental images tend to look more blurred, space feels like it has more of a "thick soup with areas of varying density" character, physical sensations are more like... if you can picture "dull pain" versus "sharp pain", imagine that but for things that aren't pain. Mental talk tends to be quieter in terms of volume, what would otherwise be full sentences tends to devolve more into phrases or trail off towards the end.
- Talk about "restlessness" or "free-floating anxiety": in the body this is mostly felt around the chest, with a raised heartbeat and a feeling of being out of breath. Sensations seem like they follow up on each other faster, mental talk feels like it's speaking in a hurry.
- Talk about "spaciousness": It just kind of feels like there is more or less space. When I say things are spacious I mean that it feels like there is more space for sensations to be, like perhaps... imagine if you filled all of space with sensations distinguishable by nothing but their location, when I say things are more spacious, it feels like I would be able to identify more distinct sensations like that? I hope that is clear. When experienced visually it's like taking a photo with a wide-angle lens versus a more ordinary lens. The shape of space itself also changes, sometimes it feels like there is more "sensation" space in certain parts of "physical" space... like it might feel that there's more space to my left than to my right, for instance.

Other stuff I feel like I have already described, e.g. throughout the report mental talk got louder and quieter, faster and slower, took up more or less space. Other stuff like sensations of the wind cutting me or the body turning inside out or such which are physical sensations -- though obviously the kind you can distinguish from "real" physical sensations, in the way that imagining stubbing your toe actually feels like stubbing your toe (or at least it does for me, different people have different degrees of vivid imaginations), but I wouldn't confuse it for the "real thing".

Is that more clear/"phenomenological" for you, or were you thinking of something else? I'm never sure how to feel about these very "phenomenological" reports since I'm always writing them in hindsight, so the thing accessible to me is always a memory, and memories are pretty unreliable and tend to "fill in the details". Plus, if I know I'm gonna write that kind of detailed report, I easily get preoccupied with trying to "record" sensations.

If you have any good pointers on how to write better more phenomenological practice logs I can try to apply them next time I feel up for it.

Oh if you are indeed seeing/noticing/noting all this detailed stuff the Shinzen way, its all golden! Thats the important part, not the detailed reporting on the forum. Don't mind me! Keep up the good work! 

Did a 30 minute sit, timed with an app with a bell at the midway point for a bit of time keeping.

From the start of the sit there was a lot of mental talk; I knew I wanted to write a practice log entry about my sit, so that triggered a lot of analytic reflexive commentary -- if you're ever curious what my mental talk sounds like, it's basically exactly how I write, since my writings are typically mostly a transcription of reconstructed past mental talk; it's typically also about as fast as you might expect from my wordy writing style :-).

I felt myself very much pulled out of the "now" and into this story of writing this log entry -- hearing mental talk of what I would be writing, seeing mental images of this blue forum with the reply edit box and so on. I knew I had to unhook from that, but I also took care to remind myself that as long as I was clearly observing these sensations as sensations, there was no "problem".

Wanting to increase my concentration, I briefly generated feelings of metta in the body, repeating a mantra of "may I be well, may I be well..." in my head; I put a slight smile on my face too, which helped a lot, though I later forgot and dropped that. After that I switched to repeating "just this, just this..." as a mantra. I also opened my eyes and found a good visual object to concentrate on right in front of me (a white conch shell on a black TV stand) -- I usually meditate with my eyes open, actually. Finding a bit of concentration, I started concentrating on the sensation of concentration itself, starting by what I perceive as the "concentration muscle" kind of between the eyes and a little bit up, like furrowing your brow but as a mental rather than a physical motion, and then letting that sensation expand to fill the body and then all of space.

Having established a bit of concentration, I switched to Shinzen Young style "see, hear, feel" noting, which uses those three labels. This clarified sensations a lot and made me feel more grounded in direct sensate experience rather than stories. I started adding different labels too as they came to mind -- for instance, labeling a noise as "loud" rather than just "hear". I would return to the "sensation of concentration" as well quite regularly, in a manner that felt somewhere in between intentional and automatic.

Proceeding from that, now at about the half-way point of the sit, I very quickly automatically shifted into "just noticing" to keep up with the speed of sensations, using labels only occasionally. Body tension got a bit uncomfortable, so I briefly tensed every muscle at once and then relaxed, which helped. I dropped the mudra I was doing with my hands around the midway point of the sit in favor of just resting them in my lap, but other than that I kept unbroken posture throughout the entire sit rather easily.

After shifting to "just noticing", effort naturally dropped and more equanimity arose. Sensations themselves were rather mundane, with external sounds being the most common (city sounds, and my partner working at the desk in the same room), but also physical sensations of sitting, sights. Reflexive, analytical mental talk -- very much like what you are reading now -- stayed present throughout the entire sit, but by now had gotten less common, far less grippy, and wasn't perceived as distracting or problematic anymore.

There was a brief but distinct period of strong sensations of sadness, mostly felt in the body as relaxation and a feeling of being pulled downwards, but also including a certain sense of warmth and comfort and a dropping of energy levels -- all in all lasting maybe 30 seconds at most. At different times the body would generate more or less physical heat, but it never rose to the level of being distracting or hard to bear, something which occasionally makes it hard for me to sit. A bit later, there were brief strong sensations of fear, which felt like "freezing" (like a deer in headlights), being pulled upwards, and increased energy -- but this also passed quickly.

At some point I decided to check out "vibrations", something which I do perceive and that are talked about a lot in MCTB but that I really don't practice noticing because I find them edgy, and counted some 4-8 vibrations per second; I don't know where the range "4-8" comes from, since I really didn't count 1-2-3-4..., but that's the number that came to me. It's been a long time since I've paid attention to vibrations and I noticed that I can gauge the speed of them much more easily now.

For a while I felt like I was noticing most sensations, but only noticing the very end of them. Dropping effort somewhat had been good, but at this point it had turned into a certain kind of torpor and "ticking the boxes" and didn't feel like very good practice anymore, so I redoubled my efforts; I went back to some of the concentration exercises from earlier, then really powered on the investigation factor, becoming very curious to the exact texture, location, duration etcetera of sensations -- this was a really good idea, and felt like a workout in a good way.

Going into the final stretch I felt that I was "holding back" in some sense, and that this was the main cause of the torpor. I dropped that and suddenly sensations seemed to come in much faster and have much more of a "piercing" and "violating" quality; it also felt like a loss of control. Mental images, which had been quite present at the beginning of the sit but then quieted down a lot, became extremely present.

The mental images mostly took the form of horror, especially body horror as well as images of blades and saws and hooks and other things that look like torture implements, with a dash of insectoid things and various forms of "inversion" or "turning inside out", as in the body turning inside out, but also more abstract representations of that idea. Images were fast and fleeting enough that they couldn't be resolved in very much detail. The body horror and "turning inside out" sensations could also be felt as physical sensations, but not as vividly as such sensations sometimes are.

A strong sense of exhaustion, a sense of "I'm tired, I don't want this anymore, when will this end?" set in. Mental images and body sensations stopped being chaotic, and settled into a clear story, that looked as follows: I was lying on the floor (actually, it was on stone, so maybe "on the street"?), crying out, throwing a temper tantrum and beating my limbs against the floor. As I was doing this, I was smashing my body to bits; smashing through the flesh, exposing bone, grinding the bone into dust, splashing lots of blood everywhere.

This sequence looped a few times, and then I could very clearly see myself smashing my body into just blood. All the flesh, bone, and just the entire (image of) the body in general became just deep crimson blood; then, the image of the surrounding scene also turned into blood; what used to be the body joining into what used to be the environment to make just a single, giant sea of blood, which sloshed around for a moment.

There was a very distinct sensation of being "done", and I naturally got up with 1:40 left on the timer.

Lately I've been very fascinated with how the meditation syncs up with the timer like that. That seems like it has very interesting and deep implications somehow that I haven't quite worked out yet. The question of "how does that work?" might be worth giving special attention at some point.

Speaking reflectively I'm pretty happy with this sit; I definitely think I gave it a good dose of Right Effort and had enough mindfulness to use the right tools in the right situations, especially given that it's been a while since I've regularly really sat on the cushion like this. I'm happy with this as a practice log entry too.

EDIT: Interesting tidbit, useful to nobody -- writing up this log entry took me 45 minutes.

Having been adequately non-mappy for the practice log I'll let myself make a bit of a mappy comment: in my report I see what looks like the Misery ñana before the Fear ñana, even though the traditional maps have them the other way around. This is actually my experience most of the time, though I encounter them in the more traditional order as well, and a lot of the time I don't see anything that looks like "Misery" at all, even when all the others show up very distinctly.

What caused that "misery" feeling? What caused that "fear" feeling? Cause and Effect. It's beneficial to "see" this chain of "events." 

Im not asking you to answer Just to watch closely next time you sit ... what body sensations accompany these feeling states/stages? Mental images? etc ... 

Also ... DO NOT LOOK FOR THE MAP! Only note matter-of-fact arising and passing experience! Very simple! KISS 

I will link you to a play list showcasing my ex-teacher Kenneth Folk explaining all the stuff one can note. These are short but of great benefit, videos. One of them is by Shinzen as well! I used this list a lot and it led me all the way to SE. 
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLky8N7-NqOd95njMDZ3LD7-i24cqKmtQO&si=Ej5snU4Renv7ueQ3

One reason for me almost daily watching some or all of these videos was knowing that we can easily start abstracting about our meditation practice. Thinking myself into a certain state for example. These videos helped me get reminded about what the actual work to be done was! Noting matter of fact rising and falling away experience no matter if unpleasant, neutral or pleasant. 

I think brushing up on my noting in general would be a good idea. I started with MCTB and then read a bunch of the Mahasi and U. Pandita books referenced (Practical Insight Meditation and stuff). Worked using those kinds of instructions for quite a while, then did much more open, "Do Nothing" style stuff (like in A Still Forest Pool) and that combination got me through what were for a long time extremely disruptive effects on my. I also did a bunch of metta and more morality-centric stuff for a while (A Path with Heart) somewhere around this time overlapping with both I think.

Got to a point where I felt like I had gotten to a point where it was fine to ease up the effort on making fast progress a bit and focus on stability, concistency, playing around and experimenting more, mastering the toolbox and not leaving any major gaps in places. Very systematically worked through a lot of Shinzen's stuff which itself is very systematic and elegantly simplified. Worked with a teacher for a bit (not very long but a couple hours of calls and some email exchange), did regular ~4 hour group meditation sessions/lessons.

Then after that my daily life became really turbulent and unstable for a while and I got pretty skittish about doing much that would result in rapid progress since I didn't feel equipped to handle a lot of turbulence again. Worked on concentration for a while, which is pretty darn difficult for me so unfortunately I do chicken out of actually practicing that a lot. Worked a ton on morality in the normal daily life "get out of bed on time, eat good food, get regular exercise, be a good friend" etcetera sense.

Lately I've been working a lot more on carrying mindfulness and the techniques and skills I've learned in my practice throughout the whole day. Learning not to overanalyze is definitely one of the best things to do not just for my practice but for my life in general, I agree. That's part of why I've been kind of eyeing Zen stuff from a distance; they're very good at "don't think about it" and keeping some form of practice going every moment of their day -- the view of enlightenment not as a place but as an activity is very important I think.

On the other hand there's a place for theory too and a place for reading. It's always very motivating to me to see different viewpoints on the practice. Right now I'm thinking about picking the Vimuttimagga back up, which I put down with my life being chaotic and it not being light reading.

I think the way I'm working now is working out pretty well and I mostly just need to up the dose a bit, as well as adding noting back into it again.

"Thinking yourself into a state" is definitely a very real and interesting thing that can be very skillful or unskillful depending on how aware you are of it and how responsible you are about it. Might be good to work in that direction in a positive sense again, since that's a really good place to practice concentration and metta from and, if you know how to do it carefully and intentionally, you're less likely to do do it accidentally in harmful ways, I think.

I will say I am very impressed by the level of wisdom clearly on display by many of the regulars here. Posting on a forum like this is very challenging but very effective at revealing where a lot of pain points are. Very frustrating, I hate it, very good stuff. A healthy dose of masochism is a great asset on the path. A ton of suffering is tied up in word games.

Noting vagueness. Noting repetition. Noting loops. Noting pull. Noting obsession. Noting constriction. Noting frustration. Noting frustration. Noting remembering. Noting frustration. Noting sadness. Noting regret. Noting shape. Noting "blue". Noting "down". Noting tingling. Noting tiredness. Noting confusion. Noting vagueness. Noting storytelling. Noting structuring. Noting seeking. Noting seeking without object. Noting cycles. Noting attractor states. Noting analysis. Noting abstraction. Noting clinging. Noting exasperation. Noting "words". Noting confusion. Noting "no way forward, no way backward". Noting settling. Noting familiarity. Noting embarrassment. Noting desire for seclusion. Noting gratitude. Noting storytelling.

Noting "freedom". Noting relief.

I wouldn't particularly recommend severe sleep deprivation to anyone and in this case it's very much not intentional, but some of the more hindersome parts of the mind do tend to give the ghost first

They finally fixed a leak we've had in the new apartment since we got it months ago this morning. Further water damage restaurations still to be done but at least the bedroom should stop smelling like mold soon.

Word games are a symptom of ignorance. Noticing how our ups and downs throughout life are bound up in these word games is excellent practice. Noticing the word games as they happen. Noticing how they feel, how they start, how they end. Simply seeing them carry on. Over and over again, returning to relaxation, returning to presence, as we are bombarded by them. Becoming frustrated by it all, relaxing with that frustration, so on and so on. 
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It can be useful to find a little compassion. When we transition from noting to more just noticing there can at times be much more smoothness, chillness, awesommeness, etc. When in the midst of darker nanas one must transcend masochism, but I could entertain the argument that one must go through it. There's a capacity to lovingly relax with suffering that develops as one realizes the degree to which they refuse to just simply be with what is. There's interesting things to be explored in this regard, how does our refusal to suffer or face suffering feed into our experience of suffering. From where do the word games arise? How could they possibly be so compelling? These are not questions which have answers that can be arrived at intellectually but through the body, through sense experience, through deep exploration of meditation. 

I left "masochism" pretty vague, and the word doesn't seem to point at the same thing for you as it does for me. What you seem to be thinking of actually sounds more like sadism to me . Reflecting on how their can be distinct senses of sadism and masochism without either a giver or a receiver [of pain] is an interesting little koan in itself.

The masochism I mean is something you might feel in the latter half of a strenuous exercise. It's a humorous, giddy, silly kind of thing -- though it does have an edge to it, too. This is what there is, this is what you asked for, this is what you wanted, isn't it? Now bend over.

Maybe a bit crass But "this sucks but I love it, this is what I need" is a bridge to freedom that works really well for me. But obviously the confusion with "I want it to suck" is easy, yes.

Compassion is very good too, yes, but depending on how you're wired it's a lot harder. I have enough trauma history that being very compassionate to myself actually tends to get very disruptive really fast, so it's the kind of thing I prefer building up a foundation of stability for first and then doing it in small doses and really giving it time.

I'm a very energetic person, and a lot of that energy is bottled up. I live next to an Asian supermarket nowadays. They sell good cans of alcoholic drinks that remind me of being in Japan (a place I love dearly and have traveled to three times). Like Strong Zero if anyone knows, but a Chinese brand. I hardly drink alcohol but I do treat myself to one of these sometimes. But they're very fizzy, and they seemingly always come rather violently pre-shaken, so I have to be very careful to open them very slowly and methodically, and I don't always entirely remember . I work at it, but I'm also a 26 year old dude, in between uni and working, moving abroad to permanently move in with my fiance, aging grandparents, autistic, adhd, average shoe size, favorite dishes to cook recently are risotto and mapo tofu, etc etc etc, lots of busy emotional work, even if it's all very normal or very good news

Thanks for the reminders, I know all that damn well, but I keep forgetting, keep dropping those bean bags... It somehow always manages to be surprising, even though the number of ways in which it happens really isn't that large, and the fact that it happens and the moments on which it happens are in principle extremely predictable. It clearly smells like sabotage Unfortunately even though I am very quick-witted I am also very forgetful generally.

I'm not sure what kind of practice would help best with this... noting gives by far the fastest insight practice of anything I've tried, but it can turn pretty damn edgy if you do it all the time, and it's very easy to learn the bad habit of having it be a switch you throw on when you sit down and flip off when you get up. Doing more shamatha would be very good for me in a bunch of ways but I don't know if it would help with this constant baseline mindfulness stuff all that much; at least it doesn't feel like it directly targets it.

I think I mainly just want to power on the daily life practice a lot, really try to power on the mindfulness from waking up until going to sleep. I'll just have to get much, much, much gentler with myself about taking it in stride and picking those bean bags back up, again and again and again and again and... Yeah. What a pain, maybe I'll just wait for Daniel and his sciencey nerd shit to extract the mindfulness hormone and put it in a pill . One can dream.

Now that I have you here, sorry for being so reflexive on the other thread btw. I was very reactive to what Chris said, you hit uncomfortably hard as well but now I recognize that you were basically right. Very much appreciated and still do that you actually put in the effort respectfully explain. Considered going back there and making a quick edit but I think I'd rather just put the thing to rest after this.

Was thinking of writing maybe "not my clowns, not my circus" or some other catchphrase on some paper or something and putting it somewhere visible for a while. I wouldn't want it to be too much of a permanent fixture though because it reads very "live laugh love" aesthetically speaking, lol.

Random thought but thinking about Daniel and how busy he is versus how many emails he gets, I wonder if at some point he would benefit from setting up a system like:

- Some program keeps an email queue for him, and serves them to him one at a time;
- When it's somebody's turn in the queue, a bot sends them a confirmation email of the form "you've reached the front of the queue; here's your email, do you still want to send it? reply 'yes' if you do"

That way everyone who really wants to get in touch with him still will, in the order that they originally emailed in, but I strongly suspect that the majority of people's responses to the confirmation would be "fuck no, that'd be embarassing" or "I already solved it myself by now".

There'd have to be some auto email sorting stuff involved and some other safety valves to let really important stuff through easily and I imagine you wouldn't want to be restricted to a strictly serial pipeline of emails etc but there's a workable idea there. Could always just make a separate email address that specifically goes through this system and direct people there for a while and see.

Dunno to what kind of extent this kind of thing exists, I do know that there's a lot of tooling for managing email but no specifics since I don't handle much email myself. If it's a tool that doesn't exist it's definitely something I could build, might be a demand for that. Tons of space to apply all the major machine learning innovations in the email space too, I think some people are gonna make a lot of money there. This is not business advice Just a thought

I do always love just writing while thinking, it really helps organize my thoughts. I do write more long-form sometimes but don't really show people except my partner. I'd love to write more publicly but being an idiot in public is scary >_<"  At least on DhO you don't have to wonder whether people think you're an idiot because they'll tell you Though the discussion culture here is a kind that I usually avoid pretty hard, so it's a fair bit of culture shock.

I notice my reflexiveness and defensiveness is triggered moreso by me showing vulnerability than by stuff other people actually do. It's much more proactive than reactive in that sense. I feel offended first, and only take offense later.

My fiance is so cool. He's working really hard at a big creative project. I feel a lot of inspiration and admiration, though there's also a lot of "God I wish I was this cool".

Struggling with the difficult question of... my cap of social relationships I can comfortably actively maintain at any given time is not that big -- I'm pretty introverted -- and yet I want to befriend more inspiring people. Stuff like that is real tricky, the shifting and weaving of social relationships can be very exhausting. I'm very much still working on a higher stability/morality baseline. Lots of progress has been made but it's all not very tight yet, and at some point the dharma waits for no-one.

The practice is be aware, lose awareness, then be aware again. It's ok to suck at this. Simply notice the sucking. You can use noting to ease yourself into just being aware. Being aware becomes easier the more you catch the story as it carries on. A certain degree of shamatha simply occurs when ones mind can fall into just being aware. It is here that the classic insight vs concentration arguments tend to fall apart for me. Good insight practice will bring with it a certain quality of immersion in experience. It's not as perfect as a deep concentration but it is often quite refreshing in that one can surf their lived experience, get wiped out by a big wave, paddle out and do it again. It's useful, less edgy and more relaxing to let more mechanical noting fall away to achieve this. 

Sometimes we have the knowledge to be right and not the grace to pull our punches... Sometimes wisdom kinda stings.

Teaching is unfortunately a touchy subject for reasons that become clearer as you gain insight.

Noticing reaction is tremendous practice. Many would not notice. 
 

Really very excellent.

The classic "insight versus concentration" argument is... very unclear, because everyone is in many ways less in disagreement than they think they are, in disagreement over very different things, disagreeing on matters of priority that tie into lots of other aspects of their teachings and aesthetic, plus I'm not very convinced that anybody really nails perfectly what the suttas say on this. You can tell that jhana was super important to the Buddha, but it's also pretty clear that ideas about what "jhana" actually means diverged almost immediately.

I do think that the skill of being able to say "okay, I'm gonna concentrate, I'm not gonna be pulled all over the place like that" is very well-trainable through hard concentration exercises, and that's very useful for life in general. But I also absolutely agree that concentration skills will naturally kind of tend to follow what is asked of them by good insight practice and both insight and concentration practice have a very large element of "allowing" that causes them to co-occur.

Thank you for the kind words .

Just a quick one on my phone in the middle of the night since I won't be sleeping for a bit...

Practice has been good. Was doing 45 minute sits most days for a while, now doing 30 mins of good walking meditation followed by 30 mins of sitting. Very much back to basics noting.

For a while I was noting a lot of vagueness and unclarity. Now for the past week and a half to two weeks everything has been very clear. Constant body pains that had persisted despite finally getting a bed worthy of the name have disappeared. Lots of dreams going on, lots of energy, creativity, piti -- very classic by the books A&P.

Had a super powerful dream experience of looking outside the "membrane" and seeing that the outside is the same as the inside, leading to feeling the entire weight of reality also bearing down from "outside" looking "in", causing the "membrane" to feel like it's violently inverting in a way that is extremely scary and violating and wicked.

Very much like going into a fruition when the no-self door is primary and the suffering door is secondary, but clearly not "complete" and with a lot more fanfare. This is my first time going through an A&P event like this post-SE, so this is interesting to observe. I understand "torus" imagery from MCTB better now, though the actual "geometry" involved isn't really describable, since the point is more so that the geometry that is imagined to be there couldn't possibly exist.

I know it's all just fancy light shows but damn, that was wicked. I feel like my mind could cut steel right now. Also -- holy shit, no stiff neck.

Gonna stick with my practice as it is for now, play around with the enhanced concentration a fair bit too -- I think I managed to very briefly dip into some real "there's no body at all" formless stuff the other day.

Another 2 months or so I'll officially be done-done with my international move, so I made some strong formal resolutions to not proceed deeply into difficult territory until then. Seemed to land well, but I feel like I'll be fine either way.

Really pumping up the "faith" spiritual faculty has been really supercharging my practice. Cool! Very helpful for my daily life too, actually.

"You can tell that jhana was super important to the Buddha"

Yes it seems so, he, the Buddha, even tried to enter Jhana on his deathbed and failed to do so. He was in such pain it just overwhelmed the Jhanic fragile nature. I mean the guy was THE master of Jhana, better than his teachers they say. So if he failed at this Jhana during such bodily suffering we sure can conclude that its limiting, not in any way an end all of anything. If it happens sure, fine, let it do it's impermanent thing but cling not to it, or put it on a pedestal of importance, otherwise more Dukkha shall thread your way which is not a bad thing but ... well ... some of us don't mind Dukkha leading the way In any case, all is good! All this is fluff anyway and all this does itself in any shape or form anyway, so ... this we try to clearly see and then ... let go of the control we never had anyway. Anyway ... I used this word too much ... 

Mind not my words here my friend as Im under the influence of several beers and the Nirvana - Live in Amsterdam concert  

Papa,

"Yes it seems so, he, the Buddha, even tried to enter Jhana on his deathbed and failed to do so. He was in such pain it just overwhelmed the Jhanic fragile nature."

I have never heard that before. The  Mahāparinibbāna Sutta says the opposite. It say that he went through the eight jhanas without difficulty, then back down through them to first, then back up to fourth, and died in fourth.

Is the account you heard from the suttas?

Surfin'

It's been a little while. I've been very busy, just finished immigrating about a month ago after a pretty damn chaotic 2 year period of working towards this and staying abroad in a really inadequate apartment for months at a time. And also, just... haven't been in the mood to talk about my practice very much. The very subtle nature of "the practice", which... at this point in time it just feels really silly to say much about it, really, plus there's something really annoying about putting something very subtle and abstract into words, communicating them to strangers, and then having to parse whatever you can understand about what they reply and

A little while back, maybe a week ago? I was pondering the question "what is something about which nothing can be said?" (and friends like "what doesn't answer any questions?" and "where do questions come from?" and "does a dog have buddha nature?" and stuff) which sort of came to me as a koan and it was just what my particular brain needed, I think.

I was educated as a computing scientist so I have quite a lot of background on things like turing machines/universality of computers, the halting problem and decideability problems, logic and abstract math (I was never "good at math" because I'm a huge klutz with all the symbolic manipulation and the homework was never motivating enough for me to do to overcome my ADHD, but I have a good intuition for it generally and am really good at very abstract things) as well as fundamentals of math stuff, very abstract stuff about what the limits of systems are to say things about themselves and how lots of different systems can share very fundamental structure with each other. 

Anyhow, this "shut the f-ck up" button of a question was really good was really good to reveal... dissatisfaction, the searching for searching's sake, the turning questions back on itself, the confusion about confusion, the surprise about surprise, uncertainty about uncertainty, the most frustrating thing. I had a rather impactful and very visual experience of this kind of raw dukkha at a solo ayahuasca trip once, where I felt very concentrated on the raw quality of dukkha and saw it in very vivid images and bodily sensations and so forth as something which I called "The Drill". I saw a lot of images of very fractal-like things, things contained within themselves in endless wrenching and illegal-seeming ways, where there is this tension that feels like it needs to be resolved that pulls strongly in, while there's simultaneously a strong feeling of repulsion, and a strong sense of pointlessness that eventually turns back on the words, turns back on understanding at all, turns back on looking for anything, identifying anything, being distinguished from anything at all, and then you come back to your senses and realize that it's fine to just make shit up. There's some good memes going around my circles right now, stuff like "stop thinking, thinking is bad" and "my source is that I made it up" (or as my fiance and I say, "my source is ancestral blood memory" ["my source is the question" just came to me]).

After that I felt like things were less "sticky", like something had been completed, a feeling of freshness that increased to a level more appropriate for my own "normal ass life", which has completely changed as well in recent years. I suddenly had much clearer models of how surprise is cliinging is dissatisfaction is searching is suffering and... where the pitfalls are, what the way to resolve the questions that imply illegal operations is.

I now had a much clearer picture of what "the self" really is. There is a kind of searching, a kind of wondering, a level of analysis, a very thorough level of sanity check, a very true and undiluted good will and innocence that is "it", and it's maximally confusing, maximally interesting, maximally important because it's maximally fundamental, maximally surprising thing because it's surprise about surprise, questioning about questioning, it's... the thing, and there's an understanding of the thing that makes it just... the thing, it's as fascinating as everything is fascinating, it was always nearer than near, because it is before distance. The "self", or at least as it manifests in the way I talk to myself, which is just one layer of the whole thing which goes back much deeper, is just... a very natural mode of defence, that completely breaks coherence in awareness in a morbidly beautiful and fascinating kind of way. The basic idea of what goes on, according to this bullshit I am making up on the spot based on what sounds cool to me, is...

Writing this out right now is actually a really good workout... I am clearly zooming through the insight stages while writing this, building my story up from stuff like mind and body and cause and effect into a rambling fever pitch, then completely, and then everything tenses up against everything again, nothing is allowed to move, and then just remembering that it's all made up.

The other day I was... taking drugs again, a powerful (still legal here, will be banned soon) stimulant you probably haven't heard of that I won't name here because even I think the stuff's too fiendish, but it does potent things to my mind. All in all my take on drugs right now is... yeah, they're wild, they're very interesting, they were destabilizing, probably less so than the doses of meditation I would've had to do to gain the same fundamental insights, and the amount of high concentration magick I would have to do to reach the same level of understanding of things. Glad to be gradually shedding off that residual karma and move on from that now, though. Mind it was never particularly extreme, it was intense experientially a lot of the time, but I always had pretty strict limits as to anything that might seriously threaten my physical health or seriously cloud my judgement or otherwise be harmful towards other people.

Anyways I had very stable high concentration with a lot of clarity and equanimity, so I was able to update my models of how the mind works a lot, or rather I have a couple of models of what is going on, with the... usual caveats, which are very helpful on their own level of understanding but sound really silly right now. Anyhow, I had this really cool, total, stable experience of my entire field of view turning completely orange, requiring no effort, while I was moving around and doing much worldlier things.

There's a lot I still don't understand, especially about how "present karma" or "making decisions" factors into all of this, and how anything is possible one sensation at a time. More than anything I strongly feel drawn to practicing morality for a while, check with the heart, see what way of relating to this understanding feels right. Things are just fine. That vipassana pull is very strong though.

Anyways, yeah. I'm quite impressed. Satisfied. More than a little embarassed.

An excellent insight !! Nice work. Once you start to see it the rest of the "work" is in the simply seeing. 

I'm really happy to have been able to get all my everyday morality stuff together beforehand. I'm happy to have followed the advice to have few responsibilities. I'm very, very grateful to have good friends.

Christ, right, that's how perspective works, duh. No wonder none of this shit about this and that and going anywhere ever made any sense while doing the disorienting my-right-your-left switching back and forth spinny thing. I had linear algebra in school, I should know this. Learning a lot about how perception of space is constructed, how it relates to searching and inquiry. Still really don't understand how time works, or how sensations can relate to each other when they are utterly transient like that.

I have a much better understanding of what it means to identify something as something now, how distinguishing "things" as separate and relating them to each other is inherently an intentional action, how relating things to each other implies space and how things like the perceived center of space and the size of space relate to the underlying intention motivating it. But that's still majorly handwaving "there being multiple things" and "relating them to each other" and... Considering perspective is constantly moving around like this, and yet the whole thing happens with some intention, how does anything keep track of what the point is?

I'll be honest, up until now I never really understood what was so profound about the three characteristics or why Daniel keeps hammering on them so much. It's much clearer to me now that I've learned some things I had to learn about searching.

Really though, how does time work? I feel like every time perspective shifts it carries with it some context about what it's supposed to find, something about the previous question which prompted it, and this creates a chain of questions that implies time. It's like perspective carries along a pointer "back" to the previous perspective, which I suppose let's you move back in time, and this is related to the confusing idea of "subject" and "object". And how does this relate to "attention"?

I think I briefly dipped into the 8th jhana earlier. I was rereading part of MCTB again and it mentioned the post 8th jhana junction point (P8JP) and right the moment I read that string there was a brief, fast dip and bounce into something that was still bound up in time but that I otherwise can't say anything about and after that I reemerged in a very quiet state, like I'd lost all context of what was going on. It was definitely different from the other more common "unknowing experiences" I distinguish, such as the A&P double dip (always two dips and they're pretty far apart, you can fit quite a few sensations between them, doesn't dip as deep, turbulent), fruitions (not a "dip" but more of a "stutter and pop" or the weird geometry thing, absolutely no space to fit other stuff between the sensations, cuts the thread of time, perfect clarity right before, re-emerges in a specific way with usually a body high that hits with a little delay after recognition kicks back in and spreads out), the sensation of "there's nothing between the frames" (which also isn't a dip, can be noticed many times in quick succession, and doesn't really cause a state change in the mind)

I might try to attain formless realms soon, I'm very interested in exploring boundless space especially. I've gotten what I identify as j4.j5 (the boundless space aspect of the fourth jhana) a few times before, but once you realise what you're looking for it's immediately obvious that that state is incredibly crude, and I don't think I'm anywhere close to being able to still the mind enough to enter the real thing for any length of time.
Today was largely the most monkey mind I ever remember feeling, and yet while there was freaking out and struggling and stuff there was much less suffering than I would normally expect. Eventually I did manage to stop being retarded, remembered the wise advice to "just see", promptly snapped out of it and could see the fun again, then eventually slept wonderfully for about two hours or so and woke up perfectly rested. My need for sleep has gone down to bizarrely low levels seemingly without ill effects.

I know the cycles are there to stay but does the neck pain ever go away? I'm still absolutely blasting through insight stages so several times per day I'll suddenly get a very stiff and painful neck that then also very suddenly abates completely as I cycle through the Three Characteristics stage. I can take repeatedly acting like an idiot in the dark night stages in stride but the 3C hard pain bullshit seems pointlessly tiring and pretty much unresponsive to any conventional measures I throw at it.

Very glad I don't have a job and shit and my partner is very used to me being a weirdo.

Christ, everything truly does understand itself, or rather, there truly is just one understanding. Reality truly is luminous like that. This twisted duality nonsense really has me on the verge of throwing up now.

In the future I'll take some time to describe the practice that actually led up to this new understanding over the past year or so because it came to me as a visionary art project in a way that I find deeply profound and unlike anything I've personally ever seen in practice instructions or reports.

Rob Burbea's Seeing that frees is a wonderful resource for deeper practice and provides great technical descriptions of dependent origination. He gets into emptiness of time and so on. 

​​​​​​​Also, y'know, Dogen's Moon in a dew drop has this stunning sort of quantum absurdity to it. Really brilliant stuff. There's a non-local, non-linear, holographic jewel wisdom to it that I've come to really appreciate. 

​​​​​​​It's every science article that pops up in my feed lately. Space is a projection of quantum particle stuff. Lately I've been thinking... What if there aren't entangled particles but just one particle that can be viewed from different points in classical spacetime. I don't know, I'm really not qualified to say, but I know for certain these meditative insights unveil some strange things about the nature of reality. 

Moon in a dewdrop was actually next on my reading list. Dependent origination is something I will get back to soon again as well, it's an incredible idea but you really have to see it first before it makes any sense. I was actually thinking about it earlier, I feel like I finally understand what makes fruition so special and how reality re-establishes itself afterwards starting from awareness, shape, intention, recognition, space, time etc. Not sure as to the exact order of the boot sequence since I'm recalling something I didn't recognize as such at the time and comparing it to the (what I think is) dip into 8th jhana from this morning, where a lot of context gets dropped but time does persist across the event.

From the understanding of time I'm starting to develop it becomes immediately obvious that time is in fact extremely non-linear and fundamentally dependent, and "the present" is basically determined by what we decide is "real". In this way the past, the future, hypotheticals, counterfactuals, things being "real" etc all fit into a single framework, which is nice. It also makes sense in terms of what actually happens, for instance now that I've concluded that reality isn't what I thought it was, I conclude that it must've always been like this and rewrite the past to fit the present.

If you consider time as a system of conditionals starting from assumptions about "what is real now", then impermanence becomes basically trivial, because "time flowing" and "reality changing" are one and the same. If you think of "the self" as "real stuff that is unconditioned" or somesuch and you accept that suffering and surprise are fundamentally the same then the three characteristics become really obvious. Handwaving this a little bit because it's all a part of the understanding I'm building on what it is that the system does. It's all coming together very nicely.

I think very similar developments about the nature of time are going on in quantum physics as well. Once you get to that level all understanding must converge, I think. Anything that fundamentally holds for all understanding must also hold for anything we could ever hope to understand about reality. There's a lot to be understood way beyond anywhere where "the real world" can still hold as something meaningful to be reasoned about.

We often call this a worldview. 

It is this world that we are born into. 

Birth->Suffering

You're starting to see the psychodrama of chronic rebirth. Is how I would say it.

​​​​​​​It's interesting to note how narrative and narrativizing are somehow intrinsically linked with a conception of time and an understanding of there being a something in which the self experience is in relation to. 

I highly recommend Moon in a Dewdrop... There's something very magical to the language used. I'm a big fan of his discussion on the flowing of mountains. It feels to me the sort of book one never stops reading. 

"My" relationship to time definitely seems to have changed on multiple deep levels. Plans and memories seem less "sticky" and because of that it's gotten easier to let go of them and return to the present, in some ways. Bunch of other random things, looking in mirrors feels a bit different, I think I'm slightly better with eye contact now.

Anyone else ever feel that it's really weird to be doing wthings with your mouth like eating or touching your teeth, while also doing other things with your eyes or looking at things, has something really offputting about it? I feel that less now, and also feel like I can map other parts of my body around there into space a lot better.

Space feels flatter, like the "background" and "foreground" have moved closer together. This also allows for space in general to become a bit wide again.

It feels easier to laugh at myself doing stupid shit, sometimes. On the flip shit if I do stupid shit stupid outcomes still happen, and significant periods of time go by where I don't notice any of this and still act and feel basically like I've always done. I do feel like I have an easier way of recognizing and analysing patterns of behaviour. But really, I haven't been doing my best nearly enough to actually benefit from what I've learned in many of the way that matter. I have an easier time not taking myself so seriously and having more of a sense of humor about things.

I do go through strong emotional waves of "holy smoke I'm the doopest motherfucker in the universe", and it really does distinctly feel like waves, and my relationship to emotions does have changed in a way that makes this more manageable.

I've become aware of quite a few new sensations, both sensations of a "type" I was already aware of, but also entirely new classes of experiences that feel more comprehensive and harder to describe, insofar as a hierarchy can be imposed on sensations. Definitely associations around time are something I at least know to look for and can at least try following and understanding.

My ability to do certain kinds of abstracting thinking has improved a ton so part of why you haven't heard me for a while is because I've been pulling 15hr days programming a couple times.

I feel smarter, but in a very distinct way. It's more like I get distracted less, or think things through more, I guess. Also a lot of the time it feels like I know the smart thing to do, and then a whole bunch of bullshit gets tacked on, and I've gotten better at realizing that I don't need to do stupid shit like that.

My relationship towards importance, just... what it means for something to be important, on a fundamental level, has changed a ton.

All of this is very much... awareness of it comes and goes. I can very clearly tell that there's a ton of old... patterns, old little "programs" that have a tendency to just activate themselves and do their little thing the (dysfunctional) way they've always done.

My ability to make fun of myself and not take it all so seriously has improved a lot too, bearing previous paragraph's caveats in mind.

There's a lot more enduring low-level faith now. Really by far the greatest thing I have to thank for my recent progress is just powering on the faith all day. I reread the part on the five spiritual faculties in MCTB, identified that I am generally very biased towards lacking in faith, then just did my best to power on the faith in day to day life when I'd remember. Easier said than done of course especially with "faith" being the thing that it is.

Anyhow, one way this seemingly new... I definitely won't say "baseline" since if anything it's more often missing than present, but this new understanding, manifests, is just... having more faith in my body, letting my muscles apply more force, letting myself make larger and faster movements.

I'm about (naturally, though I repress a lot) as energetic IRL as I come across online, I don't do sports at all, and to top it off I have a VERY muscular frame, so trusting my body more was definitely on the vague "list of things to work on" (to which my relationship also changed a lot), so this is quite welcome.

EDIT: another thing I feel I've gained a lot of insight into is qualities like
- true/false
- important/unimportant
- relevant/irrelevant
- confidence
- obvious/not obvious
- intuitive/counterintuitive
- (I could continue)
and also how these things are
- A) always relative to something
- B. always on a spectrum (I couldn't get B+close_parenthesis to not give )

I got a lot out of just remembering that "good is good", weird as that sounds. Did a lot of thinking about how "good" in its beyond-words sense could be corrupted and so forth. I don't know, it's the kind of thing I could write a very interesting 20,000 word philosophico-mathematical treatise on, and something you can just kinda sit there and figure out, and... the epic PhD thesis is a thing, and the... and this is where I would insert a shrug emoji, but frustratingly while I can't stop the software from displaying , I also can't figure out how to make it display anythng else, anyhow, that is another thing, and I'm not even gonna comment on if or how they're related.

There's always sooooo much to see in art. I understand on some level art works as a mirror, I understand on a deeper level that to understand anything is to reflect a mirror back at understanding itself, I understand that the deepest understanding is inseperable and it's possible for "some" "parts" to "express" "an understanding" that other parts "don't yet understand" with all the don't-worry-I'll-stop-speaking-this-flavor-of-being-annoying-soon that that implies and so on and so forth... And yet... Even then there is at least one artwork dearly beloved to me that... every time I look at it again makes me feel like the author has some very deep understanding indeed, which can be hard to give a spot.

There's such a massive range and plurality of different kinds of wisdom and insight, anyhow. I have so, so much to learn from so many people who aren't """spiritual""" in the slightest. I have a lot to learn from my 18 year old, 7-year-younger brother, for fuck's sake.

All "this stuff" is pretty damn easy, all things considered. Dealing with other people, which is synonymous with living whatsoever, is so much more... endlessly complex, and genuinely difficult. The karmic implications of even the slightest things are just... Even just the slightest "internal" karmic thing will end up influencing everything else, establishing beliefs and views and patterns and whatnot that inform everything else and can easily persist for decades. Then you add in anyone else to the mix, who WILL be affected by your own karma even without saying anything... And then they in turn interpret, have it influence """themselves""", communicate it to other people, things get written down, beamed into space. It's a small path to knives, chainsaws, guns, nuclear bombs, hospitals, medical laboratories, tv channels, voting booths.

And of all that even just talking to people is a tiny subset, but by itself so... We sense something, then perceive it, assign it importance, we might feel the need to give someone else advice, but we have to factor how well we understand what we're advicing about, how we can express that advice, which parts are more or less important, all the ways things could be misunderstood and the consequences of those misunderstandings, how "good" we think our advice is, how we think the other person will understand the advice, how they will apply it, what they would do if something goes wrong, what the relationship between the two of you is and how all this modulates the previous and how potential outcomes would in turn influence that relationship, how the provenance of their plan will affect what they learn of the outcome (i.e. coming up with a bad plan and having it fail teaches you very different things from hearing and executing a bad plan, or a good plan, or whatever), judge how important certain constraints are for them, judge to what extent you can help them if something goes wrong, or even want to help htem, judge whether you should get expert advice first and then what expert advice you can trust and how the fact that you are relaying someone else's problem to a third party and then translating back affects things, whether you should recommend they get advice knowing that they probably won't and that you'd either have to recommend and advisor or leave that up to them, plus to what extend should you explain your reasoning and the options, knowing that if you explain your exact reasoning and all the options you've given them nothing at all. Unknown unknowns about everything, known unknowns too. Then add the very common "do as I say, not as I do" factor. Plus you know... doing nothing is a decision. (I am in a constant state of "working on setting up a blog" and "I can't do shit because my brain is absolutely full of cached thoughts like the above paragraph which has existed fully rendered in my mind since like october" so you'll excuse the brain dump)

Stuff gets easier as I become more mature thankfully but this shit has been very crushing since early childhood, for what it's worth.

I wish some of the Buddha's advice was... easier to interpet, or more applicable to modern life, or just, I don't know, the guy had no trouble teleporting all over the place and causing earthquakes and shit so couldn't he have stuck around for another 2500-odd years?

It's absolutely amazing how many absolute treasures there still are in the suttas, and a little bit of daily sutta reading is definitely something I do whenever I'm in a serious regular practice rhythm (i.e. quite seldom), but in the end what I'm looking at is still, according to my understanding of it...

There's a bunch of shit the Buddha, a specific homeless guy in early iron age India said to a bunch of his monks, who were another, specific group of people. This all got codified into an oral tradition, passed around for some 300 years, then written down in the now long extinct language of pali (assert many asterisks after 'language' that long ago), then even eventually translated into modern English, a language half a world and 2000 years apart, etc etc.

But I have many questions too, much shit about earthquakes and "there can only be one buddha in the solar system at a time", stuff like "the dhamma would've lasted 1000 years but now that I've let women into the sangha it'll just be 500" that I'm sure meant something important and interesting but has become uninterpretable and also verifiably just wrong. Lots of stuff about reincarnation that I would have little issue taking metaphorically if it wasn't constantly wrapped in screaming THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR I MEAN THIS IN THE LITERAL OBVIOUS SENSE warnings.

It always really irks me when I pick up a dharma book, and the author is clearly just writing from experience and having practiced with actual masters, and yet half of every page is footnotes to various suttas and parts of the abidhamma and visuddhimagga, if they are willing to be so bold, and even then with the mandatory "I AM AWARE OF THE TEXTUAL EVIDENCE THAT THIS PASSAGE WAS A LATER ADDITION" disclaimers.

Bunch of malarkey if you ask me, but then the Buddha also put very strict indictments in place for falsely claiming attainments of all kinds, at a time where people were openly acknowledged to have alignments all the time legitimized by an organizational hierarchy headed by the actual living Buddha, someone by his own reckoning so special they only appear every billion trillion years, himself, with little protection against what obviously would, and did, happen when the Buddha died and disappeared without a trace, something he himself was very adamant would and should happen, beyond "please don't split the sangha ok "

Lots of thoughts about everything, but I'll save the ones that are actually interesting and do matter for another thread :-P

"Anxiety is when you don't have confidence in things you feel you should have confidence in, you can just make it go away by being a little more confident"

Thanks for telling me this brain, eventually it'll stick, see you next time.

I know I'm way too wordy, I wrote that entire an entire run-on sentence where only one word is doing work :-)

That's the kind of one I would usually just avoid saying to people lest they think the world is feel

Honestly Akko, sometimes all you can do is  

You're exploring some interesting stuff and I'm very happy for you. 

Buddhism is very dogmatic such that even highly attained people have to bend over backwards for fundamentalist tight asses just so they don't get character assassinated. It's kinda bullshit. Buddhism is kinda bullshit but the Buddha was awesome and the suttas are pretty good, particularly the shorter ones. Those longer ones .. boy I don't know. There's better books. 

​​​​​​​Have I already mentioned Seeing that frees? He does a lot of footnotes but the footnotes will basically lead you to having a sick dharma library. 

Dealing with people gets easier and harder as you progress. Easier in the sense that you are more vulnerable and harder in the sense that you are more vulnerable. 

​​​​​​​People respond very well to vulnerability a lot of the time because by its nature vulnerability can't be gamed, can't be used. It shows your willing be the authenticity of the heart, people's nervous systems pick up on that and it can allow you to really fucking be there for people y'know and there times when it means people are really going to hurt your feelings and that sucks. 

​​​​​​​So generally interpersonal stuff improves but there is a darkness and edginess to the post conventional stages of development that can be highlighted from first dark night into the mess of the paths. It can be worth doing some compassion practice, probably don't do what I do, shoot from the hip and hope no one drops.

I really look forward to settling into actually reading books again. I feel like I'm finally, finally, finally calming the fuck down again in many ways, aftershocks aside.

You are a very safe person. You radiate safety in a way that I find extremely admirable. Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings and respond <3. I get a lot out of it.

"incapacitated"

very very funny word

I have a deep appreciation for people who are willing to give the dharma a good go. 

This place is an incredible resource for those navigating the middle paths. I think I speak for many of us here when I say we've got plenty of forgiveness, acceptance and understanding for those who are giving it a good go.
​​​​​​​
A lot of the "Buddhism", "Spirituality" and so on falls apart once you get into the paths. All of a sudden this is very real, very immediate and very neurological/psychological. It can be helpful to have a few friends along the way. 

Been in a very belligerent mood the past few days (but otherwise quite content). Definitely clashing a lot, especially given how forceful I tend to be.

Often acting quite unskillful in this way lately, but I do feel like it's easier to let it go as well, though it is very much "pick the beanbags back up again and again and again".

I can see the processes causing the unskillful behaviour much more clearly now.

It's not all bad either. If anything, it feels like a lot of energy that was being very forcefully held back because I couldn't handle it skilfully is allowed to flow again, and I have much more confidence that I can learn to harness that energy skillfully, but I do have to *learn* it. May I be gentle with myself. May I remain mindful how awful it feels to make another person unhappy.

I bought my first motorcycle today! I took me 3 hours to ride the what should've been a 30 minute ride home because I am a terrible navigator and I just moved here .

I couldn't sleep, so I did metta practice for a while, which was... surprisingly very powerful, and gave me a ton of concentration on tap.

Then I actually fell asleep and... Ooh boy. That was wild. Christ. It goes deep. Some level of "it's fine, the inner workings of reality don't give a shit what you think about them". Eventually got me out again but...

The sense that "things perceive themselves as dualistic all by themselves" was definitely there. And it definitely does feel like being born and dying over and over and over again. It was pretty damn horrible for a bit.

Awesome. Humbling. Metta practice remains extremely effective.

Responding to some of what you said earlier...

Compassion practice is something I do do, but a lot of the time what I really need is the equanimity part of the brahma viharas, the "everybody is heir to their own karma" part.

"Take the position of maximum vulnerability" is a practice I at some point came up with and do try to embrace to at least some extent when I do remember, but there's always a big component of "how strong are side effects allowed to get before this gets too uncontrollable" which I'm always very cognizant of.

At least in terms of normal everyday life conditions things basically couldn't be better for me right now, that takes a lot of the edge off.

Was reading some of the parts of SN on Dependent Origination the other day. Very

Concentration feels more stable now that space has less of that sticky, bouncy quality about it. Fascination with how the number 3 relates to 0, 1, 2 on a mathematical level. Images of sefirots and similar structures in 2, 3, 4 dimensions. "Truth" appears to have a quality like "being reflected in space" or "resonating". Time still "works better" "this way". General emotional-psychological "stuff" bubbling up and finding more peaceful non-answers and recognition.

Still a strong sense of things "burning out", or otherwise things just feeling like they're... allowed to end.

Couple random changes in day to day life I've noticed:

- I feel I suddenly understand the opposite gender much better;
- My dreams seem somewhat more coherent with reality and seem easier to remember;
- I feel significantly better at dropping "subjects" and easing out of emotional patterns and such, something I've always been notoriously terrible at. My partner has mentioned this to me as well;
- Relationship to things "being" in a deep sense has changed. This also changes a lot about the relationship to abstract identities, magical and archetypical beings, other people, really very vast swathes of reality because of how deeply related "being" and space are;
- Much more of a laconic attitude towards language and communication because of what is implied by e.g. the above;
- Changed relationship to ideas of "gain" and "loss". Having to balance that insight with still very much loving the householder life, and thus wanting to find a happy place for those energies;
- Sense of the return of magical and concentration abilities from childhood. Being the weird kid that I am I would spend entire days just walking around and visualizing large, complex, volumetric, colorful, animated 3D objects out in the world around me. Those basic concentration muscles are still there but a lot of it got pushed in the "let's not go there that's irresponsible" corner over time for legitimate reasons. I feel much less threatened by those areas now.

Plus various other random upgrades to stuff like the body and sleeping and old age and death and so on. All basically on the vector that things already were on before and were already speeding up on over time, but this feels very fast and very good. Very relaxing. Feels like a settling down, like the calming of water.

New practice territory is definitely very interesting. On the one hand there's this... Things are just things, intentions are just intentions, plans are just plans, mistakes are just mistakes, good and bad outcomes are just what they are, time is just time, space is just space, practice is just practice, but then on another level there is... activity and stillness aren't truly separate, gain and loss aren't truly separate, time and no-time aren't truly separate, separation and non-separation aren't truly separate, or whatever. At this point using words to describe things has gotten even dafter than it already was, but I'm sure those who know this territory will understand.

Up until this point practice felt like it was much more about integrating things in some fashion and noticing and then stopping all the weird pushing and pulling and warping things involving space, weird bait and switch stuff involving subject and object and centerpoints, confusing words about things with the things themselves, and weird stuff involving time. That kinda stuff still happens all the time without being clearly seen for what it is but something about all this has changed.

Now it feels like there's a much deeper centerlessness that transcends ideas like "integrating" and "resolving", and yet it's still really obvious that "the process" is far from "done".

Good stuff, I much prefer things this way.

One way all this manifests is that because there's now much more of a sense that "views are just views", and because the deeper sense of centerlessness diminishes the impression that different views should somehow "battle it out" to determine the One True View, the whole... constant barrage of views is now experienced quite differently.

But still it's like... one moment there's one view that suggests I should do one thing, the next moment there's another view that suggests I should do another thing, but also there is no center from which to derive a "correct" view, there is no time outside the present, there is no "me" that stands outside of all this to decide what the correct decision is.

That's all well and good, but I also still very strongly believe that "finding the best view you can and using it to make good decisions" is meaningful and very important. Thankfully the system is still doing as adequate a job of that as it ever was, but something about all this still feels problematic somehow.

I started reading Moon in a Dewdrop. Not very far in yet but I can see why it was recommended to me. Dogen strikes me as a very straight shooter as far as this stuff goes.

Excellent observation. This is birth. Often the best view is the most human view but it was only recently that I realized that myself. From here on out your observing birth, experiencing birth, perhaps even at times analyzing birth, all towards ultimately unravelling birth. 

Tell me what is a typical practice session like. 

You first say; "Things are just things, intentions are just intentions, plans are just plans, mistakes are just mistakes"

But then you say; "but something about all this still feels problematic somehow."

Yes, "problematic" feelings are (still) just problematic feelings, and that's just unpleasant.

I was doing some serious noting practice for the first time in a while and it's... on a phenomenological level I can't fucking find anything because everywhere I look all I find is "searching" or... yeah ok

I realized that it's a lot less of a headache to stick to "just this" and not ask too many questions about where that is

Gonna make some breakfast

> Tell me what is a typical practice session like. 

Ask the clown that hides from gay people

Feels like y'all are making fun of me in front of my back

My partner just asked me to hand him his glasses. I said, how do you even know they're your glasses? You can't see shit when you're not wearing them and when you put them on you can't look at them anymore!

If you want a different kind of answer as to what my practice is like now... Spent a while seeing really fractally stuff everywhere, everything reflected in everything. Picked up actual sitting again, zazen stuff. Seeing newfound insights ripple through the system, loosening things up, watching old patterns weaken a little bit every time they pass by. Feeling pretty damn good about myself, not gonna lie; this is ways better than how reality used to understand itself before. I honestly wasn't too impressed with what I had before this, but now for the first time I actually feel wise. Feeling motivated, there's still a long way to head and I don't have to worry what's wrong or how to fix it. Practice is all about seeing through all the retarded shit "we" "do" but don't worry, I make plenty of time to do retarded shit.

Feeling like an idiot looking back at shit I was saying even very recently. Also a feeling of victory. I talk way too much and I'm a very strong analyzer/systematizer and speaker/convincer. There's very few people who can beat me in a debate which is really just as much of a curse as a blessing, especially if you always need to have the last word. I've always been very aware that most people here run total circles around me and that pisses me off.

Enjoying a bit of perverse satisfaction seeing that the parts of me that have to endlessly keep blabbering and asking annoying questions truly got schooled in the most epic way.

Just the usual, really. Living life, nothing special.

It's clearer to me now that samsara is the path. If you actually take samsara'ing seriously and are actually refuse to settle for shit that clearly isn't it, nirvana is the only place to go. You're searching for something which you really care about for some reason, there's only so many things to find and they come packaged with neatly enough hierarchy and structure that you can just kinda walk through all findable things and know whether you've got them all, and absolutely none of them are satisfactory for obvious fundamental reasons, but even if you don't see the structure, it's also really obvious from each thing at a glance. If I hired somebody to samsara and we're god knows how many incalculable lifetimes in and told me they were still looking for it I'd tell them to give up and find a different job. It's not some unknown mystery or anything, tons of people know how to do it and have for milennia, they give classes often for free and everybody knows how to pirate an ebook nowadays. There's myriad ways to skin a cat and the instructions are grade school level simple most of the time. This one is somehow even worse than "just get some fucking exercise". Talk about procrastinating.

With humorous intent of course, if you laugh at me every time I say something stupid people are gonna think you have tourettes or something.

EDIT: continuing this story of this shallower part, and then how it progresses:

I think it... surely should be pretty obvious how you'd go about iterating over all possible answers to a question, since it's just... questioning, it's the same shit all the time and we do it all the time. Maybe I'm having someone come over and I am wondering what to cook for them. Maybe I don't know whether it should be tacos or sushi but I know it won't be galvanized steel beams, because that's construction material and construction material isn't food, and the answer should be food, I would know "cleopatra's breast milk" doesn't work because cleopatra is fucking dead, I know caviar doesn't work because I can't afford it, I know manna from the heavens don't work because that's not real, I know mathematical concepts and political ideologies don't work because they're not, you know, the same class of "being", yada yada.

If you don't know what you're looking for you just shoot straight up until you've found something subtle and fundamental enough that you don't feel like it definitely doesn't work and... if you were to actually find yourself in that "okay the needle might be somewhere in this laughably gigantic haystack" you would be pretty fucked, but spoiler alert you don't and anyhow we don't even bother looking.

You do then get into okay but how do I know that the categories "work", that knowledge about one thing carries over to another, how do I know what an answer looks like, all your various little sensemaking tools aren't actually that far up the whole chain of "shit I made up", and then your ability to predict anything starts falling apart, which means "is this a good idea" goes out the window, and by those levels you're also past some really lovely and helpful safeguards like "reality is just what it is regardless of what I think of it" and "things make sense" and "other people", in general but also in the sense of "that guy did it and he was fine" and so on.

It's a scary place, insofar as it is scary and a place, and very confusing, insofar as that's something that exist and so on.

So really even as a joke yeah of course it's mean for people to not go on this ride, but on the other hand... Reality is still just reality, you really aren't doing anything, you really aren't going anywhere, it really doesn't mean anything, time is just time, searching is just searching and so on and so forth.

Please don't settle for just not going there. Everybody knows there's something super important there. Everybody knows that whatever is there, they can't do shit against it, regardless of where they look or go. Everybody is super fucking tilted by this, we're stubborn creatures. I myself actually can't do puzzles, like math puzzles or puzzles of any kind really, since I just get mad. If I need to find something and I don't know where it is I call my partner to go search for me because I'm dreadful at searching and get mad instantly. I'm an extreme case of this but this is also just what a person is. There's a question. There's fucking loose threads everywhere and every philosopher and weed smoking teen and physicist and mathematician and software engineer and science fiction writer and theologist and what will you has messed with them endlessly. You can't write it off as nonsense, you can't write it off as unanswerable.

People build their entire lives and societies and universe around "ok let's stop asking questions here and just pretend it's this cool useful thing we invented that works pretty well". All fucking little demons in your head, every little KGB satan you've created is falling over themselves to take the "let's not go there" spots, and they are masters at hiding those spots, and those spots are fucking everywhere and imply fucking everything so it's corruptive as fuck. Everybody knows that people become evil because they'd deluded and have traded their brain and morality for cheap thrills and questionable protection. I know everybody knows this because this is all we say about everyone we don't like.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. It sounds like I'm chastising people or something but even the idea of that is stupidly course. There isn't really a judgement about this, or a point, or some kind of "you should've just...". It's just one of the ways I see this shit.

Thinking about stuff like addictions and why they're so tricky, though it's a broad thing...

Imagine you're addicted to like, cocaine or something. While you're on the drug, especially if you've just taken it, you feel better than before. Also, if the drug wears off, you will feel a lot worse (this is true), and be a less functional person overall and such. Even more so I think, you're aware that when the drug wears off the state of your mind will rapidly change, different machineries will become weaker and stronger so that you'd get worse at doing things you can do now, and better at doing things that right now you can't conceive of doing since you can't do them, and furthermore don't care about since being things you can't do you don't include them in your plans and predictions, and the system might start working towards things you find unwanted and away from things you want to move towards, so you're dying, basically.

You can kinda-sorta predict what "you" would be in the future, but not really, but if you completely understood you would already be it, and regardless of what your impression of what you'd become is, answering the question of whether those kinds of core parameters (you) should be changed or not, because it breaks the duality, and because of that the idea of dividing reality into pieces, which for one totally fucks up any hopes of language or reasoning which were already well fucked anyhow, which then breaks the idea of searching, breaks the idea of a location and thus direction/target, thus the idea of an "answer" and space and time and shit. That kinda "between the gaps" thing. Then if you start considering how often "making a decision" implies going down this rabbit hole (always), thinking about "what is volitional", what all this says about time...

It's just the three characteristics. Love it.

EDIT: I think this makes for a plenty riviting story so long as nobody in the audience raises their hand and asks "that's awesome, but where does 'awareness' fit in this?", which is something I don't have an answer to.

Something else I've noticed about addiction kinda mind states of various degrees: time and space get VERY compressed and really this more than anything is the biggest problem. Positive/neutral/negative feeling tone of everything gets this weird, slow pulsing action to it, cycling around themselves and getting weaker and stronger. A lot of... misguided equanimity starts going around, because equanimity about "bad" things gets promoted while concerns about bad things get ignored, and also because, again, space and time get compressed. Really this applies to many of the insight factors (cba to recall and compare them all rn).

Outside the little box all this generates endless confusion and aversion and this blows up and causes the usual lattice fault interactions and stuff. Most people at least have this shit hit them square in the face when it gets way up into the language machinery and starts generating shit like "guilt" and "am I evil?" and "possessed" and "I just want to be happy, I deserve this" and "I'm broken" and from there it really starts blowing up into bad shit real fast.

But the flipside of this that you can at least imagine, and in fact there is, a way to get reality to unclench its butthole and just not this happen at all in the first place, or at the very least understand this on some level or another and control the damage a bit. Very cool.

Even more fascinating is what the story doesn't imply it would do, like "cure drug addiction", like, in any way, beyond the way deeper levels of realization lead to exactly the kind of character flaw healing and better relationships and magical powers and the ability to abstract mathematics and whatnot all the time. I don't know, I don't talk to a lot of realized people and definitely not in this kinda frank way, but I would be pretty surprised, and pretty disappointed, if a lot of realized people told me they really didn't get any of cool little miraculous boons like that, though from the inside it often very quickly feels like something incredibly banal that's always been there and completely unspecial because random schmoes off the street with cool powers are a dime a dozen. But I truly love all sentient beings. All may know that I think I'm the hottest shit ever because I feel with full conviction that this whole buddha field is the hottest shit ever.

I will say it's clear a lot of reality is still pretty sticky, though not nearly as much as before. I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff that's just not sticky at all anymore, but I don't really know how much and where and when and stuff, since they can't be found anymore.

Now that I've thought about the idea of reality having zero stickiness I'm fascinated by the idea of literally all of reality not being sticky. That's a really wack idea. That's an idea that really pulls. That sounds absolutely hilarious, there's no fucking way I leave this earth without being into that inside joke.

I'm pretty fine with time and space and form and shit at least at the moment but my gut says if you really want to grok this "stickiness" vibe you're gonna have to fuck with karma, with causality directly and that sounds like very hard homework to my lazy ass. Dunno, just felt that thinking about the concept of causality made me feel stupid somehow and grumpy.

Thinking about this again I'm guessing the funny word is probably "but". It's probably good for "but"s to become "and"s.

I'm a software engineer by training and I'm one of those engineers who's really stubborn about making things as simple as can be while still being good at what it's supposed to do, and the way I understand how God engineered the universe pleases me very much right now. (As an aside mind that there's also a ton of engineers who are weird hard-nosed simplicity fundamentalists that are very obsessed with finding some kind of highly abstract minimal machine to worship and then reinventing the whole universe on top of that, and they tend to be very combatitive about pushing this on others, which is as unambiguously annoying as these types always are. You do you and I don't judge anyone for what they're into, but there are some things you really should keep between consenting adults in the privacy of your bedroom. I may or may not indulge in similar guilty pleasures in the privacy of my own text editor).

Anyways, yeah, reality. What's it made of? Sensations. How do you know they're sensations? Yes. Where are they? Here. When are they? Now. What are they? Themselves. What are questions about them? Themselves. What are the answers? Themselves.

That's all well and good and very nice and transparent, but I still clearly feel like I'm on a path. Why am I on a path? Because I'm not done yet. When will I be done? At this kinda level the answer's gotta be "now". What's the goal of the path? I guess being done with it, but somehow without "being", the "done", the "with" and the "it". All well and good, I sound like an idiot because I am.

Looking at the question on a more practical level, practice instructions were dead simple to begin with (if anything just got simpler) and should still work. At this point reality can't help but gently unfuck itself over time anyhow. If I really had to place a bet I feel reality can probably completely unfuck itself within a couple years, but I really can't know, and it really doesn't matter. I'm sure the very last little bits of fuckery are gonna be extremely subtle though and that the difference between minute amounts of fuckery and no fuckery at all is probably night and day. I'm a hopeless perfectionist so I can imagine the feeling in the abstract, sounds like absolute ass.

I really wanna try hanging out with an enlightened master now, as in actually IRL, face-to-face. I'm sure there's a ton you could learn just watching someone highly realized move around, use their voice, that kind of thing. I wanna go on retreat too, really get my concentration up in a stable, enduring way, which is something I really never learned to do at all in that kind of controlled way. Thankfully I feel more confident now that I can visit those parts of concentration land without accidentally shooting death lasers from my eyes and incinerating entire cities.

Once again hats off to the buddha for figuring all this shit out by himself, he must've been one stubborn motherfucker. Walking out on your wife, kid and family because you decided you gotta go put an end to all suffering is the kind of move that only gets a pass because he actually pulled it off -- there's no way I would've done that in his position.

The buddha clearly thought he was the hottest shit ever and was very vocal about it, which I'll also give a pass because he basically was. I will call him out though: at first he thought nobody would get it, then later that the dharma would survive for only 1000 and then adjusted downward to 500 years. He was also pretty insistent on the whole going forth into homelessness thing, though to be fair there's plenty of anagami householders in the suttas (I wonder why we don't hear about arahant householders, which seem to exist today?).

But we're 2500 years in now and the path is still totally open to normal-ass people with houses and jobs and families and hobbies, applying levels of effort and commitment that are on the same order of magnitude of other serious difficult endeavours people undertake all the time. All the more credit to the sangha, in the widely understood meaning of that term, for not only preserving the dharma but also recontextualizing it for new times and new audiences, for inventing all kinds of new meditation tech unknown or in some cases (e.g. drugs) not even possible in the time of the Buddha. All the regrettable "no this is MY copyrighted special way of looking at reality!!1" and "actually the Buddha decreed that MY opinions are the correct ones and I have 58 quotes in pali to prove it" and so on aside, of course.

We're moving into an age where not just all the different spiritual traditions, but also philosophy, mathematics, physics, my field of computer science, psychology, neurology and so on are finally starting to converse and converge in the way they are destined to, I think. Follow any question far enough, developing any kind of understanding far enough and eventually... yeah. Really cool to see.

Really rooting for, you know, all the people. All the difficult questions are wide open now, whether it's physics with its quantum mechanics and relativity shit, math and computing science with godel's stuff and various flavours of undecidability, everybody's heard of something called "the brain" which is endlessly problematic, a lot of the sex drugs and rock and roll superweapons that the tibetans carefully kept in a vault in a mountain temple are all on the street and the internet now and people are indulging gleefully (I actually have no idea what tibetan tantric shit actually is but I can guess the general nature I think).

All the world's spiritual and philosophical traditions are wide open, and by and large they all sound like they disagree with each other, are incompatible with "scientific reality" which is undeniably a fantastic concept but limited, plus if you realistically look at what the representatives of various "spiritual traditions" have been up to a lot of it boils down to "insist people develop random weird compulsive ticks" and "kill people".

Lots of people out there offering all kinds of sage advice, much of which is dogshit, much of which is dogshit that is very subtly different from good advice, much of which is good advice which is basically guaranteed to be interpreted as something that is dogshit, plus pairs of good advice that sound incompatible but are not, pairs of good advice that sound different but are the same, which is already bad enough by itself, but often the people giving the advice are the biggest champions of this confusion.

I could go on, of course.

Ultimately I don't really see this as a bad thing, it's not really something which can be solved either, because if anything all of this is exactly the point. I'd struggle to realistically imagine the path playing out differently on a species-wide scale. And, you know... Us humans are very curious creatures, we can't stand not having answers. We're nice people, we really want to do our best and do the right thing. There's only so many questions. Nothing stands still.

I feel a lot of compassion for everyone. It's endearing, makes you wanna root for everyone.

Of course that doesn't change the fact that there's tons of people hanging other people for being gay and monks in burma actively committing genocide in the name of the buddha at this very moment. I am much more well-pleased with the vast majority of people who don't do things like that.

Boy am I glad I copied this text somewhere else before hitting publish because this stupid forum software ate my post again. I know I talk too much but jeez.

Working with intentions, fantasies, fear, vulnerability, intimacy... Pheeeeew, this is a real fuckin' workout. Real hard fear, the solid steel wall kind. Only thing that seems to work is veeery slowly, veeery gently. Also I'm starting to see that if you're doing this kinda work it really really helps, maybe even is vital, to actually really lean into the duality. Actually really give space to "self" and "other", "this" and "that", actually really welcome "that", talk to "that", ask questions of "that", just gently ask "that" whether it wants to open up to "this" too, whether it wants to be vulnerable with "this", whether it wants to get intimate with "this", how it feels about what "this" is saying, what it's hoping "this" will say, what it fears "this" will say, what "that" is afraid to say, ask "that" to comfort "this", tell "that" that "this" wants it to be happy, ask what would make "that" happy, express that you want to create a space of... freedom, where "this" and "that" can change their minds, where one rejecting the other won't make the other shy away in the future, where this or that can do one thing or the other without worrying that they'll be expected to want to do so again in the future, that this won't confuse the other, that this and that don't make assumptions without asking, that they won't lie to each other, that one doesn't have to follow the other down any kind of path it doesn't want to, just, you know... intimacy. Freedom.

I get a lot out of the whole "the dharma has only one taste, the taste of freedom" quote. I also got a ton out of "the answer is in the looking" which is phrased like that somewhere in MCTB. I also got a lot out of the kinda "samsara and enlightenment are one and the same" and the whole "one enlightened moment and one is a buddha" enlightenment-as-activity and just very comprehensive "everything is the practice" attitude.

I've always felt MCTB is pretty harsh on people that talk like that, because it's actually a really practical viewpoint for my planning-obsessed can't sit still for more than half an hour autistic ADHD ass. I struggle to imagine someone hearing "you are already there" and going "ok" and this throwing a huge wrench in their whole spiritual quest, other than maybe the kind of people who are looking for a justification to call themselves enlightened to look cool to women they imagine they will some day work up the courage to talk to. I feel like the zen guys do try really hard to say stuff so off-kilter that even the most conceited sophists and the "I understand very little so I've conditioned myself to act like I understand everything to function in society" dum-dums -- and as an aside, this is a horrible kind of stigma no different in nature from what queer people and stuff face; I myself am plenty clever and socially apt and such, but I was actually pretty seriously developmentally delayed as a kid, and just in general... I'm a very fast learner overall, but what I'm good at is... deep, abstract, integrated structural stuff. It's hard to explain but thankfully everyone here understands what happens to understanding as it goes increasingly subtle and inclusive and... unconstrained. I do just kind of naturally incline towards those levels of understanding for everything, including basic motor skills like swimming and riding a bicycle and stuff.

So what you see is that when I learn basics of things it's just a brick wall, it's not like nothing sticks but it's building towards an understanding that's still cooking, it's not clicked into place yet, so it can't be used very well to plan and execute with especially, deciding what to do right now can't find the answer fast enough, "thinking about it" is way too slow there, and systems that deal with anticipating actions have a search space that's too wide and landscapes of "how important is this?" "how likely is this?", expectations of outcomes/feeling tone, heuristics about what the search space is gonna be like after each step, some kind of clustering of "all of these options are basically the same", familiar/novel, how creative or experimental some option is, plus there's more explicit learning stuff like "last time I did this and didn't like it so I resolved to do that instead" or "somebody told my to try Y and I have no idea why that'd work", and then you get into "what? why? so what? what else?". Everything's gotta stop somewhere so people don't generally throw the whole vipassana engine on every time they make a left turn, but this kinda thing does slow you down.

The search space is retardedly huge, both wide and deep, and runs retardedly fast, retardedly parallel, and yet everything constantly has to lug around a massive dependency graph with... whatever the fuck memory is, like a little proof demonstration, a train of thought... I really think you both have to be a computer scientist or software engineer or otherwise deeply understand computational systems, and start reaching these kinds of levels of realizations, to really appreciate how cartoonish it is, the extent to which you are trapped in some cartoonish eldritch computer scientists worst nightmare.

Or probably not, I guess, I realize I'm just looking in a mirror, I had a vision of it on ayahuasca that is different and has a kind of... it's alluring, and there's a sense that it's visually very obvious, but you just don't recognize it until you do letting your guard down kind of thing, and then as you get in deeper it gets more and more of that "every direction leads inward" stuff (according to our current model if physics that happens inside black holes; past the event horizon space is so bent that every direction is towards the singularity, as in, you're still in normal 3D space, you can still move in 3 dimensions, they just all lead to the same point). Very branchy, fractally at the points, increasingly becoming denser everywhere and yet still always sharp because it doesn't have volume, it doesn't take up space, and it kinda "drills", so I always call it The Drill. Intense but I know when I start seeing shit like that without actively seeking it out then it's just re-observation stuff, re-obs is usually very visionary and surprisingly clear in its own tantrum throwing being annoying for its own sake kinda way.
I kinda like having this thing around sometimes in low doses, it's pretty good at warning you, and it just kinda feels... pretty friendly, kind of comforting, and more like it's a game, like a "hah you almost got me, won't fall for that next time" kinda feel. I don't like taking the drill very deep though, although if I'm just randomly cycling and I just wanna get re-obs over with quick I usually just lie down and really power on that cringe, sharp and very vividly sensory energy for a while. Yeah it's mean and ugly and in-your-face but it's also, you know, not real, not directed at anything, not actually that confusing, and over really quickly if you just deal with it. It feels more like a chore than anything. Also I feel like at least for me there's always clearly still a lot of respect. It shows you a lot of things but I can easily think up endless distasteful places where I know it could go but it never does. This is pretty idealized and I definitely don't mean to make light of re-obs.

The computer nerd thing is more like a maze, like a search space except it's somehow more space than space, it's... I really love this thing, it's so annoying... anyways yes, options, directions, zooming in and out in inconceivable ways, and yet very fractal, so incredibly similar to itself, like it's built out of pure symmetry, and there's just these hunches, "this feels like bullshit", but there's nothing that can be pointed at to be the "this" that is bullshit. Just the most unimaginable maze, which then gradually just leads to nibbana. I really like this one, if you're someone with a deep analytic/computational/mathematical understanding of questioning and computation you get to see the mind try some really interesting stuff.

I've mentioned this before but what ultimately led me to my current level of insight is posing the question "what is something about which nothing can be said?", which is just the "shut up already" button. Really neat, very direct, also just really easily accessible at any time when you catch the vibe. It's... the partner of the space maze thing above. I feel they complete each other, in some way.

Some of the words and visuals that come to mind are things like, putting all the space in one basket and all the points in another, or all the questions in one basket and the answers in another, or all the directions/movement in one and the movement in the other, but the words are crude, it's really subtle.

Unity, duality, unity, duality is what I hear in my head. Some kind of pulsing. Insight stages, from dissolution up to kinda weakish equanimity. Just kinda dark night stuff now. Lots of frustration. That feeling of "alright that's enough of that, nice jam, let's go do friday night stuff". Agreed, buddy.

That early equanimity unstable borderline section of the cycles is really profound. Something really important happens on that transition between re-obs and equanimity, something weird and paradoxical about "doing stuff" and "giving up". Now that I see there's something interesting there it's actually pretty easy to go there and pinpoint that tension around doing/not doing, starting/stopping, movement/no movement. You can make time and space really cramped if you put some concentration there. Three characteristics very useful here.

I feel like I've been describing three... pointers I guess, and I feel like I can basically directly relate them to the three characteristics/three doors. Okay buddy, that's really cool. Friday night. Not reincarnating into Friday Night Man. Eating dinner. Now where's the off-switch for vipassana again...?

It's fine that things are just the things they are but there's something about this "knowing" business that's really pissing me off now. This is a very distinctly desire for deliverance sensation for me, this feeling of "What, you thought I'd let you pull that shit on me? Who the hell do you think I am? I'd fight the whole world to protect what I stand for!", which is very empowering and really revitalizes the practice.

As somebody who is very... passionate and particular about finding the right words for things, you have no idea how incredibly pleasant it is to write a paragraph like that. As a deep lover of words... it's pretty embarassing, but I basically feel like sobbing. The most mundane sentence ring out like the most beautiful poetry. And there mid-sentence is also where my A&P gas runs out, lol. Actually this is perfect, dissolution is the perfect stage to go make dinner.

Some groceries need buying. Described the situation to my partner as "I can't go, I'm astral projecting the buddha into the shadow realm very hard. If I let myself get distracted he's gonna teleport out and it'll be over for me."

I find myself very funny. 

Really that very first part, love and compassion and humility and vulnerability metta, applied to all beings, is by far the most important part to take away from this, I think.

How that metta itself is turned into a being and what that does is another good place to look I'm sure.

Concentration

> Try to notice that all experiences occur in this moving space of experience.

Oh I really like that. "Thanks" is the only thing I've got to say to that, really. May all beings realize how fucking cool that is.

EDIT: just reading stuff now. It's just word, word, word, word. It's the same shit every time. It doesn't even matter what the words are, or that they're words at all.

EDIT2: Or how about this: every time something shows up I tell it to go fuck itself and that I'mma stay right here in nonduality land where it can't do shit to me. Fits the mood. Don't care, not my problem.

Just the most basic compassion, the most basic "I want you to be happy, and you want me to be happy"... It makes for such a wholesome, harmonious, uncomplicated, unconstrained little picture, and it truly is, until the moment you try putting it into action and everything collapses, which is perfectly natural, but it's a tragedy that we must learn the harsh way to ask not "what can I do for you?" but "what do you want from me?", because they sound so similar and yet one is so stressful, the other so easeful.

Always remember the four noble truths: shit's fucked, fuck me, fuck this, go fuck yourself

This topic seems to have become the definition of manic  

Oh please don't let anyone take the impression they'd be wise to read all this :-). The mind can be manic like that sometimes, and posting it somewhere others may read it does help move things along embarrassing as it may be, but I really don't intend anyone to get anything out of it.

Today is actually a nice calm day. Just spending time with loved ones abiding in the world. Probably less enchanted with words words words for a while, even I get tired of my own jokes. Had to get it outta my system.

Definitely quite a bit of attachment to views, and also still narrative making. On the flip side I'm cooking up some really cool views and have found really profound meanings to all the words, and they're very eager to apply themselves in their new way to stuff and see what happens. Probably better to just gently let that ride out a bit and focus on daily life stuff for a while, rather than grasping for detachment. Still much of the illusion of a "knower", "perceiver", "practitioner". Overall sensate experience is now profoundly "more nondual", luminous or what will you, in a way that can't be "unseen". Doesn't apply to nearly all sensations, nor completely to any sensations, I don't think.

New insights have profoundly changed something about the relationship between "me" and "other people" in a way that is clearly very practical, skillful, supportive without asking or giving, intimate without pulling out or pushing in, self-asserting without selfishness, surrender without submission, decision without command. This already started seriously benefiting other people within like half a day.

Right, right. There isn't some guy on a path, there's countless sentient beings and they all have their own little paths. Keep it up little guys, I'm rooting for you.

Post SE is manic territory. As one gets deeper into the paths things get a lot more mundane. Some things to be aware of...

First is what I said above about birth. 

Second is recognizing that you may find yourself being born in the Deva realms a lot and while at first this is extremely pleasurable it is also full of greed and superiority and a lot of the work of the middle paths is in unravelling those very sticky, very sweet and very subtle impulses. 

Often before stream entry we're not used to feeling the way we do after, we're certainly not as used to being born in the God realms. The trickiness of the god realms is that they look a lot like awakening but bring with them a lot of greed, superiority and indifference, often in very fine barely noticeable detail. 

It seems whenever I ask a stream enterer "how's practice" they go off on big rambling tangents without communicating anything about the rich, momentary nature of their lives experience. It's often lots of insights and oh wow now this thing makes sense and I'm having this really precious super enlightened experience. Which is fine but there's just not much I have to offer besides be careful of greed. 

The paths don't get more like this they actually get a lot more mundane and that can be a shock after the high of stream entry.

Plenty fine and fascinating things to realize. Fairies in the fields and futures in the past and so on. Second path is more of the same in a sense. Often takes a repeat or two of first to get second but that's neither here nor there. 

I think as well as somebody with a little more experience it's very interesting watching stream enterers have these experiences where for the very first time they realize this is all real. There are people undoubtedly reading this or who have read other posts here who have no idea the kind of experiences we're having. How real and totally not abstract it is.  

It is possible to experience things that are far beyond the reach or understanding of the ordinary human thus it is imperative, it is of the utmost significance and importance that we do not lose track of our humanity and the vulnerability there in as I'm no doubt sure you're discovering. 

Punks not Dead!!! Wrahhhhhh!!!  

Thanks for the advice as always bahiya, I'd reply but I'm sure you're already several steps ahead, or was that the past? I think this is where I start looking up who the hell "Indra" is, as my understanding genuinely doesn't reach beyond "I've vaguely heard the name, he seems fierce, and I don't wanna catch him in bed with my partner".

I did go and check the section on fruitions in MCTB again for a bit before bed to see what I missed on first reading and... (emphasis mine)

> On the other hand, if the only way to remember what happened involves remembering just forward to the end of the door that presented and then remembering back to when reality reappeared, keep reading.

Riiiiiight...

As though this "simple formal resolutions" business wasn't already spooky enough.

EDIT: Wait you're telling me this thing has a Wikipedia page?? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net

I could've saved a bunch of effort trying to describe this earlier somewhere in that mess of shit I wrote because I totally have one of these. Though I guess if it was actually copyrighted they wouldn't have put it on Wikipedia. I should thank this Indra guy for letting me borrow his net, it was really useful, but I'm glad to return it, you have no idea how unwieldy it is :-).

I want some books on this stuff now.

We don't say it out loud much but I'm pretty sure most of us really dig this particular trip: indras net is basically equivalent to holograms in physics. 

To give the actual experience report as best I remember it, I guess... I remember lying in bed and gently inclining the mind towards fruition. Then there's a gap in time. Then I'm lying in bed and there's some really fierce being emerging, going something like, WHRUAAHHH I'M INDRA (something like that, I have no idea). There's something questioning "how the fuck did you get here", to which Indra responds "through the gate called [my name]", to which the questioner responds very deadpan "well shit, guess [my name]'s gotta go then" and "so much for my resolution to have a gentle path, cancel that then". Indra then moves to try and hug my partner in bed, which faces some rejection. Then there's a... Very strong convergence, all time flows into one spot, so not just forward from where we are in the story, but also directly from the past of the story, and backwards from the future of the point of convergence, and including the three beings in the story, into a single point of "wait, I've been here before" (with those words). Then reality re-emerges again into this world we're in right now, so that's three lifetimes counting this one.

Experiencing this at this level of clarity I still can't really defend any conclusion other than that if I have attained anything significant recently it would probably be second path, with stream entry being in like 2021, if this kind of breaking the flow of time and vanishing without a trace is the gold standard, by the way, unless you want to argue that immediately SE has to be pleasant/peaceful/satisfying, stabilising in the short to medium term, cause a really noticeable enduring wide shift in everyday walking around reality, or occur while sober, all of which what I now think of as SE very much wasn't and what I've recently attained very much is. Or if you insist that time and space and name and form and the sense of an observer have to de-assert themselves smoothly and promptly and not painstakingly piece themselves together through some kind of churning hell realm that takes real clock time to fix itself.

I really don't know, I'm open to either insofar as it matters at all. I did truly thoroughly reality test what I thought of as SE against what it says in MCTB over and over again for a long time through a lot of reads, but it's true I didn't actually ask anyone to confirm, and if your standard is "obvious everyday sensate reduction of suffering" then I really don't think it amounts to much. If your standard is cycling paths then Iddo still really stand by it, that's the main unambiguous thing for me personally. All the weird beliefs SE is supposed to dispel are ones I don't remember ever having regardless.

Also you can't know for certain any of this stuff but once you grok that lesson deep enough then obviously a bit of speculation can be just a bit of fun. 

As far as I'm aware you at least have stream entry. 

Things get orders of magnitude more complex and deep from there. Overestimation is a constant companion throughout this journey. 

Being very clear about what beings were there: there was "my body", and "Indra", and some kind of observer/asker/decider, but that's also everyone, even though [my name] was mentioned and the body that Indra emerged out of was the body I'm in right now, the body itself was empty, and the "me" typing this wasn't present, so it's a converging and vanishing of specifically "the observer", "my body" and "Indra". I guess my partner was also there, but I don't know what to make of that, he wasn't a subject.

EDIT: btw If stuff like fractal stages and insight stages in everything and stages on deeper and shallower and parallels between jhanas and stages and running stages backwards is a standard for SE then what I have now would also be second path, though to be honest I started finding all that really annoying and confusing very quickly and don't see it at all now, and can't really imagine reality going back to something so dumb right now, or at least I hope not.

But at this point I feel like putting much stake in "which path I'm on" would be a weird and not very useful thing to worry about, I'm fine with "somewhere in the middle", I think. Really the sheer sense of immediacy turns me off from getting lost in stuff like that, all the more so because the idea of being some kind of certified meditation master is so enticing. That feels like the message I was meant to hear from what happened just now anyhow. Power is real, enticing, and dangerous.

I find the implication of there being "my body", which is just my body, it moves around and stuff but doesn't *do* or *see* anything, plus "Indra", who is an agent and has *feelings* but I don't know what he was thinking, and then some kind of observer that sees all this and makes decisions but... doesn't feel anything, or act, or even *remembers* stuff, all as separate entities, pretty creepy. Not, like, existentially terrified creepy, but enough to keep me awake. Not "I'm surprised this experience is possible" but "wow that was eerily vivid for a surprisingly long time".

EDIT: also time did something really weird there, like every moment in past and future simultaneously converged, so that if you start at some time before the convergence and move forward it works fine, but at the moment of convergence all time points directly inwards, so that all of the past is immediately before and all of the future is... also immediately before, without losing being "the future".

Okay this is really weird, now part of mental talk sometimes stops being identified as "me", so that there's a voice going "you should do this or that" or "if you do this then that will happen, you know". "I" can't really observe it directly right now without tightening up, it sneaks up on "me" as I fall back asleep, but it feels very relaxed. Going further in it's also like there's another voice answering "back" with questions and emotions, but that part even more so immediately gets grabbed as "me" when observed directly. Gotta learn to relax into that, but it's fascinating to see that "the part that knows the way" ends up on onesside and the faculties of deciding, acting, emotions and questions all on the other.

Okay so this was an interesting trip. I found myself in a really dreamy, floaty intoxicated state this morning, like being absolutely high off my ass except I wasn't, with a lot of sukkha and piti present, so very pleasurable in terms of feeling tone, and very "detached" and "out of it" in the bad deluded sense of that, with time and space being very whispy and ungraspable, and a deep underlying sense of restlessness/irritability/aversion, and still with some kind of clear awareness that this was unskillful and suffering, but hard to get out of because it was very identified with non-grasping and non-duality, so that the field couldn't really manage to construct some kind of "there" to "move toward" away from "this" in a very deep general sense.

I noticed that this felt like dissolution, where intentions just immediately dissolve themselves, and that was enough of a "right, just observe the sensations" wake up call to start moving me up through the stages through equanimity and then back to A&P. At that point there was enough oomph again for me to realize that "the desire to become an agent" is a perfectly valid sensation to notice and remember that arousing energy and willpower for the sake of ending suffering is a very skillful thing to do highly recommended by the wise ones.

I remembered the experience I had last night of Indra incarnating into my body through [my real name] as a gate, and I did do enough quick reading last night to have read that this "Indra" fellow is not an enemy of the dharma, so I tried "doing that", calling up my name and inviting that fierce, agentic, cut-the-shit energy. This immediately worked and the mind latched on and identified with something much more forceful, centered in the body, concentrated, ruthless, heroic, fearless and shameless, but also much more greedy, driven, short-tempered, less tolerant and peaceful, consequences-be-damned.

The impression I get is that the actual amount of suffering, identification, grasping or what will you are pretty similar between these two states, but it manifests differently with different upsides and downsides. What I shifted into is clearly more skillful and practical though. It's interesting to note how fundamentally conceptually impossible it is for any kind of "agent" to "choose" to "travel" from one of these spaces to the other.

I feel like I want to gain a much better understanding of realms, archetypes, skillful identification and those kinds of things. Constantly being reborn as all kinds of archetypes in all kinds of realms really isn't unfamiliar to me, to the point that this has always confused people around me my whole life.

Less identifying with non-duality, please. That's way too much slack in the whole machine. May I be always be reborn in whichever realm is most conducive to awakening, knowing that the Buddha strongly argued that's the normal-ass human realm.

Very interesting to see what the sudden shift in thought patterns, sense of initiative, wanting to change clothes and shower, undertake activities, change opinions and views and names and importance and stuff, time horizon and where there is time experience on the past->future line etc implies about how each pattern of identification tries to solidify itself.

Also very striking: the body now feels much bigger relative to the space it's in. Hard to recall at this point but it really feels like I've grown 2-3x bigger.

Having experienced this it seems obviously fruitless to incline the mind towards anything other than simply "the end of suffering", given that everything else is relative. That's a lot of control that doesn't need to be held onto. Good.

It's a funny trick, you "find" non-duality and identify it as the end of suffering, then invent "not non-duality" as the same as "suffering", so you just have to get away from that, then you throw away everything before the word "so". Gets 'em every time.