Does anyone know if people like Christopher titmuss ever address the DN? I can't help but wonder at the moment if this thing hasn't got overblown on here/mixed up with people's psychological problems?

Way to think out of the box, Robin. Keep it up.

Remember, the power of suggestion!

Sorry, I'm too dense to get this I'm afraid!

Do you mean that people like him want to avoid 'scripting' people's experience?

On the contrary, I was praising your intuition.

Not necessarily him, per se. But anyone who suggests that someone must go through this or that is already "scripting" people's experience.

Why anyone would want to follow such "advice" is beyond me. You won't find anything like this coming out of Gotama's mouth in the discourses. (Now I've gone and done it. Someone very near is ripe to label me. To hell with them. And to hell with their label. That's a not so polite way of saying, "If you want to assert it, then you OWN it. It has nothing to do with me.")

From Armando Torres' book, one of my favourites:

"Your most ingrained conviction is that you are sinful and for that reason you are justified!"

If our most ingrained conviction is that we are sinful, and yet we desire to experience bliss and freedom from suffering, how could that possibly happen? We wouldn't allow it unless we first made ourselves pay a huge price. This huge price came to be known as the Dark Night. Man created it as a way of dealing with the belief in 'original sin'.

I'm also pleased to hear from Ian that Buddha himself didn't talk about Dark Night. Maybe Buddha's followers were the Tony Robbins of the old days, rather than the man himself! I think Jesus had a few people distort his message too (think Catholic church for example).

A pliant and malleable mind is less subject to creating mental stress due to higher probability of discernment of what causes dukkha. In my own experience of what i called 'the dark night', there was a lack of malleabilty and pliancy and thus discernment of the cause of it being so 'dark'. When there is a lack of discernment, there is blindness to the habits of the mind that give rise to dukkha. With discernment, dukkha's cessation and how to see it occur in real time becomes apparent in my own experience. Lack of pliancy, malleability and thus discernment = 'dark night'. Pliancy, malleability and thus discernment and thus specific neutrality= knowledge of dukkha (dukkha nana), its cause and cessation.



A number of suttas that speak of difficulties for certain yogis.


Asubha sutta
Khama sutta
Vitthara sutta


My current two cents.

i went on a number of CT retreats where i crossed the a&p and ran straight into classic dark night territory

i also ran into it about 6 or times before that when i would cross the a&p in daily life

i had never heard of the dark night then, never heard or read the maps, so there was no scripting involved

and CT never mentioned then, not being a fan of the maps himself, nor did he give me any obviously useful support i could remember , and the standard, predictable DN problems resulted as they had before

they were first mentioned on a scratch old tape of an old burmese monk after i crossed the a&p again on retreat at mbmc and hit the dark night hard

the maps gave me a lot of confidence and a heads up to what was going on and i got to equanimity, which i failed to do on th 3 previous CT retreats

i know many others with similar experiences

read the life of the buddha: relinquished the world, searched high and low, subjected himself to profound austerity, left his marriage, became obsessed with practice

read the sequence of the armies of mara on the day of his awakening, compare the phenomenology to an insight map, draw your own conclusions about whether or not the buddha described a DN or similar territory and even lived it

daniel

My working assumption then is that Ian didn't suffer as much as he took a more concentration heavy approach?

Is it possible to try and focus on jhanas post SE without further activating the process of insight?

This I want to know as well. Nick's post points out that concentration development leads a less painful progression. Daniel's concept map shows all the jhanas before reaching fruition.

That assumption, then, would be faulty, by which is meant that there is no basis (no substantive, known evidence that has been disclosed) upon which one may arrive at such an assumption. In other words, it is speculative, and thereby faulty. My only point is that I resist using labels such as "dark night" (or any shortcut conceptual modern novation of a label at all) as it can encourage people to experience such and to label it as such ("Oh, woe is me, I'm in the dark night.") Now, you've just created (conceptualized) a problem (dukkha) for yourself! Boy, that was smart, wasn't it.


Can you be more specific about what you are asking? What is it that you mean by "without further activating the process of insight"? Do you not understand that insight is an ongoing process as soon as you gain consciousness in this world?

In my own very limited experience - had I not had knowledge of the maps, specifically the dark night I probably would have switched to a different kind of meditation or got frustrated and given up altogether. My dark night was pretty weak and mainly involved aversion to meditation and inability to concentrate during meditation, had I not known this was normal and a sign of 'progress' as I said I may not have passed through this stage, despite it being relatively mild, and I've very happy I passed through this stage, it's made big positive changes in my life.

Knowledge of the maps has had its problems for me and my experiences still don't seem to fully chime with all aspects of them but without them I think I may have even quit at the three characteristics stage (started having these experiences on retreat without knowledge of this stage and thought about quitting meditation, on the train home looked up MCTB on my phone read through the maps properly and decided to persevere). So thanks to Daniel and everyone else for the sharing of this knowledge - suttas, what the buddha taught aside I've found it very helpful in my own practice (and life) to say the least.