I shifted into seeing things with a much greater degree of emptiness after realizing that object and subject were empty in both space and time. I arrived at that through the Sevenfold reasoning practice (and much awesome advice on another thread). This line of reasoning, the seventh, really did it for me. 

-self is not the shape of the aggregates nor their continuum in time. 

Since this shift practice can be much simpler. I take the sense doors as an object and emptiness is mostly immediately recognized in them. Before, practice had more of an obvious sense of doing to it and I even found myself working directly with, sometimes being frustrated by, that sense of doership. Now it seems like 60% of experience is obviously already empty, nothing has to be added to it to see it in that manner. The remaining 40% of phenomena arise with craving, are obviously dissatisfactory and usually can be seen as empty as soon as they are recognized. (These numbers are nonsense but are accurate enough, though it's been a bit more 80-20 the last week or so.)

I’ve been working with Shargrol’s advice “Notice how the spiritual life seems to alternate between ‘I don't quite have it’ and ‘I have it but better not lose it’.”

This quickly became very useful and accurately described my experience. I often found myself oscillating between.

“Ahh everything is just obviously emptiness, I really like that, wait it seems to be slipping.”
“Ohh am I sure this is emptiness, something doesn’t feel right, I better do something to fix this. 

In this way practice becomes sort of like a balancing act and It helps a lot to be aware of the implied duality of either pole as opposed to trying to correct the disatisfactory imbalance. Sometimes it helps to just check out of the game. It’s like watching attraction and aversion try to bind you into suffering and you’re just kicking back, unphased either way. I can see that self is attempting to elicit a reaction. Reacting either way is falling for the ploy.

Nevertheless I fall for it often. I’m trying to get better at moment-to-moment, as in all day long, practice but it takes some getting used to, particularly with work. I often meditate while walking or just hanging out but work really wraps me up in Samsara. 

While there has been some mega gnarly dark night stuff since this shift, overall I much rather perceive reality like this. There seems to be a gentle effortlessness that is more readily available day to day. 

It seems like I spend a lot of time in the early nanas, which is annoying but I’m learning to love them. As soon as I crest into the A&P I rapidly spin through all the other stages, fruition, review cycle and return to early nanas. 

The whole path cycles can have meta nana qualities but I ain't paying too much attention to this stuff, though I have always experienced the nanas to be laid on real thick. 

The main traps here seem to be subtle ways the subject obfuscates itself. It’s very easy to recognize that the object of meditation is empty but there are tricky ways that the subject, or observer kind of hides itself from being seen as empty. 

Something that has had a similar quality to it as the sevenfold reasoning realization I mention above. I can’t remember where I came across this, here, in the post compilations, possibly in Under the Bodhi Tree.

Basically, there’s a difference between sensation arising & passing away VS arising then passing away. If you take each sensation to be simultaneously arising and passing, it has that same kind of “Oh yeah, that’s it” quality to when I first stumbled on emptiness and it seems to be a useful way to practice at the moment. 

…

Updates may be sporadic, I’ve got a lot going on, but I’ll try to write about anything that seems different, new or insightful. 

Something I should mention, that has become more and more fundamental to the unfolding of all this, is the heart. 

Not in the sense of metta per say, at least not how I’d normally practice it. As I explore the balancing act of emptiness (mentioned above) I notice the heart has become very deeply fine tuned to, what seems to be, good practice. 

What “good practice” now consists of is a radical surrendering into fearless unknowing. Not in the sense of recklessness but in the sense of vulnerability. It’s very paradoxical, very counterintuitive, to totally relinquish control. To let go of any knowing or certainty about how things are, were or will be. I have been taught before about this element of practice and while I have understood it intellectually and to some degree practically it wasn’t until the above realization that it became a fundamental aspect of my experience of this moment right now.  

The mind is busy, suffering occurs, because the self is totally wrapped up in desperately hedging its bets against a completely unknowable future. It thinks it can know the future, or hedge some form of strategy against the potential suffering a future implies but it just isn’t the case. It absolutely can not be known. The self is afraid and "fearlessness", as I’m calling it, is not necessarily about an absence of fear but one's relationship to it. 

I have had a number of teachers who have employed surfing metaphors. When surfing you can’t know how the wave will break, it’s literally a force of nature, no coercion or strategising can change that. This is terrifying to admit, but surrendering to the terror of the situation is oddly rather freeing. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of muscle memory, to even get to the point where surrender is possible. Wave after wave we plant our feet, we find our balance and we learn to feel into the deep mystery of the rolling ocean beneath us. 

Mostly that occurs as struggle, as suffering and only occasionally as the intoxicating satisfaction of getting it right. Despite this, throughout all the ups and downs, over time, a certain intuitive intelligence is cultivated. The technique becomes more and more a natural extension of being and one arrives at a certain sense of balance (and as Will Johnson so often points out - with balance and gravity comes relaxation - and gravity is unavoidable so balance is up to you).

I guess to paraphrase, there comes a point when you’ve done the practice and all that’s really left to do is surf. And no amount of technique can make that shift happen for you. No amount of technique can shore you up against the fear of the unknown. All that’s left is surrender and balance. There’s a heart-intelligence to that which transcends any approach, any worldview, any fixed way of seeing, in favor of spontaneous unknowing. In favor of experiencing reality exactly as it is without prehension or modification. 
​​​​​​​
Or so it seems to me
Mucho amor, Bb.​​​​​​​

Carrying on from the last update. I recently began to notice the subtle activity of the doer that still remained and began to bring more emptiness into and through that experience. There were aspects of self on a very subtle level that were still "calling the shots", this particularly showed up in ways I might direct attention or very subtle ways something seemed to initiate the direction of attention. (I really started seeing the above activity after paying very close attention to how authentic, vulnerable or liberating experiences could be reified, solidified and/or jhanified)

It took a week or two to get clear about these processes but as soon as I did I was able to begin perceiving them as empty.

Currently I'm passing through another vulnerable heart-break review cycle. I'm getting used to(less frustrated by) these weird shifts into middlegrounds where something has been realized yet still needs to be taken deeper. Though admittedly a certain desire to be "finished" with all this can arise. I could really go for some salsa, reggaeton and cold beer but I just haven't been in a very social space of late (ok, let's be real, likely since my first A&P event)

It's weird stepping into a way of seeing where all aspects of agency are perceived as tense modifications of sense experience. Even as I write this some things bubble up from the clear luminous experience and then certain words or phrases are the result of tense pinching reactions. It's clear that in some respects the sensation of agency seems to be created by an aspect of experience that ignorantly divides itself from reality and wrestles against it. That friction is necessary for a sense of self to emerge, it seems. 

To continue on the vulnerability thread it's startling how fragile this all is, how liberating yet often remarkably upsetting it can be. It seems there's no guardrails at the edge of reality.

I'm paying special attention to any aspect of agency that arises. Any aspect of experiences that thinks it's doing the nanas. Any aspect of experience that thinks it's doing relaxation or meditation. And of course any aspect of experience that thinks it's anywhere over there or somewhere back here. 

Going to spend the day crying and eating dark chocolate. 
Amor, Bb

Is it possible that you’re trying too hard? I mean, what harm is there in relaxing into the flow of your experience? I found that continually analyzing, expecting, and searching became the barrier. Giving up and letting go broke the logjam.

"what harm is there in relaxing into the flow of your experience?"
- No harm and I think that's happening more and more of the time, but there's also experiences that obviously aren't that, though less so, week by week.

Also I find the process of giving up and letting go has just been really sad lately...

On a physical relaxation level, I have been dealing with a chronic complex muscular issue that can leave my body in extreme, almost unworkable, tension for days or weeks at a time. It can be difficult to walk, sit, lie down, be alive... lol. I believe this probably has hindered me to some extent, but that's just life stuff, it comes and goes and I'm learning to deal with and rehabilitate it. Learning to let go of, or inspite of, chronic muscle spasm has been a fucking journey for me.

Wait... I think it's possible I just got it. 

3rd path
"Things should mostly seem to be happening on their own: that includes thoughts, actions, perception, intentions, feelings, movements, everything. This should be the dominant waking experience, with portions of experience that are not naturally known as being that way being the minority. The natural causality and self-lessness of action should be clear most of the time and for most things."

At some point today this seems to have actually clicked in.

Any questions, clarifications y'all could provide that might help me determine if that is the case?

Probably need some time to let it settle and be certain. 

Can you describe your moment to moment experience in your own words? Can you describe the emptiness of objects in your own words? Can you describe what’s different today, and what happened to make it so, in your own words?

Ok, I had such an intense fruition yesterday I had to take the day off. 

Some clarification upfront. As far as I understand it phenomenologically, when I'm talking about experiencing emptiness, what seemed to bring it on, is that the three characteristics became automatically known, without any practice really necessary other than the process of continually seeing reality as empty of self which is what this series of posts has been exploring. 

A while ago, as I write above, a lot of reality seemed generally empty (empty of self, arising without craving) while some chunks of sensation arose with craving, were obviously dissatisfactory but could ultimately be seen as empty once awareness was directed towards them. The empty chunks were open, bright, waving and very free. Where as in contract the chunks that arose with craving were sticky, painful, darker and were immediately obvious as dukkha. 

I wrote then it was kind of a 60-40 type deal. 

That basically progressed until almost all of reality seemed generally empty except, and this is what I noticed yesterday morning, certain qualities of mind were directing attention like little pinches of "do this" "look at that" "meditate like this" "relax like that"

When I started to observe this and relax that process, I got really sad, but also ended up having a nuclear fruition. The difference afterwards being that the dualistic balancing act that I talk about in above posts, where I was balancing between "this ain't quite right" and "Oh I've really got it now" just stopped. It no longer feels like a balancing act, there's just kind of a flowing, fluxing, rolling moment.

I feel remarkably free and unhindered by the addmittedly quite subtle anxieties and discomforts I had been experiencing recently. Thoughts happen, good and bad feelings come and go, attention moves here and there but none of that seems to happen in a way that's somehow seperate from anything else. Nor does it happen in away that's somehow heirarchically directed. Things really seem to just be happening, pretty naturally. The way I move, type, walk, act, shift my attention... that all happens very organically. 

Before, as I described, there were very subtle ways that this sort of rolling, empty space was interrupted by pinching "no, like this" type inclinations. It was very obvious that "something" wasn't right. 

I was practicing a sort of relaxing into and merging of the senses into the wide open, empty world. It was easy to do that practice but it was still a practice, now it's much more just the default. 

I can intuit ways that this can deepen, but it's very hard to point at anything and say "This, this right here, is not empty" or "That, that needs some practice". Before, though addmittedly quite subtle, I still always could see something, usually some little twitch of attention or sticky craving. (I assume things will eventually present themselves that will require practice when this needs to deepen) 

I'm in a review cycle. It has lasted so far all of 18hrs. Not very long, but definitely the longest review cycle I've had in a considerable amount of time. I've been quickly flipping in and out of review/path cycles for months. 

Even the tension from my physio issue can weirdly be seen as simultaneously uncomfortable but also obviously empty. 

I feel thoroughly relieved. If it's third path cool. If it's not yet, really no big deal. I'm happy to just keep deepening and I'm really very happy with whatever this is. This absolutely has qualities of whatever it is I've been after. That in itself is very freeing. 

Will stay vigilant. 

Hmmm... Not so convinced atm. That "fruition" may have been an A&P event. Will give it a little more time.

Maybe you should slow down and confer with someone (a reliable accomplished teacher) who can help you sort out what appears to me to be some confusion. I think you’ve been reading a lot about the progress of insight but it’s not finding synergy with your actual practice and related experience of the POI. You can’t force fit this stuff. Do you have someone you can talk to about this?

Yeah, certainly more and more my experience does not relate to the POI or even how other people describe their experience of it. (Save for Mind over easy, I find their logs some of the most relatable stuff I've read)

I used to have someone to talk to about all this but not anymore. It's kind of complicated. That's what led me here.

​​​​​​​I may need to find a new teacher. 

Though, I actually think I'm going to take a few months, years, lifetimes off for now. This process has been getting progressively more gnarly, there's always some deeper aspect of self festering further around the corner, deeper under the surface and I don't really have any confidence that will ever change, it has certainly gotten a lot more bareable and that's a victory.

I've been holding out for a time, place, space to just return to regular life for awhile. Now might be the time. "Giving up meditation" has a good resonance to it 

From way over here, it appears that you want "it" so much that you call every insight or change a large, impactful revelation, or a path moment. I do think a recalibration of why you're doing this practice would be a good idea. Why, as in what do you really want?

EDIT: Practice's purpose - I don't think seeing practice as a self-focused exercise is healthy. To see the self as the bugaboo of our lives, a thing to eliminate isn't a good way to proceed. The insights we gain from practice will lead to wisdom about the self, but that's only one aspect of it. Self is just another object and being able to drop our preconceptions about the evil self (sometimes engendered by our readings) is a good idea. 

Hey, just jumping in to wish you well, and that I feel your struggles it sure is tough! Feel free to PM me if you ever want to talk it through, or even just here on your thread, or mine. As long as it doesn't become something detrimental to the integrity of your daily life and well-being/safety, I hope you don't give up! As you know, I've definitely felt similarly at times, but I hope we both succeed in keeping life together and seeing it through. I don't have the "answers" but hopefully my sympathy and encouragement will do for now... Best of luck and hope you're well!

Hey !!

A lot of the above resolved itself pretty swiftly after my last message. I needed to give up the selfish activity and neurotic processes that had powered my meditative journey up to that point. It took a swift dose of very dramatic, all encompassing, surrender. 

This led to a very profound shift in my relationship to time. It became always immediately obvious that the future and past where just ideas being fabricated in the present and that the vast multiplicity of reality was always implicit in the atomic structure of this sense experience. 

Besides a few days nerding out about UJI, I basically lost all interest in meditation. Practicing it, reading about it, speaking about it, etc it all completely fell away. A lot of the processes that led me here in the first place, or led to me voraciously reading meditation books, were seen to be basically kind of neurotic and obsessive.

I spent awhile making art and reintegrating into society... to some extent.

As the weeks and months passed, I gently and very naturally inclined towards more and more meditation. I'm now back to having a consistent daily practice. For quite awhile it felt like I was doing the worst possible meditation, it was very vague and dull and my concentration was shit, but I also couldn't do anything about it. Any attempt to change it felt like selfish action and for the first time I was really just being with everything, in a consistent, ungamified kind of way. 

As things progressed meditation seemed to improve. It became clearer, more open, spacious, more inclusive and accepting of everything (and seemed to do all this without any meddling from me). Path cycles and stages came and went. I barely noticed them, or cared too much about them being there, just more stuff happening.  

Recently I notice meditation oscillates between really nice open inclusive stuff and sticky fantasies. These fantasies all tend to have something to do with distracting me from a sense of inadequacy or deluding me into a sense of superiority. It's usually kind of the same process which will show different faces. Probably pretty classic stuff... delusions of spiritual grandeur mostly, occassionally stuff to do with my art. As I've mentioned it can feel a bit weird applying too much effort in meditation at the minute, which is a nice shift compared to how things were before, though I am trying to gently delve into these fantasies explore why it is I'm attached to them. Why do they occur.

My early insight seems to be it has a lot to do with strategies around recieving love and being validated by others. A lot of it has some of that same heartbreaky kinda feel to it I was getting before but I feel a lot more integrated and prepared to really recieve these experiences. There isn't that same level of gamifying meditation to procure spiritual results happening and I think my heart is a lot more comfortable exploring these depths. 

I'm generally just letting the process unfolded. Cruising luxuriously, in whatever direction the winds are blowing, trying to notice any particulary sticky stuff and what might lie underneath it. 

Anyway, thanks for all the support I've received here. I appreciate you all. Sorry for being a neutoric mess. 

And I hope to start logging here more often again, I ultimately don't know what's going to happen, but here's hoping. 



Bb xxx

Good to see you logging again!

​​​​​​​It seems like you are noticing some useful stuff. There is so much stuff, so many patterns, to work through (for me anyway) but the understanding (the gradual clearing away of ignorance, or as Chris recently said, illusions) is massively helpful in so many ways. 

Hey Martin !! Endless patterns... one long strange trip ;)

Today's meditation. 
Started, warm, fuzzy, a little muddy and poorly defined. (Often meditation starts off with bad concentration and I can't like hot wire my way to good concentration like I used to, the process has to slowly gear up.)

Eventually became brighter, refreshing. I was reveling in "there's nothing I can do" "there's no future or past" “I have no control over anything”. Around this time I noticed a natural inclination towards the 6th Jhana. Oceanic space.

Then darker, painful, lots of sticky thoughts. Lots of rumination on interpersonal and social matters. The interpersonal stuff seems to be a really big part of this. 

After a time it became much more empty, lots of 7th Jhana, light sort of faded away and left that particularly odd “there’s literally nothing in every direction” j7 feel. Next I began noticing these tiny pin pricks, like a swarm of biting mosquitoes, every bite seemed to interfere with my perceptual field. It would sort of momentarily collapse around these “bites”. (I had a similar experience to this on first path. Like watching a still forest pool with all these insects skittering across the surface)

-

Generally I’m trying not to get too involved in the meditative process. 

I have really been noticing the sticky stuff, noticing how they shift or bend the perceptual field. Noticing how they seem to center or focus attention. I explore whether or not I can notice them without it collapsing the field. Can they just arise as transiently as everything else now seems to. 

I notice how when these sticky experiences arise, how there are processes that fire off like “Ohh let this go so we can return to groovy feelings“ or “Oh this is bad meditation why not do xyz”. I like where I’m at now because even though I have these thoughts, I’m not entirely convinced I can actually do anything about it. So you’re just kind of watching this stuff fire off. 

There are moments of very subtle annoyance or frustration with these experiences. But when I look into them I see that they have something to do with how I relate to the world. How I want to be treated, how I want to be loved, who I think I should be… and while they are pure neurotic madness, I feel massive compassion for myself and my experience when I enter into the stickiness. 

All my sticky thoughts have an interpersonal bent. How things could have been, the way things are, the way I would have liked things to be.

Also it has to do with the avoidance of pain, shame and embarrassment. These are like the roots of the strategies I employed to avoid the potential of pain in the future.

good stuff!

Meditation is much the same as before. I do notice a recurring experience. As I relax into the practice sometimes there’s this feeling of a series of veils being lifted. As these veils lift, everything becomes clearer, the heart becomes brighter, softer and more vulnerable. It kind of peaks into this very beautiful, inclusive, all encompassing state. At which point there’s a lot of subtle “Ohh this is very nice” “How did we do that?” “Hope I can do that again!”.

I just watch this happen as while the state is very compelling it is also always obviously just a state. I don’t get too wrapped up in it. It only happens sometimes. When it isn’t happening, there might be memories of it having been nice, but there’s no compulsion to reproduce it.

(I loosely associate this “lifting of veils” with the fetters. For example I see the activity of desire for material rebirth and seeing it causes it to sort of clear away and so on up the list. Though I’m not super dialed in to the phenomenology of the fetters, so that’s just kind of my best guess.)

Overall this is a really big change in my practice. I keep finding myself laughing at how nonchalantly I can let things come and go. I had a really big problem with perfectionism for many years, which I think was amplified by my entry into the paths. Seeing it fall away has been really transformative and I’ve even had a number of friends point it out.

It’s like in the past I was frantically obsessing over my preferences. I needed reality to be different to how it was and the persistence of that obsession was causing me a lot of discomfort. And in the face of discomfort and the dissolution of the self, I think I felt deeply unstable and I was trying to find some kind of state based stability.

A certain unease with specific situations or phenomena does remain but it’s more of a smoky annoyance and the idea that anything would need to be done about it tends to make me laugh. (Doubly so that I ever thought anything could be done about it)

I sometimes find myself asking:
What does it mean not to be able to do anything when everything is motion?

I sometimes find myself noting:
"look at this restlessness" when I observe flickering thought patterns and the body responds “that wasn’t restlessness but this surely is”

Last night I experienced an intense dose of desire for deliverance. It came in like a storm and I was a bit too scattered to maintain mindfulness. It showed me a lot of the areas in which I still have very tangible attachments. It played into the fear that I couldn't do anything to fix my failings in life. It showed me all these variables that are out of my control that prevent me from pursuing my passions and that may prevent me from earning a living. I was stuck just feeling shit about things I couldn't change.

There was practical stuff that underpinned a lot of it and I may need to make some tactical rearrangements to my life. But ultimately I saw how identified I was with survival, with the need to make money and also with the need to make art and live meaningfully. Really fundamental things.

It’s like I’m afraid the universe won’t permit me to be the person I am at my core. Which is a weird take on a number of levels but that was the jist of the experience. 

I think desire for deliverance can highlight situations in life that are sort of “damned if you do damned if you don't”. This was the first overtly nana-esque experience I’ve had for awhile. Mostly things just cycle around. It’s interesting because usually reobservation gets me the worst.

Was barely able to meditate while it was in full swing, a little exhausted now but I’ll be mindful of it if/when it arises again.

Meditation is very scattered. Phases of “good meditation” weaving in and out of scattered thinking. I’ve got a lot going on and I’m a bit high energy. Not clinging or grasping after anything which is key. When meditation is messy I let it be messy, I let it do its thing and just try to stay observant.

I noticed the very clear state return, but it did so in the midst of some very dark energetic stuff. It’s mad experiencing a negative emotional body with total stillness and acceptance. Quite cool. 

I’ve been tripping out on quantum mechanics a lot. I have often noticed how the “particles” that make up my sensations blip in and out, but now I see them as blipping out and into vast entangled realms of the universe, like great swathes of the cosmos are streaming through my nervous system as pure sensory data. Not in a spacious Jhanic kind of way but in a very “everything at the same time” quantum sort of way. Just another way to see things but a cool one and feels like a way of seeing that has 3c’s automatically built in. I find this useful when practice is difficult. 

But, I also notice, especially when things are messy. I notice the inclinations, the intentions, the choosing, of subtle states or meditative processes. Sometimes those happen spontaneously, sometimes they’re very consciously chosen. Interesting to see the difference. Interesting exploring the roots of those changes. Because at a fundamental level, there are things that feel like they happen naturally and things that it feels like the self is doing. But like, really, I’m not fucking doing anything. So why would it feel like certain things are done and certain things just happen. I want to explore this more but I’ve been a bit too scattered the last few days to get a good look. No rush. 

Some personal BS. 

Last few years I’ve been working freelance but I’m thinking about getting a corporate gig. I started working freelance so I could spend more time on self development as I had a lot of mental health issues. So over the last few years I’ve committed a lot of time to very regular meditation. I have a work schedule that lets me spend six hours a day meditating. If I want to. 

I think getting back into the dusty hustle of the world might be fun. But, and these are just wispy thoughts, it does feel like I’d be compromising my “meditative”-fucking-”evolution man”. 

I really like having space and time to practice, to integrate, to deal with whatever comes up. I fear that if I dive back into the world I won’t have time to do the meditation I need to do and if anything wiggy comes up I’ll be stuck in some corporate hell gritting my teeth through it. I don’t make a lot of money but I’m very privileged in terms of free time

I may never get the chance to have this kind of free time again and the idea of only being able to do like 30 mins a day feels so restrictive to me. Ultimately I’m afraid to lose what I have. I get that these are just thought patterns, I get that, but life has to be lived and plans have to be made. 

Overall things are a lot less wiggy/edgy/whack/difficult these days. I have a lot more faith in this journey to just carry on in whatever way it happens to. I don’t really believe I have any horse in that particular race. 

I need to keep a daily practice. That’s what’s important. 

​​​​​​​Love.

-Really enjoying the hollow bamboo practice. The body really appreciates the movement and the spine just starts to flex and bob with the breath in a very organic and spontaneous way. Natural movement in sitting practice helps my body get into a sort of relaxed flow where there’s no attachment to holding any aspect of the posture. 

-It's interesting to see different layers of reactivity. Lately I feel like a boxer unsure of his opponent and reacting to every feint. I’ve got a lot of panicky real life stuff coming through and I’m sticking to it like crazy. It's all “if you do this you're going to die” “if this happens you'll be homeless”. It's weird because I generally do not care about that kind of stuff. All of a sudden these are very compelling arguments. Very serious matters that need my immediate consideration. It has a very different quality to the stuff that has been tough for me in the past. 

Today: I had an interesting experience while walking through a hospital earlier. Movement just happening, conversations (in a second language) just naturally unfolding. A very nice experience. 

Generally: I’m exploring identificatio/non-identification. Before I was very identified with experience, states, doing meditation etc. Now I’m very “Everything is transient, no big deal, there’s nothing to do”. But that is itself a sort of duality. Like are there aspects of the self that are identified with non-identification. What aspects of attachment have been shifted out of my focus. A springer spaniel hunting for truffles in the undergrowth. 

There’s a transition between perceived dualities. Like a fluttering. When I look at it the self-bubble seems to pop. More interesting phenomena. There’s something beautiful here I’m not yet ready to say nor have yet fully understood. 

Some advice I received 
If everything is chill, non chalant, effortless then experiment with applying little bits of effort 

Explore the 7th and 8th jhana 
Explore the flickering at the center of the self 
Explore the quantum stuff 

-8th jhana is really interesting. It seems like the only jhana that doesn’t have a point of view. Like in the 7th jhana there’s nothing, but that nothing is in a sort of infinite space. In the 8th jhana that space seems to disappear as there’s no point from which to relate to it or give it shape. I don’t really know how to say this. 

There are times in meditation and walking around day to day where I seem to incline towards 7th jhana or 8th jhana. I was noticing the 7th jhana a lot and I now see that some of these very clear experiences I’m having are much more like the 8th. 

-Exploring the sort of origin of the self, or this sort of flickering, fluttering activity at the core of the self. I try to not look at directly but instead include it in the totality of perception. This tends to lead to more of these j8 type clear experiences. 

-Quantum stuff. Seeing the world as this multi dimensional implicitly entangled super position. Tends to lead to j8 as well. 

-Overall I find myself quite disenchanted with states. Things that feel good, or seem like good meditation have much less hold on me. 
My inclination is always to just steep in nothingness. There is of course some attachment to that nothingness as well. 

-Lots of agencylessness seeming stuff. Walking around, in the shower, day to day stuff. Nothing as total as the experience in the hospital. 

Really good stuff. I have a feeling that you are going to be having a lot of experiences that "are huge insights because they are so subtle and small". Sometimes at this stage you can sense the insights deepening without really being able to say what the insights were...

Some more ideas to play with:

Try some walking meditation. Go to a wide open space outside like a community park or school ground where you can walk about 20 steps or so. Before you start, think "here I am", maybe even say outloud "here", and open up to the space/intimacy of your location, basically gently intending to re-experience the hospital "view" again while you're at the park. Really be there in the park and in the moment with the feeling/view of "this is my entire life, just right here and now, there is nothing more than this" Then start walking "into and through" the space, just like walking through the hospital again, except now you are walking through the park. Allow non-agency to arise if it does and let the walking do the walking. Watch your body stopping itself after 20 or so steps, watch yourself turn around. (No big deal if you have to "do" it, but if non-agency is doing it, let it do it.) After you turn around again, take a moment to reconnect with the whole of the experience again, maybe say "here" outloud again, and then walk back "into and through" the space to the starting point.  (Being outside is important so you can feel the space above you, to the sides, in back, in front, and you might even want to think about how underneath your feet is miles and miles of earth. In some way, you are intimate/embodying the whole of your experience, "drinking the ocean with one gulp")

Another thing you might want to try is a very very simple open-eyed metta practice. Breath in and thinking "may all beings be well", breath out and think "may I be well". The goal here is radical simplicity. Just be a body that breathes and thinks these simple thoughts. You're not trying to accomplish anything except a very simple and heartfeld desire for all beings to be well and for you to be well. (Sometimes this simple stuff hits the hardest.)  

Could you say a little bit more on how your walking around experience of 7th and 8th, possibly also 6th jhana looks like?

Thanks Shargrol!

​​​​​​​Supermonkey, yup I'll add it in a moment. 

Metta:
Metta practice is great. Simple and refreshing. Interesting in this more j8 space watching the wish for well being sort of emanate from a centreless place, like it has no point of origin. 

Agency:
I certainly notice, particularly on days I practice a lot, the sense of agency is generally much more transparent. After practicing in the manner recommended above I find I can lean into this dissolution of agency. I can sort of let stuff occur, for example, I had a really silly experience in my Airbnb just walking back and forth and not stopping myself walking into a door or wall and yet somehow magically pivoting right on time 

I can notice things that seem to reassert agency and watch as they dissolve once more. Broad movements like walking are easier than say complex hand movements like typing or some kind of manual activity but even these too can happen with much less sense of agency if I really relax and let myself get out of the way.

I also notice that there have been quite a few things occurring without agency already. I had just always been too busy to see them that way. 

I can sort of feel agency as more of a sliding scale than an on-off switch. At the upper end of that scale It’s like intention and action arise contiguously. (Not in the sense that there’s an intention being set but just a spontaneous thing)

Dukkha:
I’ve been thinking about Nana's as a lens through which certain aspects of dukkha can be experienced and released. 

I’ve been exploring very subtle levels of dukkha, these roiling pools of dissatisfaction. These aren’t so much the skittering sticky reactive thought patterns I have spoken about before but more bubbling tar pits of gentle discomfort. 

I work with them in much the same style as previously mentioned, not focusing on them directly but letting them be included as a part of the totality of my perception. In this sort of weird j8 lack of point of view kind of way. 

There's some pretty manipulative shit here, it’s like the root of all my strategizing and seeking. It’s weird to look at this in the context of the potential for agencyless experience because who am I without these core drives. What is the self without any of this activity to bootstrap itself off. It’s interesting because it’s not the typical trauma or neurosis I’m used to. It’s even things I’m excited about or things I should definitely do with my life but there’s this process combining with them, whirring away under the surface that just like manufactures dukkha. I see how seeking is bound up in my deep dreams and my deepest understanding of who I am. 

I can’t fathom what an absence of that would be like.  
Ideas like chanda, purpose, skillful means and so on. That these things could arise without selfishness and be a foundation for wholesome action in the world is so compelling and refreshing for me. But in a way I can’t see it. I suppose I find myself frustrated by the suffering which remains. 

Overall:
Practice is great. Going to keep doing what I'm doing. 

 Ok dearest supermonkey,

So I was talking to a meditation teacher and they were talking about how the jhanas sort of correlate to the deconstruction of the self. They asked me what jhana seems to be naturally occuring in your experience. At the time it was 7th jhana and had been that way more or less since my last path. A lot of nothingness, non-identification, this isn't me, these phenomena are not me. So on. Basically it's Identification with non-identification

After some practice and realizations that occured, see above, that transitioned into somewhat more of a 8th jhana walking around feel but it can flip between the two.

Note I'm not exactly talking about doing jhanic practice, this is just sort of how my experience is presenting itself. I had noticed in meditation where I would be practicing basically not doing anything and then 7th and 8th jhana experiences would just arise very naturally without any intention or doing behind it. After that I noticed that my experience as a whole always had a very 7th or 8th jhana feel to it. More conscious practice with the jhanas seemed to deepen this whole process in some way that I've been sort of writing about here.

Previous path, I had a lot of 6th jhana stuff going on. Walking around merging into woodlands, other people, fairys. The 6th jhana can be very tantric like that, I think. But my tantric teachers get a little spooked when I say things like that so season with pinches of salt ;)

6th jhana walking around has that very I am the world quality. Very second path. I am the leaves on the trees and the breeze in the air. I AM ALL THIS.

If this doesn't answer your question just ask another.

I only recently realized how interesting jhanas are. 
 

Thanks! I'm also not so much into jhana practice right now but I'm also noticing formlessy states during the day, like being the witness, being everything, being totally detuned, and I was curious to find out how the aspects of 8th might show up for me walking around.
For 7th, I find it interesting that you mention identification with non-identification, because it made me find that in fact that sense of being detuned can be taken as a reference.
NB: I reread in MCTB about formless realms and Daniel says 6th and 7th jhana are sort of inverse to each other. It seems to make some sense, as you say 6th for you is "I am all this" and 7th "I am none of this".

Have you read the part of "Seeing That Frees" where he relates formless jhanas and insight?

And, maybe something to play with: if 7th (walking around) is identification with non-identification, what is it in 8th (walking around) then?

Right. Well I saw in 7th that to be able to experience infinite nothing there had to be a point of view to see it from and 8th jhana is the lack of that point of view. (Adi Da often spoke about his divine revelation being beyond yet encompassing all point of view)


I think I've read it and don't remember that part. I'm going to dig it up. I actually have a few chapters left to read in that. I'm struggling to read any dharma stuff atm

While practicing metta I had one of the most staggeringly beautiful experiences of my dharma life to date. It's difficult to write about in anything other than poetic terms. Though I will do what I can to communicate it. 

I was practicing, as recommended above and letting the mantra, the intention and the breath all happen on its own. I lean into the diminishment of agency by directly seeing the emptiness of the sense of agency. 

At a certain point something lifted off me and I began to have this very pure, perfect experience. I could see the bright emptiness of the heart and all of a sudden there was this really staggering beauty and dimensionality to everything. Seeking seemed to stop and every experience became incredibly raw, sensory and immediate. 

I’ve had a number of compelling experiences recently, as I have documented, but all arose with that no big deal, no identification, type reaction. This has been the first view for quite some months that really has me grasping after it when it faded… but also everything that isn’t it, is grasping. 

The hospital "view" had some subtle heart stuff to it but this was on another level. Staggering yet simple. Utterly obvious. A heart free of ill will. Bornless & unwoven.

The dharma itself is empty.

I feel like I can actually come to deep rest in meditation. So incredibly refreshing. 

Nice. 

These tastes are really helpful and encouraging. They let us know we're on the right path. 

also be prepared for the shadow side of this which comes from comparing states to each other...

ultimately awakening is beyond state, but the imprint left by the profound experiences are also important. 

nice job!!

Passed through another path cycle. Always kind of astonishing how crap I am at meditating in the first nana. It gets me everytime and then there's the sort of aircraft take off into the second nana and things just go back to "normal". 

The restful heart has stuck around. It's a really pleasant addition to my meditation. There's days when I want to just lounge around all day. Not doing any special bliss or advanced technique, really just resting. It can be hard to get out of meditation. 

Some very interesting insights. Hard to put words to them. Sort of like there are times when I see this persistent background activity at the core of the self and there's sort of a "huh, have I been doing that this whole time?" and it falls away and this very deep insight sort of rings through the body. At some point the activity starts up again. I'm not really chasing it down. I'm not trying to stop it in any way. Sometimes I notice it's there, sometimes I don't, no big deal really. 

In the city. Lots of morality work. It baffles me how chill and open I can be with people yet still have very specific things trigger me. Noting it all. Taking responsibility for my interactions. Learning to deal with these situations as best I can. 

I remember one Hindu yogi psychiatrist who does YouTube videos talking about samskaras (aka sankhara) and he described them as "undigested balls of emotions" that are basically stored dormant in consciousness until the right thing comes to activate them. Perhaps this is a helpful way to think about them. Perhaps this might be a useful framework to think about it in 

This is more or less what I think Nana's are or at least what they allow you to see. 

I believe it was PolyEster who said that samskaras were programming. I like that modern translation. The programming includes routines that can be triggered by events. Once the code has been executed, I am sometimes left scratching my head and wondering, "What the f*ck was that?"

Programming is good. I think I prefer patterns. Its like we live out behavioral patterns that get worn into our neurology through repetition over time. I find those patterns have a three dimensional shape and when I start to really grok that shape in its entirety the energy bound up in it starts to reintegrate with the larger organism. For me cycling through the nanas is a sort of carousel of different patterns. 

This perhaps strays more towards what I've learned from Adi Da than Vipassana. But I'm going to log it anyway just to stay consistent. 

I find myself almost exclusively meditating on the openness of the heart. There's this resonant all encompassing vulnerability that I find endlessly interesting at the minute. This quality is interesting because it can't be faked, often feels amazing and really helps me cut through the bullshit of daily life.

When this becomes the focus of my meditation I notice this flipping between true heart open vulnerability and subtle reification of copycat states. 

This bubbled out of my practice with metta and morality. I was having an issue with someone and I couldn't quite shake the Ill will I felt towards them and then all of a sudden I just entered into this extremely heart centered very vulnerable way of seeing the world and was able to go talk to that person with humor and sort things out. 
​​​​​​​
The paradox of a soft vulnerable heart being able to cut through the knots of worldy bondage is really wild. 

It feels like my heart was on the inside and now it's on the outside.

My mind keeps making vague reference to Vajrayana concepts I haven't the wits to recall or the time to research. 

Whatever you label it, it sounds like it is great practice and is helping you out of suffering! Keep going!

There was a period of time where I really explored the vulnerability thing. 

Then a period where I tried to see everything as empty, every state good or bad. 

Now mostly I'm just letting dukkha and everything else just arise in experience without focusing on it. Mostly there's this disatisfactory flickering experience that is quite frustrating but I'm just being open and vulnerable and letting it happen. 

Along the way theres been some crazy states. Even a little flash of something that really had no-self or center to it. Commiting to accepting that all states, good or bad, are all empty has been helpful. 

Metta is helpful. 

In a sense there's nothing left to do but let it all happen. That's a weirdly frustrating thing to admit. 

Harder to find time for practice lately. But working on staying commited despite work/christmas/friends etc. 

Mostly meditation is very restful. Whether positive or negative feeling. 

How could something be "beyond state"?

That's got me cosmically stumped. 

Can I experience something that doesn't have a state? What? 

--- 

​​​​​​​It seems like everything is heart stuff now. Be it subtle tensions in the heart or deeper relaxation in the heart. 

Your last few posts reminded me of this one:

KOAN

Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going from here?”
Fayan said, “I’m on pilgrimage.”
“What sort of thing is pilgrimage?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not knowing is most intimate.”
Fayan suddenly had a great awakening.

​​​​​​​PZI Miscellaneous Koans Case 62 & Book of Serenity Case 20

I was reading Angelo's book and he gives a map that uses the analogy of the moon being reflected on a pond. At first you think you're one of the small glimmers. Then eventually you see the pond and it's reflective nature. But finally you ask, "wait what the hell is this reflecting?" And you see the moon as well. 

Now, I'm just an anaryia talking out of my ass, but if consciousness has this mirror like nature, what is it reflecting? Where does the state come from?

you also hear the Buddha talk about the unborn. Or hear zen people say shit like "this moment is pregnant with every possible experience". Perhaps this is where to look, not at what is, but what could be?

Do you believe there's an answer? What if there isn't?

I often forget that I don't know what any thing is.

Wow 

0h my fuck1ng g0d

Slainte! (im on red wine)

There's just this argument I've been having in my head with all my imaginary peers. Its been going on for years. I've been through so many flavors and variations of it. I watch the pattern fire off lately and the architecture of it is no longer particularly stable or convincing and underneath there's just this deep grief/loss. 

--

'I don't know' helped with 'beyond state'. I feel I am starting to intuit things that I can't put into words yet. Like... this is so stupid to say... but... "States come and go" and that's just brutally obvious in a way it wasn't before

Had a very radical experience. Just "wow" for like 8 hours. Laughing my ass off. Not sure what to say about it. I think it helped. I saw a fluidity to experience that washed through all obstruction. Good and bad came and went without any resistance. I feel like there's more I should say about it but I'm not sure how to. I feel poorly equipped to express my experiences lately.  

Onward and outward.

Is the continuity of states a state? It feels like a flow.

Is mind that continuity or is that too reductive?

There seems to be always something happening, a flowing happening made of lots of impermanent stuffs. Its clear the bits are impermanent but how can the lot of it be? And yet still be happening?

Something really seems like its permanent. I don't know where it is. There are times when from the corner of my eye I swear I can see it's not really as permanent as it lets on. We have a good laugh about that. 

Me and the big river.

Meep moop. 

I'm just cycling deep grief and utter astonishment... And boredom

Oh no !!!! I think I'm in the covid Nana's

There's this like forever hope that things are going to turn out some type of way. 

​​​​​​​And I can't be certain they ever will. 

It's the attachment, the need, for this deep desire that needs to be rooted out. 

There's a possibility that none of this works out the way we hope. 

God might be dead. 

​​​​​​​

Schrodingers god 

We can't know objective reality with any degree of certainty
 
​​​​​​​This has been said many times. You'll have to forgive my fevered repetition. 

good questions, and they just lead to more questions...

things are a flow... but what is that constant thing over time that allows the assessing/determination that it is flowing?

consistency is mind... but what is mind if all I see are "things" flowing and I can never find "mind"?

when hoping that things are going to turn out some type of way... what seems more essential to the self, the particular "way" things will hopefully turn out or the "having of the hoping"?

... what is this "I" which I protect and defend and nurture and is so dang important to me?

...and what is the self? why did the buddha either not answer that question or say that it wasn't found in the extremes of self exists, self doesn't exist, self both exists and doesn't exist, and self neither exists nor doesn't exist?



Hope the covid nana goes okay for you!

heh, you added a few more posts while I was lazily typing out mine...

States are very nice you see that's the problem. 

​​​​​​​Hopes and dreams have me desperately intoxicated. 

Forgive the babble. I might just be entertaining myself. 

​​​​​​​Thanks for the thoughts. 

Carry on me lad! You will never awaken! There is no way in a million lifetimes for you to own enlightenment! You are truly focked! You are on the right way! Carry on! Down the rocky road ... 

So I have been practicing a lot. 

I was at a psytrance party doing some MDMA. There was a point where I was breathing all the energy through my body and I remembered that I didn't know what any thing was and then that recognition sort of spread and engulfed the whole body in a very "oh yeah, nice" kind of way. Similar to some experiences I've already had but now just readily available to me. 

When I practice with this the sense of an "I" seems to disappear or become considerably less dense. Similar to how I described practicing with agencylessness before. It also feels similar to the 8th jhana practice I was doing but somehow deeper or more inclusive and natural. 

Before this view became available I had been dancing around it in meditation. There were times where it felt like the sense of self kind of unlatched and what was left was this amorphous shape where any sense of an "I" just could not take hold. Sometimes this unlatching would hang out for awhile sometimes it would be very short lived. 

It's weird practicing when there no longer feels like there's much of an "I". Sometimes I just vibe out endlessly. Sometimes I notice the subtle sense of I that remains. But I notice it in a sort of "there's really nothing to do about any of this" type of way. Or "this can only take care of itself as there's no me to do something about it" type of way. 

Before I would flip into this way of seeing and be like "oh my fucking god wow" now it's much more natural and the mind seems to just naturally incline towards it. 

The "and what is the self" question Shargrol asked has been echoing around in my mind. Like I know the answer but can't put words on it. 

​​​​​​​But there's something to how the negation of definition is pointing to Nibbana. I can feel the question better than I can answer it. 

​​​​​​​So that view is happening kind of naturally and I'm letting it do it's thing. The only thing I add is this kind of free falling into the heart metta surrender vibe. 

The mindful apply themselves;
They don’t amuse themselves in any abode.
Like swans flying from a lake,
They abandon home after home.

It feels as though the mind is inclining more and more towards homelessness as the reality of what the Buddha means by it sinks in. 

The mindful enjoy themselves;
They amuse themselves in any abode.
Like swans flying from a lake,
They abandon home after home when the time has come.

The overall feel of this part of the journey is that there's always a blind spot. No matter how intoxicating or total the view. There's always just some tiny piece that remains unseen. 

​​​​​​​There's a plethora of interesting views that arise. But each has it's blind spot; each has it's unknowable corner. 

Deep in meditation there often this little shift into just the sweetest, most restful, heart stuff. 

​​​​​​​Like falling in love with nothing in particular. 

This is a weird space to meditate in because things are marked more by the absence of activity than the doing of activity. 

What's also weird is this natural inclination of the mind. 

​​​​​​​So if I sit and do nothing the mind goes to this less selfish place naturally. Yet I can also notice process and activity which is firing off with agency that wants to maintain it or protect it. Yet when I see through that stuff the view keeps happening. The mind keeps inclining towards it. 

Very nice, yes this is the way.

If you notice the subtle dukka that is left, it becomes data for the natural intelligence of the mind which eventually figures out how to "drop" the habitual tensions that cause the subtle dukka. It's beyond logical/cognative thinking and more of a subtle bodily knowledge. A sweet kind of relaxing, nothing-in-particular way of being is possible. Not even necessarily a jhana, just natural being (which, okay, sort of maps to 4th jhana/EQ, but anyway...)

It becomes very interesting to see how sometimes even the "need to look/find dukka" energy is its own kind of subtle dukka, which means 4th path is drawing ever closer...

Noticing a lot of weird core beliefs that I hold. Stuff about my place in the world, what others think about me, what I think I'm capable or not capable of etc. 

​​​​​​​What I think I deserve or do not think I deserve. 

I'm seeing how a lot of restless activity stirs up in an attempt to compensate for these beliefs.

​​​​​​​I can see that I can't know wether or not many of them are true. Yet they're baked in real deep. Gentle massage needed. 

This whole path has had this kind of quality like... 

"Yo you've got this problem, we need to call up this doctor, physio, lawyer, coach, teacher so we can get it solved stat!" 

Then you flip into something sweeter and its like...

​​​​​​​"Who exactly was it that had a problem to solve?"

Playing around with Schanilecs stuff. It helped me corelate experiences I was having with an understanding of the fetters. Some of the practices are useful they have a sort of cleansing quality to them. 

​​​​​​​Theyre nice to play with from time to time but I am generally inclining towards more do nothing practice. And just being aware of whatever activity presents itself. Letting that be seen and relaxed. 

Bb self-care routine initiated: nice cups of tea, talk to your friends about how you feel, sunlight, play a video game, you've already eaten too much chocolate, do a few big sighs, Ahhhh, think about smoking a cigarette and then congratulate yourself when you don't do it, nice good job, another big sigh, remember it's ok if you never accomplish any of your dreams, it's ok to admit that and still pursue them.

Don't worry, at this point in my life I have accomplished many of my dreams. It turns out they were impermanent and nonsatisfactory. At this point I'd rather have stream entry. But a boy can dream!

I still remember when I was 23 or 24 and I had gotten a job at google deepmind, the best ai research lab in the world. I thought then that I had finally reached something substantial. But I remember living in London and wondering, "why am I so fucking unhappy?" Maybe it was the cloudy weather, or the fact that everyone only seemed to have a single hobby of drinking, or perhaps it was the beans they served everyday for breakfast (actually I quite liked those... but most of the food was pretty dreadful, like they have little pies made from blood, can you believe that?), or maybe that it was just hard making friends in a new place, or that it turns out the work itself was actually kinda boring. But I remember feeling so Shanghaied on that island! I remember screaming out into the heavens, "My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me". Wait, actually, no that was the other guy.

Even the Buddha would be so fucking unhappy if they served him such a badly poured pint of Gunness as they do in effing London! Gotta move, and work for Google in Dublin! ... Im not even joking! 

Don't tell me you didn't get that SE thing while it was still in stock?!!! Now its sold out and you are fucked! Oh no! Here! you can have mine! May Sha-Man have, each and every ounce, of my attainments and may they show him the true nature of himself, may these benefit him and all other beings at that!  

(reply influenced by Tempranillo organic red wine)

The last pint of Guinness I had tasted like cigarette ash and rust. Rather put off by the flavor I brought it back to the bartender that I might give him a good bollocking over it. 

"Is everything alright for you?" he asked. 

"No sieur, it is not," I told him. 

"What seems to be the matter?" 

"No condition can bring me lasting satisfaction" I said, sly as I am, hoping to catch him off gaurd. 

"That's a shame" says he

"Why's that?"

"Seems to me it's a bit of a bummer is all."

"Aye," I said.

"You going to all this trouble to scrub up and look nice. No doubt a hard weeks work done and you're to tell me that there's not even a scrap of lasting satisfaction you could have to your name when it's all said and done."

"None," I said with a stern nod. 

"And a place like this, this time of night, does be full of wonderful ladies, and gentleman too of course, are you telling me there's not a bit of lasting satisfaction to be found with them?"

"Not a bit," I said. 

"And in all the finest liquors and all the rarest wines? Would you tell me there's not a drop to be found?"

"Not a drop," I said. 

"Sure you might as well be down below with himself," he says, eyebrow cocked at the grubby carpet.
​​​​
"Downstairs?" I asked him.

"That's it he said. Down below."

"Right," I said, worried he was getting the better of me now. 

"Tis an eternity of fire and brimstone they say. Torturous dissatisfaction down there I hear." 

"Ahh," I said. "you see that's the thing."

"What is?"

"Dissatisfaction," I said. 

​​​​​​​"Yes," he says. 

"It doesn't last either," I said with a grin. 

"I suppose that's some consolation," he conceded.

"Aye," I said, leaving the unfinished pint on the counter and walking out the door. 

​​​​​​​

It's interesting I've spent years observing the three characteristics of different phenomena. It starts with thoughts and grows to include broader aspects of experience. Now it's like reckoning with them in very total ways. I may never be satisfied. I may never find stability. Very total. Feels both deep and somewhat sorrowful. 

Yeah, it's interesting to really be with the "I" and experience it's dissatisfaction over many years. The curious nature of dissatisfaction is endlessly fascinating -- that's why long retreats are possible, studying the "self-with-a-problem" is like watching an engauging soap opera!

The dissatisfaction of the I initially seems so big yet so defined and solvable --- I just need a good job, I just need an intimate partner, I need a new mobile phone, I need to understand buddhism, etc etc etc. It can be more clever than that, but these apparent problems are always big initially... and overtime it becomes much much smaller yet more fundamentaly significant, like it's built into the very substrate of existence and inescapable...

But don't quit too soon, it's really this "I's dissatisfaction" that needs to be completely seen, completely experienced. There is a kind of end to it, keep going!  

If you really are serious, it can be helpful to work with a teacher/spiritual friends because it's very tricky to "do it" by yourself. Having a human teacher provides the kind of cognative dissonace that seems to catylize the final step. Basically, you see this fucking imperfect people who seem to "have it" and you wonder "what the fuck am I missing that these idiots seem to have... and why don't I have it if I can see all of their imperfections???"

Best wishes!!

I'm not quitting just doing a bit of greaving. 

I've got a teacher waiting in the wings and some close friends in the loop. Support network is in place. 

Just bloody smarts is all, to see through all this desperate hoping, to no longer be able to embroil myself in some hopeless dream. 

I guess I just saw the activity of my life for what it was and it was a little sad.

​​​​​​​It's like I still crave I just no longer believe any scheming will satisfy that craving. In a very "there's no coming back from this" kind of way. 

Ahhhhh some guru yoga really smoothed out the rough edges of that vibe. 

You might like this... when I was starting to see through the illusion of my fantasies, my teacher gave me a little lecture... he presented a model of mind where the "witnessing" consciousness begins to open up to something which is beyond this subject-object orientation, but it >feels< like a loss or an absence and the mind starts questioning that experience in a way that keeps it on the same level as the witnessing consciousness. The practice for dealing with that event is to directly the experience the sensations of loss or absence (or sometimes it feels like sinking down in a way, a slow motion feeling of wonder, shock, sadness, fear, etc.) and to relax >into< that feeling while opeing to more/all of experience. This gives the opportunity for integrating the energy, as opposed to identifying with/embedding in the sensation.

"Include" is a great reminder. Include this "loss feeling" in the bigger context of this room, these objects, the space of mind...

Worth what you paid for it.

"ok friend" is a nice way to do this as well. I find it sinks into the feelings/sensations associated with whatever the main view is. "Its ok friend" lovingly and with the understanding that all beings want to be free from suffering, wanting to avoid it. This way "the friend" is not pushing the dirt fast under the carpet so others cant see it, but instead is just being there naked and blunt, sad and scared and hurt and confused, wanting to be loved and appreciated. Just like all other beings. 

Yeah there was a process causing loads of suffering. It was like this constant vetting of every aspect of experience. A combo of that inclusive practice and guru yoga (what's he got that I don't) kind of shifted it. It's interesting the way each step of the journey has these views or jhanaesque states that can kind of provide some refuge whilst also leading one deeper into the experience. Giving up the micro processing subroutine is v nice. It reinstates itself pretty quickly but it has been seen beyond so more gentle massage. 

​​​​​​​Ok friends

Everything can fall away. 

Yet there's niggling doubts and centering activity that reasserts itself, it sort of disrupts the freefall. 

​​​​​​​Include and consume. 

I really appreciate this community. It's nice to have a place to share my experience. 

Deep in meditation It becomes apparent that... 

Mind is experience and experience is mind. 

Something about that insight is very freeing but as I grasp to understand it, it tends to fall away. 

​​​​​​​I wish I could spend a few days in practice and really sink into that but this wood isn't going to chop itself ;)

You've paraphrased the Dhammpada! I like your modern version way better.

You: Mind is experience and experience is mind. 

The Dhammapada:  Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought.

Love that Dhammapada quote.

IXth Karmapa, Ocean of definitive meaning:

I will go to the toilet now!  

Did it glisten? 

I'll bet it was luminous.

And self liberating...

Let's not get carried away now gentleman. Life has me pretty bound up, I sometimes have only 30 or so minutes to practice and my moment to moment mindfulness is better in some situations than others. 

I keep kind of falling into something very interesting but each time I'm also made aware of very subtle, extremely refined levels of dukkha. There's a little "work" left to be done yet but it seems like the kind of work that has to happen by accident. Lol. 

​​​​​​​I hope to steal back a little more time for practice from the claws of Babylon.

It feels like slowly freefall massaging my way backwards through all these refined layers of administrative function in the mind... And then every so often the clock strikes one and everybody just goes out to lunch and it becomes patently obvious that there isn't any seeking happening, there never had to be. 

Giving up nicotine. Had already given up but relapsed hard recently. Going through withdrawals, lots of gross discomfort, tension and pain in the body. 

It's that kind fo hyper-reactive pain, hard to keep temper under control, hard to express oneself normally.

When I practice, I flip into this mode of being where there's obviously no self, no attachment, no center.

So the pain is just there, just part of the atmosphere of experience. It has no hold on me. It doesn't even feel "bad". It's obviously unpleasant but there's nothing that needs to react to that. Nothing that needs it to stop. 

So cool. 

Haemorrhoids are doing their best to try defy impermanence! Otherwise you could be right! 

... wait!!! ... I think the haemorrhoids are now tingling and pulsating!!! I must get >into< it and examine! 

So - you're really going to put your head up your ass? 

 Papa che, now might be the time to resume your videos!  Noting aloud please!








​​​​​​​---

(Apologies Bahiya for getting carried away on your log, we're just having a bit of fun...

Good on you to stop smoking! I myself used to smoke a lot (25 rollies a day?), and the key to stopping in 2017 was to completely remove any sort of guilt or sense that smoking was something bad or dangerous or serious, and very precisely examine all the assumptions I had about smoking and why I was doing it, reframing them, and developing absolute confidence that if ever I picked smoking up again, that would just be because I haven't really finished the psychological work that would lead to stopping easily. Because I did this earnestly and with a lot of self-acceptance, stopping to smoke was incredibly easy, and I have not picked it up or even wanted to smoke since then. Wishing you success with this, but if it's not, that would not be a sign of weakness or failure, just of incomplete insight into smoking.)
 

Well, nicotine is physically addicting, and the habit of smoking is mentally addicting. I found that it's not an easy addiction to break. I smoked off and on from age 16 to roughly 40, maybe 45. I quit a few times, then went back to it. What finally caused me to quit for good was being fucking terrified of the health consequences invoked by watching several friends and relatives die of lung cancer and congestive heart failure. I guess that's the opposite process compared to what I read in Olivier's post. Whatever works - which I suppose we could call pragmatic habit-breaking.

Interesting, well, the physical addiction part of nicotine is really not very bad at all IME: although I smoked 20+ cigarettes per day for several years, when I stopped, I only experienced very minor symptoms for a couple of days, and that was that. Compar that with e.g. heroin, cocaine, etc. Further, I found that the whole psychological addiction part was also mostly dealt with before I even actually stopped, by diving deeply into the psychology of smoking and my own beliefs and views. Because I had done that background psychological work before smoking the last one, I found that the only aspect that remained afterwards was the physical, which as I said, was very manageable — there was basically never any psychological addiction complications post the last one. I was really, really helped by Alan Carr's book "Easy way to stop smoking", btw. 

Let's give Bahiya his log back. Another topic has been started to discuss meditation and quitting smoking.

My log is here to be carried away on. 

So it turns out it may have been re-observation. How funny is that? A year ago I would have been all over it. I barely even think of states and stages these days lol. 

I've given up cigarettes 3-4 times. This time I had been vaping. I had a friend going through a break up and spent some long evenings talking things over and sort of picked up the habit from him. Vaping is a weird form of nicotine because you can get a lot of it very quickly and you can keep getting lots of it repeatedly. It never has to stop lol. 

I have always been able to give up but it hasn't ever been easy. My uncle was a roadie, among other things, he did heroin for four years straight, gave up in a day, said it was easy but he never could quit the cigarettes. 

I have done a lot of the big drugs and some of the small ones too, only thing I've ever been addicted to is cigarettes. 

Sometimes life intertwines with the POI too or at least we narrativize the experience in certain ways. My most difficult passes through re-observation always catch me by surprise and I'll always have some narrative reason why I feel so bad. 

Honestly this whole path I've been phoning it in. I put so much effort into getting here, I'm hypothetically so close to one of the most significant events of my life and I've got all the gumption of a teenager laying in bed after convincing his parents he's "too sick" to go to school. 

​​​​​​​Honestly it's a relief when things just aren't a big deal. These minutes and hours where the searching seems to stop too are such a bloody relief. The easy obviousness of it is so refreshing. It's so undeniably "yeah, this is what I've been working for" 

The practice feels like every day I wake up and the mind is back to it's usual tricks, however wispy those tricks have become. 

It takes awhile to prepare the mind. I meditate and have to let go of any part of me that wants to feel "awake", I have to let go of all these pretty states and experiences, I have to let go of subtler and subtler levels of control and then something will shift and everything's very "Ahh, this is it" 

Once I hit "Ahh, this is it" I tend to fall in and out of it throughout the day. Any situation in which I'm inclined to relax a little will lead to everything just washing off and I'm like "oh yeah, nice". Like lying down, leaving the house to go for a walk, etc. 

​​​​​​​

It feels like everything becomes a form of expression, a way of giving. It always has been but all I've been expressing throughout my life is this desperate seeking. 

I don't actually have to do anything  

What? 

WHAAAAT?

This is so stupid. Who was I fooling. My self? 

I feel like someone just took the training wheels off. This is a whole different ballgame and I'm not entirely sure what changed. 

MY parents are away for the weekend and no one's around to tell me what to do !! 

This is very silly stuff lads. I've experienced agencylessness before but it was always in the context of an "I". Like stuff would move and carry on by itself but deep down there was some guy who was dead sure the reins would one day be back in his hands. 

​​​​​​​My entire administrative faculty have gone to the Bahamas and I'm not sure there'll be jobs for them when they get back. 

Heh. Sounds promising.

So what is self?

What is meditation?

What is reality?

(It's helpful to put it in words in order to help lock in insights.)

Mulling this over. Taking some notes. I'll return with some real tangible communication when I'm capable of it

Okay, if mulling is the answer that just means more practice/looking is called for. Sounds like the insight isn't quite "ripe" yet.

On the bright side, he didn't say luminous!

"​​​​​​​My entire administrative faculty have gone to the Bahamas and I'm not sure there'll be jobs for them when they get back. "

​​​​​​​Love it!

The camera pans across a desolate expanse of ruined city blocks. In the remains of a derelict office complex a lone team of administrative staff search desperately for papers to shuffle. One, stopping to adjust his collar in the reflection granted him by an overturned water cooler, frowns as he realizes Becky would not be joining them for the midday meeting. 

Oh gosh my brain hurts. I think I mistook my meditation instructions for a pan galactic gargle blaster recipe. 

Premium member bonus content: 
So I got into the shower and some thought bubbled up like "you know it can just wash itself" and I like observed that it could in fact wash itself and that quickly became the most novel, curious and utterly stupid thing I’d ever seen in my life. It sort of sunk in that “I really don't have to do anything at all" and the whole dog and pony show just scattered to the winds. 

This was so profoundly funny that it seemed rather ludicrous to carry on with any kind of ordinary business so I just laughed uncontrollably for a while and went for a walk. Whereupon some amount of mulling and chewing entered the equation. This started off as like “excited” mind activity. The mind/self seemed to be thoroughly astonished yet also trying to find its footing somewhere. It was very odd because it felt and still does feel like the whole damn hard drive was wiped and rebooted with a new OS installed yet there’s definitely a ghost in the machine. Something is trying to fabricate, it's not doing a particularly good job of it, but it's churning away none the less. 

It’s still very funny. I'm practicing just being and breathing, relaxing any sense of control that takes hold and just sort of leaning into the unknowable mystery of it all. Whatever got me to where I am will likely get me to wherever I have to go. 

I have been managing my time better and finding more time to practice. Had a good sit this morning and will do another later but for now my brain hurts and I’m going to mong out for the day and try to get some work done. 

This is great! 

And you didn't even have to have an actual pan galactic gargle blaster to get there. Hoopy!

That is true, however, I do wonder if he uses sandpaper or toilet paper after the luminosity drops away down the eternal labyrinths of enlightenment?!

Hold my beer!!!  

Still mulling but wanted to share an insight/answer a question...

The self is not the self at all. It's just a reference... like a programmer will use a variable to reference data they might need later in a function they are coding or a chess player might open a game by placing a certain pawn, allowing them to move other pieces off the backrow and develop their offense.

What we call the self, when we talk about the self, is just a placeholder the mind uses to aid in the fabrication of strategies and plans. It's fundamental to self-referential thinking, the type of abstract conceptualizing that humans used to hunt the Mammoths and build nuclear bombs and while there's obviously nothing intrinsically wrong with that kind of thinking (Lack of Mammoths notwithstanding and frankly the Japanese may have a thing or two to say) it is attachment to the self-reference, identification with it, which brings about suffering in daily life. 

Or like the way paper money used to be backed by gold. It was a placeholder for the gold.

These days it's just numbers on a screen that are supposed to represent pieces of paper which just represents a sort of vague notion of value. 

​​​​​​​It is suddenly very clear to me how we've ended up in such silly times. 

Yes. I think this is right. Adi has some exercises in which we notice how the placeholder moves around in experience. He describes it as a Post-it note (with "me" written on it) that we stick on something going on in the mind to make sense of what is happening. The interesting thing is that the note keeps getting placed on different things. 

In The Illusion of Conscious Will, Daniel Wegner talks about the felt-sense of this tagging: 

The experience of will then serves to
mark in the moment and in memory the actions that have
been singled out in this way. We know them as ours, as au-
thored by us, because we have felt ourselves doing them.
This helps us to tell the difference between things we are
doing and all the other things that are happening in and
around us. In the melee of actions that occur in daily life,
and in the social interaction of self with others, this body-
based signature is a highly useful tool. We resonate with
what we do, whereas we only notice what otherwise hap-
pens or what others have done – so we can keep track of
our own contributions without pencils or tally sheets.

There is a good precis of the book here, if you are interested: https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/dwegner/files/bbs_precis.pdf

"It is suddenly very clear to me how we've ended up in such silly times. "

Yes, it is very interesting to see what happens as a result of this reference being either consciously associated with, or inferred as being applicable to, all kinds of stuff. The use of the self placeholder explains much of what goes on in society. 

Question: why do we have a sense of self?

Not to get all evolutionary-biology-reductive about it, but I think it's adaptive. Being able to operate on a conceptual self instead of a swamp of sensations is conducive to survival, same as being able to operate on a conceptual stand-in for wooly mammoth. We take conceptualization too far, because there's no countervailing pressure to put a cap on it. The same way we evolved to eat as much sugar as physically possible, simply because we were never in a situation where we were able to eat too much. Now we're all obese and diabetic, and need to apply the self-restraint intentionally. There was never any such thing as "too conceptual", so likewise we now need to restrain the conceptualizing mind intentionally. And we've all got the mental equivalent of obesity and diabetes.

I really don't like reducing everything to biology, etc, but in this case I think biology is a good explanation, or at least a good explanatory analogy.

The post you are replying to is basically just answers to this question:

"to make sense of what is happening"

"This helps us to tell the difference between things we are
doing and all the other things that are happening in and
around us. In the melee of actions that occur in daily life,
and in the social interaction of self with others, this body-
based signature is a highly useful tool. We resonate with
what we do, whereas we only notice what otherwise hap-
pens or what others have done – so we can keep track of
our own contributions without pencils or tally sheets."

Is your question looking for something different than pragmatic explanations? Could you clarify?

I was heading in the meta direction and contrarian to the notion that we need a sense of self to survive, build our society and civilization, and so on. I'm not sure that's true. I should have posted more information, but sometimes it's helpful to start small and build from there.

I agree, but I do think it is how we have built our society and civilisation thus far. 

It's fascinating to wonder at what point did we become self obsessed? I can imagine the jubilance of developing this style of thinking, suddenly being able to refer to your self and others and over time, with much trial and experiment, eventually cultivating the ability to chain symbols and create meaningful (ring the alarm) communication. I can also see how the more abstract society becomes how self abstraction seems to be more necessary for survival. Not necessary in the sense that Chris is pointing to above but necessary in that we do it because society demands it of us. It seems to be necessary to communicate, to strategize and to understand your role and position in relation to others. My mind is drawn to medieval courts and the importance of name and title. Who are you in relation to your liege? Who are you in relation to God? (So-and-so is not an Arahat) They were well and truly self-embroiled in the medieval period, that's for sure.

From what I understand this self-obsession is a sort of neurological hyperactivity, like with the body, sometimes muscles become hypertonic or spasmodic and they lose their regular range of motion either getting locked in place or contracting compulsively. In these situations just relaxing may not be enough to remedy the tension. Often massage may be required or certain practices may be needed to restore sensitivity and range of motion to the area. In my experience it seems a continous sense of a self was a product of this hyperactivity. More and more I notice that the mind has to contract to press the shape of a self onto experience. It still contracts. Old habits die hard I guess. 

I am actually quite interested in this topic from an evolutionary biology angle. When did this obsessive tendency really take hold? Is it a primitive instinct, a survival drive, that latched onto the abstract self as we developed the ability to think this way? Could it be a consequence of the rapid evolution of the neo-cortex, or any other neurological development in the brain? We often look at evolutionary changes as things we've attained but what does it mean to be living with an evolving nervous system? Was the Buddha, is meditation, the nervous systems attempt to resolve a neurological imbalance?

Noble ones - and mammoths- notwithstanding, what combination of culture and evolution led to this self obsession becoming germain to our experience?

I suspect intelligence, consciousness, and self-awareness are spectrums of capabilities. We tend to think of them as binary - you have them, or you don't - but to me, that's unrealistic. The sense that "this is me" as an individual human probably developed over time.

Also, the sense of self seems to get a lot of negative in the dharma world. We tend to imagine that it's the root of the the evil we're trying to extinguish. But that, too, is unrealistic. Self-awareness can be an amazingly positive thing, allowing us to autocorrect our worst tendencies. What we should be doing is observing our self-sense and discovering how it operates. We'll find out that it's like most things - a two-edged sword.

We didn't start the fire!

mammoths probably had a sense of self...

I think you've pretty much already answered the question: its our complex interactions with other human beings, and human society, that strengthens our own conception of self. As societies have grown larger and more complex, we spend more and more of our time existing in a conceptual environment, rather than a sensate environment. What is important is our conceptual framework, and the way it interacts with other people's conceptual frameworks. Somewhere in there is a tipping point where we spend less time dealing with the physical world and a majority of our time dealing with human relationships, and all the conceptualization that entails, and the age of the internet has only pushed us farther in that direction. Down that road lies neurosis.

Again, I don't think we've hyper-evolved any non-adaptive traits, I just think our environment is no longer "natural", or at least it's more "created" than it is "natural", and traits that were originally adaptive have begun to harm us. Maybe that's why we moderns spend so much time on letting go of the self, while the Buddha seems to spend so much more time on letting go of desires.

This is veering towards a third-rate Ted Talk-style "Theory of Things", so I will try to bring it back to experience. Nothing spurs my selfing mind into action as much as the presense of another human being, someone who is paying attention to me and expecting interaction. It's nearly impossible for me not to marshal my "self" in response. There is still a large element of defensiveness in this action -- it is not balanced or lightly-held -- and I hope that as I progress in my practice I'll come closer to a place where the approach of another human being calls up a human response in myself, but only as much as is needed in the case, and only the kind of human response that is needed in the case, and that as they step away, the response would die down accordingly. That might be the sort of healthy self-conceptualization that Chris is talking about.

I think there's no better illustration of mutually-dependent arising (or however we're translating it) than this mutual creation of self. I am only a person because you are a person. You are only a person because I am a person. If we didn't want to be ourselves, we'd have to agree to count to three and stop together.

My other related experience is spending time in nature. I've started to notice how even the sight of human artifacts call up a faint echo of my own humanity. After two or three days in the Olympic National Park, even things like a food wrapper or a forest-service road will cause just this little faint stirring way down in there, of everything about myself that might theoretically be needed to "address" this element of my own civilization. Human artifacts carry marks of the purpose and intention with which they were made, and are very distant proxies of human beings themselves. Whereas trees and rivers fundamentally do not require the same response. They are not of us, and there is a relief in the fact that they demand nothing of us. Obviously you can and do conceptualize trees and rivers, and think of yourself in relation to them, but they don't require us to be people, and the level of selfing is naturally "just right".

So then imagine agricultural societies where you're spending ten hours a day in the fields, and are only really together with people in the evenings, and maybe church on Sunday. There's far less opportunity for neurosis!

I'm certainly guilty of this. The last six or so months of my dharma journey have really softened my attitude towards the self and lately I find myself developing a real appreciation for the intellectual and referential machinery of the mind. It does pretty cool stuff. 

---


Right and this calls to mind Marshall McLuhan and the ways we numb the nervous system when we adopt new mediums into our environment. It makes sense that the more people value the conceptual the more we numb our selves to the sensual. I think I had to become utterly disenchanted with the conceptual realm before I could really begin "hardcore" meditation and that was a voyage into the bodymind, into the sense realm. 


This is an interesting take. I'm certainly less concerned with desire and indulgence than I am with being a raging narcissist. Though I suppose narcissism is desire to have a certain type or quality of self.  


I have, both in situations where I really notice it and situations where others really notice it. It's been one of the biggest "achievements" of my own journey. For a long time I was just really at odds with the world and with people. I couldn't relax with people and I found that an immensely difficult experience. Deep down all I ever wanted was the freedom to express myself authentically in the moment and to really be able to relax and be compassionate with others. 


I spent copious amounts of time in the woods and by the sea during my first few paths. I literally found myself living inside a woodland at one point. There were phases whilst deep in the murk of post-conventional development where it was hard to understand who I was and who I was in relation to others. I was fairly solitary though blessed by a few tremendously good friends. It was both a very beautiful and very unusual time.

Over the last few weeks practice has been like this: 

I was playing with "seeing the seen" letting the senses sort of open out and just do their thing. Seeing becomes immersed in a flowing river of vision. The senses can just sort of do themselves without any overarching jurisdiction. Making sure I included all senses was suprisingly important. Letting my sense of smell do it's thing allowed my breath to breathe itself in very relaxing ways and so on with the other senses. 

Where the more complex stuff lies is in the mind sense or thought sense realm. There was the realization that I don't have to do anything, that things can be done without the need of a middleman. Then there was the realization that I also don't have to choose anything, choices can still be made, they just aren't compulsively happening as much. Now I seem to be working with this sort of fundamental need to attend to things. It's not doing things in a larger sense, it's not really choosing this or that, it's more just a subtle inclining of attention towards things that seems to be a bit dukkhaish.

Along the way there's been these deepening realizations about change. All these facets of mind are just being submitted to the flowing river of change. Somethings are submerged, others not so much, it seems inevitable that eventually everything just slides back into the river. 

​​​​​​​

"without the need of a middleman"

​​​​​​​That's the shit! :-)

Please start a new log. This one branched into another galaxy! I can't follow!  

All experience is mind 
All mind is experience 
Neither mind nor experience are self 
Thus no self can be found 

I'm not much of a noter but I've been working with directly noting ignorance and this insight popped out. It's obvious that somehow the whole thing, the whole of conscious experience, was subtly self. 

​​​​​​​Leading up to this the mind was fascinated by inquiry along the lines of "what happens if I do not pay attention to anything?"

-

​​​​​​​If it is tremendously inconvenient I will start a new log. 

The center seems to be bound up in attention. Attention creates this point of focus and self gets sort of constructed on top of that, fabricated I supposed, through this kind of obsession with choice, need, craving etc. There have been many experiences I have had that have been not-self type experiences and I would say truthfully enough I've been walking around without any obvious sense of self for awhile, chess and cigarettes not withstanding, but as I've been mentioning there's like this deeper layer of attention at the root of it all, or at least as deep as I've gotten with it. On some very subtle level I am paying attention to experience and so there's this kind of vague experience shaped self sort of pressed into reality and when that relax any sense of center also fades. 

​​​​​​

See if you can keep teasing apart the dependencies -- a sort of restlessness/worry makes an I paying attention; an I paying attention makes experience I dominated. 

This is the dependently originated last two of the three fetters (restlessness/worry and conceit). When you understand it in your bones, the last veil of unknowing goes away. 

If this was just in the psychological realm it would be a causation thing -- oh whenever I'm worried I then pay more attention, the more I pay attention the more experience becomes I dominated. And so the psychological answer is "oh, don't worry so much" or "only worry about the right things". 

In the meditation realm this all needs to be seen as dependently arising. If this then necessarily that. No that without this.  It's not something you fix necessarily, it's something you "see". And unfortunately it's paradoxical, because even when you are "practicing" or "looking" at a fundamental worry even THAT is motivated by restlessness/worry and conceit. So you're looking for how you are looking, how you are seeking to see the energy of seeking. 

It's closer than close. And it's really obvious too. 
But it's what allows being done to being done (even if life goes on and there is still stuff to do).

A lot of the ideals/dreams of awakening kinda start falling apart, maybe I'll never be perfectly perfect, etc.  You'll probably get confronted by why you wanted to practice in the first place. It's like a big circle that eventually completes itself.

 Wonderful advice as always. Thank you. What you are pointing at is exactly where I'm practicing. 

Not paying attention to things led to a strange recognition of the interdependent simultaneity of experience, not that that makes any sense. On some meta level focusing on dukkha was the dukkha arising which had already led to the focusing on dukkha. 

In general things are very equanimous and oceanic. Moment to moment it is much closer to the "ohh nice / just this" type experience and "ohh nice" is almost always available, meditation certainly tends to go straight there. What remains to be "done" seems clear enough. I get the feeling the body mind needs to be drenched in this seeing. There's a recognition which needs to wash through the world.

I find myself reflecting often on the body as water and sensation as the play of electricity across its surface. 

I think for the first time in thirty years I have come to understand the need for charity. 
 

Nice, "interdependent simultaneity of experience, not that that makes any sense" is how someone would describe dependent origination in their own words instead of quoting scripture.

Another consideration: Buddha said samsara is a world on fire, an endless fire. But how do we know that when there is dukka it is arising instead of passing away? How do we know?

One last idea: the exhale is a very important part of the breathing cycle at this stage. An exhale feels like relaxing and being done and there is that odd limbo point after an exhale and before an inhale where there is nothing to do. It has a feeling that is quite interesting. 

You added this on later so I didn't see it until this morning and that practice has entirely derailed the log I was about to write. That's one of the techniques in the Vijnana Bhairava. I have done it before but it never worked quite like it just did. There is most certainly an odd pressure drop as the exhale finishes. I'll scrap my notes and come back later. Thanks

** The breath is one of those areas that can be difficult to "submit" to agencylessness. In the past when I've noticed that pressure drop I find on the inhale aspects of the self-center-agency complex tend to whir up again as an intention or inclination towards inhaling occurs. 

*** Of course it would make sense that to become an undying lich king one would have to transcend the need for breath  jkjk

Dew drop on a spider's web,
What face is mirrored in its depth?
That now awaits the Lord of death.

Exhale and the breath is "done". Does anything of the old breath exist in the new breath?

Late night insight: I suppose I'm beginning to see how nothing needs to be carried over from one moment to the next and that lack of carrying over can collapse the experience of a moment into a momentlessness.

I've been snatching scattered strands of time in which to meditate. The reality of doing a few paths is eventually some significant moments are going to happen in bed, on the bus, in the shower and on the toilet. 

The deepest sense of doneness seems to come from this noticing that nothing continues, no part of any moment persists and these moments of time are a fabrication. Yet there's still subtle tension, dukkha in this experience because sometimes it's very done but sometimes it's a view and what's looking for doneness at all and what's up with this tiny little blip that seems to be looking at things being done or not done. 

I've been really returning to 3c's 6s's. It feels the most natural, gets closest to "do nothing and be with whatever it is" and also leads to the sensation from time to time that practice just vanishes.

I think I was overusing views and the body mind was getting a little frustrated. I was kind of feeding into the tracking and vetting of reality yet also trying to arrive at an experience without tracking or vetting. 

Bahiya Babe you Rock!!!  

Can there be any "persisting moment" without a trance state? Even if just a slight/soft trance state as in "I am mindful right now" or "do nothing and be with whatever is". Such trance state is very justified as we are "being mindful" of stuff, ya know And this thing "being mindful" is ok. As in vs all the not so ok stuff  

Bahiya Babe, Im in Wales start of June so if your shamrock self is in the vicinity would be great to meet up for a pint or three of the lovely creamy black soup!  

Thank you !!

​​​​​​​That would be a lot of fun. Unfortunately I'm in Australia but I will let you know if anything changes. I really want to go to Wales !! I'm so far from the little bahía I call home  

I think what's been bugging me, cuz there's always bloody something, is that there's this "beyond the moment, beyond the paths" type vibe which is awesome but once I'm there then you have to deal with "jeez it'd be a real shame if things weren't like this, better obsessively check to make sure we've got it" and obviously when you don't got it then there's "jeez it'd be nice if this was nice wouldn't it, what could we do now to make this nice?" 

And also obviously this is the same bloody carry on that's been going on for ages but now it's happening on this like microscopic level which somehow makes it more annoying or more annoying in the context of how fucking peaceful and serene the rest of it is hahaha lol

It feels like I'm working with letting the "beyond the paths" thing happen but also trying to just allow the wobbles and wiggles to be part of the flow of everything instead of trying to reify the nice feeling (which is a sort of reaction). I have been definitely trying to hold onto any sense of doneness. I obviously don't think doing that is effective I just noticed that I have been doing it. 

... And then you have some big insight and your like "oh right, everything is impermanent, the whole lot, I see it now father" but of course you don't see shite. 

There is something about working with the 3c's of the whole space that is insightful, especially when it can spontaneously occur alongside the momentlessness ( that really leads to some pretty stunning practice and tends to eradicate the "we better not lose this" ) but there are also these solidifications that happen. It feels like the flow of experience stops and things get a bit stuck ?? I'm not sure how to describe it but I think it's like me trying to solidify nice practices that feel insightful or just maybe aspects of attention that I really don't know anything about just clomping down on certain experiences. 

​​​​​​​Things are also pretty good, fresh, interesting, nice. Some of the most insightful and breathtaking practice I've ever had. I just practiced a lot the last couple of days and sometimes when I practice a lot I have to blow off steam - I honestly feel like I'd be a demon on retreat lol - I wish there was a Dharma friendly bar I could go to

*​​​​​​​There's a way to have momentlessness whilst also allowing it and any dukkha that arises to be a part of the flowing change. Something about that is what I needed. 


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