Is this an accurate description of what enlightenment is like? - Discussion
Jim Smith
But this part in particular I can relate to.
Is this like what you experience as being awakened? Do people experience this 24/7 after stream entry or does it come and go? Is it a feeling (that can come and go), or is it a knowing that you can never unknow? Does it lessen suffering? How?
(In my way of thinking, I called this feeling like you are in a movie. I never thought it was scary.)
But this part in particular I can relate to.
Imagine as clearly as you can that you enter a large house that you have never been in before. You feel strange and kind of scared, there is furniture and drapes but no people. You wander around feeling the creepiness of being alone in this big house. You go from room to room not knowing what you will find. You start to get nervous and a little fearful being alone in this big house. You wonder how long it has been empty like this. In time the sense of the bigness and emptiness of the house starts to weigh heavily on your nerves. Finally, when you can not stand it any longer a shocking realization occurs to you: you're not there either! only the experience exists.
(In my way of thinking, I called this feeling like you are in a movie. I never thought it was scary.)
Enlightenment is basic human sanity. A big part of being sane is realizing that you didn't have the problems that you thought you did. So this guy's metaphors are good at pointing out the general idea of "I was worried about this thing, I investigated it, and it turns out it wasn't the way I thought it was before I started investigating."
There is never going to be an easy and simple description, otherwise we would already know it and there would be no "my enlightenment is bigger and better than your enlightenment" battles.
One thing I'll mention is that the key thing with enlightenment/sanity is the absence of "ignoring/denial" of reality. For example, it is totally possible to be walking through the house and worried about how empty it is (in the metaphor above) but ignoring it and denying it by saying things like "I know the emptiness isn't a problem, I know my worries are silly, this expereince doesn't really count..." But this is basically ignoring/denial of the worry. It's very similar to, but very different than not being worried.
The only reason I mention that is that many people try to rationalize their way to enlightenment without actually walking around the creepy house.
But you can "smell" the difference between people who just know "the right definition" and those people who have actually walked through the house.Hope this is helpful in some way, definitely feel free to disregard.
I mostly agree with the article you posted, although i feel like the empty house analogy is a bit obscure. The part just before about there just being 'paper' rather than steve looking at paper is clearer, if less evocative. And also, I wouldn't take the view he describes as an endpoint, more like anatta, or mctb 4th path. My favourite way of expressing it is that you've always been identical to experience. Hence why some people say you've always been enlightened, just not known it. Also where you get the expressions no-mind or no witness/awareness. The view of consciousness moves from being something that apprehends to something that just is, almost like a solid object on which a 4D (space+time) representation is inscribed. What had felt like knowing is substituted for something that just feels like being.
Dogen said: "ordinary beings have no illumination in their consciousness, but Buddhas have no consciousness in their illumination"
I still have a practical view of meditation though. I think if it is oriented towards inquiry and insight then it's still the best tool for the job.
Dogen said: "ordinary beings have no illumination in their consciousness, but Buddhas have no consciousness in their illumination"
I still have a practical view of meditation though. I think if it is oriented towards inquiry and insight then it's still the best tool for the job.
I am trying to figure out how to relate what I experience to experiences other people describe. It's like having two parts of a slide rule and I don't know where they line up correctly. When I ask a question it is not because I don't have an opinion on it, I ask questions because I want to know what other people think about the subject.
Hello Jim, hope this finds you well and happy. I don't post here often because "awakening" happened for me after 20+ years of Dzogchen rather than Theravada, and backtracking to try to see the nanas, disgust, and fruitions, etc. wasn't really very useful or helpful to me immediately afterward (or really now). What WAS mostly helpful about this place and Daniel's book was the logic and reassurance that I hadn't lost my shit in the moment that the center of my universe went toroid shaped, center-less, self-time-space-less, and somehow continued on as before for about 20 minutes as I drove my car in 2015, I think it was.
Many thanks to Shargrol and Chris, and a number of posters here for helping me to relax and bringing me down to earth with their answers to my posts and those of others. It has always appeared to me that there is an unspoken earthiness and "Chicken Soup" quality to Shargrol and Chris' and what they share here, vs. Daniel's more cool, logic-based, but also sometimes esoteric, or even supernatural shares. I appreciate both very much.
After lurking, then tentatively posting occasionally, someone said (I think) or read somewhere that "stream entry" was like becoming a freshman in high school - contgratulations, but still tons of work to be done. This was more true than I realized at the time. One of those important things is taking your new ability to see things in this new perspective and pushing it further open so that it eventually becomes your default way of seeing. I recognize myself from all those years ago in the quote you shared - the weirdness and alienness of this new way of seeing, but also this quality of shifting back and forth between emptiness and "self", and feeling like there was a witness. That definitely dissolves over time, as someone mentioned above.
For a number of years (the "high school" years!)I would review this statement from Daniel on this board over and over to check in with my progress:
Since the topic has come up so often and been so bandied about so many times by so many people, let me state here what I mean by 4th path, regardless of what anyone else means by it. It has the following qualities:
1) Utter centerlessness: no watcher, no sense of a watcher, no subtle watcher, no possibility of a watcher. This is immediately obvious just as color is to a man with good eyesight as the old saying goes. Thus, anything and everything simply and obviously manifest just where they are. No phenomena observe any others and never did or could.
2) Utter agencylessness: meaning no agency, no sense of doing, no sense of doer, no sense that there could be any agent or doer, no way to find anything that seems to be in control at all. Whatever effort or intent or anything like that that arises does so naturally, causally, inevitably, as it always actually did. This is immediately obvious, though not always the forefront of attention.
3) No cycles change or stages or states or anything else like that do anything to this direct comprehension of simple truths at all.
4) There is no deepening in it to do. The understanding stands on its own and holds up over cycles, moods, years, etc and doesn't change at all. I have nothing to add to my initial assessment of it from 9 years ago.
5) There is nothing subtle about it: anything and everything that arises exhibits these same qualities directly, clearly.
When I was third path, particularly late in it, those things that didn't exhibit these qualities were exceedingly subtle, and trying to find the gaps in the thing was exceedingly difficult and took years and many cycles. I had periods from weeks to months where it felt done and then some subtle exception would show up and I would realize I was wrong yet again, so this is natural and understandable, and if someone claims 4th as I define it here and later says they got it wrong, have sympathy for them, as this territory is not easy and can easily fool people, as it did me many, many times over about 5 years or so. However, 4th, as I term it, ended that and 9 years later that same thing holds, which is a very long time in this business.
There are other aspects that may be of value to discuss at some other time, but those are a great place to start for those who wish to claim this. If you truly have those, then perhaps we can talk about a few other points that are less central and essential.
Now, how there can still be affect (though quite modified in many ways) when there is centerlessness and agencylessness, this is a mystery to the AF kids and to me as well, and that brings me to my next point: there seems to be areas of development depending on what you look for and aim for that may arise independently, and not everything seems to come as a package necessarily. Those things are what I looked for really hard for about 7 years, and that is what I found. Now I find that the interest in the unraveling of what drives that residual affect is arising, and so that investigation happens on its own also.
Perhaps people will find this helpful in some way. - Daniel Ingram
1) Utter centerlessness: no watcher, no sense of a watcher, no subtle watcher, no possibility of a watcher. This is immediately obvious just as color is to a man with good eyesight as the old saying goes. Thus, anything and everything simply and obviously manifest just where they are. No phenomena observe any others and never did or could.
2) Utter agencylessness: meaning no agency, no sense of doing, no sense of doer, no sense that there could be any agent or doer, no way to find anything that seems to be in control at all. Whatever effort or intent or anything like that that arises does so naturally, causally, inevitably, as it always actually did. This is immediately obvious, though not always the forefront of attention.
3) No cycles change or stages or states or anything else like that do anything to this direct comprehension of simple truths at all.
4) There is no deepening in it to do. The understanding stands on its own and holds up over cycles, moods, years, etc and doesn't change at all. I have nothing to add to my initial assessment of it from 9 years ago.
5) There is nothing subtle about it: anything and everything that arises exhibits these same qualities directly, clearly.
When I was third path, particularly late in it, those things that didn't exhibit these qualities were exceedingly subtle, and trying to find the gaps in the thing was exceedingly difficult and took years and many cycles. I had periods from weeks to months where it felt done and then some subtle exception would show up and I would realize I was wrong yet again, so this is natural and understandable, and if someone claims 4th as I define it here and later says they got it wrong, have sympathy for them, as this territory is not easy and can easily fool people, as it did me many, many times over about 5 years or so. However, 4th, as I term it, ended that and 9 years later that same thing holds, which is a very long time in this business.
There are other aspects that may be of value to discuss at some other time, but those are a great place to start for those who wish to claim this. If you truly have those, then perhaps we can talk about a few other points that are less central and essential.
Now, how there can still be affect (though quite modified in many ways) when there is centerlessness and agencylessness, this is a mystery to the AF kids and to me as well, and that brings me to my next point: there seems to be areas of development depending on what you look for and aim for that may arise independently, and not everything seems to come as a package necessarily. Those things are what I looked for really hard for about 7 years, and that is what I found. Now I find that the interest in the unraveling of what drives that residual affect is arising, and so that investigation happens on its own also.
Perhaps people will find this helpful in some way. - Daniel Ingram
https://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/2718243#_com_liferay_message_boards_web_portlet_MBPortlet_message_2718243
Some of these assertions felt disconcerting, or even worrying at the time. How would the things that I loved about my life be effected by these very alien sounding future changes? I can see how, before understanding this shift, I would have also found your gents statement uncomfortable:
Imagine as clearly as you can that you enter a large house that you have never been in before. You feel strange and kind of scared, there is furniture and drapes but no people. You wander around feeling the creepiness of being alone in this big house. You go from room to room not knowing what you will find. You start to get nervous and a little fearful being alone in this big house. You wonder how long it has been empty like this. In time the sense of the bigness and emptiness of the house starts to weigh heavily on your nerves. Finally, when you can not stand it any longer a shocking realization occurs to you: you're not there either! only the experience exists.
Is this like what you experience as being awakened? Do people experience this 24/7 after stream entry or does it come and go? Is it a feeling (that can come and go), or is it a knowing that you can never unknow? Does it lessen suffering? How?
(In my way of thinking, I called this feeling like you are in a movie. I never thought it was scary.)
(In my way of thinking, I called this feeling like you are in a movie. I never thought it was scary.)
I think I would have a feeling like that occasionally at first, but it is because my boddhicitta was impacted.
When the mind becomes still I can still see this quality, but it isn't strange anymore, it is actually cool and reassuring, comforting and luxurious like a glass of cold water on a hot day. It is what is underneath the noise of the "ornaments of emptiness" - the one thing that is always present. It is ALWAYS known, yes. It lessens suffering because it is nirodha - the cessation. When there is just seeing the clarity and luminousity of emptiness you aren't disturbed by the whole circus of the world, or "you"... as I said, a cold glass of water on a hot day... the joy of just "beingness". If you will forgive me, Jim, I have noticed over the years I've seen your posts that you have a real love/fear relationship with this idea of awakening and enlightenment. A fascination, but also a fear about what it means. Feel free to correct me, and apologies if you believe I am wrong. In either case, what I will say is this: "My" experience in this moment matches Daniel's statement. I completely get what he means. The surprise for me, on checking my huge insight at the time against this litmus 6 or 7 years ago now is that the world didn't change, really, and that it isn't frightening at all, in fact quite the opposite.
After completing the path, I still lived in the same world, the same house, with the same wife and kids. The same job. This all LOOKED (and looks) the same. It didn't all become alien, and neither did I... mostly!
I'm sure there are more, but here are some things that aren't on Daniel's list, but pertain to ME here, right now:
Life experiences are MORE emotionally engaging (once I got a bitch slap from my teacher and started putting in the hard work to develop boddhicitta and everything started to open up even more quickly). I am more available, kinder, but don't walk around for days on end identified with my suffering, or anyone else's. I cry during commercials on television, or in thankfulness to the couch I have been sleeping on since I got the flu 3 days ago. I feel loved and thankful, moment to moment, by the kitchen appliances, the frog under the pot on the porch, and my car, and love them too when it occurs to me.
I see emptiness everywhere, and it is the basis everything seems to come from it... it is the primary thing TO see, and it looks just like this already does. The change in how the pattern of your "self" expressing in the world, and how space and time present take getting used to, but you realize that they ALWAYS looked like this, your thinking mind just filled in all of the gaps with bullshit. Your stories about the fear of enlightenment are probably that too - your "self" trying to prevents its fears of being marginalized or eliminated presenting themselves. There is a supernatural stillness, a silence, a flickering, a parallax, and more happening with sensation that is reassuring.
Yes, there is weird stuff, which I won't go into, but it came for me long after I was worried about things being uncomfortably strange. I haven't ever chatted to Daniel, but I suspect his magical successes started to arise some time after his "self" was completely dissolved. My stuff seems to be primarily around "beings" visiting at night, which I have encouraged, but am sure I could discourage if there was any kind of emergent intention to do so. I'd love to hear from anybody who has had similar experiences. I know Shinzen Young, for example has, as well as my teacher and some of her colleagues.
I'm sure there is more, but I am enjoying the brain addling effects of a 101 degree fever (though with incredible clarity!) so I'll stop for now.
Olivier S
I seem to recall these two articles contain reports about presences at night and this type of stuff:
Sparby, T. (2022a). Rudolf Steiner and the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’, Part I. Steiner Studies, 3(3), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.12857/STS.951000340-12
Sparby, T. (2022b). Rudolf Steiner and the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’, Part II. Steiner Studies, 3(3), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.12857/STS.951000340-13
I seem to recall these two articles contain reports about presences at night and this type of stuff:
Sparby, T. (2022a). Rudolf Steiner and the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’, Part I. Steiner Studies, 3(3), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.12857/STS.951000340-12
Sparby, T. (2022b). Rudolf Steiner and the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’, Part II. Steiner Studies, 3(3), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.12857/STS.951000340-13
Thanks for these, Olivier. Seems like a topic of its own. There is lot there.
Martin, I'm glad my post connected.
Jim,
Have you considered you didn't attain what Daniel did?
There are many experiences or mind states that match most of the phenomenological descriptions but are missing the point entirely. Most self-proclaimed Arhats here didn't seem to have gotten the right memos and its not even only me thinking that. The most funny thing was that Daniel himself said that he thinks most people who claim 4th path on DhO are at most 2nd path - which was something I exactly thought must be the case after attaining 2nd path. I mean it was possible to fit experience near perfectly to all the descriptions - field of self perceiving sensations where they are, no observer or possibility of observer, bla bla bla. I mean it was obvious its not it yet but then again Daniel as far as I know never forbade anyone from reading him so...
... and neither did Mahasi Sayadaw - the very person who invented the methods used so should be the best reference for their results. Keen eye can still see certain differences - especially the type of glow he had but I guess its just a matter of lifestyle and the so called "maturation" - you don't get such type of glow without formless jhanas (I mean the real* ones), and to be more precise his was 5th so I might just as well consider him (when he was alive at least) to be 5th path.
Long story short - attainments can be confusing and misleading. I would even say if you don't think you surpassed everything anyone ever wrote about given path then don't claim it.
Also you say you got non-dual experiences...
...and which part of the experience proved to you doctrine of non-duality is correct?
Most people describe non-duality as experience without obviously fake sense of self overlay slapped on top of experiences. This is completely wrong and has nothing to do with non-duality and can be easily explained without it. Just like any non-dual experiences for that matter!
In the end it comes down to faith and acting according to it.
Subtle (or at times not so subtle) hints its real will happen when you are of... I would love to say "of pure heart" but mine certainly isn't so I guess it comes down to being ready for what non-duality has to show you. What it has to show you (or at least me) puts different light or spin on the whole Enlightenment thinggy and how if it was optimal for everyone to be unbound we would all be enlightened at all times**.
Which BTW your attitude might be all about. Maybe you do realize its not all as its being advertised and in that sense we are being lied to. In this case (and innumerable number of cases it wasn't it, non-duality) maybe better to just shift to basics like resolving issues your nervous system to not experience dukkha? Maybe even if - and this is a big if - if you know how to do that you'll have actual business with non-duality?
Just sayin...
Ni
*) Not many people know this (because surprise surprise not that many people actually attained 4th path) that there are actually 8 jhanas with the form. Infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness and neither perception nor non-perception are NOT formless jhanas. You describe formless jhanas at most by their faculty and not forms they make in mind. They don't have forms - hence they are called formless
**) In the supermundane experience of all experiences at all times we are all enlightened but that it besides the point ;)
ps. You say we cannot read you... but we can still write to you, can we?
Have you considered you didn't attain what Daniel did?
There are many experiences or mind states that match most of the phenomenological descriptions but are missing the point entirely. Most self-proclaimed Arhats here didn't seem to have gotten the right memos and its not even only me thinking that. The most funny thing was that Daniel himself said that he thinks most people who claim 4th path on DhO are at most 2nd path - which was something I exactly thought must be the case after attaining 2nd path. I mean it was possible to fit experience near perfectly to all the descriptions - field of self perceiving sensations where they are, no observer or possibility of observer, bla bla bla. I mean it was obvious its not it yet but then again Daniel as far as I know never forbade anyone from reading him so...
... and neither did Mahasi Sayadaw - the very person who invented the methods used so should be the best reference for their results. Keen eye can still see certain differences - especially the type of glow he had but I guess its just a matter of lifestyle and the so called "maturation" - you don't get such type of glow without formless jhanas (I mean the real* ones), and to be more precise his was 5th so I might just as well consider him (when he was alive at least) to be 5th path.
Long story short - attainments can be confusing and misleading. I would even say if you don't think you surpassed everything anyone ever wrote about given path then don't claim it.
Also you say you got non-dual experiences...
...and which part of the experience proved to you doctrine of non-duality is correct?
Most people describe non-duality as experience without obviously fake sense of self overlay slapped on top of experiences. This is completely wrong and has nothing to do with non-duality and can be easily explained without it. Just like any non-dual experiences for that matter!
In the end it comes down to faith and acting according to it.
Subtle (or at times not so subtle) hints its real will happen when you are of... I would love to say "of pure heart" but mine certainly isn't so I guess it comes down to being ready for what non-duality has to show you. What it has to show you (or at least me) puts different light or spin on the whole Enlightenment thinggy and how if it was optimal for everyone to be unbound we would all be enlightened at all times**.
Which BTW your attitude might be all about. Maybe you do realize its not all as its being advertised and in that sense we are being lied to. In this case (and innumerable number of cases it wasn't it, non-duality) maybe better to just shift to basics like resolving issues your nervous system to not experience dukkha? Maybe even if - and this is a big if - if you know how to do that you'll have actual business with non-duality?
Just sayin...
Ni
*) Not many people know this (because surprise surprise not that many people actually attained 4th path) that there are actually 8 jhanas with the form. Infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness and neither perception nor non-perception are NOT formless jhanas. You describe formless jhanas at most by their faculty and not forms they make in mind. They don't have forms - hence they are called formless
**) In the supermundane experience of all experiences at all times we are all enlightened but that it besides the point ;)
ps. You say we cannot read you... but we can still write to you, can we?