Hi all,

I just had a couple sits today and yesterday that have introduced me to what I think is a very promising strategy durning meditation.

I use to read a lot of buddhist sutras and such where they talk about how a yogi needs to adopt an attitude of dispassion / disgust with the body, thoughts, etc - I mostly chalked them off as somewhat of a monkish/ascetic oriented thing.

However during meditation recently I've been having a lot of trouble with either the attention wave fidgeting with body tensions or getting lost in rather vivid day-dreams, and trying to escape out of them / reduce them seemed difficult. I figured I need to bulk up on concentration. However, I found that by simply adopting a dispassionate attitude towards all phenomenon that arise in the field of experience (basically the five aggregates), I was able to actually avoid getting lost in anything and found that I could very easily reach equanimous states.

The body tensions have the disgusting aspect of feeling sticky in that the tensions waves of the body seem to warp awareness towards them / narrow-and-constrict awareness. Thoughts in general have the disgusting aspect of deluding awareness into non-existant fantasies. Consciousness and attention together have the disgusting attribute of subtly/somehow leading to the illusion of a witness, constructing subject-object dualities and tricking one into thinking there a sense of agency in terms of being able to control the attention wave.

I've also found that maintaining an attitude of dispassion helps in cultivating the faculty of bare attention (see Ian's recent thread on bare attention and its uses).

The most interesting aspect of this technique IMO is that this technique seems to still the mind in terms of the movement of time. I'm able to discard (as though rubbish newspaper) the past and then the future in terms of thoughts. This constitutes the vast majority of thoughts (I admit there are sometimes subtle thoughts that arise that try to guide the process of meditation in terms of noticing what's going on and what I should contemplate dispassionately). Then I dispassionately drop away body-oriented sensations, controlling attention and the individual senses as much as possible which allows me to somehow pop out of the virtual-present. Then there is only this process of becoming that seems to happen with the sense of a past and future absent. This leads to a very calm, very stilled state of mind from where the entire field of experience can be contemplated in terms fo 3C's. (This is probably 11th nana territory perhaps...)

I'm interested to hear what other yogi's have to say about cultivating dispassion during meditation and perhaps how to refine this technique!

Still, I should probably put in some kasina practice everyday to improve concentration a bit. Right now I think I've finished two MCTB paths and seem to progressing somewhere along 3rd path? The main interesting nowadays is that I seem to get long waves of no-self during the normal day time / work hours and the field of experience suddenly becomes somewhat luminous (which I take to mean self-aware) in that it sometimes feels like I am the field of vision looking back into me (there is no me inside my head).

Cheers,
Super Fox

I like the idea of being aware but at the same time understanding that mentally moving around looking for things to be aware of should show some of it's stress. Some thoughts are so emotionally charged it's easy to try and stamp out the fire but it's better to just watch it disappear like everything else. A passion to get rid of the passion just inflames the same part of the brain.

SF I've been reaching what I think is high EQ during 2hr sits the last couple of days and can really relate to what you're saying. It seems from my own experience that dispassion is the mode of awareness that causes less friction at this point. It seems natural, and difficult to imagine it being otherwise. There's a kind of dispassion/disgust with the body sensations including tensions in the back of the neck and forehead but also this strong desire for it to just be finished with!

Sounds similar to your own experience.

Lower down the progress of insight I find dispassion toward feelings of pleasure and joy seem to increase them, and move the mind forward at a fair clip...

Yes, indeed, Super Fox. That (i.e. dispassion) is what I think that Mahasi Sayādaw was aiming to accomplish with his innovation of the concept of "bare attention" when he taught this method to Nyanaponika Thera, who in turn explained it in his book The Heart of Buddhist Meditation.

If one has the insight to more closely consider what is in the suttas (discourses) in terms of suggestions for practice, one will undoubtedly come across more of these useful instructions for developing "skillful means" that one previously cast aside or decided to ignore.