Hi Daniel, and thanks for your response! I seemed to miss it unaccountably - perhaps there was a busy period on the site, and it passed off the front page of Recent Posts really quickly...
It's something of a problem, having come to your book after 20 years of practice within a different tradition ie not explicitly Noting, certainly not exclusively. I am still making major inroads into understanding my experience in the terms of your book at an intimate level. I use metaphor quite a bit - partly because at this level one is quite clear that any rational structure may or may not provide useful insights and directions, but is definitely not to be equated with the direct experience...but it is important for communication to have a common language, obviously, so I'll try and bear that more in mind.
I came across your book soon after my second experience of NS, and I think that in the light of this Fruition seemed really a lot less significant - NS itself is a Fruition is it not? and I think I was looking to that too much as I was trying to understand Fruition in everyday practice. The afterglow from NS is certainly hours if not days, and for me has been like being in a Pure Land.
However, as time has gone on, I am clearer about the everyday experience of Fruition, and easier about just letting it happen. In answer to Trent, there is a build-up of a few seconds before it, and an afterglow like a subtle mild wave of expansion lasting maybe 5-10 seconds, though in a sense it just keeps on expanding outwards and becoming more still like a ripple in a pond does... 'resetting' is a good way of describing it. I can say more clearly now that the ability to know or be aware of anything is lost at that peak - it is like the attention wave turns inside-out and cancels itself out altogether. I think prior to MCTB I would in a sense fight the Fruition moment by 'looking for Insight' at the time when one's practice was coming to a peak, so to speak, and this just confuses things. It was less frequent during a particularly tough period of Re-observation recently, in that it would arise only under more specific meditative conditions, but it is otherwise frequent. Except for the period just mentioned, I can and could repeat it in something like the way Trent suggests.
Regarding the 3 samadhis, which I said I would look up:-
I quote from Sangharakshita's lecture on Right Meditation:-
"Now we come on to three which is samadhi proper, the state or the stage of being fixed, being established in Reality, in other words the state or the stage of being Enlightened, being a Buddha. And there are of course many ways of looking at this state or this stage of samadhi. Often of course it’s described in negative terms. It’s described for instance in terms of the destruction of the asravas as they’re called. The word asra means a sort of poisonous flux, a bias, a sort of lopsidedness in our nature. And the asravas are three in number. First of all there’s the kamasrava or the bias towards the poisonous flux of the desire or the thirst for contact with material things, for their own sake, on their own level. Then secondly bhavasrava, the bias towards, the poisonous flux of conditioned existence, in other words the attachment to or desire for any mode of being, any mode of existence short of Enlightenment itself. Then thirdly avijjasrava, bias towards the poisonous flux of ignorance, in the sense of spiritual darkness and unawareness.
So in the first place, in the first instance, samadhi proper is described as the complete absence of any vestige of these three asravas, these three poisonous fluxes or biases. A state in which sense experiences, material things, mean nothing, a state in which there is no desire for any kind of conditioned existence, where one isn’t really interested in anything other than nirvana or Enlightenment itself, because one is that at that moment, and a state of complete illumination and clarity and freedom and Enlightenment, when there is no shadow of ignorance or spiritual darkness.
Now in addition to this negative description there are also various positive descriptions, though here of course we must tread rather warily and realise, understand, that we’re trying to give a hint or two about something which really goes far beyond any power of words to express. Some of the texts, some of the teachings, mention a group of three samadhis, in this higher sense of this term samadhi. Not that there are really three in the sense of three mutually exclusive states. The so-called three samadhis are more like different aspects or different dimensions of the one samadhi.
The first of these is known as the Imageless. It indicates the state of samadhi’s perfect freedom from all thoughts, from all conceptualisation. If we think for a while, if we can just imagine, even, a state in which we’re fully and clearly conscious, fully and clearly aware at the highest possible level, but there’s no discursive thought; if we think, as it were, of the mind as being like a beautiful bright blue clear sky with no cloud - not even a speck of cloud, this is what this state of imageless samadhi experience would be like. Most of the time of course the sky of the mind is full of clouds, full of grey clouds, full of even black clouds, sometimes full of storm clouds, occasionally of course full of clouds tinged with gold, but usually rather dark and grey and unpleasant. So the state of samadhi is a state of imagelessness, freedom from all clouds of thought. A state of freedom from conceptualisation.
The second samadhi, or aspect or dimension of samadhi, is known as the Directionless, also translated as the unbiased, because samadhi is a state in which there’s no particular direction in which one wants to go. There’s no particular preference. One as it were remains just poised, like a sphere resting on a completely horizontal plane, it’s just poised there, there’s no particular reason why it should roll in this direction or in that direction of its own accord, it just stays where it is. So samadhi, the Enlightened mind, is like this. It has no particular tendency or inclination in any particular direction because it has no individual or egoistic desire. It’s a rather difficult sort of state to express but if one thinks of it perhaps in terms of perfect spontaneity without any particular urge or impulse to do anything in particular then one may get somewhere near it.
Now the third samadhi or third aspect or dimension of samadhi is known as that of the Voidness - sunyata. Sunyata doesn’t mean emptiness or voidness in the literal sense, it means reality. So sunyata samadhi is the state or the stage of full and complete realisation of the ultimate nature of existence which cannot be put into words. It’s not just a glimpse as in the stage of Perfect Vision. It’s a full, a total, and a perfect realisation. Now this samadhi of sunyata, Ultimate Reality, is connected in some of the texts, in some of the sutras, by what is known as the ekalaksana-samadhi or the samadhi of one characteristic, which is also known as the samadhi of same-mindedness, or even-mindedness. This is a state or stage or experience where one sees everything as having the same characteristic. Usually of course we see things as having different characteristics. We say some things are good, some are bad, some are pleasant, some are unpleasant, some we like, some we dislike, some are near, some are far, some are past, some are present, some are future. In this way we give different characteristics to so many different things. But in this stage, in this state of samadhi, you see that everything has got the same characteristic - it’s all sunyata, it’s all ultimately real, in a sense it’s all the same in its very depths, in its ultimate depths. So inasmuch as everything is basically the same there’s no reason why you should have different attitudes towards different things. If everything is the same obviously you have the same attitude towards everything. So this is this particular state or this aspect or dimension of samadhi. So if one sees everything as same, everything as having the same characteristic, obviously one is in a state of peace and tranquillity and stability and rest."
