Experienced meditator with a jhana-focused practice. Able to establish the first three soft jhanas pretty much every sit with various objects such as the breath, metta, or a matra. Things are going well in terms of my concentration practice but not so much with the insight.

While I've recently started to experience some of the vibratory sensate experiences outlined in MCTB 2 (still working my way through the book), I have some questions:

1. Would noting be of value at this stage or is mixing the soft jhanas and noting a bad idea? (Got curious because of Daniel's strong endorsement.) Or would you just recommend pushing for 4th jhana, which is reputedly especially helpful for insight practice?

2. If you feel that noting would be value, do you recommend using it pre jhana, post jhana, or both?

3. Has anybody found that mixing noting and jhanas made the latter harder to access?

Thanks!

Hi Fainting Goat,

I'm a relative beginner meditator with more of an insight focus, but I do jhana practice nearly every morning before doing insight.  So maybe I can help a little,

I found that fast noting, in the range of 5+ notes/sec makes it very hard to stay in what presents as a more jhanic state.  So, if you decide you want to get into fast noting, start doing that and the affect of the jhana is likely to change.  

This video is also helpful I think for this question, https://vimeo.com/69475208

If you're making progress through jhanas, you might like Ven. Vimalaramsi's TWIM 6R method. The gist of it is that you purify the mind of craving and eventually see dependent origination.

I had posted this in one of my posts.  I'd gotten this at another forum and its been helpful to me: 

Once you get up to 4th jhana, take advantage of the panoramic perspective, and from here, turn the focus of attention GENTLY back upon the sensations composing "self". These will probably be sensations around or in the eyes, in the head, in the face, in the throat, in the chest. Turn the attention out toward a sensation in the foot or a sound in the room, and watch how the mind continues to toss these "self" sensations in, giving the subtle impression that there's a center point to the experience. Don't try to DO anything about this. Just watch it in real-time

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You can also look the Awakening technique by Kim Katami which gives you a more detailed overview of how the turning the attention would work. 

I have been doing these two methods for the last week and its been the most useful tools for finding a sense of "self" and turning focus to it as you see alluded to here a lot but yet really didn't have clear instructions. 

So basically I am working up through the jhanas and then once I've done the time I want to do I switch to "Hear, See, Feel" and add in "Self" noting. I spend some time examining self and then go note some more. I do the noting slowly to keep a light 4th jhana. 

Hopefully this will bring me closer to SE. IF you want to chat sometime let me know. Now I"m realizing this post is 7 months old and the OP will probably neve read haha.