Hi, all. Last Friday, August 8, during a lunchtime group sit, something staggering happened that may have been stream entry. I don't have time at the moment to detail what happened, but I will elsewhere later, when I have more time, perhaps tonight.

I know people can easily be fooled by imposter states and stages, so I'm following Daniel's advice to let what happened settle and just continue to practice with curiosity and wait to see what happens. 

However, here is my question: Is it possible to have stream entry fruition after 2 months of Equanimity and experiencing formations--and then after SE afterglow to find oneself knocked completely out of Equanimity and off of the ability to sense formations? Can a dramatic cessation event actually usher in a falling back down the stages instead of SE?

After 2 days of really impressive afterglow despite my having a migraine for almost the whole 2 days, my sits are now shit. I can't sense vibrations or any cycling at all, certanly not formations. I now don't even have the EQ I enjoyed for 2 months straight. I've done only 2 sits since that Friday event, because of migraine, but those two sits were like I was a beginner at mediation--lots of obtrusive discursive thought, itching, aching, restlessness, and the like!

Any idea what could be going on and whether the sudden knock off EQ is a sign for or against SE?

I know I'm being impatient and need to keep practicing, regardless, but I'd still like to know what is possibly going on with the sudden inability to meditate after stunning High EQ and an SE-type cessation event.. Again, I'll post the whole event in diagnostic clinic when I have time.

Love and thanks,

Jenny

Without really knowing anything about the suspected SE event, maybe you dropped back into re-ob? It is pretty crummy to drop from EQ down to re-ob, but they are right next to each other. My last retreat was mostly tottering from EQ to re-ob daily. It feels like being above the clouds with a vast and panoramic awareness, then dipping below them and finding yourself beneath a storm of neurotic obsessive thoughts, reactivity, itching, pains, and chaotic sensations to me. Stream entry ought to do some sort of damage to your sense of center point though- possibly physically, with a feeling of space where a sense of observer was contracted, but most definitely with a perceptible change in your relationship to experience, like sensations are no longer being fed through a vantage point, like observation is occuring without some undefined point which observations happen to. That's my take on it, at least.

Sensations that implied self are still intact, but the weight/gravity/contraction around them should greatly loosen. Like seeing a reflection on the water and realizing that it has no substance/has no actual matter. 

Yes! I totally have that loss of contracted "self" and center--and it is not subtle! It started right after the event. I feel very, very different.

It is just weird that I'm not experiencing further fruitions or noticing cycling. Maybe it is too soon. Maybe I'm just not good at noticing the cycling. And maybe I've not had another full cycling and  fruition because I have not had a chance to sit for longer than 25 minutes since Friday.

I will detail what happened Friday when I am home from the office.

Jenny

This is an apt expression of the shift. So maybe it is so. Time will tell.

Daniel's nana and jhana mind map walkthrough is pretty much essential viewing. Something that really caught me off guard / I had completely misunderstood was the trip back to mind & body after review, which had me feeling like something of a total impostor. Four days seems like a rather short time to spend in review, but this is just my own experience -- I'm sure others can weigh in. Keep in mind that an inability to sense cycling doesn't mean it's not happening anyway.

That video also addresses the re-observation <--> EQ chin-ups, including a funky little detour / near miss that can trigger from the EQ mini dark night, punting the practitioner back to desire for deliverance. Not saying this is necessarily the case, just some food for thought.

If anything kept me from enjoying SE, it was worrying over whether or not I had actually landed SE. Which is silly, and more than a little counter-productive. In short: don't worry, be equanimous.

Hey Jen, I am not a stream-enterer so I unfortunately can't speak from personal experience (yet!), but I do have some points of interest.

First there is the possibility that you fell back into Re-Obs, but the "contracted sense of self" you describe is certainly interesting, and indicates that something else may be going on.

Stream entry isn't always light and bunnies. For some it is quite unsettling or confusing, at least at first. I've read numerous threads about "post-path headaches" that are apparently common. It is quite possible that the shockwaves of stream-entry are just giving you a difficult time. Fruitions are not always obvious, especially after first path. For some they don't become obvious until later paths (I hear third path can be a doozy). 

Something you might try-- "just sitting" and seeing what the mind does by itself.

Also, you already know this, but believing one has attained a path, when one in fact hasn't, can really screw up your practice. Keep meditating as usual to be on the safe side.

On a different note, could you shoot me a PM or email?  I have a question I would like to ask you. It pertains to my practice and I think you may have some insight (ha ha). My email is ayearhasgone@gmail.com. 

Mark your calender for a year and a day so we can plan a celebration.

Eric

In short, no.  If you had attained path there should have been three little blips (or something resembling three blips) and then a cessation event (a bigger blip) followed by the A&P which then automatically cycles through the dark night and back up into equanimity (with formations) and then it starts over again.  It's true that it's possible for someone to miss all 4 blips.   

I suppose starting over at the A&P could be mistaken for "falling back down," but if you find this experience being more like re-observation then you didn't hit stream-entry and instead fell back to re-observation which isn't really a big deal.  Just meditate to go back into equanimity and try again.

The inability to meditate could be symptoms of being back in the dark night (re-observation).

I did have three of those and then an absolute discontinuity, and then reality "rebooted." And the rebooting was very interesting, to say the least.

Brief Background

Okay, quick version of history is as follows: I've been meditating for 3 years, never been on retreat, and rarely sit more than 30 minutes a day. I experienced A&P phenomena during the second or third time I ever sat. I do not practice "noting," but rather just "noticing," without labeling, as labeling has always been too slow. 

From April through July 2013 I was in a clear A&P phase, with lucid dreaming many nights, culminating in the A&P Event during one of these dreams, in which I meditated. I had all the zealot post-A&P clarity that is classic, and from that point on intense faith in my eventual awakening. Exactly a week later, and almost a year to the day before this possible SE event I'll describe, I entered DN and cycled around in that twice at the macro level until the second week of June 2014, when it broke and low EQ began. 

From second the week in June, I steadily climbed to High EQ, all the while seeing/hearing/feeling (but mainly seeing) formations, although without being able to clearly see the beginnings and endings . . . until this past Friday. I saw formations at every single sit for 2 months and experienced all the other characteristics of EQ, but assumed that I would fall back down the through the earlier stages again because, honestly, I've put very little total time into my formal practice (yeah, I'm a lazy Buddhist).

My longer and weirder history is here, in case you are mobidly curious:

[url=]http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/4542709?_19_redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dharmaoverground.org%2Fweb%2Fguest%2Fdiscussion%2F-%2Fmessage_boards%2Fsearch%3F_19_keywords%3Dlet%2Bme%2Boff%2Bthis%2Bride%26_19_searchCategoryId%3D0%26_19_breadcrumbsCategoryId%3D0%26_19_redirect%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.dharmaoverground.org%252Fweb%252Fguest%252Fdiscussion%252F-%252Fmessage_boards%252Fmessage-boards-home%26_19_formDate%3D1407898323199

(How do I make links shorter?)

Night Before Event: My Sit and My One and Only Resolution to Meet Stream Entry

Thursday night, the night before the event I'll try to describe, I logged my sit with just the following words to show the sequence of what I noticed:

1.      Fast vibrations (seeing, feeling)
2.      Intense multilayered hearing of "silence" as particles
3.      Flows in the carpet arise, flows in the walls, flows wherever I look (formations)
4.      Trying to locate sense of self watching, failing
5.      Several feelings of rapid, momentary dislocation
6.      Intimacy with the flowing arises
7.      Fear arises
8.      Remembering to investigate fear
9.      Fear alternates with strange rapture
10.    Thought arises that I want and expect stream entry but am afraid of cessation
11.    Mild nausea arises (physical)
12.    Expansive feeling of love arises, nausea vanishes
13.    Surprise, wonder blooms
14.    Resolve formally to reach stream entry as soon as possible [this was the first and only time I've resolved this.]
15.    Bell and stop

Friday, August 8, at a Lunchtime Group Sit at Work (30 Minutes)

The event happened unexpectedly, right after the moment that an intensely clear realization arose about the now slowed-down, almost rhythmic formations I was watching arise and pass away clearly, from beginning to gone. What I call formations are like 3D "blooms." And their passing away is like a concave, inverted bloom that is blank at center--even black, to tell the truth. They are big and constantly fluxing and flowing. Normally they are moving so constantly that I cannot catch the instant of arising or the instant of "gone." Moreover, one tend to overlap another, so this fact makes seeing specific beginnings and endings hard (impossible till this day).

The realization was pre-verbal, but the way I would put it now is that the "gone" I could suddenly watch is actually still a kind of arising, and the reason that it is so is that there is, or was, the frame of reference that was the "real" arising. As far as I can tell, this crystal clear realization ushered me into a kind of collapse of duality.

As soon as I realized that "gone" wasn't actually GONE gone, absolute discontinuity! So I remember up to that moment, and then I remember back to what it was like when reality was coming back online. And that was really the most earth-shattering moment--the rebooting of the world: During those few moments, "I" was dislocated into everything around me, with nothing on "my" side, no center, no sense of within-body or location-grounding. "I" was gone!

I knew something transformative was happening, or had happend. I remembered to try to see clearly.There was this hard-to-describe quality that was visual, I think (but I'm not absolutely sure I was physically seeing), and the closest I can come to describing it is to point to what happens in planetarium shows or movies when they are trying to convey warp speed through the stars, and the stars turn into whiteness bleared out into bright white lines. The difference in this case was that there was no contrasting darkness or outer space background, so I'm not even positive it was visual apprehension of white lines at all. If so, my sense was of white-on-white/clear. I guess sometimes experiences are so unusual that all we can do is grab onto metaphors for them. At any rate, there was a quality of ZOOM! and radical dislocation, or diffusion, of center and ground--no "this" side. I now understand, "In the seeing, only the seen. . . ."

Immediately, and to my confusion, the meditation bell rang. And the oddest thing then was that I was almost paralyzed. I couldn't stop meditating, even when I finally rose, stunned, and we walked upstairs to the cafe and ate! 

The "door" was emptiness, with impermance secondary. I'm not sure why I think this; maybe it was the other way around.

Afterglow

Thereafter, I felt different--and not subtlely different, but very different. Specifically, I feel noticeably less concentrated/localized within the boundaries of my body and immediate reach. I flow out further into the far off. Saturday I experienced cycling sensations of being diffused into all that surrounds me, feeling intense gratitude and weepy love for everyone (and telling them), and feeling a little bit scared/queasy at the sheer intensity of whatever has happened. At the restaurant I ate in Saturday, I could distinctly hear all the voices and conversations at once, individually, hearing each so acutely that "I" was there in the sound, not where I usually am, in me. It is hard to describe, but something is very, very different now.

I had a migraine headache all Saturday and most of Sunday. I sat only about 25 minutes Sunday night and again Monday night--but was itching, restless, aching, and unable to see even vibrations that I always do, both times. So I started to feel doubt. I guess I assumed one stayed in EQ for a bit after SE. Whatever the event was, after 2 days of afterglow, it kicked me out of EQ. However, the diffused sense of "me" remains. If this was not SE, it was a stunningly convincing imitation--especially given that my "progress" through the stages to that point was "by the book" and I have zero doubt that I was in High EQ.

It looks like you've probably gotten stream-entry. See if you can call up a fruition when you're meditating.  If you can't call one up, then watch out for ones that might happen spontaneously  Don't get too obsessed about this if you can't get one or one doesn't come up.  See if you can call them up in a relaxed un-obsessed way.     

Also look for A&P. Sometimes it is more noticable than the fruition/cessation. You might see flashes of lights or get energetic tingles.

Also see if you have better access to the jhanas. Intend to cultivate manic pleasure, then sunbathing tranquility, then cool bliss, then spaciousness. The cool bliss sensations may come easiest, since cycling takes you back to the A&P --- which coorrelates to the third jhana.

Congradulations! Being around equanimity myself, hearing your story is very encouraging!

Congats! (claps with one hand)
Sounds pretty textbook....you did read the textbook though...
May I reccomend making a new strong resolution to move thru the Nanas and get to cessasion again....They are amazingly fun for quite a while...until the newness fades.
This is something I recommend doing....Panoramic Awareness; unfocused awareness of the entire visual field...add a little awe feeling to it. I wish I had practiced the Panoramic Awareness more because when it
faded I really missed it a bunch. At second path it came back and I
could with sustained effort reside in it. At third path it is your
baseline state until you add thinking layers to it which obscures it,
until you let go of thinking again.
You are in the honeymoon phase now and it lasts for most people about month or so and then the energetic intensity wears off and you get so used to the new state that everything calms down to your new baseline "normal". Enjoy the intensity now.
Play around while the intensity lasts and maybe explore the jhanas a bit....resolutions/intentions have much power to them right now too.
Have fun!
~D

Thanks--will do. I think it was your idea to make a formal resolution to meet SE--which I read on someone else's thread and then tried. Wow, that worked quickly! I guess I need to resolve more often!

Cheers,
Jenny

I too have been feeling like an imposter--particularly since I really put in very little total time on the cushion. I think I just have leaky boundaries, openness to alterned states and weird happenings, for whatever reason. But I also feel that my Dark Nights were particularly horrific. I guess there is no correlation between horror of DN and speed to SE, though. 

Good--you can do it! Or something can if you just stay with it. I read what seemed like contradictory advice: to make strong resolutions, and to let whatever happens happen without obsessing. I did both in the end. I made the resolution the night before, a strong welling up of verbalized intent and faith, but after that, in meditation itself, I relaxed and didn't strain toward SE--in fact, it seems that it won't occur unless you are really geniunely focused on the formations/equanimity and not on anticipating SE. Or--that's how it seemed to be for me, anyway. 

May you reach SE soon!

Yes, last night again I did too short of a sit, but I did have the vibrations, a few sparkles, and then nausea and fear. So maybe this is a bit of cycling. 

That is a really helpful way of describing the jhanas! I will have to remember that.

So a couple of times I've had momentary feelings of spinning and falling out a split second, but there was no discernible bliss wave or anything dramatic like the event from Friday. I'll keep looking. I need a longer sit, I think--so I need to stop spending all night on the DhO!

Okay, well, still no sign yet of another fruition. I've been tired in the evening so doing short sits, but sleeping little (kind of wired) and seeing flashing images in my minds eye when I try to sleep, which is why I'm still up. I do see fine vibrations when I sit and just a few sparkles during here and there (not nearly as dramatic as last year's A&P), followed by mild nausea, oddly enough.

The really standout thing in the past few sits, though, has been twitching and trembling--also a bit of swaying, but I had that swaying thing first emerge in low EQ, too. Tonight my left elbow and upper arm muscles twitched involuntarily (fasiculations) pretty much the whole sit, which was very distracting. It also feels like my eyelids are not so much twitching as just prone to fluttering. Really weird.

Return of high sex drive and heady exuberance and excitement too high to sleep suggests to me that I am generally hanging out in A&P currently. The nausea thing is like Disgust. The rest, if there, is vague.

Actually, one of my personal pet theories is that greater suffering, DN or otherwise, can lead to faster enlightenment. Dipa Ma got stream entry after only six days on retreat. This was after losing her infant son and her husband, and laying bedridden for quite a long time with hypertension and depression. Her fast progress, I suspect, occurred simply because she had a deep understanding of suffering.

I made it all the way up to the 11th nana without knowing what the progress of insight was or what was happening. My only form of spiritual practice was keeping a dream journal, almost no meditation at all. I thought I had developed some kind of mental illness. Fortunately I picked up MCTB and it all fell into place.

It's possible that you had a near miss. These can really seem like SE, but there isn't the sense of cycling, the instant access to A&P, the clearer and easier jhanas. One of those things should be more noticeable, but not necessarily all of them. My "review" period post stream entry didn't have clear fruitions as a part of the cycling. What stood out for me was the super easy access to A&P like vibrations and lights and then snapshots of the dukka nanas which flew by almost in the background, covered by a thick third jhana cool bliss. Fruition was barely noticible, what was more noticeable was being back in the A&P.
At a certain point, I felt like a beginner again (what had I achieved? wasn't this the same as before? maybe there is more access to pleasurable sensations and concentration states, but so what?). That was the beginning of second path. Second path is just doing it again... but it can be confusing because jhanas start arising more easily, which makes perception weird, which makes mapping weird... unless you are one of the folks that has very clear jhanas, in which case those can be use as a centerpiece of practice.

No worries Jen, you have a good practice, keep enjoying, keep going.

Hi, X X, thank you for following me through this phase and advising.

Here is what I am noticing:

• Feeling "different" from the way I felt before the event--this is constant, so far "permanent"; specifically, my former "boundaries" seem diffused and extended into the environment, with none of the former frequent sensations of chest/heart contraction around emotional responses formerly identified with as "myself."
• 99% of the time I no longer feel the need to convince others of my views, but when I do feel the need to discuss then the right words flow out of me as if I'm channeling a prepackaged perfected message.
• I'm no longer ruminating and worrying continually--and I'm normally a very anxious worrywort.
• I completely stopped posting on Facebook, which formerly was an addiction. I have no draw whatsoever to idle chatter.
• I'm very aware of an acute sense of hearing--this is very weird, especially considering that I'm a bit hard of hearing normally. I think that maybe this is just the auditory dimension of Number 1. In any crowd--restaurant, cafe at lunch--I can hear each voice of other people distinctly, such that it seems I'm more located in the surround-sound than I am in my body. This is not subtle.
• At a macro level of cycling, I'm defininitely back in the A&P; I'm exuberant in that almost hypomanic way that A&P was last year, with intense faith in the dharma, need for very little sleep (3 or 4 hours!), feeling like I can sit all night, and seeing/hearing/feeling fine fast vibration with a few lights. My A&P last year was characterized in part by frequent lucid dreaming that stopped after the A&P Event. Last night--lucid dreaming involving flying through space. Also trembling and twitching during sits.
• As of last night's sit, incredible concentration states--like nothing I've ever experienced. No discursive thoughts arise at all. The clarity is amazing. Normally I find it difficult or impossible to really stabilize these states because I have a tendency to see the 3Cs and am drawn to them. But last night, when I tried to do insight practice, it was as if I was pulled into these jhana states instead, regardless of what I intended. Something is telling me to explore these states right now, but MCTB advises waiting until after mastery of the insight stages per Review. Any thoughts/advice?

In short, I still do not believe that last Friday was near miss--it was just too clearly a cessation and fruition, with a mind shift that followed and so far hasn't reversed or waned one iota. Maybe I'm a outlier to Daniel's assertion in MCTB that SE must be followed within one week by another fruition. Anyway, I have another sit today at lunchtime, so the week isn't quite over yet!

[EDITED for a few typos and to add that lucid dreaming has returned after a year--A&P.]

[EDITED again to add in the trembling during meditation--just read on one of Daniel's tables that this is A&P]

To me it sounds like you got it.  People often feel like the brain goes into over-drive because of the lack of aversion.  I would still continue practicing as you did before without goal orientation (other than the goal of being aware of what is) and keep developing other areas of your practice.  If jhanas are easy access then I would continue developing them because they are useful in blocking hindrances.  Some people like to go as far as they can with the jhanas and then let go all efforting and have a fruition.  By accessing all jhanas you can become disenchanted with all of them and gain deeper equanimity. 

Keep playing and if you can get another fruition hopefully you can develop the skill to call them up whenever you want to.  Fruitions wean you further and that's the value of them.  3rd path will be to get rid of desire and ill-will which sounds like a difficult area because you would have to be completely honest about your desires and aversions as you continue on.  Then there's Daniel's book and his opinions on emotional perfection models.  Use right effort to guide your choices which will be as important as anything else you do in life because even monks with high attainments make huge blunders.

http://integrateddaniel.info/podcasts-and-videos/
The Hurricane Ranch talks includes Hokai Sobol's description of developing concentration then adding a watcher and watch all of that vibrating.

Good luck!

Welcome home, Jen!

Does the following Adyashanti quote make sense to you?

'Make no mistake about it- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true'

If so, consider reading his "The End Of Your World" sooner rather than later. It's useful for orienting yourself to your new baseline, and what you might expect in the days, months, and years ahead of you. 

Jen, I agree, likely SE. The incredible increase in access to jhanas is a tell-tale sign. That's what happened to me to, big increase in jhana but no noticeable post SE fruitions.

At this point, you might want to explore "meditation doing you instead of you doing meditation". Let your mind go where it wants to. Loosen up the reins and let the horse run and enjoy. You might begin to notice how one jhana flows into the other, how the eyes and sense of space change as the jhanas change. It's interesting. And you don't need to do anything, just let your mind/body adjust as it wants to.

Thanks! I sent the sample of this book to my Kindle. 

Hey, Richard, thanks.

Everyone, I'm a little confused about something: In this big table of Daniel's, it looks like "fruition" is the cessation ("Nirvana" in the table). And MCTB decribes in detail the experience of the possible "doors" leading up to the cessation. Okay, well, my experience wasn't like any of that: The weird experience was after the cessation, not before it (ie, "three doors"). It was when reality was starting back up, not when cessation was being approached.

The sequence was (1) realization during formations, (2) cessation, and then (3) bizarre experience of zoom and radical dislocation of center/self, which never fully resolved. If I'm looking for subsequent "fruitions," then I guess I ought to understand what I'm looking for, huh? So am I looking for the "three doors" experience, followed by cessation, followed by just a little bliss wave?

Maybe the reason that I'm not picking up on subsequent fruitions is because I've been looking for that wild startup after the cessation. By the way, I do not recall any "bliss wave" after the first experience, either. It was just rad, not blissfull.

Momentary little blip-outs and bliss recoveries seem like little things that can and do happen during any pre-path sit. So help me understand how to know.

http://static.squarespace.com/static/5037f52d84ae1e87f694cfda/t/5055922624acbaa64592c1c3/1347785254496/

I mean, wow! A little "blip" and then a bit of bliss is a fruition? Really? That sort of incident seems like it could be anything, or nothing at all, so this news is anticlimatic, to say the least. What I experienced a week ago on reboot was being and yet being gone, radically dislocated, no body, no centralized "mind," no "this side"--way, way, way more dramatic than a little blip out and nice bliss rise! And this was after the cessation, not before, when reality was kicking back in. No wonder I've miss these so-called ensie-weensie fruitions!

I guess I won't worry about looking for those little things, if that is all they present as. I have the baseline shift for sure, so I guess that is what matters.

X X,

I agree that I need to loosen up. Last night I had a sit in which I was turbulent and wound up. I'm looking too hard for "signs" of fruition. Tom Tom advised me to look for the fruitions in an unobsessed way. I'm trying to figure out how that works! 

Really great descriptions in here. Fascinating and motivational stuff. Congrats on having it happen. I feel like I keep inching closer and closer and reading this thread further normalizes stream entry for me. Especially since it took you a year. Its been three for me and Im clearly reaching EQ each day and am enjoying investigation more and more, sometimes when im in the DN even. Fun thread!

Great! Best wishes, Alex. I was quite surprised that it happened, even though I had been in EQ for a couple of months, finally getting to High EQ for the first time (instead of slipping back down after Low EQ). It is true what people say: the SE even happens during moments when you aren't looking for it, though resolutions to get it the night beforehand obviously seemed to help.