Dependent Arising: Difficulty with Sensations

[altj1aMember]

I am at stage 8. Before I began reading TMI I had meditated in zendos and at home. I can do the practices in Momentary Concentration, redistributing alternating attention, and Choiceless Attention. However, I am stuck with the Meditation on Dependent Arising, which is described thus: “In this meditation, you follow mental events as they occur in sequence. Specifically, consciousness of a sensation or thought (contact) is followed by an affective response (feeling), leading to desire or aversion (craving), then to the arising of an intention to act (“ becoming”), and finally to the action itself (“ birth”).”

Sensations move too fast for me to discriminate each of the five events. I can discriminate the beginning, which seems identical with the end of the prior sensation, and sometimes craving, but that is all. If I slow the sensations down it seems I begin conceptualizing them. I have searched on the web and, as an example, Daniel Ingram advises noticing sensations as vibrations until the gaps are seen in them. That I may be able to do, but as for the five events so far no good. I don’t feel I can move on until I have mastered discriminating the five events.

I have been working for days on them. I have asked, Am I getting ahead of myself? It does not seem so. I test myself against the criteria Culadasa sets for each practice and stage and keep at it until convinced all fits his descriptions.

As for his Meditation on Dependent Arising, anybody been there, done that? Do I need to retrace my steps?

[Meshe MooetteMember]

Good morning!

We are lucky in that the implications of this meditation are clearly spelled out in various ways depending on the teaching lineage. While it accomplishes the goal of enhancing metacognitive awareness of mental processes, it deep value is that it can lead to insight experience.

Keep in mind that this meditation involves seeing the how “things” arise, and the suffering that is engendered through a personal self relating to objects as having a separate independent nature. So, great benefit and insight can come from a “chunkier” level of this meditation (not trying to get so deeply into every single sensation and seeing the links arise for each). Or simply choosing to start with obvious “triggers” of craving or aversion.

For example: image of “my lover” with another woman arises. (contact)
feeling response arises (-)
aversion arises
impulse to say something (becoming)
speech (birth)

Plus, it may be helpful to not look at it quite so linearly. But like a ball of con-fused things. The sensation may be fused with the affective feeling, but while resting with the sensation, there is a dawning awareness that in the feeling is just the feeling.

Looking forward to hearing from others on this topic!
_______________________________

From Culadasa’s writing on the subject:
Slide 10:
The Subtle Implications of Dependent Arising:
1. Nothing stands outside of cause and effect.
Therefore, anything that appears to be “supernatural” or “magic” only appears that way because
we don’t fully understand the causes. The laws of causality are never violated.
2. All that arises due to causes and conditions must also pass away.
Everything, therefore, is impermanent.
3. Anything that arises does so in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions.
Each individual thing or event is the nexus of a massive causal convergence.
4. Causes and effects always arise together.
The arising and passing away of separate “things” is an illusion. There is just a single, continuous
process.
5. Everything, everywhere is causally interconnected.
Absolutely everything and everyone is an interpenetrating, inseparable part of a single, indivisible,
causally interdependent whole, best conceived of as a process.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by  Meshe Mooette.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by  Meshe Mooette.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by  Meshe Mooette.

[altj1aMember]

Thank you for that explanation, which got me to looking further. I found this in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s book The Shape of Suffering: A Study of Dependent Co-Arising:

“The upshot of [Chapter Three] is that a person aiming to put an end to suffering does not need to know all the ins and outs of dependent co-arising, because the practice can be completed by focusing on any one of its component factors. Once that one factor is understood, that understanding will spread to the other factors as well. Still,an appreciation of the complexity of dependent co-arising helps to explain why this is so.”

Available in pdf here: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/shapeofsuffering.pdf

I appreciate that you gave me a new approach. It was clear and to the point.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by  altj1a.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by  altj1a.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by  altj1a.

[Anonymous]

Meshe and altj1a,

I want to thank you for this very interesting discussion.

Colleen

[altj1aMember]

Re, Stage 8, Metacognitive Awareness with Meditation on Dependent Arising.

I have not been able to apply “chunkier” but do appreciate your advice. At this stage sensations mainly arise (perhaps it is different for others) and with only occasional thoughts (you suggest thoughts) and images.

I have found help with sensations. Daniel Ingram in MCTB wrote that one recalls the sensation as a resonance. He says this: ” The mind takes a crude impression of the object, and that is what we can think about, remember and process. Then there may be a thought or an image that arises and passes, and then, if the mind is stable, another physical pulse. Each one of these arises and vanishes completely before the other begins, so it is extremely possible to sort out which is which with a stable mind dedicated to consistent precision and to not being lost in stories. This means that the instant you have experienced something, you know that it isn’t there any more, and whatever is there is a new sensation that will be gone in an instant.”

That explanation has enabled my investigation. Because we can “sort out which is which,” we can recall the memory at a second remove. In recalling it we can tease it apart.

Then there is the Buddha’s, “Deep, indeed is this dependent origination. It is through not understanding and penetrating it that people become entangled like a tangled ball of threads.” (Long Discourse No. 15) Of that, I read this by Gil Fronsdal (Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California and Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, California. Short URL https://goo.gl/iqPPkm): “The task of mindful investigation is to discover some of the individual threads and the connections between them. It then becomes possible to begin unraveling the tangled ball of suffering. Because of the way they are all intertwined, loosening any one thread loosens the rest.”

Investigating the full sequence seemingly is prescribed in that Stage 8 section (“you follow mental events as they occur in sequence”) but here is an alternative if undoing one thread loosens the rest.

Comments anybody?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by  altj1a.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by  altj1a.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by  altj1a.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by  altj1a.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by  altj1a.
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[Meshe MooetteMember]

Good morning!

We discussed this In our class yesterday, here’s a summary:

In the meditation on dependant arising both awareness and attention are working together- high state of mindfulness- observing rather than analyzing.

To the degree that the meditator may need or want to analyze this, they would wait and do it afterwards.

They are watching the process. what their attention is doing, is following the process. what awareness is doing is guiding attention in the process. The relationship of things to each other is a kind of information that awareness is very good at detecting, whereas attention makes inappropriate and overly simple connections between diverse objects.

The is the kind of investigating that a naturalist does- paying attention to behaviour by just taking in the information through observation. Then the relationships, the links between all these pieces of information begin to emerge. Once they begin to emerge, then it’s possible to analyze and describe it.

[altj1aMember]

Meshe,

The naturalist metaphor is one to keep in mind. The post-facto discriminating accords with what I have discovered and as yet am discovering. The beginnings and endings of A & P’s are bound up together, as it seems are the interim “sequences” as well as the contingent dependencies. They arise out of nowhere (emptiness) and fall back into it. Scary, that.

Thank you for your response. I appreciate your clear-cut pointers and your support.

John

[Meshe MooetteMember]

Scary sounds like incomplete integration of insight experience =) (aka dark night). I’ve been through my share of that. The experience of wonder started to arise when insight into selflessness deepened-

TMI’s Appendix F has been a huge support in putting “scary insight experience” into perspective.

yours,

meshe

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