[CheeseMember]

Hello all,

Thanks so much for your responses.

Ivan, I think I understand much better now. I have before had experiences where I felt physical pain but could not discern any mental resistance. The way I would put it is just “perfection of the present”. Like there’s nothing that needs to be changed, even if it’s “uncomfortable”. This happened the most strongly with physical pain during a strong determination sit on a Goenka retreat. In fact, ever since then I’ve been able to sit for much longer periods, and physical discomfort is not the limiting factor it used to be.

Blake, he mentions it in the Buddha at the Gas Pump interview he did (I don’t want to look through it to find the exact point, since this doesn’t seem like a problem anymore, see update below). In any case, as I mentioned before, it’s really not clear what people mean when they say “loss of emotion”, since they still seemingly manifest emotion. As far as divine abodes, I will do an experiment with them for a week or so and see how it goes, as an addition to my regular sit of one hour.

Malte, thanks for the Adyashanti recommendation. I’ve found him very helpful already, mostly just watching videos of his.

Wiley, luckily I don’t think anything like that is going on. Lots of meaningful personal relationships (hence the concern behind my question), high conventional success (or at least on track for that), etc. In fact I’ve pored over the DSM-V at previous times of particular dark-nighty-ness and been quite reassured of my sanity. The primary thing to note about this sort of stuff (i.e. dark-nighty-ness) for me at least, is that it’s very temporary and infrequent, and doesn’t derail my life at all (beyond the general tone of angst which is imparted), which basically disqualifies it from any sort of clinical diagnosis immediately.

An update:
With the update in my view, namely with the combination of the two arrows metaphor and my reflection on previous periods of no (well probably just very much reduced) second arrow, this doesn’t seem like a problem. I really have no clue what will happen to “emotion”, but I am sufficiently reassured that it won’t turn me into a zombie unless I let it, and I won’t. Especially since, as others mentioned, lots of seemingly awakened people don’t seem like zombies at all. What I think was happening was that I was reacting to a concept I was getting, which was that awakening was like being a steady “observer” far back and removed from experience in a way that feels isolated, apart, separate, whatever. Basically a terrible duality. When I realized that was what was happening, I simply applied mindfulness to it and it disappeared. It has mostly stayed away, but the prospect of it returning isn’t particularly problematic either. One thing I’ve noticed is that sitting is just really great. I look forward to it every day, and really appreciate the simplicity and straightforwardness of it.

Recently, outside of sitting, I’ve sometimes noticed myself very near or even in this state where the present is just “perfect”. It seems to be really correlated with the attenuation of my normal very goal-oriented behavior (I took a while responding because I had the GRE, as an example). It’s like the world is just shimmering and resplendent. The way this differs from tuning into the insight I mentioned before is subtle, but basically it involves a much more emotion-oriented shifting than a purely perceptual event. Not sure if I’m on the right track here but it “feels right”. Anyways as a method of inducing this more I have been taking a break on dhamma learning, discussion of meditation, really all the mental thought oriented stuff I had been doing before. It seems to just be causing agony at its worst, and at best simply distracting from this thing I think I’m very close to: just engaging in the present without any “designs” beyond curiosity and joy. I’m not going to stop sitting, but I will probably take a break from posting on here. I’m really enjoying things like just driving without a destination and enjoying the experience. Also going exploring on trails near my house. Working on doing nothing. It seems like I always need a “task” so I want to see about being “taskless”. I suspect the brahma viharas will fit in nicely with this stuff, so I’m going to do the week long experiment I mentioned above.

Cheers,
Cheese

[CheeseMember]

Hello Ivan,

Thanks for your thoughtful responses. I especially liked the quote you sent. One of the most satisfying things for me has been keeping track of my level of understanding of various poetry like the Tao Te Ching and that of Ryokan, great to add that to the repertoire. As far as the recorded talks, I skimmed through the ones in the “What is Enlightenment?” series and surprisingly didn’t find anything about the loss of emotion claims (I think because that is not explicitly described in the ten fetters model on which that discussion was founded). I will try and go through the “Meditation and Insight” ones at some point soon though.

I guess my main question at this point is how *absolute* the experience really is. I understand that the texts say things in specific and absolute terms. But in terms of plausibility alone I find the perspective of Daniel Ingram much more satisfactory: basically, yes emotions get easier (and are perceived more as “energy” which dissipates quickly like you mentioned) and there is a “type” of suffering that is destroyed, but “you” (here I mean the organism or whatever) can still get angry, sad, whatever given sufficient stimulus. Indeed, I am quite confident that things such as the fight or flight response can’t be overridden by meditation (and why would you want them to be?). If you say that when my mom dies I won’t “feel sadness” in some sense congruent with what Daniel Ingram is saying, that seems both plausible and desirable to me. If, however, you mean that there just will be no “reaction” to the news, I’ll just keep sipping coffee and breathing or whatever, that obviously seems very undesirable (I would consider that zombie behavior).

Similarly, how absolutely do you mean the “no suffering” thing? It is my understanding that suffering wasn’t completely eliminated until death according to doctrine.

As for why I got into meditation, it was because I wanted to see deeply into life. I wanted to know it well at every level really, from scientific descriptions of external reality down to the subtlest strata of internal reality (I now realize even my motivation was dualistic… *facepalm*). It was not motivated much by suffering, beyond the vague idea that it sounded like getting good at jhanas would be really worth my time.

To your question: I don’t think I am ready, given my current doubts. If I could have some guarantee that it wouldn’t hurt my loved ones then I think I would be. Currently I am rationalizing that I can (a) always turn back (Jeffrey Martin says people have done that) and (b) it’s not like I’m going to get to 4th path anytime soon which means I can always quit if I get somewhere I prefer and (c) the practices that are being taught seem like inherently worthwhile things, so I doubt they could really lead to terrible results.

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