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  • #2351

    neko
    Member

    Sorry for bringing up this defunct thread, but it has been brought to my attention that what I wrote above:

    Why do overly expensive private consultations make this a cult?

    sounds like an unfaithful representation of Samuel’s original concerns, which was that others might think that this is a cult. I am sorry, because I understand that having one’s point of view misrepresented can be quite frustrating. I was assuming that, from the context, it would be clear that I was referring to the (potential) opinions of Samuel’s friends, and not his own. I certainly did not mean to strawman, but, with hindsight, I realise that what I wrote was unclear, and I would like to apologise to Samuel.

    Have a great day everyone!

    neko

    #2336

    neko
    Member

    Allen, I’ll go straight to the point: Just do TMI. Having tried both approaches, and talked with people who practice Goenka-style exclusively, TMI is much better from practically every point of view. More complete, more healthy, less dogmatic, more scientific, more pleasant, more fun, less dark-night-inducing, more conducive to the Big E. My 0.02€ worth of opinion.

    #2096

    neko
    Member

    Now, back to practice. Ivan adds:

    The Jhana meditations are much more fixed concentration where thoughts have been temporary suppressed. It is like diving deep into a lake. First you start on the surface, where there is much activity, and slowly dive down, deeper and deeper…..

    Meditation on the mind/fusing of attention/awareness if more like you take off up out of the lake, the lake disappears, and your vantage point becomes a 360 sphere, where anything is permitted to move and dance in that space.

    I agree with these metaphorical descriptions, and they generally match my experience. One point of doubt on this topic is the following. The way you describe stage 9 is also compatible with:

    – How I experience the 11th Nana (Equanimity) when I do dry insight practices, for example Mahasi noting, or Goenka body scanning.

    – The way I used to experience soft 4th jhana when I practiced the jhanas MCTB-style.

    So my next question is: When you are in 4th jhana (whole-body, pleasure, luminous, your pick), is the way your attention is working more comparable to your first paragraph, to your second paragraph, or to something completely different?

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by  neko.
    • This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by  neko.
    #2095

    neko
    Member

    [edited out. not useful]

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by  neko.
    #2088

    neko
    Member

    Hello Michael, thanks for your reply!

    I think two different topics got mixed up a bit: dullness on the one hand (gross and subtle, stages 4-6) and what happens to attention during higher stages of concentration (2nd jhana, stage 9). Of course it is extremely important not to mix up the two things, because it can be extremely easy to confuse dullness with high concentration states, for a bunch of reasons, including:

    * The bliss of dullness feels very much like sukha.

    * The loss of metacognitive and introspective awareness makes us prone to fool ourselves as to what is going on.

    * “Blank mind moments”, which are the definitory characteristic of dullness, are easily mistaken for what happens to attention in 2nd jhana, with the dropping away of vitakka and vicara.

    Now I am reasonably confident that, during a sit, I am skilled enough and honest enough with myself to be able to know whether what I have been going through is dullness or a high concentration state. (Or both in different portions of the sit.)

    ——-

    When it comes to dullness, I am using the techniques from TMI: The antidotes, increasing introspective, extrospective and metacognitive awareness, and giving more stuff to do to my attention, both spatially (increasing the scope of my focus), temporally (increasing the “framerate” or time-resolution of my attention), and sensitivity-ly (is that even a word? :D). In addition, like T. suggested, I am trying new practices to keep myself interested and switch things around a bit. It’s interesting that the fundamental tips from TMI can be adapted to most practices, so I am also learning some additional chops. “Life quality” is in check. I get enough sleep at night, and healthy daily doses of non-strenuous exercise (walking, yoga, a 2km jog, stuff like that). Overall I am quite optimistic about the prospect and satisfied with the results so far.

    ——-

    I was wondering if anyone has any comments on the topic that I put up on top as the “subject” of this thread: The difference between attention fusing with awareness in Stage 9 and attention dropping in 2nd jhana. Let me quote the two relevant passages from TMI:

    Along with unification, two jhāna factors are present: meditative joy (pīti), and bodily pleasure and/or happiness (sukha). Since unification of mind has eliminated potential distractions, directed and sustained attention (vitakka and vicara) are no longer part of the absorption. In other words, there may be no moments of attention at all, particularly with the deeper forms of 2nd jhāna. Moments of introspective awareness continue and have as their objects the mental state of joy and feelings of bodily pleasure and/or happiness.

    Whether you start with the attention focused on the Still Point or the breath, awareness should be almost entirely metacognitive. When you expand the scope of attention until it includes everything in awareness, the entire field of conscious awareness is the focus of attention. The object of meditation is the mind itself, and the distinction between attention and awareness disappears.

    The question is: How are the two phenomena different from one another? I have a few theories and ideas based on my own practice, but since I have come to TMI after practicing the jhānas in a slightly different style*, I would like to hear the opinion of someone who practices in this tradition.

    Any thoughts on this?

    neko

    ________

    (*) Specifically, if you are interested, Ingram – style jhāna practice. There are some minor, but relevant differences between how I experience the jhānas (very much in line with how Daniel describes them) and how they are decribed in TMI. 2nd jhāna and 3rd jhāna in particular have some subtle discrepancies, related to exactly how vitakka and vicara drop away, when, and what those words mean. I am training myself to develop more Culadasa-style jhānas. This distinction is related to footnote 32 to the second luminous jhāna:

    It is possible, however, to experience a kind of intermediate jhāna, halfway between 1st and 2nd. In this case, just as with the whole-body jhānas, attention to the meditation object continues past 1st jhāna. In other words, the nimitta continues to be an object of exclusive attention, although less prominent, since conscious experience is dominated by peripheral awareness. The Theravadin commentaries call this vicara without vitakka.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by  neko.
    #2077

    neko
    Member

    Hello Samuel!

    Premise: I am in no way associated with Culadasa or this community, except for the fact that I have signed up for this forum.

    Three questions:

    1) Why do overly expensive private consultations make this a cult? If a famous musician charges 1000$ for a private concert is he founding a cult? What if a medic charges that much for his services? Or an engineer?

    2) Assuming for a moment this is a cult, when and how did you join it?

    3) Again assuming this is a cult and you joined it, how does having joined this cult affect your life?

    Practice well!

    neko

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by  neko.
    • This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by  neko.
    #2076

    neko
    Member

    Hey Mr. T, thanks for your reply!

    Dullness is, I agree, the central issue for me right now, and I have made it the central focus of my practice. I have almost vowed not to enter jhana anymore until I have defeated it (though I am not very rigid with vows). So eyes open, energise continuously, increase peripheral awareness to the max, increase continuous introspective awareness to the max. I will try *anything* at this point. Attention on the nostrils is horrible from this point of view, and it gives me dullness very, very fast.

    Sessions with eyes open while powering up awareness feel very satisfactory and productive. My practice is kind of do-nothing-ish, within the boundaries of fighting dullness. Attention goes where it needs to, in particular to areas in mind-space that feel dull or fuzzy, to shine some light there. You could say that I am meditating on dullness, which you might even see as some form of meditating on the mind (an advanced technique) but taking as an object the fact that I suck at controlling dulness (a beginner’s problem). More on this below.

    Piti is, I feel, not a great diagnostic tool with me, because I have located the “piti switch” and I can turn it on at will. I get what looks like pervading piti (pleasure / energy / vibrations buzzing in the body and the space around it) although it is not always so intense. Which brings me to another question: Culadasa seems to imply that the grades of piti are grades of increasing intensity and different type and pacification/unification at the same time. This is not necessarily my experience. I would actually grade piti on three axes: intensity, type (kriyas, wavelike, surging, showering, pervasive), and pacification (have the “ordinary” bodily sensations vanished?). On this scale, I would say that I can at will turn on:

    * intensity -> 2 or 3 out of 5

    * type: surging or pervasive. (kriyas, wavelike and showering happens spontaneously, or the do not)

    * pacification/unification -> I cannot turn it on / off at will, it takes some work. If I am not dull, a few minutes I would say. If I am dull, yes, of course it is extremely easy to be pacified, but the loss in clarity does not qualify as unification.

    Which brings me to “parts which have progressed more”. It seems to me lately these days that TMI tends to overgeneralise progress into stages. I don’t mean it is generally a bad thing, his model probably applies to over 90% of practitioners. But for me, I cannot place myself in one specific stage for the life of me.

    I don’t know how often it happens, but it seems quite possible to have certain skills from advanced stages while having problems from lower stages. For example, in my daily life these days I have constant, powerful mindfulness throughout my daily activities. Very high clarity and concentration, pretty good equanimity too. It happens very rarely that I get lost in the “content” of my experience without being aware of it, even in daily life. This looks like stuff from stage 10 practice(!) (If I am not bullshitting myself).

    But on-cushion I get strong dullness. Stage 4 stuff — of course with advanced skills in the mix. I do not get startled by sounds at all, I don’t slouch, from the outside I look perfectly alert. But basically I am in a very deep mindful dullness. Almost like lucid dreamless sleep, if I let myself go there.

    Thanks again for your reply, see you IRL some time 🙂

    #1802

    neko
    Member

    What do you mean by ‘natural state’

    The natural state is a technical term from Mahamudra. I am not a Mahamudra expert in any sense of the word, so I will try to explain this from the point of view of my very limited understanding.

    Some background: Mahamudra practice is roughly divided into sections:
    0) preliminaries.
    1) First yoga, Mahamudra shamatha.
    2) Second yoga, Mahamudra vipasyana.
    3) Third yoga, Mahamudra shamatha-vipasyana.
    4) Fourth yoga, Nonmeditation.
    5) Post-enlightenment practices.

    The preliminaries include a bunch of stuff, including tantric practices, but the most important part is basically the material covered in TMI: the Asanga map, the nine stages of samadhi, and the jhanas. In the first yoga of mahamudra, the same path is described in terms of taking progressive objects of concentration, starting with material objects (like looking at a coloured disk) and proceeding to more “rarefied” objects.

    One way to describe the natural state is: It is the endpoint of Mahamudra-shamatha. Very roughly speaking, you could see it as the launching point from which one can start practicing Mahamudra vipasyana. Now since there is more than a bit of overlap between the Asanga map (TMI, technically part of the preliminaries) and the first yoga of Mahamudra (Mahamudra-shamatha), the late stages from TMI are also an adequate launching point to start doing Mahamudra-vipasyana, hence Culadasa’s description of the practice.

    I am noticing how things slide in and out of awareness, kind of like an ever-shifting puddle of consciousness.

    This is very good practice and I believe you are on the right track. It is the kind of thing you are told to look at in Mahamudra vipasyana. Looking at stuff like, how do perceptions and thoughts come into awareness? How do they slide out of it? Where do they come from? Where do they go to? What colour do thoughts have? What is the stuff they are made of? Is it the same stuff as the natural state, or different stuff? And so on.

    when doing this practice, it seems to currently make it ‘harder’ to experience the cessation events

    This does not surprise me. I get cessations easily when doing Theravada-style vipassana, but only occasionally when doing Mahamudra-style vipasyana.

    I wonder if the two practices are working against each other in any way?

    That’s a good question, and one I am not at all qualified to answer. 😀

    Currently when I get the cessation/frutions, it is often accompanied by some form of dullness and dreaminess that I’ve been trying to work on.

    Are you 100% sure they are cessations then? There’s a bunch of stuff you could be mistaking for cessations. Strong state shifts, formless realms (particularly so-called 7th and 8th jhanas), occasionally even just the Dissolution nana. Either way, Mahamudra strongly cautions meditators against practicing with dullness, lest they mix up the natural state with dreamy dullness.

    should I prioritise experiencing as many cessation/fruitions as possible (which would be in another practice at the moment) or keep going with this one…?

    This is up to you. It might be a good idea to work on one practice at a time… let’s say decide one, and keep at it for a few weeks or month at the least, before switching from one to another one. If you are familiar with MCTB, there is a lot of overlap between Daniel Ingram’s description of the higher paths (3rd and 4th) and stuff from Mahamudra. I am not sure what Culadasa thinks of Ingram’s description of the higher paths, or in general what the community here thinks about it, but it is a point of view you might want to take into account.

    In addition to the book I suggested above (“Clarifying the Natural State”), and Reggie Ray’s CDs, you might want to have a look at this:

    http://www.mahamudracenter.org/mmcmembermeditationguide.pdf

    Hope this helps 🙂

    neko

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by  neko.
    #1799

    neko
    Member

    My experience with Mahamudra (which meditating on the mind is a form of) is very limited, but sadness does not seem to me like an expected outcome of it…

    …This being said, I did experience it while practicing Mahamudra. In my case, it was a kind of reactivity to the idea of the self “going away”. Like missing an old friend. Longing. That area of loneliness. Does this ring a bell? Are you sure you are doing it after getting to Stage 9 in Culadasa’s map and stabilising it? I imagine yours might be a case of vipasyana / shamatha imbalance. Perhaps you haven’t realise the “natural state” well enough before starting to do the practice. Does this make sense?

    Either way, if you are into this kind of stuff, Reggie Ray’s series of CDs “Mahamudra for the Modern World” is a fantastic source. There is much more to it than Culadasa could condense in one page inside TMI, so you might want to have a look there. Also try Tashi Namgyal’s “Clarifying the Natural State”.

    Anyway, I repeat: I am NOT an expert in Mahamudra at all. I just felt like chiming in because what you wrote has rung a bell.

    #1748

    neko
    Member

    Ted: at stream entry, the keenness of your interest in stories drops a _lot_. So when something happens, a story doesn’t pop up to carry it.

    I would rather describe my experience as:

    1) Something happens.

    2) A story pops up to carry it.

    3) “I” do not feel embedded in / identified with the story. The story is seen with relative clarity as something arising out of causes and conditions.

    There is still reactivity (and hence suffering, which is a form of reactivity) but those are seen in a very different perspective, so they have a different flavour. In addition, with experience, new options open up to transmute the flavour of the experience, and hence the type of reaction.

    #1705

    neko
    Member

    Addendum. I realise I haven’t answered your question fully.

    Nelson Satoru I’m not sure I’m entirely clear I know what the answer is, or how to distinguish the second whole body jhana from the first pleasure jhana in terms of their phenomenology.

    About the difference between whole-body jhāna and pleasure jhāna: this is related to the object of concentration that you have used to enter the state. In the whole-body jhānas, you are focusing on the sensations of your whole body – specifically to those related to the “breath” or “energy” flowing through your body. In a pleasure jhāna, you would be focussing on pleasure (pīti/sukha) itself.

    So whole-body jhāna number 2 has pleasure (pīti/sukha) but no directed and sustained attention. It is self sustaining, pleasurable. Your attention is on the body sensations, your awareness is suffused by the pleasure, happiness, excitement of the jhāna.

    Pleasure jhāna number 1 also has pīti/sukha, but it feels less stable. You are still putting effort on keeping your attention directed and sustained on your object of concentration, which is pleasure itself.

    Back to personal experience: I would say that the kind of pīti/sukha of a 1st/2nd whole-body jhāna feels more embodied, like the name suggests, whereas the kind of pīti/sukha of 1st/2nd pleasure jhāna has a more “pervading” quality. This is related to the fact that in the whole-body practices your attention is on the body, so you perceive the body against the background of pleasure, or vice-versa. In the pleasure practices, on the other hand the body is unnecessary, so to speak. You usually start accessing a pleasure jhāna by “anchoring” to a pleasurable physical sensation in a specific part of your body, but since you are focusing on pleasure itself, rather than on the specifics of where in the body it arises, the body is kind of secondary to the whole process.

    This last part was mostly my personal experience, so I understand it may not be 100% in line with what Culadasa says in TMI.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by  neko.
    #1702

    neko
    Member

    Nelson Satoru: I’m not sure I’m entirely clear I know what the answer is, or how to distinguish the second whole body jhana from the first pleasure jhana in terms of their phenomenology.

    First jhāna (of any flavour) has vitakka, vicāra, pīti, sukha, ekaggatā.

    Second jhāna (of any flavour) has pīti, sukha, ekaggatā, but no vitakka and no vicāra.

    So the difference is in vitakka and vicāra, which are translated and interpreted differently by different meditation teachers, but which are for the most part rendered as directed (or applied) and sustained attention. These are dropped when moving from first to second jhāna. This means that second jhāna has a quality of “self-sustaining stability” that first jhāna lacks. First jhāna feels more effortful, second jhāna is much more unwavering, becasue you do not need to voluntarily direct and sustain your own attention. Apart from this, they are fairly similar. The bigger differences are when moving from second to third jhāna and from third to fourth jhāna (more on this below).

    In my personal experience, once I got skilled at entering a certain type of jhāna, first jhāna feels kind of like “the effort to enter second jhāna”. So for example, with the pleasure and whole-body jhānas, which are relatively easier for me, I find it natural to kind of skip directly to second jhāna and then abide there. Again, in my personal experience, if you re-enter first jhāna again and again, at one point it will progress naturally into second jhāna after getting used to it and feeling that you can let go of the effort to guard and control your attention to stay in it. This is very similar to the progress from Stage Seven to Stage Eight in TMI, again, in my experience.

    With the luminous jhānas, on the other hand, which are much more difficult for me, it is very hard for me to progress beyond first jhāna – or, on many days, attaining it in the first place. So I suspect that, if the difference between first and second jhāna is not clear to you, this means that *probably* your first jhāna is still not very stable, and you have not worked long enough on it, and you haven’t entered second jhāna yet, otherwise you would have noticed the difference.

    The differences between second, third and fourth jhānas are much more marked. They are related to how pīti (rapture) and sukha (bliss) are gradually replaced by upekkhā (equanimity). To borrow from the descriptions of Daniel Ingram in MCTB, third jhāna is about getting bored with pīti, and fourth jhāna is about noticing how sukha has an irritating, noisy quality, with respect to the full expression of upekkhā that characterises fourth jhāna.

    Does this help?

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by  neko.
    • This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by  neko.
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