[Ted LemonMember]

Il y a au moins un francophone qui se joint fréquemment à ma convocation en ligne du samedi matin. Je ne mentionnerais pas cela, mais vous n’avez pas reçu de réponse, cela semble donc préférable à rien. Des informations sur la convocation peuvent être trouvées ici: https://abhayakara.fugue.com/weekly-meetup/

La convocation est malheureusement en anglais, mais peut-être pourriez-vous le rencontrer et prendre rendez-vous à un autre moment en français.

[Ted LemonMember]

One of the barometers I’ve used for this in the past is to notice what the content of the agitated thoughts is. If it feels kind of weird, surreal or fictional, that’s hypnagogia, not agitation. It feels busy like agitation, but indeed the cure is to counteract dullness in one way or another. One way to do it is to notice whether peripheral awareness has collapsed; if that doesn’t do it, sterner measures may be called for.

[Ted LemonMember]

We’ve actually been working on a wiki to accomplish something like this. Do you think that would work, or are you thinking of something different?

[Ted LemonMember]

When you say you are working on stage 3, the assumption would be that you are experiencing forgetting. Is that the case, or is it just that when you put your attention on the breath, sometimes there is no breath there? If it’s the latter, what you are describing sounds like stage 4, not stage 3. And if all you are experiencing is subtle dullness and subtle distraction, it’s actually time to start stage 5 practices.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple, and I don’t mean to say that you should skip stage four practices, but it’s worth taking some time to notice what your actual problems are in meditation.

Two things to investigate with respect to the breath: first, are you efforting to find the breath? If so, that can actually drown out the breath. The more you can just invite the breath sensations to come, and gently notice them when they arrive, rather than stomping out looking for them, the better.

Second, one thing that can make the breath faint is dullness. What is your actual experience of dullness?

And third (out of two : ) do you think that if you had perfect clarity on the breath, there would always be sensations of breath popping up, or would it be the case that sometimes there would be sensation, and sometimes there would be gap? Do you think that when there is gap, this means that your attention has wandered?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by  Ted Lemon.

[Ted LemonMember]

One thing you might want to think about is that “ignoring” is not the right thing to do. What you want is to just not be distracted. It’s fine to be aware of your eyes—you just ideally want your attention on the breath and your eyes in awareness. Ignoring them, particularly at the early stages, is a pretty artificial solution.

What is likely happening is that your eyes are looking at your nose, where you are trying to put your attention, and crossing your eyes is making them hurt. So until you break this habit, you’re going to have to allow the eyes to distract you from time to time: when you notice, hopefully in awareness, that the eyes are pointing at the breath, deliberately release that (don’t demand that it go; just release it). If you keep doing this, after a while the eyes will stop automatically looking at the breath; you may still occasionally have to make corrections, but it should become less and less of a problem over time.

Try not to be frustrated about this. There are lots of habits you have to learn and unlearn on the way to shamata; this is one. You’re going to have to do it, so doing it is not wasting time, and is not a distraction from the practice, even though it’s a distraction in a technical sense.

While we’re on this topic, I’d like to point out that you said that you are trying to ignore this and keep your attention on the object. That’s not actually what you are supposed to be doing. What you are trying to do is train your attention to automatically stay where you intend for it to stay. You are not trying to learn how to keep it there: you are learning how to intend for it to go there, and then for it to go there because you intended for that to happen. At the end of the process, this will happen with no effort. At this point in the process, there may be some effort involved, but the more you can stop thinking that you are putting your attention on the object, and the more you can instead think that you intend for the attention to be on the object, and then just see what happens, the more you are moving in the direction of developing the right habit.

There is a kind of a razor’s edge to balance on here. In the early stages, there is definitely some effort involved in doing the practice. But anytime it starts to feel stressful, that’s an indication that you may be putting too much emphasis on doing, and not enough emphasis on intending and noticing.

[Ted LemonMember]

Depends what you mean by compatible. Will TMI meditation work in that context? Sure. I’ve used TMI meditation in a practice that I would describe as similar to what you are experiencing. It’s not my a practice I do anymore, but it was a lovely practice. The ability to stabilize the attention while maintaining mindfulness worked just great for getting in touch with this higher power. What the higher power is, I wouldn’t claim to know. Is it just my deep mind? Could be. Is it God? Dunno, now you’ve just put a label on it—what does the label actually mean?

What I would argue against is reifying it. Does it feel like there’s a presence there taking care of you? Great, go with that. But don’t get dogmatic and start believing it as an axiom. I have a theory that the sin of idolatry, making an image of God and worshiping that, is actually just the act of deciding that you know what you’re referring to when you talk about God. If there is such a being, how could this mind, here, ever encompass what that being is?

[Ted LemonMember]

No, TMI is a process for becoming an adept meditator. Once you become an adept meditator, the practices that you’re calling “Theravada” practices are things you can do. Before you are an adept meditator, many of these practices are impossible to do well enough to get much value out of them. However, bear in mind that “vipassana” means insight. All of the practices you are describing, including the early stages of TMI, are insight practices. It’s entirely possible to have insight in the early stages of TMI if you get lucky. Usually the insight will not lead you to awakening at that time because your mind isn’t sufficiently unified until stage 7. But it can happen.

The point I’m making is that the distinction you are drawing isn’t a real distinction. You’re calling some practices “Theravadan” that are actually coming from sources outside of the Theravada lineage, but which are used by Theravadan teachers because they are effective for some students. This is what you should expect of a good insight teacher: that they pull in whatever they can find that will help you to get to insight, and don’t encourage you to do just one thing that they think is the One True Way to insight. 🙂

My personal experience of this is that I’ve been doing TMI since 2014, and gotten a lot of good results from it, and also done other insight practices. This is entirely compatible with TMI. Some insight practices are a bit dangerous if you do them outside of the support of a Buddhist community before you have sufficient aptitude at meditation. So e.g. Culadasa recommends that you not do noting as described in the Progress of Insight until you reach stage 7 of TMI. But the practices are not incompatible—you can do these practices at any time. You’ll just get better results when you’ve gotten a bit deeper into the stages of learning meditation.

Also, bear in mind that the stages Culadasa teaches are not his invention. They come from the suttas and from later teachings in India. You can read about this stuff in Asanga’s writings or Kamalashila’s, which are all first millennium. What’s new in TMI is simply that Culadasa has collected a lot of data from working with students trying to do Asanga and Kamalashila’s stages, and Anapanasati, and added a lot of clarifying explanations that are not available in the Tibetan versions of these texts. The distinction between attention and awareness is a bit of an innovation—the early meditators obviously saw these effects, but did not know about the neuroscience that Culadasa has had access to, which led to some insight into how to use this to make advances in meditation practice more quickly.

[Ted LemonMember]

Lots of good questions here. First, meditation is one of the aspects of the eightfold path: “right concentration.” So there’s no conflict between TMI and Theravada. TMI is a “shamata/vipassana” practice, meaning that you are practicing vipassana at the same time that you are learning to practice shamata. In order to reach the later stages of the practice, you have to have some insight into what “no self” is referring to, and this process begins somewhere around stage two or three. Of course, it doesn’t usually turn into a supramundane insight at stage three, but it’s a vipassana practice even then.

Pacifying the senses refers to what happens in meditation. When you are walking around in daily life, your experience when you’ve reached the meditation stage of pacification of the senses should be that your senses are more vivid, not less. You should experience more connection, and more facility in your connection, not less.

Enjoying a good meal or your relationship with your girlfriend can come with some craving, but craving isn’t essential to these experiences. If you look at the Pali, there are two words that refer to wanting something: tanha and chanda (I’m sure there are more than two, but these are the main two). Tanha is craving, and literally means thirst. Chanda is just noticing that something would be beneficial in a way that motivates you to take action to bring it about. Chanda is useful even to arhats: otherwise you would just sit there staring at the wall until you died of starvation. The transition from being primarily motivated by tanha to being primarily motivated by chanda is quite wonderful, and you will not be deprived of your favorite food. What you may find is that for example when you are in a situation where your favorite food isn’t available, you don’t even notice a problem–you just take what is offered and enjoy it too. But that doesn’t mean that you stop liking your favorite food.

My experience with the practice has been that at the various stages, my engagement with life has improved. I would hope that you would get a similar benefit!

You should review the part of the book that talks about the distinction between attention and awareness. Both attention and awareness can be active at the same time; this means that your attention is on something, but you are also aware of other things. You can’t have more than one thing in the focus of your attention at a time, but awareness can continue to encompass everything that is going on around you. Learning to manipulate the balance between attention and awareness is part of developing mindfulness. It is possible for attention to be so focused that you aren’t aware of anything but the object of your attention, and it’s also possible for awareness to be so open that your attention isn’t on anything in particular, but these extremes usually aren’t what you want.

[Ted LemonMember]

One thing that I would suggest you consider is that you may not be meditating at stage 2/3. It’s pretty common for new practitioners to mistake stage 4 for stage 2 or 3 because they don’t know the distinction between forgetting and distraction. So the first thing I would suggest is that you make sure you aren’t doing this. If you aren’t, then we can debug further.

The difference is that with forgetting, you are sitting on the cushion but you’ve forgotten the breath. There is no attention on the breath. It’s still there, but you aren’t paying attention to it, and you don’t remember that you’re supposed to be paying attention to it. And then eventually you remember, and that’s the time to rejoice.

If you are distracted rather than forgetting or mind wandering, you still notice thoughts coming and going, and you may find yourself thinking at length on some topic, but the whole time, you are also attending to the breath in the background. And you have some sense that you are meditating, and not just gathering wool or thinking about stuff.

If this is the case, then applying the antidote of remembering and rejoicing won’t help you to make progress. It’s still fine to do, but you need to do more. If you are not experiencing significant dullness, then the thing to do is start noticing subtle distractions. You’re not trying at this point to stop having subtle distractions—the goal is simply to notice the distraction before it sweeps you away into a gross distraction. There’s a nice picture describing this practice at the beginning of the chapter on stage four. Of course there’s more to the practice than that, but this is a place to start if this is what’s going on for you.

[Ted LemonMember]

Wow, I’ve heard enough people talk about this happening at the end of stage three that I think it’s almost a marker. I suppose it doesn’t happen to everybody, but rest assured that you are in good company. It certainly happened to me.

The approach I took, which may or may not work for you, was to learn to laugh at and love the inner toddler that Just. Doesn’t. Want. To. Keep. Sitting. That is, there was some part of my mind system that had noticed that something significant was happening, and was not comfortable with it, and wanted it to stop, and was kicking up a ruckus.

I don’t know that this is precisely what’s happening for you, but you might try investigating it. When this little tantrum of monkey mind agitation happens, just notice it happening, smile, and try to generate feelings of love and care. Don’t imagine that you can suppress it. The good news is that it’s quite energetic, and you aren’t going to forget that it’s happening. Don’t think of it as a failure—think of it as just one of the many gateways you will have to cross as your practice deepens.

[Ted LemonMember]

A couple of things to say about this. First, gross distractions are a stage four phenomenon, not a stage three phenomenon. Beware of confusing gross distraction with forgetting.

Second, if you are in stage five with no subtle dullness, you’re in stage six. But that doesn’t really sound like what you are describing. Don’t think that subtle dullness and “I feel really energetic” are synonymous. They aren’t. There’s some pretty clear instruction in the chapter on stage five on how to tell the difference; I encourage you to follow it. My experience is that meditations can feel quite energetic when there is still a lot of subtle dullness, so you absolutely have to do the full due diligence and not just think “ah, I have no subtle dullness.” 🙂

Third, what you are describing sounds like you just need to do some more work on introspective awareness. When things are going smoothly, you don’t need a lot of introspective awareness to keep them going smoothly, but if you are doing stage five practices, you’re (a) going to tire yourself and (b) going to increase mental energy, which will make the mind less stable. To counteract this, you need a strong introspective awareness that happens fairly automatically.

So I would suggest that you go back to stage four and look at the advice there. There’s a nice diagram at the beginning of the chapter that shows the cycle from “on the breath” through “subtle distraction” to “gross distraction.” The inflection point is identifying (automatically, not with attention) when a subtle distraction has the potential to become a gross distraction, and renewing the intention to stay on the breath. If this isn’t happening automatically, then just enjoy practicing with it for a while until it becomes more automatic, and then go back to stage five practices and see if things have changed. If you can’t get the problem to happen without doing stage five practices, that’s great—just do the practices that make it happen, but with the intention of developing this skill.

[Ted LemonMember]

To expand briefly on what Frédéric just said, one thing you should be aware of is that having a clear experience of the distinction between something that is “in awareness” and something that is a subtle distraction is something that doesn’t happen early in the process. You get glimpses of it when stage four practice is close to the stage four goals, but more so in stages five and six.

So there’s not much point in worrying about getting a clear understanding sooner than that. So although as Frédéric, you should not be “splitting your attention” between foreground and background objects, as long as the breath feels like it’s in the foreground and the other stuff feels like it’s in the background, it’s fine.

Mechanically, the way this works is that things appear in awareness, and once they have appeared in awareness, they become candidates to appear in attention. If they appear in attention, they can appear as subtle distractions, and those can turn into gross distractions. What you will discover as you work in stage four, if you haven’t already discovered it, is that subtle distractions are stickier than things in awareness. But aside from that, it’s hard to see the difference clearly, and until you can, there’s not much point in worrying about it. Learning to notice the stickiness will help you to avoid having subtle distractions turn into gross distractions, of course.

[Ted LemonMember]

What is your current medical condition?

It’s hard to answer the question on body movements because it’s different for everyone.

[Ted LemonMember]

Samuel, one thing that what you have said brings up is actually a really important question: how do you determine whether or not a teacher is legitimate? As students, we don’t always have a good way to do it. One of the Bodhisattva vows in the Tibetan tradition (possibly in others) is to behave in a way that gives the appearance of being virtuous, so as to help others to develop faith. From that perspective, any behavior that serves as a basis for judging a teacher negatively could be seen as behavior to avoid, including, for example, charging for meetings.

However, another way to judge a teacher is by the quality of the teaching that they offer, and the availability of that teaching. I personally find this to be a more useful metric. Why? Appearances can be deceiving. There’s a story in that same Tibetan lineage about the abbot of a monastery who doesn’t even have refuge, but is considered a high holy being by virtue of his outward appearance. Such a person is not actually qualified to teach, and could harm the students by teaching.

So how can we do this? Appearances are easy to see; in order to learn the quality of the teaching, we have to put it into practice. There are useful criteria for that: does it make sense? Do we understand what to do, what to pay attention to, what to expect, and how to respond when that which we have been told to expect occurs? When we do the practice according to that understanding, does it produce the intended result? This way of judging the teacher is harder, because it takes time to see results. But the clarity of the teaching can be evaluated readily; the clarity of Culadasa’s teaching is why I started trying the practice he teaches.

Can you get the teachings? Yes, not only from Culadasa, but from his teacher training students. You can download course material online, and of course there’s his book. Are the teachings you get clear? I think they are, but you can judge for yourself. If you share Culadasa’s web site with your friends, I encourage you to try to help them to understand how to evaluate the qualities of a teacher. This will help them to avoid falling into the trap of elevating their own prejudices about how the teacher should act over the ability of the teacher to help them.

[Ted LemonMember]

Renunciation doesn’t mean that you stop doing things you enjoy. It means that you let go of the idea that doing things you want to do will make you happy, and that avoiding things you want to avoid will prevent you from being unhappy.

As a consequence of this, your habits may well change, but it’s the understanding that’s the core of renunciation, not the change in habit. Of course, you can practice renunciation by deliberately giving up on things you enjoy, but that may just make you miserable and put you off of real renunciation.

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