[Ted LemonMember]

If you look at a pencil, your attention is on the pencil. If you hear the sound of a passing car, your attention may flicker to the passing car, or even land on it, or it may not move to it at all. You can be aware of the passing car even if your attention never goes to it. This is difficult to see until you start doing it in stage six—you can approach it theoretically, but clearly seeing the distinction between something that is a subtle distraction in attention, and something that is in peripheral awareness, requires a lot of practice. Or at least that’s been my experience. I am meditating in stages four and five right now; the only time I’ve clearly perceived this distinction was in my most recent retreat when I was peaking out in stage seven.

[Ted LemonMember]

Thanks for that. That’s a much more clear way of putting it. I was trying to make the same point in my most recent reply, but neglected to point out that my earlier reply was actually wrong. 🙂

[Ted LemonMember]

Think about it this way. A story about Jevan feels like a story about “me” to you, right? And a story about “Ted” feels like a story about “Ted.” If you break down the connection between “me” and “Jevan,” then a story about “Jevan” will seem less like a story about “me” and more like a story about “Ted.” It’s not that you won’t care what happens to Jevan anymore, but you’ll just be a lot less attached to it.

That said, you can’t think your way to awakening. Awakening happens in the deep mind. So having a perfect answer to this question is definitely something that would be interesting, but it’s a bit academic. 🙂

[Ted LemonMember]

Bear in mind that there are four paths of awakening in the Theravada tradition so how they end your suffering and to what extent depends on which path you are talking about. Stream entry doesn’t end your suffering, but it does suck a lot of the energy out of it.

Culadasa could probably give you a better answer than this, as could some of the more senior teachers, but one way to talk about it is that 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. You stub your toe, you just stubbed your toe. It’s not someone’s fault. Someone says something mean to you, okay, they said something mean to you, but you don’t get sucked into a story about the person being mean and needing to do something to make up for it.

So where before it was very easy to get swept up into some big story about something that went wrong, now it kind of bounces off. If you get pissed off, it drops away quickly. If the stimulus is continuous, the upset can stay, but you notice it staying, so again you can pull back away from it to a much greater degree than you could before stream entry.

What this has to do with no self is that self is a story that you tell yourself. And I think the realization of no self is what makes you stop being so interested in stories—you just don’t believe the whole thing the way you used to.

[Ted LemonMember]

Ah, I see your problem.

And the hold your breath, clench up and release technique has no effect?

I should say that I went through a process similar to yours, and only made it out the other side when I finally figured out how to notice that I was entering dullness before it got so strong, and learned to counter it at that point, not later on when it’s almost impossible to stop.

[Ted LemonMember]

Major props for creativity. Meditating while standing didn’t work?

[Ted LemonMember]

So many people report it feeling like they backslid in stage four. This is not unusual. One of the nice things about stages two and three is that all of that mind-wandering really energizes the mind, so when you are on the object, you can feel quite sharp, and then the loss of that source of energy can result in a feeling of things having faded a bit when you begin to meditate in stage four.

[Ted LemonMember]

None of this is going to be particularly clear at stage two. My main experience of it was simply noticing the breath either being in the foreground or in the background. The background is still attention, though. Awareness is not the background. The distinction between “background” and “awareness” is really subtle, and I think the first time I saw it clearly I was in retreat and practicing around stage five.

So really the answer is that the right percentage on the breath is 100%, and that doesn’t help much, because you can’t do that at stage two, and would create massive stress for yourself trying. What has worked for me at stage four is simply to notice when peripheral awareness has gotten less distinct and less detailed. At first the way I did this was to consciously check in with my attention every ten breaths or so. I think this is a technique Culadasa mentions specifically in the book, and he warns not to count the breaths–I’m actually guessing at that number.

Also, perhaps you are aware of this, but your description of your practice sounds like stage four, not stage two.

[Ted LemonMember]

When you attain pliancy, you will (so I am told) be able to sit for two hours without pain. But that doesn’t happen until pretty late in the stages.

When I want to meditate for more than an hour, I do it in a comfy chair. If you are at stage five or later, you should be able to meditate in a relaxed posture without sinking into dullness.

If not, you could try getting up and doing fifteen minutes of walking between two one-hour sits, and while at first the walking might pull you out a bit, once you get into the practice it’s actually a very sweet way to stay in meditation for longer periods without causing yourself unnecessary pain.

[Ted LemonMember]

I do all kinds of different things, but what I did on the cushion on Wednesday was to use use a particular piece of music I love (Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium), which I really feels comes from a place of silence, as an entry point to get to the place of silence that Culadasa talks about in TMI. I’m not clear on whether I’m getting to the Silent Point, or just to the place of mental silence, because it’s hard to compare an experience I have at one time with an experience I have at another. The silence I find always seems perfect.

I didn’t actually remember the text on p. 318 until you mentioned it and I thought “ah! I wonder if that’s related.” It sounds like it is. I’ve had the exact experience he describes asking those questions and then getting answers which felt insightful but not exactly correct, so it was really helpful to me to re-read that and revisit his instructions to keep looking. Thanks so much for calling that back to my attention.

Yes, Doug is a dear old friend. I haven’t seen him in a quite while, but would love to see him again. I’m delighted to see one of his students here, and to hear that you are having success as his student!

[Ted LemonMember]

Thanks for asking the question, Sergey. I found the answers you got very helpful to me as well. I’m curious if Meshe can talk about his experience of the “still point” meditation. When I heard the name of the meditation, it reminded me so strongly of a meditation I’ve been doing that I went to read the description, but the description is a bit different. What I get to in the meditation reminds me of the end state of the meditation, but I don’t do all the visualizations at the beginning–I get there a fairly different way. So I’m not sure if my “there” is the same there. 🙂

[Ted LemonMember]

Do you feel like negative emotions still arise? For me, the strong ones are obvious, and don’t stick, but the subtle ones can creep up and hang out. You might want to really pay attention to what’s keeping you from sitting and see if it isn’t some low-key grasping that isn’t loud enough to trigger your new-found protective shield.

[Ted LemonMember]

This is what we in the business refer to as a “meditation obstacle.”

It’s actually not uncommon to have experiences like this when meditating. I get this frequently when I do the body scan–my body will tense up where I am scanning, and when I notice, I have to consciously release that tension. I have never had it happen when following the breath, but I don’t see why it couldn’t happen. Just notice that it’s happening, and notice that it’s frustrating you, and let go of it, and keep looking for sensations. If your mind goes back to it ten times a second, just notice that that’s happening, accept that it’s happening, and keep going. Try to be amused rather than annoyed, if you can pull it off.

It may feel like just the opposite, but my experience is that anything like this that happens in meditation is a goldmine, because it’s so predictable, and you can be ready for it. It’s a great opportunity to practice not following sensory distractions. It may or may not stop, but either way, you will eventually stop being distracted by it.

[Ted LemonMember]

Addressing the hard problem of consciousness would violate Gödel’s Theorem. 🙂

This is a really intriguing topic, and I think there’s a lot of value in trying to answer this question in meditation, as long as you don’t get attached to succeeding. I would suggest that it’s like an Awareness meditation, or Mahamudra, or Dzokchen.

[Ted LemonMember]

You should read the section of the book that talks about Jhanas. Outside the context of the book, Culadasa has also been talking a lot about the value of doing metta practices, which are very much related to Vajrayana practices. Another thing you will find common to Vajrayana and to the presentation Culadasa is offering is the emphasis on the availability of awakening in this lifetime.

As for Vajrayana and superstition, remember the context that it comes from. Both Vajrayana and Vipassana practices are at their essence practices that work on the mind, as opposed to in the mind: the goal is not to “figure out” emptiness and thereby have realizations, but rather to do what you can to get your mind into a place where when it sees the contradictions inherent in the deceptive view of reality, it is able to take them and run with them, instead of brushing them aside as distractions.

If you think of it that way, and think of the “superstitious” part of the Vajrayana practice as a story told for the benefit of a particular audience, then you can readily see the essence of the Vajrayana practices, and see that their function is to work on the mind, to work on breaking down the obstacles to awakening.

In that sense, many of the practices taught in the Vajrayana lineages would work quite well when combined with the techniques that Culadasa is teaching. You may find in the process of progressing through stage six that a lot of the stuff that you’d heard about in the Vajrayana teachings is actually stuff that you can perceive directly in meditation. The more metaphorical, visual stuff may suddenly appear to be a tool that you can use to address a particular thing that is happening either on or off the cushion.

So if you are attracted to what you have learned of Vajrayana, I wouldn’t abandon that. But you must get over any resistance you have to doing the work of progressing through the stages. The ten stages that Culadasa is teaching are virtually identical to the 9 stages taught by Asanga and Kamalashila, both of whom are in the Vajrayana tradition. His Holiness the Dalai Lama teaches these same stages. The main difference with Culadasa’s teaching is the degree of detail, and the addition of the clear distinction between attention and awareness, both of which are really helpful for making real progress.

My experience is that the practices that are taught in Vajrayana, particularly surrender, will help you to make rapid progress in the ten stages. The more you can let go of the idea that you need to improvise, and instead look at the ten stages as a training framework that will bring you to the point of being able to improvise, the more you will be able to actually hear the instructions correctly and put them into practice correctly, and the more you do that, the more quickly you will progress.

My experience is that I have a strong tendency to hear one thing and understand another, and wind up doing the wrong practice for a while until I hear the instruction again and see the contradiction between what I am being told to do and what I’m actually doing. The more you can surrender to the process and not do this, the easier it will be. One of the instructions that I missed early on is that there is a lot of joy to be had on the way, and that we should seek it out. There’s no reason for the process to feel like a painful slog. Have fun with it!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by  Ted Lemon.

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