[Ted LemonMember]

I’ve been to quite a few retreats with Culadasa at this point. My experience is that real progress occurs between retreats, but retreats really help to give glimpses past where I’ve gotten so far, and they also help me to _see_ the progress I have made since the last retreat. Your mind is never more clear than in the middle of a retreat, so you can see a lot of cause and effect relationships that weren’t obvious when they were happening. I generally leave a retreat with an idea of what to do on the way to the next retreat, and a feeling of excitement about doing it.

I have heard other students say that they went up a stage or two during a retreat, and I am certainly not saying that’s not possible, but ultimately you can do what you can do, and whether you are in retreat or out, doing a steady practice is effective. If you want to put some oomph behind your progress, one thing you can do once you’re not suffering from mind wandering, forgetting and gross dullness all the time is to do long sits, more than 45 minutes. Andrea and I have been doing those recently, and it’s been pretty interesting.

[Ted LemonMember]

Wow. That is very cool. Thanks for sharing it with us!

[Ted LemonMember]

I have the same problem–Culadasa explains the practice in a way that makes it seem so simple that I often don’t go back and re-read the book for months at a time. I’m glad you were able to get some help out of that passage–that’s one of the very passages I was referring to when I sent my response earlier.

If you get a chance to do a retreat at some point, I recommend bringing the book and reading it in some of your resting periods. I’ve gotten tremendous benefit from reading it in retreat, because things happen much faster there, and so you get to apply a larger swath of the series of practices described in the book all at once.

[Ted LemonMember]

What you are describing is very familiar to me. It sounds like you’ve learned to do a better job of avoiding progressive subtle dullness and gross dullness. The effect of this is to increase the energy of the mind, and increasing the energy of the mind gives distractions fertile ground to spring up in.

This is, however, not a bad outcome, because you wanted to do something about progressive subtle dullness and gross dullness. It’s just the next step in the process of weeding the garden. So now you need to increase your introspective awareness. Expanding the scope of awareness is a good start, but you also need to work on turning it inward.

Essentially what you are trying to do is upload the introspective attention you have already used in stage three into your awareness, so that it becomes a continuous process that your awareness does without you having to move your attention off the object. I don’t know how to tell you how to do this–there’s some explanation in the book that I’ve found helpful, but it’s really something that you have to feel your way through. The other thing I would suggest is to make sure that your intention includes a decided intention not to follow the distraction: one of the things that appears at least for me to weaken my ability to use introspective awareness to stop gross distraction is simply that when my IA registers the distraction, it doesn’t always do anything about it, because the distraction seems “useful.”

It might help to read over the moments of consciousness interlude and start thinking about intending moments of consciousness versus non-intending moments of consciousness. I don’t know if your perception of striving is the same as mine, but for me, I can tell that I’m striving because some part of my body will be tense, and also because it feels like my mind is tense. I’ve found that it’s possible to chase the attention around the breath indefinitely without getting tense if your remedy is not to put your mind on the breath, but rather to renew the intention to keep the mind on the breath. When I can maintain an awareness of whether I feel tense, while maintaining a somewhat continuous renewal of the intention to keep the attention on the breath, it feels like I can remain diligent without the effects of striving.

Full disclosure: I’ve been wrestling with the same issues you have. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel I’m done with stage four once or twice for a week or two at a time. Right now it feels like that’s imminent again. But obviously there’s some process I haven’t entirely internalized the way I’ve managed to internalize not forgetting. There was never any deciding point where not forgetting happened either, though–I just noticed at some point that forgetting had stopped happening. So I’m hopeful that the same will be true for the transition from stage four to stage five.

[Ted LemonMember]

Joey, thanks for your question! You mention a couple of things that we’ve discussed quite a bit in class with Culadasa–the comparison between the Mahasi method and the Ten Stages, and also the question of how to deal with the Dark Night. I have felt reluctant to respond because I have not personally had a Dark Night experience nor practiced the Mahasi method, but several of my fellow students have, so I was hoping they would answer.

It sounds like one of my fellow students will compose an answer from his personal experience, hopefully tomorrow, but I brought up your question in class yesterday with Culadasa and he gave me some pointers to relay to you as well, so I’m going to try to write them up here. I hope these will be useful, but do bear in mind that I’m relaying what I learned from Culadasa as best I can, and not speaking from personal experience.

The first thing Culadasa said is that the underlying reason for the Dark Night experience and the dukkha-ñanas being so strong that a person can’t make it through them and has to start over is self-attachment–the attachment to the idea of the self, and more importantly the habitual acting out of that belief in a separate self and the craving that arises from that. He mentioned that there are some other factors involved in the Dark Night and some other things that can be done, but specifically recommended looking at a few sections in the book specifically addressing attachment to the self.

The first section he mentioned is Appendix E on mindful review. It’s not obvious at first, but this section is really about the practice of virtue, and he said in class yesterday when I asked him about this that the practice of virtue is the best antidote for the Dark Night. That’s not to say you’re not already practicing virtue, but doing the practice described in Appendix E will definitely make it less likely that you will suffer another Dark Night.

There’s also a passage at the end of the Sixth Interlude, starting on Page 257, titled “Insight Experiences and the Attainment of Insight” that talks about five factors that help to minimize the trauma of the Dark Night experience. Culadasa said that looking at this should really help you to “sail right through” the dark night. He wonders if you might not yet have had much experience of joy yet, and that if you continue you might have more joy, and that can help you.

Of the five points mentioned in this section, he specifically called out point three, and referenced the fifth and seventh interludes as resources for deepening your understanding of this point.

He also recommended doing the Loving-Kindness meditation described in Appendix C, and recommended reading footnote 23 on page 429 which specifically talks about samata-vipassana practice as opposed to dry insight practice and talks about how that practice can help. How this process unfolds is discussed in Appendix F.

One of the students in class, Josh, also mentioned that one of the ways you can cultivate joy at Stage 7 is by practicing the jhanas, and Culadasa agreed. Josh recommended working on the first three jhanas in particular, and Culadasa described this as an “excellent idea.”

I hope these pointers are of some use to you. I can say from studying with Culadasa for some time now that the problems you are having are topics that he considers very important to discuss, and we spent two weeks on the Mahasi method during our training class. I found the topic quite interesting, and am curious to try the method just to see how it differs.

One of the things that Culadasa has said about the Mahasi method is that although you do get a kind of samata as a result of practicing it, it’s not as stable as the samata that you get from practicing the ten-stage method. This may have been one of the other factors he was referring to (I didn’t think to ask him in this class). This is not to say that the method doesn’t work, but just that spending some time working on strengthening your samata practice and improving the various parts of the process in the earlier stages may also be of some value.

I’ve found personally that I can get to the point where I have attained the goals listed for a specific stage, but that they are a bit flimsy, and going back and working specifically on the various methods that lead to completion of that stage can still be useful even though in principle my meditation has reached the next stage.

Again, thanks for your question, and I hope Nick will be able to chime in tomorrow with some personal experience on this topic!

• This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by  Ted Lemon.

[Ted LemonMember]

The disturbance you are describing from sense perceptions sounds more like subtle than gross distraction to me. If you started thinking about what caused the noise and trying to anticipate when the noise would come again, or what noise might follow if you correctly identified the source of a noise, that could be a gross distraction. When you are in the state you describe, I would suggest starting on the body scan and just see what happens. If you find that your distractions become worse, that means that you’ve increased the energy of your mind. When you notice that this has happened, you can intentionally go back to the breath so that you can work on the distractions until they settle. When they have settled, you can again notice that this has happened and very intentionally go back to the body scan.

[Ted LemonMember]

What you are describing now sounds like a combination of dullness and gross distraction, which are actually the things you work on in stage 4. So you might want to try doing the stage 4 practices and see if that helps. It really sounds like you’re mostly out of stage 3. It’s really easy to confuse distraction and forgetting; the difference is that with distraction, you never entirely lose the breath as an object of attention–it just goes into the background.

I don’t know if the fear you are experiencing is a stage 4 purification, but it can’t hurt to try the techniques described in the book for dealing with that. I found that I had various issues with the breath when I was making the transition from stage 3 to stage 4, and it could just be that, but what you are describing sounds more intense. Even if it’s not a purification per se, the practice you do when a purification comes up is really the same practice you do to just stop being distracted by breath phenomena.

[Ted LemonMember]

Patrick, I’m going to take a shot at answering this, although I would certainly encourage you to take Blake’s answers as more authoritative. It sounds like what is going on for you with checking in is that when you are fully in the hands of a distraction, your mind doesn’t have enough energy/attention on checking in to actually do it; it’s when there’s a lull in the energy from the distractions that you are able to check in. In other words, the intention to check in is waiting in the wings the whole time, but doesn’t actually generate any activity until there’s space for it.

If that is the case, then I think you are probably actually doing the right thing, and it may be that as you continue to do this practice, you will find that the checkins are able to happen even when the distractions are fairly strong. To encourage this, make sure that you don’t allow yourself to be disappointed that the checkins are only happening when the distractions are weak. Be happy that the checkin happened at all, and renew the intention to have the checkin happen again soon. Try to be aware of what is happening–see if you can confirm or disprove my theory, for example. Bringing this analysis into your attention when the checkin happens will get your unconscious mind working on it, and may result in the checkins happening more dependably.

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