Stage 7 techniques

[charlesanattaMember]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working with stage 6 practices for some time now and also trying the mindfulness technique of paying attention to the breath (or keeping it in peripheral awareness) throughout the whole day while off the cushion.

So I recently had a new experience while meditating. I was very focused on the breath, and it became so vivid, my awareness increased momentarily to an even sharper and brighter level than ever before. It felt like my whole awareness was “glued” exclusively to the breath, this lasted for a couple of minutes. Subtle distractions were absent during the whole period, the mind was extremely quiet.

I read somewhere here that when one is able to stay with the meditation object with little or no subtle distraction for 5 minutes or more, one should try the stage seven practices found under “investigation of Mental Objects” in the book. They said there are 3 techniques that will naturally lead one to a state of effortlessness in time. Could someone please share what these 3 techniques are? I live in a country where it’s virtually impossible to get the book (since we have problems with restriction of imported goods) and also the kindle version is not available.

Thanks in advance!

With Metta,
Charles

[Matthew ImmergutMember]

Hi Charles,

I’ve attached an older draft version of what’s in the book. This should help until you get the book.

M

INVESTIGATION OF MENTAL OBJECTS
This practice involves maintaining exclusive focus on the breath as you non-discursively investigate mental objects with metacognitive introspective awareness. This kind of purposeful activity helps counteract feelings of boredom due to the dryness of this Stage, while deepening our understanding of how the mind works at the same time. Observing the breath has become quite automatic by now, and this practice requires only a partial shift of conscious power from attention to metacognitive awareness. Because you’re maintaining exclusive attention on the breath, pacification of the discriminating mind continues.
By this point in your practice, mental objects such as thoughts, memories, and emotions rarely enter consciousness. When they do, they are easily noticed. To begin with, observe the three primary forms that thought takes: self-talk, visual images, and mental kinesthetic “feelings.” Thoughts are often in the form of words, phrases, or sentences, and can easily become long inner dialogues. Other thoughts take the form of images, such as when you think of cooking dinner and have an image of your kitchen. Memories are often verbal or visual as well. You’re doubtless quite familiar with these kinds of thoughts. The third kind, kinesthetic thoughts and memories, are when we “feel” ourselves doing something, as in the memory of picking up a phone and dialing. Emotions also fall in the kinesthetic category. Just as you can have the kinesthetic memory of picking up a phone, you can have the kinesthetic experience of an emotion like jealousy.
In the course of this inquiry, you’ll be especially aware of “symbolic thought.” The words and phrases that appear as inner self-talk are obviously symbolic, standing for something other than themselves. But so are mental images and the mental representations of physical sensations – like the urge to scratch your nose, for example. One of the things you may also notice is the incredible speed of symbolic thought. It’s so fast that individual thoughts, especially the components of individual thoughts, such as a particular word or image, are fleeting and hard to identify.
In those intervals when symbolic thought is absent, we can legitimately say, “No thoughts are present.” Yet, as you keep observing, you’ll start to notice a lot of mental activity in peripheral awareness that is pre-verbal, pre-image, and pre-sensate. This reflects the ongoing conceptual activity of the thinking/emotional, and is what gives rise to symbolic thought. We’re not ordinarily conscious of non-symbolic conceptual thought, but it starts to leak through when conscious experience is no longer dominated by symbolic thought.
Times when thought seems completely absent are well worth observing too. When the mind is engaged in the present without grasping, neither looking to the future or the past, then joy, happiness, and energy arise. [Insert Margin quote 158]This often happens during walking meditation (see Appendix A), or with any ordinary kind of concentration where we become totally immersed in the present. It happens here in Stage Seven, too, but can easily go unnoticed. Being fully aware of joy and happiness directly counters the dryness of this Stage, and promotes unification and pacification of mind.

CLOSE FOLLOWING
This practice is a more intense version of the following the breath technique. Only this time, you want to identify even more thoroughly the many distinct sensations that constitute the “breath at the nostrils.” Set your intention to follow the microscopic movements of sensations. As you focus in more and more, you might discern half a dozen or (many) more different sensations for each in- and out-breath.
As you continue to examine these sensations quite closely, your perception shifts and you’ll start experiencing the breath as jerky or pulsing, rather than smooth and continuous. The “jerks” typically come at about one or two pulses per second. At first, it may seem like it’s just your heartbeat you’re feeling, or that your heartbeat is somehow affecting the breath. You can investigate this by intentionally expanding your scope of attention to include both your heartbeat and the breath sensations. If you can’t clearly perceive your heartbeat apart from these pulsations, then put your finger on your carotid artery, focusing attention on both your pulse and the breath at the nose. Continue to maintain exclusive attention and introspective awareness, of course. You’ll eventually discover that the pulsations of your breath don’t actually coincide with the beating of your heart.
Once you’ve satisfied your curiosity, look more closely at the content of each “jerk.” You’ll find continuous change occurring within each one, as though they were made of very short clips from a motion picture. The changes consist of recognizable sensations like warmth, coolness, pressure, movement, and so forth arising and passing away. Yet as you probe deeper, you’ll start detecting subtler sensations you can’t easily label. You’re now reaching a much finer degree of discrimination. If you continue, at some point your perception will shift again; instead of pulsations within which there is continuous change, you’ll experience what feels more like a series of still frames, occurring at about 10 per second.
Here, we’re giving the mind an activity to perform that produces novel experiences. What makes it useful for our practice is that we can only sustain this investigation by staying vigilant and highly focused. Any slackening of attentional effort or vigilance will lead to disrupting distractions.
If you’re lucky – it doesn’t always happen – perception will shift one more time. The still frames will dissolve, becoming something too rapid for the mind to clearly discern. You’ll then experience the breath sensations as the rapid flickering on and off of separate moments of consciousness, or simply as vibrations. [Insert Margin quote 159] Some meditators interpret this experience of “momentariness” as the universe continuously coming into and going out of existence. That description is quite accurate in terms of a persons’ subjective universe. When this happens, there’s nothing the mind can recognize or hold on to, so it naturally recoils from the experience. The mind jumps back, so to speak, to a place where things are recognizable once again, where it can apply familiar labels and concepts to what is being experienced. This is an Insight experience.
If you can re-enter this “vibratory ” experience, you can gain a clear Insight into impermanence. You may realize that all there ever was, is, or will be is an ongoing process of constant change that cannot be grasped or clung to. “Things” don’t actually exist. “Process” is all there is. Then, if you can overcome the mind’s resistance enough to go in and out of this perceptual state repeatedly, it will become an Insight experience from which you can gain Insight into emptiness. [Insert Margin quote 160] First, you’ll observe how uncomfortable the mind is with that level of perception and how desperately it wants to “pull back” and organize this experience conceptually. Then you’ll realize at a very deep level that the familiar world of forms is shaped entirely by the mind’s attempt to “makes sense” of an “empty” reality. Dharma teachers often speak about the world as being merely a projection of the mind. This direct experience of the mind creating meaning out of emptiness allows us to understand exactly what they’re referring to.[Insert Margin quote 161] It’s not that the world doesn’t exist. Rather, the world you perceive, your personal “reality,” is nothing more than a construct of the mind.
These realizations happen if you’re really lucky, but there are two significant caveats. First, if you spend a lot of time doing this practice, you’ll have a spillover into your daily life. You’ll see everything as impermanent, which can really throw you off. Familiar feelings of certainty and purpose disappear, which can produce a sense of hopelessness, even despair. Things lose their usual importance, and life can seem pointless. And it’s all the more disconcerting because these emotions have no logical basis in conscious experience, and seem to come from nowhere. In fact, they are produced by unconscious mental processes trying to assimilate your meditation experiences. In the Theravadin tradition, this state is called the “knowledges of suffering” (dukkha ñanas) and is in some ways comparable to the “dark night of the soul” in the Christian mystical tradition. (See the section on Insight Experiences and the Attainment of Insight in the Sixth Interlude for more on why this happens and what to do about it.) These insights into impermanence and emptiness can create aversion to practicing, but stopping your practice is probably the worst thing you can do in this situation.
The second caveat is, don’t count on having these types of insight experiences. Some people never experience sensations dissolving into a field of fine vibrations. Others don’t recoil from the experience, but actually find it delightful and intriguing. If you fall into that the latter group, you can expand your scope of attention to include the whole body, experiencing it as a shimmering process of sensation too subtle to describe easily. Remember, the purpose of this practice is mainly to help you overcome the dryness of Stage Seven, and to continue strengthening exclusive attention and mindfulness. It’s a creative way of applying your abilities to help you practice more productively. There’s a strong possibility it will produce Insight experiences, but it’s not guaranteed. If they don’t come now, rest assured, they will come later!

PLEASURE JHĀNA PRACTICE
The pleasure jhānas are a more powerful and satisfying absorption than the whole-body jhānas. As the name indicates, we use pleasurable sensations as our meditation object. The pleasure jhānas are particularly helpful in countering the tediousness of this Stage. More importantly, the state of flow in jhāna induces a temporary unification of mind, which in turn promotes more lasting unification, thus speeding up our progress through Stage Seven.[Insert Margin quote 162]
To have access to the pleasure jhānas, you’ll need exclusive attention to the breath at the nose. Both mind and body must be quite stable and still. Your subjective experience should be one of sustained stillness, stability, and mental clarity. Your breath will be slow and shallow, and the sensations faint. Nevertheless, your awareness of the sensations will be so acute it almost hurts. It’s normal to still have peripheral awareness of occasional sounds or other sensations, perhaps even the faint whisper of a fleeting thought. You know they are happening, but like the awareness of clouds in the sky, or cars passing on the street, they barely qualify as conscious experience. Even so, if you relax your vigilance, they can still draw your attention away. Achieving the flow state of jhāna will change that.
When you have achieved this level of access concentration, without shifting your attention from the breath, explore peripheral awareness to find a pleasant sensation. They can be just about anywhere, but try looking in the hands, the middle of the chest, or the face. If you have trouble finding a pleasant sensation somewhere in your body, try smiling slightly. This is very helpful and often produces a pleasant feeling around the mouth or eyes. In fact, smiling when you meditate is a good habit to cultivate in general. By the time you arrive at access concentration, the “fake” smile you put on when you started meditating will have become genuine.
Once you’ve found a distinctive pleasant sensation, shift your attention to it. Staying focused on a mildly pleasant feeling won’t be as easy as focusing on the sensations of the breath. You will even find your attention wants to return to the breath because focusing on it has become a strong habit. Practice just letting the breath sensations stay in the background while remaining introspectively aware of how attention alternates between the pleasant sensation you’ve chosen and the breath. It usually doesn’t take too long to get the hang of this. Then, attention will no longer alternate at all, becoming exclusively focused on the pleasant sensation.
Focus your attention in particular on the quality of pleasantness, rather than the sensation that gives rise to the pleasantness. Just observe, letting yourself become completely immersed in the sensation, but don’t do anything. Let the pleasantness intensify. Sometimes, though, it will fade away. In that case, allow your attention to return to the breath. Stay in access for another five minutes or so, enhancing your peripheral awareness to allow any physical or mental pleasantness to arise. Once it does, try again. Sooner or later, your focus will intensify the pleasant feeling, which, in turn, makes it easier to remain attentive.
Pleasantness won’t necessarily grow stronger in a linear or continuous manner, so be patient. As long as it doesn’t fade away, just observe without reacting. Definitely don’t push or chase after it. If you do, it will simply fade, and you’ll have to return to the breath for a while and try again.
As the pleasantness builds, you may experience unusual sensory phenomena, including strong energy sensations that can cause trembling and spontaneous movements. These are distracting and can be hard to ignore, but just hold the intention to let them remain in the background of awareness. Don’t be concerned if attention starts alternating with them, as it did earlier with the breath. That won’t stop absorption from happening. In fact, if you’re lucky, you may experience a release of this energy accompanied by strong pleasant sensations in the body and a brief period of joyful happiness. This gives you a taste of what’s to come in the first pleasure jhāna.
The pleasantness will grow incrementally stronger, in fits and starts, until it suddenly takes off. You’ll feel as if you’re “sinking into” the pleasant sensation, or as if it has expanded to consume all your available conscious “bandwidth.” You’ve entered the flow state that is the first pleasure jhāna. If you’ve already practiced the whole-body jhānas, you’ll immediately recognize the feeling. Trembling and energy sensations tend to persist in this first jhāna.
When you can easily enter first jhāna and remain as long as you choose, consider moving on to the second pleasure jhāna, following the instructions in Appendix D. The physical sensations and movements grow more stable in the second jhāna, and the feeling of happiness becomes more pronounced than the physical pleasure. While pleasure jhāna practice doesn’t have the same potential for insight as close following, it’s a far more enjoyable way to cultivate effortlessness.

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Charles,

I am sorry to hear that you are unable to get the book. However, some of the ideas that you heard do not match what is in the book. The three practices are designed to be done when you have mastered Stage 6 and you are regularly practicing in Stage 7.

The Book has the following to say: “There are three additional practices you can do to add variety to your meditation and to help you through the dry periods … These practices are all very rewarding in themselves, while still unifying and training the mind in stable attention and mindfulness.” The pleasure Jhanas practice is the main one that can help you achieve effortlessness.

While you can probably do these practices in stage 6, they will not produce optimal results until you are consistently in stage 7.

Blake – Dharma Treasure Teacher in Training

[charlesanattaMember]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks a lot! The draft does indeed help until I can hopefully buy the book.

Hi Blake,

I see, thanks for clearing things up. I definitely have not mastered stage 6 yet, so I will avoid the practices outlined above for now. But like I said, it really does help me to know what I should be preparing for in the near future, so I’m thankful Matthew posted the draft.

I’m very glad to learn that the pleasure jhanas can be used to master Stage 7. So would you say that once a person has cultivated often the first four pleasure jhanas, they can choose to ignore the pleasant sensations and move to Stage 8 effortlessly by just staying with object of meditation?

With Metta,

Charles

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Charles,

Mastering the pleasure Jhana’s will habituate the mind to effortlessness, and make is easier to master Stage 7 when going back to the breath. However, it may not automatically propel your practice to Stage 8. You may also need to learn to let go of effort when practicing with the breath.

Blake – Dharma Treasure Teacher in Training

[charlesanattaMember]

Hi Blake,

Thanks for the info! I guess the same thing could be said for the whole body aka “ultralite” jhanas helping one to master Stage 6, right?

With Metta,

Charles

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