Welcome!

Hi, Julie. Good to have you here.

Hi all

Found my way here through lurking on the dharmaoverground and Kenneth Folk’s forum

I’ve been drawn towards existential inquiry since my mid-teens, and dabbled in various religious/neo-religious traditions until I grew frustrated with contradictions in dogma, and outright BS. Through a pervading desire to escape from my own mind, and paradoxically to explore it, I gravitated towards a long period of ‘experimenting with drugs’, and reading as much as I could get my hands on.

I was introduced to meditation while living in Thailand, but didn’t really get into it until I came back to the UK. It’s since been a tumultuous on/off, love/hate affair! Much like concentric rings, each period of study pushed insights/perceptual shifts more and more into everyday life – to the extent that I now have to really put some effort into coming up with some really crap excuses for abandoning my practise

My practise has/does include Theravada/ MCTB technics, direct pointing via the LU team, and yoga/breath work.

I’m looking forward to getting to know the people on here, and to pick your brains regarding practise!

Welcome Paul and Julie!

Julie, what area are you a professor in? I'm a uni teacher (basically a humanities theory jack-of-all trades)...

Welcome, Paul!

I'm in the chemistry/biochemistry field.

Julie, great to have you here. Paul, feel free to pick to your heart's content.

Hello to all here! It’s about time for a first post. I've been lurking for quite a while, my usual habit regarding most of the message boards I'm interested in. The community here seems very nice, open minded, and down to earth, so I decided to try to be bit more active - I hope I'll be able to keep that intention alive.

A bit of background: I'm almost 50 years of age, mathematician, working in the middle management of a huge financial institutions risk controlling. I've been practicing meditation for almost 20 years now. My motivation to start out was a sense of desperation regarding my increasing level of neurosis and a feeling of ungroundedness.

After reading Joko Becks books I knew I had to start some sort of meditation practice. I found an old christian zen teacher and did a lot of sesshins with him, mostly with an rather narrow gung-ho approach (which wasn't due to the teacher). After about 2 years I branched out into vipassana (IMS style, usually with Carol Wilson who is quite an adorable teacher in my opinion), which brought about a much needed softening to my approach. Around 4-5 years after beginning to practice I went through a very slow but definite shift after which the majority of my neurotic stuff just ceased to stick. It felt like an irreversible arriving at a basic level of sanity. At the beginning there was some fear of "backsliding", but after a while it became obvious that this is highly unlikely. (After discovering the stages of insight I tried a bit to fit this shift into them, but to no avail … doesn't matter anyway.)

I continued to practice daily, attended retreats, a bit less than before due to an increasing amount of work commitments, joined the sangha founded by Joko Beck, worked with a teacher, … but at the same time became more and more disengaged with practice, as if I had lost my basic motivation. Some years later it resurfaced, this time much deeper in a sense. I knew something was lacking and started to take the whole awakening/enlightenment thing more serious. Before, I had placed the mechanisms of practice mostly within a purely psychological context and didn’t really entertain the possibility of there being actually something like “awakening” in a more wider, religious sense. (Not sure, if I’m making sense here.) After a bit searching around I stumbled on Adyashantis “The End of Your World” and a bit later on MCTB. Both convinced me it would be worth the effort to at least give it try .

Since I was already familiar with it I decided to start noting practice again, yet this time much more diligent and precise. Much to my surprise after about 4-5 months of industrious practice, I started going through the A&P, lots of crazy stuff happened, some of it rather violent (probably due to sliding into dukkha nana territory), I actually had to stop practicing for 1-2 months (and also saw a psychiatrist and a neurologist to make sure I’m not going insane). Afterwards I passed through a relatively mild dark night, some not so nice peaks, a lot of frustration, but overall manageable. Almost two years ago I began working with Alan Chapman, got stream entry a couple of months later (didn’t notice the event, just started to get dozens of fruitions), got second path three months later after a self retreat (this time a more clear experience), and am now somewhere around third path.

Oh my, this post is now way longer than intended - I’ll fire it off anyway. So again: Hello to all, I hope you’ll keep me around.

Welcome Timus. Thanks for the intro. Not sure if you are going to start a practice thread or not but I would be interested in hearing about what your practice with Alan has been like. Techniques and such.

Hi, Timus. Good to have you join our motley crew. I too read Joko Beck early on: Everyday Zen, Nothing Special. Like you, I also ended up taking the pragmatic dharma route.

Hi everyone,

I just joined this forum and wanted to introduce myself. But first I want to thank Chris for the warm welcome, which is very much appreciated.
I'm a relatively new practitioner, with only 2 years experience, but I can honestly say that this - the Buddha's teachings, meditation, learning about all kinds of related things from people on message boards - is what I had been looking for all my life (I'm 48 years old). Hence my name on screen; I was lost , but finally found what I was searching for. More specific; as a relatively little girl I wanted to become a nun (and an opera singer and helicopter pilot ), but I couldn't find the religion I was looking for, so I gave up the search, but still had an uncomfortable nagging feeling that something was not quite right, like the wheel axel the buddha described as dukkha.
I found my way here through the Dharmaoverground, as many others before me, I think.
In the beginning I read a lot about buddhism (explanations on how to meditate, what the Buddha meant when talking about aggregates, dependent Origination and the 8 path factors, but also suttas, listened to pod casts and doing mostly guided meditations. Now still reading, but - now I've got the hang of it - rarely guided meditations anymore and occasionally listening to a podcast.
I'm not a native english speaker, so please forgive mistakes I make
As for my profile pic, not very cheerful, but it's a small reminder for me that I'm not permanent, nor is anything else.
Nice to meet you all and I hope these days and the new year will be a good one, whatever that may be for you

Glad to see you here. Maybe the next person should be named Amazing Grace (one of my favorite hymns, by the way).

Welcome Timus and Lost and Found!

Laurel, I love Amazing Grace too - that and Simple Gifts seem to have resonated for me a lot this year particularly.

Thanks for the nice welcome!

Dan wrote: … Not sure if you are going to start a practice thread or not but I would be interested in hearing about what your practice with Alan has been like. Techniques and such.

I’m thinking about it. I’ve grown quite a bit tired with journaling over the last months (I’m keeping a daily practice journal for Alan), its like I’m repeating myself ad nauseam. But since other peoples practice journals have always been a great source of information and inspiration for me, I guess it’s only fair to give it shot.

Regarding techniques: I started out with noting (on my own). Alan tried to wean me off, since I was pretty fixated to it, like it’s the one and only key to progress, but I stuck with it until stream entry. Afterwards, I followed his suggestion and switched to open awareness, which was my main practice on the road to second path. The time around second path was accompanied by rather “mystical” feelings of being held by a greater reality, which sometimes even had an ‘I’m done’-quality. Alan took that as an opportunity to suggest to try out a more devotional approach. After some resistance - I’m not good at all at changing my practice - I gave it a try and grew rather fond of it. Before that I did, for about 3 months, some kind of koan practice, asking myself the question “Why am I not awakened?”. It made my feel pretty shitty (which seems to be one of its expected outcomes). Nowadays, I usually do a mix of open awareness and the devotional approach.

andy wrote: … I too read Joko Beck early on: Everyday Zen, Nothing Special. Like you, I also ended up taking the pragmatic dharma route.

Those are great books, material for a lifetime. They still belong to my favourite dharma books.

Timus wrote: Nowadays, I usually do a mix of open awareness and the devotional approach.

What kind of devotional work are you doing? I moved from early noting/vipassana practice in a Theravada framework to being a theist and doing devotional work and I'm interested what other people find as objects of devotion...

Hi Timus - I studied with Alan, still talk to him now and then. Nice to have another Alanite join the forum.

Welcome Lost and Found. Love your picture. I'm quite fond of death imagery myself.

Cheers!

every3rdthought wrote: … I moved from early noting/vipassana practice in a Theravada framework to being a theist ...

That’s interesting! I’m under the impression that something similar is currently happening to me. It’s too early to tell how it’ll turn out, seems rather highly unpredictable, at least for me. I never thought of myself as a buddhist, despite sewing me a rakusu and receiving the precepts at a jukai ceremony etc. But buddhism was for a long time the most appealing kind of (organised) religion to me. Once, as an early teenager, I tried for some time to believe in god, but to no avail, I couldn’t make it happen. To be honest, the process is a bit frightening, there is some fear of loosing a certain intellectual integrity. I actually tried rereading Richard Dawkins The God Delusion but had to put it down after a while. A lot of his points regarding unduly influences of religion and religious organisations on society seem valid to me. But he is only refuting a god in which I don’t believe, rather shallow and simplistic concepts. Instead, I put David Bentley Harts The Experience of God high on my 2014 reading list and hope it’ll clear things up a bit.

every3rdthought wrote: … What kind of devotional work are you doing? ...

I offer myself to ‘god’. But: I can’t exactly say what that means. The best approximation would be something like ‘the mystery of life’, although I don’t like to put it that way because it sounds so cliché. At the beginning I struggled a bit over using the word god, but found it eventually to be the best fit.

Warm greetings to all. Nice to be here.

Brief (necessarily partial - probably irrelevant and misleading) intro:

Sat my first Goenka 10-day in March '09. Turned my world inside out. I've been sitting daily since then. Mostly scanning and sweeping with various tweaks. It's different every time.

The practice moved off the cushion quite a while ago.

Had a couple of non-dual 'openings' in my late teens and early 20s. Each followed by what you might call in these parts nasty DN.
Spent some time with an Advaita teacher in the South of India.

The last couple of years I've also been working with a Fourth Way group (of sorts) and teacher.

It just continues to unfold. I've pretty much abandoned the notion of a definitive conclusion to this thing.
Absolutely no idea where I might fit in to the MCTB paths, some of each level resonates deeply, other bits are completely alien to me. That matters much less than it used to

Lately (last few months) there seems to be a blurring of the distinction between true and false that animated me for so long and fueled the search. I could be falling back to sleep...or moving on. I don't know and that is fine.

I'll stop before the babbling gets out of control and just send out a huge thanks to all who have given to this place (and DhO and KFD.) For many reasons I have not been active online but it has been a crucial piece of my little path.

See you soon.
Anthony

Welcome, Anthony.

Welcome Anthony! What is Fourth Way?

Hello all,
I am from the dharmaoverground as it looks like most here are. I started reading the posts here lurking but finally wanted to jump in and post so I joined up.
My narrative is over on the dho if you wish to read about me - Dreamwalker's Narrative
I got stream entry without knowing it and had lots of follow up fruitions until I found MCTB and learned what was going on. I was stuck in review for a couple years then finally started down the road to 2nd path. Got there in Feb 2013. Started again with no review and moved up to EQ and Dec had a baseline shift followed by a deepening shift this January (couple weeks ago). Still fresh so waiting to see what happens next but I'm in review again. My daily meditations are not very skillful right now but I am just enjoying sitting doing nothing much more than hopping up the jhanas to 4th and sitting with it. Things are pretty good.
That's the condensed version. Nice to be here.
~D

Hi e3t,

I was a little worried someone might ask that but here goes...

The Fourth Way is a system. It is based, I suppose, on the idea that we are basically asleep but can awaken. Transformation is possible for some through inner development work.

It is generally associated with G I Gurdjieff but many (including Gurdjieff) claim that it is a 20th century reformulation of perennial esoteric truth.

Nothing really knew there. The term Fourth Way refers to the the idea that there are three traditional paths to realization: the way of the Fakir, the way of the Monk, and the way of the Yogi (loosely via body/heart/mind.) The Fourth way is said to combine and accelerate these via schools. It emphasizes "work" in the world rather than the monastery.

The initial work in the system is based on a technique of self-observation and quite a few other ideas.

Like any system it is a model. ("All models are false. Some are useful") I have found it very useful so far and have yet to discover any material inconsistencies with my limited understanding of the Buddhist Canon material and Advaita generally.

I came to Theravada meditation after quite a few years in the non-dual/Advaita sphere and was floored to find an actual technique that one could simply apply on a daily basis to great benefit. For me, the Fourth Way stuff has been very useful on the day to day, off the cushion, level - in interactions with others and with my own thoughts and emotions.

This is a woefully inadequate outline but there is a ton of material available online and if you are at all interested in knowing more I would be happy to suggest some resources.

Be aware that the Fourth Way has more than it's fair share of crackpots, scandals, cultish excess and shadow-derived distortions. It also has a rather complicated and wacky sounding cosmology that many find off-putting.

Be well.
Anthony

Sounds interesting! I know a little about Gurdjieff, good and bad, through a book I read on Blavatsky and Theosophy (from a historical not a practice perspective) which also discusses him, and he seems like a fascinating guy.