Pre A&P practice

Thanks Chris for pointing this out. Not even the Buddha could guarantee any kind of assistance or help. His dying words were basically "Work hard to gain your own salvation."

Atha kho bhagavā bhikkhū āmantesi - handa dāni, bhikkave, āmantayāmi vo: "vayadhammā saṅkhārā appamādena sampādethā"ti. Ayaṃ tathāgatassa pacchimā vācā.

Now the Blessed One advised the bhikkhus - Well now, bhikkhus, my counsel is: experience is disappointing, [it is] through vigilance [that] you succeed. These were the last words for the Tathāgata

But all that morbid talk aside...

I suspect that the reason you were so inclined to call the body problems and releases "insights" is because you were seeing examples of the three characteristics first hand. That isn't time wasted at all, but rather what has to be done.

Maybe this mapping is correct, maybe not. Even if it is correct and you were in the midst of three characteristics, I doubt we could have said anything that would have made it go quicker. That's the downside of maps, they tell you where you are, but they don't change the landscape of your personal terrain. Your practice will be unique to you.

So there is always something bittersweet about placing yourself on the maps. That's why many maps will also come with a disclaimer, like the one on the "sixteen stages of insight" page I linked to earlier:

Note to the reader: Some meditation teachers feel that the following information should not be made available to the general public. That isn't because these teachings are for members of a select group, must be specially transmitted, or are in any sense esoteric; but because, due to the tricky nature of the mind, learning about these insights before acquiring personal meditation experience might cause you to anticipate results, thereby slowing your progress.


But it can be good to have a sense of context sometimes. if the map gives you some sense of progress some context for understanding what happened, maybe that's useful enough for now.

I haven't read all of your responses yet just now, but I got the last couple and just want to clarify that within the last year, although maybe slow, my practice has been going at what I'd say now at a reasonable pace. But before that there were a couple years where its possible I was a victim to the maps, or to my totally unyielding desire to change something. So sure there were systemic problems on my part there. Those are the times/problems that I'm trying to address in this thread.

I plan on reading it all but I feel like I'm just discovering some rhythms of the day, ext, so it may take a little bit for me to get around to it.

You're right, I think it is the 3 characteristics. I guess the one I'm observing is misery. Maybe a bit of impermanence.

But though I was saying mind & body blah blah, what I was talking about is really just pre A&P.

Daniel's description of this territory is really great. But this wasn't emphasized with my practice for a long while. It should be. It should be used to generate appreciation of the territory someone is in.

Is it so unrealistic to portray a progression of becoming more and more clear through uncovering any of these weird manifestations? For me, it seemed to happen in an upward way. The same for Jake. It seems like Jake went through these in the DN and EQ, too, but assuming he wasn't a person who could do that, someone who would have to develop concentration/tranquility first, Is it such an unrealistic thing to do to suggest that someone has these dominoes in their way when they start practicing so that they may be sensitive towards these phases in a way they might not be otherwise?

That is, to assert that clarity is a value of fully exploring this nana, and that it is vastly beneficial in its own right?

(I can't tell in the post above if you already know the answers to your questions and they are rhetorical or not?)

The nice thing about this life is we can focus on whatever makes the most sense for us. It's tricky to advise someone. Unless they are harming themselves, if someone really wants to explore any aspect of meditation or experiencing the body, why not?

It's important to be clear on the choices we make. Since I don't quite know what "fully exploring the nana" means in practice, it's hard for me to say anything grounded in my experience. You might be suggesting something different than traditional meditation practices which call for simply observing what is arising. The maps and practices of traditional meditation is directed toward a particular end: learning how not to stop directing, controlling, and/or manipulating experience. Seeing it as it is. Dropping the obsession of judging, picking out faults, stopping the believing of our preferences to be real and true, dropping the habit of creating ways of staying busy, letting go of the continual effort to reinforce the sense of self that is "over here" and observes objects "over there".

So it all depends on what you want to practice.

My best guess is that when you say "fully exploring this nana" you are talking about a directed approach that looks for body knots and untangles them by placing attention on them, (in yoga they say to "breathe into them" which means holding the sensation of breathing and the knot at the same time and energize those feelings), feeling them completely, which allows them to let go. I think that's fine work, and it's a big focus in yoga and Chinese martial arts. It's important work. I don't quite place that practice in "pure" meditation though. Does that make sense? It seems like a combination of body work and meditation. The reason I'm saying that is you are "looking for" a particular type of experience and you are looking for a particular result of the experience. I think that's perfectly fine, but you should know that it isn't quite the same practice as simply noting what arises on it's own in body, feeling, emotion, and thought.

Here's the reason why seeing that difference is important: if you use a meditation map to judge and direct a blended bodywork-meditation practice, there are going to be misalignments. That doesn't mean it's "wrong" it just means it's not the same as a pure meditation practice.

We've already seen how talking about the nanas gets complicated with a blended practice. I don't think it makes sense to just say "Pre-AP" because these nanas are very specific aspects of meditation practice. Also using the terms from one mapping scheme to another domain will be confusing. As we realized earlier, your use of "insights" for observing and untangling body-emotion knots isn't being used the same way as a nana's "insight".

That's my thoughts, but I could be wrong. What do you propose? What would fully exploring this nana entail? What would be the practice, what would be the signs of progress, and what would be the sign that it had been fully explored?

I think it's great to be an explorer and a mapper of our own practice path. As long as we take responsibility for the practices we are doing and the effects that they have --- in other words, take an active role in assessing "am I being helpful to my mind/body or am I being harmful?" --- then any adult should feel free to explore whatever they want. If your choices don't impact others, there's no need to justify them. Everyone makes choices. Usually, the best choice is to follow your heart's interest.

Hope this helps!

Sure, maybe it is not 100% accurate all of the time to correlate body insights with the progress of insight. But why are we enumerating on this, does this not seem to be pedantic? Isn't the real question how to orient people who are really remedial to be able to meditate?

What I'm getting is that no one cares about that.

It's like, why do I even get out of bed sometimes?

Femtosecond wrote: Isn't the real question how to orient people who are really remedial to be able to meditate?

Yes. That is the real question. Not just remedial people either. Anyone.

So I would expect people to be interested in what fosters insight practice, that's all

I think if you look up thread, you can see a lot of examples of people who have identified challenges faced by meditators and possible solutions. They have also tried to interpret your very general questions and tried to help you get more specific. Right? Let's be honest. And let's also be honest that you have spent the last few posts making broad statements about other people's intentions, which is kind of passive aggressive (EDIT: I don't know if it really is passive aggressive, but it does seem surprisingly inaccurate). It really doesn't have a place in this conversation between adults.

It is only reasonable to assume at this point, that you don't have a very specific question or you don't have a specific situation that you are curious about. (I think you would have asked about it by now.) That's fine. I think we had a good discussion, but there is only so much that can be discussed generally. There are entire libraries of books that have been written on how to generally practice.

I'm just disappointed, I would hope that things like this would be an idle interest for people here and that they would have racked up some things to say about it over the years.

I know there's general libraries of books, but I have been to many different teachers from the ranks of those who write books like that and none of it made a difference for me. This thread was looking for ideas to make the rubber hit the road for non-advanced meditators, but no one is chiming in insofar as this.

I had a thought of mapping the process of physical releases and 'purifications', and tried to correlate this with progress on the progress of insight.

Anyway, there are a lot of factors at play w/ life so I don't hold it against anyone.