Why I don't "feel" enlightened from the vipassana "progress of insight" perspective even though I have "stream entry"

I sent a slightly different version of this to a friend via email and was persuaded to post it here. I was a little shy about doing this at first because I'm not sure how all of you feel about anyone claiming certain attainments. But, anyway, what I am saying and I can explain more if needed is that within the vipassana "progress of insight" map I'm pretty sure I've made it to stream entry which some practitioners see as one definition of "enlightenment." No big deal really, believe me.
Anyway, read the below material and we'll see if it sparks discussion or not:

These are just my thoughts/feelings, not a declaration of any actual truths about dharma. It shows my views, my prejudices, my feelings, my impressions, and, most likely, my misunderstandings.

Okay, I've realized this past week that to me, feeling enlightened would feel like this limited explanation:

-- I GET emptiness, impermanence, suffering, completely. This makes my actual, constant, point of view on my entity and on my experience one of a palatable freedom. I can SEE, all the time things rise from nothing and then fall back into nothing. I mean, I really GET it, you know?

Okay, now, what I just described is not my life, so I don't/can't think of myself as "enlightened." Now, I've had many moments of what I've just described. I've definitely been there and seen such a thing. No doubt on that. But this is NOT the default state. Not even close.

Here is my second point, or idea that could be very wrong:

-- to live in that way after becoming awakened to its possibility requires practice. Right? One has to learn how to, with effort and momentum and continuity, get into the habit of living with right now, with whatever is happening right now. This isn't something that is bestowed on someone after some great experience of insight, it's almost like a separate skill.

Third point:

-- I've done this off and on many times in my life and I'm trying this out and it seems to be working. It's all about how to look, how to be, how to live. Right now. It is both perfectly ordinary, mundane, boring, unsatisfying, and -- awesome, empty, inspiring, insightful, energetic, etc. -- at the same time. Living this way means that one really has no expectations, doesn't know anything about what is next or what will or can happen, does not have and wont come to any conclusions, ever. Ideas, thoughts, concepts, opinions are from the past and are thus dead, lifeless and irrelevant.

What you say here, Mike makes me wonder about how useful models/maps are: if you can work toward the goal, attain it-- by the criteria set forth in the maps and models-- and still be confused by the notion that 'real' enlightenment would be some one state/experience/perception distinct from all the randomness of life... then are the maps a help or a hindrance?

I just want to say I appreciate a direct, honest post (which I think you've been poking around for a while now, in other threads), and I think this kind of straight-up question is a real benefit to others.

The other thing I'd say is that whatever you are experiencing right now, whether you have stream entry or not, is all you've got. Keep sitting with it and watch what happens.

I'll save a novel I could write for later, since I'm relatively new to this forum and I'm in a ranting mood today, which tends to make me write more than I should.

What you say here, Mike makes me wonder about how useful models/maps are: if you can work toward the goal, attain it-- by the criteria set forth in the maps and models-- and still be confused by the notion that 'real' enlightenment would be some one state/experience/perception distinct from all the randomness of life... then are the maps a help or a hindrance?

-kategowen

I'm confident the maps are helpful, its not their fault that I have questions and curiosity.

"I'm confident the maps are helpful, its not their fault that I have questions and curiosity."

How are they helpful in this specific case? It seems instead they have been most un-useful.

This is exactly why I was reluctant to post this here. I had a hunch that the veracity of the context from which my question was coming from rather than the questions themselves would be addressed. I can defend/explain the maps on another thread.

Mike, I have a few thoughts and questions.

One, do you think the state you describe could be the default way of experiencing? I'm asking this just to clarify, I don't have anything invested in you answering either way. I ask because while I 'get' the point that no experience in and of itself defines realization per se, I will admit that, based on my experience and my careful consideration of the significance of different ways of experiencing, I do think that a certain way (or ways) of experiencing define or delimit authentic awakened experiencing, whether momentary or (to one degree or another) lasting. This is a tricky subject though and prone to misunderstanding. For instance, the modes of experience I would recognize as "awake" are characterized by a distinct sense of boundlessness or openness. So it sounds odd to say that they are "defined" by that.

and Two, since stream entry, or at least since you began to appreciate the significance of stream entry and follow up in ongoing investigations into that experience, has your default sense of self/ sense of how you experience not changed at all? Or has it drifted/shifted in the direction of the mode you describe as enlightenment? Or is it simply that you have recognized that "state" or way of experiencing, and are learning to access it more often, but basically you are either in the same old way of experiencing as "Mike Monson", whatever way that is/was*, or in the "awakened" way of experiencing?

Know what I mean? Do these questions make sense to you?

* Background: the way it felt to be Jake was one way at six months, another at two years, another at seven, another at twelve... another at 16 or so... and then more or less just mellowed till my late twenties, early thirties. Then things shifted in my early thirties, then they really shifted after SE, in what seems to have been a different whole direction to some degree.

This sequence of changes I'm talking about are different than the momentary Jakes which come and go throughout a situation, a day, and so on. They are more like an overall style or gestalt or kind, and the momentary Jakes I experience every day are like a sampling of examples of all of the previous layers, depending on circumstances and what comes up. But since SE, most of them have a certain "flavor" -- of fictionality, or imaginary-ness-- and with rare exceptions they all prove to have that flavor if I look closely.

This definitely has implications for my moods and such, as it usually requires effort and feels fake or pretend to proliferate stories around the primitive reactions, which latter still arise of course-- even perhaps moreso since the stories seemed to keep them 'under wraps" so to speak. I've never really talked with anyone about this I guess. Is it very different for you? I just assumed this was entering the stream.

I haven't done a billion years of vipassana, but I've seen the maps, read about the maps, talked about the maps with other meditators, and experienced parts of the maps. I've experienced cycles that roughly follow the stages of insight, so I think there's quite a bit of validity to them - they describe experiences in meditation that seem pretty common and normal - in a more simplified schema, an alternating opening and closing, or expansion and contraction. I tend to like that broader description better than the detailed stages of Arising and Passing, Desire for Deliverance, and so on, because I think a person can get overly obsessive with which exact micro-point in each cycle they have just experienced, and to a degree it doesn't matter at all. Opening are the blissful, expansive periods; closing are the dark, heavy, restless, uncomfortable, gritty periods. They happen just like that whether you follow along on a map or not. That's the rhythm of the universe, growing and dying, arising and passing away, blooming and withering.

So I think the maps are useful in gentle doses.

In my own experience, your expectations of stream entry seem off. It is a major opening and a significant, permanent shift, but it is still followed by closing...opening...closing...opening. So not a permanent steady state of "all done perfect awesome". Where I can't speak to your vipassana practice is in the specific expectation you had about getting arising and passing away and emptiness in a certain way. That's outside my vocabulary a bit, since I haven't been deep into that method and terminology in my own practice.

This is exactly why I was reluctant to post this here. I had a hunch that the veracity of the context from which my question was coming from rather than the questions themselves would be addressed. I can defend/explain the maps on another thread.


-michaelmonson

For my part, I mistook your curiosity for some sort of distress and spoke to that: viva curiosity! It often turns out better for humans than for cats. It is certainly a big part of our lives.

The only reason that I think I ever got stream entry is that I can vaguely relate to all the stages up to and just before equanimity, and then I strongly relate to descriptions of equanimity as well as to frution/cessations.

As far as I can tell I can get to equanimity fairly often sitting or not and then I can synch up with my experience in an open, disembedded way with momentum and continuity and eventually have what sounds like fruitions/cessations as described in the vipassana "progress of insight" maps. This has been verified a couple of times by accomplished yogis who I only know through email and/or skype.

And, there are times in my life when I am looking just the right way when my awareness seems infused with what seems to be significant clarity, wisdom, insight, freedom, unity, connectedness, and an ability to take on intense suffering and horribly awful experiences while connected to some huge mind in which the pain barely registers and then quickly fades away into nothing.

However, I don't really know for sure. I wrote the title of this just after someone new had verified my stream entry so my doubts were temporarily gone. Anyway, since I've never gone on long vipassana retreats and thus have never worked closely with a qualified meditator, and since I am just a doubtfull kind of person, I truly wonder what is really going on. Truly.

Again, my point is that while individual experiences and moments and milestones on the map are awesome, wonderful, worthwhile, and important -- they are all temporary, they all fade away, and that there is very likely no permanent change to one's default state without continued practice. That awakening, enlightenment IS practice in this moment and nothing else. Right?

And, I'm not sure if there are any "permanent shifts," because that would make each of the three characteristics untrue.

Okay, just now I sat in my office at work (I don't officially start until 8:30) for about 20 minutes. I quickly got focused on each in breath, each out breath, and the times in between. Then, I synched up with various kinds of sensations, vibrations, and sort of floating feelings and images happening in real time. I saw the beginnings and endings of things. My brain started to feel kind of light yet energetic and there was a sort of pulling feeling up to the top of my skull. Things seemed brighter. This process intensified as I continued to synch with things. Then, there was a series of "jerking awake" sensations followed by a slight sense of release.

When I got up from the chair to walk over to the chair in front of my computer I lost my equaniminous awareness. Though I felt energetic and a little thrilled, my mind and body became immediately infused with a slight anxiety over work, personal, family, financial, and health issues all at once. It was basically uncomfortable, unpleasant, unsatisfying. This happened no more than 90 seconds after what seems like a fruition.

Then, just before writing this, I made a conscious decision to "practice" to purposely attend to the moment with open awareness. The unpleasantness immediately began to subside and I began to feel energetic, a little thrilled and sort of .... empty, for want of a better word.

My (admittedly not entirely engaged) understanding of stream entry is that it's basically just indicative of Right View and a commitment to the dharma, and full confidence in the refuges. Basically like matriculation into the dharma world. Sotapannas are generally considered to be incapable of the really bad stuff, but I have not heard of the notion that stream-entry is actually considered enlightenment itself. That seems like a pretty low bar! Who is it who believes that's actually equivalent with arahantship?

As for the bulk of your post: my understanding of Enlightenment, as a factor of understanding, is that it is an intuitive knowledge that sort of then 'bubbles' up into the acting and perceiving mind. This understanding derives in part from insight experiences I've had in the past. I think there's a tendency to imagine a 'permanent shift', which implies that when we roll over on our meditation odometer, something will change about our sense perceptions—like everything in our vision will change in tint, or a sound that we had been hearing all our lives will suddenly cease. But I agree this is not particularly reasonable to expect.

That said, I have in my own practice experience some fruits of wisdom already. And the process of insight 'working on me' is subtle but not ineffable, if you ask me. And in my experience, the process goes like this: through meditation and sila/metta/all the rest practice, I acquire certain insights about dhamma. These might start as intellectual knowledge and work themselves into my intuitive understanding, but more often they come from moments of direct experience of my mind and of dhamma. That is, through meditation I will acquire direct experiential familiarity with some deep and usually inaccessible quality of experience. And as with most objects of understanding in the world—people, places, tastes—experiential familiarity of these qualities is able to sit in my immediate, emotional experience, much more deep than even rigorous knowledge.

And so what I find is that when I acquire this kind of understanding about some quality of experience—not even necessarily expressible in words, like 'I get resentful because of control issues' or some similarly analytical insight, but more like the basic truth that your loved ones' actions will be more intelligible and more understandable as an expression of who they are, because you feel for what makes them tick—it works on me. It expresses itself in my tendencies, in the impulses I feel (or don't feel), in the values I apply to my decision making process. These are all real, volitional things. They're not, obviously, just the product of me resolving not to be resentful any more; but the emotional patterns that I construct in my brain nevertheless guide my behavior in the world, in the exact same way as a new parent finds their values and behavior shifting. It's not an occult, externally derived shift imposed on them, and they can point to exactly what values and emotions they have now, that have changed them as people. And yet it's a deep and subtle change. One that occurs in them seemingly without changing the nature of any sense object.

And if you ask me, that's what awakening could be. Not a state—and maybe not even a new practice, either—but a deep, intuitive, bodily understanding, that we allow to work its way up through our thoughts, emotions, speech and actions. Its precise flavor, the exact content of that realization and what we then do with that understanding, is still up for debate. I am not 100% inclined to the 'practice in this moment and nothing else' suggestion but that question is really not even the point, you know? Anyway, when I think about enlightenment, I don't think about a state, and I don't think about a practice; I think about a transformative understanding.

In the model I'm talking about, "stream entry" is "first path." First path is what happens just before a yogi first gets to his or her first experience of fruition/cessation. This is not arahantship, which in this model would be when a yogi has gotten to "fourth path."

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/mahasi/progress.html

Zach, a lot of what has gone on in the whole "hardcore dharma" movement, which I don't think you ever got sucked into, is that people like Daniel Ingram and Kenneth Folk were using versions of the map I attached just now and being very emphatic that sitting down, following directions and then getting to first, second, third, fourth path wasn't some lofty, mythical goal, but something that anyone could do it they just worked at it.

Then, a LOT of people it seems like got very excited and encouraged by this and started meditating, talking to each other on the internet and on skype or in person and started reporting success in attaining different stages on this map, even up to fourth path. It's been going on since about 2007, I think.

I was one of those people (though once I made it to purported stream entry as verified via skype by one of these teachers I realized that I'd hit that what seemed like a very similar point many years before, which was very confusing). However, after this "stream entry" I lost interest in the teacher and much of the hardcore stuff and wound up here (which is why it is called a "Refugee Camp"), kind of continuing to practice, explore, read, think, discuss, and sort it all out, you know?

Sure, I'm familiar with those things, though you're right that I've never followed them myself. I was just interested in your comment that some people actually consider stream entry to be a definition of enlightenment. Only because my limited engagement with thoughts of stream entry has it more as an affirmation of the capacity for serious, sustained dharma practice; most of the qualities associated with a stream enterer are distinctly oriented towards the future and towards a preparedness for full engagement of the dharma, eg., right view and confidence in dharma, sangha, and buddha, rather than the statement of spiritual attainments themselves. Then again, I'm not really a big attainments person one way or the other.

Sure, I'm familiar with those things, though you're right that I've never followed them myself. I was just interested in your comment that some people actually consider stream entry to be a definition of enlightenment. Only because my limited engagement with thoughts of stream entry has it more as an affirmation of the capacity for serious, sustained dharma practice; most of the qualities associated with a stream enterer are distinctly oriented towards the future and towards a preparedness for full engagement of the dharma, eg., right view and confidence in dharma, sangha, and buddha, rather than the statement of spiritual attainments themselves. Then again, I'm not really a big attainments person one way or the other.

-cruxdestruct

Cool, this one teacher I had used to say that people like me were "one quarter enlightened" because we still had three paths to go. I don't know, that word is so powerful and strange.

Mike - I concur with Kate's statement that the question sounded quite urgent, a reaching out for help, on first post. If I felt that way I'd be quite distressed, not "curious." In any case, hopefully something has helped in all this?

Re: "Again, my point is that while individual experiences and moments and
milestones on the map are awesome, wonderful, worthwhile, and important
-- they are all temporary, they all fade away, and that there is very
likely no permanent change to one's default state without continued
practice. That awakening, enlightenment IS practice in this moment and
nothing else. Right?"
And, I'm not sure if there are any "permanent shifts," because that would make each of the three characteristics untrue"

I think the great difficulty is just in having to use language to talk about things that are very, very strange and hard to describe. Things arise and pass away on various levels. On a relative level, in the ordinary day to day, your body was born and will die, the flowers bloom and wither, and ten years of college education gets you a five year job in a cubicle with a paycheck. The sun rises and sets, and so on. On an absolute level, there is only the moment, now, manifesting out of the unmanifest. At some level there is no past or future, only this micro-instant of now. If you recall a memory, that is happening now. If you think about tomorrow, that is happening now. Nonetheless, one schedules appointments for next week, and recalls memories of a deceased friend on the anniversary of his death.

I think it can be also true and relevant to apply the idea of impermanence to macro things. Like "that was my favorite cup and now it's broken." But I think sometimes people go down this gloomy road with Buddhism - like it's all death, suffering and everything endlessly disappearing into some nihilistic void. Everything also arises. Like a joyous instant constantly manifesting out of the boundless Source.


The idea with the "paths" as I understand them is that at each shift further hindrances or delusions fall away. It's not "getting" so much as a gradual revealing, uncovering, of Reality.

Jesus.

While I'm fascinated with dharma practice and love doing it and talking about it and thinking about it and learning more and more about it and from it, it isn't something I could ever imagine causing me stress or anxiety or "issues" in and of itself, you know?

The idea that I would "reach out for help" on the issue of why or why not I don't feel enlightened just seems so odd to me and leaves me completely baffled.

(Edit: Okay, here is one reason why it seems so odd -- the spirit of my post is along the lines of "oh wow, what I'm thinking about here could really be helpful to some other practioners, I should share it" rather than "oh my god, please help me" more arogant than desperate)

For what it's worth, I was tempted to reply earlier but I felt I might be projecting... I'm somewhere in the early stages of the paths and am feeling fairly stagnant, as if my practice has plateaued. I'm not totally sure what to do, practice more on the cushion or practice more off the cushion... practice "better" or practice "softer"... Not sure what I'm shooting for. >shrug<

Mike, I just listened to a woman at a dharma talk this weekend burst out, near tears, "I've been meditating for 30 years! 30 years! And I don't see or feel or experience anything. People talk about flow and now and bliss and peace and all these other things, and I just don't get it. Nothing. And my friend, who has never meditated a day in her life, get's it. Her life flows. Everythings just right, just here and now. What the hell?"

I would never in a thousand years consider that arrogant or odd. She was in emotional pain. She didn't get it. She was struggling and reached out to people in the group to offer some words of support or guidance. There's zero odd in that, to my mind. She's not the first person I've heard similar desperation from.

Maybe it's a girl/guy thing?

In any case, this discussion may be very useful to others despite some of us misinterpreting the intention of the question, I would think. Thanks for posting it.

Hmmm, what does this say about me then? This past hour has sparked what feels like a reassessment for me.



I'm always about half an instant away from laughing at the silliness of it all even at my most earnest seeming moments.



I would've felt for the lady at your talk but my advice to her would be to try find ways to lighten up and to not take all this practice stuff so seriously.