Fetters and Paths, Oh My!

Laurel Carrington wrote: Okay, so are we saying then that technical 4th is actually stream entry? Sorry to be such a tool. Just trying to keep my head above water, as usual. I personally would be more inclined to say fetter model 2nd b/c desire and aversion are greatly reduced.

For me, from wherever I find myself currently, it doesn't matter what name/shape is assigned to where I find myself. I see movement to significantly reduce that tendency. Though i can see that it does matter to others as it once did to myself.

I also saw that reduction as well post tech 4th, but have seen even more reduction since then. What does 'attenuated' really mean? How attenuated is it meant to be till it's the sakadagamin 'attenuated'? We could speculate for ever on this notions. What does matter is that there is attenuation of that which sucks. Not the nama/rupa assigned to such a 'place', at least as I currently see it. The more the drop continues, the less care there is for all of these ideas and notions of nama/rupa-ing 'stages'.

I'm holding off till it's clearly 'anagamin' territory and then i can say "in hindsight, that was probably sakadagamin, but meh! I can now dip into the earth and travel through the air." The real deal sakadagamin territory is probably a vast stretch of 'plane of volition' territory with varying degrees of attenuation in between there being no more need for attenuation. Race you to 3rd?

I'm in . Eat my dust!

Hi Nikolai thanks for your excellent reply to this thread, the description of the process resonates a lot with what I think I am trying to do.

Does anyone have any good structures or system for practice in this volition phase?

For example, do you have set practices where you go, ok I'm going to work on elements of lust, or aversion to certain things? Or do you just use your own pulls and pushes as a guide for working with stuff in day-to-day life? Or a mixture?

I seem to work well with goals and structures and am wondering if there is one that you (or anyone else) has found working well. I guess sensual desire and ill will are good places to start... seems like a quite long and formless path (for me) though.

thanks.

Do you think it might be possible to work with a teacher? I know people make wonderful progress just posting to the forum, but a teacher can give you more specific guidelines and help you process your unique experience.

Hi Laurel, short answer: I would like to work continuously with a teacher but haven't really found one that really clicks, in terms of style, tradition, location, method etc. Also I guess different people need different conditions to bring out the best in them and it seems from my experience that I am at my most motivated, authentic and creative when working in a very long orbit from any teacher.

I have a couple of teacher type figures who I sometimes very infrequently check in with. I last saw one of them about 4-5 weeks ago after I had the mctb 4th path stuff happen, and we talked about this same question, how to completely 'master' the clear seeing-through of all patterns of arising 'stuff' as Nick very beautifully describes. I was expressing diligence and belief but some doubt about how long it might take. Her parting words were "Do it. Email me when you're done. It's not a lifetime's work". (She thinks it took her about 6-8 years). So I am trying to do it do you have a specific tradition or markers for this sort of development?

btw I am in on this race (EDIT: to third and beyond) too
Adyashanti took about this same time from initial awakening to a feeling of 'done' (about 6-8 years from what I understood in End of Your World)
Believe and anything is possible

Laurel Carrington wrote: I'm in . Eat my dust!

I'm in, too. Ya'll better watch out, 'cause "I've got my good shoes on, and I got'em tied up tight."

(My apologies to anyone who hasn't, at one time or another, been a fan of Andre 3000.)

Ona Kiser wrote:

Nikolai Stephen Halay wrote: ....... and with a baby on the way...

Congratulations!

Indeed!

I've been a daddy for almost 17 months, and I can assure you that parenting provides and amazing opportunity to work with this "volition" stage! This process has more or less forced me to let go of some unskillful habits, and also to intentionally work on developing helpful attitudes and behaviors. There's no other way to make it through with dignity

Chris Marti wrote: They are accessible if you log in to the Wikifoundry version of KFD using your old KFD login/password

Comes up as "This video is private." For me.

I think a lot of the fetters stuff is of course well intended as pointers, I think some have some fairly concrete underpinnings (say sensual desire), but others are again, well intended dogma, maybe to be thought of as overfitted stages from another era, maybe not. Though I think the broader community suffers from underfitting or rather a lack of any fitting at all. What are the appropriate fetters/concepts to talk about? Are there some that aren't listed in the holy of holies?

I think for me learning the Progress of Insight cycle (or the highlights, anyway) and following it thru a couple of paths was very useful to me and kept me going, baby step by baby step, eyes on the prize, likewise the same map expressed with more absorption i.e. jhanas. Wow, and how good was it to be able to look in on other people's meditation journals when they were going thru the same stage?

I don't seem to have much analytical ability around cessations, I seem to be gone, and seem to prefer to be gone. That kind of seems to be the point, although I may be missing quite a bit. To make much of an observation or analysis seems like additional work or contradictory to being gone, but then again maybe I'm just lazy . I guess it doesn't have to be this way but I would assume that there is indeed an order in which various processes arise, which I would tend to think is hard wired and reproducible.

So um, volition? You folks have volition?

Regarding the videos, Kenneth told me that he took them down because he no longer believes in the 8 or 9 stage model in that way.

Thanks, Nikolai. Very interesting, and something to file away. Daniel has tried to add a (gasp!) quick-and-dirty section on DO to MCTB2. Boy, are we going to have to wade in deep. For starters, he says in the draft that technical 4th means Contact ceases. So my question to him was, "If there is no more Contact, then no Vedana, so how is that attainment not something like a 'package model,' wherein something very like emotional/moral perfection is attained?" I guess I'll need to wait for his answer, but I have been wondering whether it may be something like, "Well, karma keeps ripening even though one no longer creates it, for a body was born." Anyhow, we were clipping along till he thought he could cover DO in a couple of pages. It is going to be a slog to dig out of the heap of implications he's sunk me in.

Even if it delays getting the book out, it will be wonderful to read what he has to say about DO. I don't think I need special powers to predict that one or two pages won't cut it!

I largely rewrote the section for him today while he was doing his hospital gig, LOL! I flat out refused to try to define Volitional Formations, though, and just said, "Good luck with that!" The rewrite literally gave me a migraine and took a ridiculous amount of time, so I may have to ask the doc to call something in for the headaches his runaway trains of thought are causing his editor.

He's not really directly addressing the Dependent Co-Arising of phenomena-causes-conditions-effects part of the DO teaching, but I guess he does that indirectly (or directly, depending on your perspective, or whether you even have a perspective anymore ), when he starts up about the luminous fluxing field. We seem to be trying really, really hard not to start discussing karma and rebirth. What a can of worms DO is that way, though.

Since this DO stuff appears in Part 1, "Fundamentals of Practice," I'm also wondering precisely how the DO stuff facilitates practice, especially beginners' practice. I think it is useful mainly for showing that even an arahat (per MCTB) must keep working the Morality Training--that is, it will have that purpose if Daniel brings out the karma loophole a bit more explicitly, which I tried to do today. He really has to bring it up and out into the light up front, or his rejection of "package models" of awakening later makes no logical sense.

In a way, it is probably good that the editor of this book has only stream entry or thereabouts. There seems to sometimes be such a gulf, otherwise, between how he would say and teach something and the level of explicitness and unpacking a relative novice reader-practitioner probably needs.

By the way, I cannot remember how blowaway the Four Noble Truths teaching was in MCTB1, but it is astonishing in MCTB2. That much I can say, especially Truth 2, the cause of suffering. It is literally the best 4NTs teaching I've encountered. He's put the DO stuff under Truth 3. It struck me today in seeing how seriously he takes the DO teaching that he is really very much a traditionalist, oddly enough.

Hey, Nickolai,

I've been looking everywhere for something like this, everywhere but where I should have looked, the texts:

By 'fruition' (phala) is meant those moments of consciousness which follow immediately thereafter as the result of the path, and which in certain circumstances may repeat for innumerable times during the life-time.

So "fruition" is not the same as cessation. This was exactly my SE experience--it was the few moments after the cessation that were earth-shattering, and something was very keenly aware during those moments that layered me back to being.

Thanks so much for posting this stuff. I need to finish and read again, from the top.