General Practice Updates

I'm totally picking up what you're laying down, Chris. And, I love that you're able to put it into your own language, which is very clear and lucid to me.

This "narration track" is, I think, and aspect of mental elaboration, which I think can be classified as sankhara (Skt: samskara). This is one of the meanings of "formations" or "fabrications" in both the teachings on the Five Kandhas and dependent co-arising.

The coolest thing about getting familiar with dependent co-arising is that you don't have to know the ins and outs of the entire process to change it. You only have to intercept the process at one of the links, understand its causes, and view it in light of the Four Noble Truths. This sends wisdom into the feedback loop, and progress continues from there.

So, you're noticing how complex reactive emotions are very much linked to this narration track. Knowing this, you start looking into the narration track more fully, seeing it in light of wisdom leading to the end of suffering.

When I've done this for long stretches, things definitely open up, or "shift". Suffering drops, big time. I don't know if there's anything special about being able to see the process at the level of fabrications, but it hasn't always been something I could detach from enough to see clearly. Only recently has this stuff started coming into view for me. I should expect this, however, since you and I have practice lives that unfold in similar movements at relatively correlated intervals. It still kind of creeps me out, in a good way!

I'd love to hear more about this as you continue to practice!

Great! Thanks for sharing this, Chris. Seems that, regardless of what we practice, we are moving in the same direction. I am starting to realize how much all of this is connected to the chakras. Have you notices that they tend to melt and then dissolve into emptiness and clarity, leading to a natural effortless samadhi state, while the body feels more and more transparent?

Chris - I was going to ask what your typical meditation practice has been lately. Besides the jhanas, how else do you usually sit (before this event, in any case)?

Interesting. I didn't meditate hardly at all from about March to May. Then I picked up practice again and generally do exactly that - just sitting - with a few exceptions where I've experimented with this or that specific practice from a book or whatever guided meditation a teacher is suggesting at a group event or experiments suggested by friends. Just sitting has tended to feel like the "right" thing in general. The main oddity I have noticed is that while from last December until around July I was doing an intense amount of spirit work, my interest in that has slowly tapered off, and I now rarely do any. I've just - for the time being anyway - mostly lost interest in it. I did try at one point a couple months ago to try to learn to do the jhanas, and had some mild success, but couldn't be bothered to sustain the effort. I think in a strange way the spirit work is not unrelated, as it takes you through various altered states; it also activates various chakras.

At another point last month I started doing some yoga exercises to generate bliss states, and found that mildly entertaining but not enough so to bother sustaining it. I had a very intense period of kundalini activity around then while doing a weeklong series of offerings to Ganesha, even to the point of waking me up at night, which was surprising and unusual. I now do some yoga breathing exercises each morning, but don't tend to find they generate any particular bliss (at least not without more effort than I care to bother exerting), more just a clarity and tranquility. I still do that, as it is a pleasant way to start off the day and focus my attention before moving on to meditation.

I'd been meaning for some time to ask what daily practice other people are doing, so thanks for sharing. It does seem to be best to follow my intuition, as it were, and do whatever feels most right and natural at a given point.

That makes sense. I have often had various energetic stuff happen particularly during the period while I am falling asleep, or occasionally during that 3-4am period when I tend to wake up and then fall back asleep again.

Have you any experience with the bottomless black pit that I described earlier? That happens when I breathe into the jhana-like part of this new "thing" and focus the in/out breath on the back of my neck. Things just sink into a black nothingness if I stay with that, but first there is a flickering/flashing kind of thing that happens. Inside the blackness there appears to be nothing but Awareness.

-cmarti

I know this was directed to Alex, but I thought I'd chime in. In my understanding, what you're describing is a causal state experience. The jhanas are considered subtle states, because there is still subtle forms (i.e. dreamlike appearances). The causal state is just voidness and awareness. In my experience there are two subtle traps to avoid at the causal level. The first is to get attached to the voidness aspect, as if it were somewhere you could pass into and stay forever. The other is to try and reconstruct your personal identity from the witnessing perspective (classic Tozan's Third Rank pathology). By cultivating equanimity in place of aversion, and clearly recognizing that the personality is never what gets enlightened, both obstacles can be avoided



Being able to access this state has been helpful in clarifying awareness as consciousness without surface or form. Simple awareness, free of contents. It's fairly easy to get this conceptually prior to the experience, but the experience really brings it home (as is usually the case).

Sometimes I think what I have to say is not so interesting or useful, because I am so NOT a technician, not at all methodical, not working a program, nor all that conversant with the Vipassana schema beyond the most impressionist sense of its function. However, I am nonetheless a persistent chimer-in when opportunity presents...

I think maybe I experienced a brief phase of this BLACKNESS prevailing during earlier meditation practice. When I tried to describe it, all I could come up with was 'black light'-- because there was some paradoxical luminosity to it. And there was a lush depth to it, not like light bouncing off a shiny surface. It was not at all frightening: it was like the fruition of TS Eliot's practice advice lifted from St. John of the Cross:

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
?Which shall be the darkness of God. ..
?I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
?For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
?For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith?
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.?
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
?So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

Until the experience, I hadn't recognized that I had been carrying that bit of poetry in my heart, like an amulet, for when I'd need it-- but at the time this was clearly so.

Oddly enough, lately-- a decade and more after this phase-- my meditation has become just this sense of 'open listening'. Settling down and hearing if the silence has anything to tell me.

Kate, your input is never *not* interesting and useful! And I adore that you so often have a poem to hand to illustrate a point.

I love serendipity: picked up an almost-random book* from one of my stacks today, flipped through it to the back, and discovered this--

"LIVING MIDNIGHT

The real living midnight is like this: when you are sitting quietly, body and mind are both free, and the whole being is supple and relaxed, empty and silent, merged into one whole, you are not aware of the existence of heaven, earth, people, or yourself-- you only sense a great physical and mental stability and a springlike warmth. This is the arising of positive energy, and it is called the living midnight. When you experience this, it is imperative to let it be as it is naturally and not become overjoyed, lest the experience disappear and your work regress."

* The book was Thomas Cleary's Vitality Energy Spirit: a Taoist Sourcebook.

It reminded me that this phrase 'living midnight' recurs in Daoist and Chan works, and clarifies what about the phrase was evocative-- that deep darkness that is vibrantly alive.

Wonderful contributions, Kate!

Black Light.

Living Midnight.

Yes! Nailed it!

-Jackson

One last bit of poetry-- from decades ago, but this discussion brought it to mind for the first time in ages:

The first time

you took me into your arms,

I fell free, wild and silly,

into the vast unknowing

where still that one

I was, is floating, edgeless

as an echo in the endless:

still falling

like a shoe dropped in space.

Have you any experience with the bottomless black pit that I described earlier? That happens when I breathe into the jhana-like part of this new "thing" and focus the in/out breath on the back of my neck. Things just sink into a black nothingness if I stay with that, but first there is a flickering/flashing kind of thing that happens. Inside the blackness there appears to be nothing but Awareness.I have no idea what led to this stuff. It started happening earlier this week on one particular night. I was doing a lot of jhanic arc practice, however, rising into the 5th jhana and hanging out there a lot when I would sit.

-cmarti

@Chris: yes, Chris, I did experience this a few weeks ago, but I haven't tried to get back into this state since then. What I did was to get into a deep thoughtless state and then sink down, deeper and deeper below the navel, as if falling at the bottom of the ocean. Once there I attended to a warm feeling of love/happiness in the chest that felt like all that remained of my sense of existence. Observing it, it faded away. It felt like being sucked into a vortex to land in "the beyond". There, there was no sense of self and no sense of space. Just a tiny thread of awareness and a sense of eternal rest. It seems that I could have remained there forever. It also felt like awake dreamless sleep and did match my Advaita guru friend's description of Turiya, the fourth state.

Now, Ramana Maharishi to Nisargadatta and other reliable authorities seem to say that the mastery of this particular state is somehow necessary to get stabilized in the next stage of development. Aziz "Anadi" Kristof states that one can get established in this state and somehow bring it back to everyday consciousness. This seems to be what Jackson did.

@Jackson: sorry, we have not been able to talk about this earlier. But, how did you do it exactly? Did your experience validate or at least match Anadi's description?

@Chris: I have noted a deep connection between the jhanas, the chakras, the grounding of emotions (especially in relation with the navel chakra). This seems to validate Adhyashanti's idea of a process of embodiment (of awakening) through the chakras.

It seem that the only way to really open the crown chakra is to get into deep jhana. The most it opens, the more kundalini energy is sucked into the system by an effect of aspiration. When it does it feels like you are describing.

PTHTHTH. Every time I fell into some black void during meditation I just shrieked in terror. You all do the same and find it inspires poetry?

PTHTHTH. Every time I fell into some black void during meditation I just shrieked in terror. You all do the same and find it inspires poetry?

-ona

Interesting. Find why? Does it feel like death?

I've never died, so I can't say. But I've also never had such an experience recently, either, so I can't say whether I would still find it scary.

Well, Ona, the poetry is a kind of exclamation of surprise, the 'outro'. The 'intro' was a sense of resistance-- 'Nonononono-- I won't jump... AAAHHH-- got shoved, HARD!' And then, 'Oh-- NOT what I expected. AT ALL.' Immense tenderness, it turns out, is what has held me all along-- not my heroic efforts.

Some folks are better at keeping it all together, at not having their world turn inside out, or their mind turned inside out. My little skill seems to be finding the hurricane's eye... since my resistance is so futile.

@Jackson: sorry, we have not been able to talk about this earlier. But, how did you do it exactly? Did your experience validate or at least match Anadi's description?

-alex_w

No worries, Alex. The opening and stabilizing effects have only really occurred fairly recently. So, we haven't really had time to talk about it an earlier than now.

I've been able to access this causal territory for a while. For me, it's similar to the subtle jhanas in that it can be accessed with either partial or full absorption. Full absorption, where there is absolutely ZERO awareness of any objects other than the formless void* (explanation below), usually occurs for me only when I make a conscious effort to practice during sleep. When sitting, I'm usually less absorbed in the state**.

I did use Anadi's instruction in a conscious way at first (activating the sense of presence [i.e. Witnessing] at the third-eye center, and moving that awareness to rest in the stillness at the hara/dantien). This resulted in learning how to move "I am-ness" (my "I-thought" center) to different areas of the body. That is, I could locate "I" in the stillness at the dantien, whereas "I" am/is usually centered (location-wise) at the third-eye/upper dantien. Then, I learned to split "I" up into multiple zones. It's really quite weird!

For a while I had the mistaken notion that in order to "stabilize" the state, I would need to spend as much time in the state as possible. Since I could move the "I-thought" around, I though stabilization meant that it would partially stay there. This, I think, came from a mis-reading of Anadi and a lingering trust in my understanding of some of the Theravadin commentaries (not the Pali canon itself).

In a serendipitous fashion, a friend of my introduced me to one of his friends due to our compatible interests in meditation. I let him know how my practice was going, and I asked him for some pointers. Through reading some of the details from his practice prior to some major breakthroughs, as well as engaging in a dialog with him for a few weeks, I was able to clear up some conceptual confusion enough to break past where I kept getting stuck.

What I think I realized (which I should have realized already, due to prior events in my practice) is that stabilization is not the result of staying in a state as long as possible. It's a matter of clearing up delusion that keeps the facets of awakening that are apparent from that perspective from being living expressions all of the time. For me, it was once again clearly seeing that it wasn't the voidness that would carry me through to the next stage; it was, indeed, the aware that knows this voidness. (Seems like a no-brainer, right?) Being able to let go of the void was the first step. When Witnessing has nothing to identify with apart from anything else, it seemingly flips-over itself (in my case, at least) and perceptual duality is dropped.

Similar to Anadi's teaching, the focus for me has shifted to the Heart (more like the solar plexus area most of the time). Emotional energy can get very strong, and it feels like it forms a pillar of light and heat through the center of my body. If I had to guess what this phenomenon is symbolizing in my body and mind, it would be pure, distilled craving. At this point it isn't even clear if there's an object of the craving. Craving just shows up habitually, and looks for something to grasp. It gets pretty wild when it can't find an object to poor its energy into. As with all things insight, clear seeing and equanimity feed wisdom back into the feedback loop, and the craving drops cold (albeit temporarily). I can't say I know exactly how to work with this thing, so I'm just sort of feeling it out. I have a feeling this is all related to burning up the remaining vasanas.

I hope that's the kind of info you were looking for.

-Jackson

*Voidness is made into "the void" (an object) by ignorance/delusion at the level of the casual/very subtle mind/state. It's a very subtle projection/fabrication that is not inherent in the state itself... at least that's how I think it works.

**Hokai mentioned in the Hurricane Ranch Discussions that, in terms of realization, some people require a stronger jhanic state than others. If I understand him correctly, I agree. Being able to access the territory with enough clarity to "look around" is what's important. That doesn't always require full absorption.

In addition to the above, I should mention that I feel a little bit vulnerable and exposed at the moment, having just written about my practice in a very detailed fashion. I know that this used to be status quo for me, and it remains so for others. Still, the following needs to be said; not for the sake of the participants of this forum, per se. More so for anyone who happens lurk around our conversations in the public space of the interwebs...

I'm not claiming to be DONE. If there is some traditional title for someone with realizations similar to what I described above, I don't want it.

I have made progress. My life is better. I'm not the same as I was before I started practice meditation. I suffer less. I'm happier. I'm less "blown and tossed by the wind". But I do get caught. Reactive emotions still arise, though not near as often, and with much less influence than before. There are insights from the great traditions that I seem to have truly apprehended for myself, and so I have more confidence in the teachings than ever before.

Most importantly, I LOVE TO PRACTICE!

OK, I'm done now

-Jackson

's good to be reminded that this is a public space. I keep forgetting.