some new thoughts from Charlie Tart

http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/

Models of Meditation and How They Might Affect Us

That was a fun read, Kate. Thanks for posting it.

I think Young is pointing Tart in the right direction. I have a feeling that if he keeps up his practice in this way, his understanding and skill as a meditator will probably grow and deepen.

But this level of intellectual understanding hasn’t had any particular effect on my life, so it must not, I’ve believed, be the real understandings of Impermanence, No Permanent Self, and Unsatisfactoriness.
-- Charles Tart

This is interesting to me. I'm willing to share that I've had real understandings of the three characteristics listed above. Whether Tart has or not I'm not sure, but I have a hunch that he has not.
However, have these understandings had a "particular effect on my life?"

Yes and no.

No, in the sense that my default state sans moment to moment practice is not free of suffering nor is it full of insight.

But, yes, in the sense that when I am practicing with the right combination of effortful awareness of the moment and surrender to the experience of that moment (with continuity and momentum) the truth of the three C's will be displayed in a way that makes everything having to do with my normal projections, desires, resentments, self-centered ambitions, etc. just sort of melt away, leaving a kind of cool, empty, energetic, frictionless state.

More often than not, still, that cool state prompts a desire in "me" to want to maintain it and keep it (so now I'm no longer surrendered and aware) and I'm back to the default. I'm thinking though that continued practice may (or may not) increase the practice times and lesson the tendancy to try to grasp onto the nice state.

edit: what I am saying is that when I first started getting insights from intense and enthusiastic "choiceless awareness" and vipassana practices this "cool" state mentioned above was signficant and special and I didn't doubt it was the fruit of my practice. Lately I'm starting to think that I'm pretty freaking fortunate in that sense, you know? Why me?

I know lots of people who are doing the same practices I've done and am doing who never seem to get it at all. One can just tell by talking to them or reading what they write about their practices that the three C's are still just words.

Is it grace? Luck? (or a curse?)

I'm nearly convinced that the tiny sliver of difference is that little bit of continuity when one drops all concepts and just jumps into the next moment and the next and the next without stopping to reflect, without -- at least for whatever the right amount of time it is -- stopping to go back to "me."

But this level of intellectual understanding hasn’t had any
particular effect on my life, so it must not, I’ve believed, be the real
understandings of Impermanence, No Permanent Self, and
Unsatisfactoriness.
-- Charles Tart


This is interesting to me. I'm willing to share that I've had real
understandings of the three characteristics listed above. Whether Tart
has or not I'm not sure, but I have a hunch that he has not.
However, have these understandings had a "particular effect on my life?"

Yes and no.

No, in the sense that my default state sans moment to moment practice is not free of suffering nor is it full of insight.-- Mike Monson

This is, as you say, an interesting area, Mike: it's hard to know how much of the differences you point out are simply a difference in subjective interpretation. When I look at how CT presents himself, the way that he teaches-- it looks to me like he's in thrall to his rigorous scientific training and paradigm. He seems to take for granted his honesty, modesty, and openness; others might very well point to those qualities as exemplifying a thoroughgoing understanding of the 3 characteristics in real life.

When one sees those things for the first time, being primed for what to look for, it can be quite an 'experience' with a kind of trippy, 'whoa, this is really different!' quality. And I think maybe there's a risk of thinking that anything less remarkable is a retreat from grace-- rather than the inevitable further development. 'This being so, how shall I live?'-- pretty ordinary and easy to overlook. Once I have a baseline of confidence and essential freedom, it easily gets lost that I wasn't always like this. I have to recall specific earlier occasions of being trapped in anxiety; and the longer time goes on, the vaguer those memories get.

I find myself really encouraged these days, by everything I encounter that points out the ordinariness, the obviousness, the accessibility, even the universality, of what I'm gonna call 'the entirely present state of being.' [To avoid all the aggrandizing terms that get slung around-- one of the stories one of my Aro buddies used to tell, when I was new there and interested in enlightenment, was that Rinpoche had said that talking about having attained enlightenment was like making a big deal about having armpits]

For me, I have no problem remembering being lost in anxiety because it was just yesterday and again this morning.

I may be presuming, Mike-- but when I was 'lost in anxiety' I wasn't capable of saying that; I was only capable of saying, 'Things really suck; I can't do this.'

I wasn't proposing that ordinary life stops being even excessively challenging, that there's some transcendent happy place with no screwed-up relatives or employers or co-workers going apeshit; with no government officials herding us toward doomsday; with no global crises-- political or ecological. Just that I have found-- big surprise!-- a small steely core of certainty that, in the next moment, I will do the next thing. Without any grand promises or illusions about being triumphant-- it may be a mistake, the next thing I do. And afterwards, I will do the next thing.

The biggest boss at our firm -- I'll call him "darth" here -- went apeshit yesterday. It was tremendous. He had the two case attorneys, me (the paralegal), and the staff manager/supervisor show up for a meeting. He sat with a memo he'd written three weeks earlier about all the things he wanted done in one of the cases. He was clearly pissed and wanted to read us the riot act.
His point was that NOTHING he'd instructed to be done had been done.
As he went over each item, the lead attorney calmly explained either that
- the thing HAD been done
or
- the thing had not been done,but for a really good reason that wasn't the fault of anyone in the room

Darth heard each point but conceeded nothing, just kept repeating "The reason I write these things is because I expect my instructions to be followed immediately."

After about 45 minutes of yelling and cussing and complaining and not listening to what the other attorney was telling him -- he seems to brighten up and lighten up and get into a good mood. All of a sudden, he was happy and optimistic and it appeared he loved us all.

It seemed like he just needed to yell for 45 minutes.

He felt better and I felt horrible.

Anyway, Kate, I hear what you are saying and I'm sometimes in that place for days or weeks at a time but still, often, I need a minute or an hour or maybe a couple of hours to get to that place where I can know that all I need to do is the next thing and everything will be all right.

I LOVE your vivid stories, Mike: you get to be vice-president in charge of keeping it real!

-- slight addendum: there IS no "place where I can know that all I need to do is the next thing and everything will be all right." Or, I have never found it. There is just wherever I am, whatever I do, the consequences-- good, bad, or wtf-- of what I do. And again, each time a fresh start with uncertain results. Practice, lately, has been getting used to this state of affairs, and relinquishing the sources of my prior confusion. And these were preposterous ideas about what were the results of 'successful' practice-- romantic notions of becoming invulnerable to confusion, uncertainty, mistakes, even failure. Or to all the incoming assaults of people even more confused than I am.

I keep returning to this point, because it seems to be CT's source for misunderestimating his own practice: the idea that our problems are 'out there' and that if we practice well we will not only 'conquer' them, but we'll do it once and for all as the result of a sufficiently dramatic enlightenment event. I also think that this is a common expectation, encouraged by far too many teachers. And that it has a profoundly discouraging effect: problems still appearing? Must not be practicing too well.

[Of course, by that standard, the 16th Karmapa, Suzuki Roshi, Lama Yeshe, and many others who died 'before their time' must have also been poor practitioners.]