Owen's Practice Journal, Part II

I bit on the morbid side if you ask me, but somehow I can see you sporting it!
LOL
you should take a picture of yourself wearing it and put it as your profile pic!

Big chunk of somatic charge dropped off this evening. The striving and willingness to push through anything no matter how painful that worked so well before is becoming a hinderance now. The problem is that this is so easy, and that I'm actually good. There is a lot of my conditioning that can't quite make sense of this, and I stay focused in my body and watch it rebel. It rebelled hard tonight and I finally let go of it.

The drive to be anything other than whats happening in this moment is just too painful. Hell, even the sense of self, that contraction that's been with me since I could remember is just pain. No reason to hold onto it. It was never me, it's just a bunch of sensations that don't even have to come up if you stay present. If you are the ocean, after a while experiencing life as the wave gets old. I tried going up the arc today and even the 13th jhana kinda sucked in comparison.

I've been in direct mode/pce for most of the evening now. It seems so much easier to get into now that the striving thing got seen for what it was. Amazing.

Feeling strong aversion and the associated proto emotions this afternoon. My body is trashed from an intense workout, so it is fertile ground to investigate. As I dig into the physical sensations of aversion, I notice a burning, twisting energetic pattern around the heart chakra. Almost tearing, it's pretty intense. Had a conversation with Kenneth and Nick about this last night. It is as if the crux of the problem is the very sensation of self-contraction (small self, ego) trying to separate itself from what's actually happening. But it's a false problem since the contraction is just another thing that's happening. The perception of a self other than what's occurring is the fundamental delusion. At 4th path, it gets seen to be not a controlling entity, but it still arises and causes pain. Post 4th path, constant grounding in direct mode reduces the frequency it appears, it might even disappear completely. That remains to be seen. My koan lately is this: "Have I ever experienced something that isn't just a sensation?" Interesting times.

"It is as if the crux of the problem is the very sensation of self-contraction (small self, ego) trying to separate itself from what's actually happening. But it's a false problem since the contraction is just another thing that's happening. The perception of a self other than what's occurring is the fundamental delusion. At 4th path, it gets seen to be not a controlling entity, but it still arises and causes pain. "

Thanks Owen! This is really a clear description of what that self contraction is and how it works, makes it really easy for me to understand it in my own experience-in-the-moment, to whatever extent I am currently able to do so.

So, is there still a sense of self when there's no self-contraction? Can you have a sense of self that is absolutely not separated from anything that's going on?

"So, is there still a sense of self when there's no self-contraction? Can you have a sense of self that is absolutely not separated from anything that's going on?"

Short answer, I don't know. I'm in a pretty good pce right now so I'll see if I can describe it.

0. No suffering, at most just intense physical sensations.
1. Everything looks very real. More solid and vibrant somehow.
2. I am aware of my hands moving and when I speak there is a voice, but it seems to happen on its own.
3. When I try and look, there is a bare edge of a self contraction, but it is just being seen as a mild somatic charge in the abdomen.
4. Experience is more continuous - attention is pristine.
5. Pain and proto-emotions arise when I try and wrap a concept or a description around it. Real life it too big for my ideas, it rips through them like a morbidly obese gentleman trying to settle into a shoddily constructed hammock.

Hope that helps,
-o

"

0. No suffering, at most just intense physical sensations.
1. Everything looks very real. More solid and vibrant somehow.
2. I am aware of my hands moving and when I speak there is a voice, but it seems to happen on its own.
3. When I try and look, there is a bare edge of a self contraction, but it is just being seen as a mild somatic charge in the abdomen.
4. Experience is more continuous - attention is pristine.
5. Pain and proto-emotions arise when I try and wrap a concept or a description around it. Real life it too big for my ideas, it rips through them like a morbidly obese gentleman trying to settle into a shoddily constructed hammock.
"

Hey Owen,

I'm right there with you on these descriptions/ All day i've been dealing with some intense heart chakra sensations. So much pushing and pulling going on there. I basically forgot what i did yesterday when told you my discovery. Then as I walked to work 30 minutes ago, I was just looking at my surroundings, the trees, feeling the warm spring wind hitting my face and I slipped into a PCE. I think it seems to be easier if i just pay attention to one of the senses rather than the chakra pain. I am in the pCE and the pain is still there,.., But no push or pull. Your descriptions are spot on.

"Hey Owen,

I'm right there with you on these descriptions/ All day i've been dealing with some intense heart chakra sensations. So much pushing and pulling going on there. I basically forgot what i did yesterday when told you my discovery. Then as I walked to work 30 minutes ago, I was just looking at my surroundings, the trees, feeling the warm spring wind hitting my face and I slipped into a PCE. I think it seems to be easier if i just pay attention to one of the senses rather than the chakra pain. I am in the pCE and the pain is still there,.., But no push or pull. Your descriptions are spot on.

"

Thanks man, nice not to have to do this alone. I'm mystified by all of this. Hope I get the bernadette roberts books soon. This is almost spooky, but I can't seem to get scared.

"Pain and proto-emotions arise when I try and wrap a concept or a description around it. Real life it too big for my ideas, it rips through them like a morbidly obese gentleman trying to settle into a shoddily constructed hammock.
"

This is really helpful Owen, thank you. Do concepts arise on their own, without pain? I guess I'm curious the attempt to create/force a concept as the-way-that-things-are is what causes the pain, or if its the act of using any concepts at all (however much they're understood to be temporary).

Life might be too big to fit your ideas about it, but does it necessarily follow that all ideas are completely unhelpful and must be done away with altogether, in order to avoid suffering? There's probably not an easy answer to that one either, I guess, but its still something being pondered...

I guess I also find it a little spooky, if only because what you describing seems like a state similar to what is cultivated while watching television, but turned toward reality. Sort of a mindlessness rather than a mindfulness. I'm not saying I think this is actually what it is, since I know you to be a pretty thoughtful and well spoken dude, but I would love to hear tell me why I'm wrong.

Thanks for posting this Owen, it is very consistent with my own experience playing with the PCE. If I was a politician I would be called a flip flopper. I just can't seem to make up my mind about the thing. Its good to hear you also have experienced feeling like talking and other things seem to happen on their own. I push for this state and have a lot of success for a few days and then I just get burned out... I question it. I am in one of those stages right now... my interest and aversion seem to be cycling in relation to this stuff...

What you guys are exploring is unfathomably awesome and I have nothing to contribute except recharged enthusiasm for 1st gear practice. But maybe I can offer one bit of background if you're reading B.Roberts for the 1st time, especially What Is Self? I enjoyed a correspondence with Bernadette for a couple of decades, and she didn't always do the diatribes against neo-Advaita or the suggestions that Christianity is better than Buddhism. So, I hope you can look past that. When I first met her she expressed nothing but respect for Buddhism and said the important thing was, if you're a Buddhist then really do it, and if you are a Christian (which to her means Catholic) then really do that, all the way. Over time she expressed being increasingly irked by quasi-Buddhists and Advaitists retreat hopping through her occassional Christian mysticism workshops and retreats, and started to develop what looked like a strategy to scare them off by apparently hurling Christian chauvinist critiques at westerners attracted to eastern paths. She said she knew from experience only the Christian contemplative path and was prepared to work only with students committed solely to that. She said she thought Advaita was a high realization but not as high as the highest realization she could find in Buddhism, which she said was expressed by ""I have run through a course of many births looking for the maker of this dwelling and finding him not; painful is birth again and again.Now are you seen, O, builder of the house; you will not build the house again. All your rafters are broken; your ridge-pole is destroyed; the mind set on the attainment of nirvana has attained the extinction of desires.[Dhammapada. XI. Jaravagga[Old Age]153,154] Bernadette said that the Buddhist identification of the skhandas and the realization of their cessation was it's greatest genius, comparable she said to the highest Christian realization.

Maybe later she really did settle on some Christian chauvinist attitudes, but from what she said privately over time, it looked like a way to screen her students. Another possibly interesting anecdote, she said none of the contemporary Buddhists she met or read understood Buddhist No Self, but mistook their experience of No Ego for that subsequent realization. I used to have a tape of a 70's Christian Buddhist conference at Naropa where she seemed to flumux some IMS teachers by asserting that enlightment is not just seeing the emptiness of the skhandas but is the falling away of the skhandas. I remember being struck by her seeming unshakable confidence and their seeming uncertainty. I'm outa here.

Edited out duplicate post. Site took about 5 hours to register my post. Wow.

Hey Guys, thanks for all the questions and comments. I honestly don't know how to answer them. I'm reading Robert's books and they are helpful. They make a lot of sense. At least other people have done this before, I feel for her getting thrown into it like that.

So I'm going out on a limb here and saying that if enlightenment is going to be embodied rather than just realized, the subjective experience eventually has to give way. How can there be two? How? For the interior, subjective experience to be there at all the one has to twist back on itself. After enough time in mindfulness, that twisting gets seen as painful. I feel like it needs to get dropped for me to go forward in this, but there is grief and instability in the process. I don't know where I'm going. I don't mind.

My default mode has changed. It is now direct mode borderline pce most of the time. The sense of a self contraction is getting more and more subtle. Even subtle anxiety is grounded and I keep getting surprised by that. I could easily do like Eckhart Tolle and sit on a park bench for a few years. Where the hell did I go?

I don't know what mode I'm in anymore. Proto emotions arise and feel like energy currents in the body, then they get quickly grounded. Pick apart mode is too painful to hang out in anymore. Any suffering is too much, hell any suffering is too much. The self-contraction is thinning out, maybe going away and it is definitely yelling - but it isn't hurting me. I alternate between feeling homeless and liberated.

"So I'm going out on a limb here and saying that if enlightenment is going to be embodied rather than just realized, the subjective experience eventually has to give way. How can there be two? How? For the interior, subjective experience to be there at all the one has to twist back on itself. After enough time in mindfulness, that twisting gets seen as painful. I feel like it needs to get dropped for me to go forward in this, but there is grief and instability in the process. I don't know where I'm going. I don't mind."

Owen, it seems to me your comment here is based on the premise that subjective experience is a duality. So... why buy into that? Why not accept the "subjective" as part of what IS and move on? The "twisting" you describe appears to this outsider to be unnecessary unless you perceive the subjective as a duality. If perceived simply as part of what occurs naturally in awareness it seems there is no problem to resolve.

Just curious.... not arguing. I'm trying to understand your experience of this because it sounds rather painful.

Thanks

Hey Chris,
Good questions, thanks. So this is just how the experience is presenting itself. It seems as though, when you ground in the body and stay in direct mode for any significant period of time, the subjective interior sense begins to fade.

The more I look at the sense of "me on this side of my eyes and the world on the other" the more I notice it hurts. Not much of a philosophy, just feeling the affect in my gut and noticing the pain of it.
If I were hallucinating and had delusions were causing me pain, I would take meds and deal with it. The subjective sense (self-contraction, little self, whatever) seems to be just another pain filled hallucination. The fact that it is no longer seen as me or as a controlling entity doesn't mean it won't continue to hurt. This feels like a responsible way to deal with it. Should anatta just be something I know or something I experience as a bodily reality? Why should continue I feel I'm something other than just what's happening? Where am I apart from this?

And the thing is, it doesn't hurt because what's dying is also what cares about the dying. I've never been happier, and that more than anything is what's getting me into trouble.

Hi Chris,
As the days pass in direct mode for myself, any of the slightest of movements to "hold" onto a sensation results in a very bare and obvious tension in the body and mind , equating to a really undiluted pure suffering which seems more painful these days as opposed to before. Maybe due to spending more time in direct mode or rather the turbo version of it (PCE), which is quite suffering-free, it becomes so obvious when it's interrupted by any self contraction, which still occurs post 4th path but seemingly just as the emotions and feelings. Yes, I can see that in 3rd gear mode, you can ride the wave and let things arise like that as just part of the ISness, but the more I see what I see to be an attention wave, the more I see the ISness as just that attention wave taking itself as object. It's fine and dandy, and I am not knocking it as someone's practice, but for me as of late, it has lost a lot of it's "prestige". Same with all the jhanas, and the nice nanas. Even though preference can be let go and I can be preference-free, My preference is for direct mode rather than 3rd gear. Could change. I doubt it though. It seems second rate these days. Result of direct mode? For sure. I am happier.

"My preference is for direct mode rather than 3rd gear."-Nick

Hi Nick,

Just a point of terminology. I've given a lot of thought to how direct perception mode fits into the 3 Speed Transmission, and here are my thoughts:

Direct mode is 3rd Gear. "Be as you are," remember, is the essential 3rd Gear instruction. Just as 1st Gear is big enough to contain vipassana and samatha and insight knowledges, 3rd Gear is big enough to contain both awareness-oriented practices and direct perception practices.

The general themes of the gears are like this:

1st Gear: Looking at objects.
2nd Gear: Looking at subject.
3rd Gear: Surrendering to things as they are in this moment.

So, in the same way that all Four Paths are developments within 1st Gear, direct perception mode is a further development within 3rd Gear beyond the understanding of awareness-as-awareness. In fact, this understanding has been present from the time I first began teaching the 3 Gears, as I was as influenced by Adyashanti and Eckart Tolle as by Ramana, Nasargadatta, and Tulku Urgyen. My own experience of what the direct path can be has deepened and changed over time, but the teaching and learning vehicle of the 3 Gears was designed from the beginning to be able to accommodate "this is it" style teachings with or without emphasis on seeing awareness as an aspect of the experience.

Stability in direct perception mode as a phase of a yogi's development is a transformation rather than a linear development, but a development nonetheless, and the fact that it has to do with seeing things as they are in this moment instead of development through time allows it to fit comfortably within 3rd Gear. I'm happy to say the the 3 Speed Transmission still runs great.

Let's also be careful not to set up an artificial dichotomy between various insights that exist on a continuum of development. It will be best not a get into a kind of "my spirituality can beat up your spirituality" kind of contest. Let's just all see where our practice takes us collectively and individually.

Hi Kenneth,
So 3rd gear is now not a synonym of the clear light/rigpa/primordial awareness, but rather a group of practices which have some things in common but not all?

Direct mode, as far as I have experienced it is certainly not the clear light/rigpa/primordial awareness aware of itself.
Doesn't this need to be emphasized? I think 3rd gear has been seen strictly as the clear light thus far, no? So when talking about 3rd gear, we now may have to differentiate which practice is being used, awareness of awareness or direct mode, right?



Nick

P.S. Anyone else having trouble with Wetpaint today? Seems not to register my posts sometimes.

Nick,

I posted something earlier and it took a while to show up, but it showed up eventually.

"I can see that in 3rd gear mode..." -Nick

More clarification of language: There is no "3rd Gear mode." 3rd Gear is a category of practices that lead to enlightenment. Within that category, many modes of perception are possible. The common denominator of 3rd Gear practices is that they bring about realization in this moment and have more to do with surrender to what is than development through time.

I can see that it would be helpful to have a term for the mode of perception that we are lately contrasting with "direct mode;" we don't yet have a good word. I have variously called it "filtered" mode, "pickapart" mode, and "vipassana mode." Daniel calls it "cycle" mode. Lately, though, I'm thinking a good tag might be "prism" mode, because that is how it seems; "prism" mode, in which you can look through various facets to reveal various aspects of experience can be contrasted with "direct" mode, in which case there seem to be no facets and there is only the simple, direct input of the senses.

"spending more time in direct mode or rather the turbo version of it (PCE)..." -Nick

Here again, I'd like to urge care with the language. Thinking of the PCE as a turbo version of direct mode may be missing the point, which is the end of suffering, also known as enlightenment. It is true that the PCE is a subset of direct mode, and a particularly refined experience. But the important thing here is the direct lens itself and the fact that to see through the direct lens is to be able to see dukkha and the cause and cessation of dukkha in realtime. As always, we do best to avoid becoming experience-oriented, as in "this experience is better than that experience." Instead, we are looking at human development resulting in enlightenment along with practices and modes of perception that foster that development.

"So 3rd gear is now not a synonym of the clear light/rigpa/primordial awareness, but rather a group of practices which have some things in common but not all?"-Nick

Yes, and this is confusing, but it isn't new. When I first started talking about 3rd Gear I was not even making the distinction between awareness-oriented 3rd Gear practices and direct mode practices; I was teaching and practicing them side by side. When I wrote the 3rd Gear page for this site, though, I emphasized the rigpa aspect. I plan to fix that at some point, leaving the category of 3rd Gear more flexible. These conceptual schemas are not useful if they become too rigid, because we don't yet have all the data, so the schema is either able to grow with us or we have to abandon it and start over. I see no reason to abandon it in this case; we are just continuing to refine it.

"Direct mode, as far as I have experienced it is certainly not the clear light/rigpa/primordial awareness aware of itself. Doesn't this need to be emphasized?"-Nick

That's right; direct mode, as I have repeatedly written and said, has nothing to do with the recognition of awareness-as-awareness. I am doing my best to emphasize this, although you would be justified if you were to criticize me for being slow to edit the 3rd Gear page. Too busy enjoying my practice to do all the things I should do!

"I think 3rd gear has been seen strictly as the clear light thus far, no?"-Nick

No, see my comments above.

"So when talking about 3rd gear, we now may have to differentiate which practice is being used, awareness of awareness or direct mode, right?"-Nick

Absolutely correct, but the importance of these kinds of distinctions is not new or unexpected. Within 1st Gear, for example, we distinguish between nana and jhana, samatha and vipassana, strata of mind and modes of access; all part of the game.

Hi kenneth,

I think maybe an article or a thread to get all this terminology sorted is in order, so people , including myself, don't get confused or confuse others. When you set the terminology, I'll use it for sure. Are you still working on it? I like the way you described it on my practice notes thread with the terms "prism" and "filter" etc. You might want to establish terms now, before we go cementing other terms that confuse, like "turbo direct mode"..hehe.

Sorry about the "3rd gear mode" reference, but in my head, it had always been synonymous with primordial awareness. And it can be seen as a mode of percpetion. Now 3rd gear is not a particular practice by itself, but an umbrella term for specific practices. Right? If this is so, you might need to write about it and explain this change or rather expalin this development (which you seemed to already have in mind originally)...as I am speculating many yogis may equate "awareness of awareness" as just 3rd gear itself. Now it appears it is not only that. Yes it can get confusing and apologies for adding to the confusion.



Edited : Kenneth just posted a reply at the same time. No worries.