Part 1 - link

Part 2 - link

Broad practice instructions

1. I know you are an Anagami. Congratulations it is very very respectable .... your attainment. At the same time you need to be humble. You need to be like Rocky Balboa who's gone to Apollo Creed's gym and is learning everything from footwork onwards, because he got badly beaten by Clubber Lang, and he has realized that his skillset in comparison to Clubber Lang is weak! :) :) So be humble. Have a beginner's mind
2. All theoretical models have only one purpose - it is to inform practice. We will be using various models in order to inform practice, through practice those models will be 'confirmed'. None of these models have any ontological value whatsoever. For example one of the models we will be using is the model of pancha upadana skandha - or the 5 aggregates of clinging. To imagine that a human being is these five aggregates and that is the only definition of what it means to be a human being is silly. This model (as well as others) has only one purpose. It acts as a vector pointing at something deeply experiential - saying ... investigate this! Be curious about this! learn to develop and maintain a perception of that in experience which is being represented by the model. To be unable to treat models in this way is to hold a snake in the wrong way. If you do not learn to hold the snake of theory correctly then its going to twist and turn and bite you in the ass.
3. All practices discussed are either positioned as insight (vipashyana) practices or as unification or calm abiding (samadhi or shamath) practices. There will be a natural overlap most of the time. The failure mode of a samadhi practice is vipashyana. It is by seeing all the ways in which samadhi fails to get established that vipashyana opportunities arise. To get frustrated in a failing samadhi sit and walk away is .... suboptimal. If the exercises are out of your range today ... be like Rocky Balboa and keep at it. It may seem as if you are being asked to spin plates while juggling scimitars and riding a unicycle. That's fine, learn the practice by breaking it down into constituent enabling skills. Layering skill upon skill until you can do the practice as described. What seems complex today will seem simple tomorrow. Wax on ... wax off ... wax on .... wax off
4. Each path in terms of the unraveling of Insight is a traversing of the same territory as the previous paths ... but at a much deeper level. So deeper and more powerful concentration is required for the Arhat path as compared to the Anagami path. 80% of your time initially must be devoted to developing concentration - stable/flexible attention, relaxation, withdrawal of passion, unification of mind, balancing of power between attention and awareness etc. Once developed you can move to a 50-50 time split between practices designed for concentration and practices designed to generate insight. Keep returning to the 80-20 time split as and when concentration ability deteriorates

Without further ado:

Savikalpa Samadhi using the breath as an object

The purpose of concentration or shamath or samadhi practice is to develop all 7 factors of awakening. The 7 factors of awakening are learning skills. Imagine sitting in front of a textbook and reading a challenging subject. You need to have mindfulness/short term working memory strong enough to actually engage with the written material and concepts, retain them, and work with them. You need to be energetic but yet relaxed and not bouncing off the walls. You need to have stable attention and yet be very playfully curious. You need to have some degree of joy and happiness regarding the act of studying and learning and some degree of equanimity to counter balance that happiness as you engage with the subject. A challenging subject though interesting is inherently forbidding because it takes hard work and its difficult to do it with a mindset that is aversive to the subject or craves release from the subject. Other skills needed specific to Insight practice would be softening into or the ability to cultivate dispassion and clear comprehension of what happens in the mind as the mind studies aspects of itself or Meta-cognitive introspective awareness

Between these two posts you will get a good idea of how to do the cultivation.
Post 1, Post 2

But for the sake of completeness here's an instruction set:

Exercise 1.0 - Savikalpa samadhi using the breath

1. Take a few slow deep gentle abdominal breaths, after a while let abdominal breathing continue and stop trying to deliberately deepen it
2. Remember I am just sitting here
3. Remember I am just sitting here meditating and every dominant experience is just one more presentation of the mind
4. Remember I am just sitting here meditating and I am supposed to be meditating on the breath
5. Simply remember the breath as it happens
6. Relax deeply on the outbreath initially and then relax on the inbreath as well - relax body, heart and the intellectual mind
7. Balance this relaxation with energy or virya - try and notice more and more about the breath as well as more about the background in awareness
8. Restrict the scope of attention to the breath at the nostrils, use the factor of curiosity/investigation to sense various subsections of the nostrils and then various elements - fire, water, earth, wind, void. Use investigation to develop concentration
9. Soften into distractions as they happen and then soften into distractions as a category and then soften into the inner need to attend to distractions
10. This restriction of attention using curiosity to give a target for attention to work with combined with the softening into distractions and the inner need to be distracted will lead to joy. Joy will turn to happiness, happiness will turn into satisfaction and satisfaction will turn into equanimity or 'upeksha'- no more fucks left to give
11. Use curiosity to cultivate samprajanya/sampajanna or meta-cognitive introspective awareness (MIA). Place a demand on the mind to generate a running non verbal meaning based background commentary on the state of the mind itself
12. Use this MIA to detect extremely subtle movements of attention and keep softening into the need to have these subtle movements of attention
13. Eventually attention will stabilize completely and sati-sampajanna will be strong and powerful. The breath at the nostrils will morph into the breath nimitta
14. At this point the mind will stop sensing all 5 senses, or there will be a significant decrease in 'signal strength' except for the breath nimitta which is a mental object that the mind creates using the tactile sensations of the breath at the nostrils. At this point you can still sense the mind and the mental qualities represented by the 7 factors of awakening, the dispassion, the MIA
15. How energetic and tranquil can you possibly get? using intentions like gentle nudges keep getting even more deeply relaxed and powerfully aware. If there is nothing to be aware of then be aware of that 'nothing' with increased sensitivity and receptivity

Notes:

• Concentration is an absolute must to gain deep transformative insights, as a subject cannot be learnt properly unless all 7 factors of learning/awakening are strong
• In terms of a practice this has a success mode and a failure mode, like all practices. The failure mode of a samadhi practice is vipashyana. All failures provide an opportunity to gain Insight. One simple straightforward way is to memorize the instruction flow and deeply investigate what exactly it is that prevents samadhi. This then becomes a pratyavekshana/paccavekhana practice or a review of the fetters that still bind the mind to a world of suffering
• After gaining multiple path moments the mind is probably actively investigative regarding its own nature and the mind may refuse to cooperate. Just simply stay with the instructions - you may want to do vipashyana - noting, noticing, choiceless movements of attention, tracking of objects, seeing specific conditionality. These things may have a pull on the mind. Or you may want to do metta to gladden the mind .... dont! Reject these ideas or notions. Savikalpa samadhi or samadhi using a chosen object is the goal of the practice. To investigate what prevents you from this goal is excellent and its an anticipated vipassana opportunity, but the goal of the practice remains.
• The mind probably has had enough learning of the previous path and has had enough taste of the fruition of the previous paths, its now time to graduate. Don't get pulled into a momentary concentration exercise because it seems 'right'. This is Mara at work. Tell Mara he can fuck right off!
• Memorize the instructions and keep at it - either doing the samadhi practice or doing the pratyavekshana in the process of failing at the samadhi practice. Remember initially 80% of your time has to be devoted to samadhi practice. If you want the next path attainment then you have to develop much deeper concentration and unification of the mind, your tranquility and energy game has to be at an all time high, joy and equanimity must be available every time you sit down to do practice .... else you will just keep cycling. So be disciplined. Stick to the objective of the practice use the phenomena that hinder you from meeting the objective as an insight opportunity to do pratyavekshana.
• The end result of this practice will be a highly developed mind that can settle and stabilize in a relaxed energetic way on an object of choice ... on demand. But this goal and the attempt to meet this goal sets up the opportunity to do pratyavekshana and this too is important

The model of the arrow of attention

When you do a practice devoted to settling attention to a great degree on a very specific chosen object , like the breath at the nostrils, this gives the mind the opportunity to get familiar with one particular construct or sankhata (as opposed to sankhara). The mind is very very good at meta level sensing and story creation. One such meta level sense that will emerge, and we will be using it, is the arrow of attention. The simplicity of experience that gets created due to a savikalpa samadhi practice makes the arrow of attention construct extremely obvious. Within this construct there is a chosen object, there is an arrow of attention and there is a sense of a 'me' or a 'you' sitting at the nock end of that arrow of attention. A person at the nock end gets created who watches something pointed at by the arrow head from a distance with directionality as represented by the orientation of the arrow shaft.

In the deepening of the savikalpa samadhi practice if you hit a seemingly insurmountable floor then the thing to do is to soften into the sense of being the person sitting at the nock end of the arrow. In parallel with the base instructions do the following:

Exercise 1.1 - Savikalpa samadhi using the breath relaxing the sense of a 'me'

1. Do exercise 1.0 to the extent you can
2. In introspective awareness, without using attention, sense any type of wanting - wanting to end the session, wanting to do something else, wanting to succeed at this exercise - anything at all, and with slow deep gentle abdominal breathing withdraw the participation of the mind that this wanting needs to survive ... drop it.
3. Within the arrow of attention model can you sense that need within to sit at the nock end of the arrow, soften into this need within, relax it, drop it .... go slow, there is no rush to do this, it takes time and some experimentation by touch and feel
4. The end result of this would involve losing the sense of a 'me' sitting at the nock end of the arrow. It will keep forming, you will keep dropping it and you will keep getting a sense of unburdening upon dropping it
5. That sense of unburdening has a very subtle niceness to it. simple repeated familiarity with that niceness, having it snatched away due to habit, getting it back using the technique - it creates a juxtaposition of ownership versus abandonment of ownership over the arrow of attention
6. Even if you cannot completely lose the sense of ownership over the arrow of attention sankhata/construct just repeated exposure to these two possibilities is an excellent insight opportunity
7. As and when you can either drop the sense of a me sitting at the nock end of the arrow of attention ... or reduce its power ... continue progressing in exercise 1.0

Pratyavekshana

Today I have the ability to ride a bicycle. I am not riding a bicycle right now, but I know that the ability exists. It for me is a 'sankhara' in Pali or 'samskara' in Sanskrit. In English we can call this as learnt conditioning. It got constructed through intentional actions and it further enables or constructs intentional actions. Sankharas are in effect constructs that construct further. Having the ability to ride a bicycle enables the ongoing experience of riding a bicycle as and when an opportunity presents itself. similarly I as well as many others I hope, have the ability to breathe, speak, walk, talk, think etc.

Sankharas are the back room boys that enable experience as well as experiencing. These sankharas like the ability to ride a bicycle got created at a certain point of time. The ability to see, to cognize to get interested, to decide to learn, to move the body, to persevere until the ability to ride a bike got created are all sankharas. If there is a sankhara then at some point of time intentional actions were taken in order to create that sankhara. There was a sensory environment of interest, of social pressure, of parental encouragement and a sense of playful competition and achievement within which the sankhara of riding a bike got created.

Similarly there was a sensory environment of ignorance of anicca, dukkha and anatta in which the sankharas as represented by the 10 fetters in general or, specific to the topic at hand, the 5 higher fetters got created. To try and figure out when they got created is futile, but to try and see them as they happen in experience itself is very very valuable. Formal paccavekhana practice will help you do that. Here are the steps:

Exercise 2 - Pratyavekshana

1. Create a set up of attention and awareness. This set up could a part of the concentration practice that you may be currently failing at executing to completion
2. Watch the mind as it works to create a strong sense of a 'you' who is failing at maintaining the set up or moving forward in the set up
3. Start labeling the fetter - rupa raga, arupa raga, mana, audhatya, avijja
4. The fetter is recognized by the resultant mental state that arises or the 'world' within which a 'you' is now born. Have you taken birth inside a world, with both the you and world driven into existence? What was the driver?
5. Accurate labeling is a goal, but it is a practice goal and not a performance goal

6. To simply apply one's self over and over to a particular set up or a particular progression and to simply watch the heart-mind as it is shaped and reshaped is the purpose of the exercise.

   Having a list of 5 fetters and therefore five drivers of 'birth' is a support to practice. We can expand on this list and create multiple sub drivers and thus postulate and look for multiple fetters. Our list of fetters can be expanded to 15 or maybe even 50 if we are creative. But in doing so we lose the power of simplicity in the blessed one's modeling. We will stick to the blessed one's modeling and permit his model to act as a vector that points to something within experience. A vector that says investigate this, categorize this, use this particular categorization schema in order to actually look and build familiarity. In order to improve the accuracy of the pratyavekshana exercise lets flesh out what each fetter is, lets give more detail to the theory. But always remember the theory has to be held like a snake. It has no ontological value whatsoever, it only and only has instrumental value, it helps you practice and directly experience that which is being pointed at by the theory

The Fetters

• Karma or intentions/ intentional actions enable sankharas (or conditioning)
• Sankharas enable the sensorium - the five aggregates of experience and experiencing

specific to the fetters:

• Ignorance of anicca, dukkha and anatta enables akusala kamma or unskillful intentions
• Akusala kamma enables the sanyojana or fetters - these are a specific kind of sankhara/conditioning
• The sanyojana enables a sensorium within which 'birth' happens

All the five higher fetters are expressions of the ignorance of anatta or not-self or non ownership or autonomous nature of experience and experiencing. They are an inner push or compulsion to try and own some or all aspects of experience and experiencing.

Rupa raga

The job of the sensorium is to sense, to make sense, and to generate affective responses. It can sense that which has sensorial materiality. If you are breathing and can state with confidence that you are breathing based on the ability to actually check whether you are breathing, then this is because the breath has sensorial materiality. If you are thinking and can state with confidence that you are thinking based on the ability to actually check whether you are thinking, this is because thoughts have sensorial materiality. That which has sensorial materiality impinges on the sensorium.

To have raga or passion towards sensorial materiality or the act of sensing or the act of the sensorium getting impinged upon is rupa raga. Rupa or rupa-ing the gerund form representing the impingement, makes you feel alive! Makes you feel like you exist. To love it or to hate it, to embrace it or to reject it are both two sides of the same coin. Both represent raga or the passion within to take birth, establish ownership, lay a claim on 'this' ... and 'this' ... and 'this' ....

Arupa raga

The mind is capable of holding passion for that which it cannot take as an object. the mind is capable of creating complete abstractions. A sound of a dog barking is a complete abstraction. The mind intuits 'sound', 'dog' and 'barking'. Such things don't have any sensorial materiality. They are a result of the samjna (sanskrit) or samajhna (hindi) or sanna (pali) or cognition/recognition process. Similarly the mind cannot take painting as an object, or the Mona Lisa as an object. The mind cannot take honesty as an object, it cannot take dishonesty as an object, it cannot take generosity as an object it cannot take gratitude as an object. But it is perfectly capable of creating these abstractions and then being deeply passionate about all of these abstractions.

So does honesty exist? sure it does :) but it is arupa, the mind cannot take it as an object. You can have a thought about honesty, you can have raga towards thoughts in terms of the impingement and the gratification you get (rupa raga) or you can have raga towards honesty or dishonesty itself (arupa raga)

The arupa world is a capability of the mind, it helps us navigate our world, so there's nothing wrong with that which is arupa, the problem is the raga. We literally live inside an arupa world. The problem is the passion or raga towards this world or any of its constituent elements.

As an aside. What do you think about time? Do you think time has rupa or is an arupa abstraction? I mean forget about the natural science of physics. Can the mind take a chunk of time as an object? Interesting as a thought experiment?

Also by now it might be clear that rupa raga and arupa raga have nothing whatsoever to do with the jhanas. You may not know the difference between jhanas and bananas, most human beings do not know, but they too are subject to rupa raga and arupa raga.

Mana

Generally this fetter is understood as conceit in a social sense. But its best to think of this as a compulsion or a sanyojana, a specific kind of sankhara that pushes the sensorium into comparing. I am less than you, I am equal to you, I am greater than you. I am not up to the task, I am equal to the task, this task is beneath me. To be pushed/compelled to take a position of comparison with reference to something within the sensorium, this is the fetter. Is this position of comparison true correct and accurate is not the point. But comparison and raga or passion associated with comparison leads to taking 'birth'. Outside of a social context, mana keeps forcing the heart into the conceptual cage of comparison with ... something .... anything! This is the sanyojana. The fetter.

Are you better than others ... well you very well might be :) at least in some context like playing blackjack :) Or maybe you can easily drink everyone of your drinking buddies under the table and .... you know it!
But in playing blackjack or drinking games, when the heart is shoved inside the conceptual cage of comparison and a human being is fully formed ... that is the fetter in action, that is the birth.

Audhatya/Udhacca

The push within that hasn't found a target yet is audhatya. Restlessness physical or mental is a gross presentation of this audhatya

Avidya/Avijja

Ignorance is called avidya. The ignorance of anicca, dukkha, anatta which leads to intentions and conditioning with regards to the 10 fetters is called avidya .... but that is not avidya the fetter. Avidya the fetter is an active dynamic process that defends all existing mental models. It defends the other 9 fetters from the attack of vipassana. It creates tremendously confusing states of mind, it creates amazing levels of delusion, it creates extreme sleepiness when the vipassana starts to cut to the bone. It exists purely as a defense of the status quo with regards to the conditioning or sankharas present. Particularly the sankharas as represented by the 10 fetters, and specific to our topic the sankharas as represented by the 5 fetters that are left.

To have this clear conceptual explanation of what each fetter is, has only one purpose, to give the investigating mind a target, a structure, a categorization schema to know the fetters experientially in a pratyavekshana exercise. Using these explanations of fetters it is possible to start investigating the failure mode of a samadhi practice, and to start categorizing each way in which a samadhi practice fails. to see which birth is active, which fetter or compulsion has shoved the heart into which twisted conceptual cage.

<To be continued>

Hello friends,

"I" am an arhat with stabilized no-self. I am a priest in the Soto Zen tradition. Since somewhere in what I would guess is the anagami territory I began to see full color, face and handless Franciscan monks at night when I would wake up at night. They always have stability even if I sat up or shifted my perspective within a few feet. As time went on, I began to see a variety of other entities, including what I think of as the "dead", often with tortured or confused faces, and eventually a variety of religious figures which I can get into later if there is any shared experience or legitimate curiosity.

I am deeply aware that none of these figures have "self" existence, but are the creation of causes and conditions in the moment I see them and "we" are sharing.

My questions are:

Anyone else have similar experiences?

If so, do they interact in anyway? My visitors are generally still (with some exceptions) and silent.

How do you choose to respond to them? In my case I offer them a gassho, offer an abbreviated path to the end to suffering to them if it seems appropriate, and let them know that I would be happy to receive any deepening of my insight that they might have to offer with a thanks for whatever that might be. Occasionally I ask some of them to back away, when they are a little too close or around my wife, who sleeps in the same bed.

Link to Part 1

Preface

Above it all, having seen it all, am I
Beyond it all, free from thirst I am
Beyond the mire
This higher knowing by me known,
who then, could I as teacher indicate?

No master have I
For even another such as I cannot be found
Among the gods or in the world;
I have no equal in any man.
The world's aristocrat am I
I the teacher unsurpassed
I alone the Samma-sam-Buddhassa man.
Tranquill, extinguished.

To set a-roll'n the Dhamma Wheel
I get me off to Kasi town
beating the drum of deathlessness
in a world gone blind.

Victorious indeed are those
who've laid waste the asavas
Evicted by me are evil things
Therefore, am I, Upaka, Victor!!!

~ Siddharth Gautam

Near the end of the Buddhist tradition many people are born, but try finding a man like me in the world. Set up the flag of great diligence—proclaim me like no other! I practice all sorts of meditation. With lion-like intellectual powers, I have completed the path of jhana. I have mastered and control all five of the masteries [of the jhanas]. In all the realms under and above Brahma, I have set up the flag of power abundantly. I will reside in contentment. In the future I will be brave and unsurpassed during the victory of the next Buddha, Metteyya

~ Ledi Sayadaw

With these auspicious and wildly inspiring words, paying great homage to all the aristocrats who have come before us, upon whose capable shoulders we stand, to whom we owe great reverence, and with a spirit of great friendship and generosity to the aristocrats who would come after us, we now begin ..... beating the drum of the deathless!

Preliminary notes

1. This post has emerged out of multiple different conversations I had with a couple of different Anagami friends working towards Arhatship. The attempt is to put it all in one place creating a single narrative of theory and practice guidance thus becoming a reference point, a source of information, inspiration and encouragement for other yogis working towards the same. Part 1 covered a theoretical understanding of the project thus far bringing the yogi up to speed on the conceptual framing and languaging that would be further used in this post. This post also covers some more theory necessary to contextualize and understand practice, but I have tried to keep it practice focused, connecting theory with practical advice generally applicable and specific to the raw mechanics of doing Bhavana or cultivation (of wisdom and of the skills by way of which wisdom is accrued). For an Anagami this post will be directly useful, informative and educational regarding the theoretical paradigm and the practice techniques useful to actualize the theoretical paradigm. For those with little dust - those who are very close to my heart, this post will inform and orient and can be saved for later in your journey.
2. Here's the thing, that which we speak and hear; write and read is but merely a mechanism of learning how to approach and explore that which we sense in direct experience. A vector that guides our efforts at observational skill building and investigation of perception, apperception and the interplay between the two. The interplay that contains a lot of friction or Dukkha. An innate native intelligence beefed up by acquired learning and wisdom keeps viewing cognitive compulsions and keeps grating with those cognitive compulsions. This friction or grating has a negative valence - Dukkha-vedana. We live our lives experiencing a lot of this negative valence or Dukkha-vedana and we embark on this exploratory journey in order to solve the problem of Dukkha-vedana. Our problem statement may contain words like I am experiencing discomfort, dissatisfaction, sadness, moroseness, helplessness, anxiety, frustration etc etc. Some well read book worms with a love for Indic soteriology might even use the word 'Dukkha' .... I am experiencing 'Dukkha' - and though its true in one way, until we develop Dharma Drishti we have no idea what Dukkha actually is. The very concept of two mechanisms or two modes of operating are baffling and totally opaque to us. What we are most familiar with is the Dukkha-vedana. The suckiness rather than the underlying friction. Here .... right here is the power of bringing in precision in language. It basically tells the reader upfront - Boss! you don't have a clue as to what Dukkha is - all you know and are deeply familiar with is Dukkha-vedana. To keep looking at the story of our lives, the story of the 'puggala' in order to be fully and completely free of dukkha-vedana is a grave error. To look at and develop an understanding of perception (and the mechanisms that enable it) and apperception (and the mechanisms that enable it) is totally counterintuitive. But that is where the solution to freeing ourselves of dukkha-vedana lies. Because that is where Dukkha lies. It doesn't lie in the story of the puggala!
3. In the town of Benaras lived a very very privileged kid. His dad was probably the richest man in Benaras. His name was Yasa. Yasa loved orgies :). One night Yasa woke up in the wee hours, saw naked bodies strewn around his super sized bed and experienced the greatest disgust he had ever experienced in his life. Yassa ran from his home - hopefully after dressing himself. And he ran out of the gates of Benaras into the forest clearing nearby. Where Uncle Sid was taking his late night walk probably to relieve gas. Uncle Sid took one good hard look at Yassa and saw something in his eyes, something unmistakable - Nibbida / disgust/ disenchantment. Uncle Sid at this point had set the wheel of his spiritual entrepreneurial venture into motion. His initial target market for his proof of concept was fulltime dedicated contemplative practitioners and he wanted to break into a larger market segment. And in Yassa he decided to beta test his product in a new market segment. He explained to Yassa about how we live inside a construct created by our mind. How elements of our life, the way we relate to them, the story of our lives, our lives as we know it in its entirety - is a product of constructs that construct experience and how when we come face to face with this, from time to time, we experience nibbida. And we mistakenly think that this nibbida is due to the presentation of our lives, but in reality this nibbida is towards the constructs that construct experience. We experience nibbida towards the act of story creation, to the act of being a slave to cognitive compulsions that keep stuffing our hearts into various cognitive cages and we believe that it is directed towards the story itself. In the story we may be poor, we may be rich, we may be healthy, we may be sick ..... it doesn't matter, the fact that we construct stories and that we are born and live within them is the cause of nibbida. This induced within Yassa a nibbida nana - a knowledge of nibbida ... setting Yassa on a journey to close the PoI map stages
4. Nibbida is a like a force of nature. A tornado or a storm, it has a tremendous amount of destructive potential. When it shows up as the emotion of disgust it can ... potentially change the course of our lives. Unless we have been appropriately instructed or unless we are sane, rational people with little dust in our eyes. Someone living as a monk in a monastery may turn in his bowl and his robe and run helter-skelter to the nearest bar, never to even look back at the monastery. Someone living inside a mansion - like our friend Yasa may abandon their life of prosperity and pick up monasticism as a vocation / profession. This same strong emotion can show up as a sort of listlessness, a sort of .... fuck 'this' .... I don't want 'this' .... whatever 'this' maybe. In the hands of someone very skilled - and Anagami you need to become someone very skilled - this nibbida becomes a tool of dismantling the mechanism that creates and sustains suffering/dukkha. The Dukkha-vedana stops once the Dukkha stops. The Dukkha stops when the cognitive compulsions (Sanyojana) or the psychic irritants (Klesha) or the latent tendencies (Anusaya) ... are gone, ended, finito! But this takes time and no matter how skilled you may be, from the path of Anagami to Arahant .... Nibbida is constantly present. It shows up often in awakening practice as an extreme reluctance to engage in practice itself.
5. Metaphorically speaking .... the path from Anagami to Arahant feels like walking through a thick muddy swamp, each step taking a lot of energy. But it only feels like that ... until one gets started ... and every time one gets started and some amount of mindfulness, concentration, investigation, tranquility, joy, equanimity, energy builds, it begins to feel easy again. But this is temporary. These are fragile meditative mental skills and faculties, the nibbida is more powerful than they are, more self sustaining .... so we have to start all over again. Begin ... take a few slow unsteady steps, hop skip and jump, stop ... experience nibbida all over again .... then begin again. The job now is like the job of a surgeon wielding a scalpel, metaphorically speaking, but it feels like doing very complex surgery using a very very heavy Viking battle axe! But then ....Begin - experience ease - take a few steps forward - then fall back into listlessness - begin - take a few steps forward ...... The little engine that could! .... this is what you can expect when you are awakening!
6. Two Stellar Tits In A Tight Tank-Top, Kemal Ataturk, John D Rocker Fella! With each path moment we discover the power of the remaining fetters. Its like we live in a quiet idyllic rural farmhouse. And we aren't satisfied because there is a constant stink coming from the back garden wafting into our house. We are told and we provisionally accept that the stink comes from 10 dead bodies buried in the back yard. We are handed a spade and we are taught how to use that spade and told that the only way to be free of this stench is to dig up the dead bodies, exhume them and to burn them! Under the shining hot light of awareness! As we start digging, we hate the act of digging, because gosh its so much work! as digging continues, we get better at digging and we start to enjoy it because well its a nice repetitive task, a work out which sometimes gives us a runner's/digger's high! But then! ... we start getting closer to the corpses ... and the stench becomes overwhelming!!!! Yes! this is how it works. From Anagami to Arhat ... you will experience the stench of the remaining 5 corpses assaulting you! You will find yourself seeking identity or 'birth' in the raw accompaniments of the act of digging - the spade, the mud, the smell of the earth - Rupa raga, You will find yourself seeking identity or 'birth' in the abstraction of being a digger who is doing the digging - Arupa raga. You will find yourself extremely restless with digging as well as not digging - Audhatya. You will find yourself feeling like the best digger in the whole world, or the worst, or equal to the task at hand and revel in it while digging or end up not doing any digging whatsoever - Mana. And all of this will continue in the act of digging as well as in the act of hanging out with your friends as well as in the act of being a spouse, an issue, a sibling, a parent, a professional, a yuppie, a hippie, a CEO, a wastrel. It will all be magnified! But its not magnified, you are just seeing things clearly now. It was always there! You were just totally incapable of seeing things, you did not have Dharma Drishti - the view or vision that is granted by practicing well. But now you do and now you cannot turn it off! But the one corpse that exists to protect all the corpses is Avijja. As we discussed above, looking at languaging as a completely satisfactory explanation of direct experience and what one needs to do in direct experience is a tremendous fallacy. Avijja as a name for one of the corpses is not meant as a passive weak limpid 'ignorance'. Avijja as a Sanyojana and its expression, is an active dynamic process that creates utter confusion, delusions, red herrings, blocks every attempt to dig up and burn the other corpses. From Anagami to Arhat every time you practice you can fully expect: a) Narcolepsy like effects - absolutely convinced that what you really and truly need right now to be happy, satisfied and fulfilled is a good solid nap. b) Powerful sexual fantasies - absolutely convinced that you are god's gift to your preferred sex and that if you were to apply yourself you will gain tremendous satisfaction from chasing and bedding your fellow human beings. c) Miscellaneous other fantasies of finding and keeping joy and fulfillment in various accomplishments like profession, politics, popularity, becoming a shining light of morality and an example to all human beings like some kind of beatified saint. Avijja picks up your deepest desires, your own 'sankharas' and magnifies them making them shiny, bright and attractive. And Avijja is relentless, it does not stop - not until Arhatship! You have been warned! The paradox is, you wont be taken in by these fantasies, at least not for long. but they sure do tank the vipashyana. Forewarned is forearmed.
7. The princess and the pea You An-agami are the princess, the 5 fetters that remain are the pea. Sleeping on multiple layers of the finest mattresses .... you will experience that pea and it wont let you sleep peacefully. The job isn't done! If you walk away from this project then over a period of time the perceptual abilities you have developed will diminish and slowly the pea will poke less and less, but it will never go away. You have to complete this project. It is within reach, there is an other shore and it is sweet. And on that other shore you can aspire towards and apply yourself to do whatever the fuck you want. Work a job, become a CEO of a fortune 500 company, labor in the fields, lie around in a meadow all day and scratch your balls. Whatever the fuck you want - there will be no more birth, no more dukkha, this will be your last life. Apply yourself in a systematic and structured way and get rid of the psychic irritants that have tortured you for eons!
8. Finally, before we proceed. I am the beneficiary of the generosity of my teacher and other authors, content creators from whom I .... borrow ...... practice ideas, theoretical modeling, instruction sets. I do not have any tacit or explicit authorization, permission, encouragement from any of these people. Though I freely borrow stuff I write exclusively from a position of inner authority granted to me by my direct experience, thus I shape and mould ideas and practice instructions in line with my own inner authority. Which is what I would encourage you to do. Take these ideas, theoretical models and accompanying practice instructions ... and make them your own. But before you do that apply yourself multiple times to these practices instructions .... to the letter. Only the wearer knows where the shoe bites. Once you know where these shoes bite, you can make corrections in order to suit your own particular constellation of skills, natural talents, interests, weaknesses and strengths. Develop inner authority and modify these tools in order to finish the fucking job!!!

We usually live in a world of abstractions - jobs, family, friends, a conception of who we are and how well (or badly) adjusted we are in our environment. Our perception, cognition, and affect functions are all attuned to the world of abstractions. We have learnt strategies of how to make sense of and deal with jobs, colleagues, family, bullies, friends, lovers, our identities, our goals, our ambitions etc. In the world of abstractions these strategies work to keep us mostly functional. The operating term is 'mostly functional'. There is always a niggle, a feeling of something not quite right, and sometimes that feeling intensifies. It is the intensity of that feeling which brings us to awakening practices. It is very unlikely that anyone in their right minds, being perfectly well adjusted in the world, would sit on their ass for hours each day and pay attention to the breath at the nostrils or sounds, or thoughts. It is always the niggle - with varying degrees of intensity that brings us to this very strange very counterintuitive practice.

This practice then takes us out of the world of abstraction into a world of sensations, phenomena, how they are sensed, and how they are related to. It takes us into the domain of subjective conscious experience. In this domain we develop observational skills and discover some 'laws' that govern this domain. The way the domain of the physical world is governed by laws like the law of gravity, or the law of conservation of angular momentum, similarly the world of subjective personal direct conscious experience also has its own laws.

We discover and gain knowledge about those laws. But what we are also supposed to do in parallel is to gain wisdom regarding how to manage the mind given that these laws exist. And to gain dispassion towards the mechanisms that move the mind in opposition to these laws.

If practice becomes tough, and it becomes tough for everyone for at least some time, its because we have the skills of observation, but we haven't cultivated the skills that the mind needs in order for wisdom and dispassion to arise.

Skill of observation - Mindfulness, concentration, investigation, energy

Skill of acceptance / wisdom - Relaxation, Joy, equanimity

Skill of dispassion - softening into experience, changing the way the mind relates to experience, withdrawal of participation in the habitual tendencies of the mind so that they are deprived of fuel and they wither and die.

We believe, and we aren't necessarily wrong, that wisdom and dispassion will naturally emerge from knowledge. We will naturally become wise in terms of how we manage the mind, naturally become dispassionate towards the mechanisms that move the mind going contrary to the laws (dhammas) that govern conscious experience . And yes it happens. The learning happens on its own. But that kind of learning is very very harsh. We have to help it along by cultivating - Relaxation, Joy, equanimity, skills of dispassion.

A well balanced practice plan will incorporate within it the cultivation of these skills.

It is natural to be inclined towards our strengths. Our strengths may lie in mindfulness, concentration and investigation - and by utilizing these we may feel we are gaining more and more knowledge. But knowledge without wisdom isn't sustainable. Wisdom without dispassion towards the unwholesome is an incomplete project

The hard charging aggressive go-getter-ish style of practice isn't sustainable. It just leads to freaking out and then we freak out about the freaking out.

The terms dukkha nana is very interesting. When there is dukkha there is always a little bit of nana. We train ourselves to be observant and then the nana increases. Finally there is enough knowledge to carry us into equanimity and at the other end of equanimity to a marga phal moment. But if the nana/knowledge doesn't become the wisdom of managing the mind, the wisdom doesn't become dispassion towards the unwholesome then we enter a phase of practice characterized by seemingly infinite cycles where each pass through the dukkha nana leaves us disappointed with, dejected because of and sick to our guts of this practice.

Practice changes

If we find ourselves in such a situation we have to take a feedback from what is happening to us and we have to realize that we need course correction. We have to direct practice to include skills that we may have neglected. The following skills are what I would recommend be incorporated in a practice plan:

1. Dialing up or down each factor of awakening

Use an anchor to rest attention on and fully experience each factor of awakening as it gets established, play with each factor, tweak it

2. The deliberate cultivation of tranquillity

Use an anchor to rest attention on, establish mindfulness, increase energy/sensitivty to a certain degree in order to not fall asleep, and learn how to relax, build tranquility - and take it as far as it can possibly go

3. Generating dispassion - softening into

Learn the mechanics of softening into from MIDL - understand that it needs to become your own native skill set rather than some term from some system of practice. Apply softening into to all sense doors. Choose a particular sense door and let objects self select, don't control attention - just simply soften into the object which is currently in the foreground. Do this at a micro level - like softening into the elemental quality of fire in body sensations. Do this at a macro level - like softening into the entire sense door of the mind. From the micro to the macro - as experience arises - learn to change the way the mind relates to experience. Move away from passion to dispassion, from greed, hatred and confusion to dispassion and then equanimity

Brahmaviharas

When nicely and properly frazzled by insight practice, to the extent that one has begun to feel physically or mentally sick - it is necessary to halt insight in its tracks. To keep gaining knowledge with absolutely no idea of how to gain wisdom and dispassion is a disaster!!!! Stop the unfolding of insight in its tracks by cultivating the brahmaviharas - particularly metta in case it is the most accessible to you.

The Brahmiviharas are like a constructed platform of relating to ... stuff. From sensations, to compound objects to an obnoxious colleague at work. The Brahmaviharas teach us how not to relate to stuff from a platform of competition and adversarial-ness. This is a very important skill for life on this shore as well as the other shore. For this reason alone the Brahmaviharas are a wonderful practice. But right now apart from this they will put a full stop to the constant rapid cycling. They will permit the mind and the body to heal from the trauma that comes with knowledge without wisdom and dispassion.

I had a (for me) very unusual experience yesterday. I’ve trained in samadhi for 15 years, but have done relatively little dedicated insight practice, so was hoping one of you insight practitioners could help me get a handle on it.

I was happily pootling along in the 2nd Jhana, and then noticed that there was very subtle aversion present (probs due to comparison with other times in J2). Noticing this caused the mind to instantly drop into a very stable and joyful 3rd Jhana. Shortly after, I noticed “this is where intentions come from” This wasn’t thought in words, it was seen clearly. I can’t clearly say what the “this” would be referring to. I was able to see intentions arising, persisting and subsiding very very clearly. The whole thing seemed ‘realer than real’ if that makes sense. I could rest in a way that seemed to stop intentions from forming. Seeing intentions clearly, including the intention that’s a component of attention, caused the ground to totally fall away from underneath me. I’m finding it hard to put into words. The subject was just a still sense of awareness floating in a vast still blackness. There was delight, but it was different to sukkha. It felt intensely euphoric at times. There was one really short episode (maybe 10s) of strong fear, but I backed away from it. I can’t remember clearly what caused it.

I went in and out of this state for about three and a half hours. What pulled me out and kept me out was trying to think about/understand the state. What got me back in (instantly) was recollecting what I’d seen regarding intention, not verbally, but really seeing it again. I could get back there via the third jhana too.

After it was ‘over’, there was a powerful feeling of love and kindness, which is pretty unusual for me.

I was also left strangely bright. Almost wired, but smooth, not jangly. Sleepiness didn’t come as normal and sleep when it came seemed light.

Today it’s like I’m floating around on a cloud of gentle happiness. Had a busy morning in the monastery kitchen with lots of visitors to interact with and help. Normally that causes some turbulence but today it was just really nice.

So, what was going on here? is this just the kind of experience that’s to be expected from insight practice? Where to go from here? Like I say I don’t really do insight practices, so I could really do with some ELI5ing.

Thanks

Stream Entry can be described in many ways. One helpful way of describing Stream Entry is the sinking in of the experiential fact that our experience of being conscious - all of it, the whole shebang is unreliable.

We have an expectation of reliability. This expectation of reliability is affirmed and strengthened by our intentional actions in terms of cognition, taking mental positions, verbal thoughts, attitudes, outlook, speech, outwardly behavior. Its a bit of a feedback loop. We expect reliability, we act in accordance with that expectation, we strengthen the expectation. The mind is tricky, in the university of hard knocks as we keep meeting a social presentation of unreliability and we keep getting disappointed we form newer and more updated mental models of what to expect from life and we then start to rely upon those. But those newer more updated mental models are also a part of our experience and they color our experience. What we are unable to grok is those mental models that get freshly created are also unreliable.

The world will always fuck me over, the world will sometimes fuck me over, the world will never fuck me over. All three of these mental positions are - mental positions, a part and parcel of our conscious experience, they too are unreliable. This is the supramundane aspect of SE, this has to be understood experientially. This comes about through meditation practice. It cannot, will not come about through listening to 'The True Dhamma'. whatever the fuck that means!It comes about through practice and practice alone. Some people are positioned in such a way in terms of innate skill set, life circumstances etc that 'practice' for them could be just a matter of a week, for others it could take an entire lifetime. Given the fact that we have been dealt the cards that we have been dealt with, it then makes a lot of sense to simply understand a little bit of theory, pick up a structured practice and just simply apply ourselves consistently within the constraints of our lives.

Over and above any structured practice, we need to bring in some degree of customization for our present constellation of circumstances. Practice itself provides the feedback necessary to make these customizations:

1. We begin with a structured practice plan and we discover that we just simply cant consistently practice. Well take your current instruction set and just simply show up every day. Over a period of time looking at your schedule set a timer for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes - once maybe twice a day and simply execute your practice
2. This consistency illuminates meditative hindrances. Dull? learn to brighten up while doing your current practice. Bored? learn to take interest in, build curiosity towards the practice and what it is pointing at in present experience while doing your current practice. Agitated? Learn to relax the body and mind as a separate skill and bring it into play while doing your current practice. Experiencing regret and remorse? learn to forgive yourself and others for things in the past as an additional practice .. and experience the stillness of the mind towards the past ... and bring this stillness into play while doing your current practice
3. Feeling stagnated, feeling as if you can do more - make changes to your current practice, deepen concentration, if focused on vipassana in the body, learn to do it with sounds, learn to do it with thoughts feelings and emotions - supplement your current practice

In doing regular meditation practice - building skill sets and applying them towards structured experiences two avenues open up. these aren't avenues that you have to pursue by doing something special - these are avenues that are baked into the act of practicing:

1. Specific conditionality - the interdependency of objects and events in various sense doors. Some sounds make us tense, some thoughts make us feel relaxed, relaxation in the body leads to relaxed mental states, agitation in mental states leads to tightness in the body
2. The universal characteristic of anicca - unreliability - We start to see how objects change. Object can be sounds, thoughts, mental states, attitudes, a feeling of being under threat, a feeling of being safe, relaxation, agitation - anything and everything changes! We also start to see how we hold expectations from objects and that one of our core expectations is that we can predict how they behave and against this prediction is affective investment. We are invested in our prediction of success, we are invested in our prediction of failure, we are invested in our prediction of neutral outcomes. It is this investment that is seen to be a source of our regular discomfort and unease in meditation and in life. To see this enough number of times is to coax the mind, train the mind, convince the mind to give up! give up its investment in reliability.

And that's how stream entry happens. Does it follow a certain known pattern of phenomenology - Yes!!! Its called the PoI map. Yes there is something called cessation - bright clear awareness that has nothing within it to take as an object, the lokuttara citta taking nibbana as the object! Yes all of that happens and is how you gauge Stream Entry. These are the markers, signs of a practice that has lead to Stream Entry. It is a map!

But you cant make that map happen! You cant will a cessation to happen, You can't drop fetters, you can't challenge fetters, heck you can't even one fine day sit down and understand fetters - not in the way it matters! All you can do is practice well! Practice in a very structured methodical way - building skill upon skill, solving problem after problem, working through hindrance after hindrance, doing investigation after investigation. With enthusiasm, interest and a willingness to be methodical.

All of this begins with a well designed, structured, methodical practice - with you the yogi showing up everyday and cranking out a session or maybe two sessions. Reading suttas - Wont help! Attending dharma talks - Wont help! Reading books - Wont help! Spewing out MCTB - Wont help! Mala beads and incense sticks - wont help! Prostrations - Won't help! Spitting out TMI - Wont help! Pali pushing - Wont help! Sutta peddling - Wont help! Hero worshipping your favorite Ajahn, Sayadaw, Lama - Wont help! 'Following' your friendly neighbourhood Arhat - Wont help!

Daily consistent structured methodical practice Baby! There's no way around it!

I wanted to write this post because I was interested in the utility of 5 elements body scan. I have a dedicated meditation practice mostly samatha based, some re-treat experience, jhana practice, as well developing insight into the A&P.

I recalled today a post from long while back from (adviader, delicious-mixture, or another skilled meditator in this subreddit or r/streamentry) regarding the 5 elements practice however I cannot find seem to find that instruction set, misplaced it, or might not have bookmarked it.

I wanted to know what is the advantage or benefit of practicing body scanning in relation to the 4 elements. I have done this practice quite sometime back and had some energetic activity when alternating body, breath, elements and noticed everything dissolve into 1 uniform energy field which continuously was moving & arising&passing away. While I did not investigate this energy phenomenon in great detail it seems to relate to same energy sensation in jhanas but carrying slightly different distributions of energy factors (feeling more like a snake or dragon moving inside the body).

I had already experienced the A&P event prior and this energy felt very similar to that event however slightly more stable. Towards the end of that particular sit the energy body dissipated. Originally there was some strong fear but that passed quickly and there was more automatic mindfulness present. Everything stabilized and the rest of my retreat became fairly lightweight.

This has been my only experience into the 4 elements practice and ever since then I performed much lower doses of the same 4 elements body scan without any emphasis on energy body or investigation.

What I wanted to know is the following

1. How to more effectively generate this energy-body sensations and track (chi/chakra/energy/ki/prana/kundalini) or whatever terminology is relevant for this practice. How to investigate this.
2. Void element and how to track that. Is void element different than this energetic phenomenon. How to investigate this.
3. Is this practice safe, relevant, stable. If not how to have this become more stable. If this practice is not relevant then which body scan would be more relevant at this time.
4. Does anyone have any saved posts regarding this practice/technique.

Introduction

Anagami!! Congratulations :)

The day you attained to Shrotapanna was the day that you were enlightened. You saw the entire elephant on that day. What remained after that was basically a clean up job. Your house was messy and there was darkness and you were bumbling around your house stubbing your toe everywhere. On that fortuitous day the lights were turned on for a brief moment and you saw all the mess in its full glory. Had you the depth of attentional stability and unification of mind, that day all of the mess could have potentially gotten cleaned up, all 10 fetters ... gone! But that was not to be. But fortunately you kept practicing. So the lights stayed on.

You could have reached out to poets, philosophers, magicians, wizards, priests, the religious, the mystical, the spiritualists ..... but you reached out to me. You reached out to someone who takes the view of a home appliance repairman, technician, watchmaker, architect, engineer when it comes to awakening practice. You could have reached out to a sage, a supportive figure whispering ancient wisdom in your ears. But you reached out to me. A wartime consiglieri :) :). A Genco Abbandando instead of a Neem Karoli Baba :) :) And personally I think you made a good decision.

Now for the duration of reading this post, you will have to set aside any 'ism' and stop being any kind of an 'ist'. Hinduism, Daoism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Judaism, Jainism ..... just chuck it all out. There is no need to prostrate or genuflect in front of an image of the cowherd from Dwarka, the carpenter from Nazareth, or the crown prince of the shakyans. Because you see, the day when you started meditating ... you declared war!! War on the defilements!!!!! And that brings you in the ambit of 'Dharma' and not in the ambit of religion or philosophy. This war isn't fought on the back of faith, its fought on the back of skill, technique, knowledge, wisdom and sheer cussedness.

A broad discussion of the project so far and what lies ahead

The day you tasted nibbana for the first time, was the day you were fully awakened ... momentarily. 'The mind' experientially understood everything it needs to understand in order to completely finish this project. You basically understood the entire subject and now that understanding has to be deepened.

1. Shunyata / Emptiness - This is the correction of a perceptive distortion. That which is perceived is distorted and largely abstracted to build a world of things and meaning attached to those things - to live within - a construct. Everything experienced is a construct, which in turn come about through prior 'learnt' constructs that work with the raw material that comes in through the 6 senses on an ongoing basis. Ordinarily, we perceive solidity, we perceive meaning existing in and as part of objects - but actually objects are constructs of the mind, so are meanings that are imputed into the objects - they are also constructs of the mind. This correction of perception comes about through tracking change - things change, things aren't permanent, they come into existence and dive back into non existence. Things as experienced have a life cycle. The tree in the forest - does it exist - we don't know - but the tree comes into existence as far as 'we' are concerned only when form strikes eye consciousness and multiple layers of abstraction and meaning is layered on top of it. A perturbation in awareness thus finally becomes a 'tree'. A tree isn't really a tree until the mind turns it into a tree. A realization of this is Shunyata. This realization does not come through mentally masturbating about chairs or chariots. It comes about through tracking change, impermanence. This tracking requires Upasana or being an upasak. This has nothing whatsoever to do with how many women you sleep with ... or don't ... or how many animals you slaughter in the abattoir you work in ... or don't. Upasana means to 'track' or to 'be with'. To do kayanupassana, vedananupassana, cittanupassana and dhammanupassana. On gaining the insight into Shunyata one gets a lot of temporary but fake relief from suffering. One feels WOW!! .. my experience is constructed, including the horribleness that I feel. But you see dukkha hasn't gone anywhere. Within your constructed experience lies constructed dukkha and simply seeing/knowing/understanding that it is constructed, standalone, is neither here nor there. Your experience was always constructed, but because now you know it, you know that there is some say and some play in this construct. Some 'rules' of this construct and construction process can be bent, others can be broken.
2. Anityata / Unreliability - This is the illumination of an affective distortion. The stuffing of the heart where it doesn't belong. The heart-mind or citta seeks reliability, it is nowhere to be found in conscious experience - which as far as the mind is concerned is the entirety of the universe. This is an expression of the movement of the Citta - the heart-mind - and it comes about through tracking vedana. . The insight into Anityata is about seeing/knowing/understanding this affective distortion. Affect deeply entangled with the expectation of reliability. On encountering Anityata, basically your nuts leap into your mouth :)
   Anityata is often mistranslated as impermanence. Contextually, it means unreliability. We cannot rely on anything because things have a lifecycle, they are constructed and they have no inherent meaning. I love my children and want them to succeed in life. 'I' is a construct, 'children' is a construct, 'love' is a construct, 'success' is a construct, 'life' is a construct. To stuff the heart into this construct is a result of not seeing/knowing/understanding that this is a very abstract construct. Not seeing/knowing/understanding that this construct cannot be relied upon. All of its elements as well as the construct as a whole is put together, assembled, collapses, assembled again, collapses, assembled again, collapses, assembled again, collapses, assembled again, collapses, assembled again .... ad infinitum. It is totally unreliable. Sabbe sankhara anicca. All constructs are unreliable. The insight into Anityata brilliantly illuminates this affective distortion
3. Dukkha / suffering - This is the correction of the affective distortion illuminated above. unreliability of conscious experience meets some very specific ways in which the mind meets its objects - the grips of the mind - expectation, dislike, rejection, separation - this is how dukkha comes about . An expression of these grips of the mind is the affective results of Fear, Misery, Disgust and Desperation ... to get out! This insight is all about developing an understanding in specific conditionality. We learn to let go of expectations, dislike, rejection, separation. Cognitive models that are an expression of the inherent claims of ownership of conscious experience have to be loosened, relaxed, put down ... and its a bit like struggling to straighten a dog's tail. It keeps popping back into its twisted shape.
4. Anatma / Not-self - This is a correction of a cognitive distortion. when expectations, dislike, rejection, separation are given up, relaxed, put down, de-powered - the mind realizes that the sense of self is actually hollow, its cover is made of these grips of the mind and there is really nothing inside. These grips of the mind are a claim of ownership - this claim of ownership necessitates the construction of an 'owner'. Usually we feel that we exist therefore we hold expectations and the right to dislike, reject, create separation from experience. But it is the other way around - The mind holds these grips and therefore in order to reconcile these positions it keeps ascribing it to a fictitious constructed entity. This is understood as when the grips of the mind that cause suffering are relaxed, the entity is seen as just one more object in awareness, rather than a subject that is experiencing other objects. Anatma - This is a correction of a cognitive distortion. We believe that we exist therefore we lay a claim of ownership on existence. But in fact there is a claim of ownership and to reconcile consistency with the logic of the relative world, the mind constructs a self. Due to the ignorance of this chain of dependence the mind mistakenly invests affect in this fake fictitious sense of self. The heart is stuffed into a conceptual cage. Once it is realized how this works, the cognitive distortion is corrected, the affective investment is reduced and finally nullified and all passion cools down. And then .... your lineage changes.

Perception, Cognition and Affect. They are all addressed.

The 'three' marks of existence - Anityata, Dukkha, Anatma are a misnomer - Dukkha is not a mark of existence. There are only two marks of existence. Anityata and Anatma are the marks of existence, Dukkha is an emergent property which requires ignorance of Anityata and Anatma as a necessary condition. But we will use the same silly nomenclature ... very very reluctantly - 3Cs. Each path moment requires the 3Cs to be grokked at a deeper and deeper level. But each path has one C that is the C that is the lever that unlocks the path. The entire project is best driven by a solid grounding into Anatma but It is Anityata that is the first path key

​

1. First path - The ignorance of unreliability is dispelled in first path - Anityata is deeply understood (relative to the other Cs) The fetters dropped at first path represent the mind's ignorance of Anityata. The mind seeks reliability thus the fetters exist and are nurtured and powered and nourished by the ignorant search for reliability. This nurturing, this powering, this nourishing of the fetters cannot be stopped by just simply accepting a conceptual explanation. Its stopped by seeing/knowing/understanding. Its stopped by being an upasak doing
   Upasana on kaya, vedana, citta, dhamma.
   Personality view - is a sense of reliability of who and what we are in a very superficial sense - I am an Indian, I am an American, I am an Eskimo, I am an Atheist, I am a Buddhist, I am a Jew etc etc. This view is invested into by the affective mind. Same for the other two fetters - we want to feel safe and secure and our world and experience to be predictable - thus we engage blindly in rites and rituals to keep us safe - could be keeping a rabbit's foot in our pocket at all times for example, or never leaving home without taking blessings from Lord Krishna. We want to be free of problems, we don't want to experience unplanned, surprises thus we obsess over petty things and try to solve problems that cannot be solved, or aren't even problems - vichikitsa - perverted dysfunctional problem solving - anything to ensure security and safety of 'us'
2. Third path (and second) - Dukkha is fully understood in second/third path. The fetters of kama-raga and vyapad are both two sides of the same coin - Addiction to vedana - The compulsive affect driven chasing after positive vedana and compulsive affect driven avoidance of negative vedana. Third path (and second) is all about dropping the addiction to vedana. We are no longer compelled to possess positive vedana and no longer compelled to push away negative vedana. This does not mean that we are indifferent - the preference comes from the nature of vedana itself - but the push, the compulsion to take birth as the guy who wants to chase that particular skirt, or the guy who wants to avoid needle jabs and thus experiences dukkha is gone
3. 4th path - The ignorance of Anatma is dispelled. Each fetter here represents the mind's need to create the hollow shell entity and stuff the heart into the hollow shell thereby giving it solidity

The hallmark of 4th path is full and complete knowledge that the job is done. You don't walk around seeing 3Cs, you don't walk around perceiving anything in a different way, life is just the way it always was. Now you don't stuff the heart into any possible conceptual cage, you don't take birth. You continue to have a sense of self as a navigational marker, it doesn't dissolve unless you deliberately practice dissolving it. As long as you interact with the 'world' you will have a clear conceptual marker of this is 'me' and that over there is the 'world'. But there is no affective investment in this way of being. There is no affective investment against this way of being either! Perception creates this distinction so that the organism can navigate the world of furniture in the living room and the complex relationships in office politics. The ignorance that enabled the affective investment is gone. This is me - that is the banana on the table - I will peel it and eat it. This 'view' of this and that is a function of a healthy perceptive mind doing its job. The cognitive mind no longer holds models that create a sense of ownership - The mind has no sense of ownership of perception and its constructs - Perception isn't owned, the banana isn't owned, the sense of me over here isn't owned - and thus the heart cools down, the affective investment in that which is perceived is 'nil'. We now reach out and peel the banana and eat it to satisfy our needs - the entity eating the banana is seen as a necessary construct and the affective oomph that it had is gone! This way of relating to the banana on the table is 'tathata' The hallmark of tathata is a lack of affective investment - the cooling down of the passion - the withdrawal of the claim of ownership on the banana as well as the self that is eating the banana. You have checked-out of samsara and checked-in to tathata. You have reached the other shore. Abandon the raft sweet prince, no more Upasana. Absolut Vodka - The world is calling :)

The attainment of 4th path: 1st is all about understanding that experience is unreliable - so we drop the very expectation of reliability 3rd (and 2nd) is all about understanding that experience if lusted after or hated upon - to compulsively chase sukha vedana or avoid dukkha vedana - leads to dukkha (and thus dukkha vedana) - So we drop our crusade of creating sukha for ourselves - stop being greedy and hateful. 4th is all about understanding that the claim of ownership leads to the creation of the owner. As long as there is a owner, the owner will have nads and can be kicked in the nads - so we drop our claim of ownership on everything and thus we fully embrace anatma

On 4th path we work in the way using the rubrics I will explain in the post to follow. In my experience 4th path is a fuckton of work. But the work is towards - 'not doing' we have to keep working on withdrawing the claim of ownership. Letting it get established again. Seeing the consequences. Ownership, drop ownership, ownership, drop ownership, ownership, drop ownership. Familiarize with ownership. Familiarize with dropping ownership. Juxtapose ownership with dropping ownership. See the precents and consequents of ownership and the dropping of ownership. Again, and again, and again, and again, and again ...... and again.

This is a lot of work for the perceptual mind - the perceptual mind has to scrutinize conscious experience and how it is constructed and we have to learn to soothe the heart completely - to completely stop affective investment in what we see in perception - thus the 5 higher fetters drop away - because they are deprived the fuel they need to survive - it is hard work. The Yang and the Yin working together. Grab hold of objects ... penetrate them ... if you must ... but soothe the heart, relax the heart, withdraw the claim of ownership while 'penetrating'. This is supposed to be vipashyana its not supposed to be a viking raid. Conversely there's a lot of technique based doing to be done in order to learn how to 'not do'. This is supposed to be vipashyana its not a slumber party. Middle way baby :).

Some necessary theory

Smriti

Smriti in Sanskrit (Sati in Magadhi Prakrit) is often translated as mindfulness. Its application in practice is better represented by translating it as memory/ short term working memory/ remembrance/ recollection. Smriti has multiple roles to play in meditation practice.

Smriti as short term working memory

In some ways we use the faculty of memory in order to hold ongoing direct experience of our meditation object in memory - as it happens. We 'remember' our meditation object. In case our meditation object is specifically defined, like the breath then we establish smriti or mindfulness using the breath as a device. Keeping the breath in mind would mean to keep the breath as it is happening in short term working memory. We continuously remember the breath, the experience of the breath ... now ... and now ... and now ... and now ... and now ... and now ... and now ....

If we were to think of a model of conscious experience involving and supported by a mode of receiving data - which is broad and undirected - as awareness, within which we can take an increased interest in a particular aspect of conscious experience thus creating a subset of the overall experience which is attended to in greater granularity and detail .... then we can call it attention. That which we pay attention to if we remember it as it happens, hold and release from short term working memory that subset of experience, releasing the moment gone by and holding the moment as it is happening then we can say that we have established mindfulness on that subset of experience. Mindfulness once established thus is not confined to the subset of experience you used as a device to warm up the engine.

And it isn't as simple as being aware - we are aware all the time. We receive data from our sensory environment all the time. But we aren't intentionally mindful all the time. This project requires us to be intentionally mindful.

Smriti as memory

It is not enough to be mindful of our meditation object. In our memory has to be available the very purpose of why we are meditating, why we are doing this practice. What is the objective of this practice, what is the goal of this practice. What is the technique we are following or the algorithm that we are executing. In this application smriti serves us in the form of the memory of our meditation instructions memorized and made available on demand. This project also involves the memory of the outcomes of executing the algorithm itself. Formal practice done in specified planned durations has to spill over on to daily life.

A point has to come where our entire life becomes our practice. What we learn on the cushion, what we learn in daily life has to become available to us as we go about living moment to moment in our lives. To give an illustration - we cultivated calmness yesterday, we have to remember what calmness is and what it feels like, we get into a road rage incident, where we objectified our opponent as 'the enemy' and we suffered the consequences in our minds as well as the real world consequences of social friction, legality, making an enemy rather than a friend and adversary. This entire scenario right from how calmness comes about, how it is evaporates when mental positions of adversariness get created and how it feels shitty to make enemies where a smile and a polite word could have resulted in better outcomes - social as well as mental. All of this needs to be remembered. This is also smriti in action. And in this sense we are now in the domain of Sila or ethics - which is a topic for a separate discussion

Samprajanya

The best explanation of what samprajanya is comes from a brilliant book by an absolutely outstandingly brilliant meditation teacher - whose name we cannot mention because he got a bit naughty :) teehee .... Sheer Utter Genius! Sadhu! Sage!

Think of the flow of conscious experience as carrying data packets. Some of those data packets are a narration of the story as it unfolds - or binding moments of consciousness. In daily life binding moments of consciousness works in attention creating a narrative of what we see - an oblong shape, flappy flappy flappy, blue blue blue all around - becomes a kingfisher bird flying across a clear blue sky. In practice we train ourself to recognize and encourage binding moments of consciousness in awareness, particular introspective awareness. Its not that they don't exist, we just want more of them. This leads to the creation of the meaning based non verbal narration of a fictitious but very convenient entity called 'the mind' .... 'I' am paying attention to the breath and 'the mind' is agitated, 'the mind' is excited, 'the mind' is relaxed, 'the mind' is horny, 'the mind' wants to smash some dakinis. This is Metacognitive Introspective Awareness - this comes about through deliberate intentional training. This is Samprajanya.

Smriti-Samprajanya - Memory/short term working memory coupled with metacognitive introspective awareness as we meditate .... is the name of the game!!

The Dharma (singular)

The technique and the hypothesis that the technique is trying to prove together is the Dharma.

Hypothesis: I feel like shit because of something called Dukkha. And it isn't what I think it is.

Technique: Place my attention on my left butt cheek, and very very carefully observe my left butt cheek for a defined duration - lets say 1.5 hours, simply refusing to stop. ..... Yes ... I can now see what dukkha is!! .. I have developed Dharma Drishti.

Hypothesis: Dukkha exists because of ignorance of anatma. With ignorance of anatma dispelled .... NO MORE DUKKHAAAAA!!!! .... Arrrrrrggggghhh Kundaliniiiiii .... lets get started shall we?

Technique: Place my attention on my left butt cheek and very very carefully observe that attention moves ... on its own and when it stabilizes clarity of knowing increases and one can see the very very subtle wobble of attention. Perfectly stable attention is a myth. Attentional control is a myth. It isn't my attention and it isn't my butt cheek either :) lol :) ... also ... it isn't 'my' dukkha.

This is the Dharma or a small representative sample of it. For some people I speculate that its enough and those hypothetical 'some people' are very very talented and can actually go all the way and get to Anuttara Samyak Sam-Bodhi. But for the rest of us, we need more Dhamma ... otherwise we end up in Anuttara Samyak Sam-Stupidity. The Dharma whether in its concise form or its detailed form is basically a hypothesis (or a set of hypotheses) and very simple (or elaborate) techniques that have to be executed with military precision in order to test those hypotheses. In the absence of a hypothesis and in the absence of techniques .... one might just lazily languish getting absolutely nowhere.

We establish mindfulness on the Dharma. We remember the hypothesis and we remember the technique.

The dharmas (plural)

If I were to sit under an apple tree and an apple were to land on my noggin, I would probably curse under my breath and move. But maybe I wont move because I am too lazy and I have a sense of the improbability of the event. But some geniuses ... they immediately grok the dharma of gravity. If multiple apples were to land on my head, day in and day out and if I were tremendously interested in what was happening, its possible ... though not likely that I too may understand 'gravity'. Now what is gravity really - can you touch it, can you feel it, can you smell it, can you taste it, can you intuit it in the absence of the tree and the apple ... it has no existence of its own. It has no phenomenology. It is basically pattern recognition to which we give the name gravity as a cognitive shortcut. This 'pattern recognition' is also an object and with smriti-samprajanya is now accessible. We can pay attention to the dhamma or gravity, we can be mindful of it, learn it, and then plan how to lob a missile into the air so that it lands with great precision on the capital of an enemy nation. An understanding of the dharma of gravity helps us get shit done!

Anityata, Dukkha, Anatma, Shunyata, Idampratyata, Pratitya Samutpada, Pancha Upadana Skandha, etc etc etc .... these are all dharmas .... Patterns that can be seen, we learn to see them, we learn to recognize them, we name them, we build familiarity with them ...... so that we bring about transformation. We learn about gravity so that we dodge apples falling out of trees and pianos falling out of windows. We learn about the dharmas so that .... No More Dukkha!!!

For that to happen as the dharmas arise in our awareness, we establish mindfulness of them. We remember the patterns. Remember them as they arise in the mind. With objects from the 3 foundations of mindfulness bumping into each other or tumbling around on their own arises pattern recognition. We hold this recognition of patterns in short term working memory so that they get encoded and burnt into the mind.

The importance of Dharma - The hypotheses and the techniques

About Bahiya Darucariya:

Bahiya in many interpretations has an origin story that is very weird. A guy who got ship wrecked, wrapped himself with the bark of a tree and just randomly yeeted himself into the awakening project. It is an incorrect origin story. The cult / sect of the bark cloth used to be a small but pretty established and socially supported group of spiritual practitioners based on the western coast of India. somewhere around modern day Nalasopara in the outskirts of Mumbai. The operating practice of this sect was: In the seeing there is an unseen seer - locate him. In the hearing there is an unheard hearer - find him. In the thinking there is an uncognized thinker - hunt him out. In doing so you will find your true self. This is the foundational principle of the Brihadaranyak Upanishad.

When Bahiya went to meet Sid. One good hard look at him and the trappings of his sect in terms of his garb, his hair, his introduction of who he was, was enough to tell Sid what precisely Bahiya's working hypothesis was. This has nothing to do with some magical intuition but in fact speaks volumes about Sid and his exposure to spirituality and the various working hypotheses that existed regarding soteriology in the Indian subcontinent. The man wasn't just familiar with Bahiya's sect but was also conversant with their practices. Bahiya was essentially working with a particular kind of practice that involved a positive hypothesis regarding finding a 'self'. Despite every evidence to the contrary that Bahiya must have collected in his study of the mechanisms of perception and apperception, Bahiya was simply adamantly refusing to accept the absence of proof as proof of absence. Which by the way is a very good thing to do if you are a scientist. If you were an astrophysicist and through extending existing theories and building mathematical models around them, you predict the presence of black holes - and then for decades there is no evidence to be found - It is a good idea to persevere in your search. It gets you a Nobel!

But if in soteriology one's hypothesis is that one should shove a thumb in one's mouth and shove the other one in one's rear and jump up and down in the air 1000 times everyday - one would find Santa Claus and by his grace, one would be free! Chances are one would spend an entire life time looking for Santa Claus and not find him and perhaps even refuse to give up this data collection because ... Hey ... Black holes!

Sid took one look at this guy and essentially flipped his hypothesis. From a positive hypothesis he flipped it to a negative hypothesis. Bahiya had basically spent his entire adult life looking, closely scrutinizing, deep diving into each and every aspect of conscious experience. A quick rapid scrutiny - once more - using a flipped hypothesis and all the blocks came together in Bahiya's mind. Like a game of tetris where we play patiently till that one particular perfectly shaped block comes along - and we win! For Bahiya that tetris block was one single elegant flipping of the hypothesis by The Blessed One.

This scrutiny of conscious experience requires a deconstruction from which we learn that absolutely nothing that we deconstructed .... absolutely nothing ... contains a little green man pulling the levers! Once done, once this becomes knowledge and the tube light of the mind blinks slowly and lights up ... we drop the effort so that the mind can construct the self ..... again. Without having a solid sense of self you will not be able to navigate your living room ... let alone type on a laptop and write a message on social media. Any notions that float around people's noggins - there is no self - I am forever dissolved .... aaaaahhhhhh ... are just simply notions. That lighting of the tube light is so fucking dramatic that it has forever changed deeply held mental models that condition the way we experience our lives. This radical changing of mental models has only and only one symptom ..... one that lasts ... one we get to keep ... The end of suffering!!

This! Right here! in the story of Bahiya the practitioner of the Brihadaranyak Upanishad ... lies the importance of having a really really sexy hypothesis !!! And this hypothesis cannot be verified unless one has even sexier techniques at their disposal.

Sanyojana

Ten little monkeys jumping on the bed. 3 fell off and bumped their head. Mama called the Arhat and the Arhat said ... No more monkeys jumping on the bed

seven little monkeys jumping on the bed. 2 fell off and bumped their head. Mama called the Arhat and the Arhat said .... No more monkeys jumping on the bed

Now Capo ... there are 5 left and they are really really strong adversaries. You have fought and won against the Tattaglias now its as if you are going to go up against Hyman Roth. 5 Hyman Roths! Fuck even thinking about it makes me weary. You will need a dossier on each one of them before you go to the mats. Please refer to this.

Prerequisites

There's a whole host of techniques that you need in your arsenal. Everything that you have practiced in order to get to anagami needs to be very very current. You have to refresh your smriti. Now you haven't practiced in accordance with The Awakening Project. The Awakening Project is deeply inspired by Steven Procter (MIDL) and by John Yates (The Mind Illuminated). It is is also deeply inspired by Uncle Sid (selected works) and Uncle Shariputra (selected works) . Here below I am writing about the protocols of the Awakening Project that one would typically work with to get to Anagami. Keep all these skills alive

Sankalpa

Form a deep desire, a pure and true wish that you do not want any of the Dnyans/nanas from the previous path particularly the fruitions from the previous paths. I am assuming of course that you have experienced those fruitions many times now and are satisfied with those experiences in the past and have now started noticing that they show up as distractions. That traversing of the same territory is a mix of conceptual knowledge and experiential habit. You absolutely have to break that habit! The Tattaglias are already dealt with, there is no need to keep reliving your glory .... move on Capo! Every time you practice, form this sankalpa hold it deeply in the Citta. Program the mind. When the mind starts to traverse the same territory, you will know and you will straight up reject it.

Techniques for Shrotapanna Marg Shrotapanna Phal

Link

Techniques for Anagami Marg Anagami Phal

Link

Using a meditation log

Link

Sila

My view regarding sila is that that sila is not 'rules', the practice of sila is as experiential as the practice of Shamatha Bhavana or of Vipashyana Bhavana. And if one approaches it as a rigorous practice of learning about the mind then it becomes an insight practice as well as a Sila Bhavana practice. towards that objective in my own practice I have approached it in the following way and often recommend it to people while knowing that such an approach may not appeal to everyone. Build some samadhi using meditation techniques and the objective is not just to build samadhi but to fully experience it and fuckin ... remember what it means to have samadhi. This doesn't have to be a very high grade of samadhi, but needs to have enough of a difference so that the mind remembers what it means to be calm, collected, tranquil, centered, clear, energetic. Induce this using concentration practice. As you go about your day, your week, your month .... just simply use that samadhi as a canary in a coal mine, or as a barometer ... to see the value of your own views, attitudes, thoughts, speech and actions. Once you frame the practice of sila like this then vichikitsa (or perverted problem solving) does not arise. One doesn't spend too much time hassling one's self about silly things like eating meat or drinking alcohol or killing mosquitos. Do what you have always done and let the practice make the adjustments to behavior (internal and external)

Brahmaviharas

Link

Pratyavekhshana

Link

Doing the Jhanas and using them for vipashyana bhavana

Link, Link, Link

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The theoretical paradigm and the techniques / algorithms that take one to Arhatship will follow in the second part to this post. Link (to be updated).

I am working on a book to help people find the missing links to Awakening, with practical suggestions to address these. I value the input of people in this group and was wondering if I could get your thoughts on it.

What do you think? What would you like to read about more? Would you like me to address anything in particular?

This is the first draft of the first chapter. It is a personal story of my journey along this path. I have since helped dozens of people free themselves from dukkha and the rest of the book will be about these students, as well as practical things you can do to help you on the path.

If you happen to know anyone who may be interested in this, please feel free to share the page with them.

All input welcome - here on Reddit or on the link.

Introduction

A friend and student of mine is working at attaining to shrotapanna. This post is a ready reckoner for him to refer to in order to inform his practice and help him plan and execute the techniques that free.

Theory that supports and shapes practice

Fetters
Cognitive compulsions that push the citta - the heart-mind, into certain positions. These positions are experienced with ubiquitous commonality across people/minds and thus a shared language has emerged to describe the positions. The fetters have no name, they take their name from these commonly experienced positions. They are 10 in number. But this is a mere convenience in terms of efficiency of 'modeling'. This list of 10 is MECE - mutually exclusive and cumulatively exhaustive. Therein lies Uncle Sid's sheer genius. A problem so well defined that it becomes relatively easier to solve it. To read more about them all please check out this post. In this ready reckoner though, we will concern ourselves with the first three fetters. Sat-kaya drishti, Sila-vrat paramarsh, vi-chikitsa.

To fully understand how these fetters are laid out and to deeply appreciate the problem solving/ mental training/skill building/investigation techniques that free, that lead to the uprooting of the first three its useful to think in the following way:

We are ignorant of the two marks of existence (or 'lakshan')

1. Anitya - unreliability
2. Not Self - Anatma

Our ignorance of the two marks of existence keeps alive the latent cognitive tendencies that push us into a world of suffering - Dukkha. This happens sense contact by sense contact, moment by moment, day by day ... year by year of our lives.

The first three fetters

The hallmark of the first three fetters is the desperate search for reliability. We want our conscious experience to be reliable!

Sat-kaya drishti - We want to clearly know who we are! - I am ... 'x'. I am a man ... oozing with machismo. I am a yogi ... oozing with my ill understood second hand knowledge of Uncle Sid's 'teachings'. I am a theravadan .... those tibetan fellas ... hah!!!

Sila-vrat paramarsh - In order to make my life predictable I will figure out strange positions and rituals structured around those positions and 'follow' them. I will go to the gym everyday and thus I will never ever ever lose these sexy rippling muscles. In order to make my practice predictable I will memorize and spout Sutras and only the ones from the early texts ... the later ones ..... pfffffffttttt

Vichikitsa - In order to ensure that my life, my sense of being alive predictable and safe I will imagine all sorts of strange problems and butt my head against them - real or made up ... doesn't matter. Am I doing this kettle bell swing right? Is this gym instructor the right gym instructor for me, those crossfit guys seem to be making a lot of gains! look at these guns ... why aren't they getting bigger? My practice isn't going anywhere, am I 'following' the right 'teachings'? Is this the right teacher for me? is this the right practice program .... those advait vedant dudes seem really chill, I want what they are smoking. We just can't be still!!! We just can't sit peacefully on our commute to work without hassling ourselves over whether we actually locked our front door or are misremembering having locked it.

Think of each fetter that leads to a potential cage - upon receiving sense contact there is a set sequence or pattern of mental actions that lead to the heart being stuffed into that cage. The sequence or patterns of mental actions is very very predictable in its nature - its called Dependent Origination. Think of DO as a dry desolate factory - it has no richness - its just a pattern. This pattern is given richness and colour and flavor by the details of our lives as it unfolds - sense contact and terminate and stay resident programs that kick into action upon sense contact and start to churn the gears of the factory .. feeding it with details - samskaras or sankharas.

For example one may have learnt through life experience that one should never let a bully walk away without bloodying his nose - this is a sankhara. Upon coming into contact with a bully - sense contact, the sankhara kicks into action. The richness of the sense contact and the sankhara adds colour to the process and outcome of the specific set of events that lead to taking birth as the guy who must now defend himself or die trying. The hallmark of the process and its final outcome is the involvement of the citta or the heart-mind ... affective investments, emotional entanglement.

Through your practice you have worked on an action plan that builds knowledge, wisdom and dispassion towards these fetters, the DO pattern, the sankharas, the end outcome. It is this knowledge of how shit works, wisdom of managing the mind and dispassion. It is dispassion towards all of this subtle but profound, powerful but useless cognitive activity that frees the mind from it. This dispassion or nibbida is like a force of nature - very powerful but completely blind to collateral damage. Its supposed to dismantle the tendency to take birth as the guy who must get a promotion at work ... and it ends up shoving the guy into a monastery with a begging bowl in hand or in a forest eating wild taters. Your action plan needs to factor in this brute force strength of nibbida.

The action plan

Broad action plan:

1. Build observational skills that involve the 7 factors of awakening along with sampajjana or MIA in TMI parlance. along with some powerful compound skills like softening into
2. Live life in a way that supports the above - investigate your own attitudes, thoughts, viewpoints, speech, behavior to figure out what leads to samadhi and what leads away from it. to encourage that which leads to samadhi and to discourage cognitively challenge and soften into that which leads away from samadhi
3. Use intelligently crafted investigation rubrics that free

Skill building:

1. Concentration skills (TMI adept level)
2. Jhanas
3. Softening into
4. Concentration practice with the intentionality on working on specific factors of awakening of the 7. leading to a clear sense of what each factor feels like and developing the ability to crank up or dial down each factor on demand
5. MIA or sampajjana
6. Awareness of awareness (that is aware of the object)

Investigation rubrics:

1. Grounding in Anatma - as described here
2. Sorting and categorizing body sensations into skin flesh bones
3. #1 + #2
4. Sorting and categorizing body sensations into the 5 elements - earth, water, fire, wind, void
5. #1 + #4
6. Tracking sounds from start to finish
7. #1 and #6
8. Sorting and categorizing thoughts into the following categorization schemas: (1) visual/verbal/meaning based. (2) Self/other/world/fantasy (3) Past/present/future/fantasy (4) Habitual/random/Driven by emotional charge/ Narration of what's going on
9. #1 and #8
10. Experiencing and tracking emotions using the tracking of thoughts driven by emotional charge
11. #1 and #10
12. Sorting and categorizing aggregate mental states using the rubric of the 6 realms of existence
13. #1 and #12
14. Choiceless attention - letting objects self select while 'knowing' the sense door, the object and staying with the object .. to track it
15. #1 + #14

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My assessment of your practice so far

Your practice

1. The factors of awakening of mindfulness, energy, concentration, investigation are very highly developed
2. The factors of tranquility, equanimity ... they come and go
3. The mind has a certain grabby-ness, it tries to grab the jhanas. This is the reason that you are unable to reliably move from jhana 1 to jhana 2. This grabby-ness is not gross its very subtle. the reason its so subtle is because of your excellent concentration. You can hold on to one object and thus let go of all others, but the grabby-ness shows up to the priti that arises. This requires a lot of softening into a lot of letting go. It requires the yogi to totally relax (tranquility) and let go of the affective investment in the success of the meditation itself (equanimity) - and then each jhana will arise and jhana mastery becomes possible
4. You are cycling in the Progress of insight
   Emptiness - all of conscious experience is 'assembled'
   Unreliability - nothing in conscious experience can be relied upon
   Dukkha - Unreliability and a lack of acceptance ... sucks
   Anatma - Some degree of equanimity arises, affective investment is withdrawn, the heart is no longer thrust into the conceptual cages formed by the fetters
5. This cycling will continue until you develop the factors of tranquility and equanimity. Both will come about in the process of the cycling itself. sooner or later the mind will 'give up' and stop doing the stuff that bumps you back into a previous stage of the PoI.
6. Very very intentional planned methodical samadhi skill development combined with a very very intentional planned investigation execution is the way forward
7. Practice has to become very structured and methodical - the citta / heart-mind has to settle down and accept the experiential insights that are arising. This will happen organically by keeping on keeping on ... but its like a throw of dice. We can load the dice in our favor by identifying and working on skills in isolation and combination

Areas for further strengthening in your current practice

1. The intentional maintenance of mindfulness, investigation and softening into skill in order to support off the cushion investigation as mentioned in the section of 'Broad action plan'
2. #2, #4, #5, #6 from the section of 'skill building'
3. #4, #5, #8 ... to #15 in the section of 'investigation rubrics'

In Summary

1. You have made great progress so far
2. The 'grind' is getting to you - its leading to vichikitsa regarding the practice. All the cycling is possibly causing a sense of failure and associated stress. You aren't failing - this is a part and parcel of the awakening project. The stress has to be countered by doing sufficient tranquility in practice on and off the cushion
3. Work with patience and intentionally be very methodical on the cushion as well as off the cushion - in practice as well as in planning and reviewing your practice
4. Make weekly / fortnightly plans - what are you going to work on - log your sits
5. At the end of the planning period - review your log and plan the next period. Factor in practice technique changes that correct for imbalances like insufficient tranquility, gaps in investigation techniques etc.
6. What seems like a daunting project - split up into chunks (weekly/fortnightly) helps the mind actually settle down and do the techniques. It is the technique that frees and not the aspiration for freedom. Aspiration for freedom is great! but left undirected it turns into a fire that burns the mind. In reviewing and planning give the mind what it needs in terms of accepting and acknowledging that aspiration. In the executing of the plan - settle down and get deeply interested in the execution. This is the way!

Introduction

A dear friend of mine is currently working on the path to Anagami attainment. These are notes that I am writing for him as a ready reckoner to refer to. Due to these being notes rather than detailed instructions, they are brief and to the point. I hope this is of help to someone out there reading this.

The exercises that lead to Shrotapanna - the winner of the stream

As part of a curriculum we have worked through many of these exercises.

The mind is dumb!

Had the mind been smart, it would have freed itself in the many decades that we have lived. We take cognizance of the fact that the mind is dumb and we create practice plans structured around operating principles worked out by the yogis that have come before us which in turn can be traced back to the general principles taught by Uncle Sid. In the months that we have worked together you have applied yourself at many of these exercises. But I am jotting them down here because these exercises that got us to shrotapanna are the very building blocks of mental training and the skills they afford to the mind keep deteriorating thus we keep returning to these exercises as and when required. Often we return to them just to diagnose our current skill level and then we continue doing them in order to keep these foundational skills alive.

1. Using a chosen well defined object to tether the mind to and develop each and every one of the factors of awakening
2. Doing the above exercise with a sankalpa or a resolve to work upon specific factors of awakening. You should be able to access each of the factors of awakening and dial them up or down as if you were turning dials. For example choose to establish mindfulness and simply work on amping up tranquility balanced with energy. Doing such an exercise inclines the mind to readily access these factors of awakening. In a similar way you can choose to focus on concentration and investigation or equanimity and joy.
3. Doing the jhanas is not readily possible for everyone but if the mind as it presents in our specific individual case is inclined towards absorption then it is beneficial to learn the formed jhanas at a bare minimum and practice getting really flexible with the formed jhanas - work up and down the jhanic arc, jump around in the jhana sequence, take a deep breath and simply enter the jhana of your choice
4. Familiarity, juxtaposition, precedents and consequents with the sense doors - here we use categorization rubrics in order to apprehend, sort and categorize phenomena. read more here
5. Establish mindfulness in a grounding object and do anatta practice. Attention moves on its own, attention reaches out to a sense door on its own, attention lands on an object on its own, attention tracks the object and the object 'changes' on its own, objects have life cycles independent of what we want from them. Read more here

The exercises that lead to Anagami (Sakrdagami on the way)

Copy pasting this from a post that I had written on discord. Some context is lost.

1. Here's how DO works Lets take it from contact onwards Through out your life before that itch showed up this has happened: Avijja (ignorance) - Samskara (constructs that construct experience) - vijnana (consciousness actively moulded by samskara) Because you were ignorant, therefore you kept taking intentional actions that created and embedded samskara or constructs that construct experience. These are like terminate and stay resident programs, or apps in the background, simply waiting to be called into action. Awareness - the pure potentiality of knowing is now coloured/conditioned to bend into specific grips, postures in response to specific contacts. This is all in the past - birth after birth after birth - you have been doing karma that create or strengthen these sankharas. A statement like - I will never let a bully walk away without bloodying his nose otherwise tomorrow he will bring his pals for a repeat performance - this is a construct / samskara - it is preverbal and preconceptual and simply waiting to be 'called'. Upto this point there is nothing for a yogi to do by way of technique On the day that you meditate Contact (sparsh) - feeling tone (vedana) - thirst (trishna) - followed by the usual mess Itch - negative vedana - urge to act - the process and final product of a human being that now has to scratch his ass but cant because he is sitting in a meditation retreat hall
2. Regarding contact Anything that the mind can take as its object is a contact An itch is a contact, I am irritated and meditating and there is an itch on my ass and I am about to let out a loud burp is a contact, The negative vedana of the itch once taken as an object is also a contact Simple contact, compound contact - lots of scope for what constitutes contact when you meditate In our example: I am irritated and an itch showed up on my ass is the contact - this has negative vedana I won the lottery, the winning ticket is in my pocket and an itch showed up on my ass can be an alternate contact - this might have a positive vedana (we dont know) Regarding the chain of DO To learn the concept and to start investigating it makes a lot of sense to talk of a chain of events each 'causing' the other. A logically connected causal chain. But further scrutiny and experience in tracking specific conditionality in general and DO in particular will show that it is not a chain and it has nothing to do with causality. Because there is a hole in the ground, therefore there is a foundation, therefore there is a ground floor, therefore there is a first floor ... and so on .... therefore consciousness in all of its potentiality has a whole landscape populated with sky scrapers. The salient point is that the hole in the ground does not cause the foundation, the foundation does not cause the first floor etc. The human sits on top of the sky scraper. Depending on salience of contact - one particular sky scraper manifests itself with a fully formed human being on top, contemplating suicide :) (I mean this as a joke). Our moment by moment conscious experience is a fully formed human atop a sky scraper. The sky scraper and therefore the human keeps changing - moment by moment. Continuity is an illusion What defines which skyscraper and which human in any given moment depends on the vedana or charge of any particular contact - and remember that contact is not a simplistic thing

Practice philosophy:

When we meditate on objects using mahasi noting for example with sounds for example, something naturally happens: 1. The mind notes - fart sound, bird tweet, door slam, keyboard clacket, flute music 2. The mind starts taking sound specific characteristics and notes them - hard, soft, loud, cacophonous, pulse, continuous, etc 3. The mind starts taking object specific characteristics - start, fluctuation, end Either this happens using the brute force noting method or the yogi has to be given exercises with specific instructions that can induce this In understanding specific conditionality and DO - we are talking about a level of talent which is very rare for this to naturally happen. Either this talent exists or we have to give/do exercises to induce the mind to take skyscrapers as objects so that it can then start recognizing foundation, ground floor, first floor etc

Preparation:

List down 4 to 5 memories that carry negative vedana (negative vedana is good because it creates the salience that is required to permit a skyscraper to form - as per plan and intentionality). This can be done with positive vedana memories but ... difficult. List down 4 to 5 meaning carrying phrases that mean something to you. eg: I am being attacked, I am being humiliated, I am being criticised, There is a pandemic, The republicans will win the next election etc etc - remember that these things have to be salient but don't traumatize yourself

The method:

1. Generate momentum in mindfulness, relaxation, energy, concentration and investigation - do a practice that you are familiar with
2. Forget about equanimity and joy - they will take care of themselves
3. In a calm still mind drop the memory, objectify it
4. Observe all the results, the discomfort, the stress in the jaw, the heaviness in the gut
5. While keeping the memory alive, dropping it in the same 'place' again and again - use slow deep abdominal breathing to calm the body and mind
6. With each drop of the contact - observe: Contact - Vedana - Trishna - the mess that follows
7. You are recreating the same 'skyscraper' for the purpose of learning how skyscrapers get constructed
8. Using the same memory over and over will lead to a side effect - the vedana of the memory will get cleaved off - the memory is no longer of use to you - move on to other memories, other phrases
9. Over a period of time with this exercise you will start noticing two things: Just like mahasi noting moves to characteristics or contours of objects and not its meaning, similarly this exercise will yield familiarity with each floor of the skyscraper - from contact onwards. The second thing you will notice is that each floor of the skyscraper requires effort to maintain - and effort that you didn't even know existed - This is the house builder - You will smash his rafters
10. At contact and vedana start relaxing the mind and body, slow deep abdominal breathing, relax the jaw, drop the eyelids, drop the brow, and sigh at the construction process, literally sigh at it - a silent sigh, no noise
11. You will interrupt the housebuilder successfully at vedana - once! and if you are fully present and metacognitively aware then once is enough, on demand you can interrupt him - Sakrdagami
12. Now permit some skyscraper to get created, interrupt others - move to open monitoring and noting of whatever ... randomly permit dukkha and randomly interrupt it, the mind learns not to encourage the housebuilder any more - Anagami
13. Bullet points 11, 12 take a lot of time to get to. Time and regular diligent practice.

I had written a detailed post along similar lines here

Dukkha nanas

The progress of insight map and the way it plays out is a direct result of practicing a certain way. Heavy doses of momentary concentration practice done for hours every day over months in a retreat like setting will probably lead to insights arising in the precise way that they are described in the PoI map. If we don't practice like that, and we arent - we are doing a lot of shamatha practice and we are establishing ourselves in anatta then the gaining of insights will not necessarily follow the PoI map. but the PoI map is still relevant for us.

Consider the map and its sixteen stages and the learnings from each stage and start clubbing together insights into categories. We see that insight happens across 4 different categories:

1. Emptiness - this is an insight into the construct nature of our conscious experience. Conscious experience is constructed, it is assembled. An apple is an apple because the mind uses raw sensory data and constructs an apple. a friend is a friend because the mind imputes the meaning 'friend'. Love, friendship, hate, adversariness - everything is a construct. Basically we 'live' or we take 'birth' moment by moment in worlds that are constructed by the mind
2. Unreliability - Due to the construct nature of our conscious experience, absolutely nothing can be relied upon to last. Nationality, relationships, love, devotion, jobs, wages, economy - everything is unreliable
3. Anatma - the sense of self that we carry around inside us it too is a construct of the mind. The mind uses the sensory information that it receives through the 6 senses and creates a sense of self that is born moment by moment in newer worlds - continuity is a sticky illusion. This does not mean that their is no self - it means only that what we are conscious of , what we are aware of is a hologram that is constructed and refreshed sense contact by sense contact
4. Dukkha - we are ignorant of the above three things and have spent a lifetime perfecting the results of our ignorance. the results being the way in which the mind meets its objects, the way in which awareness engages with objects, the grips of expectations, dislike, rejection, seperation

But but but .... I am a sakadagami! .. why am I experiencing dukkha

This path is all about dukkha and dukkha nirodha. we don't need to practice the mahasi way in order to trigger or induce dukkha. It already exists. We are doing this entire project to be free of dukkha.

We do not do this to understand emptiness - who cares!

Appreciate unreliability - fuck that shit!

Revel in not-self - pffffffftttt!

Dukkha is what we are trying to understand and be free of. All the knowledge we gain regarding the other insight categories is really in the service of being free of dukkha.

All those many years ago when you came to meditation, I am presuming that you did not come due to mysticism and interest in the mystical world, what brought you, and me, to this craft is ... dukkha.3rd path for me, and for a lot of people would be my guess is where you go toe to toe with this particular problem.

We are tremendously entrenched in the story of our lives, but when we reach this territory we need to get aligned with the story of the mind. Learn that dukkha arises due to the 'grips' and learn to let go of those grips. The sooner the association is made between the affective outcomes of fear, misery, disgust and desperation with the ways in which the mind meets objects (as opposed to looking at the 'story') the sooner we learn what dukkha is and we conquer it experientially.

Refer to these: 1, 2

A while back, I wrote a short piece on what I think are some of the drawbacks MCTB has for the aspirationally advanced meditation practitioner. It was met with a bit of hostility and maybe confusion -- mostly due to the fact that I wrote it as a kind of stream-of-consciousness post and it was super scuffed. I did not anticipate so much engagement with it. The post itself lacked an overall message about what to do with the information I presented. This post is a continuation of that post with more practice implications. It is a rough first draft of a path of insight being developed that puts skill at the forefront of the activity.

First things first. This is not a pro- or anti-Ingram thing. I like the guy, I like MCTB. I think it has a lot of merits. But, I believe, it does not do full justice to people who want to really advance their practice. I believe it misses out on conveying the proper framing from which wisdom can take hold. If you are a person who already finds MCTB the perfect guidebook for your needs -- you need not read further. I'm only out here to help people who may be confused or looking to gain a new perspective on their practice territory to advance.

My main two issues with how MCTB presents the Path of Insight are twofold:

1. It is not framed from the perspective of the 4 Noble Truths, which are the actual core teachings of the Buddha (Dukkha & Dukkha Nirodha). Instead, they are framed through the 3Cs, which are very liberating, but they are just part of the story, not the whole thing. Following from this point...
2. In MCTB, the Path of Insight is generally explained as a series of perceptual shifts, attention changes, or other psycho-somatic diagnostic criteria to indicate progress. Changing your field of awareness is not awakening. Non-dual perception is not the core teaching of the Buddha. Ending suffering is.

And this circles back to the Four Noble Truths being the core teachings of the Buddha. They are framed as a set of skills or competencies which we must master. It is similar to learning a language. Each Noble Truth (and the Noble Eightfold Path, as a consequence) is like a certain part of the language we must learn. There's grammar, syntax, vocabulary, colloquialisms, idioms, etc., all of which combine to produce a deep skill that stays with us for our entire lives. When we reach a certain level of competency in a language (typically, fluency) it is impossible to unlearn the language or even forget it because language is such a vital part of the human condition. Similar to self-awareness, mindfulness, and ending suffering. Similar to learning a language, when we've mastered the core teachings of the Buddha, it permeates throughout our entire lives, it opens new opportunities in mundane life, gives us a new perspective, changes our emotions, changes the way we see old ideas, and makes us appreciate ourselves in a different light. Using the language metaphor, I believe MCTB gets it backwards with a diagnosis of path progress. You do not assess how good one speaks a language based on what new opportunities they've gotten, how they see old ideas or their perspective. You assess the language directly. Similarly, you do not diagnose yourself on the path by your mood, recurrent thoughts, or perceptual changes, but through how well you can let go. Each stage of the path is a different way of letting go we must master to reach the next stage.

Dukkha and Letting Go.

Skills exist because the human mind adapts to solve a problem. I need something to give me safety from the harsh environment, so I develop the skill of crafting shelter. I need to provide nourishment for my family, I learn the skill of farming. There is a problem, and the skill fulfils the gap.

The Buddha cleverly designed the Four Noble truths like this. The first noble truth is the problem: there is Dukkha. The second noble truth is how the problem exists: due to causes/conditions. The third and fourth noble truths are how we go about fixing it (the skills we practice). The skills we practice are, in essence, about letting go.

The problem is unique because it's generally right under our noses but we haven't paid much attention to solving it because it feels like a feature and not a bug. The Buddha, being as wise as he is, had the strong hunch that this was a bug, he set about de-bugging his system. And he found the root cause of the problem. The mind, due to not knowing the causes and conditions, continues to create dukkha. To change this, we embark on a long journey of mental training to calm the mind and start an investigation to find these causes and conditions and let go of them for good.

So far, so good. This is simple handiwork being done. Plants won't grow in this soil? Fertilise it. Plants are looking dry? Water them. Weeds are growing in my garden? Pull them out. Pests coming to eat my plants? Wrap them in mesh so that they can't get chewed up. Easy as.

In short, the problem is clinging. The solution is letting go. So, we learn the skill of letting go. As such, any path of insight that we hope to use to diagnose our progress, understand potential pitfalls, and generally give us some loose direction should be focused around skill execution first and side-effects second.

What is letting go? This is a complex question to ask. But, from my experience and others', it generally has two major components. First, awareness. Awareness is the ability to notice things, in this particular case, we're talking about dukkha and its causes. When we're novices, we may only notice dukkha and not the causes. As we advance we start seeing some causes of our dukkha. The second component is release. Release is when we're able to drop a compulsion to do something. Release can come in gradients, on the shallow end, we can just momentarily drop a compulsion to do something and return to our meditation object. On the deeper end, we learn to drop the causes and conditions of our compulsions. However, to do this all, our awareness and release need to be working in tandem. This is a very basic overview of what it is all about. For more complexity, you can read the thousands of meditation books out there that teach various ways of letting go (I'm happy to recommend them later).

A Path of Insight.

The Path of Insight emerges as the mind starts to investigate itself, and embarks on mastering the skill of letting go of dukkha piece by piece. Each step on the path of insight is cumulative and not necessarily linear for individuals (i.e., certain minds may naturally understand a fetter better than others and therefore be further along in the PoI than others). What follows in the path of insight is like a sign-posted checklist of executable skills in reducing suffering and the eventual eradication of a fetter. For the record, this map I am writing is mostly from the perspective of using basic breath or noting meditation, I have no long-term experience with mantra/visualisation/kasina (I invite people who have practised those methods to write their own PoI in the skills at every stage).

1. Mind and Body. This is the first signposted step on the path of insight. The skill of letting go is very immature, but fresh and the forefront of the mind. The mind can distinguish between physical (form) sensations and mental (formless) sensations. This aids in letting go, because, in that distinction, we can cleanly distinguish how sources of physical pain cause certain dukkha and how sources of mental anguish cause a certain type of dukkha. We progressively get better than disentangling these largely interwoven sets of dukkha arising in the mind. This stage, as noted elsewhere, when mastered, can really feel very settled and equanimous because we've made the first big step in letting go; the usual ignorant tangle of physical-mental dukkha that arrives usually in too large of a quantity for us to properly process. Now we've processed it to a degree, and the dukkha drastically falls away. In the very mature stages of Mind and Body, one is keenly aware of the interrelated physical-mental nexus; bodily sensations lead to mental sensations, and mental sensations lead to bodily sensations. Intentions arising from form become clearer (pressure -> I know I am sitting; cool breath -> awareness in nostrils). Intentions arising from formless become clearer too (focus on a mental feeling of happiness -> happy memories and feelings come into mind).
2. Cause and Effect. Letting go retreats slightly from the forefront of the mind. Instead, the focus turns to intentions and the conditionality of phenomena. Following the breath becomes very laborious at this stage because the mind is on a dual track; it is noticing the intention to follow the breath occurring simultaneously with the sensations confirming the breath is being followed. This can feel very cumbersome in the mind, as we're not so much learning to let go, but actually noticing how the mind creates desire, intention, and potentially going as deep as greed. Similar to the mature stages of Mind and Body, we see how conditions of the present lead to conditions in the future. Awareness of the present moment -> awareness in this new present moment. Subtle distraction arises -> potential for more distraction. Subtle distraction arises -> subtle letting go helps stay on the breath. Subtle distraction arises -> overemphasis on the distraction leads to a different distraction coming in to ambush you. Cause and Effect is very much a game of Goldilocks, we're trying to find the right effort in staying on the breath as well as let go of potential hindrances. In the mature stage of Cause and Effect, we see how too much focus on ending hindrances is a hindrance in itself. We understand that not enough focus on the breath lets hindrances fester. Unlike Mind and Body, which is about disentangling form and formlessness, this is all about modulating the reactions to the disentangled sensations. A lot of trial and error happens in this stage and we're intent on getting back the clean-feeling boundaries of Mind and Body that let us feel so at ease, because that sort of letting go was easy and not so cognitively demanding like it is now.
3. The Three Characteristics. This stage is about combining the understandings of the first two stages and seeing the characteristics of conditioned phenomena. We're starting to see how mental/physical sensations interact. Further, our mind is becoming progressively sharper and actually more sensitive to dukkha. The paradoxical thing about meditation, in my experience, is that we tend to actually become more sensitive to dukkha as time goes on, in becoming more sensitive to it, our minds are training themselves to get negative feedback quicker. The lower the threshold for detecting dukkha -- the quicker we're likely to learn. The Three Characteristics stage is really all about this sensitivity heightening. Intentions coming and going are very tiring to maintain, letting go of hindrances requires a balanced approach, mental sensations and physical sensations seemingly co-mingling and ricocheting off one another. It's a real mess. Things that may have never bothered us before now bother us in this stage, because we see just how precarious our awareness really is. Restlessness is quite a normal side effect of this stage as the mind is amped up but not yet 100% certain on what it all means. However, if we focus on letting go of the hindrances as they arise, letting focus on the breath feel engaging and joyful, the mind will see how 1) Physical sensations have no owner, no me, no I is involved in making them happen; so too with mental sensations. They have conditions that make them grow and proliferate or recede. 2) Physical and mental sensations arise and pass, continuously. 3) Physical and mental sensations are burdensome when there's an attempt to hold onto them, cling to them, possess them, or control them. In the mature stages of the Three Characteristics, our minds are using this knowledge to let go of things with relative ease. Everything arising and ceasing means there's no need t possess them, which means we can unburden ourselves to simply observe without getting too involved.
4. Arising and Passing. When the knowledge of the Three Characteristics is ingrained and translates into the executable skill of letting go and not getting tied up in sensations, we head into the territory of Arising and Passing. In the Three Characteristics, our minds became very sensitive to dukkha and the precarious nature of awareness, along with the general burden of trying to possess any single type of sensation. This translated into very rapid letting go, so that physical and mental unpleasantness was quickly let go of. We kept doing this, and now everything is rapidly coming and going without a care in the world. Arising and Passing is a threshold point because now we have some very tangible rock-solid skills in letting go to the point that our mind feels kinda like Teflon, nothing is sticking to it. Letting go should feel smooth and almost like walking, it comes very naturally. If you've read MCTB, the ancillary diagnostic criteria is feelings of happiness and can even manifest as mania. Arising and Passing stage is very happy and very liberating because we've precisely taken our understanding of how sensations are body-mind, conditional, impermanent, not-self, and dissatisfying and turned it into liberation. In terms of the skills of "letting go", this feels a lot like we've made it. And in a sense, we have. This is the first real signpost of a tangible, repeatable, and clearly present skill that we can execute in our lives without the stop-and-start jerkiness or unpleasantness of previous stages. The training wheels are off, we are autonomous letting-goers. However, our skills are still on the shallow end of letting go and release; but make no mistake, we can very rapidly drop compulsions on a moment-by-moment basis. As we mature in this stage, we see what the path is and is not. The path is not about groovy fun sensations, it's not about hedonistic pleasure, it's not about that ball of light that takes up your vision, it's not about overcoming sensations. Our skills may get corrupted down these kinds of detours -- we can untether our minds from a lot of what was holding it back, and in this freedom, it is really exploring the excitement of letting go. If you are practising in this stage, keep this in mind. The goal is about letting go (i.e., ending suffering). Everything else is just a side-effect. As we further mature in this stage, we start to notice new things that need to be let go of. We see that letting go itself can arise and pass based on conditions. We see that things are exciting as they arise, and as they cease, leave a disturbing sensation while the mind continually looks for something to be there in the spot at which it ceased.
5. Dissolution. Dissolution is where things start to get very messy. In the past three stages, you linked up your insights and skills to let go turbo-mode. But in that letting go, you've been leaving behind things because they're not-self, impermanent, conditional, stressful, etc., now in Dissolution, letting go starts getting deeper because we're noticing that in letting go of things, they truly do go away. This is our entrance to the deeper levels of release. If the skills in the Arising and Passing were about liberation, then the skills in Dissolution are really the realisation that being free needs to be all the way through your being. We used to get annoyed by pain, we can let go of that. Now we're left with pleasantness, but this too is let go of. Included is the actual pleasant feeling of letting go itself. One thing becomes prominent in Dissolution, and that is the endings of things. The mind may become slightly preoccupied with "getting back" something that it feels was lost. Or it may become very deeply immersed in the hindrances as the mind detects even deeper levels of dukkha to uproot. Dissolution is a really mixed bag for practitioners; for some, it's smooth, slow, and comfortable as we descend deeper into the mind. For others, it's spooky seeing things end over and over. The skill in dissolution is really about taking a "wide scope" in awareness, not just letting go of the things bothering us, but letting go of everything with the realisation of "damn things really do fade away for good". For people pre-SE, I think Dissolution appears to be quite messy, sort of muddy(?) feeling, like everything feels very thick and sludgy. You can't really put your finger on it, because you're leaving things behind. For people post-SE, dissolution is when the mind thinks, "yep I'm ready for Nibbana". The jumping-off point into where we let of it all to get satisfaction beyond conditions.
6. Fear/Misery/Disgust. I heap Fear/Misery/Disgust (FMD) together because we tend to oscillate between the three and they're on a sliding continuum. Everyone knows what the emotional and psychosomatic effects are in this stage because other progress of insight writers have done it to death. In terms of skill, we've become skilful at letting go on the wider scope and letting go of the feelings that come with the relief in letting go. We see that everything that starts also ends. FMD is called the Dukkha Nanas because we're really understanding how deep the dukkha rabbit hole goes. We're gaining firsthand direct knowledge of the real deep dukkha lurking in our mind. Things end and that triggers fear. Things end and that triggers misery. Things end and that triggers disgust. FMD is directed towards sensations themselves and our mind which apprehends them too, kind of like, "how was I so ignorant to believe this crap in trying to make myself so unsustainably happy? How did I think so-and-so was gonna make me happy to begin with?" Fear feels like a deep fright in seeing the mind trying to be satisfied in this-or-that sensations. Misery feels like a deep sadness in seeing the mind trying in a futile attempt to be happy with sensations. Disgust feels like residual anger in the mind trying to grasp to a sensation to generate happiness. Basically, we're stepping on the landmines we've buried through years of ignorant conditioning. Stepping on a landmine is progress in this stage. Not stepping on it again is mastery.
7. Desire for Deliverance. After finding where most of the landmines are buried, detonating them, and staying safe, our mind has a decent skill in letting go at this deeper level. No really. You won't feel like a good meditator at this stage, but it is true. Now that one has let go of a lot of old conditioning, one moves into a type of anger that really wants to get somewhere. Desire for Deliverance has the intention of, "well I stepped on all these landmines, could there be, perhaps, a fertile plain in my mind that is free of landmines, and a place where landmines can't be buried?" Basically, the mind has now experienced enough dukkha to want to let go beyond basic sensations and thoughts, to get something far more refined. The skill in Desire for Deliverance is really about recognising the discomfort of the mind trying to find anywhere to be safe in conditioned reality; it's really more like a competency. The skill we execute is letting go of this mad rush of anger to get refined goodness. Mature Desire for Deliverance is where letting go becomes more refined, sharper, and also very sensitive to "falling back" into FMD, it's really about generating the insight of "there is something better over the horizon" and being okay in trying to sincerely find something that matches that description.
8. Re-Observation. Re-observation presents itself when we are skilfully aware of just how deeply unsatisfying mental and physical sensations are as a basis of happiness. Re-observation is the previous 3 stages grouped in one. The general flavour is the mind becoming totally repulsed by any sensation that occurs. However, one is actually still obsessed or compulsively being repulsed, which is still a form of grasping. Here, the skill is about letting go completely, totally disenchanting even from the disenchantment of sensations; disenchantment, too, is a sensation worth abandoning. Generally, the skill here is about realising that we've worked ourselves into disenchantment and the resulting negative state is also conditioned/fabricated. Re-Observation is mature when the mind is attuned to the traps of letting go as being a negative thing. We've let go of notions that it is bad or good to let go, things simply let go in and of themselves without input.
9. Equanimity. Now that we've let go top-to-bottom, the mind is generally sharp, pliant, and very engaged without getting "messy" or caught up in the negative or positive states of letting go. Things are letting go of themselves. In immature Equanimity, there may be very very faint residual notions of emotions. E.g., if a thought pops in that would've made you angry, there is a recognition that it is a trigger for anger, but no anger will arise. This is what I mean by "residual notions of emotions". Our mind can freely move about in investigation without getting caught up in anything compulsive, aside from these residuals now and then. As we deepen our Equanimity, we even abandon those residuals by letting go, recognising the extremely subtle forms of grasping present here. The skill of Equanimity is finding the triggers of a Fruition, and being able to execute. However, pre-SE, this is mostly an accidental happening. The general rule is to remain Equanimous and soak in how formations let go of themselves. One powerful skill in this stage is to remain aware of one's equanimity but then investigate and remain sensitive to barriers such as tendencies towards personality views, craving, aversion, restlessness, conceit, ignorance, etc... These formations will arise mostly as either a gross disturbance of equanimity, in which the skill is to remain equanimous and observe its letting go. Or it may arise as a subtle disturbance akin to the residual. In either case, the power of investigation must exceed the demands of the fetter that arises. This is a game of patience.
10. Path Moment: Fruition and Review. Fruition is undefinable and not a skill. The mind empties itself of fetter and this takes many forms for people, depending on their particular mental strengths and weaknesses. This is the path landed. There are many guides out there on the phenomenology of a Fruition taking place. The most important aspect is then reviewing the fetter's removal. The mind will feel fresh, re-booted, and generally de-bugged. In terms of the skill-based model, Fruition is when we attain a level of fluency. Mindfulness is now ingrained; our mind's strengths exceed the weight of some fetters. In my personal experience, the job post-fruition is to simply observe the mind that is unfettered and notice the prevailing sense of satisfaction where dissatisfaction may have been. Soak it up and really enjoy the new freedom and practice those fluency skills! The skill to be mastered here is to simply relax, enjoy, and eventually not resist as the mind becomes more sensitive to deeper levels of dukkha in order to begin a new path. Remember: we can't solve a problem unless we know it. This is the basis of all the paths.

Some Thoughts in Conclusion.

Insight meditation is generally regarded as somewhat mystical or that something special is happening. This couldn't be further from the truth. We are solving a problem. By becoming more keenly aware of just how prevalent our problem is, we can learn the skills required to solve them. In trying to solve the problems, we have emotional side effects, which really are part of the problem too. So we keep learning and working to build this skill. This is not to devalue mystical traditions. This is to empower the practitioner, for whom the traditions were created in the first place.

The insights we generate are for naught if they are not applied. As such, the Path of Insight written above combines the "knowledge of..." with the "execution of..." which is a general guide of what we're hoping to execute in order to bridge this gap. This is because observing and noticing dukkha is only half the game. The map is also pretty light on phenomenological data, I think MCTB does a great job of listing potential emotional and psychosomatic markers of stages (which are, ironically, the consequences of lack of skill in that stage). This is not written as some definitive guide, but a general guide that could work as a companion for others written out there. It is based on personal experience, along with my experiences from teaching meditation and feedback I've received from co-travellers.

Feel free to criticise, condemn, complain or question. This is a preliminary draft of a skills-based insight map. I'm not here to displace other maps, but to add what I think may help other practitioners out there. Thus, I welcome all input that can move the needle forward. However, I am not interested in your textbook analysis. I'm interested only in your perspective based on your practice or anecdotes. I want to make this the best guide possible for people hoping to bolster their letting go skills.

Can someone give a pithy guide kinda like on the sidebar of r/streamentry? Jhanas recommended/most efficent? Retreats? How important is daily life practice and what do you do? Daniel Ingram says one has to have exquisite daily life practice for 1st path or else better go on retreat. Is doing Mahasi noting and choiceless awareness practice without stage 6 samatha a waste of time?

EDIT: I'll probably delete this. I realize this question is probably too newbie for this sub. I just thought that arhats could give better advice than the average practitioner.

A very important part of our meditation practice is doing the right thing as much as possible (this is the 8-fold path). And one of the most critical components is making sure we have the right view and right thought. Do we know how to recognise good/fruitful from bad/unfruitful? Do we have the right concepts and ideas shaping our practice that will lead to the outcome we desire? This may seem like a foundational discussion to some advanced and very grounded practitioners, but I think it aims right at the heart of what meditation is and isn't. Specifically: how the questions we ask lead to the answers we seek. Knowing the difference between how and why, in my opinion, is what separates a good practice from poor practice. Or at the very least, it helps clarify our purpose in meditation versus other more speculative-based modalities out there.

Why?

It is very often that I see people in various advanced/serious meditation forums asking lots of questions such as:

• "Why am I thinking about X so often?"
• "Why do I find X so appealing?"
• "Why does X hurt so much?"
• "Why do I feel so bad?"

These are all valid types of questions, however, they are not the types of questions we can answer in meditation. They're the sort of questions that'll lead you in a circle to nowhere when meditating. They are best left to your philosophical, psychological, self-help, and therapeutic contexts. Why (heh)? Because, in short, there is no meaning to your dukkha. Dukkha has no teleological purpose at all. It is meaningless. In the linguistic and/or semantic sense, the question of why is all about finding the meaning of things, purpose, grand narratives, etc... In our meditation, we will never find the meaning of things because, for the purposes of our practice, we need to know there is no meaning to it.

We can understand this practically by looking at dependent origination. If we assume there is a meaning to our suffering, we understand that there is some sort of inherent essence to the suffering. That is, we believe that suffering occupies some aspect of selfhood. In other words, there is something that can be clung to, craved, etc... Because if we find the meaning, the suffering is no longer in vain. If we find the reason why we suffer, we can be content suffering because now it's good. It's a bit like a conman telling you how putting gravel in your shoes will cure your bad posture, it's a lie. And, we can also see that in believing the suffering is now good, we are setting ourselves up for future suffering -- if we discover that the suffering didn't serve a purpose to begin with. So, by asking why in the context of meditation, we are holding ourselves back and impeding real progress and actually increasing our dukkha by presuming something to be clung to in meaning for suffering; this in turn causes further craving for even more meaning. So, we must do away with this notion ASAP.

How?

So what are we actually doing in our meditation? We are finding out how.

• "How am I thinking about X so often?"
• "How do I find X so appealing?"
• "How does X hurt so much?"
• "How do I feel so bad?"

Instead of seeking meaning, we are looking at the process. The process is what we are all about in meditation. Process process process. The way things are fabricated to appear as they are to our ignorant minds. The question of how aims at finding out this exact thing for us.

How we suffer is a process, with discrete elements that can be uncovered, investigated, and eventually unmade to never come back. The next time we find a theme in our lives that bother us, we mustn't jump to our ignorant first question of asking why. Instead, "how does this theme occur to my mind? How does it seem prominent?" Only then can you start breaking down how stimuli appear, get interpreted, and weaved into a story about "me". And only the question of how does a self get extricated from the process of the investigation itself. The question of why always presupposes there is some centrality to the experience of suffering at hand with no reflection on how that presumption is itself a critical part of the problem. By taking the "me" out and assuming a process is occurring, we're immediately starting in the right frame of mind for good investigation that'll lead to the fruits of the path.

In short: if you ask shitty questions, you will get shitty answers. Input influences output. This is itself a (meta-)lesson about process vs meaning. Meditation practice is far closer to woodworking than philosophy -- despite appearances. If you ask a woodworker why they make chairs you'll get some tautological or vague answer. If you ask a woodworker how they make chairs, they will reveal to you their skill.

One of the most important teachings one can receive from contemplation is that of radical pragmatism. We aren't here to philosophise about metaphysics, play linguistic games about definitions, or justify this or that position like in a court of law. No, we are just here to know how things are, how they are made, and how they can be unmade. If we ask ignorant questions we will get ignorant answers.

May this be of use to someone reading. Be well.

Introduction

This is a protocol that an advanced meditator can follow to reach the breath nimitta in one go.The initial steps of the protocol can also form the basis for a daily practice for someone wishing to progress. Simply begin with the first few steps that take you to the breath and stay there, adding further steps every week. Week on week building a firm concentration practice. The protocol does not address hindrances and other problems that come about. But if you keep a log of how each sit goes and review it every couple of weeks, that forms the basis for protocol tweaks and additional exercises.

The protocol though, the way it is written, assumes a lot of proficiency with directing attention at choice and with a skill called softening into which you can read about here.

Here is a link to a two part series of talks that cover the prerequisites required to get to the jhana. Part 2 of the talk focuses specifically on access concentration and how it is a spectrum and how at the deeper end of access concentration comes up a breath nimitta - giving a sense of how concentration practice develops, what to watch out for.

The Protocol

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Craving is a burden we have picked up:

Craving is a burden that we've picked up

\- How heavy is a car? 0kg until you try to pick it up, and then it's two tonnes!

\- We drop the burden we're trying to carry

\- We drop the story we've told ourselves about why we're carrying the burden

\- We then drop the thought of wanting to burden ourselves

\- We then drop the intention to burden

\- We then drop the emotional pull toward burdening

\- We then drop the triggers of the emotions for burdening ourselves

\- We are then free of the conditions for creating burdens

Desire = fascination with the weight, wanting to be the person to carry, wanting that weight

Aversion = burdened by the weight, being burdened by the thought of needing to carry

Restlessness = fussing about the weight, overthinking, playing "what-if?", etc...

Dullness = not appreciating what weight is to begin with, how it feels, what it is, etc...

Lack of faith = not appreciating that we can unburden our mind of wanting to pick up weights that we don't need and wanting to drop weights that are on us.

Buddha-Rumi

The Buddha would say: “Your task is not to seek for satisfaction, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Distinctness

The mind pulls into layers of distinctness

Ø Me, distinct, centre
    ○ Me, doing something
        § Me, doing something to get something
                        □ Me, doing something to get something, to feel something

At each layer, there are levels of distinctness, the mind clings to the distinctness at each level. Our job is to unravel this mess, lay it out, and like a calm and practised surgeon, remove everything that causes dissatisfaction.

Being the winner

Meditation is often framed as a fixer for things. "I have so-and-so problem which I'm working on." We start with this barrier to our own happiness and salvation-liberation. This is a loser mindset. A mindset that says you lack something and need to get something. There's nothing to get that's more important than realising you have won by simply being aware and it doesn't matter what you are aware of. So long as you are aware.

Instead of going some place or meditating or making liberation a job, enjoy courageously living one breath at a time while in a seated posture. And be aware of that. And you've won.

Everything we're doing is a feedback loop to itself

I calmly breathe, which calms my mind, which makes more calm breathing and so on.

I speak to myself with a caring loving tone, which makes me feel loved, which makes me speak more lovingly to myself.

I let go of unnecessary burdens, which makes me feel less burdened and makes me want to drop more burdens as I go.

Follow this path to liberation.

This is a random collection of my journaled writings about the path. May they be of use to someone.

Getting to our peace and happiness

As someone who is thoroughly embroiled in your own little internal private world, you are incapable of appreciating your existential predicament with any measure of objectivity... That is, until you awaken to the truth. The unconditional beyond conception, time, death, birth, or fabrication.

By appreciating, apprehending, somehow glimpsing at Nibbana the truth is laid bare. You finally understand that all actions (verbal, bodily, mental) have consequences. And all you can do is act in this world. This makes this moment so important to develop skilful and wholesome activity, but also as a safe harbour. Your past brought you here. Your present takes you to a new future. Everything can change. Nothing about you or your experience is essential. Trying to lay claim to some part of experience causes suffering. Trying to cling to pleasures that will fade is futile. Resisting pain or change causes the dukkha. The beliefs and ideas about what is good or bad were all rooted in a realm of things that do not appear as they truly are, and are things that will eventually fade, are unreliable, uncertain, and bound to decay. Resting your happiness on this realm is sure to bring dukkha for these reasons. This is the liberating truth you realise in this glimpse of the truth laid bare.

You realise: the energy you have been using to maintain certain habits has been too high relative to the rewards. Happiness only comes in trickles and only when the time is right. Like Goldilocks you have a pre-conceived notion of what happiness should be. But it is an empty construct, and the construction of your happiness took a lot of time and energy. A burden you carried hoping it would pay off. But, the biggest payoff, you realise, is in letting go of all of this acquired nonsense. Your private internal world was a fantasy you made up, a private fiction. But everything was written to impress the author. The whole story was planned out already, except the parts that took the author by surprise, so he retrofitted a story to make sense of it -- but that hurt...

The whole enterprise was doomed from the start in many ways but we didn't know because we had no incentive to look. But now we've looked because we saw something deeper, something mysterious behind the constant stream of stories about what makes me happy or not. We've only wanted happiness and peace. But we got dukkha and commotion instead. The incentive stayed the same. We simply refined it through our skilful and wholesome actions to reach a happiness beyond conditions, beyond ageing, sickness, grief, lamentation, despair, wanton lust, and endless desire. We pulled back the veil and saw the truth laid bare. Free, without compromise.

You were trying to appreciate the gravity of death and what it means, it seems as if you already knew it. It's the end of something to cling to. Death is also just an idea that we have from our point of ignorance, which is inflated through our need to want something... However, there's something beyond death which isn't clung to or craved for. This is the truth laid bare.

We found happiness and peace.

Control Over Mind

We learn to stop being victims of conditioning, to knowing its full operation

Thus we learn to understand and liberate the unwholesome into the wholesome

We can control our conditioning, meaning we are not slaves or victims to its operation

Turning mistakes into opportunities

Turning ignorance into learning

Turning suffering into liberation

Then learning how to balance all the factors present

Vedana Are Triggers

Another way to think of feeling (vedana) is TRIGGERS

\- Pleasant

\- Neutral

\- Unpleasant

    ○ All feed into a certain mode of craving/thirst

    ○ Craving/thirst are the results of this trigger, like a spark in the mind

    ○ Clinging is the fire being burned after that spark, now we're thinking about the thing that's pleasant/neutral/unpleasant, now we have a narrative saying something about that thing and what we're gonna do about it

    ○ Existence is the fire taking over, now the mind is fully submerged in that mode of being, we're existing a certain way

    ○ Birth is the action taking place

    ○ Death is the action ceasing

    ○ Dukkha is the dissatisfaction-stress we feel after the thing is gone

Teach Me Impermanence

​​​​​​​A man and I are in the desert. We have sticks in our hands. He says, "I'll show you what impermanence is. Try to draw a circle around the line as I'm drawing it in the sand." He goes on, and I can't do it, he's too fast. By the time I've drawn a circle, the line is already a metre ahead. He says, "I'll slow it down". He slows down drawing the line to a snail's pace, and I now try to draw the circle. Our sticks collide. "It's impossible to do," he says, "... And that's impermanence."

The Nobility of Anatta

Once we see anatta, we see that there is no essence to our being or to the being of any fabrications we may have.

Our mind used so much energy clinging and craving to an imagined essence of things

Once we see that this energy can be used to fabricate more wholesome activity, we drop the unskilful fabrication for the skilful. We can then abide more peacefully knowing that we are creating our reality and being in harmony with that creation so that conditions for dukkha are melted away. We simply let go of all this energy and effort to sustain a wrong perception. We let go of disharmonious fabrications and start fabricating in conformity with a happiness beyond conditions, beyond conception, beyond fabrications.

Enlightenment as a Skill of Energy Preservation

Craving sucks because it takes up a lot of energy. Think of it this way, if this moment is unsatisfying, then you're on the prowl for something better. If not in the formed world, then in the formless world of mental chatter and imagination. That's stressful. That's dukkha. It actually takes so much energy to do this. While peace takes no energy.

This is supported by our insights into no-self and impermanence. All these sensations aren't yours or owned by you, yet you invest a lot of energy into them. And they constantly need to be refreshed by investing more. It's a vicious cycle. And it's really stressful actually. So we see that everything changes, yet we invest so much into resisting it. We see that we can't own experiences, yet we invest so much into trying to keep things. It's all very burdensome. Another way of thinking about no-self and impermanence here is that we're constantly creating (fabricating) our reality through thoughts, actions, and speech. So instead of doing stuff informed by craving, we do it instead with wisdom. And the constant fabrication becomes light and easy because it is in tune with the causes and conditions of true, lasting, and carefree satisfaction. It's the realisation that we're always cooking up our reality. It's just now we can be much more judicial with ingredients that we are using. Another way of saying it is that we're always investing with the hope of some payoff with a degree of risk involved. Now we've changed our investment strategy from seeking a long-term payoff to an immediate repeatable dividend that keeps compounding itself.

This is why the Buddha's path is meant to be easy in the beginning, middle, and end. You're not smashing the breaks and tearing apart your reality. You're taking your foot off the accelerator because you realise it is unnecessary. You're dropping the weight you were saddling yourself with, which was the entire chain of dependent arising.

Digha Nikaya at DN-28:10, the “Modes of Progress”. There were four modes of progress:

1. Painful meditation with slow comprehension is Poor Progress.

2. Painful meditation with quick comprehension is Poor Progress.

3. Pleasant meditation with slow comprehension is Poor Progress.

4. Pleasant meditation with quick comprehension is considered excellent Progress

Why is this the case? Because we're dropping unnecessary things for our happiness! That craving you have is like a heavy bag you're carrying. While Nibbana is like a shadow that follows you without you needing to do anything.

This subreddit has a very high bar for participation in the topline posts and the comments to the topline posts. All topline posts have to be written with high effort and absolutely must come from direct experience.

The topline posts have two broad objectives:

1. Share knowledge gained personally in the pursuit of Awakening
2. Seek inputs on practice with practice history, goals, and problems faced. Lots of detail is expected

All comments to those topline posts, in turn, have to come from direct experience or from the desire to gain direct experience. The purpose of comments is to add value to the topline posts, either by supplementing the material shared or by answering the questions asked.
Basically a high effort, practice focused space.

This thread is an exception.

Its to create a platform for members to interact outside of the high bar of effort and practice focus. Feel free to use this thread to share links, express opinions, share details of your practice, seek help, showcase scholarship, engage in scholarly discussions and debates. But please keep it civil and within the bounds of Rediquette. On topic interactions are encouraged. Off topic interactions are also permitted

A new discussion thread will be created and pinned as and when this one gets too clunky. Maybe a week, or a month, or an year later.

Introduction

This post has been written as a ready reckoner for a couple of my students. They are experienced yogis with a background in TMI and by TMI standards they would be considered 'adepts'. Thus this post does not cover many of the concepts and exercises that might be needed in order to support a yogi who is new to meditation. This post in some form or fashion will find its way into my book 'The Awakening Project' which I am writing chapter by chapter on r/arhatship. First chapter accessible here. All of the topics that I cover in this post emerge from my deep engagement with a system of practice called MIDL or Mindfulness in Daily Life. It is perhaps the most brilliantly designed wisdom practice system that I know of, and the one system that I have deeply engaged with for the purpose of cultivating Vipashyana Bhavana. I do not represent MIDL nor do I have any authorization from the creator and teacher of MIDL. If you wish to engage with MIDL, you can find it at midlmeditation.com with a new but growing community at r/midlmeditation. Everything that I have written here I have written it on the basis of my own understanding and inner authority emerging from my practice and my own attainments.

A note on the quality of Anatma

Anatma is one of the two marks of existence - Anitya and Anatma. And ignorance of Anitya and Anatma leads to the emergent experience of Dukkha. When the ignorance of the two marks of existence is eliminated, then Dukkha is no longer experienced in any of its forms or presentations. This is the broad overall arch of awakening practice. Typically all yogis have a sensitivity towards impermanence. In vipashyana practice the quality of impermanence becomes very apparent and the yogi moves on to the quality of shunyata (emptiness) or the constructed nature of experience and then towards the quality of unreliability (anitya) and then towards the quality of Dukkha or suffering. This is the progression one sees in systems like the Mahasi method. Once Dukkha becomes very very apparent the only way out is to resolve the friction by looking at the various mental postures that lead to Dukkha and letting go of them in order to them fully apprehend the quality of Anatma.

Anatma for some very rare people might be very noticeable up front but .. well I suppose its very rare. If I were to step out and grab a stranger on the road and query them on whether they know that all things change - the person might enthusiastically agree. But if I were to ask them, do you know that you don't really exist - not in the way that you believe you do, do you know that your memory, your ability to think, your ability to talk, your ability to walk ... isn't really 'yours' .. not in the way you believe it to be. It is likely that the person will probably look at me as if I were nuts. And if at all they do decide to humor me it would be in the form of a thought experiment. It wouldn't be based on direct subjective experience.

Vipashyana geared towards the quality of Anatma is designed to generate that direct personal subjective experience. You don't need to listen to any talk, read a book, or a reddit post, or 'follow' someone, or 'follow' some silly made up code of conduct. Do the exercises, sets and reps, day in and day out and knowledge, wisdom, transformation naturally emerges. The realization of anatma, the deep transformative insight into anatma does not result from accepting and embracing any heuristic blindly as an end in itself. The heuristic may incline one towards investigating and therefore discovering anatma in one's direct personal subjective experience. Transmissions don't help, authorizations don't help, obscure manuscripts in Magadhi Prakrit language in sinhalese script ... don't help. Its patient repetition of the sets and reps while maintaining a deep curiosity and engagement with those sets and reps, to approach these very same exercises over and over with a fresh set of eyes ... that is the only thing that works. So on that note, here are the exercises you can try and see if they work for you.

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The Grounding Object

Exercise 1.1 - Set up a gross grounding object

1. Take your posture either seated or lying down on your back
2. Your posture is decided by your physical constraints primarily and secondarily by temporary mental qualities - excessively dull - sit up straight, excessively energetic, restless - lie down
3. Slowly parse through each sense door simply noticing that it exists. spend a couple of minutes on each sense door familiarizing yourself with the sense door and maybe tracking a couple of objects within that sense door.
4. Take 4 to 5 slow deep abdominal breaths and make the outbreath long and thin. Piggy back on the relaxation of the diaphragm slowly relaxing all major muscles. Try to particularly relax your forehead, your eyelids, your jaws, your paws, your thighs. Typically our body has markers of 'doing'. Let go of the 'doing' in the body
5. Place your attention on the aggregate sense of heaviness in the body
6. Include the sense of temperature
7. Include the sense of touch of wherever the body touches the chair or the floor
8. The sense of heaviness, temperature and touch is now a gross / very large grounding object

Exercise 1.2 - Set up a subtle grounding object

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1. Do steps #1 to #4 from exercise 1.1
2. Place one hand in the other if seated and rest your attention on the touch of the hands
3. If lying down, rest your attention on the touch of one of the hands on the floor or the yoga mat
4. This limited sense of touch is the subtle grounding object

Exercise 1.3 - Set up a dynamic grounding object

1. Do steps #1 to #4 from exercise 1.1
2. Choose 3 to 4 touch points - buttocks on the floor, ankles on the floor, touch of the lips, touch of the hands etc
3. Cycle between the touch points in a set repetitive pattern. If too repetitive intentionally change the pattern. Add to this. Listen to 3 sounds, pay attention to 3 thoughts, come back to your touch point pattern - rinse, repeat
4. This planned, deliberate, intentionally chosen movement of attention is your dynamic grounding object

Exercise 1.4 - Set up awareness itself as the grounding object

1. Do steps #1 to #4 from exercise 1.1
2. Become aware of your left foot, can you be aware of the awareness of the foot
3. Switch to your right foot, can you be aware of the awareness of the right foot
4. Alternate between taking your left foot and your right foot as the object of awareness, can you be aware of the awareness that is alternating between the objects
5. Become aware of your left foot, include your lower left leg, exclude your lower left leg, rinse repeat can you be aware of the awareness that includes and excludes parts of an 'object'
6. Become aware of your left foot, include your lower left leg, include your entire left leg, include the entire left side of your body, sequentially reduce the size of the object till you go back to your left foot as the object, take only the toes as the object, take the big toe as the object, take the very tip of the toe as the object, in one step include the entirety of the left side of your body, can you be aware of the awareness that expands and contracts to include and exclude experience within the object
7. In these exercises where you are setting up contrasting objects or expanding and contracting the scope of the object of awareness, it is the way in which awareness works, its flexibility that becomes the entry point into approaching awareness itself as an object. Do these exercises very very slowly. Often simply returning to the breath to take a break. Through simple repetition, you will find what the exercise is designed to point you towards
8. once you 'find' awareness, rest with awareness as the object of awareness

Note:

Stay aware of awareness, be mindful of mindfulness, pay attention to attention itself, be sensitive to sensitivity, observe observation .... in concept and in writing this is so annoyingly recursive that it seems Fucking Diabolically tricky to even understand let alone do. In all vipashyana exercises concepts and language has to be used to prime the mind to gain direct experience, but beyond a point concept and language get in the way. This particular exercise for some people may be ridiculously easy to do and for others it may be neigh near impossible ... at first ... but through repetition the conceptual mind will let go of its grip on the exercise and direct knowledge and emergent wisdom will appear. Some times in a flash and sometimes in the form of a grainy picture that gets sharper and sharper as the repetition continues.

This repetition can be drudgery but that drudgery can be countered with an attitude of chhanda - a passionate hobby. Imagine a bank clerk in Mumbai sitting in a cashier's cage counting currency notes the whole day handing them out to a steady line of people that never ceases. Going home and sitting at a keyboard, slowly and methodically learning from sheet-music occasionally improvising here and there. This clerk has no strong sense of greed or ambition for wanting to be a world renowned musician, he does it simply for the sheer joy of learning and practicing a skill he enjoys. Same goes for a clerk in a patent office somewhere in Austria with a penchant for thought experiments. This is chhanda at its finest.

Vipashyana

Exercise 2.1 - Grounding in Anatma

1. Set up your preferred grounding object
2. Notice that maintaining a grounding object takes some effort
3. Taking slow deep abdominal breaths with the out breath long and thin, relax your brow, relax your eyelids, withdraw the effort needed to maintain the grounding object
4. The structure of awareness that you have set up will collapse
5. Every time that happens, notice it, appreciate it, hold the realization that the structure collapses in short term working memory - you can say 'collapsed' ... 'collapsed'
6. Slowly recreate your grounding object and withdraw the energy needed to maintain it
7. The structure collapses and attention moves - 'collapsed' .. 'moved'
8. The structure collapses and attention moves to a sense door - 'collapsed' ... 'moved' ... 'sense door of sound'
9. The structure collapses and attention moves to a sense door and takes another object - 'collapsed' ... 'moved' ... 'sense door of the mind' .... 'thought'
10. The structure collapses and attention moves to a sense door and takes an object which has a life cycle - 'collapsed' ... 'moved' ... sense door of body' .... 'itch on the ass' ... 'begins, fluctuates and ends' ... 'temperature' ... 'fire element' .... etc. etc.
11. From step#5 to step no #10 lies vipashyana geared towards the quality of anatma
12. Keep simply returning to the grounding object as many times as you need, whenever you need

Notes: Shunyata, Anitya, Dukkha are very easy to notice for most people, but this shit! ... is tricky! ... very tricky! But also very rewarding. Patient peaceful repetition, sets and reps, wax on - wax off, wax on - wax off .. is the way to go.

Exercise 2.1 - Sense door of the body - body parts

1. Forget about Anatma
2. Send awareness out, wield it like a tool and scan your body from top to bottom and back -looking for skin on the downward pass, flesh on the upward pass, bones on the downward pass
3. Remember what it means like to have body sensations that originate in skin, flesh, bones
4. Create and ground yourself in the grounding object
5. Define the scope of interest to be the body
6. As the grounding object collapses do vipashyana oriented towards anatma on body parts
7. Notice collapse, attention moves, object, skin/flesh/bones, track the lifecycle

Exercise 2.2 - Sense door of the body - elements

1. Send awareness out, wield it like a tool and scan your body from top to bottom and back looking for the elemental qualities. Earth - hardness vs softness and the spectrum in between, Water - wetness vs dryness and the spectrum in between, Air - steadiness vs motion and the spectrum in between, Fire - warm vs cool and the spectrum in between, Void - Clear and strong vs absent and the spectrum in between
2. Remember what it means like to experience the elemental qualities of Earth, Water, Air, Fire, Void
3. Create and ground yourself in the grounding object
4. Define the scope of interest to be the body
5. As the grounding object collapses do vipashyana oriented towards anatma on body parts
6. Notice collapse, attention moves, object, Earth/Water/Air/Fire/Void, track the life cycle

Exercise 2.3 - Sense door of the mind - Thoughts, emotions, mental states

1. Send awareness out, wield it like a tool, parse through thoughts and classify them in various categorization schema. Visual/auditory/meaning based; past/present/future/fantasy; self/other/world/fantasy; random/habitual/carrying emotional charge/narration
2. Do the vipashyana exercise geared towards anatma
3. Send awareness .... yada yada yada ... parse through mental states .... yada yada yada .... yada yada yada ........
4. Do the vipashyana exercise geared towards anatma

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Hope this helps somebody working towards developing sensitivity to the quality of Anatma. All comments and questions emerging from direct experience and/or the ambition to gain direct experience are welcome. Others ... not so much :) :)

This is a post about discussing the concrete effects of general meditative development or more specific attainments. This is not a place to discuss doctrinal differences about what term or title means what, but a very direct sharing of how experience changes with awakening.

Important: descriptions of the fruits of the path do not translate to good practice advice. If you read about someone attaining something you'd like to attain as well, make a separate post about it or DM the person. Do not translate any described effects into hints of how you should conduct yourself or practice! You might however derive motivation from reading the descriptions, which is wonderful and can be very valuable.

The structure should be that 1st level comments ask a question, best put in the form of a very concrete situation, with very precise definitions of what is asked and people can respond to that with their personal(!) experience, which should also be very precise and are best kept at a very concrete phenomenological level. Try to use little or no spiritual or technical language, or define every term in a way the average person would understand. Other people can then respond with clarifying questions. For top readabilty, instead of creating a thread of back and forth, clarify the original post with an edit, if reasonable.

An example of a bad 1st level comment:

What is your experience of emotions?

Way too general to answer in one comment

What is your experience of sadness?

Better, but no definition of what you are asking about. An example of a good question would be

Your best friend dies, what does your reaction look like, will it create emotional sensations in your body, will you cry? What are other differences have you noticed in this area as a result of your progression on the path?

A good answer, in turn, includes the asked for details, possible refinement, suggestions for the question, and ideally a time horizon how long this has held up so far. If you had an amazing experience yesterday and now have some cool effects, in most cases that will change or wear off. The traditional suggestions I've heard is to wait a year or ten to see whether something is actually a baseline shift, but of course everything that holds up over more than a few weeks is interesting.

An example of a bad answer:

I don't feel any sadness since the kundalini rose past the throat chakra shortly after streamentry.

No reference to the details of the question, no tangible time horizon, spiritual terminology that could lead to confusion because of differing definitions. An example for a good answer would be

I haven't had extreme circumstances like that yet, the last significant shift that had an effect on my emotional life was 7 months ago, but my experience of most sadness inducing events includes me reacting appropriately to the situation according to my ability without causing any irrational damage. There are still emotional sensations in such situations, but they are clearly experienced instead of pushed away and there is only minimal mental commentary on the situation, I cry more easily now, but it isn't a negative experience anymore.

A lot of weight is placed on dependent origination as a means to ending suffering. It is said that seeing dependent origination is seeing the Dhamma and vice versa. I think this is true, and so it benefits us to practice seeing, understanding, and working with dependent origination as much as we can, and as best we can. With that all in mind, I'd like to start with the most practical aspects of the dependent origination links, the ones we can immediately start working with, even as novices, in daily life and in our formal meditation. I realise that in the 12 links of D.O. these are strictly not the middle ones, but they're the middle ones from the phenomenological point of view, they're the obvious ones that are happening right now, but not as quick as formations. Not as slow as becoming. If we're working with earlier links, we need a very very steady mind. If we're working with later links, we're too slow to catch the dukkha at a practical time when it's easiest to end it.

The middle links are:

• Feeling: the feeling tones of sense contact. There are three feeling tones from sensory contact: Pleasant, Unpleasant, Neutral. As soon as one of the six senses are in contact with the relevant sense media, a feeling is there. Immediate and direct. We can think of sense contact and feeling as almost simultaneously occurring. They're right there in unison.
• Craving: the feeling we get with respect to the feeling. We want more, we want less, or we ignore. This happens as soon as the feeling is recognised. It is an urge. A pre-verbal feeling of something. Like an itch in the mind. Something has pulled the mind into its gravitational field. There's a hankering. There's a decision to act, but we don't know why yet. The urge hasn't been verbalised, but there is a distinct feeling, like you've dropped a colour dye into clear water. Something is changing and beginning to get tained.
• Clinging: the story we tell about how/why we want to get the thing, get rid of the thing, or ignore the thing. Once the urge is processed, the mind starts talking. This is the narrative we have with regard to things. This may be views, obsessions, ideas, etc., about the object in question. This is our opinion of something. Now it's not just the case of wanting or trying to get rid of something; there's a whole backstory being played out of why we should act this way, how we should act, etc... "Things have to be this or that way because of x y z reasons..." or "So-and-so is chewing so loud, they should respect me more!" or "I'm going to eat this triple mega cheeseburger because I deserve it for all the work I've done!" or "That driver who beeped me is such an inconsiderate ass!" Make no mistake though, if there's clinging, it's basically a justification for our suffering, based on craving which is based on feeling tones.

How to work the middle links?

Regarding the feeling tones of sense contact. We work by first getting a sensory base and honing into it. This may be the body, eyes, tongue, ears, nose, or mind. They each have their own way of creating feelings. Pleasant taste? Unpleasant body contact? Neutral smell? Pleasant thought? The possibilities are endless. But as we start to see the feelings we can learn to see how they condition the next steps in the causal chain of D.O. In daily life, we can simply notice how feelings work and arise from sense contact. Simple as. In our formal meditation, we can learn to relax feelings in two ways. In the Samatha way, we take Nibbana as our object of meditation, by focusing on release, relaxation, and calming of the feeling tones. This soothes feelings as being a relevant conditioner for other links of D.O. and leads one away from identification with feelings. True happiness lies beyond feeling tones of sensory contact. The other is the Discernment way, we understand that feelings are an unreliable source of true happiness. We can notice how the mind jolts around looking for a certain feeling tone, which speaks to how unreliable feeling tones really are for producing true happiness. In training this discernment, we learn to cleave the mind's identification away from feeling and to true happiness. The end result of either way is the same. The method or starting point only differs. Each has its own benefit and drawback. See which you are inclined to. This is a fairly advanced practice in either the discernment or Samatha way, but it is very doable even for a novice, and one can get regular glimpses in order to cultivate the routine skill.

Craving is an interesting and very rewarding basis of practice. After the mind has processed feeling, it gives rise to an urge, or to an inclination of what the mind will do with that feeling. To work with craving is to get familiar with the energy flows and currents in the body. Where is the energy pulling or pushing? Where is the energy seemingly missing? Can we recognise the energy moving and perhaps breathe in a way that relaxes or redirects it? A simple practice is noticing the energy in the body when we feel like we really want something. Notice how the energy in the body changes as we approach the thing we want. Where does it start and where does it end? If it is a tangible thing, feel the energy when you reach your hand out to get it. If it's food, notice how the energy works as you're handling the food to your mouth. How does the energy resolve itself when you encounter the object of craving? The energies here are very interesting because we can learn to soothe them in a similar way to the feelings. We can notice that the energies of wanting more or wanting less are like a crude form of excitement or arousal? Can we rely on these energies for guiding us toward true happiness? We've been talking about energy for craving, energy takes time and work. Craving is an activity and relaxing it takes off the burden of all this work, so we can lighten our load immediately by choosing to not indulge the craving energies in our body, eventually they melt away.

Clinging is most likely the easiest place to start if wishing to get familiar with the links of dependent origination. But it may also be the slipperiest to get a handle on and work with, because we are quite used to being our voice in the mind that narrates things, the reasoning for this or that, and generally talking ourselves into or out of association with certain things. The good news is that because we are not these thoughts, we have a very simple way to start de-conditioning the clinging aspect of dependent origination. As we recognise habitual thoughts regarding certain aspects of our experience, we can see them, and immediately start re-writing those thoughts in our mind. If we can catch ourselves in self-talk about a thing, we can halt that, and talk in a more wholesome way, informed by wisdom and not by ignorance. It sounds simple, but it is actually quite tricky especially for novices. There is a distinct payoff regarding this practice due to this, it is the easiest to work with, but sometimes can be the hardest to recognise. Once we do catch it though, the remedy is easy to put into action, and it is unbelievably non-esoteric and down to earth of practice as you can get. Just catch the unwholesome self-talk-narrative, and start talking wholesomely informed by your best view of wise thought at the time. One other thing, sometimes the thoughts we have are very ingrained, or perhaps super quick, so quick that we cannot catch them despite us thinking that they should be there. An example is pain, if we're feeling strong continuous pain, we may be focused on the feeling and craving and less on the clinging aspect. In this case, it is actually beneficial for us to give voice to the thoughts, and learn to work that way. It is the same with anxiety, we may be so focused on the worry that we cannot catch the thoughts because we're caught up in the unpleasantness of the frantic energy swirling around in our body.

The most important part of each of these elements is to have fun exploring them. Have fun catching them and playing with them like toys. A big part of learning disenchantment with sensual pleasure is playing around with the facets of our experiential reality until we see through it as a source of true happiness -- but that doesn't mean we can't be happy while doing so! The goal of each part is to find a more refined happiness and peace away from the noise and confusion of mind acting out of ignorance. So let that be your guide... If I can recondition the relationship I have to this element of my experience, can I find a new way to be happier?

The benefit of starting with the middle links is that you are already implicitly training to recognise the other earlier and later links of dependent origination. By working on simply one link, you are breaking the chain of ignorance, as all links arise together, and fall together. You are also learning multiple strategies for dealing with each of the links. Lastly, as these links are the easiest to spot in daily life, after we are familiar with them we actually can start de-conditioning them as they arise in daily life, leading to more positive morality and harmony with others.

Have fun and enjoy your practice

Previous Chapter

About the Awakening Project

The Awakening Project is deeply informed by my practice which in turn is deeply informed by the work of Stephen Procter (midlmeditation.com), Siddharth Gautam, and their guidance and direction on achieving freedom from suffering. It is also deeply informed by a brilliant teacher of Asanga's Elephant Path - one who cannot, should not, must not be named, lest ignominy falls upon The Awakening Project! No ..No ..No ... we cannot have that happening! Absolutely not ... how can we? even though the man is dead and gone!

Unlike any religion, tradition, sect that has emerged from Siddharth Gautam's teachings, The Awakening Project stays true and consistent with experientially understanding what suffering is, understanding where it comes from and completely taking it apart, demolishing it, vanquishing it, becoming free of it. All strange socio cultural fluff like mala beads, golden statues, incense sticks, pali pushing, sutta peddling is dropped completely in The Awakening Project. The author - me - is a middle aged Indian dude and has absolutely no hostility towards incense sticks or to prostrations, in fact the author is known to light a couple of incense sticks now and then and walk around saying namaste to people at social occasions. But such things are recognized as completely incidental to the project. A complete waste of time and mental bandwidth as far as the objective of awakening is concerned. The author uses Sanskrit, Magadhi Prakrit (mistakenly called Pali) freely as languages just like C, C#, Pascal, Fortran. Language is needed to communicate. The message is important, the language is a medium.

Many people on encountering suffering go looking for one more idol, one more ideal, one more in-group, one more identity, one more self soothing story, one more highly conceptual superstition based religion, one more way of worshipping, one more cultural artefact that they can bow or prostrate or genuflect in front of, one more set of concepts that they can gain academic scholarship on ...... The Awakening Project does not concern itself with any of that!

The fundamental principle of The Awakening Project can be encapsulated perfectly in the following way:

1. Gain calmness, collectedness, observational skills through cultivating them in meditation
2. Guard those skills by watching your attitudes, thoughts, speech and behavior in daily life thereby understanding your mind as it interacts with the world
3. Use the skills thus cultivated and guarded in order to investigate the mind using well crafted time tested rubrics that act as a vector for investigation, designed to uncover the mechanisms that cause suffering

The natural progression of awakening goes through certain stages that are in synch with the order of the ten fetters from the previous chapter. On overcoming the first three fetters one achieves the stage of Awakening called Shrotapanna, on overcoming the 4th and 5th fetter one achieves a stage of Awakening called Anagami. On the way to Anagami, these fetters and the way they manifest are understood thus through intentionality and self observation their expression can be consistently interrupted. Thus these fetters are significantly weaker. This stage prior to Anagami is called Sakrdagami. On overcoming the last 5 fetters one reaches a stage called Arhat. At this stage all latent tendencies that color the working of the mind and cause cognitive friction or dukkha are completely eliminated. For ever!

This skill development, this application of those skills, these results are perfectly do-able. This requires a certain level of interest, some degree of willingness to accept the concept of freedom from suffering and applying one's self consistently, diligently, energetically, in a very very structured and street smart way. Some degree of co-operation from life and circumstances like physical and mental health are required. How much time, how much energy, how much consistence, how much diligence will be required for any individual is not known. It is variable. But one would never know it unless one applies themselves. The broad timeline ranges from 7 days to 7 lifetimes. This is a very large variance. Thus there is an element of raw talent which is undeniable but we don't get to choose how much talent we have. Try as I might I cannot run the 4 minute mile, but that doesn't stop me from getting off my couch and walking for half an hour around the block.

The structure of The Awakening Project

The Awakening Project is loosely structured like the Smriti Upasthana Sutra (Satipatthana Sutta in Magadhi Prakrit). To develop the skills needed to establish mindfulness and then apply it towards the 4 foundations or domains of experience.

1. Body (5 senses)
2. Mind (the 6th sense)
3. Vedana (emotional valence associated with the 2 prior foundations)
4. Operating Principles that describe behavior between the 3 foundations

In order to actualize this we use a few well crafted rubrics and exercises designed around those rubrics

1. Cultivation of mental faculties listed in the 7 factors of awakening, plus some other crucial skills. Collectively - for the sake of convenience I will call this shamatha bhavana. These factors and associated skills have to be kept going through out the entirety of the project. These skills aren't permanent and deteriorate with disuse and are also affected by accruing insights which can be unsettling. Thus this is a set of exercises that continue in parallel to investigation through out the duration of the project
2. The rubric of the six sense doors to attain Shrotapanna
3. The rubric of Pratitya Samutpad or dependent origination to attain Anagami (and Sakrdagami on the way)
4. The rubric of the Pancha Skandha or 5 aggregates to attain Arhat.

From #s 2,3,4 the exercises collectively will be called vipashyana bhavana in this book

Structuring a daily meditation practice

In the beginning simply pick up shamatha bhavana as your daily practice and start practicing. Use the exercises in that section to start developing observational skills and start structuring your day, week, month in such a way as to support a consistent daily meditation practice. Begin modestly with 20 minutes per day. Increase this over a period of a couple of weeks to 20 minutes two times a day. Both sessions at different times or with a single small break in between, doesn't matter. Eventually move on to developing a rhythm of practice that contains at least one session of a minimum of 45 minutes or more if you can manage it. Do multiple sessions if you can manage it. Once you have established a consistent daily practice, one weekend every month, manage your life so that you have two days - Saturday and Sunday for eg - completely free and meditate for 6 to 8 hours each day

In parallel to formal practice - use some well crafted instructions to carry those skills into daily life. Initially this transition will be difficult to achieve but persistent application of the techniques will make them easier to do and then daily life becomes a part and parcel of formal practice

Within the first few weeks when a basic daily consistency is developed start to alternate 4 shamatha bhavana sessions with one vipashyana bhavana session. It is advisable to begin with the six sense doors and to stick to that rubric until the attainment of Shrotapanna. So you are consistently alternating between a shamatha practice and a vipashyana practice in a 80% - 20% mix.

Along the way if life cooperates and you are able to reach a daily consistent practice of 2 hours, at that point shift the mix of shamatha - vipashyana to 50% - 50%. Soon you will realize that the distinction drawn between shamatha bhavana and vipashyana bhavana is actually contrived and a mere convenience to direct intentionality in practice and the two practices will merge.

What is awakening

For the purpose of this book, this term has only one meaning. To understand what Dukkha is, to understand how the mind constructs Dukkha and to teach it to stop doing it. The definition of Dukkha and the ten fetter model in the previous chapter is the basic blue print of understanding the purpose of this project - the problem statement so to speak. It is also the blueprint for planning, executing and measuring progress in this project on a meta level. But this project can be described using some additional conceptual models that may be of use.

Awakening is a change in relationship

Imagine a small child eating an ice-cream cone. Thoroughly enjoying it. Imagine the dollop of ice-cream slowly sliding off the cone and landing squarely on the dusty pavement. Getting dirty, melting away. The child will experience tremendous disappointment and probably will start crying. Now we can walk up to the child and console him and perhaps buy him one more ice-cream cone. As parents, guardians of children this is what we do. But now imagine walking up to the kid and telling him that the negative mental states of disappointment, distress, loss that he is feeling comes not from the event itself but from how the kid has related to the event. Beginning with how the kid related to the ice-cream cone believing it to be a reliable source of pleasure, believing his joy at eating it to be permanent and unassailable and his to keep. Laying a claim of ownership on the ice-cream cone, the joy that it gives him, secure in the knowledge that this situation cannot go south. Insist that the kid learns to change this way of relating to the ice-cream cone. Chances are the kid will start bawling even louder :). But that is what Awakening is all about. It is to grok at an experiential level that the way we relate to all of conscious experience is flawed. The inevitable conclusion of this flaw is to keep experiencing negative mental states, or afflictive emotions if you will. It is also to grok at an experiential level that the problem does not get solved by avoiding an ice-cream cone, swearing off it. It doesn't even get addressed in telling ourselves, talking to ourselves, doing positive thinking and cognitive re-framing of the ice-cream cone. In life, each and everything that makes up our conscious experience is that metaphorical ice-cream cone. Each and everything has the potential of going south.

Death, Old Age, Sickness ..... and Taxes lie in wait for us all! The tax man is particularly brutal! I mean ... what the fuck man! Slog your ass off to have 20% of your earnings taken away! But in a more ordinary sense - disappointments ... of some sort or the other from some aspect of our lives or the other .. are imminent and keep coming our way - again and again and again ... and again. These disappointments cannot be avoided as long as we relate to our lives and the experience of being alive with a claim of ownership and a belief of reliability. As long as our relationship with 'stuff' remains the same we are bound to the experience of disappointment and afflictive emotions. This dysfunctional way of relating to the world is 'samsara'. The cycle of life after life after life .... full of disappointments! A far more functional way of relating to the world is to relax and eventually withdraw the claim of ownership, fully accept the unreliability of things. At which point we experience what is traditionally called 'Tathata' in Sanskrit or suchness in English. A full acceptance of life and how it presents itself to us, a full acceptance of how our minds create the experience of our lives. A permanent state of deep engagement with life drawing joy wherever you may find it, taking undesirable outcomes in your stride. A state of mind that is calm and collected, independent of the ups and downs of life.

Adyashanti in an article I had read describes the state of being awakened thus ... and I heavily paraphrase ... because I don't remember the source ... here:

Someday in the pursuit of awakening you will awaken. You will go for a stroll in a park nearby and a friendly stranger will ask you "Hey dude, how are you?" ... and you will answer ... "I am doing well, simply can't complain!", and on that day there will not be even an iota of untruth in your answer.

The world is what it is, what it has always been. Through The Awakening Project our relationship to it changes. For ever! This change in relationship is awakening. The movement away from Samsara to Tathata is awakening.

Awakening is to grok the nature of conscious experience - Anatma, Anitya

We firmly believe that we exist. A single continuously existing entity that was born on the date of birth stamped on our birth certificate and that will die on the date that is stamped .... well will be stamped ... on our death certificate. From the womb to the funeral pyre, the hero of the story.

Through engaging with awakening practices we realize that the sense of self that we carry - a homunculus in the head - pulling levers, exerting control, experiencing angst, jubilation, frustration, satisfaction - is really a construct of the mind. Impersonal mental processes coordinating with each other constantly creating the sense of an entity that is in control. The heroic victor, the defeated victim. The direct experience of this realization of impersonality, of the entirety of conscious experience, as it emerges in awakening practices is called Anatma in Sanskrit (or Not-Self).

We expect elements in our experience to behave a certain way. We expect good things to happen, bad things to not happen. Or vice versa. We believe our expectations are based on the control that we have. We have control over stuff that makes up our experience of being alive. Thus in our own minds, our expectations are real, justified, and are an accurate assessment of how the details of our lives will flow and how we will experience our lives. This expectation is not just an intellectual evaluation but it is an affective investment. We are affectively invested in the behavior of stuff, things, outcomes, goals, results. It doesn't matter what our intellectual assessment is, but what is salient is that we attach our heart to that assessment. The problem is we are not in control. It's not that there is no control its that there is no 'we'. Its not that there is no agency, its that there is no agent. We don't 'control' our perception, cognition, mental models, emotional reactions, cognitive impressions that color future cognition or consciousness itself. In the absence of control over our own cognitive faculties how can we exert control over stuff that we cognize, how can our expectations from our life, our year, our day, our next moment be true and accurate. The direct experience of this flawed expectation of reliability is called Anitya in Sanskrit (or Unreliability)

If a reader reading this were to completely embrace these concepts, it wont help! As long as we are experientially ignorant of Anatma and Anitya we will keep getting disappointed, keep experiencing cognitive friction, dissatisfaction, and keep experiencing afflictive emotions. This is Dukkha.

The Awakening Project gives us a direct experiential understanding of Anatma and Anitya - the impersonality and unreliability of conscious experience - thereby delivering us from Dukkha

Awakening is deaddiction from Vedana

Our experience of being alive can be explained as awareness or 'knowing' coming into contact (or Sparsh in Sanskrit or Phassa in Pali) with a continuous barrage of 'objects'. These objects can come to awareness through the 5 sense doors of sight, sound, touch, smell, taste and also through the 6th sense door of the mind in terms of thoughts, emotions, mental states, memories, fantasies, recall of the past, projection or planning for the future etc. Each one of these 'objects' can be simple objects like an itch on the elbow or complex objects like the experience of being called upon to give an extempore speech at work or school, or being caressed on the cheek, or slapped in the face. The mind through its learnt experiences tags each of these objects into positive, negative or neutral. This is akin to an electrical charge or valence. This is a sorting exercise that the mind does in order to make sense of the world and relies heavily on accumulated experience. This sorting tag against an object may change - for example the taste of beer, bitter as it is, is rarely considered pleasant by a kid who drinks it for the first time, but as time passes by the taste itself moves away from being sorted as unpleasant to pleasant ..... well .... in most cases.

In and by itself this is a fantastic function of the mind that permits us to navigate our world. We navigate the physical world in terms of avoiding touching a stove while cooking, seeking out the pleasant in terms of food and avoiding the unpleasant in terms of a rotten apple. We navigate the abstract world of societal structures, group hierarchies, professional relationships, familial bonds in terms of seeking out situations that are pleasant and avoiding entering into or creating situations that are unpleasant. This sorting function is an absolute necessity of survival.

The problem with vedana is that we are addicted to it. We are compelled towards positive vedana and away from negative vedana. This compulsion is a strong push that is oftentimes in direct contradiction to rational evaluation. When a smoker stops smoking, they may start snacking in order to get exposure to a substitute positive vedana. People stick earphones and listen to music on buses and trains because they need their daily dose of positive vedana. and they 'have' to avoid the negative vedana associated with doing nothing. We cannot be 'still' against vedana because of this addiction.

Meditative progress gives us freedom from the addiction and compulsion. This freedom permits choices to emerge from wisdom rather than from compulsion. One who is free of this addiction will never be compelled towards positive vedana or away from negative vedana. One will not cheat, lie, misrepresent in anyway compelled by the addiction to vedana ... and by the way that does not mean that one is incapable in any way of lying , cheating or misrepresenting. One will not have to overcome the compulsion of this addiction and suffer the consequences of cognitive friction the way a cigarette smoker has to, every time they try to quit.

Awakening is never again taking 'birth'

Ordinarily we have a clear distinct memory of who we are. We were born on such and such date, to such and such parents at such and such an address. This is the city we lived in, school we studied at, friends we made, this is the job that we do, and these are the hopes, dreams and aspirations that we have. In the context of The Awakening Project, 'birth' means something different, something far more subtle.

Imagine being in the arms of your beloved, hair tousled, light kisses, sweet nothings being whispered in your ear. Some serious amorous adventure is about to follow! Now imagine being in a minor car accident with the other driver jumping out of their car with a tire iron in their hand. Your death, mutilation or injury is imminent. In these two circumstances there are two different entities being born, in two different 'worlds'. The defining qualities of these two entities, the circumstances within which they find themselves, the emotions and mental states they experience, the cognitive resources available to them, the decision making abilities present .... are vastly different. These two entities are two vastly different people 'born' in two vastly different worlds. This is birth. Birth happens in a set pattern. An event, a situation, an interaction, a trigger is where it begins, from there strong pervasive cognitive patterns lead to the creation of an entity in response to the trigger. The process of conception, cell multiplication, embryo, baby ... the kicking and screaming ... all of it in our simile, is set off by Sparsh or contact carrying Vedana or valence.

The Awakening project involves understanding the process of the creation of this entity and stopping that process completely at vedana. The mind experiences Sparsh, recognizes vedana and then acts on the basis of rationality supported by experiential learning rather than this set pattern of being 'born' into a world and then acting in line with the conditions of that particular birth. In this sense Awakening involves the end of rebirth.

Awakening is gaining Knowledge wisdom and dispassion

Whether we posit the presence of latent tendencies or fetters or Sanyojanas as a way of explaining cognitive friction or we define the problem as an addiction to vedana, in either case there are cognitive mechanisms that lead from trigger to suffering. These mechanisms - 'we' don't power them, they are powered by passion that the mind has towards them. The mind sees these mechanisms as necessary for wellbeing and it does not see the consequences of powering them. These mechanisms have been in place and have been practiced over and over again throughout our lives until we have come to believe them to be a core part of who and what we are. The Awakening Project is all about building observational skills and applying them towards these mechanisms. To observe how they operate in direct experience, to see directly the consequences of these mechanisms. To observe that they are just one possible way in which the mind can work. This persistent observation leads to a knowledge of how stuff works in the mind to create Dukkha, it leads to a natural wisdom that is incorporated into the working of the mind as it deals with the contact or Sparsh provided by the world, it also leads to a dispassion towards these mechanisms. The culmination of this collection of knowledge, application of wisdom and building up of dispassion is that all of these mechanisms are slowly de-powered, till they fall silent and eventually simply die off.

Addressing some misunderstandings about awakening

Awakening is not about amazeballs experiences

The practices in The Awakening Project require cultivation of certain mental qualities and the gradual fading away of other problematic mental qualities. One of those qualities, to take an example, is a relaxed exclusivity of attention which is a workable translation of the word Samadhi. On the path to gaining Samadhi and maintaining it in formal practice as well as to some extent in daily life, the mind experiences a state which is totally unfamiliar. The hyper distracted mind upon being deprived, due to the practice, of ... well distractions ... starts to generate its own constructed distractions. Supernovas going off in the visual field, sometimes scary sometimes pleasurable tactile experiences are common. They are a part and parcel of the practice and in and by themselves they have no value .. at all. At best they can be considered a marker of deepening but not yet fully mature Samadhi. This happens in shamatha bhavana as well as vipashyana bhavana where in deep insights into the mind's workings may arise. But these deep insights are accompanied by these amazeballs experiences and if these experiences capture our fascination then the insights are ignored, a tremendous opportunity is lost.

Imagine a flat earther. Through their own efforts or through the efforts of concerned well wishers, they are miraculously transported to the International Space Station. Its super duper amazing. There's no gravity, its a novel experience, they get very excited. From the observation window they see the 3D spherical earth in its full majesty. Its 'earth shattering', dismay creating but also awe inspiring. This is the gaining of knowledge, facilitated by a shift in perception, accompanied by some extreme powerful and mind blowing states. If the hero of our story does nothing but somersaults in zero gravity yeeting himself from one end of the room to another and completely ignores the observational window, well ... OK.

Awakening is not about perceptual changes

Imagine now that our flat earther did in fact avail the opportunity to take a gander through the observation window. Well then they gained insight and the practice was successful. They are then dropped back into their routine mundane village, town or city. For a period of time they will feel super duper special. But what goes up must come down. All the specialness will drain out, there will be nothing special about being them. States come and they go, just like always. The vantage point of perception is back exactly where it was. But for ever and ever, till they die, they now know that the earth isn't flat. They have gained insight. Their everyday experience of life will keep presenting perceptions of the earth being flat. Nothing about those perceptions have changed! But they know! They have changed, their 'lineage' has changed. They have become truth enterers :).

This change in lineage will change behavior, they will be less likely to believe other silly things, less likely to engage in stupid conspiracy theories, more in alignment with their new lineage. They are not special, but their knowledge is rare. The attainment is extraordinary but the person is very very ordinary. Their life is very very ordinary and so is their perception. They don't see dragons sitting on rocking chairs smoking tobacco filled pipes when they look around their living rooms. They see ... their living room ... just like everybody else. But all of their preconceptual, preverbal, intellectual assumptions, their cognitive models, that play a role in how they process what they see, are now different. Therefore their affective state moves away from a low grade anxiety which may oftentimes increase, to a low grade relaxation response which may oftentimes deepen even more

Awakening is all about cognitive changes and affective changes that happen because of those cognitive changes. In the Awakening project we do perceptual exercises. We train ourselves to be aware of our left butt-cheeks and to be aware from our left butt-cheeks. We train ourselves to see characteristics of experiential objects rather than the objects themselves.

To take an example - we train ourselves to be exclusively attentive to the mosquito buzzing around our ears - thereby deconstructing the knowledge of this mosquito into the fact that there is really a perturbation in awareness from which emerges a recognition that it came through the sense door of hearing, from which emerges a recognition that it is a sound, a sound carrying pitch, tone, volume, from which emerges the classification into the sound of a mosquito from which emerges an image of a mosquito from which emerges the conceptual understanding of a motherfucking blood sucker victimizing us by sucking our blood!!! This is what we train perception to do thereby recognizing the constructed nature of this limited experience and thereby realizing the constructed nature of ALL experience - resulting in permanent cognitive changes - resulting in permanent affective changes. The perceptual changes ... are .. not ... permanent.

Awakening is not about becoming 'moral' or 'ethical'

Dukkha does not exist because sometimes we are mean to people. We are mean to people because of Dukkha as one of the potential causes of said meanness. Dukkha leads to dis-functional irrational behavior which sometimes breaks social norms. The source of Dukkha, its root cause has nothing to do with consensus morality or commonly accepted codes of ethical conduct. Morality is a social construct. We are a part of society, if we violate these social constructs we will experience consequences that carry negative vedana. To have a booming successful business - carries positive vedana. To have your business 'cancelled' because you called some placard carrying vegan chick with an agenda and an attitude a snowflake on twitter or reddit - carries negative vedana. Don't do stupid shit. Don't be a dick - as an end in itself this is a fantastic goal. While practicing 'not being a dick' please remember that its connection to the Awakening Project is very very tenuous and tangential.

The social norms that exist are applicable to everybody including the ones who are awakened. There is nothing special or sacrosanct about these norms. They are an imposition to keep people in line so that society functions smoothly delivering mostly positive societal outcomes through the peace and order that these norms create. Some of these norms get codified into law particularly when they are deemed crucial to general peace. And some of these norms are straight up perverted! Ages ago abortion would be considered immoral, then for some time it wasn't, now I understand that there are places on this planet where a woman getting an abortion out of choice would be considered a crime! It comes with a jail sentence! The law is an ass! So is a consensus based morality!

But as a member of society we the awakened or the one's engaged in awakening practices have to take cognizance of boundaries and constraints on behavior. Don't cuckold your neighbor! He may come after you to bash you on the head with a baseball bat as you sit under a bodhi tree meditating on formless realms. Then where will you be? If that doesn't happen the fear of such a consequence will prevent optimal practice. If not fear then some strange guilt, regret, remorse will torture the mind and prevent any kind of Bhavana. So ... don't cuckold your neighbor! In order to be plainly street smart and guard your mind from the negative consequences of your actions you don't need any code of conduct that you swear on! Hold a spirit of friendship in your heart, a desire to help people, a desire to not hurt people. Practice just this simple thing. And you are good to get started. Eventually as The Awakening Project does its job, you will realize that this simple principle of being friendly and helpful is a natural outcome of awakening any which way.

That big juicy steak! ... don't worry about it homie, dig in! There is no need to buy into somebody else's definitions of what is right and wrong. A solitary vegan chick should just be ignored. Of course if there is the possibility that a mob of vegan chicks will show up at your doorstep to lynch you, or if the police will arrest you if you devour that animal ... don't eat it ... eat something else. Respect the mob! Respect the law! :) :)

Awakening is not about exchanging your Lamborghini for a begging bowl

Awakening practices got developed by sages, monks, hermits, sadhus in ancient times. During those times these practices were also taught exclusively by them. Sage, monk, hermit, sadhu ... these are professions or vocations just like lawyer, doctor, accountant. They are dedicated professions and dedicating one's self to those professions opens up a lot of time and energy needed to finish the project. But time and energy needed varies vastly amongst people. The project itself doesn't care what your profession is. You may have an accountant who may have the talent necessary to apply themselves within their lives for an hour or so everyday for a few years (maybe decades) and awaken. You may have a sage living in a Himalayan cave who may have the talent necessary to apply themselves for an hour or so everyday for a few years (maybe decades) and gain a CFA certification.

In order to do these practices and gain freedom from suffering you need to apply yourself with consistency and dedication in a very structured and methodical way. You do not need to exchange your Lamborghini for a begging bowl. Maybe someone is completely untalented and has no choice but to move to the Himalayas - but unless we apply ourselves consistently in a structured and methodical way for a few years at least - we have no way of knowing this. For the time being - keep your Lamborghini. As long as part of your profession you aren't murdering puppies, torturing kittens, conning pensioners, kidnapping children for ransom, dealing in blood diamonds, smuggling cocaine ... and such like ... you are good!

The broad principle of the arbitrariness, and sometimes silliness, of consensus morality and socially emergent ethical conduct applies to profession as well. If you work in an abattoir or a meat packing business and have been at peace with yourself - don't let the nutty vegan chicks hassle you. Guard your mind against such unskillful nonsense. But if during the course of The Awakening Project you discover that your job actually causes a lot of mental turmoil, which you weren't aware of - well you may have to change your job. And that too is a 'may'.

OK - lets bite the bullet and talk about sex

Uncle Sid had some kind of obsessive objection to sex. He once berated a student who had gone home for a visit to his aged parents or something like that and had a quickie with his wife.

Uncle Sid .. if this story is true ... was an idiot!

Sir Issac Newton was perhaps amongst the most brilliant scientific minds that has ever existed. He also believed that he had discovered the secrets of the philosopher's stone and could convert lead into gold and spent days weeks and months pursuing this utter fascination that he had. Pythagoras was perhaps amongst the most gifted mathematicians ever. He was also a cult leader and completely believed that he was a demigod. He had rules for everything - for example he instituted a rule in his cult that everybody must wear their right shoes first ... as in always ... else they would be expelled from the cult. He also believed that bodily fluids contain 'power' ... particularly semen and insisted that his cult members always abstain. Both of these people were brilliant! ... geniuses! worthy of our respect for the simple fact that they existed and walked amongst us. Great minds have very very very unusual fascinations. They are eccentric. But if one wanted to learn geometry one should have the stability and clarity of mind needed to understand that the 'right shoe rule' was dumb, stupid and completely silly. And that semen retention has nothing to do with calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle!

If one wanted to learn the art and craft of studying perception and apperception and gaining knowledge, and wisdom regarding how suffering is created in the mind, one should have the good horse sense to know what is useful and appropriate as opposed to what is silly and completely tangential to the objective one has set for themselves. Sadly such grounded-ness is missing. If you consider the awakening project. Most of us aren't gifted! Thus most of us are going to take 7 years rather that 7 weeks in order to finish the fucking job. Most of us will have to invest thousands of hours in this pursuit. The people who would really roll up their sleeves and put their back into this are people who have experienced a certain minimum degree of suffering in their lives. Such people come to this brilliantly conceived practice popularized by a brilliant brilliant man and buy into all of it! ... all of it! Thus the fascination with Sid and his eccentricities is understandable. In any case when it comes to matters of spirituality the first thing people (mostly men) think about is the ding dong dangling between their legs. It gives so much pleasure ... surely there must be something wrong with this scheme of things! :)

My suggestion is ... don't be an idiot .. keep up the bedroom action ... don't keep up the bedroom action ... it is all about personality, quirkiness, superstitious nonsense and has nothing whatsoever to do with The Awakening Project.

On that note we move on to the next chapter.

A friend of mine wanted to know how I experience cessation versus nirodha sampatti in order to inform their own practice. To create a meaningful comparison between these two attainments and the direct experience of what they feel like and deliver, it is important to create a context of how they are approached, thus there is a build up to the comparison. I am sharing it here in case it helps anybody else. Whatever I write, I write from direct experience. I use language created by other people but that is a mere convenience since it saves me time from cooking up new lingo.

Cessation in the Progress of Insight

In doing the practice of investigation within the 4 foundations of mindfulness, the yogi starts to track objects from the point of inception onwards to the point of extinction. Initially clumsily, and then with skill and confidence. The yogi knows the object, knows the sense door where it comes from and how the object and its knowing is different for different objects and their knowing. Within the 3 foundations of mindfulness the yogi through tracking and knowing objects has already developed a lot of familiarity with objects, categories of objects, and the sense doors. The yogi has done a lot of juxtaposition between objects, between categories, between sense doors. The yogi has seen linkages or specific conditionality between objects and categories through seeing precedents and consequences.

This relentless object tracking naturally leads to the tracking of characteristics of objects. Awareness of sound naturally leads to the characteristics of sound like shrillness, volume, tonality. Awareness of body sensations naturally leads to the characteristics of body sensations like heat, coolness, friction, hardness, smoothness, stability, movement etc. This switch from object to characteristics of objects leads to a engagement of awareness with universal characteristics which are common to objects across categories and sense doors. Awareness starts to engage with the characteristic of impermanence. Impermanence fully experientially understood is the insight into Emptiness (or Shunyata). Nothing exists as far as the mind is concerned. The mind creates the world and it imputes meaning into the world. Minute by minute, moment by moment the world collapses and then is recreated. Meaning is seen to be given to the world rather than the world carrying any meaning by itself. From the impermanent characteristic of objects the mind switches to the characteristic of the interplay between perception and apperception. This leads to the insight into Unreliability (or Anitya/Anicca). The mind has a-priori assumptions about how stuff works. It has models regarding how stuff works and those models do not conform to what it has now learnt. The mind naturally experiences a cognitive friction which at first presents itself as fear.

The mind meets 'objects' with awareness gripping them in a certain way. There are four such grips to be relaxed one by one. Conventional experience and language helps us here in describing these grips as Expectation, Dislike, Rejection, Separation. These descriptions of the grips in conventional language can only act as a vector to help us find them and release them. Standalone the dictionary meaning and its linguistic and conceptual understanding doesn't help. These words are pointers.

1. I expect things to be a certain way - when we totally relax this grip - the mind lets go of fear and experiences misery
2. I dislike what is happening - when we totally relax this grip - the mind lets go of misery and experiences disgust
3. I reject what is happening - when we totally relax this grip - the mind lets go of disgust and experiences desperation to get out of here
4. I am separate from what is happening - when we totally relax this grip - the mind lets go of desperation to get out and then enters into complete acceptance and equanimity

Each and every nana on the PoI map is like setting a chain of dominoes falling - the dukkha nanas and what the mind learns and therefore does within dukkha nanas to move past them is required to explain the cessation event. At the end of the Dukkha nanas - there is no yogi, no meditator. The yogi identity, the fiction of an entity who is doing the meditation is a construct. A construct that is supported by its raw materials:

1. There is a right to hold expectations - that's why there is an 'I',
2. There is right to say 'This is preferable, its likeable, this is not preferable its unlikeable' - that's why there an 'I'
3. There is a right to pass judgement and say 'this is rejected, that is accepted' - that's why there is an 'I'
4. There is a right to demarcate 'This is me, its mine and that is not me, its not mine' - That's why there is an 'I'
   

Our understanding as it emerges from conventional / relative reality of this relative world is that there is an entity and therefore there are mental positions. Our understanding of the absolute world where the interplay between perception and apperception creates the world is that there are mental positions these mental positions lead to the creation of an entity and not the other way around.

In equanimity the yogi is no longer doing the yog, 'The Mind' is doing the yog and 'The Mind' sees the entity as just one more object. In the absence of the grips or the mental positions the entity is now just an object that enters through the sense door of the mind, and fluctuates and blinks. The meditating mind recognizes its fallacy and totally relaxes its participation in that which it has habitually done and dumps - everything. This is a cessation - it solidifies all the knowledges that has come before and an exit from the cessation is accompanied by a tremendous relief.

Summary

1. Objects change
2. Objects are unreliable
3. If unreliable objects are met with sticky grips then there will be friction
4. The mind lets go of sticky grips and then there is no friction
5. The mind discovers that 'I' emerges from these sticky grips and in their absence it is just a marker, a place holder, just one more object like a random thought of pizza
6. The mind dumps everything
7. Awareness is now completely un populated by any object
8. A cessation is chock full of awareness - it is most certainly not a state of general anesthesia
9. A return of injection of objects in this unpolluted awareness is accompanied by a tremendous amount of relief
10. The mind does a quick check of all the grips it has abandoned and all the sticky grips that are still left
    

Nirodha Sampatti through the practice of Nirvikalpa samadhi

A detailed overview of what this practice is is written here. I wont go into the details.

Summary

1. Awareness keeps engaging with objects and selects one notional object to create a subject
2. The exercise of softening into objects leads to Awareness losing the momentum of selecting objects
3. The exercise of softening into the tendency to objectify leads to Awareness no longer selecting any object at all
4. This is a state where awareness contains all objects - but there is no subject. This is partially mature nirvikalpa samadhi. It is comparable to equanimity or sankharupekkha nana from the PoI
5. The difference between the two modes of practice lies in a quality of investigation in the PoI progression and a quality of renunciation in the Nirvikalpa samadhi practice
6. Awareness drops all objects and takes itself as an object - this is fully mature nirvikalpa samadhi
7. At this point further softening into the desire to objectify awareness leads to awareness dropping itself as the object - Phenomenologically this is precisely the same experience as that of cessation in the PoI
8. Completely unpolluted awareness unengaged with anything as an object - not even itself
9. This is not even comparable to general anesthesia - OK I shouldn't be saying this, I have never experienced general anesthesia - This is not a gap in experience - this is a better statement :) :)
10. This state can be maintained for very lengthy periods of time simply by forming a Sankalp or firm resolve at the beginning of the session to stay in this state for a defined period of time
11. In this practice wisdom or specific conditionality is missing. The quality of renunciation leads to the abandoning of objectification therefore halting the creation of a subject or an 'I'

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Commonalities between the two styles of practice

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1. Partially mature Nirvikalpa Samadhi is deeply healing. All the day's events that might be cognitively heavy are processed and released, past traumas simply come up are acknowledged and released, there is no 'I' to interfere and hold on to a story or create a new story, a new trauma out of this processing. The state of equanimity in PoI has attention and preference for object, but the sense of self is also taken as an object .. again and again. Equanimity too is healing and feels rejuvenating but it is not even comparable in its power to rejuvenate like Nirvikalpa samadhi. Doing partially mature Nirvikalpa Samadhi alone without even letting it mature fully and doing Nirodha Sampatti is a very very valuable exercise for healing the psyche
2. Cessation in the PoI is exactly like Nirodha Sampatti. Awareness without any object projected into it, awareness not even taking itself as an object. It is the one time in our lives when we are deeply deeply aware
3. Duration control is very easy in Nirodha Sampatti. Nirodha Sampatti is approached as a renunciation practice. This is not renunciation of a lamborghini and fetishization of a begging bowl. This is renunciation of the act of being an entity, the act of choosing objects, the act of having objects at all in awareness. Thus practiced regularly it becomes a quality of mind. Whereas in Cessation attainment there is always some amount of uncertainty at least for me, and I simply never could control duration ... ever

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Questions?