This document contains a transcription of all the questions that were asked during Culadasa’s Q&A sessions that were held from October 2017 until May 2021.
I have put this together to make the information contained in the recordings of those sessions more easily accessible and searchable.
Some basic notes on how to use this document
The heading of each question is a timecode which also links to the exact place in the video where that question was asked.
If a notable topic came up during the discussion, I added it to a list of keywords that I put after each question. This should help with searching through this document. I also linked some of the keywords to the part of the video where that topic was discussed.
Sometimes I also included quotes from the answer to the question if something was said that stood out to me as significant and worth including here as a quote. Each quote also contains a timestamp linking to the relevant part of the video.
In total there are 61 video recordings, all of which can be found on Culadasa’s YouTube channel. I have also made a playlist of all those videos in chronological order.
Contributing
This is a large document that took a long time to put together. Proofreading it would take a long time as well, so I only did it to a limited extent. It is bound to contain typos and is subject to improvement.
If you would like to contribute, please do so by editing this file. If you know how to submit a pull request on GitHub, you can do so. Otherwise, you can send me a message on Reddit.
See further notes on contributing here.
Regards,
Alex
How do arising of pīti and spontaneous body movements relate to purification of the mind? Do you have any advice not mentioned in TMI for someone who is going through a prolonged period of these sometimes painful movements (besides therapy, yoga, qigong or taichi)? Will just sitting with the movements eventually release the blocks or will sometimes other methods be required? What would you advise someone who has been going through it for about a year now, and whose development of concentration has stalled because of the movements around Stage 6–7.
How can one practice mindfulness in daily life to reduce craving and procrastination? What do you do when you have recognized the craving?
Keywords: self-clinging
If gross distraction occurs when the mind is overly energized, and strong dullness occurs when the mind is overly calm, does that mean that gross distraction and strong dullness always occur independently from one another, or can they exist simultaneously?
What is your opinion on the Progress of Insight maps? How much energy should a TMI meditator dedicate to studying those maps?
Keywords: mahasi, dukkha-ñana
What is your opinion on the relationship between Jeffrey Martin’s Finder’s Course and TMI? Does deeper equal better when it pertains to things like running a business and having a family life. Are TMI and the Finder’s Course compatible with each other?
Keywords: higher paths, functioning in the world on higher paths, decision-making on higher paths, relationship to emotions on higher paths
I listened to your Path to Awakening in Daily Life and found it really helpful. How should one handle situations involving stress at work and in general? How should one draw the line between investing too much at work and seeing it all as an opportunity to watch craving and aversion?
Keywords: mindfulness in daily life, objective distance between self and other mental objects, reflection in mindfulness in daily life, tmi: the magic of mindfulness
When practicing at Stage 5, breath sensations feel very smooth and uniform. How can you reconcile this with the instructions to keep breath sensations ‘vivid and clear’? Is smoothness and uniformity indicative of subtle dullness?
00:56:37 As it pertains to Jeffrey Martin’s Finder’s Course, I found it interesting that you talked about locations as a state kind of phenomenon. Also, Jeffrey speaks of sub-locations, and that the four locations each contain an infinite number of sub-locations
It’s often said that Awakening is a recognition or understanding, not a state that is subject to passing away. Even today, though, some prominent people and researchers continue to view it as something that is more state-like, something that one could fall out of, and that could, in principle be measured in, say, neurological terms. What is your view on this apparent dichotomy?
Keywords: experiences vs states vs traits, tmi: mind-system model, flat and round earth analogy, mind and brain, non-duality of mind and matter
I’m having trouble applying mindfulness to my health conditions off the cushion. Formal practice helps greatly, but as soon as need to return to a complex task at work, the dread and pain get overwhelming, and motivation tanks, and I’m not sure where to anchor my focus.
Keywords: mindfulness in daily life, second arrow, attention and identification, attention and objectivity
I’m practicing at stages 4 and 5, and experiencing bubbly vibrational sensations associated with sensations of the breath at the nose even off cushion.
Keywords: acquired appearance
We are two meditators from Spain, and have been practicing daily for two years. One does one or two sessions, the other three or four of sitting and walking meditation. We also listened to several hours of online content. We have made big progress. First of us is stagnant and having difficulties adding more sessions; the other feels continuous progress, but with a lot of mind wandering. What makes people not acheive Stage 10 in one year? How much time does the majority of meditators take until Stage 4. We regard that stage as critical.
Keywords: trying too hard, attention vs awareness
Completely overcoming the fetters of sense-desire and ill will is a toil for a layperson in a society which bombards us with sense pleasures and divides us with adversarial state of politics and the media. Do you think some particular distracting modern technology should be minimized or avoided in order to cultivate the mind more capable of achieving śamatha, equanimity and Insight?
Keywords: path of a layperson vs a monastic, returning to the marketplace, tmi: mindful review, practice of virtue
TMI says that long month or year retreats are not critical to achieving Insight since regular diligent practice 1–2 hours a day is sufficient for progress. At the same time, Ajahn Chah said that solitude is essential for a meditator’s progress, especially for novices. Likewise, Ānāpānasati Sutta begins the explanation about a monk that goes into the wilderness to be alone.
My line of work as a CEO is generally known to be stressful. I sometimes worry that it would be hard for me to get beyond the current Stage 4, unless I find a way to spend a few weeks or months in solitude. Could you please comment on how important solitude is to the progress in the early stages.
Keywords: path of a layperson vs a monastic, original buddhadharma, withdrawal from the world
As practice progresses and suffering declines, questions begin naturally to arise as to what practice and dharma might mean beyond insight into anatta and emptiness of phenomena, beyond the end of suffering.
How can somebody be an adept meditator, and also engage in physically and sexually abusive behavior? If this practice does in fact incline one towards compassion for all beings, how can it be that there have been multiple cases of respected and advanced practitioners who have acted in this way? My practice has been incredibly valuable to me over the last few years, but I find that this one issue which sometimes undermines my faith in the dharma, as it seems to imply that changes are not as profound as many would suggest.
Keywords: compassion, Serenity Prayer (Wikipedia)
Can you talk about the importance and benefits of super-slow walking meditation? I think many of us, myself included, neglect it in favor of more casual mindful walking, and perhaps out of aversion to the tedium, or lack of privacy space. How critical is it for our daily practice?
Keywords: complementarity of sitting and walking meditation
Could you talk more about how analytical meditation can be used in the development of pīti? There’s a footnote in TMI that says that analytical meditation can be used to cultivate pīti, but little information is given. Could you discuss this, how it happens, and maybe recommend particular topics for it? I found that analytical meditation had really helped with my understanding of the dharma, and my intellectual and creative life. I find that many people ignore it, but I think it has many benefits.
Keywords: pitfalls of analytical thinking
Do you have any recommended sources for practicing the formless jhānas and the powers as TMI does not give much information about them, except to say that this is beyone the scope of this book?
Keywords: past lives, realms of power
What practices or techniques would one do to remember past lives? You’ve talked about having experiences that are like past life memories. Ignoring the issues of whether these are actually past lives as there is no self, how would one with strong concentration actually remember past lives? What is the technique and where could one read more about this type of practice?
Keywords: past lives, interconnectedness of mind, Shinzen Young, realms of power, no self, no reincarnation, knowing the minds of others, other lives, channeling, rebirth
In Deconstructing Yourself podcast interview you said that mindfulness can be used in training of wholesome behavior and the practice of virtue. In this context, you made a point to mention that you could expand on the topic of how this applies to livelihood, but not then. Could you do this now?
Keywords: inevitable and avoidable pain and suffering, right speech, right action, right livelihood
How do I know when I’ve moved from stream entrant to once-returner? Additionally, besides just being continuously mindful of aversion and craving, and continuing meditation, are there any other practices which help to accelerate the progression?
Keywords: ten fetters, craving and self, attachment to craving, attachment to self, dukkha, first path, second path
Follow-Up: Is there a distinction in this framework between intention and wanting? If I intend for something to happen consciously, is that considered craving?
Keywords: karma is intention, wholesome and unwholesome intentions
Follow-Up: If I understand you correctly, you would associate craving with “low-level” intentions. So, would you say that one should just be aware of the purpose for their intentions, and let go of those low-level purposes for those intentions?
What is the most likely progression on the stages of Awakening to expect when following TMI? Most students simply go through them in sequence: first, second, third, fourth path.
Keywords: four paths
A few author encourage adjusting and experimenting with the breath to allow for feelings of comfort, relaxation, joy, and similar positive feelings to arise. In TMI you emphasize not trying to consciously change the breath. Could you please contrast the two approaches pointing out pros and cons of each if possible?
Keywords: doing vs allowing, sexual fantasies
My understanding of the law of karma is that our actions in this life will generate good/bad karma/conditions that will ripen upon us in future lives, and that the purpose of karma is to encourage the practice of virtue. However, since you have taught us that there is no reincarnation, no atman, no past/present/future separate selves to inherit good/bad karma, then does a belief in karma provide any benefit or have any meaningful role in TMI? In other words, is the belief in karma among the rites and rituals of Buddhism that are to be eventually discarded?
Keywords: karma is intention, paṭicca-samuppāda, virtue, wholesome and unwholesome intentions
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Hence, pain and suffering are two different things. If we remove the suffering, is pain just a sensation? Like the sensations of my back touching the chair—a neutral sensation, or the sensations of a massage—a pleasant sensation. There must be something intrinsic to the sensation that characterizes it as pain, pleasure, or neutral. If this is true, the suffering that is produced by the reaction to the pain is the only one that can be removed by not having aversion to it, and therefore not triggering the suffering. But the part that belongs to pain is still there, which contradicts the statement at the beginning. It seems like we are working to remove the layer of suffering that depends on the logic by which we respond to, but there’s still another dimension that is unremovable. I am confused about this especially if we add the idea of realizing Awakening and attining fourth path, which if properly done, deepening the insight into no-self seems to remove the assumption of being a self, which is the thing that is susceptible to the suffering. Does this realization remove the reactions to the pain and the part of the suffering that goes with them, but not the part that is intrinsic to the pain?
Keywords: vedanā, dukkha, resistance, Shinzen Young
Have you heard of and/or experienced transfer of consciousness occuring between two living adults? If so, from what and to what is the consciousness being transferred, and what is the purpose of the transfer?
Keywords: interconnectedness of mind, consciousness is not self
I find it concerning that there are so many “awakened” people who seem to behave poorly in different ways. At its worst this bad behavior might involve gross ethical violations, or it might involve grandiosity, and potentially abusing the guru yoga relationship. Or it may just amount to personal blind spots, where that person can no longer see their own faults, and they are unlikely to accept feedback on that subject. For example, an ariya might dismiss constructive criticism from someone they see as a worldling since clearly that person isn’t operating on the same level as they are. For example, someone could have a highly unified mind except for one heavily fortified area of delusion or bad behavior, i.e. a blind spot. They might truly come to believe that as a realized bodhisattva, the ordinary rules do not apply to them. I know people who are actually wary of Awakening since they don’t want to become deluded or grandiose. What is the best way to prevent that?
I’m working with Stage 6 practices. In general I’ve noticed a change in perception of the breath at the nose. There is a sense of having descended into the sensations, whereas previously there was a spatial sense of distance from the breath. Also, breath sensations associated with the nose seem to manifest in other body locations despite stable attentional scope at the nose. I have been interpreting this as a conceptual stripping away of the breath experience that is described as a characteristic of the acquired appearance, uggaha-nimitta.
Follow-Up: The conceptual stripping away leads to confusion as to defining attentional scope.
Keywords: four elements
Although I understand that your training is in Theravādan and Tibetan traditions, and thus you yourself haven’t yet practiced Zen, or used kōan, I’m wondering if you could commentk, based on whatever you may know of kōan practice, on its nature and function on the path, and specifically whether you see any parallels between kōan practice, and the practice in Theravāda or Tibetan Buddhism.
Would TMI be approached any differently if one were already a stream-enterer?
I’ve heard you comment that the so-called Dark Night is mitigated by practicing śamatha. But does this still mean that someone doing TMI will go through the stages of Insight as a dry vipassanā practitioner would? I’ve also heard Daniel Ingram talk about cycling through stages repeatedly once on the path, and that it never seems to end. And he also spoke of being in the Dark Night for the majority of his life since Awakening.
Keywords: dukkha-ñana
I have an early edition of TMI. I don’t recognize the terms first path, second path, third path from my edition.
I have a question about luminous jhānas. For years I’ve had an experience of a disk, like a purple light rotating when my attention was focused on the third eye region. I’m now reading Stage 8. You say that this is an internally generated phenomenon. As a neurologist, it fascinates me. Could you comment?
Keywords: kasiṇa, fire kasiṇa, visual hallucination, Charles Bonnet syndrome
Can you please talk about the connection between concentration in daily life and in meditation?
Do you make the distinction between awareness, consciousness, mind, and the Buddha-nature? If so, what are the distinctions and relationships amongst these four?
Keywords: non-dualism, non-duality of mind and matter, dualism, René Descartes, dualism: reductionistic materialism, dualism: reductionistic idealism, suchness, unconscious mind, subconscious mind, unconscious awareness, conscious awareness, Thomas Nagel - What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, subjectivity, interconnectedness of mind, individual mind as a filter/barrier, five aggregates, hard problem of subjectivity, rigpa, memory creating reflexive activity of consiousness giving rise to subjectivity, tathāgata-garbha
Follow-up: You never mentioned emptiness or dependent origination. Wouldn’t that be ultimately what Buddha-nature is? Is rigpa the positive sense of emptiness?
Keywords: Joanna Macy - Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (Open Library)
I’m wondering, is it possible to progress through the Ten Stages, and become awakened using walking meditation as the main practice? If this is possible, how could this path potentially differ from using a sitting practice? For instance, are people able to experience purifications, jhānas etc. while walking?
In The Mind Illuminated, in your discussion of body scan, you discuss a traditional meditation on the elements (in particular the wind element), and say that Tibetans call the breath-related sensations that arise from this practice inner winds. I’m sure, you know that these inner winds are what is called prāṇa in Sanskrit. Could you share your thoughts on connections between this awareness cultivated through the use of the body scan at Stage 5, and the cultivation of awareness of prāṇa in Indian yoga practices and chi in Chinese practices such as taichi and qigong? How are they related to the phenomena of pīti?
I frequently experience energetic flows in my body while sitting when I’m just at Stage 4, just starting to do the body scans recommended for Stage 5.
Are there degrees of intensity of craving or the hindrances in general? If so, are these degrees related with the amount of conditioning that is beyond their manifestation?
Keywords: addiction, karma is intention, self-attachment
There are meditation retreats where, depending on their progress, people may be asked to stay awake for 24 to 48 hours, or even longer. What is your opinion on this? What is the purpose? In which situations is it useful, and how can you tell whether or not you’re pushing yourself too hard? When is it better to persevere? When is it better to be kind to yourself, and rest? Do you have any advice for people who are planning to participate in such a retreat?
I’ve been meditating for 3–4 months. This week I had a remarkable session. I was in stable attention and awareness of the breath right from the get-go. Then I felt happy about being able to meditate, and the great feeling it gives me. Suddenly a strong tingling sensation came from the back of my neck, and grew over my head and my whole upper body. With it came a profound and overwhelming feeling of happiness and bliss about nothing in particular. My breathing got heavy and I shed some tears of joy. The whole experience lasted for a few minutes. The rest of the sit was great as well, and there was even a second, less intense wave of bliss. How can I acheive this again?
The concept of stable attention is clear. Describe the distinguisting characteristics of access concentration, one-pointedness, and absorption. I.e. compare and contrast these terms.
Keywords: jhāna factors, directed attention · vitakka, sustained attention · vicāra, Shinzen Young, realms of power, collective unconscious, siddhi, flow state
Can metta practice assist in achieving and sustaining these?
What role do perceptual and sensory changes play in the path?
I’ve noticed that dry insight pracitioners on forums that tend to emphasize techniques like noting, like at Dharma Overground, tend to emphasize shifts in their perceptional functioning and senses over reduction of craving and increase in positive emotions and equanimity like I’ve seen śamatha-vipassanā tend to do. These shifts tend to emphasize centerlessness, and opening up of visual field and luminosity amongst other things. The way these things tend to be phrased seemed confusing and unappealing to me.
I’m not exactly sure what I’m asking, but just pointing out an observation that I’ve noticed that maybe you could comment on. I.e. do the senses of the body operate a little differently before first path, and then shift at each path? Is this a weird quirk that noting could have on the brain, but isn’t essential to practice?
01:14:03 In my own practice I’ve experienced a lot of positive benefits of TMI, but I haven’t noticed any major changes in the functioning of my senses—except for the description of a completed Stage 8 with an internal light and sound. I felt an opening up of my mental space and perceptual changes to do with insight-related things, but nothing to do with my senses off the cushion like I read a few people mention.
Can you speak about your experience of going through Awakening process as a layperson, in a commited relationship, and if possible, and if not too personal, what it was like for your partner to be with someone going through Awakening.
What advice would you give someone who is suffering from complacency due to recent stream entry.
What is your take on why there’s so few people at and beyond third path?
For example, Shinzen states in his book that he’s only met three or four who perhaps were arhats thrroughout his life. I find it problematic that the higher stages of Awakening seems so elusive even for people that spent their whole life on the path.
Shinzen’s approach is to synthesize a completely new meditative approach. Mine is to go back and try to find out what it was about the early ways of practicing that was so incredibly effective that we’ve lost the way.
Keywords: Shinzen Young, no reincarnation, belief in reincarnation as obstacle to progress on the path, consciousnoss is not true self, The Buddha and Sāti the fisherman’s son (Sutta reference), convergence of science and innovative approaches to meditation
Tinnitus.
Keywords: second arrow
How are you doing? How is your health? How are your projects? What can we do to help you?
I recently came across Daniel Ingram’s writings on his experimentations as a fire kasiṇa practice. Then in an interesting bit of synchronicity, a TMI mentor happened to mention chataka practice, which is somewhat similar to what Ingram is talking about: using a candle flame to generate an inner image to support concentration practice.
Could you comment on this sort of practice, and say whether or not you see it as useful? Specifically, could it be useful for one working on the TMI stages? And if so, at what levels and in what way?
Keywords: Visuddhimagga, jhāna, luminous nimitta
I’m reading The Master and His Emissary, and I’ve just read the essay The Divided Brain by Iain McGilchrist. It’s very interesting what you’ve said at the very end of this discussion of attention and “toys and process” and manipulation of the world, and how the left-hemisphere this is. And what you’ve said, “Oh, no, I’m not really interested in all of the other stuff”, which is more of the right-hemisphere interest.
I found this very powerful practice now: choiceless awareness meditation, I think you call that. And in you book it’s so beautifully described—that delineation of the region, of the zone of mindfulness when we begin to explore the connection between the focused attention and peripheral awareness.
Is this unification in the sense that you describe in your book? It’s so powerful. Will that be part of the exploration in the retreat that you’ll be doing?
I did this flame meditation. I’ve been doing it very regularly for years. It’s so beautiful what you’ve just described because as I looked and looked and looked, the images would split so that the right and left visual fields, the right and left eyes were giving me the two images etc. But as I looked more, and as I let go and let go and let go, suddenly there was a very clear center, and almost a Buddha-like luminescence, and then a surrounding—kind of like the peripheral awareness, again, exactly, in many ways what we were just talking about, this connection.
It was a very beautiful and powerful special experience, but I did not close my eyes.
Part of what was behind my question was sort of noticing in my own experience that sometimes visual objects are much easier to focus on than the tactile sensations of the breath. So that’s a common experience.
And basically what you’re saying is that’s not necessarily an advantage?
I’ve read that you practiced TM and Advaita Vedanta prior to taking up Buddhism.
Is there anything that you retained from either that you found beneficial to you on the path that you’d like to share? What are your thoughts in general on supplemental meditative practices outside of our regular TMI practice?
Keywords: attention and awareness, collapse of awareness, TMI as framewok to other practices, Pa-Auk (Website), Mahasi noting practice
Is it allowed to apply techniques of a higher stage in order to achieve the goals of a lower one?
I was able to experience uniform pīti when I was working on Stage 4. Very quickly I realized that by applying my attention to these subtle sensations, I get rid of all perceived distractions and dullness. My sessions are joyful and my daily life is more mindful. Basically, it was very similar to experiencing the whole body with the breath. I was surely heading towards Stage 5, but then I asked a question on Reddit to get validation from more serious practitioners and was strongly discouraged from doing this technique on Stage 4. So I stopped, and then was slowed down in my progress and lost a couple of extra months. I am sure I had to trust my intuition, and to keep working with subtle sensations as my meditation object to overcome gross distractions, keeping in mind that I would need to return to the sensations in my nostrils later on. Now I’m doing Stage 5 practices again, and I see that working with the whole body allows me to overcome subtle dullness and getting more mental power better than by doing the body scan.
Would it be advisable to use the whole-body breath to overcome subtle dullness, and only then spend some time doing body scan in order to learn to define the scope of attention at will?
How do right effort and equanimity fit together?
Equanimity is total surrender to what is, or as you often formulate it, “Let it come, let it be, let it go”. This is a process of releasing, and seems conducive to fourth path’s goal of total uprooting of taṇhā. Right effort, on the other hand, is to eliminate and maintain the elimination of unwholesome mental states, and then to cultivate and maintain positive mental states. This is an active process of changing the way things are. This practice feels antithetical to the uprooting of taṇhā because it’s so easy to be averse to negativity, and attach to the positivity when actively transforming these mental states.
Keywords: equanimity as non-reactivity, Noble Eightfold Path · ariya aṭṭhaṅgika magga
Follow-Up: Cultivation of joy intersecting with equanimity. Would you call joy an equanimous state just because it’s more satisfying to be joyful?
Keywords: jhāna, third jhāna to fourth jhāna, sukha to upekkhā
If you find narcissistic thoughts arising, what do you do?
Keywords: surrender, thought replacement
In the last Q&A, you said that there really is no hard problem of consciousness. It was mentioned in the context of Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? you indicated that consciousness acts as information exchange, and has the reflexive quality related to memory, and that those facts somehow explain the subjective element understood by me as having qualia, or not being a zombie.
In this context, I’d like to ask you to elaborate, why do you think that those functional aspects of the mind—information exchange, reflexive quality—solve the hard problem of consciousness? And particularly, is your reasoning in this area based on intellectual (if so, is it philosophical or scientific) understanding, or rather you base your position on the insight you had into the ultimate nature of the mind?
Keywords: brain damage, long term memory loss
I’m currently around Stage 5. Sometimes I drive my car for a couple of hours, and I tried to make this time support my practice.
My understaning is that one can turn many daily activities into meditation if you can define a scope of attention on the main tasks of the given activity so that you can observe those tasks, keep your attention their, like with sensations of breathing at the nose. I tried to do that in my car by observing surroundings of the car, road and cars around me, plus movements of the steering wheel and pedals. I can perform driving mostly automatic on the highway, and this seems safe, but also helping to train my mind similarly to when I observe my breath.
What do you think of this approach, and is there a better way to support my practice while I’m driving?
00:59:48 To bring this to a more generic level, is my approach to turning activities of daily life into a meditation sound? Could you please give advice on how to approach it in general? How to approach tasks like washing dishes, driving etc. to support the practice?
There seem to be a number of people on the internet who’ve got second path, but have found progress after that to be much more tricky. What advice can you give people looking to get to third path.
Keywords: higher paths
In the Scientific American article from February 2017 you wrote, “What is the mind other than the brain that is experienced from the inside? What is the brain other than the mind experienced from the outside?”
My friend thought you were saying that the mind is the brain, and the brain is the mind, but I thought you were equating experiences rather than things. Could you clarify what you meant?
Keywords: non-dualism, René Descartes, Cartesian dualism, materialism, idealism, suchness, rigpa, Buddha-nature · tathāgata-garbha, Theory of Mind
Follow-up: As part of the statement you made, you referred to the five insights. I know about three insights, but I don’t know about the other two. What are the other two?
Keywords: Three Characteristics · ti-lakkhaṇa
I was wondering what your thoughts are on meditating yourself to sleep.
I like lucid dreaming, and I would like to experiment with meditation as an induction technique, but I’m afraid it would be counterproductive to my daily practice. If it is okay to meditate oneself to sleep, can you explain the process of doing it?
Keywords: dulness, hypnagogia, hypnopompia
Should I also put the focus on the breathing, like in TMI?
Since I have epilepsy, could doing this practice have a negative influence?
I’ve been studying with Tucker for a year or so. He told me that I repress thoughts a lot.
Basically, when I sit down to meditate, when I first started, I didn’t hear any thoughts. And working with Tucker, I’m getting a lot better now. Now my practice is mostly like, putting everything in awareness. So there’s very little attention, and I try to focus it on the breath. Those are Tucker’s instructions for me now.
I was wondering if you have anything else to add.
I have been aware of increasing mental clarity and unification of mind manifesting in powerful ways. Most powerful benefit has been from setting a conscious intention before any meditation or activity. I’m noticing how frequently this conscious intention becomes reality.
Could you discuss this aspect of unification of mind? As it always takes me back to one of the most powerful guiding verses I use in my practice from Śāntideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva: “The intention, ocean of great good”.
Could you comment on this, or add any guidance?
Keywords: formation of intention as the root function of the mind, enlightenment-mind · bodhicitta
Can you explain and expand with some examples about how the insight into impermanence, emptiness, and paṭicca-samuppāda shatters the three points of the universally accepted worldview, especially the third point? And which are the pitfalls that we have to avoid when we ponder these things?
It seems to me that an incorrect understanding can be dangerous, and I’m also worried to think badly in terms of relative truth and ultimate truth.
Keywords: suffering = pain × resistance, Shinzen Young
The importance of morals in the process of enlightenment is becoming very experientially clear to me. I would liek to know if you know of people who have achieved one of the four levels of awakening without practicing the Eightfold Path, or something similar to it. Maybe you could comment on the importance of the Noble Eightfold Path, which is something that I hvven’t found in TMI.
In an earlier Patreon Q&A you mentioned that you have practiced advaita techniques, which I take to mean self-inquiry. If this is correct, could you say a bit about your experience with this practice, how it is related to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of awareness of awareness (sometimes called śamatha without an object), and how it may or may not fit into the TMI structure?
Keywords: finding the still point, experiencing the witness
You mentioned to me once that it’s important to stay in the clear light. If consciousness is only information exchange, then what is the clear light?
Keywords: love, The Buddha and Sāti the fisherman’s son (Sutta reference), hard problem of consciouness
I’m having difficulties with dullness around Stages 3–4. As I go through the four-step transition to the meditation object, my mind has a normal amount of clarity, and I can often evoke some joy. But further into the meditation, my mental energy drops.
I can hardly perceive any breath sensation with clarity even as I try to focus, and have poor introspective awareness. This feels like a struggle, and it often frustrates me because I seem to be unable to easily shake if off with the antidotes.
After applying the antidote, my mental energy goes up just for a few seconds, and then I gradually settle back to the same low level of alertness again. Then I become reluctant to apply more antidotes because I get physically tired of forcefully exhaling, or clenching my muscles, and perhaps disappoined that it didn’t work, too.
If I stand up to meditate, the frustration carries over, and I can become annnoyed at how uncomfortable it is, or think that I can’t always stand up to deal with dullness. I need to learn to deal with it while sitting.
Sometimes I even stop meditating all together because of this, and usually with only a few minutes left until the end of the session.
I know that pretty much everything is wrong with the way my mind currently reacts to dullness, but I still find myself stuck with this problem. So any advice would be greatly appreciated.
What is your opinion on the view that every form of physical pain or sickness is a manifestation of a certain aspect of the person that needs to be purified, and that this is the body’s call to bring the person’s attention to it.
Which modern teachers are you inspired by?
How can I make metacognitive introspective awareness stronger? I can’t see distractions coming before they hit me. I’m just suddenly in it.
I’m wondering about doing longer and longer sits, and how to schedule my sits. If I’m free for six hours in a row, is it good to try and increase the time of the sits when possible?
Similar to muscle trining, I sit for 90 minutes. Sometimes it can make me very calm for a while, but sometimes also make me feel crazy.
I might be able to sit with bearable pain for 30 minutes, but I start to really want to get rid of that unpleasant pain.
I’m at Stage 4, encountering gross distraction, but no strong dullness.
The alternative would be to sit for one hour, do walking for 45 minutes, then sit again. This way, I feel it goes easier.
If longer sits are good, would it also be good to sometimes do really long, rigid, three-part step-by-step walking meditations for as long as possible? I’ve seen the interview with you and Stephanie Nash discussing longer sits, which peaked my interest. I’m grateful for your great teachings.
Śamatha is my go-to practice; it’s been of enormous benefit to me. That being said, I’ve been dealing with some depression over the past couple of months, and it’s been characterized by obsessive and recurring thoughts. These rapid invasive thoughts as well as blunting of joy are preventing unification of mind, and don’t leave any room for much stability at all. Even if I’m on the path of śamatha, would it be wise at a time such as this to diverge completely from the standard TMI śamatha practice, and instead focus on positive, as Shinzen would say? Such as doing metta, or qigong exclusively until the depression has lifted? As it is, my śamatha sits are enjoyable, but they don’t feel very productive.
The precise distinction between attention and awareness in meditation is one of your unique contributions. You mentioned that the two correlate to different neurological pathways. Where would you recommend someone to start reading on this? Any particular papers, favorite textbooks?
01:54:54 How does this relate if at all to the finding that meditation reduces default mode network activity?
How are you feeling, and generally, how is your health?
01:57:44 How is your next book coming?
01:58:23 What can we do to help you and support you, other then contribute through Patreon website?
In your view, can consuming alcohol and cannabis be reconciled with the precept discouraging intoxicating substances?
I found light or moderate alcohol to allow me to function more comfortably, and even effectively in social situations, and decrease anxiety, even thought it does dull the mind.
Keywords: psychedelics, set and setting
Using earplugs during sits is discouraged, yet I live in a really loud environment—almost continuously.
Mindfulness and creativity.
Some scientific studies on creativity have shown that mind-wandering is vital to the creative process.
Keywords: psychedelics
I have some doubt about introspective awareness. I’m able to do Stage 5 and 6 techniques, and I have concluded that since I can do those techniques, I must have introspective awareness with metacognitive quality—because that is required for those techniques to be successful.
Yet I’m not aware of the functioning of my awareness; I don’t see what happens in the background.
When my mental energy level begins to decrease, my awareness gives an order to correct for it.
Keywords: Susan Blackmore (Wikipedia)
What is your opinion on mixing or alternating between different insight practices? Is it better to pick one and stick with it, or is it okay to do several ones at the same time?
You said that everyting is mind-generated, which is the truth that you realize with emptiness. In TMI, at the beginning it is said that we get a direct experience of ultimate truth. What is ultimate truth?
If everything we can experience is empty, how can we experience ultimate truth? What can we do to get to this experience?
Keywords: cessation · nirodha, consciousness without an object (CWO) | pure consciousness experience (PCE), the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know, awe, T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding (Wikipedia - Author, Poem)
My close friend with no meditation experience has deep depersonalization/derealization symptoms. He currently undergoes cognitive behavioral therapy. I’m aware that such problems might also occur as a side effect of meditation, a.k.a. Dark Night. Would it be wise for hime to practice some forms of meditation that are recommended as antidotes for Dark Night, e.g. metta, or would it be irresponsible to give him any meditation-related advice as he is already under specialist care? Obviously, I do not want to make him worse, but based on the description of his symptoms, I suspect he might be in a way closer than me to realizing insights like No-Self or Emptiness. So, not pursuing this direction could also be a waste of a great oportunity for Awakening.
Keywords: dissociation, healthy ego-structure, meditation as tool for dealing with difficult psychological material, dukkha-ñana
You said that not only metta, but also standard TMI meditation should not be harmful in this situation. For example, getting to Stage 4, which is not very advanced (and is my own current level at the moment). I haven’t experienced purifications myself yet, but I think I might experience them soon. Do you think experiencing purifications would not be harmful to a person experiencing those problems? That person was actually the one who approached me about meditation, but I was very cautious about encouraging him.
Stage 4 can bring things up. And the thing is that meditation is an adequate tool to deal with those things so long as the person can remain mindful.
By that I mean they don’t forget who they are now, where they are now. You know, here I am, sitting in a comfortable room, safe, on a meditation cushion, and these things are arising in my mind. In a state of mindfulness, one can deal with a lot of things. But if one is overwhelmed by memories and emotions, and things like that when something comes up, then meditation is not the suitable venue for dealing with those things. […]
Any time that something comes up, and [you] feel overwhelmed by it, [you] should back away. [You] can reapproach it later on, but if [you] find that every time it comes up, [you] are overwhelmed by it, then [you] should be dealing with it with the assistance of a highly trained therapist.
Keywords: meditation as tool for dealing with difficult psychological material, meditation or psychotherapy?`
Are you familiar with the writings of Bernadette Roberts, and if so, can you expain the extent to which the progress of her journey of Insight into and beyond No-Self correlates to the stages of TMI?
Her Dark Night experiences appear to have been excruciatingly painful, disorienting, and to have occurred over an extended period of time. I’m still reading, but so far I haven’t seen her describe any of the purification śamatha experiences that you have described and incorporated into TMI.
Would you characterize her experiences as an extreme example of dry insight, and can you provide some explanation/reassurance regarding the extent to which the severity and disorientation of her insight experiences can be minimized by following TMI?
Keywords: all spiritual paths lead to the same place, dukkha-ñana
Follow-Up: When you were reading her accounts, did you get any sense of how much of what she was describing was a necessary part of that transition, and how much was a result of the confusion that she had because she had absolutely nothing to guide her?
Is intent part of the ego-self, or is it something deeply ingrained in consciousness like peripheral awareness?
It feels like intent is part of the ego-self as we have direct control over it.
01:26:23 If intent is part of our ego, then it seems like throughout our practice we are using our ego to cultivate certain mental traits—stable attention and mindfulness—and then ultimately achieve the dissulution of it.
You have this unshakable knowledge and understanding that my ego-self, my idea of who I am is a picture my mind is painting.
It’s taking my preferences, my experiences, my predispositions, and those things that would be called my personality traits and so forth, and it’s assembling them into a self.
And then it attributes to Self the experience of observation, when in fact in the seeing there’s only the seeing. And it attributes to this created Self the agency that results in not just actions, but at an unconscious level, our thoughts and our emotions, and it appropriates those into the self as “our intentions.
How can something be used to dissolve the very thing out of which it arises?
Keywords: metacognitive awareness
I studied with Namgyal, and I enjoyed and was dazzled by the vast range of practices that he drew from traditions of every different kind.
Now I’m determined to go narrow and deep rather than broad and shallow, and I’m diving into your approach with enthusiasm. Could you please speak to the relative benefits of the smorgasbord practice-it-all, awaken-along-the-way versus the kaiseki or sushi-bar following one method all the way to Awakening, then practice/learn-the-rest-if-interested approach to Awakening?
Keywords: Buddhadharma vs religious Buddhism, Jeffrey Martin - Finder’s Course
How is your health? What can you tell us about your work on your upcoming book, on the changes to the Stronghold, and the integration of TCMC?
In The Mind Illuminated you seem to be advocating developing very strong pīti before releasing effort, which allows it to calm down into sukha and equanimity.
I seem to have trouble seeing pīti as very pleasurable until I release more effort and attempt to let the body’s intuition take over, upon which it turns into something that feels more like sukha.
Could you talk about your integration of the jhānas with the nine mental abidings in TMI? Do you understad TMI as an original integration of Mahāyāna, Yogācāra and Theravāda models of śamatha practice in addition to integrating insight practices as well?
If so, was the integration based mainly on you own meditative experience, or were the precedents in the tradition that you made use of?
Keywords: Namgyal Rinpoche
According to your instructions for Stage 7, we should practice experiencing the whole body with the breath only as needed for the beginning of this stage to achieve exclusive attention, and then try experiencing effortlessness with the sensations of the nose. As I’m navigating between Stages 6 and 7 techniques, I find it natural to drop effort when doing the whole body with the breath, and stay with these sensations for a while.
Are the sensations in the body a valid meditation object for practicing effortlessness—at least for a part of the session?
It would be nice if you could comment on śamatha, insight and the relation with path attainments.
I’ve heard that realizing fourth path may take years for people that are on third path. But some people become spontaneously awakened. I understand this is full Enlightenment, fourth path. I also imagine that there is a process of maturation after the key realization spreading it through the mind, and also that people at Stages 7, 8, 9 and 10 start to have Insight, which is what makes you enter the paths.
Shouldn’t someone at Stage 10 easily be able to have as much Insight as they want, and therefore achieve paths easily?
Keywords: samādhi, sāti
What are the specific formal and informal practices you would recommend for someone who has already attained second path and is ready to work towards third path? And what are the key signposts along the way that indicate progress is being made in the right direction?
Follow-Up: My understanding of the Ten Fetters approach was that the transition to the second path doesn’t result in additional fetters being broken, it’s more a dramatic attenuation in craving for sense-pleasure. Is that correct?
And then the transition from second to third is where those fetters are broken.
Are there particular signposts along the way as one is working towards that transition from second to third path that indicate that things are moving in the right direction? In terms of the relationship to craving, but also sensory perception-wise. Anything that stands out?
I’m new to the dharma. I’m trying to learn how to gain confidence in my own exploration of the dharma.
I love TMI. It’s practice based. But there’s the other aspect. It’s learning, reading the dharma: virtue, śīla etc.
There’s so many different traditions out there, and what I love about what you do is that you unify things and bring them together, but still as a solitary practitioner you have to learn how to discern this stuff on your own. I’m really struggling with what to take, what to let go of etc.
Can you provide further explanation/clarification that would help me to understand, reconcile the apparent contrary views asserted by teachers like Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu who strongly asserts that the fear induced by belief in multi-life rebirth is necessary for an effective practice of right view, virtue etc., and that only when you appreciate the potential for even the most natural or innocuous-seeming attachment to lead to long-term suffering, will you be willing to take it seriously and work to abandon it, and only then will you be really following the path.
I find myself unable to reconcile/accept belief in multi-life rebirth due to the fledgling insights of anattā that I have already exprienced. Yet Ṭhānissaro’s view causes me to doubt whether my well-intentioned practice of renunication is truly adequate.
Can a dedicated practitioner safely reconcile Ṭhānissaro’s orthodox view of rebirth as an example of skillful means?
Our personhood is real, but our selfhood is not.
Keywords: The Buddha and Sāti the fisherman’s son (Sutta reference, rebirth as rebirth of self as mental formation)
What role does dharma/Awakening play in treating psychiatric conditions that are commonly believed to be more biological in nature—like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia? Can Awakening cure such disorders? How would such an individual progress through the Ten Stages and the paths of Awakening? What precautions should an individual take?
The traditional texts do not seem to mention things that could match up to bipolar or schizophrenia, or patterns of behavior that correlate of our modern understanding of mental illness.
Keywords: Ken Wilber - Clean Up, Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up (Wikipedia), meditation or psychotherapy?`, Dark Night, dukkha-ñana
Follow-Up: What are the blind spots that the dharma can prevent one from being aware of?
TMI was mostly about śamatha. Will you be writing a book about Insight too? What resources and methods which go beyond just hoping for spontaneous insight experiences during śamatha do you recommend—besides a personal teacher—for meditators looking to systematically develop their Insight?
Could you explain the purification process from the perspective of a Stage 4 practitioner?
I still feel unsure about how to know whether I’m having a purification or not. Until recently I haven’t experienced anything that seems to qualify as a purification, but recently during a sit I experienced extreme unusual tension that came from nowhere, and had no cause or reason that I could identify. It built up to an almost unbearable level, then ended, but I did not experience any sensation of relief or release.
How can you better understand whether such experiences that come from nowhere are true purifications, and how to reap the full benefit?
I have attention deficit disorder, and this predisposition seems to affect my ability to maintain mindfulness throughout daily life, to allow enough time to practice, and my rate of progress and ability to maintain stable attention.
If you have ADD, then you probably aren’t going to be nearly as successful at stabilizing your attention as most people would be, and as we describe in the book. But that’s all right. What you do is you shift the emphasis to the cultivation of strong mindfulness, of strong awareness. […]
It is [awareness] that is most important in terms of bringing about Insight and Awakening.
So what you want to do is to keep that in mind. Let that background awareness be there. [And] what you’ll notice is that the different things arising and passing away in extrospective awareness and introspective awareness, they are what is drawing your attention away.
So it’s just allowing yourself to notice that, not focusing your attention on it. Just notice that your attention is moving, but that you know what your attention is moving.
Keywords: ADD, ADHD
I have a question on the extent to which your lifestyle on the cushion affects your progress in meditation. Is it possible that being in certain life situations can stop your meditation progress?
For example, if a person is in a long-distance, long-term relationship that is hard on him or her.
Secondly, and this might sound like a strange question, as a heterosexual male, od you think that lifestyle choices regarding sexual behavior affect meditation progress?
For example, if you take a male who has an abundance of women, would he progress faster than the same male if he does not pursue intimacy. Since sex affects social status, and social status affects the brain as well as confidence and motivation.
What do you believe happens when we die?
I’m interested in your thoughts about Buddhism and death, as traditionally Buddhism is about ceasing the cycle of rebirth. What do you make of the Buddha’s emphasis on ceasing the cycle of rebirth?
You’ve spoken about accessing past life memories, which implies memories are stored somewhere?
No Self continues after death, but is it possible that certain habitual mental energies continue and influence mental development of new lifeforms?
Keywords: rebirth as rebirth of self as mental formation, past lives, knowing the minds of others, non-dualism, karma is intention
Follow-Up: When you have these experiences of accessing what you’re calling past lives or memories, how do you know that this isn’t just a manifestation like a dream or a daydream? Or even a vivid lucid dream that’s happening to your waking consciousness, or something like that? How do you verify that kind of thing?
Keywords: Zhuangzi (Wikipedia (not explicitly mentioned, but Culadasa talks about the same thing)
Follow-Up: I was very interested in what you were saying about cockroaches.
I had this thought when I was trying to ponder this whole thing about rebirth. It occurred to me that parts of the mindstream—it didn’t make sense to me that the whole thing would just move forward as an item, but that it could be dispersed throughout whatever that is. And that bits and pieces of it could be all over the place.
That sounds like what you were saying. But then the Jātaka Tales? That looks like there was some kind of linear progression. What can you say about that?
Keywords: modifications to the Suttas, comparative studies of the Suttas
How could one go about making a decision as to whether or not to abort a child if it was known that the child had a very serious genetic condition, in the context of the precepts?
I’m currently at Stage 5, sometimes Stage 6. This summer I will go on my first retreat.
As far as I understand it, it’s possible to gain a lot of momentum during retreat so you can practice on higher stages than in your usual day-to-day practice.
My goal for this retreat is to achieve jhānas, and take them back to my day-to-day practice.
So my question is, what would be the most effective way to achieve this? Going as deep as I can, maybe practicing Stage 8, so-or-so? Or should I concentrate on perfecting my skills on, say, entering the whole-body jhānas?
For the sake of curiosity and inspiration, what is beyond fourth path?
I’ve read few mentions that particularly in Mahāyāna, they don’t see arhat and fourth as the ultimate thing, and I think you’ve also mentioned there’s a path beyond.
Can you please be specific and try to put into words what experiences are beyond fourth path? What are the things that you’re investigating and discovering today? And, finally, is it possible to extrapolate and tell where it leads? Do you have a sense of what is beyond what is visible to your experience now?
Keywords: rigpa, timelessness
I believe I have heard you say that you believe the attention given to the default mode network in recent discussions of the neuroscience of meditation is a bit overblown.
I think you said something about it being culture-specific, but I may not be remembering accurately. Could you say more about this?
Keywords: Jeffrey Martin - non-symbolic experiencing
How do I know when my ego-structure is healthy enough that I can go for Insight without worry?
What are the main obstacles to the spread of the dharma in the West?
For instance, you’ve recently mentioned holding certain reservations over aspects of the pragmatic dharma movement. What would have to change to better align it with buddhadharma?
What the Buddha spoke of is a shift in perception. He spoke of seeing things as they really are. And this is the essence of Awakening. […]
He used the word Awakening because it’s like being in a dream, and then waking up and recognizing that you were in a dream. And seeing how things really are.
Keywords: naturalization of the dharma, paṭicca-samuppāda, paṭicca-samuppāda is the dharma; the dharma is paṭicca-samuppāda, there is nothing that is outside the realm of causality, nothing is super-natural, experiences vs states vs traits
I have certain benign addictive behaviors that sometimes overtake my life: sugar, shopping. I’ve looked into twelve-step programs, but they talk about surrendering to a higher power. Is this possible in the context of Buddhism?
Keywords: refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the saṅgha
If I’m understanding intention correctly, isn’t there an implication that an adept meditator can influence the collective unconscious, and thus the world itself, very strongly through the use of repeatedly sustained intentions?
Keywords: karma is intention
00:38:41 Are there any resources that might be helpful in better understanding this?
We talk in TMI about recognizing that you are not doing this, that it’s all through intention. You form and hold intentions. And intentions lead to actions. And intentions and actions repeated long enough become habits, they become automatic.
So we speak of this as though, you know, it’s just a means, a device, a part of the meditation process, a way to make your meditation work better, and to give you a more healthy relationship to the meditation process—rather than striving, and selfing, and “I’ve gotta do this”, things like that.
We present is this way, but at its heart, it is the deepest part of the dharma. Through developing the mindfulness to recognize and to direct the intentions, the Mind-System liberates itself.
You have mentioned that there are different ways that stream entry might occur. For example throught the progress of insight stages, through a PCE, or throught a gradual series of lesser awakenings.
Keywords: pure consciousness experience (PCE) | consciousness without an object (CWO), cessation · nirodha, nirvana · nibbāna
00:47:04 You’ve also mentioned the value of repeating fruitions. For a person who has entered the stream gradually, or through a PCE, what approaches, activities etc. would make further fruitions more likely?
For somebody for whom it happened gradually, […] what you’re doing is becoming fully conscious of the difference, the distinction between the way you perceived yourself, and the world, and your relationship to it [and how you saw things before].
Because all of these Insights mature and deepen throughout the four paths that were described by the Buddha (and the fourth path is a path), and it continues throughout this process. Your initial understanding of these Insights continues to deepen, it continues to mature, it continues to open up new dimensions.
And there is a process of bringing more and more of your Mind-System at every level into, first of all, a state of perceiving things through Insight rather than through our consensual shared reality that we have, and then, as that spreads, then the deepening, the maturing, the multidimensional aspect of those very same Insights, that also starts in certain parts of the Mind-System and needs to spread to others.
And so, holding in consciousness—rememeber, consciousness is how all of these parts of the Mind-System are ultimately communicating with each other—so holding clearly in your mind the understanding that is the gift of Insight, and its distinction from, and its differences from the delusion that you lived in before will serve the same purpose as the fruition experience.
As a matter of fact, I would put more weight on this practice of intentionally and consciously holding the state of Insight in a very powerful form as being the most important thing to do.
Keywords: experiencing the world from the perspective of Insight
Could you please say a little more about gross distractions in Stage 4 as opposed to Stage 2, and telling the difference?
I would like to ask about using an electronic reminder for a brief time in conjunction with intention at Stage 3—as a reminder to check in every 5–6 breaths.
Please discuss/clarify/expand on your recent comments regarding your view of the distinctions between naturalist, pragmatic and secular dharma Buddhism. I’d like to have a clearer understanding of what it means to be a naturalist, and a clearer view of where the naturalist’s path diverges from that of a secularist and a pragmatist.
Keywords: naturalization of the dharma, distinguishing the Buddha’s original teaching from what was added, supernatural and non-verifiable notions in various presentations of the dharma, the Buddha as a phenomenologist, dhamma in the sense of contents of consciousness, comparative studies of the Suttas, no reincarnation, past lives, consciousness is not Self, mind is not Self, the Buddha’s redefinitions, rebirth as rebirth of self as mental formation, karma is intention, comparing the Buddha’s redefinitions and Newtonian and relativistic physics
Follow-Up: I previously had thought that your explanation of experiencing past lives of others to be a supernatural-related event. Am I correct in understanding that for you the distinction of something supernatural vs. not naturalistic is that you’re able to exprience it?
Keywords: our individual minds are not really separate, the past is not something that is gone, non-dualism, materiality, mentality, suchness, life is your one great creation, Zhuangzi (Wikipedia (Culadasa makes a reference to it)
You mentioned on a podcast that you were doing research into fire kasiṇa to see if it had any potential to help developing meditators. Do you feel like it may be useful for advancing one’s practice as an object of attention in place of the breath for people who are more visually oriented, or are you finding that as more of a toy to play with once one already has developed concentration?
If it can be a useful tool, at what TMI stage do you see it fitting in?
Keywords: murk, jhāna, access concentration · upacāra-samadhi, fire kasiṇa is the last kasiṇa mentioned in Visuddhi-Magga, brain stimulation, neurofeedback, deep brain stimulation with ultrasound, positive psychology, Jeffrey Martin, getting in touch with emotions through body awareness
Can you talk a bit in detail about intention and holding intentions?
How does one develop a sensitivity and ability to be mindful of intentions, and to evoke them like we do with loving-kindness and metta?
I have an example of what works and doesn’t work, but I don’t know how to generalize it. What works during breath meditation, I mentally say “vividness” as my mindfulness of the vividness of the breath waning. What doesn’t work, in walking meditation, I’ve heard the instruction to notice the intention to move before you move.
Keywords: intention · cetanā, intention forms before one becomes conscious of it, dukkha-ñana, knowledge of fear vs knowledge of fearfulness
Duplicates: 1
In TMI you mentioned that Insight into No-Self was what brings people to achieve first path. You’ve also mentioned elsewhere that there are different gateways from first path to second path, and that that affects the progression of how one achieves third path and beyond.
I was wondering if you could talk about different progressions that could happen.
Depending on which is the experiential gateway, and which is the Insight that triggers the deepening of, really all of the Insights, that leads to this empowerment, that will have a certain effect on the way the person experiences the work of second path: whether it’s the focus on craving gives rise to dukkha, or whether it’s the focus on craving is an indicator of self-clinging.
Keywords: four applications of mindfulness - mindfulness of mental states, ten fetters, craving for craving, suffering as tranlation of dukkha: dukkha covers the entire range of dissatisfaction from the sublest to most extreme forms, relationship between self-clinging, craving, dukkha
Follow-Up: It’s really interesting that there are different gateways. I was also thinking, how does that affect progression beyond second path? Because I’ve heard people say, once you’ve achieved first path, progression to the second path is almost natural, but to go beyond that is a lot more difficult.
Keywords: metacognitive awareness · sāti-sampajañña, effortless stable attention · absorption concentration · appana-samadhi, Yuganaddha-Sutta (Sutta), śamatha and vipassanā, states vs traits
If one were to achieve first path from Insight into interconnectedness, resulting in a few-week long No-Self experience, and brought on by experiencing the introspective links of dependent origination, but not while meditating, would you recommend doing any specific practices to attempt to recreate the insight experience? Would this advice change depending on their current TMI stage?
Keywords: experiencing the world from the perspective of Insight
Can you please elaborate on the material in Stages 4 and 5, and the moments of consciouness model regarding the best approach to setting conscious intention to generate perceiving moments of attention and awareness?
At Stage 5, I see multiple conscious intentions: intention to observe the meditation object, intention to maintain continuous extro- and introspective awareness, intention to detect subtle dullness, intention to intensify vividness of attention; but when sitting in the Stage 4–5 zone after completing the Stage 4 transition, and while at breath at the nose, I’m not sure how to handle these multiple intentions best, and what an optimal approach feels like.
Do I consciously set each separate intention one after the other, or is it better to somehow fuse multiple intentions into a single, holistic meta-intention which is asserted continuously?
Follow-Up: When I was reading Stage 5, I became really interested in generating more perceiving mind-moments with the conscious intention being a means to acheive that. Now I feel like I’m juggling all these different intentions. Is it wrong to feel like there should be a feeling of this intention-setting?
I know it’s a mental activity; it almost feels like attention, actually. But as I was reading it, it almost felt like there’s a feeling to it.
The feeling to intention, that’s how intention is manifesting continuously in awareness.
[Someone else mentioned] doing things like repeating the word “vividness” […] to act as a trigger to help them zero-in, focus-in, maintain that attention, and not get into dullness.
There’s nothing wrong with doing things like that, but what you’re doing when you do that is you’re actually taking attention away from the breath to shift it to the concept of intention and the word “vividness”. So that’s fine as an initial kind of approach, but you want to let that go […].
Instead, the intention begins to just be the framing of your mind. It’s sort of the background state of your mind that [has a continuous sense of] “I know where I’m heading”.
And where the emphasis is, you just go with the feeling.
Follow-Up: I’m trying to stay away from a lot of concepts when I’m doing this. I’m trying not to add a bunch of layers that I know I’m going to have to try and remove later.
Am I correct in understanding that it’s probably not a good thing to be trying to work with the concept “I’m intenting to create more perceiving mind-moments”? Is that a skillful thing to try to do initially?
There are ten stages in TMI, and sixteen parts in the Ānāpānasati Sutta. Is there a correlation between TMI stages, and the parts of the Ānāpānasati Sutta? If there is a correlation, how do they match up?
Keywords: Satipatthana
I’ve listened to virtually all of the guided meditations found on dharmatreasure.org. In all the cases I can remember, the guided meditations begin with a period of open awareness, being in the present moment with sounds and bodily sensations, and only giving attention to the thoughts that pertain to bodily adjustments in the present moment.
Matthew Immergut described this as being the entry protocol. I’ve never heard that you formally discussed this after having listened to all of your discourses that are available on Dharma Treasure, and I wonder what you deem to be important lessons to be learned during this entry protocol.
Please, can you shed some light on the phrase yoniso manasikāra, which often appears in the Suttas? In one sutta, the Buddha says it is the food for development of mindfulness and clear comprehension.
Keywords: ayoniso manasikāra, virtue · sīla, sāti, sāti-sampajañña
I was wondering if you could talk more about the significance of the kriyās and the best way to work with them.
Since the Mahasi retreat I did in May last year, most of my sits have included some form of involuntary arm movements, some vigorous arm and hand flapping, and sometimes it’s smoother yoga-like postures, often it is accompanied by tension in the middle of the head. I attended another retreat last week, and the energy disappeared on the third day, but the day after, the movements were back again.
Prior to the retreat, I had also sometimes started getting odd facial contortions. It’s nothing unmanageable, although it’s not particularly enjoyable either.
I’d just like to know the best way to work with the energy as it has been quite some time since it originally began.
Keywords: yoga, qigong, taichi, aikido, kriya yoga, kundalini yoga
My friend is having problems with the practice. He has social anxiety, which makes working on the Eightfold Path either impossible, or extremely difficult. The intensity of the hindrances and ego is such that his attempts to progress throught the Stages have been cyclic for more than two years. Falling off the practice, falling asleep while trying to meditate. We wonder whether a retreat would change critical conditioning that would allow him to sustain a regular practice. We’ve heard that retreats do put you on the higher stages, but people fall back again to the start when they leave the retreat.
In last Q&A you mentioned that you were exploring the role of additional practices to develop body awareness. I wonder what falls into this category, and how it relates to the Stages. Feldenkrais, yoga, qigong can be done without explicitly working with energy, and develop general body awareness. Or are you thinking more in lines of working with energy itself, and trying to feel it, and learning to lead it?
01:19:11 What relationship do you see in training of such practice to the stages in TMI, or is this more or less independent?
Duplicate 0: Can you talk a bit in detail about intention and holding intentions?
How does one develop a sensitivity and ability to be mindful of intentions, and to evoke them like we do with loving-kindness and metta?
I have an example of what works and doesn’t work, but I don’t know how to generalize it. What works during breath meditation, I mentally say “vividness” as my mindfulness of the vividness of the breath waning. What doesn’t work, in walking meditation, I’ve heard the instruction to notice the intention to move before you move.
How important of helpful do you think it is for beginning students to work with an instructor trained in the approach taught in The Mind Illuminated?
Is it useful for one to specifically practice awareness of sounds or visual objects in order to strengthen introspective awareness of those senses, or can one obtain the same clarity through body awareness alone?
I find that althought my body awareness is good, and I’m sometimes aware of thought through the body door before they manifest, at other times I’m still caught off-guard by auditory or visual thoughts. Would specific practice with those senses strengthen awareness of them?
Follow-Up: Is it actually useful to sometimes select an object of attention of that particuar sense door in order to strengthen awareness of that sense?
[In Stages 1–3,] when you know that there’s something that you haven’t had in awareness previously, you will almost involuntarily direct your attention to it, and then if you have the intention to keep it in your awareness, then attention goes back to the meditation object, that continues to be a part of your awareness. […]
This is how in interaction between attention and awareness, attention is going try to fulfill the intention of being more aware, and it actually does that by flagging things in awareness that you want to continue to be aware of.
But eventually that stops happening, and there’s no need to redirect attention towards those things.
I would like to know, what are the difference between feeling and emotion. I’m experiencing changes in my ego-structure, and I experience different things that could be called emotion, and qualitatively speaking they are very different.
Keywords: feeling · vedanā
You define mindfulness as the optimal interplay of awareness and attention. From what I can gather, we usually aim for a majority of attention mind moments, and a fewer, yet consistent amount of awareness mind moments. Can you expand on how variable this ratio should ideally be throughout the many circumstances of life?
Keywords: attention guided by awareness, attention dominating ordinary conscious experience, at the expense of awarenes, revisions to TMI, circularity in the TMI definition of mindfulness, attentionless, awareness-only states, mindfulness is awareness, `initial purpose of stabilizing attention is to get it out of the way, to allow awareness to develop
Follow-Up: Could I ask for a clarification? How can sāti be mindfulness and awareness at the same time, and mindfuless be the optimal interaction between attention and peripheral awareness?
My understanding of intention as applied in Stage 2 is as follows: one sub-mind aware that there is a meditation project in progress, acting through consciousness, voluntarily directs attention to the sensations of the breath at the nose. One unconscious sub-mind announces to consciousness a determination to act, as in “follow and sustain attention on the breath sensations at the nose” (Stage 2 practice guide, p. 29). This is setting an intention.
A number of subconsciousness minds that are tuned into consciousness at the time, hear the recommendation and join in to support the effort of “following and sustaining attention on the breath sensations at the nose”.
When one of the team of sub-minds notices that attention has left the breath, it alerts consciousness, which redirecting sub-mind here as in then involuntarily redirects attention to the breath.
As this happens over and over, more and more sub-minds get onboard, and the redirecting becomes a mental habit.
Questions:
What is your opinion on/experience of the different realms and their inhabitants described in Buddhist texts?
Both in the Theravādan and the Tibetan traditions, you con find numerous accounts of the Buddha and other saints travelling to other realms, and meeting different forms of beings, but then again you can find in both traditions teachers who see all of it as a huge metaphor.
I think this together with reincarnation is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for Westerners entering the dhamma, so your views would really be helpful.
I’d like to ask a bit more about interaction between karma and rebirth. The Buddha said that you should amass good karma to have a good rebirth in one of these different realms. Would it then be another metaphor for the next moment of consciouness?
Keywords: rebirth as rebirth of self as mental formation, modifications to the Suttas, comparative studies of the Suttas, karma is intention
Can you please discuss how a practitioner can better understand the line between the skillfulness or diligence on the one hand, and hindrance of striving/over-efforting on the other?
I recently realized that I have been exerting way too much energy into seeking an intellectual/analytical understanding of the concepts in TMI and dharma, and I find myself taking a much more relaxed approach. Or perhaps too relaxed?
For example, I find myself preferring to stay in step 2 of the four-step transition seeking to become more grounded and aware of body sensations with less motivation to engage in the highly energetic/focused following and connecting to the breath that I was doing previously.
I now feel much more calm and grounded during my sits, which counters the anxiety that I have been experiencing on the regular basis, but I wonder if I’m not exerting enough diligence as I’m spending more time wandering and in distractions.
Per your guidance last month, I’m endeavoring to become more skillful in the use of intention, but I’m still a bit hazy as how to maintain an appropriate balance of intention and diligence, while avoiding striving.
Keywords: No-Self, deconstructing Self, Self as agent, Self as observer
Do you feel that a dry insight practice prepares someone for the work of first path? And is there a difference in the character, or depth, or intensity of the material which arises for purification on first path as compared to before?
Keywords: Self as mental fabrication, personality view as mental fabrication, inherent sense of being a separate self as mental fabrication
I experiece pīti-like waves of sensations when off the cushion, while standing, sitting or lying, as well as other prominents sensations off the cushion, and I wonder what the best way to approach these experiences is. Is it best to recollect what may have preceded their onset to reproduce them, to use them as a reminder to practice awareness of the breath at the nostrils, to ignore them, or some other method of utilizing them? Also, what do you see as the differences between the body-scan techniques, and associated intentions that you teach, and those taught by U Ba Khin, Goenka.
Keywords: qigong, taichi, prāṇa, aikido, kundalini yoga, kriya yoga, skin as a thin shell
In TMI, you advocate a combination of concentration and Insight practice, whereas in MCTB, Daniel advocates separating the two practices. However, in Stage 7, you give two separate practices: close following and cultivating the pleasure jhānas. Clearly, they both require some level of concentration and Insight. The close following seems to be more of an Insight practice since it involves investigation of the sensations, breaking them apart to see impermanence, whereas jhāna is more of a concentration practice in which one is absorbed in the breath as one object, which can’t be investigated/broken apart without breaking the absorption. In Stage 7 and onwards, how should one decide how much investigation to apply?
Keywords: stable attention · samadhi, directed attention · vitakka, sustained attention · vicāra, flow state, exclusive stable attention · access concentration · upacāra-samadhi, effortless stable attention · absorption concentration · appana-samadhi, still point | witness, meditating on the mind
Sometimes it seems like you can emphasize the pleasurable smoothness that is leading towards jhāna, or you could go the other way and break down everything and continue looking more impermanence, and it’s not necessarily as pleasurable.
I was wondering, how does one decide which one is more appropriate at any given time?
I believe during a Q&A, you mentioned that exploring hypnagogia mindfully would be interesting, and maybe beneficial. Do you have suggestions on mindfully study hyphagogic states?
Depending on what stage of the practice you’re in, you may experience [hyphagogia] with the onset of strong dullness. As progressive subtle dullness moves into strong dullness, hyphagogic imagery arises.
Keywords: hypnopompia, lucid dreaming
00:22:58 Do you see any correlation between synesthesia and seeing the breath in the way that Pa-Auk jhānas are practiced, and how does that compare to the synesthesia of an acid trip, seeing the music?
Keywords: psychedelics
In one of your Q&As, you answered a question about formal and informal practices from second to third path. It was extemely helpful for my practice. What practices do you recommend for third to fourth path?
Keywords: inherent sense of being a separate self, existential angst, ten fetters, still point · witness, meditating on the mind, mindfulness in daily life, surrendering, craving is resistance to what is, non-duality of Self an Other, non-duality of mind an matter, non-duality of being an non-being, dwelling in suchness
I find that if I take awareness as object of my meditation, and then I can watch that watcher, and then I take the watcher as my object, and then it dissolves, and I go to a non-dual state. Is this a good practice?
Do you think there are any common misconceptions of the Middle Way?
Keywords: buddhadharma, No-Self · anatta, no reincarnation, karma is intention
An article entitled The spotlight of attention is more like a strobe, say researchers.
The heart of the universe is process; there is nothing to hold on to. Would you say that not two, not one is what you are directing us to?
I’m at a stage where most days after a few minutes, halfway through the four-step transition I got lots of meditative joy and tranquility going, which to me sounds like Stage 8. The body is feeling really nice, awarereness seems expanded, and I sense thoughts and feelings as vibrations most of the time. It feels natural to do the witness or meditation on the mind. If I do this though, I will subtle gross distractions after some time. When I try to do Stage 4 then, I don’t really feel sensations at the nose. Everything feels so expansive that it feels kind of forced to make these solid sensations.
I’ve been reading the Theravādan suttas, and also some Mahāyāna sutras. The practice of the jhānas seems almost central to the path. Samma-samadhi is even defined as the jhānas. What are your thoughts on how and why the jhānas became so obscured in most present-day traditions? Also, in TMI, they don’t seem necessary for progress. Could you comment on that?
Keywords: jhāna factors, Majjhima Nikāya 111 - Anupadasutta (One by One) (Sutta), Brahamas going from the first jhāna straight to the formless jhānas, correspondence of jhanas to the last four of the ten TMI stages
A few years ago, you reported promising results combining neurofeedback training and meditation in a ten-day retreat. What’s your current opinion on the combo? Thanks in advance, and I hope you’re feeling well.
Until 16th century, chairs were luxury items, and 2500 years ago, they would have been rare. Perhaps the Buddha didn’t have a chair, and that’s the only reason he meditated while sitting on the floor. Is there a significant advantage that the cushion has over the chair other than portability? I’ve seen it argued that the lotus position is best for keeping the spine straight, and therefore preventing dullness. If I understand correctly from TMI, encountering dullness is inevitable anyway.
I wondered if you could give your understanding of the term dharmakāya, especially in reference to creative and fulfillment meditative practice.
Keywords: Buddha-nature · tathāgata-garbha, nirmāṇakāya
What is your understanding of rigpa in Dzogchen, if you are familiar with this term?
As one discovers in the progression through Insight, there’s a realization at some point that in the knowing there’s only the knowing. The knowing happens. Just happens. It’s independent of any knower, or even of any known. That neither of those is anything more than a projection of the mind onto the fact of knowing in order to make it into the kind of information that we can use and do things with. […]
[I]n deep states of meditation, there is a direct experince of that. The realization that there’s only the knowing, there’s only this primordial awareness, or this clear light of mind, this rigpa. And that it’s not just a phenomenon of the individual mind that comes to this realization, but that it is universal.
Keywords: information exchange, paṭicca-samuppāda
Regarding your model describing ultimate reality, which includes:
Could you please expain how your past training and experience in neuroscience and meditative experiences, reading the suttas, and reading about the historical changes of the suttas, and any other sources have led you to create this provisional model of ultimate reality?
Please correct any summarization of the model which I haven’t correctly stated.
Keywords: knowing that you don’t know, non-dualism, nirvana as extinguishing, cessation, suchness, rigpa, information exchange
Follow-Up: I guess, I was thinking specifically more about the idea of lack of reincarnation, and that interpretation, and what the source of that was.
[The Buddha] used the term rebirth to refer to the rebirth of the Self as a construct of the mind. And your Self, a person’s Self gets reborn over and over, and over again.
And in each new being that’s born, the Self is born, but this is not a particualr Self. This is just that illusion of Self that’s constantly being reborn.
The Self of one individual is identical to the Self of another in that it is an illusion that has exactly the same properties.
Keywords: rebirth as rebirth of self as mental formation, the Self of one individual is identical to the Self of another, The Buddha and Sāti the fisherman’s son (Sutta reference
For the past couple of years I’ve been dealing with nihilistic perspectives. There are times when I feel deeply depressed and start worrying about taking my own life because of the toll these perspectives have on me. I’ve sought therapy, which has led me to you and your teachings, and so I’m seeking guidance from you on how to deal with these feelings of meaninglessness.
I don’t know how dense the answer to this question may be, so I’ll be appreciative of any resources, practices, teachings from others you have to offer as well.
Beauty doesn’t need a purpose. Beauty just is.
Keywords: getting out of your Self
When I focus on the breath at the nostrils, and the sensations are very faint sometimes I only seem to be able to detect some during one-third of the exhale. Also, my inhale is very short, and my exhale very long, and I don’t feel much of it. I have many years of meditation experience, but I’m new to this method of focusing on the breath at the nose. Will I develop more sensitivity and be able to feel more with practice, or am I a case of someone who should focus on the movements of the abdomen instead—as I’ve heard you say in a talk on YouTube.
Keywords: sensations vs elaborations
In the previous months I’ve had many insights, and I’ve experienced the possibility of not creating mental suffering even in the face of very strong emotions like loss and fear, and now I feel that something in me is shifting. In many situations it previously triggered desire and aversion. I feel that my mind doesn’t react, and it is in sort of a stasis. It seems like the sub-minds don’t know how to respond, and when I respond in the old habitual way, aversion or desire arise, I dislike the sensation and the corresponding mind state. But in the same way it appears that there’s no response. It is a very strange phenomenon, and I’m not very comfortable with it.
I wonder how the process will continue to change me, and how it will impact my life.
Keywords: pain · dukkha of physical origin, suffering · dukkha of physical origin, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, the second arrow, craving, craving is resistance to what is
After Thanksgiving, we had a beautiful gratitude meditation yesterday. It was brought up to think of gratitude as the eleventh parameter. Could you in the same way you talked about love, talk about gratitude as well a little bit?
As a beginner, how do I handle intense trauma during meditation from a very bad breakup, or lovesickness and hurt in general?
Keywords: getting out of your Self
I think I’m looking for reassurance for my doubt more than anything else. I am a mother of young children, and I felt for some time that this path of meditation is my intended way, and I feel very dedicated. Though I am far from Enlightenment (Stage 3), I worry about how the path may change me. I sometimes think being a mother is one of those nature things that truly work because of attachment and other primal instincts. I think I’m just looking for some reassurance that all of this is compatible, and hopefully deeply beneficial for motherhood.
Keywords: love beyond attachment, spiritual evolution transcending biological evolution
I’ve practicing śamatha-vipassanā meditation by instructions from TMI for about two years, with the daily practice for about one hour during the last year. Right now most of the time is in Stage 5, some in Stage 6. Last March I’ve completed Goenka’s ten-day silent retreat, right now starting to plan the next one, and I would really like to join a retreat by some teachers because of vipassanā organization, determination of teaching completely dry insight without a lot of detailed guidance. Can you recommend any particular retreats by teachers you trust or give general advice on how to find monasteries or other places where I could possibly go on a reasonable budget, or maybe online resources with advice for finding retreats. I live in Russia, so I’m mostly able to travel to Europe or Asia, and hoping to find a place where I could practice śamatha-vipassanā mostly in the way you describe, or possible do a whole retreat dedicated to metta practice since I expect it to be very beneficial.
My current practice is pretty consistently Stage 5. Still working with subtle dullness at times, although sometimes I’m working at Stage 6 on occasions when I’m feelng pretty alert. I’ve had a few experiences that I would describe as a brief period of absorption, pacification of the mind along with feeling like I was metitating sideways, which isn’t always pleasant and sometimes causes very mild nausea during meditation. Since then, which was only a few days ago, I’ve notice a moderately strong tingling sensation on my arms, legs, parts of my face and head along with periods of very strong flushing in the arms that resembles a deep sunburn. These sensations happen even when I’m off the cushion, and I can feel these tingly sensations as I type this.
I’m trying not to make a huge deal out of these sensations, although they do sort of seem to ground me in the present moment when I focus on them, and they make body scanning seem almost effortless. I’m wondering if this is a grade of pīti, which grade it sounds like, and if it’s normal in meditative practice to have this type of pīti so early on.
I had an extremely unhappy childhood. I’ve suffered neglect, and physical and psychological abuse. My mother was psychotic, and my father violent.
For the past 20 years, I’ve studied and practiced the spiritual path—mainly Vajrayāna, but also Advaita and Zen. From talking to my teachers, instructors and gurus from these traditions, I’ve gathered that until I can completely forgive my parents, I can’t attain any realization. But I feel as though it would be the other way around. Because as long as have self-grasping, this Self has too much suffering to be able to forgive. But if I could have a realization of anatta first, forgiveness wouldn’t be a problem.
I guess my question is, is it possible to become a stream-enterer without having resolved all my past childhood traumas.
Keywords: Self as agent, Self as observer, virtue · sīla
I currently practice at Stages 4–6, sometimes 7, and often encounter strong dullness and fatigue in m sits resulting from the demands of work and parenting. Thanks to TMI’s instruction I can quickly diagnose dullness, and sometimes bring my energy level back up. However, often the dullness/drowsiness is too strong, in which case I try to work with it by observing the mind’s activities, including hypnagogic images, and thoughts, and the aversion to a dull mind. In TMI you say that continuing to practice with a dull mind still aids unification of mind, but I wonder whether there’s a point of diminishing returns. and how to diagnose it when that’s the case.
I am currently at Stage 4. After four-step transition to observing sensations at the nose, and doing that for five minutes, it seemed like I switched to a different way of perceiving them. Pulsating and vibrating. It also feels voluntary, i.e. I can switch back to normal perception, but then the sensations are very weak. Reading descriptions from TMI, I’m not sure whether this is acquired perception of the breath, or perception effects resulting from close following as described in later stages, or maybe something else, and I should return to normal perception, and make it stronger with body scanning for a while.
In your last Q&A session, you made an illuminating account of rigpa from Dzogchen. I would like to pose three follow-up questions.
In you Q&A session and the TMI book, you explain consciousness through the notion of information exchange. In the conventional dualistic framework there are two aspects to information. On the one hand, information can be interpreted syntactically, i.e. as a structural complexity of an object, and even measured as such. In computer science it is measured in bits, and in physics, in units of negative entropy. On the other hand, information ultimately requires a subject—someone who makes semantic sense of the information. Otherwise, information is synonymous with structural complexity.
Please correct me if I’m wrong. What is your non-dual interpretation of information?
Keywords: when a tree is falls in the forest, and there is no one there, does it make a sound, non-duality of duality and non-duality
Follow-Up: In artificial intelligence, they claim that they might create a conscious entity. Do you think if there’s a model of the human brain in terms of information exchange, will it have the consciounsess, subjectivity or will it be a model that just mimics a conscious entity?
Keywords: Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?`, hard problem of consciousness, subjectivity and memory
01:11:40 In addition, I suppose, some form of universal awareness, which in its rudimetary form is non-personal has to be presupposed. Panpsychism.
Information generation and information exchange are happening at absolutely every level. But that doesn’t mean subjectivity is happening at every level.
01:13:55 Ultimately, from a practitioner’s point of view, what do you think is implied by experiencing rigpa?
Keywords: any experience is the construct of the mind, mahamudra
From Stage 6, according to the Mind-System model, metacognitive awareness results from the activities of the narrating mind.
The narrating mind takes in, combines and integrates information projected into consciousness by other sub-minds, then projects that back as a binding moment of consciousness.
In most meditational conversations, the narrating mind is treated like the big bad wolf—something to avoid or eliminate, but from reading the above, it seems to be important part of the story.
Please address the skillful way to work with the narrating mind in Stage 6.
Keywords: Yogachara · Yogācāra (Wikipedia), [Eight Consciousnesses (Wikipedia), narrating mind · manas-vijñāna, unconscious mind · ālaya-vijñāna, turning of the basis · āśraya-parāvṛtti, default mode network ] delusion, not about giving up worldly things, history of Buddhism, misunderstandings of what the Buddha originally taught
I’m curious how you would characterize Zen Shikantaza in relation to TMI. How does it fit into the scheme of Buddhist meditation? Also, practices like mahamudra and Dzogchen. How does TMI relate to these practices?
Would you say that Awakening as a worldly person is much more difficult, hence the Buddha’s admonitions about renunciation?
[…] Geshe Dorjee said to me in a conversation where I brought up lay practice vs. monastic practice[, ]“Lay practice is much more difficult, but much more powerful than the monastic approach; the monastic approach is easier, but not as powerful”.
Keywords: Geshe Thupten Dorjee (Website)
The majority of any sangha has laypeople. Would you agree that a famous awakened being would be capable of an enormous impact in the world?
Keywords: awakened women
Do you think the same happened with Christianity?
What resources do you recommend for reading the original buddhadhamma?
Keywords: things from other religions in the suttas as later introductions, Advaita Vedānta, contradictions in the suttas as later introductions, Buddha’s redefinitions, buddhadharma agrees with reason, Gödel’s theorem, buddhadharma can be verified experientially
I’m currently in Stage 0 despite attempting to transition to Stage 1 for years. I aimed to a one-hour sit. Not once have I lasted that long, and in fact I haven’t atempted to sit for weeks. To be fair, I just came out of a long depression, and my self-discipline and motivation are recovering back from extremely low levels. I intellectually understand that meditation is crazy good for you, yet I haven’t been able to transform that knowledge into fuel to fire up my motivation and anchor myself onto the pillow. I guess, my question would be about self-motivation. Something along the lines of how to build up the intention of sitting when motivation is in negative shortly after I sit.
From the perspective of the dharma, what are the most important methods to use in communication with your spouse and children. For example, raising children in a way that points them in the direction of Awakening, mindful listening etc. Also, from the dharma point of view, how to approach deciding whether to have a child considering the future suffering that a new human being will inevitably experience.
I understand that the path to Awakening is rewiring the brain to perceive reality in a manner that is a better approximation of the truth rather than what evolution deemed important for the propagation of genes. I’ve heard that the most successfully enlightened people are able to selectively tune into these viewpoints when they are useful, and then drop back into their standard experience of Self when it’s appropriate. I’m wondering if there’s a risk of going too deep to the point where one is not able to live a normal life in society because they are physically unable to return to the state of separate Self. For instance, there is a condition called mirror touch synesthesia which causes individuals to experience a similar sensation in the same part of the body, such as touch that another person feels, which could imply that they have a permanent impairment of their sense of Self.
[I]t’s not like you’re going into some other place and coming out of it. It’s just that when it’s appropriate, this way of seeing things arises. And when this way of seeing things arises, it allows you to participate in that wholeness, which is where your awareness resides. And as a matter of fact, it’s not even your awareness, it’s just a local manifestation of the awareness of that wholeness itself, of suchness itself. So it’s something that suchness does that manifests locally, that allows local activity.
[Y]ou recognize that the relative truth is a necessary part of that greater truth in order for something in the form of a human being to participate in that greater dance of wholeness.
Keywords: falling away of sense of separateness, non-duality of being and non-being
I found your description of third path and people who wander off into the cave on third path to be quite interesting. You probably heard Jeffrey Martin talk about the path of the world, and the path of freedom. And sounds very much like you’re referring to his path of freedom when you talk about the people who wander off into the cave.
Once one has achieved stream entry, is there a way to cultivate moving into the unfolding paths, so to speak, to Awakening?
Keywords: ten fetters, first to second path, second to third path, satipaṭṭhāna, addiction to craving · craving for craving
In what situation you would recommend dry insight practices over śamatha-vipassanā? You said in an interview that dry insight didn’t work for you, but śamatha did. Daniel Ingram said in an interview he was struggling with concentration until he came across the noting practice as taught by Mahasi Sayadaw. Is there a way to tell which practice would work for which student?
Keywords: history of Buddhism, śamatha and jhāna
What is the difference between the knowledge that comes from tapping into the resonance of others who’ve had prior experiences; those moments that we spontaneously have have access to abilities, information without prior experiences, training and the knowing that gives access to experience based on information before the events occur as well as the thoughts and experience of others that one has direct, unsolicited access to.
If neuroplasticity is a direct result of meditation, do you feel that it may be possible to alter DNA in the same way? If we can grow and reroute neural pathways, it seems plausible that the same rerouting would be possible in the coding of proteins within the DNA. Science, impermanence or both.
I hope I’m not being off-topic in the question. I play guitar, and also sing. I’ve also read that you play an instrument, sitar. What are some suggestion you have to approach these two activities simultaneously, in the mindful way.
Stage 4. Strong and intense body and face movements, together with energy throught the body. Supposed to be normal during meditation? Happened in two or three sessions, and a few during the day to a lesser extent.
Some of them resemble my total posture reprogramming, and others resemble a reaction from fear with memories.
Keywords: purification of mind, Dark Night
Could you comment on the two types of dependent origination: the Theravādan concept of a temporal dependent origination—one thing happens after the next, and the more Tibetan, Mahāyāna type—dependent co-origination? It’s a subtle, and a very powerful and important difference. How does that impact the way that we conceive of, or perceive reality, and this very foundation of the buddhadharma, which is dependent origination.
Keywords: Huayan (Wikipedia), Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, Joanna Macy - Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (Open Library), the present moment contains within it the entirety of the past and a total potentiality of the future, interconnectedness of the moment · mutual causality and interdependence, suchness, paṭicca-samuppāda
Duplicate: I’m currently in Stage 0 despite attempting to transition to Stage 1 for years. I aimed to a one-hour sit. Not once have I lasted that long, and in fact I haven’t atempted to sit for weeks. To be fair, I just came out of a long depression, and my self-discipline and motivation are recovering back from extremely low levels. I intellectually understand that meditation is crazy good for you, yet I haven’t been able to transform that knowledge into fuel to fire up my motivation and anchor myself onto the pillow. I guess, my question would be about self-motivation. Something along the lines of how to build up the intention of sitting when motivation is in negative shortly after I sit.
My carreer has caused me a good deal of suffering. Not becaused it’s misaligned with Buddhist values, but because it’s not fully aligned with my values or aptitudes. Meditation has eased the suffering over the past few years, but I still feel a deep longing for something more creative and meaningful to me. In this way, hopefully, I can maximize benefit to others as well. My question is: related to career, or other big facets of life, how do we disentangle simple aversion from following the heart’s true path? When is it wise to keep the course, and get to the root of suffering, and when is it wise to make a change?
Duplicate: Intellectually, I’m struggling to reconcile having worldly goals in my life with the mission of Awakening. It seems like having career goals, and romantic attachments, sexual desires, the worldly life—these are ultimately delusions based on craving and narratives about the Self. Wouldn’t the eradication of craving ultimately mean abandoning these things as superficial, and the subsequent adoption of a monastic-like lifestyle.
Would an awakened being even have a calling in life? A writer, an artist, a scientist, a CEO?
Isn’t the motivation behind these creative activities ultimately craving?
Would an arhat have sex? Would they want to if desire was truly gone?
Aren’t worldly goals just delusions based on craving?
How do you reconcile living a modern Western lifestyle with fetishes, achievement, career, sex, fame, finding a romantic partner as the ideal forms of happiness with the dharma, which sees through these things?
Modern life seems designed to provoke craving in us. I practice around Stage 9, and I consider myself to be very happy, but the pressures of the world like finding a job, providing for the future chip away at my happiness. I say this, but I also feel like sometimes the dharma, or at least the cult of renunciation can be life-denying.
But then I wonder if that’s just me rationalizing not wanting to give up things like sex for being an artist, or achieving something with my life.
These worldly things are fun, but they also come with stress, but at the same time, I don’t want to, in this stage of my life, live like a monk. Even though I know it’s all ultimately ridiculous.
There is a conflict here, I feel, between Western values and dharma, which tells you to give up worldly things. Western Buddhism seems to say you can have your cake and eat it too while using techniques that were originally designed for monastics retreating from the world.
Keywords: lay followers of the Buddha, layman Citta, the best teacher of the dharma, coming back to the marketplace, Geshe Thupten Dorjee (Website), true love vs transactional relationships, Serenity Prayer (Wikipedia), craving · tanha vs. zeal ·chanda, vedanā
I have a question about the subjective value of Enlightenment. In a blog post, Shinzen Young says, “If I was given the choice of living one more day expreriencing life the way I experience it, or living 20 more years as a wealthy, healthy celebrity/sexual athlete beloved by everyone, but not experiencing what I experience, vis-à-vis, Enlightenment, the decision would be a no-brainer: I’ll take the one day of enlightened living.” Would you agree with this, and more generally, is there any amount of material success that would subjectively seem better, than even one hour of enlightened living? Such comparisions seem enormously helpful for me to generate motivation to meditate.
I sent a question a few months ago about my heart rate suddenly increasing to such an extent that it felt like dying after a kind of insight experience. This happened again, but in a deeper way than before. I’m writing this question as I’m having my monthly two-day retreat. I am at Stage 7.
The meditation sessions started very sharp, and soon after I entered a jhāna. Around 30–40 minutes later, suddenly I felt as though my senses were dissolving, but it happened consciously as I suddenly felth this happening. Everything didn’t dissolve all at once, but it was more of a slow dissolving that seemed like rapid movement. Existence seemed rapid, very quickly my senses disappeared; even my sense of being in the body vanished. As this happened a strange sensation of spinning around very fast became the one thing I felt. As if I was sitting on a wheel that someone was turning very fast. But the strangest thing was that I had no feeling as if my body was spinning. Just as if I were spinning without the body.
Not long after this happened, maybe a minute or so, or even less after the experience started, again my heart felt as if it was beating out of my chest, and I was about to die if I gave in. I wanted to give in fully, but somewhere it was still blocking me from doing so. The strangest thing was that I felt sort of at peace, just my heart was going like crazy, but it didn’t feel as if I was panicking. The only non-happy feeling I felt was not fully giving in to it, if that makes sense. This entire experience lasted, I think, 10–13 minutes or so.
I’m writing this the day after the experience. Somehow my mind woke me up after 3 hours of sleep with heart palpitations that have been active, but decreasing during the day.
For several days now, I’ve been having heart palpitations that sometimes make it impossible to sleep. I also felt nauseous, and even noticed my stool has turned yellow. A sign of stress or anxiety.
My question is: is this normal, and is this a result of an Insight not being fully accepted by some sub-minds, perhaps? Also, have you seen this kind of experience with any of your other students?
Keywords: sleep apnea
I’ve been meditating for almost 4 years now, and for the last year and a half, I have a terrible problem with tension and the resulting pain in the muscles of my face. As my stability of attention improves, the tension increases. Even doing walking meditation, when my attention on the feet gets more exclusive, my face will tighten up. My skill level has decreased significantly over hundreds of hours of daily one and a half hour sits. I can only seem to keep the tension at bay by backing off from effort—so much that I’m barely keeping the sensation at my nose in the periphery. Every time I get to around Stage 5, the tension and pain set in, and I have to drop back to Stage 2.
Do you think chanting and mantras are a good adjunct to meditation? I had a strong spiritual experience with chanting years ago, so I find myself drawn to it. But as the Stage 3–4 TMI meditator, I wonder if time for spiritual practice is better spent on getting down to the nuts and bolts of meditation.
Keywords: No-Self · anattā, flow state, jhāna, Interconnectedness · paṭicca-samuppāda
I have an impression that a big part of improving concentrated meditation has to do with one’s ability to relax moment by moment, without inviting dullness to the experience. So how does surrendering to the experience, or to the situation affect one’s ability to go into deeper stages of meditation? Are there certain stages of meditation where surrender plays an important role compared to others? Can we only surrender to experiences which are perceived as negative, but not enjoyable ones?
When you surrender to positive and negative experiences, it has kind of opposite effects. You can fully enjoy what is pleasurable, without any attachment. As soon as some attachment develops, it’s palpabale how the degree to which you can fully experience it declines.
Same thing with an unpleasant experience. As soon as you begin to cling to it, you feel the dukkha associated with that increasing in severity.
When the Buddha gave instructions on the Second Noble Truth, he basically suggested to the bhikkus that he was speaking to, you try this, any time you experience a strong unpleasantness or pain, just simply surrender to it, and you’ll see that most of the suffering associated with it goes away. […]
When you experience pleasant things as a worldling, just as when you experience unpleasant things, you generate that second arrow of suffering. When as a worldling, you experience pleasant things, you create a lot of craving in association with it, and craving is basically suffering. So you mute the enjoyment, and you interfere with the enjoyment that would be a natural part of a pleasant experience.
If you surrender to it, then there’s nothing there. So you experience it exactly as it is. No more, no less.
Keywords: surrender, acceptance, letting go, let it come, let it be, let it go, not resisting · non-resistance, non-doing, craving, surrendering to the higher power, refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the saṅgha, three definitions of the saṅgha
Is there a reason for shifting to the abdomen before beginning the body scan in Stage 5. I have on occasion gone straight into the body scan from attention on the breath at the nostrils. Is this problematic in some way?
How intense can a shift in the brain after Insight be on our personality, tastes, hobbies, considering how they were before it? Are things dropped out of the blue, or is the process continuous throughout our periods of mindfulness?
Keywords: personality quirks getting exaggerated in awakened people
Follow-Up: Could you elaborate on what you mentined before regarding restlessness and non-specific anxiety?
Keywords: Dark Night
Is having the Insight something evident? How can one make sure that their mind has deeply understood them?
I had a deep insight experience many years ago. As it has matured, I felt an increasing ambivalence toward meditation. It’s less that my mind is actively resisting it, and more that it just doesn’t see how it will help cultivate further insight. I can see how it might help refine my concentration skills, but that is a different story. Through listening to your previous lectures, Q&A sessions, I’ve come to understand that at a certain point you seem to advocate that one must increasingy be out in the world rather than in a cave. To me this implies that the effectiveness, and therefore the importance of formal meditation must diminish at a certain point on the spiritual path, namely after one gained stream entry. Can you please comment on this?
Can you discuss the influence of diet, in particular ketogenic diet and/or intermittent fasting in improving one’s ability to meditate? Especially for someone who is early on in the stages.
Can you talk about the lack of motivation for formal sitting meditation? Even after many insights, how does it improve my life? I actually see more and more when I compare myself to other people—superior, equal or inferior—and I succeed more and more in seeing this comparison as suffering, unstable and empty of Self, and this has lessened, and continues to lessen my stress immensely, and has opened many doors for compassion with others that feels more connected and natural. I find it very easy to let go of gross suffering; it is like an automatic process. Still, I’ve almost lost my motivation to meditate, and concentrate the mind. I always thought I was not skilled at concentration, but before the insights, my mind was really calm and workable, so I have that potential when my mind finds something pleasurable or useful. I rationally know that the mind was better than the one that I have now. I still have a lot of desire for sense pleasure, but I don’t feel motivated to use effort to get there.
Keywords: metacognitive awareness · mindfulness with clear comprehension · sāti-sampajañña, vipassanā
01:22:29 I read in the Majjhima Nikāya that the Buddha says that sensual pleasures give little gratification, and much suffering and distress, and they are all the more full of drawbacks. Even though an noble disciple has clearly seen this with right wisdom. So long as they don’t acheive the rapture and bliss that are apart from sensual pleasure and unskillful qualities, there’s something even more peaceful than that, they might still return to sensual pleasures. But when they do acheive that rapture or bliss, or something more peaceful than that, they will not return to sensual pleasures.
01:27:47 So what do I have to do? Build more faith in the Buddha’s comments? Develop the intention to stay more and more in open awareness, and try to feel pleasure in it? Should I work for the jhānas?
From your point of view, what would happen to the universe if all beings would stop clinging at once? If every being was enlightened?
In meditation, it occured to me the degree to which guilt creates a strong attachment to Self. Any means to resolve the guilt by means of apology or confession is an extremely selfish act. Although it can be appropriate, it is not necessarily for the other person. It is more about desiring to have things be different, to not feel badly etc. Intellectually, I can see that guilt will only fade away when it is seen through, and the circumstances are allowed to be just as they occurred. Can you offer any suggestions on how to work with guilt as an aspect of craving and desire, and its inherent means of clinging to Self?
Things over the past couple of weeks have become increasingly empty. And I’m finding that emptiness a little challenging to integrate into daily occurences.
Keywords: sensation · rūpa, perception · saññā, four paths, first to second path, second to third path, third to fourth path, suffering · dukkha, craving · taṇhā, suffering, Self-clinging, sense of Self
I have been meditating for years intermittently, and making no progress, but your book has given me a new understanding, and really healped. I feel like I’m getting stuck on the first step of the gradual four-step transition to the meditation object. When I let my attention wander, and it’s a quiet room, I pretty much slip into dullness—fall asleep without realizing it. I modified it to have some nature sounds like waves or birds singing in the background, and this works better as it gives my peripheral awareness something tangible to be aware of. How important is the first step of the gradual four-step transition, and how do I tell when I can move on from step one to step two, and so forth? As you’ve instucted, I’m willing to get the foundation down, so I’m willing to stick with it diligently. If this is a key step, any suggestions?
I have only recently noticed that when practicing Stages 4–6, I was blocking my thoughts. I did let them come, but not let them be. But I didn’t know that I was doing that, and it was very draining, a big source of anxiety. Attention without awareness puts too much feeling of control as thought I have to do with everything, and this paradox is not nice. Not to mention what people were saying. When this happened in practice, I thought I was reengaging with the breath, but actually I think I was not, it only felt like so.
00:45:20 With that in mind, I started to allow them to be there, and the very first session of doing it was full of good feelings and also positive changes in daily life even though attention did not seem quite strong, and things are better overall.
But regarding my practice, it seems that when I allow those thoughts to be there, two intentions are conficting. It looks like to know what I am allowing, and placing attention in them, so it conflicts with my intention to attend to the breath.
Keywords: Self, let it come, let it be, let it go
00:49:05 Difficulty with the faculties of awareness and attention, intention-wise. What would you recommend to deal with this situation in practice?
Keywords: attention doesn’t need to chase after objects of awareness anymore
I’ve been practicing around Stage 6 for some time, but seem to be struggling with metacognitive introspective awareness. While my plain old introspective awareness is relatively strong, and I’m aware of most of my thoughts before they have a chance to turn into gross distractions, it’s still very much awareness of the content of my thoughts. I don’t seem to be consitently able to be aware of just a thought arising without knowing its content, or indeed activities of the mind in general. I’m trying to hold the intention to observe states and activities of my mind, but maybe I’m doing it wrong.
And tips on strengthening metacognitive introspective awareness? Is the intention key, or are there any other tricks?
Are you familiar with what Ajahn Sumedho and Ajahn Amaro called the sound of silence. It is an all-pervasive sound that some people can hear enough to use as a meditation object.
For me, it is a very easy object to locate and practice with. Much better than the breath. In the later chapters of TMI, you mentioned something like this, and I’m curious if they are the same.
My primary question is, can this be used as a meditation object in TMI all the way throught the stages, and if so, how, and if not, why not?
Keywords: nāda yoga, sound and light meditation, vipassanā: seeing what’s really there (sensations) rather than the mental representation, sensory edge, The Five Aggregates · pañca-khandha
I’m currently doing the Stage 4 practice. At the last DPC meeting, someone asked about ADHD, and I believe you suggested his focus in Stage 4 should be on introspective awareness, and metacognitive introspective awareness rather than just watching out to stop subtle distractions from becoming gross distractions. Could you expand on this?
I’ve found that a lifelong ADHD has left me with awareness that seems to get immediately jumped on by attention—no deficit there! At the retreat in April, I seemed to be able to be doing Stage 6, the full-body breath sensation before it would collapse back into forgetting and mind-wandering. I think I had eliminated distractions by willpower, which clearly wasn’t the way to go. Eve Smith suggested stepping back a bit from the breath, and this seemed to have helped me start to see subtle distractions before they get gross.
Is it possible to say that the experience of the Still Point and that of the equanimity factor in the fourth jhāna are of the same nature/quality?
Keywords: `“blinders” in the flow state, Advaita Vedānta (Wikipedia)
What would you say are the causes of obstruction in the flow state from the Theravādan perspective?
Can physical pliancy come gradually? I am now able to sit for 1 hour with blissful comfort, which is quite new for me. Is it still a manifestation of physical pliancy, and will it be extending gradually, or it only counts when one can sit for hours?
There is the understanding of the emptiness of Self and impermanence. At times there can be brief moments of knowing that arises and passes away. I am wondering how to work with this, and maybe the idea that there is something to be worked with is a hindrance in itself?
Keywords: this question contains a lot of good discussion of Insight
For the past few years, I’ve been aware of feeling vibrations throughout various parts of my body when I’m not meditating. These vibratory sensations are most prominent in my feet, hands, but also felt throughout my extremities and trunk. They become most prominent when I’m sitting, standing still or lying down. For many years, I’ve also felt a sort of burning sensation at the tips of my fingers, sometimes when I start to urinate. These sensations are different from the pīti sensations that I experience sometimes as a sort of showers, or locally in my head, back or throughout my body. Sensation of pīti is like tingling, or bubbles bursting. The sensations that are aroused with yawning and sneezing are very similar to the tingling during meditation. My question is, what should I do with the sensations when I’m not meditating? Should I continue to put my awareness at breathing at the nose, and just keep these sensations in peripheral awareness?
Keywords: vipassanā
Which type of shamanism did you study, and can we make use of shamanic practices to supplement our TMI efforts in meditation towards non-dual mindset?
Keywords: Ken Wilber - Clean Up, Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up (Wikipedia), William L. Hamilton - Saints and Psychopaths (Open Library)
In the last 10 years a number of articles was published on default mode network, and task-positive network based on fMRI studies during meditation. Do you see validity in default mode network theories? If so, how can we take advantage of the default mode knowledge in our meditative path?
Keywords: Iain McGilchrist (Wikipedia), left brain and right brain, Yuval Noah Harari (Wikipedia), Byron Katie (Wikipedia), karma is intention
I’m curious about references in the suttas to the cessation of consciousness. I was reading recently about taṇhā, and he stated that when passion for the aggregates is overcome, consciousness becomes unestablished, and final liberation will be attained. I did some online research which revealed that the idea of cessation may be an errant translation of nirodha. Am I confusing the term unestablished by equating it with cessation? Can you speak to both of these ideas?
What is prayer, and how does it work? Can we pray for someone who passed away, and would prayers benefit them?
Keywords: mind as mental construct
How are your the two books that you’re working on coming along? Is there a new batch of online course starting anytime soon?
What is your advice on meditating when energy is low due to health issues? I feel that when energy is low, it’s almost impossible to maintain attention on a specific object. Attention just bounces around, and perception becomes drowsy. In these moments I just go to Shikantaza and become aware of impermanence. I think your advice is to not meditate when we are very tired, except when we are at advanced stages, then I think the advice is to meditate even in the midst of drowsiness. Can you expand on that?
Keywords: unification of mind
This situation feels like it would be similar to the moments just prior to death when we’re losing all control over consciousness as the brain physically breaks down. So, as a related question, what is your advice on what to do at the moment of death? And I believe different traditions offer different advice.
Keywords: near-death experience
I’ve recently learned a technique to release negative emotional trace reactions, habits, and emotional reactions as they evolve, called dismissing, and coming from a non-dual tradition of inquiry. I’d had great success in relieving severe back pain, and abdominal pain, and diarrhea using this method.
Dismissing technique instructions:
Eventually one can realease any concentrated sensation causing discomfort felt in the core, and eventually anywhere else in the body. There are many variations on it such as dismissing sense of powerlessness, smallness, resistance, and reference to the I, me, or mine related to the emotion or situation.
I was curious how you would understand the mechanism of how this might work within your TMI explanatory framework.
Keywords: it’s not the emotion, but what gave rise to the emotion that needs to be released
You wrote a while ago that you were experimenting with the Wim Hof method. You tested it yourself for about four weeks, and I’m wondering what your experiences and thoughts about it are, and if you would recommend it.
Do you think math can help the modern world to fully adopt the dharmic worldview? How might fully awakened beings, assuming they can acquire the relevant skills, use the precise language of mathematics, and the systematic processes used in science and engineering to facilitate our society in adopting a precise and systematic education system that might have the chance of being able to facilitate the most optimal integration of the dhamma on a global scale? For the sake of adding context to this question, I personally grew up with no spiritual views relating to suffering, and the end of suffering, unity, suchness etc., but held a various high esteem for scientific processes. So when I watch the cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman’s “do we see reality as it is?”, I discovered his conclusions arrived at using math, science and computational models of evolutionary game theory, in fact, accorded with the perspective on consciousness and the illusory, mentally fabricated nature of experience that I directly experienced myself as the result of practicing the dharma. As an aside, I wonder why it was that mathematics was able to arrive at such profound conclusions as well. I couldn’t help but wonder if this gateway to the dharma could be designed in a systematic way and be used to help spread the dharma in our modern age.
Recently I had the insight that stillness gives way to silence not through the abscence of sound, but rather as one is unmoved by change. Acutely aware of the everpresence of change which has given rise to fear. There is the knowing that what there is to let go of is essentially nothing. Just thoughts that create separateness, and the ideat that a me exists, and that what there is to surrender to is becoming everything.
I would appreciate any suggestions that you might have as a way to work with this in sits. Currently I stay completely present to whatever is arising, and just watch it until it passes.
Keywords: rangtong and shentong (Wikipedia)
As a result of the learned technique to release repetitive negative emotional grasping traces as felt sensations of tension or contraction anywhere in the body, my experience of pīti, which was formerly patchy and transient, comes more frequently, persistently and extensively on and off the cushion. I discovered a place somewhere around the throat such that when attention is placed there, it really augments the pīti in those dimensions. Would giving more attention to this location be helpful to lead to using the pleasure of pīti as a pathway into jhāna or access concentration?
Are there laws that govern us and the universe as a whole? I’ve read about the law of karma, law of attraction, law of correspondence, and a few more, but their descriptions vary. Could you describe some in brief, or point us towards a authentic book for a list and description of these laws?
Keywords: karma is intention
I’ve heard that you were into shamanism and psychedelics at some point in your life. Could you please elaborate more on this topic, and tell us what practices were you engaged in, and how did shamanism/psychedelics affect your spiritual path?
Keywords: Michael Harner, core shamanism, Timothy Leary, set and setting, peyote, san pedro, ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, Maria Sabina, DMT, Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), Stanislav Grof
I usually practice a Goenka technique of vipassanā because I have access to this where I live. The whole promise of this techique of vipassanā, as you know already, is that everything that we intend of we do is stored in our body as sensations, and if we observe them with equanimity, we can eradicate the old actions that we took. Using the technique of body-scanning is how they do it. When I did some research, I realized that none of the sutras by Buddha mention the technique of body-scanning anywhere. What are your thoughts about this technique of vipassanā?
Keywords: non-duality of mind and matter, dualism, materialistic monism, idealistic monism, non-dualism
Follow-Up: The reason I asked this question is, when doing the technique of body-scanning and observing sensations, do we develop the kind of insights that we are meant to develop? Is this an actual insight technique, or is it more of a śamatha technique? I think that doing this technique we are developing a better concentration, and vipassanā would be more into developing insights. Do you think it’s possible to develop insights in this way?
Follow-Up: If we observe the sensations of our body, does it change our mental conditioning?
Keywords: psychedelics
Would a strong psychedelic trip (e.g. a DMT trip) be perceived differently by an enlightened being? Would it be even more profound? Is there still a possibility of a bad trip? Is there any value in using psychedelics after that point?
I’m curious if psychedelics are considered a break to the fifth precept.
My mind seems to grasp hard at whatever my attention is on, leading to painful tension. I never seem to have much of any strong dullness because when my introspective awareness notices dullness, instead of getting sleepy, my muscles seem to automatically tense up in order to force sensation. I have to keep the intention to not tense up, or I tense up. Occasionally I get into a great place where I’m relaxed and have really clear sensation and stable attention (Stage 4–5), but before long I notice that the painful tension snuck in, and my breathing is very controlled. Is there a specific technique to learn to regulate effort? How do I let go if any hint of doing so immediately causes tension that stays with me even off the cushion?
I have a purely practical question. I’ve decided to take a year off until I start graduate school next September, to focus on meditation. I have a few retreats planned, and I will be ramping up my practice time from my current 3 hours a day to about 5 or 6 hours a day.
Given this time budget, how should I schedule my daily practice? Should I allocate one continuous five-hour block for practice each day, alternating walking and sitting, or should I split this up into smaller periods throughout the day? Would you have any other advice on how I can best use this year for Awakening?
Keywords: four grades of samadhi, vipassanā, sāti, sati-sampajañña, doing what happens to be best at any given time
I hear a lot of terms used such as The Four Noble Truths, Ten Fetters, Awakening, Enlightenment, nibbāna and so on, many explaining their own interpretations of what they mean. I could say, intellectually I have a vague understanding of what this terms or interpretations are pointing to. However, the more work I do, the more I realize that I don’t actually know much at all. It’s as though these terms and interpretations are becoming so distant. This distancing seems strongly linked with the slightly better embodiment as though I can’t yet reference them fully to my current felt experience of reality. So leading on from this, the questions below might have already been answered before. However, I’m curious as to their answers from a more embodied perspective.
00:04:14 Can you clearly define or redefine your present understanding of Awakening from a more embodied perspective? What actually is it, and how does it feel? What are its benefits?
It is very difficult to put into words what it is like to be awakened because words and anything that they refer to, they belong to the world of appearances.
00:15:50 How does this term Awakening compare to the term nibbāna, preferably from a Theravādan perspective? Again, from the more embodied perspective.
00:29:01 Once nibbāna and a practitioner rests in this state more permanently, does that mean that there’s no more shadow work remaining, and that everything is known, seen and integrated such that we will not fall victim to our shadow parts influencing how we create and express in this world via thought, gesture and physical health and well-being and so on?
Done many three-day retreats, meditated about 3–5 hours per day, reached a very quite state similar to what you call bliss of physical pliancy. No more organic sensation, but very pleasand energy all over the body. In that state, there’s hardly any more personal thoughts, but quite a few hypnagogic mental situations like impersonal thoughts, images etc., which at the same time helped me to get deeper into the meditation state as long as I keep my metacognitive awareness very clear. Otherwise I would get very sleepy, or develop dullness. You do not mention hypnagogia in your book, but those hypnagogic images are always present in my meditations, and as I said are very helpful to reach that bliss state.
Keywords: archetypal imagery
Say we were to view an individual mind-system as a sub-mind within a network of other sub-minds/mind-systems, and our society as a whole as a social network of sub-minds or something like the collective mind-system of suchness.
00:52:47 Do you think it would be possible using science, cybernetics, cognitive psychology and/or any other relevant fields of study to develop multimedia online plus offline social network platform to replicate the functions of mindfulness and clear comprehension on the path on a scale that might awaken the collective mind-system as a whole?
Follow-Up: Once when I was in India, I went to a place where donations were being given to this one swami. There were pictures all around of him, and he came in with a security guard that had a gun in his holster. I have to admit, that I had developed somewhat of a prejudice against this person that seemed to be so full of ego. But at one point, I could feel his consciousness probing my mind, and my reaction when that happened was, “Boy, you have a great big ego!” And right after that I was told to get out of the ashram.
My question is, is that part of a larger mind experience, I guess some sort of telepathy.
Keywords: siddhi, knowing the minds of others, non-duality of mind and matter
Does our practic in śamatha and/or vipassanā get carried to the next life? Do we take rebirth at the same level of progress as when we die?
When I experience the breath with the body, I can find subtle sensations in any body part with enough diligence. However I find that I can internally draw energy through any body part, and this relays a very tangible feeling. The feeling is like air swishing through a wind tunnel, very much a suction feeling as if you were drawing water into a syringe. It is quite pronounced, and I can produce a feeling on command through my whole body, but specifically through any part of my body. I’m wondering what I’m doing here, and if I should be doing it.
With regards to the human experience, there can be moments that give rise to the experience of emotions and perception of pain/heartache within letting go despite the spaciousness and knowing that exists. This knowing allows for more flow and the return to letting things be as they are with more grace and ease. Is this really letting go, or just surrendering to what is?
Keywords: mental vs physical pain - not cut and dry
Currently, in these experiences I’m aware of the Self-nature of perceived experience to move into whatever is arising until it passes. When I inquire as to what is stopping me from fully waking up, it appears that the reaction created by the perception of the experience serves as a hindrance to waking up.
The human experience still serving as an anchor for Self-existence.
I am aware that it is at times easier to cling to Self-identification than to acknowledge the magnitude of emptiness and impermanence that I am. Despite No-Self, emotions will continue to arise. Learning how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
If you could provide any further distinctions on how to work with this, I would be most grateful. Honestly, I’m not sure if there’s anything to work with rather than just to continue to be fully immersed in the experience of the arising and passing until it runs its course, and Self-identification returns no more.
Keywords: integrating relative and ultimate reality, impermanence · anicca, dependent origination · paṭicca-samuppāda, emptiness · suññatā
I believe I’m in Stage 7. I’ve had every type of pīti that you’ve written about, and more. So I’m one of the lucky ones. There’s just one that occurs to me, and it’s really intense. And I just kind of wanted reassurance that it’s normal.
Most of the pīti happens to me in the head, and it feels sometimes as though my head were dull and somebody were kneading it. I have that sensation often, and sometimes it’s very intense. Once I can break through it and fully concentrate on the breath, then I almost immediately go into first jhāna, then the second jhāna, third jhāna, and the up and down of that.
But the sensation, it almost scares me sometimes. It doesn’t hurt. It hasn’t affected me in any way apart from when I’m doing the meditation. I meditate for about an hour and a half in the morning, and close to two hours in the evening every day.
And I just wanted to know if that is normal.
Keywords: psychedelics
Follow-Up: In fact, in the last couple of weeks since I first wrote my question to you, the pressure has started to cease, and I was contemplating going into Stage 8, but now for the past couple of weeks either I’m extremely focused, and I’m starting to do following of the breath, and then from one second to the next, my mind is going between two extremes of subtle distractions/mind wandering, and the hundred-percent full concentration. Is that normal? Am I relaxing too much? Am I overconfident?
Keywords: collapse of awareness, revisions to TMI, importance of awareness
Follow-Up: Is it normal to have spontaneous meditative states arise in daily life? Sometimes when I sit back and if I close my eyes, I almost immediately go into a very light first jhāna state.
Keywords: jhāna as flow state, jhāna “blinders”`, correspondence between the four jhānas and the four stages of śamatha
I was wondering if we might speak a little bit about the relationship between śamatha and vipassanā, and especially how you see these two aspects of practice working together, and separately in the later stages to support Awakening.
For example, when someone is able to maintain a state of unification characterized in Stage 10, and to a lesser extent Stages 7–9. Is there a clear direction about when it would be of benefit to stay in that deeply unified state, or to begin inquiring into the impermanent, unsatisfying and No-Self nature of that unified state.
Keywords: history of Buddhism, meaning of vipassanā
Is this correct? One solution to the shadow issue on fourth path is developing a practice that replaces the dukkha feedback mechanism largely absent, but it seems not entirely absent on fourth path, with some emotional subtle energy feedback mechanism in conjunction with psychotherapy. What might be the core elemnts or techniques that such a solution should consist of, and could a comprehensive solution be some kind of practice that viewed intention from a purely cause-and-effect perspective? In other words, to internalize a sort of cognitive and energy network alert system which alerted conscious awareness to the subtlest energies and intentions that may be deviating from the dharma. Some intention recognition systems in which the mind was primed to recognize when its intention is being deviated from—not because of dukkha or craving being present, but simply because the results of forming an action around such an intention would result in consequences that are knowingly contradictory to its comprehensive and evolving models of the dharma.
Keywords: integrating relative and ultimate reality, illusory, apparent and ultimate nature (yogācāra)
I was wondering about getting from one kind of jhāna like pīti-jhāna to luminous jhānas. The problem is that I feel comfortable with pīti-jhāna (at least the four material ones), but can’t get into the luminous ones. Any time I reach access concentration, I naturally feel the joy, and therefore do not work any more on the nimitta, but focus on joy and rapture. Then I get into the pīti-jhāna, go through a pleasant state with a very quiet mind without much physical sensation. But I wonder if I should go on chasing the nimitta in order to accesss the luminous jhānas.
As before, the yogi should react to the awareness rather than to the distraction, and should do so with a feeling of satisfaction, but the awareness is there—of confidence that the mind is becoming well-trained. But if it is a larger area (think of it in your mind as just a single location, not as a series of separate locations that the breath is moving over in a sequence).
From the first, I have noticed that rather than seeing my alternating attention as distractions getting in my way, using this as a moment for appreciation that my awareness is on was actually helpful in keeping it on with stable attention. Before, I would be aware of every moment of alternating attention I had, and even though I should not bother with them until Stage 6, they had a sticky effect on my attention. So I actually had the urge to manually direct attention many times, and it was tiring to keep repeating it. I also lack dealing with it in a skillful way—like using the body scan, which is also helpful.
Any thoughts you could add?
I have noticed that I was actually focusing on a defined location, but within that location there would be these separate smaller ones. I think this had an effect on my breath, which was not continuous, but rather was happening in bursts of resistant movements which disrupted this cycle. This would happen especially on my out-breath and in the pause, so I would have difficulty identifying a pause because there would be an extra out-breath to feel something. I’ve only seen this post today, and after trying it seemed to be correlated with focusing location. But I need to make sure of it through practice, and also get used to using this.
Could we talk a little bit about the phenomenology of Stages 8 and 9 śamatha? What is your experience of having the sensory minds pacified, and the joy, peace and equanimity that unfolds?
Keywords: feeling body as thin shell, feeling body as effervescent, proprioceptive alterations, luminous nimitta, internal sound · nada sound, divine nectar, Shinzen Young: feather-light and paper-thin
I feel like my mind gets exhausted during my sittings starting at the middle of the session, progressively increasing in exhaustion towards the end of it. It feel like it is a muscle that is getting fatigued, and that I have to put in a lot more effort in order to keep the same amount of mindfulness.
I’ve tried a few things which seemed to have helped, like meditating in the morning, making sure I’m well-hydrated, and actually have some light breakfast to make sure my brain does not starve. That being said, I’m concerned I might be mistaking exhaustion for simple dullness, although it does not feel like so, and that it may be best for me to go back and train my brain against strong dullness some more before continuing in Stage 5.
Edit: I think it’s actually hunger. In today’s sitting, I started to hyperventilate, and I got a bit of a headache. I might need to eat more breakfast.
How should somebody cultivate joy in Stages 5, 6 and 7, whilst at the same time putting effort into the cognitively demanding tasks of overcoming subtle dullness and sustaining exclusive attention? Is it a simple case of continuing to notice pleasant aspects of the meditation as recommended in the chapter on Stage 2, or is there a different approach to cultivating joy that starts to happen here—one that specifically appreciates the flavor of joy that comes from a more unified mind?
How much attention should one give to things like slouching. I’ve had a slouch for most of my life. I try to sit up straight when I’m meditating, but then I notice I’m slouching, and so I pull myself up. Should I be making such an effort to keep my posture straight, or should I let it do its thing?
I’d appreciate our discussing the various jhānas. In particular, advice for setting the conditions for jhānas to arise, for exploring and maturing the different jhānas, and how jhāna may contribute to Awakening.
All of the hindrances have to be subdued. Well, what does it mean, “subdued”? Or what are the hindrances anyway?
The hindrances are really catergories of distraction that produce movement of attention. And to subdue the hindrances is just a shorthand way of saying “overcome movements of the mind”.
Is there anything that can be said generically about the experience of peripheral awareness during access or the access going in and out of jhāna?
It seems to me that the object of meditation that one has when one gets into jhāna, or, and I’m not sure, maybe into access is not the original physical sensation of breathing, but something secondary that becomes a different object of meditation. Is this the case?
I’ve heard sometimes from other teachers like Shaila Catherine that the luminous phenomenon, the nimitta can occur in different modalities. Has that ever been your experience where that’s just the visual modality, but there may be sort of tactile or other sensory modiality analogues for the visual illumination phenomenon?
Keywords: mental counterpart appearance · paṭibhāga-nimitta, nada sound, divine fragrance, divine nectar
There is the knowing of emptiness and form with accompanying equanimity. As compassion continues to expand there is the knowing that there is ony interconnectedness. How might one now approach boundaries within context of the human experience? Is it even possible to set boundaries from the state of interconnectedness without re-entering the state of separateness and duality? If one is living as pure intention there is nothing to do other than to allow for the unfolding. It seems as though the mere fact of suchness and causality render any boundaries unnecesssary.
[…] I’ve recently found the three natures of the Yogācāran school very very valuable.
The illusory nature is not ultimately real. But the apparent nature is ultimately real, and the ultimate nature is ultimately real.
And so we go from recognizing the illusory nature as illusory and the ultimate nature as real to the more difficult place of the complete falling away of the illusory nature, and experiencing the ultimate reality of the apparent nature as ultimate reality as well.
So form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.
Keywords: fourth path, form is emptiness, emptiness is form, non-duality of duality and non-duality
You mentioned the Wim Hof method a few times in the previous sessions. What do you think is the utility of it, not so much in general because there are things written about the overall benefits of his method, but more specifically in the overall context of TMI and dharma in general?
A few months back I asked you about meditating with ADHD and how I was able to stay on the breath for a while in Stage 4, but then a major distraction would come. And you suggested just to move on, and not try to get a ten-minutes period of stable attention.
So I’ve been doing that, and I’ve been doing more Stage 6 practices. I noticed with the whole-body breathing that it feels like alternating attention most of the time between the breath at the nose and related sensations in the body. Is that the case? I’m having trouble separating awareness and attention.
When I reach mental pliancy or am on the way to, I have quite a few hypnagogic mental situations (like impersonal thoughts, images etc.) which at the same time help me to get deeper into the meditation state as long as I keep my awareness very clear. Otherwise I would get sleepy or fall into dullness. You barely mentioned hypnagogia in your book, but those hypnagogia are always present in my meditations, and as I said are very helpful to reach that bliss state. They can also be used to go faster into jhānas. I also practice lucid dreaming.
When I get into a jhāna state (the pleasure one, not the luminous one), I can really see the difference between first, second and third jhānas. But when I reach the fourth one it gets really strange. The flow of energy in my body gets so strong that I can’t feel my body anymore. I can’t do a body scan because there is nothing to scan. I already had some experience with the formless jhānas of infinite space and infinite consciousness, but what I really feel is a very strong increase in the flow of energy. I remember how in Stage 9 you say that it’s important to control the flow of energy, which I have trouble differentiating the higher jhānas because the flow of energy is so strong.
Keywords: archetypal imagery, universal and individual archetypes, realms of mystery and power, lucid dreaming, Majjhima Nikāya 111 - Anupadasutta (One by One) (Sutta)
I’ve been doing Shinzen Young’s “see, hear, feel in and out”, which I guess is momentary attention. Is this like dzogchen or mahamudra meditations on the activities of the mind, and does working with momentary attention develop greater attention skills or greater peripheral awareness skills, or both equally?
You would be guided in mahamudra to answer some ridiculous questions in the first place. Like, “What color is the mind?”, “What’s shape of the mind?”, “How big is the mind?”, “Where is the mind?”, and things like this. These are absurd questions. But they are the way that attention frames the world.
The mind is in constant interaction with something that it doesn’t know, and that it’s trying to know.
Keywords: meditating on the mind · mahamudra, merging of attention and awareness, mind as mental construct
How would you compare your epistemological/ontological description of it all with the generalizations of Donald Hoffman about the limitations of our ability to have an accurate description at all?
I thought it would be helpful and certainly interesting to have a glossary index of TMI practices of where different techniques came from. Which traditions, which are common to different traditions.
I was curious, are you still working on another book now?
I’m investigating some of the subtle forms of attachment and urgency that seem to underlie conscious experience. I’m experiencing fears arise related to losing control. The feeling of moving to yet another unknown way of being as these primordial urgencies are better understood and so transcended.
What advice would you offer for skilfully investigating those sorts of subtle attachments, or for gaining right relationship with the fear and anxiety that can arise around around losing control?
Keywords: non-duality of duality and non-duality, Yogācāra: three natures
I have a question regarding the word “cessate” in this discussion. It sounded like the word “cessate” was used as a transitive verb—like you’re trying to stop something. I’ve never experienced it that way. In my experience things just come, and they stay, and they go. So I’m trying to understand the difference between allowing them to cease, and cessating them. It doesn’t make sense.
I tend to go into jhanic states quite easily. I’m one of those people for whom it becomes natural. I experience these waves when I am in the jhanic state.
At first these waves started below my buttocks—as if they were in my cushion, and on top, over my head. Then they went up the spine. And recently I started feeling these waves not just below me, above me and inside of me, but they are also around me—outside of my body, as if I were floating in a very warm sea. I can feel them very strongly; it’s kinf of nice. It’s not pīti-swaying because I went throught that, and it’s not that. Do you know what these are?
These wave-like sensations together with the jhāna bring me into a state where my body feels like a puff of air, like a cloud. In my mind, I’m very aware of the no-thought state; it’s very clear to me. And then I have this sensation as if this cloud-like state, if I can call it that, is leading me into a deeper state. I feel a primal fear in this state, but it’s not like, “No no no, I don’t want to do that”, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I want to do that”. I was a mountain climber, so I know this fear very well—it’s an exciting kind of fear. But that little second of fear is enough to pull me back. I don’t know if I should work on this fear and then go for it, or if I should heed the fear, and kinf of wait it out.
Keywords: jhāna as flow state, jhāna “blinders”`, correspondence between the four jhānas and the four stages of śamatha
I’ve noticed there’s not much information about Insight around Stages 8–9, and I would like to ask you what you think about the information about Insight that we find in the Visuddhimagga. I assume that the best way to go for Insight is after acheiving jhānas, but it is unclear to me how to proceed.
Keywords: Majjhima Nikāya 111 - Anupadasutta (One by One) (Sutta), nāmarūpa, five aggregates, awareness of passing away of attention together with its object
Lucid dreaming. Mind-made body.
I reached Stage 4 a year or two ago. The practice started reinforcing my sense of Self, and especially my sense of agency to the extent that it seemed to cause me a lot of agitation when I’m not on the cushion because my mind and body wouldn’t do what I wanted them to.
Then I switched to metta practice.
Why did I get into a situation where I would be annoyed outside of my sitting? My sittings had an unintended side-effect of being irritated outside of my sittings—even though the sittings were wonderful—because my mind and body wouldn’t respond to my intentions, and it triggered a panic reaction.
Is it possible to acheive Insight doing metta meditation?
Donald Hoffman.
Mathematical model very similar to Culadasa’s Mind-System.
As a college student, I’m spending a lot of time studying and completing assignments. I’m looking to improve concentration.
Do we have a general concentration ability that can be trained both on and off the cushion? And if so, how can we use neuroscience to explain the fact that meditating improves our ability to concentrate in on- or off-the-cushion activities such as studying, eating of speaking with others?
Keywords: Iain McGilchrist - The Master and His Emissary (Wikipedia)
I’ve been practicing Tibetan Lojong.
Can you explain how one would use the practice of Tonglen using the instructions in TMI? With the breath, one focuses on the sensations, whereas in Tonglen you use imagination and feelings of compassion.
I watched a teaching of yours, Compassion in Action, and did a meditation where you had people recall a moment in their life where someone was kind to them, or when they did something out of love, and recall the feeling, in order to work with it. To my understanding, Tonglen can only be done with a genuine attitude of compassion, otherwise it is only a technique, but I’m finding it difficult to find ways of arousing compassion.
A world full of compassionate, wise people.
Forming groups.
How do pick up if someone is significantly awakened? What traits would you highlight if given a regular interaction between two people that are significantly awakened.
Keywords: four paths, ten fetters
I’m at Stage 7. Should I try and contain the bodily movements. The thumb-twitching I was expecting, but my back and back started bending in snake-like movements. Also, my breath gets very accelerated. Ignoring it allows me to perceive the sensations of the breath very vividly. But it feels wrong to be swirling around. Attempting to remain still and pacing the breath works, but I seem to lose some concentration.
I’m practicing in Stage 3–4. I wonder if you could talk about the feelings of awareness. My understanding is that awareness is a subconscious process that doesn’t feel like it is me like attention does. At least for spontaneous awareness like the a-ha moment after forgetting, I don’t feel like I have done anything. Similarly, I often get an a-ha moment for a subtle to gross distraction while I’m still focusing on the breath, which I understand is continuous introspective awareness. And I get the feeling that “someone else” has brought to my attention that there was a distraction present. However I also had a few episodes of what I thought was metacognitive introspective awareness, and that one did feel like I was both the one watching the breath, and the one watching the one watching the breath. Was that then not metacognitive introspective awareness or is it that feeling around awareness change as the practice progresses?
Keywords: TMI - Fifth Interlude: The Mind-System
I’m practicing at Stage 2–3, I think, and have noticed that it’s easier for me to focus and concentrate when doing metta practice as opposed to ānāpāna. What are the ramifications of focusing more on metta, and less on the breath?
I wanted to understand your take on balancing between desire and detachment. I have interest in computer science and mathematics, but I find that spending more hours studying causes thoughts of problem-solving to arise during meditation. On the other hand, when I do long periods of meditation on a routine basis, my motivation to study starts to fade away. Is there something I can do to pursue both activities in a more balanced way?
Keywords: preference vs craving, looking for the joy
There’s so much emphasis on describing things that arise as distractions, and feeling negative about getting distracted. Whereas the observation that when one sees, or is aware that one is distracted, that exactly the kind of metacognitive awareness that one is constantly trying to develop—to catch oneself in absent-minded habitual thought patterns. That is sort of the primary skill that we are trying to develop.
For me, it’s easier to distinguish or look at distractions, wherever they arise, as a process—as opposed to trying to be aware of the content of the process. So just seeing them as processes for me helps to disidentify with those.
I’ve been reading this book by Jan Frazier, The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is. You’ve talked of attentional behavior as it being an evaluation of our relationship with an object we are attending to. Is it good for us, bad for us etc. But first there is peripheral awareness, which is not analyzing, but just being aware of what is arising. She talks about that evaluating part of attention as being the ego-attention, and I almost get the idea that she is identifying that peripheral awareness as being like the Witness. And I was curious what your thoughts were about comparison or contrast between the Witness and peripheral awareness.
One of the way in which she talks about peripheral awareness is in terms of not resisting reality. Whatever reality is, it’s just accepting anything and anything that comes up.
I know Jan Frazier. Her two main practices were devotion practice and chanting, And mindfulness—just being aware of everything all the time: everything she was doing, what was happening, and she woke up. And it’s interesting because when she expresses herself in her writings, it can sound very Buddhist, but she doesn’t know anything about neuroscience, and she hasn’t figured out the attention–awareness thing. So the languaging can get a little confusing, although she is very clear.
Which brings me to my question. Neuroscientists know that there are two different parts of the brain, and that attention and awareness are not the same. And yet in the Theravādan tradition, people may have heard it, or read about it, or read your book, but it’s not really working its way into meditation practice very much as far as I can tell. At least in American Insight meditation societies. Only little bits of it, but it seems so important. And I’m wondering if there are any more conferences, or conversations or anything where people are trying to address this.
I’ve had this general experience that so many of these methods (whether Buddhist or Advaita, or even those that are related to trauma therapy, or Feldenkrais) all use different vocabulary, but they all talk about the same processes. It seems that people have attractions to different kinds of metaphors, they all being incomplete, they all being stories, all having that universal property of emptiness, but they all point to similar things. So it becomes like a process of trying to internally translate, or at least trying to maintain an awareness of how they are all pointing.
Would you mind saying a bit more about the difference between discerning, preference and craving like you brought up in the question before. And maybe what your experience is around being able to observe craving without moving into it, and what that might entail, different ways of doing that.
Keywords: brain circuits for pleasant, unpleasant and wanting/craving
I was curious, were these three circuits distinguished by neurotransmitters as well?
I was wondering if you could expand on what you said earlier about the importance of metta in our practice. You even mentioned this in the book. Perhaps you could say more about why you feel it’s such a fundamental and critical practice to engage in.
I might have a second part to that question. My experience with metta has not been very fulfilling, and I developed somewhat of an aversion to it because I find that it’s like I’m trying to create feelings that aren’t there. Which I think you mentioned in the book: it feels artificial to me. Perhaps you could talk about that as well.
How to deal with being both dull and distracted at the same time?
I am practicing at Stage 3–4, and a couple of sessions at Stage 5. I’ve made a lot of progress stabilizing my attention to the point where I couldn’t really see how a distraction could ever capture my attention again. That’s a silly thought!
The sessions would usually go like this: lots of distractions, few distractions, no distractions, and vivid sensations; then the dance with dullness, on which I was making progress, but haven’t fully mastered to reach the end of Stage 4. For the past month, however, the sessions don’t have the same sequence. They are now all the time full of distractions—like Stage 2 type where I have so little introspective awareness that there is mind-wandering. Plus it feels like there is very strong dullness from the very start: sensation aren’t vivid anymore, but never wanting to go to sleep either. Dullness antidotes don’t shake it off—including putting my hand in a bowl of icy water—and create even more distractions.
I’ve tried the opposite, and tried something new like guided meditation, or trying to do long periods of checking in. Novelty helps, but usually wears off very quickly. I’m now a bit worried because sessions are really uncomfortable, which then leads to resistance.
Is this a common issue? Should I stick to Stage 2 practice, or would you recommend something else? I know it’s very hard to diagnose while I’m not present, but any advice would be appreciated.
Keywords: attention vs awareness, collapse of awareness
I’ve been practicing for 15 years, and it really has felt like a slog. And there’s very little in the way of pleasantness, and I’ve made what I objectively think to be very little progress. But I’m a little confused. I’m really eager to hear you say that, and I want to learn how to do that.
If I’m practicing at Stages 2–3 right now, and the object of my attention should be the sensations of the breath. But when you say, “Focus on the other feelings of pleasantness”, does that mean leave the sensations of the breath?
When we were talking about that balance between attention and awareness, I think that example that you use in the book of visual focus vs. peripheral vision is one of those ones that is very useful because we already have experience with it that we can trust. We know what the felt experience of that is. So doing something as simple as holding up your thumb, and placing your attention on that, and understanding that you can do that and be simultaneously aware of the space and the objects in the background is a feeling of that same king of thing that we’re trying to experience.
I also think that it can be particularly useful to be available to the feeling of pleasure in that moment where we have woken back up from mind-wandering. That moment when we’re lucid again. Because the person who asked the question talked about resistance, and that’s a form of contraction—of awareness, but that’ll show up in the body as well. And so in that moment of lucidity when we suddenly realize, “I’m present”, there can be, and probably will be if we’re able to be open, a moment of pleasure. A moment of lack of contraction in the body. Some people who have a particularly strong somatic response there, can really feel this, and benefit from this.
Do you have any advice on meditation in the times of emotional turmoil? Is meditation helpful at such times, or best avoided? Especially for those at the beginning of the journey.
Keywords: metta - loving kindness meditation, walking meditation
You talk about walking meditation being good for developing extrospective attention. I haven’t being doing walking meditation at the early stages, but now I’m experimenting with it, and finding it a great practice because of the whole fact that it allows your awareness to develop.
When you were answering an earlier question in this Q&A session, you said that you would like to talk to talk one on one of them, and ask them additional questions. What would be your recommendation to someone who needs to develop that awareness.
For me, awareness started spontaneously developing at Stages 5–6, and then I finally clearly understood what awareness was. And possibly, it would have happened sooner if I were under your tutelage at that point.
Since you mentioned walking meditation, would that be your primary advice for someone to develop awareness?
Keywords: neurological and functional relationship between central and peripheral vision, and attention and awareness - the visual analogue to attention and awareness
My question is kind of related to that. It’s related to awareness. There is a sense in which I still don’t really understand what you mean. And I’ve read those opening chapters many times, but I’m trying to get a more experiential understanding.
I walk a lot, and I go on hikes a lot. Yesterday I went on like a five-hour hike. And I felt amazing; I love it.
But when you talk about expanding awareness, does that correspond to just higher density of sensory perceptions of what’s around me? Or is it something beyond that?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the original impulses that brought me to serious meditation practice. How important is it to understand your motivations to practice? With all the minds you’ve worked with, what percentage of students come to an understanding of what brought them to the cushion, and what patterns have you seen around motivations to practice?
I was wondering if you could provide a summary of the four paths, and what traits and behaviors distinguish them. I’ve heard you speak about them individually, but I’d find it useful to hear a summary of all four.
There is a claim in Tibetan Buddhist teaching that practicing in lucid dreams is significantly more effective than while in the daily states of consciousness. If one were to develop the skill of meditating while lucid dreaming, could the Mind-System be in a position to unify in a way that would not be as easily done while not in a lucid dream?
Keywords: sleep yoga
As one works throught Insights, and has incomplete realization of them, and the Self thins and starts to become absent sometimes, at least in my experience, fear can become a significant challenge. I’m finding that with the fear comes a very strong conviction that one is a separate Self, and that Self is in danger in some way.
So I was wondering how fear looks as you start to move into stream entry and the different paths. If you fully see through the Self, and realize that it’s not a separate entity, I wouldn’t think the fear could really be there—although I know there’s some oscillation even with some of these realizations.
Keywords: dealing with difficult emotions
Would you say that drinking Ayahuasca is against the fifth precept? What’s your opinion regarding similar substances in relation to TMI practice?
Keywords: psychedelics
Do you have any book recommendations on this topic? This is one area that even the Buddhist monks aren’t very open to teaching.
I have a college who is a psychologist who’s doing research into the benefits of things like LSD for major depressive disorder and things like that.
I do think since we’re talking on a public forum here, it’s really important to mention that there are risks involved with taking these kinds of substances. Drug-induces psychosis is a real thing. I have several colleagues who work with it on a regular basis. This is not a risk-free choice to take.
I think we need to be careful about endorsing this as a way to Awakening.
The main things keeping me from consistently being in Stage 5 are persistent distractions in my face. I often feel a strong tension-like energy in between my eyes or on the bridge of my nose that automatically draws my attention every in-breath. I feel that my introspective awareness is strong and persistent. It isn’t my thoughts that are keeping me from overcoming this gross distraction so much as these persistent sensations in my face and eyes. What is your advice for this?
Keywords: arising of pīti
I’ve been meditating almost daily for almost a year. My sits usually last about 20 minutes, and sometimes up to an hour. I believe I’m around Stage 4. When I’m really focused, I tend to feel some sort of tingling sensation on my right ear as if it was swollen and vibrating. The more focused I feel, the stronger it gets. By more focused I mean wider awareness and more stable attention. Sometimes I even get it on both ears, or it starts crawling to the back of my head. At some point, I started feeling this energy even when I’m not meditating. I asked my partner if it was indeed swollen or if there was anything strange with it, and she said it looked normal. Can this sustained feeling be a sign of pīti? I’m reluctant to believe it as I also believe I’m in Stage 4. Even if in good sits I get a few gross distractions, I still get them. Sometimes they even throw me into forgetting and mind-wandering. Maybe I’m in Stage 2–3. Ha-ha! The cool thing about these sensations in the right ear is that I get a very direct and clear feedback about how focused I am, and can thus correct more easily.
You said that this process of pīti development can start in earlier stages. Is it also the case that it might conclude before—say Stage 6 or 7?
Since we’re talking about pīti at whatever stage. At one point you said that you don’t want to be craving it, but then the other thing—especially as people are going up in the stages—is to have the curiosity to begin to explore, and begin to notice any sense of well-being or pleasure that is associated with pīti, because we’re also talking about rapture and bliss, and the beginning of the jhānas. If this is beginning even earlier, with TMI, all along we’re looking for the pleasantness of the sensations that are arising. Could you say a little bit more about the art of doing that with pīti and these energetic sensations?
I know this is a complex topic without definitive answers. Could you give us your thoughts about the relationship between Awakening and the brahmavihārās? If a person practices TMI without ever trying for example metta practice, will they still develop those qualities? Could a person have a highly realized wisdom, yet still behave in an unethical or uncompassionate way, and if so, how come?
I’m having trouble with dullness. In some sessions I constantly have to do the technique of pursed lips and the breathing technique. But I’m trying to increase the length of my sessions, so when I get to 30–35 minutes sometimes I even have to get up and maybe even do some yoga movements to try to wake up. I’ve tried two things which have been interesting. One is forcing thoughts to appear. It felt a little bit like a noting technique, maybe. I don’t know. But it worked. I don’t know how productive it was for my progress on the path, but the dullness subsided. The other thing, which I’ve been trying for the last couple of days, is maintaining spatial awareness of my immediate environment. Which also helps me to remind myself what I’m doing. This is something that I do throughout the day, and it’s a magnificent experience, which is something I didn’t realize before. Every time I get this awareness of the immediate environment I’m in, my breathing picks up again.
My question is about the use of volition/will to generate concentration. I understand will/volition as an act of choice, even forceful choice, to pay attention to the breath and pushing the desires and aversions into the background. The stronger the desire/aversion, the more force of act of choice is needed. This helps me to keep track of my breath. After a while the mind shifts into a state where the active effort is not needed anymore, and the background noise has disappeared or considerably reduced. However this seems like a strategy to force desires and aversions out of consciousness temporarily because when I come out of a meditation sitting, it’s not so effective to use this strategy. I also get a sense that this strategy makes the desires and aversions stronger when they return. Is this use of volition to generate concentration counterproductive.
I’m doing a ten-day retreat and I started contemplating No-Self, finding the Still Point, realizing the Witness. I began to experience panic-like fear, my heart started racing like crazy. I had a feeling like something big and terrifying was about to happen. It got so intense that I couldn’t handle it, and I had to stop meditating. I happened twice during the last two days of the retreat and only during anattā contemplations. This is the first time something like this happened to me during meditation, so it was totally unexpected. What would you advise in this situation? How can I work around this fear if it arises again in daily practice? Or is No-Self contemplation too early for me? After I stopped meditating, the fear subsided rather quickly, and I was back to normal. But in both cases I could not continue meditating and had to stop.
To give you some context of my practice. I was between Stages 7 and 8 before the retreat. Some days I could acheive effortlessness, but it was not consistent. Then by the fourth day of the retreat, I was consistently having effortless concentration. By the end of the retreat, I would often get meditative joy and pīti, and bodily sensations were rather faint, and then almost absent from awareness.
I consider myself to be Stage 4. I have a lot of gross distractions. I’m having trouble finding my meditation object. I find myself overwhelemed by this turmoil of really violent contractions and pressures around my face and forehead, emotionally charged with frustration, mental noise, fogginess and confusion. And it also feels as if all this area is numb, blank as it’s physically impossible to sense the sensations of the breath. I believe this is due to a really intensive surgery that I had in this area of my head when I was a newborn baby, and my therapist believed that it created a huge trauma. It may have something to do with pīti. I also wonder if I should be reading Stages 5 and beyond even though I’m still at Stage 4.
Keywords: dissociation
I feel like every micromovement that one makes is filled with aversion, and as long as metacognitive awareness and joy is present, suffering is reduced. My strategy is to slow down my movements. That instantly helps me to keep track of body awareness and joy at the same time. It stabilizes mindful awareness. I experience an instant 10 times reduction in suffering and radical increase of jhānic stability of joy in my mind. But my negative impatient habits are so pervasive that I forget this often in daily life. Even as I’m typing this comment, I do feel the joy with metacognitive awareness, but I also feel this nagging urge to finish this sentence and get this over with. I can see the aversion in those subliminal intentions, and I have to work with them. What would you suggest I do? Should I continue practicing in this manner, or should I change my strategy?
To tie together the first question and this question, I’ve heard people ask quite often is, “When I do this investigation of my experience, I take my mind off of my meditation object. Am I not interrupting my meditation by doing that?”
Keywords: papañca
When those things come up, how do we recognize whether those are gross distractions rather than really important things to put our attention on?
Is there a point in the journey where this investigation of these traumatic emotions or suffering becomes part of the formal practice, or it is something we’re supposed to be investigating by getting away from the breath to investigate these things as they come along?
Recently, I heard about the direct path of Ramana Maharshi, self-inquiry, non-duality and this is creating some confusion because all of these non-duality teachers like Rupert Spira make it seems as if there is no need to train the mind to reach the ultimate goal of Awakening, and I’m losing motivation and clarity on why should I keep working on a progressive approach like TMI even though I already experienced amazing benefits out of it. Can you please bring some clarity onto the relationship between the so-called direct path and progressive path? How do they integrate within the bigger picture of the awakening path?Why should we focus on one or the other?
I’ll be explaining my practice in more detail for this reason. First of all, due to TMI, I’m feeling a consistent sensation of pleasure around the sides of my head area. This has been going on every day to varying degrees for more than 12 months. I feel like this has become an easily accessible joyful mental state as long as I’m mindful. I’m not sure which brain circuits are producing what chemicals, but what I know is that it completely eliminated severe and stable negative emotional mind states like depression, shyness and anxiety. If I focus on it, I can maintain it with mindfulness. If I wing it, I can lose this pleasure, but the moment I direct my awareness towards my head, the pleasure reappears. I smile slightly to facilitate it. As a practice, I stabilize attention to the breath and expand the awareness to this joy, whole body and mind activities. Or I can direct the attention to the joy, and expand the awareness to the body and mind—disregarding the breath in the process. I tend to direct the attention to the pleasure if I feel instability within it. Regardless, this enables me to practice effectively and develop metacognitive awareness. This was so effective that it radically transformed my life and my entire meditation practice.
As long as I’ve consciously intended to maintain this awareness in the morning, I can do it with consistent success. But my resolve is not always so high every single day, and sometimes subtle dullness described in Stage 5 can appear. I never experienced so much sluggishness where I feel the need to go to sleep, but I can definitely feel this low-tier energy with joy where I’m not alert. Comparing that mental state with how my mind feels increased energy as I’m playing video games makes me realize the problem of this subtle dullness. But while playing video games, the downside of that is they tend to lose or feel a sense of diminishing in the mindfulness, joy, body awareness and introspective awareness. Even though joy definitely gives me energy, I’m still trying to bridge the gap between the quality of energy I feel in daily life with the quality of alertness in formal sitting meditation. What would you suggest I do?
Keywords: samsaric cycle, links of dependent arising
What is nirodha-samāpatti?
I want to ask about your thought on whether consistent psychedelic use is a good idea on the path to Awakening. I’ve never used it, but a friend of mine extensively uses the substance called 5-MeO-DMT. He says that it is a fourty-five times more effective psychedelic than DMT and produces an insight experience, an ego-death so profound that you know yourself to be God. He says, “You are literally God and you are infinite”, “Everything is love”, “Death is 100% an illusion”, “Life is a dream”, “What we experience normally is a controlled hallucination”, “Materialism is wrong”, “Brain is part of this controlled hallucination”, “There is no objective external material world”, “Perception is a part of this hallucination”, “No-Self is a beginner-level insight”, “Compared to what is possible to realize on 5-MeO-DMT, in normal mediation even TMI will only partially get you to these states and realizations”. He says that these realizations are infinite. By using 5-MeO-DMT he claims to realize certain thuths that no other spiritual master has talked about. Is such a thing possible? Do you agree with his realizations? I know that you make a distinction between states and stages, Insight embodiment. My friend says that you experience these insights, although temporarily on psychedelics, with 1000 times the depth than traditional meditations. And he believes it is important considering people meditate for 10–20 years with very little to show for it. He also says that permanent Insight embodiment and temporary Insight experiences are dualistic notions and they collapse after the experience of time is seen as an illusion. What advice would you give to this person?
Keywords: states vs traits
I join this type of question from a different angle. In an ayahuasca ceremony, being outside and looking up, I suddenly saw everything—house, trees, the sky, people, my own thoughts—in a completely different way. First, everything was luminous, bright, vibrating, a vast space; second, it appeared and disappeared at an extremely high rate. One could also say that it was like a water fountain—solid, and yet not solid. Third, it was like a giant display. An immense screen that I could look at, but this looking was subtly different. I kind of had to turn my head, keeping the eyes fixed. Fourth, it had an emotional quality of endless awe. Fifth, my mind said, “This is all me”, whereas the me was everything that arose. This state lasted perhaps for a few minutes. I should add that in the minutes prior to this, inside my eyes seemed to throw two distinct light beams to whatever I looked. I could actually enlighten the walls with bright light at will. This left such an incredible impression that eventually I picked up TMI, and now I’m reading Tibetan Bon instructions translated by Daniel P. Brown, which to me come closest to express much of that depth of experience. I had zero prior meditation experience. This happened at age 63; I’m now 65. I’ve only once re-experienced this state in a lesser for when looking at night at a water fountain. My meditation motivation comes largely from these few minutes. Sometimes I experience a somewhat similar non-dual state when meditating on the autobahn. With podcasts as my meditation object, with eyes open. However, the experience of luminosity is then not present. The question is, I am now pretty convinced that the descriptions I read in, for example, the six lamps referring to luminosity, brightness, self-driving, vastness of appearance of phenomena are not just metaphorical. They correspond to the actual meditative experience. Is that true? Also, the more modest question is, does this experience without an experiencing individual Self correspond to some kind of Awakening experience. I have to say that this experience was more formative for me than many of the other more symbolic or emotional experiences. I have to add that since I’ve had these experiences, I am more and more in the state of compassion after having insights into my own trauma.
I’m a bit confused. Everyone talks about how you can learn from and get insights from psychedelic experiences. But now, if I understood properly, what you’re saying is that all of these experiences you go through, they are just mind-created, they are just more illusions. So what are you getting Insight into? What are you learning about if it’s not reality itself? If at the end of the day it’s just another illusion. How can that be valuable in terms of getting Insight into the actual reality (if there is such a thing)?
If we were to open your skull and started to remove parts of the brain, do you think that at some point we would remove enough so that these permanent traits would be gone?
My question was a proxy to another question which has to do with the idea of permanence of this shift in perception that happens after Awakening. The question is can those traits be undone by e.g. actions that we carry out or habits that we acquire after Awakening? Can something make those stable traits that we’ve developed unstable again?
How is Buddhist texts structured and organized? I’m curious how one goes about reading them. Ideally, I would like to read the text in its original script and explanations in English. How does one go about learning Pali, and do you have recommendations for books that discuss important parts of Buddhist texts?
A good friend of mind is engaged in religious Buddhism, and even aspires to become a monk. What I say next may be biased in some way, but I will try to describe my understanding of his path to the best of my knowledge. My friend interprets the suttas—early Buddhist texts—quite literally and believes in reincarnation, predictable karmic effects on your future lives, heaven and hell realms, renunciation from the world etc. Also, he thinks that the whole material world or existence is saṃsāra, that it is bad and something to be transcended through a spiritual path. Also, for him, an arhat is someone who is also practically perfect in his conduct. I recommended your book to him, but he does not believe that you are an arhat. Because of the recent allegations, he will not even read it. How would you advise to find common ground with such a person? I’m not trying to persuade him. I just want to have a productive communication about spirituality even amongst our differences. We spend lots of time together, so having harmonious communication without arguing constantly is important for me. Also, if you personally have some thoughts about this literal religious approach to Buddhism and why you don’t follow it, I’ll be glad to hear your views.
Keywords: history of Buddhism
As I understand it, an arhat is someone whose craving and delusion has been permanently extinguished as a result of Awakening. And consequently, there is no more scope for the arising of moment-to-moment becoming or rebirth. I don’t understand why such an arhat wouldn’t just let this conventional life end and transition to parinibbāna as a natural consequence. At the moment, how would the intention arise in the arhat to get up from the couch and to continue living the conventional life? Especially if the arhat has not been asked to teach or hasn’t found interest in people who want to learn?
You once said something like there’s some evidence to believe there are more paths after fourth path.
What is the Buddhist take on free will? Is there no free will, or is there limited free will? Why is it that some people are able to quit their addictions, while there are others who are equally motivated, but are unable to do so?
What is the most common way in which stream entry happens to people? I am aware of the important distinction between states and traits, and I ask this question out of pure curiosity. I undestand that one should not judge whether one is awakened or not because that person had some kind of experience. Bearing that in mind, did you notice any trends or commonalities in your students, or people you know?
Here are some questions that make me curious. How often is a stream entry accompanied by a cessation? Is it usually a sudden realization, or more gradual and long-lasting event for most people? Does it happen on the cushion more often, or just randomly in daily life?
00:49:31 Also, if you are comfortable with it, could you please describe how your own stream entry happened?
A documentary on the life of David Bohm: https://www.infinitepotential.com/
With regards to the question of free will, and everything being interdependently connected, a lot of people who are new to meditation wonder how sitting down and meditating every day is a good use of their time in terms of making the world a better place. Why not use that time to go and work for a charity, for example? It comes across as a selfish thing to do to some people.
Do you feel there is a consensus among contemplative teachers about what the dharmic view would be?
When you mentioned you own experienced of stream entry, it reminded me of in a way similar experience that I had last year on my first ten-day Goenka retreat. It was sometime in the middle of the retreat, a few days in. I was already in bed, about to go to sleep, and I had a similar sense of that I understood everything way deeper, how reality works at a deeper level. But what struck me, and the reason why I remembered this was because I had a sense of “This is so obvious to me right now”, “Of course it’s like this”. And I got excited, but then the next morning I forgot about everything. So what I’m trying to ask is, what exactly happened to me? Was I close, or was it some illusion, fantasy or dream? What would that be?
Would you anticipate that someone who has already cognitively taken in this idea regarding rules, rites and rituals, who is already living from a place of virtue rather than simple ethics or morals that they would still experience a profound shift in that sphere at stream entry, or do you think that this would be something that would be more pronounced for someone who was living from rules and morals etc.?
What is the interaction between the progress of insight and the progress of śamatha? Could one draw a table with how different ñanas feel in the different stages of TMI?
00:30:07 I’m asking because about a month ago, I experienced a sudden drop in clarity of the object of attention and a decrease in my ability to keep peripheral awareness wide open. Literally, one day, distractions would not be able to grab my attention at all during the whole sit; next day, everything felt slippery and my attention would jump from one thing to the next. Are these changes common? Do they have to do with something happening in a different axis of practice?
Keywords: Mahasi Sayadaw, Buddhaghosa
Do you know of any virtual meditation retreats in the spirit of TMI?
Do you think that we will be able to use technology to accelerate Awakening in the foreseeable future? I’ve heard Shinzen Young say that he really hopes that we will find some way to make meditation easier for most people using some kind of technology. Personally, I’m worried that it will be really hard to reach a critical mass of awakened people because Enlightenment is not easy and takes a long time for most people. Especially those who don’t have good instructions such as TMI. What are your thoughts on using technology to speed up meditation progress or even cause Awakening—both in the near and far future.
Keywords: psychedelics
I’ve been reading about what you call the Mind-System. Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind; Bernard Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind. It seems that nowadays there is a large consensus about the idea that our mind works as a distributed mind system rather than an egotist consciousness. I have two questions about this system:
01:07:09 It appears that most of information is processed unconsciously. Can we say that it works better this way? Unless we are in a learning process. And therefore we should interfere as minimally as possible and try just to be a witness of our own processes?
01:14:05 The theater where our moment-by-moment awareness takes place, especially in meditation, seems to have limited capacity and can track information almost one-by-one. But it is not that obvious, for instance, let’s say that I’m focused on my breath with central awareness. If I hear a noise like a loud-working machine, I feel that I can stay focused on the breath, and at the same time hear the disturbing noise. Can we say that the breath remains central or shares the space-consciousness with the machine noise? Or that it is an illusion and that there is still a moment-by-moment breath–sound, breath–sound way of processing information?
Keywords: revision of the moments of consciousness model
It seems to me that there is a real importance to differentiate between this stepping back and allowing things to happen automatically when you are present for that and when you are not present for that for people who might have different levels of awareness.
Keywords: being present, sati-sampajañña
I feel I’ve been in Stage 4 for months, maybe almost a year. I also have the impression that my peripheral awareness has been gaining ground week by week—even off the cushion. That leads me to think that being stuck in Stage 4 is mostly due to the stability of attention that is lacking, not the strength of the peripheral awareness. Yet in TMI, I get the feeling that a strong peripheral awareness will naturally and inevitably produce a stable attention. I do feel my attention gets more stable when I exert effort, however that effort does not feel at all relaxed. And TMI says that relaxation is key for success. Also, when exerting effort, I tend to drift away from joy into seriousness. During my meditation sessions, I find it hard to balance relaxation and effort. What would you recommend?
If craving is extinguished by attaining fourth path, what is left for the further paths? Or are there subtler and subtler forms of craving?
I’m really curious about psychic powers. I understand that in light of the purpose of the practice they are not important, but this topic keeps peaking my intellectual curiosity, so I cannot resist asking about it. I think I have a firm intellectual understanding and conviction of your metaphysical views, non-dualism, individual minds not being separate etc. So I have no doubt that all sorts of mental phenomena are possible that do not align with the materialistic intuitions of ordinary people. What psychic powers are possible or you have personally developed, if you don’t mind me asking. Is reading the minds of others siddhi real? If so, what is the exact nature of that siddhi? Can a meditator know the exact content of another person’s conscious experience (thoughts, emotions etc.) in real time?
00:40:44 I wonder whether or not siddhis have any practical use. For example, would it be a good idea to perform a siddhi to get someone interested in dharma if such a thing is ever possible?
This is a follow-up to a previous discussion that we had in July. I have had very long and intense meditations lately and was surprised at how easily I could get into jhānas if I just let things happen. I realized that I do not need to try to do anything to get through Stage 2 to Stages 6–7. In fact, anything I do doesn’t go in the right direction. It seems that when you have built enough experience over time, inner or unconscious processes work better on their own. They know how to get you where you need to go, much better than anything that you try to do consciously. There is a point where any personal effort can be considered an interference to deepening your meditation. Would you agree with that?
01:06:08 Somehow, naturally I’d fall into jhānas, and I’ve also built enough experience. They deepen by themselves. The way I feel it, a sort of energy (śakti, whatever) goes all over my body, and as jhānas deepen, physical sensations vanish completely, my mind becomes very quiet until finally my thoughts stop, finally freeing myself. Then I may wonder, “Do I have to do something to go further, or should I let things happen?” But I don’t have much experience of going any further, so what can happen by itself if I don’t do anything, and remain without much I in that place of bliss and quietness?
Keywords: correlation between the four jhānas and 7th–10th stages of śamatha, sati-sampajañña
I’m currently in Stage 5–6. I’m curious about how I should expect discursive thought to change off the cushion as I continue to progress from here. I work in a creative, analytical job in investing where I need a lot of spontaneous discursive thought to arise in order to be productive—as well as to investigate and explore and play with those chains of thought. Should I expect to improve at this due to enhanced attention and mindfulness? Should I expect to get worse at some point because the frequency of the arising of discursive thought is simply less? To put it bluntly, should I be concerned that at any point—Stage 7, 8, stream entry, fourth path—something in how my mind works is going to change that will make me worse at my job?
Keywords: autobiographical memory when advancing on the path
Cleaning up, growing up, waking up.
My question is about whole-body jhānas. I had an experience a couple of weeks ago where I used an approach that is a bit different to what is described in TMI. When I focus on the sensations at the nose, it can get quite intense. This led me to try a method described in Ajaan Lee’s Keeping the Breath in Mind & Lessons in Samadhi which involbes imagining the breath flowing through the body. I believe I kept doing this until I noticed that a noticeable ease and flow of energy was achieved. And since you mentioned that joy is part of acheiving jhānas, I imagined every being experiencing this sensation, happiness being within themselves. And that was the last thing I remembered before going into a flow state. It was like my body was effortlessly being glazed in energy. For the past couple of months, experiencing sensations at the nose or over the body has been easily accessible. Sometimes I can dial up or down the intensity. But it is quite difficult to go into a flow state. Sometimes I wonder if I am going to explode at any moment. But it just ends up being the experience for an hour-long sit. During sessions I would sometimes take a break by focusing on nothing while maintaining quality of awareness before getting back into intentionally observing sensations. Besides all of the abovementioned, I don’t know what else to do.
Yesterday, I tried the loving-kindness meditation as it is described in TMI, which is quite defferent from the Tibetan way. In the Tibetan way, you imagine the loving of your mother and then you imagine what suffering is, you develop this sympathy. Whereas what you had is more like imagining what it’s like to not have any suffering at all. And it hit the mark very quickly. The Tibetan way is a very traditional way, and it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. And I felt it didn’t quite hit home.
I was wondering if you’d be willing to speculate about an experience that I had when I did a course with Goenka back in around 1973. It was a self-course, so there was no instruction being given. It was a 30-day course. We did 10 days of ānāpāna meditation during which I started having these painful burning toes in both feet like they were in molten lead. And as soon as I would stop meditating, the pain would go away, and when I’d start meditating again, it would come back. I think that to some degree it was a reflection of the degree of concentration that I had. It was also the first time when I experienced full-body sensations. It was as though my whole body was exploding with vibrations. And after that, for about two days it felt like I was walking about 6 inches off the ground. Until somebody came with a message, because I just retired from the Peace Corps, that my money was lost or something like that. Immediately, I came down. I was curious, this feeling like I was walking 6 inches above the ground, what do you think might have happened?
I have a question about pīti. Sometimes I close my eyes and put the attention at the nose or somewhere else and I start experiencing a kind of movement that is very appealing. Does this count as pīti?
I would like to follow up on my question from last session. I asked about relaxation and energy or effort. I tried following what I understood from what you told me last time. Also, something I’ve been doing is trying to stretch up the spine. I noticed that by doing that I get some sort of natural energy that feels relaxed. It’s an energy that doesn’t have this feeling of striving or efforting too much.
Keywords: posture, chakras, yoga
How is the book writing going? I’m curious.
Realizing that you didn’t understand something as well or as deeply as you previously thought.
Mind as a sense. Thoughts and emotions as sensory input.
When do you think it is appropriate to teach children and what is appropriate to teach children [in terms of the dharma] depending on the age?
During one of the previous Q&A sessions, you mentioned that one of realizations after deep Awakening is that everything is love. Could you please elaborate more on that? Why is that the case?
It seems like sentient beings on this planet tend to experience a lot more suffering than pleasure in life, and now we all potentially face an anthropological existential threat which could bring even greater suffering. How can we integrate these facts with the notion that everything is love? How would you explain it conceptually to a person who is not yet awakened?
Some religious branches of Buddhism use the fact of suffering to promote an idea of finishing the endless cycle of reincarnation and getting out of saṃsāra. To them, living is suffering, and this whole material world is dukkha, and nibbāna is the way to get out.
I understand the problems with the notion of reincarnation and how it was incorporated from Hinduism. You discussed it quite often before, but is there any value at all in such teachings?
I personally find it repulsive and quite nihilistic to view existence as bad and something to escape from. However, so many Buddhist schools and experienced meditation teachers promote this idea, and they are basing it on the suttas. So I’m feeling quite confused. What is your opinion on this approach to Buddhism?
What amount of meditation is needed to maintain Stage 10 and stay in the state of śamatha?
How stable in the state of the mind? How long without concentration meditation would you be able to stay in it? Is it realistic for a layperson to stay in the state of śamatha? Could you also elaborate on the role of Insight in achieving Stage 10 and describe the state of śamatha of Stage 10 in greater detail?
As someone who’s been a lifelong spiritual seeker, I have read about and practiced in different faiths, but finally found what I was looking for in Buddhism. There’s one aspect that I miss from before, and that is prayer.
Ironically, I never used to like praying very much, but not that is not really included in secular Buddhism. I miss it. I know that there are religious Buddhists who pray to Buddhas and Taras etc.
Could you talk about the place of prayer in early Buddhism and whether we can still incorporate prayer and chanting in our practices? Who are we praying to if there is no God and the Buddha was human? Can we pray for help? Can we get help from or connect to previous Buddhist masters? I’ve always felt a strong connection to Dipa Ma even though I never met her. How would prayer be explained as working in Buddhist philosophy?
I know there are a lot of questions here. Essentially, I’m looking for an overview of prayer from a traditional Buddhist perspective.
Let’s say that you have the realization that you drifted away from the meditation object, and are coming back celebrating this realization. However, if the thought that captured your attention was of a dark nature, will the celebration of coming back connect this achievement in your brain with the returning to the present, or with the dark thought?
I would like to hear your take on the difference between feelings and emotions and how we can feel good, loving, positive on a daily basis even if we’re going through a phase of shadow work where all we can feel is painful and confusing feelings, thoughts and emotions.
I’ve been focused for a long time on healing all my past traumas. Now I feel like I forgot how to feel good again.
What is the usefulness and effect of following your heart or following your inner voice in relationship to developing powerful mindfulness? Do you have knowledge or experience that following of one’s intuition leads to the unblocking or acceleration of the development of an enlightened mind? Is intuition naive or superrational?
I’ve been wondering about the similarities between the state of awareness characterized by the mind at Stage 10, and the mind which is unsurpassable, and nibbāna.
I’ve just been on a retreat where this thing was touched on. The teacher discussed the different schools of thought splitting them clearly between those who believe that there is just consciousness and those who believe there is something out of which consciousness arises.
My sense was that it was the latter of these two schools of thought that could entertain the possibility of gradual Awakening without an experience of cessation and nibbāna. I’ve been finding it hard to reconcile my own experience of crossing into what feels like the territory of stream entry and not experiencing cessation. In TMI you said that cessation is not at all necessary. I’m wondering why it is given so much emphasis in other traditions.
It feels like this experience might be a time trap, but I don’t want to be nonchalant and disregard an experience.
How common is it to be at Stage 9? I’ve been meditating on and off for 10 years now, but I’ve been with TMI for only the last few years. As sittings go by, I’m more and more convinced I’m actually at such an advanced level. It’s quite literally unbelievable to me. The experiences you describe in TMI match mine to the extent that I can recognize them. But somehow I expected more. I guess I’m just not perceiving the day-to-day gradual growth I’m having and that most insights come now at Stages 9 and 10. Could you comment on this?
Keywords: chakras
In TMI, you say that stressful life circumstances can bring even the most advanced meditator back to the early stages. Can you expand on this?
It is my understanding that those who experience Insight and Awakening never fall back. Are you referring instead to the development of śamatha?
I do my sits at the same time of the day every morning. Since you want all of the different sub-minds to get onboard, do you recommend switching it up and doing your practice at different parts of the day so that you are working with different sets of sub-minds?
Culadasa talks about systems theory and the books The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, and Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems by Joanna Macy.
I have more experience with Awakening within my nighttime dream life vs Awakening during my daytime waking life. This is something I’m trying to remedy through the instructions in your books. I cannot help but wonder though, what are your thoughts on so-called lucid dreaming, dream yoga and the benefits that can be derived from it. I do personally believe it has its benefits, but I would enjoy your perspective on it.
I’ve had a very difficult past, which I’m working to rise above. I am remarkably well for all that I’ve been through. I’m finding meditation practice to be soothing and helpful. In the past I self-medicated with wine and cannabis as a way to cope, and I still sometimes struggle with craving and reaching for those things as antidote for stress. Is there any particular form of practice you would recommend for someone like me?
Keywords: trauma, conflict avoidance
Depending on the day, I seem to be at Stages 7–8–9. When I get to the point of effortlessness, I notice that joy arises and I get a lot of satisfaction if I completely let go and take the entire mind as meditation object and just sit back and observe. And then every now and again when anyting arises, noticing e.g. that it contains suffering, that it’s changing etc., that it’s not me because I’m witnessing it. That has started to develop a deepening Insight which is really nice.
What I’m noticing though is that I feel a reluctance to go to the breath at the nose at all, it feels like I really want to stay in that expansive state. And I guess, my question is, is it necessary? Or is it just the case that it’s a season of practice, that I’m just exporing this and that there will probably come a time when it feels more natural to go back to the breath sensations at the nose?
Keywords: meditation on the mind
In recent sits I’ve been letting go of attention on the breath, and instead relying on metacognitive awareness to investigate the Mind-System. I’ve been investigating arising phenomena by noting how they are constantly changing, how they contain subtle suffering, and how they are different to the Witness observing it, and so are not me. This has brought about some very useful Insight.
For example, in my daily life, I seem to identify far less with my emotions, reactions, thoughts etc. because I know them as mental formations. I still experience them in much the same way, but I can relax about them more because I’m more in touch with their emptiness. However, I think my identification with Self has instead shifted from these formations to the sense of Self that comes from being a witness to these phenomena. A kind of neutral observer.
It seems, therefore, that it’s not deepening an insight into No-Self because I’ve instead just started to identify with a different kind of separate Self.
It seems like I’m going through Stages 2–7 or 8 during every sit. First 20–30 minutes of my meditation are usually characterized by working through Stages 2–4, and by the end of the sit, I’m consistently at Stage 7, and often Stage 8. I’m wondering, is this okay?
Even though, I’m close to the adept stages, the first half of my meditation still has a lot of mind-wandering and forgetting, which are characteristic of earlier stages. I’ve noticed that this process happens regardless of how much effort I apply. For example, I can sit and relax for the first 30 minutes, and there will be lots of mind-wandering and forgetting, but after that I will begin to have a clear mind with lots of mindfulness, and it will be really easy to stabilize my attention. The opposite is true, even if I apply lots of effort and diligence, the beginning of my meditation will still have significant mind-wandering and forgetting, and then it magically gets really easy to sustain. This even caused a period of laziness in my practice when I thought, “Why should I apply all this effort in the beginning if my mind will get much clearer by itself in half an hour, and it will be really easy to meditate?” However I recognize this as a hindrance, and now I try to remain diligent from the very beginning.
Am I doing something wrong? I feel like I’m making progress, but not as fast as I could. Should I go back to Stages 2 and 3, and focus more on mastering them? Should I just go with the flow and not worry about it?
I think I’m kind of a perfectionist with the techniques described in TMI. I’m talking about Stages 2–3–4. I think I have this feeling that I haven’t mastered those techniques from the beginning and that stops me from going further, although I feel that I need some of the techniqes from the more advanced stages. I have this feeling that I didn’t complete something, and that I haven’t mastered the earlier stages well enough to go further. I have this psychological need to stay longer at the previous stages, although I feel that I need something else. Should I focus more on the previous techniques, or should I go further even though I don’t feel that I haven’t completed the earlier stages?
I was thinking about intention. When you set your intention before you do your sit, you can have a very general intention and a more specific one—what you’re going to do on that particular sit. I was wondering what you think about the traditional Buddhist refuge in the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha. I wonder what your opinion on it is, given that you take what’s traditional an give a more practical approach to it.
Problems with the pragmatic dharma movement.
Which masters are you referring to when you speak of pragmatic dharma? Because the way I’ve seen it phrased is, “Whatever works for you to get to Enlightenment is good.” That sounds a lot like what you’ve just explained when talking about taking the refuge in the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha.
I’d like to discuss what you call non-perceiving mind moments, which I think are very important. You said, the more of those moments we have, the more dullness we experience. Indeed, but behind apparent dullness, there’s a powerful hypnagogic process that can be used for deepening meditation.
A non-perceiving mind moment seems like a blank spot in the field of consciousness. If one looks closer in the past few seconds of the non-perceiving mind moment, one can find out that it is not empty at all, that it is filled with hypnagogic perceptions like people talking, images, sounds etc., and it happens just below awareness at a very close-to-subconscious level, but with a proper traing it is possible to bring them into the field of consciousness.
Why do this? Simply because hypnagogia comes with interesting effects. During a non-perceiving mind moment, the capacity of bringing it back, the capacity of bringing it back to memory always seems to come with a narcotic effect consisting of physical anesthesia, dullness, amnesia and rapture—the same rapture that can be experienced when entering jhāna.
I found out after lots of training in lucid dreaming that non-perceiving mind moments are like the tip of the iceberg, but underneath the surface there is everything needed to get rid of physical sensations (anesthetic effect) and to be filled with joy and rapture, which is exactly what is needed to enter jhānas.
When non-perceiving mind moments are properly used, it works like a shortcut to jhanic state, and it works wonderfully well, but it is essential to control the narcotic effect in order to get anesthesia and rapture without the dullness and amnesic effect and keep awareness perfectly clear.
Keywords: waking state vs dream state
TMI is a wonderful book, but you’ve often said that you couldn’t possibly include everything you thought was important, or the book would have been twice as large. You have an online book recommendations list. Either from that list, or in terms of books or resources you’ve come across since that time, could you make a recommendation for the top 3 books you urge TMIers to read to supplement or enhance their experience with TMI? Why would you choose those?
What is the difference between the experience of the Witness, and the experience of the Self? Is it possible to have non-dull moments of consciouness where the sensations of the breath are present, but the Witness is not?
During sittings, I lose track of me and my immediate surroundings, yet when I am that, it doesn’t feel like I was under subtle dullness. It feels different. It feels like I was mindful the whole time, even though the I or the Witness wasn’t there.
I’m challenging the idea of being able to tell when I was mindful or not a moment ago. Ultimately, “I was mindless just now” can be seen as just another thought. But it feels risky and weird to assume that we can’t trust the memory of event thats happened just now as that would mean having no basis to understand what is going on during meditation in order to know what antidotes one might want to apply.
Maybe some information about me as a person can be helpful. I’m very easily distracted—work, reading, school etc.—at the same time I can be very focused and deep-dive when I found a focus. This characteristic seems to be present in my meditation sessions as well.
For a long time I found myself very easily dragged away from the breath, mind wandering being the major content of a meditation session. I’ve been meditating one and a quarter hours per day according to the instructions of your book for more than 3 years now. I believe myself to be in Stage 3 according to the classification.
I would say, it took me about a year to reduce cases of mind-wandering and its duration. Furthermore, the concept of being able to attend to sensations of the breath, and at the same time realizing what is going on around me—be it thoughts or feelings—seemed unreachable to me. It’s only very recently that I noticed a change in my meditation sessions, and I would like to talk to you about it.
It seems that I can attend to the breath, and still realize my stream of thoughts or feelings, which are there, sometimes more in the foreground, sometimes more in the background. Sometimes in realizing these thoughts, I ask myself whether I forgot the breath or not. I rarely still have short periods of mind wandering when there is a strong thought or emotion.
I have two questions. I start to realize that when the thoughts are not coming in as events anymore, but rather exist there all the time in the background, I rarely label them. I actually only label a thought if it somehow stands out of the stream of thoughts going on in parallel to my attending to the breath. Is it okay to not label in that case?
00:56:14 So far, I stuck fairly strictly to the stages of your book, but I wouldn’t say that I completed Stage 3 as I still sometimes forget the breath. On the other hand, a clear change has happened to my meditative experience which I interpret to be linked to a higher level of introspective awareness.
I’d like to expand a little more on one point that you touched on during a previous session.
Let’s say that a meditator has a chronic medical condition that produces symptoms which significantly hinder meditation progress. For example, brain fog.
As you probably know, it becomes quite hard to stabilize attention in such a state, and lots of dullness is naturally present. Also, negative thoughts can arise. Meditation progress is really slow. You are barely making any progress. You are constantly being kicked back to the early stages etc. What attitude changes, perspective changes or practical tips would you advise in such situations so that the meditator can still continue to progress through the stages without getting demotivated?
Somewhere around February, I was playing around with the Wim Hof method—hyperventilating. And after a week I felt my attention was more scattered when I did TMI. I was probably practicing around Stage 3 at the time, and it took me a week or two to have a more consistent stable attention. Since then, I never tried the Wim Hof method again. I’m wondering if these two methods conflict with each other, and it’s best to stick with one way of practicing.
One of the things I was taught while learning tantric guru yogas was that one can either start with deep breathing exercises—the vase breathing—or use the common method of following the breath, but not to do both. Try both, but in the end, you should focus on one only.
01:28:35 When one tries to relax to achieve effortlessness as described in Stage 7, are there any uses of gazes? Mahamudra traditions describe having eyes open, looking straight ahead when meditating on the mind.
I’m curious to hear you view on the role of longer retreats as part of the dharma. In TMI you offer teachings that can be incorporated into a daily routine, and to me this seems to be an integral part of your teachings. Nevertheless, I notice that retreats for me are spaces where I can work much more diligently, with much more focus on those practices and that they often have a positive, long-lasting effect.
I’m curious to know if you consider retreats a necessary part of the dharma and how it would be best integrated into TMI teachings. I’m curious about the length of these weekend, week, 3 months and other retreats that accompany TMI teachings as well.
Two weeks ago, I did a two-week long day retreat at home with friends. We could make our own schedule, and I tried to follow a bit more of a structure during that time.
But one challenge that I had is that sitting longer stirred things up. Part of that might have been integrating new teachings. That is in contrast with the daily routine that is strongly based in the TMI practice which gives clear guidelines. I found it challenging to on the one hand have this daily routine which has lots of structure, and on the other hand in the retreat setting, where they essentially teach the same things but use different words and concepts. I think now I’m at a point where I look back and see that the core of it is very similar, but I found it challenging to have a different framework of teaching. I’m curious to hear if that’s just part of the process—to recognize challenges, to feel a bit unstable at times if other people use different words. Talking to my friends helped me to see the similarities, but my question is how do I deal with different teachings if they all use different words and that always throws me a bit off balance.
A couple of months ago I asked a question about entering jhāna. A few weeks later, I re-read Stage 6 trying to see if there was anything I was missing or overlooked, and then I started experiencing it again, which happened a couple of times. But then my daughter was born and it went away.
So it has been a month and a half, and I haven’t experienced it again. A part of me feels like I’m on a plateau. I think I know the answer which is that I should just keep practicing it in a systematic way, but perhaps you could give me some pointers.
Do you have any suggestions about what to do when intense, emotionally charged thoughts and mental images arise during meditation and you feel like you don’t have the willpower to move away from that? It’s just to seducing and alluring. You are aware that you’re there, but you don’t have the strength to bring the mind out of that and go back to doing the technique.
I found that when you run into this problem during meditation, sometimes there isn’t anything you can do, but other times it’s worth to keep going and I had some good meditations when this happened, but I could overcome this state. But it takes time—1 hour, sometimes longer.
There is this idea of sitting through and seeing what happens, but how can I combine this approach with effortlessness, lightness? Is there anything to say about that combination?
Keywords: right effort, Shinzen Young - flavor of purification
I’m practicing between Stage 3 and 4. So far, I’ve never fallen asleep during a meditation. I’m wondering if this is a sign of me not having sufficient stable attention. I sure do have the feeling that I experience subtle dullness, but rather as a precursor to me forgetting the breath and not as a precursor to falling asleep. I believe that I’m a very alert person in general. Maybe that will help you to interpret my observations. Can you please give me some advice? I would be very thankful to hear whether there is something that I should improve, work on, or just continue with Stage 3–4 practices.
I’ve been meditating using TMI for around 4 years now. I find myself stuck in Stage 3–4. I’ve been able to maintain good extrospective awareness very early, but I’m not able to get a steady introspective awareness going on. I do practice walking meditation before my sit almost every day, genearally for 10–15 minutes. At times my meditation sessions end up creating some anxiety or dullness. I’d like to get your perspective. Is this something common? What could I do differently to have a steady introspective awareness?
“The Witness doesn’t exist.” What do you think? I’m coming to that conclusion. Sometimes I try to get to the place of the Witness, but I seem to be automatically sprung back out of it. I’m left with a feeling of “I don’t want to go back there anymore”. It brings back memories of some bad trips I had where I felt paralyzed (not physically), and my mind would spin in circles trying to make sense of the experience where other non-meditation could just “go with it”. I guess identification with the Witness and psychoactive drugs doesn’t mix well. Would love to hear your opinion.
When I meditate, sometimes my awareness goes off into memories and thoughts, then there is a point when I come back, and there is this experience of selfness, ego. Same thing happens when I wake up in the morning. There’s now a very clear distinction between ego-moments and no-ego-moments. What I’ve realized is that there is suffering in these ego-moments, and I was wondering where this suffering might come from. Does suffering appear because of the effort to try to create something permanent and stable out of something that is inherently ephemeral and empty?
In this way of seeing things as being ephemeral, everything changes, change is constant, I do have a concern about rules and grasp of meaning in terms of not being able to function and getting to a kind of a nihilistic way of seeing. I understand that might be one thing holding someone back from fully understanding or further wisdom. Maybe you can say a few words to that.
Culadasa: There is always something for you to do. There is intention. This is really what I think the Buddha was trying to communicate to us referring to karma as intention and using the term re-birth.
If you’re going to be engaged in the world, there has to be a Self. You just don’t need to be attached to the form that that Self takes in the moment.
What is reborn is the Self. And every time the Self is reborn, it’s different, but what it is is based on what it was and what it did the last time it arose. In its last birth.
So the idea of karma and reincarnation is a crude level of understanding, understanding at the level of mythical and magical of what is a very real process that’s happening hour by hour, moment by moment.
They also call re-birth “cycles of existence”, and you get many of them during a day. Maybe if you are unlucky and you are tortured by someone, you are reborn in the hell realm; then maybe you need something and you are reborn in the hungry ghost realm; and so on and so forth. But if I understand it corrctly, in theory, when you get to the fourth path, you stop being reborn? So do you king of live in the Bardo constantly?
A friend of mine and myself are interested in an answer to a question. There seem to be two different flavors of Awakening. The self-realization of Advaita and the levels of Awakening described in Buddhism. Although dissimilar when you examine the details, both types of Awakening appear to be genuine and valid.
The Buddha disavowed the Advaita view, but a basic examination of traditional Advaita Vedānta makes clear that the true Self they are referring to—and Brahman—is not an entity or individualized aspect.
Given this, why is there such a difference in the realization of a singular truth, and are these two views on Awakening really in conflict?
Keywords: solipsism and nihilism, samsara is nirvana; nirvana is samsara
Two weeks ago we were talking about the two sides of the Witness: first recoginizing that there is no one doing anything, and the other half being that there is no one observing or witnessing or watching. You were pointing me to what the source of this observer might be. What conceptual model might create an illusion that such an observer exists. You pointed me to thinking in terms of everything being a process including the I.
I think that it’s working in terms that it’s making my meditation sessions more peaceful. My mind isn’t making so much effort trying to analyze everything that is happening.
And that’s exactly my question. By not trying to analyze things, by trying not to attach myself to the I, I feel like sometimes in meditation I don’t really know what’s happening. And I wonder if this state of not knowing is a good place to be in or if I should be trying to do something else.
It’s not dullness, in case you wanted me to clarify.
I’m just wondering if there is any benefit to changing between peripheral awareness and one-pointedness similar to what you describe in Stage 6 when changing between the sensations at the nose and then to the body. I came out of a cold recently and I’ve been feeling like I was back at square one for a while. Some dullness and mind-wandering was common and pretty annoying. But it occured to me to change between being aware of everything to focusing on the sensations at my nose or in the body. When I did this a number of times, I seemed to get a firm grip on my practice again and mind-wandering and dullness did not last long after that. I guess I’m asking if there is any benefit in doing this beyond getting rid of dullness and mind-wandering.
I would again like to ask a question today with regards to the stages and the strictness of when to practice in which stage. I was under the impression that you said a few times that it was okay to practice in several stages during one session. When I practice for 60+ minutes in a day, I sometimes start out with light forgetting and see myself in Stage 3. Followed by a certain duration where I would judge myself to practice according to Stage 4. Some intense thoughts or emotions sometimes also draw me back to Stage 2, with certain periods of mind-wandering. I assume that it is important to accept the settings as they are and not be disappointed to be drawn back to the earlier stages. But is it actually okay and even normal to practice in several stages during one session? When reading TMI, I first got the impression that it was important to complete a stage entirely before you start out practicing in the next one. If that is true, what does it mean to complete a stage?
I’ve experimented with cannabis in the past and I know of its mind-numbing effects and that’s why that’s no longer something I pursue. My experience back them was that you do get enhanced perception of sounds and flavor, but there is a price for that you’ll have to pay afterwards. Two days later you feel dullness throughout the day and being less present.
I was wondering if you had an opinion on CBD which does not contain THC?
After listening to almost all of you recording discourses, one thing that I have sort of missed was much discussion of the tasks and challenges for working in Stages 7, 8, 9 and 10. And I would be interested in hearing you talk about those stages at some point.
I would say I’m around Stage 6–7 at the moment and one thing that worries me a lot is that I don’t seem to be getting that very fine clear virbratory sense of the breath. In the book you talk about how your perception of the breath changes and it becomes sort of staccato as other people described. You see the breath breaking down into vibrations. What I get instead is that the breath stop being sort of a physical thing and becomes something that is happening in my mind and it’s much easier to focus on that mental aspect of the breath than the physical aspect. And there is no dullness involved because I’m completely with the breath, and my awareness is very bright and expansive and clear, and I’m following every moment. I’m totally aware that I’m breathing and in what moment. But there is just not a lot of physical sensation connected to it. There is just a kind of a knowing in the mind that that the breath is happening, and I’m able to follow that quite easily. And I keep going, “But where’s all these very distinct breath sensations that people say you’re supposed to start experiencing?” On occasion, I did experience the breath becoming more vibratory, but more and more it feels like there’s this shift from the physical sensations to a mental component to the breath. It’s very smooth and it’s quite easy for me to follow. So could you perhaps talk about that?
Over the years I’ve heard people use the term “Dark Night” to describe difficulty as the result of their practice. What has been confusing is that I’ve seen it used to describe everything from a period of relatively mild ennui through to more serious depression or anxiety or to a profound sense of hopelessness or other existential crisis and even to seeming psychotic symptoms.
I know the term “Dark Night” to originate in Christian mysticism, and I’ve also heard you intimate that it has been misappropriated and has no real place in the vocabulary of a meditator. Yet I’ve seen its increased use and popularity in modern meditation movements, particularly pragmatic dharma circles. Dr Willoughby Britton even runs support groups and does research on the phenomenon.
Could you explain the “Dark Night” in its original context, and what, if any, relevance it has to the experiences of Buddhist TMI meditators or other contemplatives? Why does it occur? Is it something that can be avoided? If it is not a real risk for meditators, are there other adverse effects we should be aware of? Is there a more suitable term that we could be using?
And the bonus question, what is Zen sickness?
To be motivated to meditate, it would help to know if there are after-death benefits of Awakening during life. Would you guess there likely are or not? Such as a continued reduction of suffering in the universe.
01:11:08 Nothing exists except this changing discontinuous moment with its various ephemeral qualities. There are no entities, but there are coherencies, causality and dependent origination.
Imagine there are four people living in a remote area and never influence another person during their whole lives except each other. 01:12:49 One is an adult and three are children. The adult teaches the children meditation and eventually dies. One of the children remains unawakened, one becomes a sotāpanna, one becomes an arhat. Then they all die.
Do the deaths of the above described unawakened child, sotāpanna and arhat precipitate future events any differently than each other? Are there any different after-effects of their deaths, especially with regard to suffering and rebirth vs extinction and vs persisting in the universe via forces and fields without a biological substrate?
Where can a meditator find guidance on how to practice after attaining first path? I’m familiar with the ten fetters model, but it only describes what should be overcome at certain stages, not exactly how. Are there any resources with specific practices for higher paths which you can recommend? Or is it enough to continue practicing as usual with having an intention to work on specific fetters? For example, just practicing after stream entry with an intention to reduce desire and aversion in daily life. Or are there some particular practices one could do?
I was wondering if there’s any difference between surrendering as you sometimes mention and letting all effort go to attain effortlessness as you describe in Stage 7. I’m just curious because as I continue to practice in Stage 6, I am attempting to make it a part of my intention—to strive less for goals and just do the practice for its own sake. Or at least keeping in mind the underlying purpose—developing one-pointed stable attention.
This led me to wonder if there’s any difference between these two letting-gos. I don’t mean abandoning goals, but the striving part.
Preliminary practices.
I’ve been reading some books on polyvagal theory and polyvagal therapy for resolving trauma. And one of the things they talk about is that in the animal world after an animal goes into a freeze response, when coming out of it, there’s often and agitation that releases some sort of a suppressed energy or a part of the suppressed energy that led to the immobilization.
A brief explanation of polyvagal theory is that the most primitive response to an overwhelming threat is to play dead, which is phylogenetically the oldest. Then comes the adrenal response which is the fight or flight. And the latest in the phylogenetic evolution is the ventral vagus which is tied in with the muscles of facial expression, and so is related to communication between individuals.
And that trauma usually occurs before the age of 5 when your reaction to emotional situations gets imprinted by either imitating or reacting to those of your caregivers. And that oftentimes when we have these strong outbursts of behavior, they are related to the uncovering of these implicit reactions, that we don’t have a story about as to how they arose, but they are just these remembered reactions.
So my question was, is it possible that these things of pīti, the sensations that arise in meditation, might also be a form of the same kind of agitation that releases this pent up energy? Because it does have this agitating or bubbling nature to it.
And another question that’s sort of related to this is how would you say pīti differs from the opening of a chakra? When it feels like the heart or some other chakra opens?
How is your health?
I was listening to one podcast where you were you discussing the bioemotive framework in relation to health, that there was some self-destructive belief that you had which was eating you from the inside. And I’m curious, do you still explore bioemotive framework therapy or do therapy at all, and have you found it helpful for the health?
I think somebody asked a few months ago about nirodha-samāpatti. I think it was about when they come out of that, do they get to fourth path. I remember your response saying that you knew what you had to do to practice nirodha-samāpatti, and I was curious if you had tried it out.
What is direct knowledge? How can we know that we understand something through direct knowledge?
Can scientic reasoning allow us to know something with direct knowledge? Can a phenomenon be known directly through scientific explanation?
Keywords: Gödel’s theorem
How would you recommend approaching addictions, which I understand are forms of strong craving. For example, psychological addiciton to smoking marijuana, maybe on the weekends. It is not something that is so detrimental to my life that I need to seek professional help because it’s not all the time. But still, I consider myself a serious practitioner. I still have a regular meditation practice. It doesn’t interfere with the regularity of it, but one part of my mind understands that there are some negative effects on the quality of my mindfulness, for example, on those days, and the quality of meditation. But still, another part enjoys it so much that I still experience strong craving. I’m wondering if I should approach it just like any other craving and just continue practicing and trying to be mindful, or if in this case some other course of action should be taken. Maybe you have some experience in this area.
I don’t have a question, just an update from the last time we talked, if that’s okay.
For the background, I’ve been meditating using TMI for about 4 years, and I was in a plateau somewhere in Stage 4, and I’ve been in that stage for a very long time. That was the point of our discussion last time.
Since then, one of the things that I found out was about the right view. I think I didn’t have the right view about interactions and people, so internally somehow I was demonizing everybody who was giving me a negative opinion. And I think that since I started looking at all of this as a process, I woudn’t really say that my meditation has improved, but I think generally in life I’ve started to develop a much more positive attitude and that is truly starting to reflect in my meditations also.
I think that was something very crucial that I missed for all these years. What do you think?
I heard you talking about the precepts. Unfortunately, I don’t know what they are. If it’s okay, could you elaborate on that?
I have a question about conditioning. I’ve noticed some mental conditioning in my meditations. Sometimes I withdraw myself from sensation, and I can’t change this. I think it has been causing a problem for me because it makes it hard to watch the sensations. What can we do about subtle conditioning, mental behaviors.
About once a month, Michael Taft has a traditional Buddhist remembrance of death practice, and I wondered if you had any suggestions for doing that in context of TMI.
My question is a bit vague. Do you think there is any value in entering saṃbhogakāya when it comes to Awakening? Do you use it in your own practice?
I’ve been thinking lately about sāti and samadhi as being two axes or dimensions of development. In TMI there is a certain path that’s drawn in this two-dimensional space. And sometimes you refer to what happens when you deviate from that path. I think that in my experience I see more and more that the two are not as much correlated as I thought they were from reading TMI.
I’ve been reading a book by David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. (Culadasa: This is the branch of philosophy known as epistemology.) In the book he says that the law of causality is a view that arises because we’ve been seeing since our birth that every phenomenon is accompanied by another phenomenon right before it occurs, and therefore we conclude that the first phenomenon causes the arising of the second phenomenon. However, he argues, there isn’t any necessary connection between two phenomena. In other words, we can’t know for sure that one phenomenon will cause the arising of the same phenomenon in the future simply because it did so in the past.
For example, we see that every time we see a ball hit another motionless ball, the ball that is motionless starts to move. Therefore we conclude that the impact of the first ball caused the motionless ball to move. However, there isn’t any necessary connection between these two events that indicate that this impact must give the result of the movement of the motionless ball. We can easily conceive of another outcome that follows the moment of impact. Like two balls becoming motionless after impact.
This reasoning seems valid to me, and I started to think that, in appearance, the concepts in Buddhism I mentioned above are based on this law, therefore they do not bring a completely valid knowledge. For instance, the law of dependent arising says that contact conditions feeling. Is this statement formed because the arising of a feeling has always come after contact in the past? I know these concepts are profound and my understanding of the words feeling and contact is not deep enough, and the concept is probably different than the appearance.
I spend a lot of time driving for work. I notice that there’s a lot of time for myself to think. Is there any practice one can do while driving that would aid the meditation practice? Given the obvious safety considerations, of course.
I’ve been working on the Still Point lately, and I was wondering where you found this expression or concept. I mean, what tradition were you referring to, or does it come from personal insight?
Keywords: Advaita Vedānta (Wikipedia)
You mentioned that you were spending more time on non-dual practice, is that right?
Keywords: non-duality of form and formless, non-duality of the relative and the ultimate, non-deuality of duality and non-duality, Dòngshān Liángjiè - Five Ranks (Wikipedia)
When you were talking about the Still Point, I only remembered the one guided meditation where you actively did the Still Point. Are there any variations or any other ways of approaching that? Or is it mostly by contrasting it with the movement beyond the Still Point?
Keywords: T. S. Eliot - Four Quartets (The author, the poem)
I would like to talk about the Yogacharan idea of storehouse-consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna). What you mentioned when you described the Mind-System, one of the definitions I found is “Ālaya is a sort of eternal substance or matter, creative and containing all forms. When considered as a whole, it is non-existent or contains nothing. When considered phenomenally, it fills the universe.” It seems to be of the nature of materialism. It is the store or totality of consciousness—both absolute and relative.
Considering this, it could be possible that consciousness as a whole might not be a local phenomenon, but rather a non-local phenomenon containing all mind experiences. Even some scientists like David Bohm have talked about the idea that what we think could be information stored locally could be a non-local phenomenon. What do you think about this idea?
00:13:49 In the same vein, I would say that anything we experienced as humankind requires creating a view. Anything we think, believe, learn etc. is always a view—of a personal subjective reality and happens any time from morning till evening. We can’t function without creating a view.
In a way, our subjective being, what we experience is built entirely out of a certain amount of this ālaya, and this is what makes us think, “I am.” My view is that there is not any soul or real individual entity, but I don’t believe in the Buddhist idea of anattā (No-Self) either. I would say that there is a Self. We experience it every day. It is made of mind experiences created and stored by ālaya. We could be a construct of this ālaya.
00:23:21 The destruction of my body might not make such a difference because what makes me is a view of my experiences and that information never dies.
Keywords: non-duality of mind and matter, lucid dreaming
What is death from your point of view? Do you have any thoughts on what would happen next, right after the impact if you jumped off a cliff causing a fatal injury?
In one sutta in Majjhima Nikāya, it is stated that one reappears in accordance with his or her aspirations, and an arhat does not reappear anywhere at all.
Do these statements imply that somehow this cycle of rebirth and the world around us is an operation of mind. What is the relation of nibbāna to this subject since it is also defined as being released from the cycle of dying and reappearing along with the cessation of greed, hatred and delusion?
What do you think of the Tibetan practice of conscious dying? Is it possible that after somebody dies, everything becomes kind of scattered and they are not being held together as a real them anymore, like in the body, but you could still influence their stream of consciousness?
I have a tendency to get easily stressed when dealing with difficult situations. Often the feelings of stress go to my head and I get light headaches with most of the pressure at my temples. There are times when I do my sitting practice—even though I’m not stressed and can feel the sensations of the breath quite easily around my body—I feel pressure mostly on my face, and at times at my temples. It seems to resemble the pressure I feel when I’m stressed. Perhaps it’s because of how I dealt with pressure or stress throughout my life and it spills into other activities, whether I like it or not. It occurred to me a couple of days ago during my sit that I tend to narrate what I should be experiencing or doing. I don’t even know if that makes sense, but it’s like telling yourself to feel the love, and you can feel very intense about it, but you’re not really feeling the love, you are just feeling intense. Instead of telling myself what to do, I should just do it and drop the inner self-talk, if this makes any sense. I’m wondering if there is any underlying issue that needs some resolving. Maybe this is just an overall inability to relax.
01:09:28 Also, I listenced to Shinzen Young over a year ago, and I heard him give the advice to some practitioners to pepper the day with short meditations. They could be anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes, and you do it throughout the day as a complement to one’s regular and longer daily sit. What do you think about this, and what do you think I should do during those 30 seconds?
Would you be able to clarify the difference between effortlessly stable attention and effortless metacognitive awareness? In my sits, I stablilize attention on the breath at the nose, then let go once joy starts to arise, and if my attention remains stable, I then rest as metacognitive awareness to observe the mind, allowing attention to move freely. Sometimes dullness arises, which I assume means attention is no longer effortlessly stable, but my subjective experience behind the dullness is still very clear, alert, present and stable. Is it that my metacognitive awareness is effortless, but not attention?
Keywords: effortlessness
I have a question about the connecting technique in Stages 5, 3 and 4. I understand it as “Breathing a long breath, one knows they breath a long breath” etc. from the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, which I find useful in stabilizing the breath. But this connecting the states of mind bit I find distracting. Kind of like I’m adding something on top of the breathing—like an additional conceptual overlay. I feel like the point is to overload the technique so that the stable subtle dullness doesn’t get a foot in the door, is that correct?
Keywords: Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (SuttaCentral)
My inquiry is about Stage 7 purification process. A few months before I started my meditation practice, I did a lot of daily mindfulness practice. As a result, I started feeling a loosening of tension in my chest. I had had that tension ever since I can remember. The tension was so uncomfortable that I was almost unable to lie on my stomach. After I started sitting meditation, the purifications sped up, and I quite successfully went through what I believe I can describe as Stage 4 purifications, though purifications have been me to some extent since Stage 1, and as I mentioned earlier, even before that. There was this pattern to the purification process where I would feel as if there were a thick hard jelly in the entire upper left part of my chest, some of which would loosen up one day, and the next day I would feel energy sensations in that particular place which were very soothing. The sensations were so overwhelming that I stopped sitting meditation and made the tension and following the energy sensations the focus of my attention throughout the day. As time went by, the tension in my chest became less and less uncomfortable, which tremendously raised the quality of my life. I believe I am going through Stage 7 purifications now, but the purification pattern has changed. It is now just the tension loosening without the following energy sensations, which I find very uncomfortable at times. What would you advise me to do in this case? Also, how would you explain my uncommon, I believe, and strange purification patterns. If it’s any help, I had full-blown DPD before the purifications, along with a host of other mental health issues courtesy of an extremely traumatic childhood. Thanks to you, I am now free of almost all of them.
How to deal with confusion combined with a degree of mindfulness?
By confusion I mean state of mind that makes it impossible to focus on anything long enough because it feels like there is an unsolved problem, and attention withdraws from any object it is directed towards, and trying to direct it again and again leads to a state of anxiety-like agitation. This state usually occurs after long periods of unskillful mental conduct and it contains a lot of painful mental conditioning.
How do I maintain my motivation for Awakening when in the midst of homework and deadlines? 00:25:44 Do you have any tips on dealing with the stress that is caused by difficult responsibilities and for preserving the intention to awaken in the midst of hard workd that one finds unpleasant and meaningless.
Every time I check in, I don’t experience any thoughts. There’s nothing there. As I’m following the breath, I will have a spontaneous awareness and bring myself to the breath, or I will spontaneously realize that there is a subtle or a gross distraction, but when I actively check in, I never find anything. How do I check in? Or what does checking in feel like? Does it happen quickly, less than a second, or does it last multiple seconds.
00:37:59 What does awareness actually feel like? Attention is clear, but awareness, I’m not sure which part it is. I switch attention to them when something happens. I know there are times they are talking, but I don’t notice because I’m focusing on the meditation object.
That knowing without noticing is awareness without a movement of attention taking place. That’s what awareness feels like.
00:46:06 Sometimes I feel my pulse in my head and body and a slight tingling feeling. Is that awareness?
In TMI it says that there are moments of attention and moments of awareness. But I feel like at earlier stages awareness occurs simultaneously with attention.
Keywords: revisions to TMI
What does awareness feel like? I would say it feels like feeling many things at the same time. An I thing that to get a feel for it, someone could try diffusing their attention over multiple things. That way you can get some sense of what awareness feels like.
Can we know something with awareness even in daily life? Like when studying a topic, for example a math theorem. Can we know this with awareness?
I’ve been practicing TMI since May last year, and I’m currently working at Stage 6, mostly. A few months back when I started Stage 5 practice and had been working on overcoming subtle dullness, I’ve noticed an increase in mental energy. I’m noticing a lot of stuff I didn’t notice before—both mental and physical.
One very prominent phenomenon that is a distraction both on and off the cushion is the feeling of energy in my forehead and between my eyebrows. There is a feeling of agitation when I close my eyes making it harder to close my eyes completely. This is especially an issue when I’m going to sleep.
When trying to sleep, I’m trying to keep an awareness of the body, and the softness, warmth and comfort of the bed. But it’s often difficult to not get distracted and worked up by the energy in my eyes and forehead, and the fact that I can’t close them completely.
Should I just ignore it, and eventually it might work itself out? 01:03:45 Do you have any experience on whether meditation can induce migraine with aura?
Something came to my mind when you talked about blood vessels in the brain. Do you feel a degree of uncertainty when talking about scientific matters? That the knowledge that science bring is different to the knowledge that we hope to acquire through this spiritual practice?
I asked last time about the agitation between my eyes, and it has not been very bothersome since because I’ve started to just accept it. But I’ve noticed that when I get very stable attention, exclusive attention and feel relaxed and pleasant, I notice flashes and vibrating light occuring behind my eyelids. This very much sounds like some of the description of the pacification of the senses. However, I’m a bit worried about the fact that when I get up from the sit, my vision is a bit blurry, different for an hour or so after this. Is this normal?
00:03:25 I’ve been trying to incorporate this into my mindful review as a way to not get caught up in worrying/ruminating about it. But I can’t help but worry whether this could be something harmful to my vision.
How should I relate to dullness occurring in daily life? More specifically, dullness setting between 1 and 4 p.m. due to the circadian rhythm.
I have a lot of online lectures due to COVID-19, and the dullness makes it very hard to concentrate during this period of the day. Should I use the same antidotes as described in the book? I can’t help but feel a lot of aversion towards the dullness.
I’ve had a practice gap. Coming back, I was able to resume roughly from where I had left it off. Perhaps due to some crystallized Insight? 00:18:43 Anyway, I have confidence that time and patience will bring about more Insight. Yet my mind asks me, “Why should I prefer a meditative state of mind over any other state? 00:22:39 What is wrong with suffering?”
Is thought an a posteriori rationalization of a process which is already taking place, and is that why thoughts don’t matter? Is the sole purpose of thought that of human communication?
Keywords: symbolic thought: verbal, imagery, kinesthetic
How can we be sure that the things we’ve discovered about our mind apply to the other humans? Is there another way to validate them other than external verification through observable behavior of others?
00:57:20 Is the knowledge gained through Insight both mundane and supramundane, experimental and contains an induction element, that is assuming that one thing discovered about a particular experience applies to another similar experience as well? For example, suffering. 01:04:59 If so, how can these knowledges satisfy the mind without being a priori, a knowledge that is known independent from experience?
I have been practicing meditation on and off for about 5 years, and I estimate that I’m currently at Stage 6, perhaps Stage 7. Truthfully, I’m not sure. Simply put, subtle dullness no longer seems to plague me, and my concentration on the breath is generally quite strong. These days, I would say that my practice is focused on maintaining a wide scope of attention by feeling the breath through my entire body. I also find that I’m able to zoom out pretty easily and simply watch metacognitively how the mind naturally directs attention and awareness as it sees fit. Meahwhile, I still suffer from intermittent bouts of severe depression, and I’d like to ask for your council on how to use meditation to deal skillfully with it. My intuition tells me that I need to learn how to simply allow the feeling of depression to reside in awareness without allowing attention to dwell on it. And yet, in practice I find that when the feeling of depression comes, I can’t help but pay attentin to it. And the more I try not to pay attention to it, the more it seems that my mind is determined to pay attention to it. It seems as if even when I’m able to establish my attention on the breath, my mind refuses to let go of attention to the depressed mood. The result is that attention is alternating imperceptibly between the feeling of depression and the breath. It’s quite frustrating to say the least, and leaves me wondering if meditation might in fact be exacerbating the depression.
What is spiritual bypassing?
Sometimes there appears an awareness of a narrating mind in tandem with a feeling which one might name conscience. Sometimes these two even talk to each other. In the body, it seems this conscience is connected to the stomach region where waves of feeling of fear and joy get in sync with the tummy’s subtle relaxation. It’s more of a feeling rather than a muscular contraction per se, so what is this conscience?
I’m having difficulties perceiving the environmental stimuli clearly. I’m setting a strong intention to perceive details of those stimuli, and eventually the breath sensations in the nose, also to find the balance between activeness and passiveness in four-step transition.
When I intend to spend more time on environmental stimuli and push myself to be actively in search of a sound or a bodily sensation to examine its details with attention, the strong intention to perceive the details of a particular stimulus usually doesn’t arise. Maybe it’s partly due to the fact that usually environmental stimuli around me are familiar and not stable, and not attractive.
00:28:53 On the other hand, if I intend not to push myself to actively examine the environment with my intention, dullness comes on. It usually results in progressive subtle dullness, which usually results in falling asleep.
Keywords: conscious power - viriya
I have recently read about the vedanā concept, and I’m wondering what you think about it. What can you get out of it when you understand the concept and know how to apply it in your meditations? I also wonder if I can find elements of it in the book, and where it fits in.
Two questions about practices using breath sensations compared to loving-kindness with regard to the stages, or at least up to Stage 7.
I understand that applying the advice is basically the same with regards to stable attention. But I tend to get confused at some point. For example, one can use breath sensations to see their impermanence and develop Insight, or use them to go into jhānas and so on, but with loving-kindness (or sometimes Tonglen in my case), besides bringing one’s attention back to the object, what happens when one expands the scope of attention to include more and more people, places, worlds etc. Is there something more than just an attitude change? That would be my first question.
00:50:15 I find when doing this practice that there is a point when I will experience sensations throughout my body that are the same as in whole-body breathing. A thought then pops up, “What do I do now?” Should I drop everything and attempt jhāna? Do I just keep doing the same thing being unsure where this is supposed to go besides just stable attention? Do I even want these bodily sensations? Because they are different from the feelings related to happiness, and somewhere along the line I swapped them without giving it much thought.
I have a question regarding metta. I have a way of doing metta: first sending the phrase, then imagining that the person is smiling, and then maybe sending to them that feeling in my body. I think that as a result of metacognitive introspective awareness it’s become very easy to see how my attention is flickering between those three things. Is that normal?
I started to think that loving-kindness is just another view. It’s just a mental construct. You tend to see someone as repulsive or perceive them as pleasant or desirable, but it’s just a mental construct. It’s just a way of seeing things for a moment and then it disappears.
Is there a way you would approach reading the suttas sequentially?
What would be your game plan for someone who is at the later stages of TMI and would like to attain nirvana in under 10 years? What might their daily routine look like?
It seems that knowledge is always in the form of mental fabrication. Knowledge provided by science is known as a mental fabrication that interprets a raw phenomenon. Knowlege provided by past experiences, which is the basis of mindfulness that prevents us from doing certain actions, or to be more specific, the knowledge or memory that comes from a previous moment of consciousness is a mental fabrication. Even the knowledge that sound comes from outside arises as a mental fabrication.
Should one trust mental fabrications? What makes them true or false if these terms have a meaning?
00:26:52 What to do if we are not able to form an intention that we consider right? Sometimes even though I can formulate an intention verbally, I notice that I’m not holding this intention in the heart. Can we increase the probability of the arising and sustaining of a specific intention and make it strong enough?
I’m in the first few months of restarting meditation, and I feel there is a tug of war between meditation flow and controlling for external factors during sitting. For example, correct posture. I can enter a flow where my breath becomes automatic and easy to follow, and at the same time distractions arise but fade on their own due to their obvious unimportance. But to enter this flow, I’m letting go of other controls like reinforcing my posture, and consequently I find myself absorbed in the flow with my breath, but starting to slump as I sit because I’m not concentrating on correcting my posture, just on the breath. What would be your recommendation at this point in the meditation. Should I be reinforcing basic posture continuously at the expense of interesting this incredibly content flow, or is it okay to reinforce the enjoyment of each meditation session at the expense of better posture?
I’m sorry that my question about vedanā two weeks ago was confusing to you. Thanks anyway for taking your time to answer it. You actually answered most of it.
Do you have any advice on how best to learn to realize whether a particular mental object has a pleasant, unpleasant or neutral vedanā? Can I trace the initial vedanā back from the current state of mind? For example, an emotion or a thought.
Let’s say for example, I notice the arising of a pleasant thought/emotion which itself arose as an association after something else. Does it automatically mean that the initial mental object is accompanied by a pleasant vedanā?
In the early stages, it seems there is a progression of wandering to breath in the background to breath in the foreground.
Can someone who is awakened do mentally demanding tasks back-to-back without the emotional downtime that is sometimes needed to switch gears before doing another task?
01:08:27 For someone who is awakened, is it easier to be blindsided by one’s own shortcomings? Unawakened people are usually guided by their stories, and course-correct based on their judgement of themselves and the opinions of others, so insecurity plays a big role in improving oneself.
01:19:07 What is the relationship of empathy to Awakening.
Keywords: empathy, compassion, sympathy
How does one distinguish between pain and discomfort that should be dealt with vs the kind that comes from the mind’s ability to blow up minor discomfort?
I can give an example. When doing walking meditation—like the two-part or three-part described in the appendix—I recently started noticing discomfort in my hip and groin. I’m not sure whether this is due to something physical that should be attended to, or if it’s just something that is blown up by my mind because attention goes there and makes it stand out more in awareness.
I’ve noticed how stories rooted in worry quickly arise, and it’s very insightful, but also quite distracting. I can’t help but worry if I’m actually walking in a harmful way since walking this slow is not automatic at all. I may be walking in a way that puts unhealthy pressure on some joints.
I’ve tried re-reading through both Stage 3 and 4 on how to deal with pain, and you mention that if it doesn’t persist after meditation that shouldn’t be an issue. But it does persist sometimes. But here’s the catch: I don’t know if this just because my attention has been drawn to it so much that it’s standing out more than other things.
Should I consider walking meditation that doesn’t involve slow walking?
Can you apply the advice you just gave to mental suffering?
This year has been a very challenging year, and I experienced negativity, depressive thoughts and stuff like that that I had thought that the dharma had helped me to resolve. They returned, and I wonder what advice you would give for not the physical pain, but the pain that we create in our minds.
I see you on a TV. I feel like TV, and especially algorithmically supported unlimited entertainment like YouTube, Reddit and Netflix leads to reduction of awareness and trains the mind to be distracted. With my friends, they are often the focus of social gatherings either by watching or talking about them, and they can be great sources of information. How would you recommend one deals with these technologies as to not hinder meditation progress.
After my morning sit, awareness slowly decreases throughout the day. Would it be beneficial to plan small 10-minute sits throughout the day to counteract that?
My meditation sessions tend to be between Stages 2–3. Which should take precedence: greater detail on the breath, or maintaining present-moment orientation?
It feels easier to avoid wandering if I try to maintain awareness. For me at this point it looks like trying to zoom out and look at all the sensations at once. But based on what I am reading in TMI, it sounds like progress will involve greater attention to more and more subtle details.
Should I be seeking greater detail even if it seems to result in risking losing the stability of my attention?
When you say “expand awareness”, is that something that is possible without the use of attention?
What is boredom, and how does it relate to suffering and desire and aversion? Sometimes I catch myself doing meditation just because there’s nothing better to do. Like when walking or going to sleep. I’m wondering if this is just me avoiding the pain of boredom, which would create suffering instead of alleviating it.
You know how sometimes you’re doing something painful like doing stretches, and suddenly the mind realizes there’s no need to suffer. That you can accept the pain, and that it’s easier that way. I’ve now more than once caught myself scanning for suffering. My mind scans consciousness to find suffering, and to extinguish it with its light. This seems fine, but seems tiring. Can you comment?
I’ve listened to one of your talks in which you mention a faculty of the mind that breaks down information into pieces, and labels the parts, and imputes particular nature to those parts. But what exactly is this information?
Is it the total sensory input we take in in a given moment of consciousness, and does this information also include our interpretation of these raw inputs? What is the whole and what is the part that is obtained by this process of breaking down? I would be great if you could provide an example to illustrate these terms.
Finally, 01:09:42 why does the Insight into emptiness change drastically the way we see the world? Or maybe we can use the term “cognitive processes” where you see the world and act.
I’m a bit confused about the differences in experiences of moments of awareness, rapidly alternating attention and awareness that takes place simultaneously with attention. I have three different types of experiences, and I’m not sure which one needs to be labeled as awareness.
The first one is the experience of a sense of expandedness in meditation like feeling less limited in terms of perceptual field which seems to fit the description of awareness that takes place simultaneously with attention in the first interlude.
Keywords: revision to the moments of consciousness model
The other one is the experience of knowing something such as a thought is there in a given moment of consciousness, but not knowing much about its content. This example usually happens in daily life. For example, while studying, I’m aware of the presence of some background thinking activity, but don’t see its contents very clearly. But still, this is experienced as a single moment of consciousness, not something that takes place simultaneously while I’m paying attention to something else as described in the first interlude. Is this a moment of awareness, or a moment of attention in which the attention alternates so rapidly that the thing it goes to is not perceived very clearly.
(The third one was skipped.)
I have no problem maintaining my introspective awareness, and I don’t focus the attention so much that it’s to the exclusion of introspective awareness. And I understand that the objective is for both of them to grow in balance.
There are three ways in which I maintain that balance. One, I check in; the other is the a-ha experience; and the third is just mainaining a level of metacognitive awareness.
I tend to get into a situation where I’m constantly checking in, which seems to result in attention using metacognitive awareness as the meditation object. I’m wondering if I’m checking in too often, or if I should favor the normal backdrop of metacognitive awareness where I don’t focus the attention so much that I lose that.
My current question builds on your response to my previous one. How do I cultivate that interest, that curiosity for investigating the sensations of the breath such that that intention gets stronger and stronger to want to see these little details.
You had a video about five ultimate insights on YouTube, and there you talk about left-brain dominance. You said, “There is a neurophysiological basis for Awakening. What happened to you is that you came into this world, and became strongly inculturated so that many of the right-brain functions became minimized due to inhibition from the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere became dominant and this became reinforced throughout your life, and you became trained to do, and think, and feel in this way.”
I find this left brain–right brain distinction very helpful because it is a convenient way to think about it in terms of rational thinking, intuitive thinking, egoic thinking, non-self thinking, time-bound–timeless. But rather than think in terms of right brain and left brain, because we talk about the subjective consciousness, I like to think about it in terms of right-mindedness and left-mindedness.
Do you find it justified? In your opinion, is it fair to say that mindfulness meditation can bring us more right-mindedness?
Meditation and mindfulness have helped me improve my behavior, and increase my day-to-day well-being enormously. But I have a few questions regarding handling purifications. The handling of emotional material as described in the book during meditation and the mindful review of daily events.
Question 1: Isn’t the undelying mechanism of these two essentially the same? Bringing mindful awareness to what’s happening and learning to let go because it only causes suffering to hold on to it.
01:00:05 Question 2: I have an unusually strong habit of comparing myself to others, which can at times be compulstive. I have only had the chance to address this issue during mindful review. It has not come up much during meditation. No strong emotions, anyway. Just occasional thoughts and memories. Should I just keep noticing in daily life when it’s triggered, how the behavior makes me suffer, and over time I’ll naturally stop doing it?
The main thrust of my question is to identify whether a period of debilitating fatigue I’m experiencing can in some way be connected to my meditation practice.
My hypothesis being the process of rewiring the brain requires energy, and that this for some could be considerable, or perhaps it’s a purificaiton. Also, I’m a proud possessor of a dyslexic brain. I would be interested to hear if you know of any particuar challenges, or indeed, advantages to this particular hardware configuration. Indeed, it could be a factor in my fatigue when related to practice.
I work as a builder, and about a week before all this started, I had a huge surge of energy lasting four days. I was fizzing, no stimulants involved. What followed was three days with normal energy. The following day, I turned up to start work and realized there’s no energy in the tank. For the next two weeks, I did almost nothing. After this my energy did partially pick up. Some weeks later I could feel that fizzy energy returning that I experienced pre-crash. Unfortunately, there was no substance behind it. Now two months down the line, quite happy in myself, but still unable to work, I had various blood tests, scans and x-rays, which so far have shown this organism to be in rather good health.
Practice with TMI began 5 years ago, for at least an hour daily. I also have benefited from walking meditation and regular metta, self-retreats of 3 days, and one one-day retreat with a short period of TM prior to this which I learned at 18. I’m now 56.
At Stage 4, I had little if anything in the way of purifications—other than body contortions and some tears of gratitude.
01:23:31 Fruits of practice include a dramatic reduction in depression which was plaguing me most of my life; increased humility and compassion; reduced craving; various insight experiences mainly involving interconnectedness; enhanced appreciation of nature; vastly decreased tendency to be resentful; take offense and hold grudges; some knowledge of chronic fatigue.
Keywords: intiuitive/insight vs intellectual/discursive/conceptual (symbolic) knowledge, implicit memory