30. The Progress of Insight

The progress of insight (borrowed from the title of one of Mahasi Sayadaw’s classic books on the subject) is a set of stages that diligent meditators pass through on the path of insight. These stages initially appear in the Buddhist literature in the Abhidhamma section of the Pali canon written around the third century BCE. [15] Some of the “content-based” or psychological insights into ourselves can be interesting and helpful, but when I say “insight”, these stages with their specific perceptual shifts and upgrades are what I am talking about. The formal names of the stages of insight in order are:

1.Knowledge of Mind and Body (ñ1, M&B)	The pre-vipassana stages	1st jhana
2.Knowledge of Cause and Effect (ñ2, C&E)		1st jhana
Knowledge of the Three Characteristics (ñ3, 3C)		1st jhana
Knowledge of the Arising and Passing Away (ñ4, A&P)	Vipassana formally begins	2nd jhana
5.Knowledge of Dissolution (ñ5)	dukkha ñanas	3rd jhana
6.Knowledge of Fear (ñ6)		3rd jhana
7.Knowledge of Misery (ñ7)		3rd jhana
8.Knowledge of Disgust (ñ8)		3rd jhana
Knowledge of Desire for Deliverance (ñ9, DfD)		3rd jhana
10. Knowledge of Re-observation (ñ10, Re-obs)		3rd jhana
11.Knowledge of Equanimity (ñ11, EQ)		4th jhana
12. Knowledge of Conformity (ñ12)		4th jhana
13. Change of Lineage (ñ13)		4th jhana
14. Path (ñ14)		4th jhana
15. Fruition (ñ15)	Nirvana/Nibbana (one of two meanings)
16. Review (ñ16)

I will give detailed descriptions of these stages shortly, referring to them by their shortened names, their numbers, and occasionally shorthand slang and acronyms. These are formally known as “Knowledge of” or “Insight into” and then the stage, such as “Knowledge of Mind and Body”, or “Insight into Mind and Body”, but I will just use the part after the “of” or “into”. They are also called ñanas, which means “knowledges”, and I will say, for example, “the first ñana”, or abbreviate it as “ñ1”. Notice that I use the word stage rather than state. These are stages of heightened perception into the truth of all phenomena, opportunities to see directly how sensate reality is, but they are not seemingly stable states like those cultivated in concentration practice. The above jhanic groupings refer to the vipassana jhanas, which will be covered in more depth later, but they borrow core attention shapes and phase characteristics from their shamatha jhana equivalents. In other ways, they may diverge significantly from the experience of pure shamatha jhanas.

One of the most profound things about these insight stages is that they are strangely predictable regardless of the practitioner or the insight tradition. Texts that are 2,000 years old describe the stages just the way people go through them today, though there will be some individual variation with respect to the individual specifics today as then. The Christian maps, the Sufi maps, the Buddhist maps of the Tibetans and the Theravada, the maps of the Kabbalists, and many non-Buddhist traditions of India are all remarkably consistent in their fundamentals. I chanced upon these classic experiences before I had any training in meditation, and I have met many people who have done likewise. These maps, Buddhist or otherwise, are talking about something inherent to how our minds progress in fundamental wisdom that has little to do with any tradition and much to do with the mysteries of the human mind and body. The maps are describing basic human development. These stages are not Buddhist, but universal, and Buddhism is merely one of the traditions that describes them, albeit unusually well.

The progress of insight is discussed in many good books, such as Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart in the section called “Dissolving the Self”, which I highly recommend. A very extensive, thorough, accessible, and highly recommended treatment of it is given in Mahasi Sayadaw’s works The Progress of Insight and Practical Insight Meditation, a partial version of which appears in Jack Kornfield’s Living Dharma. As mentioned before, Practical Insight Meditation is my favorite dharma book of all time with no close competitors. If you ever lay your hands on a copy, do so; fortunately, it is now easily available on the web. Even the section of it that appears in Living Dharma is much better than having access to none of it at all. Again, Mahasi Sayadaw’s Manual of Insight is highly recommended.

Sayadaw U Pandita’s In This Very Life also covers this territory, and is a must-read for those who like lists and straight-up Theravada, but he leaves out a lot of juicy details. The previously mentioned fifth-century text Visuddhimagga by Buddhaghosa also has a great treatment of these stages, and contains some interesting and hard-to-find information. However, it focuses largely on the emotional side effects and thus does not include many other useful points. Shaila Catherine’s Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana, is a modern re-explanation of the Visuddhimagga and is very worth reading.

Venerable Sayadaw U Jotika’s A Map of the Journey is a fascinating and traditional fusion of compilation, summary, and elaboration of the traditional stages of the path. It also contains solid foundational vipassana meditation advice. Another good but brief map appears in Venerable Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche’s Dharma Paths. Though he labels the stages differently, the territory is the same. You can also check out Bhante Gunaratana’s The Path of Serenity and Insight if you would like to know the traditional explanations well. It is a thorough and scholarly work.

Matthew Flickstein’s Swallowing the River Ganges gives a light treatment of basic Buddhist concepts and contains a superficial treatment of the stages of insight. It is kind of like what would happen if you dumbed down a medical school textbook for a fifth grader, focusing almost entirely on the emotional side effects and thus leaving out so much that is worthy of discussion, but it comes from a good place. While it is not nearly as comprehensive as the other sources mentioned above, it is easy to read and good for beginners who like their dharma simple.

There are many less accessible maps of insight as well. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo requires some prior familiarity with this territory to sort out the wild symbolic imagery. A twelfth-century Sufi map is given in Journey to the Lord of Power by Ibn ’Arabi, but again the medieval symbolism is hard to untangle unless you are already personally familiar with these stages. It also provides a very interesting, if quite cryptic, description of the higher stages of realization. St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul does a good job of dealing with the most difficult of the insight stages. His map is often called “The Ladder of Love”. Unfortunately, the translation of the medieval Spanish and thickness of complex Catholic dogma make it somewhat inaccessible to non-native readers of Spanish. Still, there is true value in reading it, particularly to gain an appreciation of the depths of practice attained by some of the medieval Catholic contemplatives and that some aspects of meditative practice are universal and arise across very different traditions. While the Theravada typically calls the middle stages of insight the Knowledges of Suffering, I prefer the term “Dark Night”, so I use it here for those stages.

I strongly recommend that you consult some of these other sources, particularly the first ten mentioned. While I consider the treatment of the stages of insight that follows here to be the most comprehensive and practical yet written, there are still many great points made in those books, and you should check them out. I certainly don’t reproduce every useful thing you will find there, as that would make this great hog of a book even heftier than it already is. There is a huge amount of valuable information necessarily left out in all these sources, perhaps due to some of the difficulties in describing the myriad nuances of the subject in its myriad possible variations and, on occasion, perhaps due to the mushroom factor. Thus, working with a qualified teacher or good, qualified friends who have personal mastery of these stages (regardless of what they call them) is an extremely good idea.

This model is used mostly in Burma but also to some degree in the other Theravada traditions. Zen is quite aware of these stages in their non-labely way, as all Zen Masters had to go through them and continue to do so, but they tend not to name them or talk about them, as is typical of their style. This can be helpful, as people can get obsessed with these maps, turning them into just another form of useless content, imprisoning identification, and competition. This is the ugly shadow side of goal-oriented or map-based practice, but it often (though not always) may be overcome with honest awareness of this fact. That said, Zen’s persistent lack of attention to them can cause other problems, and plenty of modern reality testing has shown that some balance between intentionally ignoring them and obsessing over them works better than either extreme.

Luckily, if the meditator really is into insight territory, then continued, correct, sensation-based practice has a way of facilitating progress given time. Also, when the proverbial crap is hitting the fan, having a map can help the meditator not make too many of the common, tempting, and occasionally disastrous blunders of that stage, as well as provide the meditator with encouragement that they are on the right track when they hit the grueling, weird, or captivating stages. Contextualization and knowing that some of the strange or hard stuff is expected, normal, and doesn’t last can be extremely important to help people find the courage and perspective needed to persevere. These stages can significantly color or skew a meditator’s view of their life and experience until they master them, and it can be alleviating and even life-saving to remember this when navigating rougher waters while trying to remain functional in our endeavors and relationships. Those who do not have the benefit of the maps in these situations or who choose to ignore them are much more easily blindsided by the psychological extremes and challenges that may sometimes accompany stages such as the Arising and Passing Away and those of the Dark Night.

While many people don’t want to know the maps for various reasons (such as their own unexamined insecurities, biases, givens, beliefs, and traditional silos), the experiment has been done and it has shown clearly that, in general, people get further in their practice when they know the maps and have good guidance about how to use them properly and avoid their traps. I don’t know why people persist in thinking that ignorance is so much better than a solid grounding in practical theory. When you think about it, many adult meditators have already witnessed thousands of people killed in the media and maybe killed in real life, likely have had sex, may have given birth to children, may have themselves killed people in war, dealt with pain, illness, and modern life, and yet somehow can’t handle insight maps? This bizarre view needs serious questioning and exploration.

At the very least, the maps clearly demonstrate that there is vastly more to all this than just philosophy or psychology. They also clearly and unambiguously point to how the game is played step-by-step and stage-by-stage, what we are looking for, and, more importantly, why; and they provide guidelines for how to avoid screwing up along the way. Why people wouldn’t want to know all this is completely beyond me, but there are entire meditation traditions dedicated to keeping people in the dark concerning the maps.

The maps fill in the juicy details of the seemingly vast gap from doing some seemingly boring and simple practice to getting awakened. Further, providing this extremely precise information on exactly what to do puts the responsibility for progress or its lack clearly on you, the meditator, which is exactly where it should be. If after reading this book you don’t put this extremely powerful information into practice, the fault is yours alone, or perhaps is the better part of valor if you feel you are currently too unstable to attempt these sorts of practices and strive for the effects they create.

There is considerable evidence that the lack of this information in insight traditions that don’t consult the maps has been one of the primary obstacles to progress. On the other hand, the maps can sometimes cause furious competition and arrogance in the followers of traditions that do use them (who have not trained sufficiently or adequately in morality), as well as harmful fixation on purely future-oriented goals, both of which are basically spiritual poison. Please, do your very best to avoid these sorts of problems by applying the various remedies given here and in other fine works on meditation, but recognize that problems and complexities often go with the territory, sort of like injuries in the world of athletics: common, unfortunate, but not a reason to ban all sports.

The more intense, consistent, and precise the practice, the easier it is to see how the maps apply. The more energy and focus are dedicated to practice, the more dramatic and even outrageous these stages can be. If these stages unfold gently over long periods of time, it can be more difficult to discern the progression through them, though it does happen. Certain emphases in practice, such as Mahasi Sayadaw–style noting practice, particularly on intensive retreats, seem to produce a clearer appreciation of the maps, and some individuals will have an easier time than others seeing how these maps apply.

Each stage is marked by very specific increases in our perceptual abilities. The basic areas we can improve in are: clarity, precision, speed, consistency, inclusiveness, and acceptance. These improvements in our perceptual abilities are the hallmarks of each stage and the gold standard by which they are defined and known. Each stage also tends to bring up mental and physical raptures (unusual manifestations). These are predictable at each stage and sometimes very unique to each stage. They are secondary to the increase in perceptual thresholds by which we may judge whether we are at a specific stage.

Each stage also tends to bring up specific aspects of our emotional and psychological makeup. These are also strangely predictable, but not as reliable for determining which stage is occurring. The emotions that might show up are suggestible, scriptable, ordinary, and will show more variation from person to person. However, when used in conjunction with the changes in perceptual threshold and the raptures, they can help us gain a clearer sense of which stage has been attained. Further, these stages occur in a very predictable order, and so looking for a pattern of stages leading us to the next can help us get a sense of what is going on. Thus, when reading my descriptions of these stages, pay attention to these distinct aspects:

1. the shift in perceptual threshold;

2. the physical and mental raptures;

3. the emotional and psychological tendencies; and

4. the overall pattern of how that stage fits with the rest.

So, we sit down (or lie down, stand, walk) and begin to perceive every sensation clearly as it is. When we gain enough concentration to steady the mind on the object of meditation, something called “access concentration”, we may enter the first jhana, now called the “first vipassana jhana”, which is in some ways the same initially for both concentration practice and insight practice. However, as we have been practicing insight meditation, we are not trying to solidify this state, but rather trying to penetrate the three illusions of permanence, satisfactoriness, and self by understanding the three characteristics.

We try to sort out with mindfulness what are physical sensations and what are mental sensations, and when these are and are not present in our direct experience. We try to be clear about the actual sensations, just as they are, that make up our world. We try to directly understand the three characteristics moment to moment in whatever sensations arise, be it in a restricted area of space, such as the areas in which the sensations of breathing arise; or a moving area, as in the case of body-scanning practices; or in the whole of our world, as is done in what are generally called “choiceless awareness” practices, using some other technique or object, such as noting, or just by being alive and paying attention. Thus, this first stage has a different quality to it from that of concentration practice, and we attain direct and clear perception of the first knowledge of Mind and Body.

1. Mind and Body

There is a sudden shift; many mental phenomena, particularly the main narrative thought stream, shift out away from the illusory sense of “the watcher” and are just out there along with the sensations of the other five sense doors. This is an important insight, as it shows us clearly and directly in some basic way that we are not “our” mind or “our” body. It is also a pleasant, clear, and unitive-feeling state (it really is still more state-like than stage-like), and people can try to hold onto it just as with the first shamatha jhana and thus get stuck. That first taste of a little space around thoughts can be a huge relief for those who have never noticed they could observe their thoughts as thoughts, and the emotional benefits can be profound for some people. It is this early insight that provides the benefits of some of the shallow-end-of-the-pool techniques, such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

Mind and Body—the start of the first vipassana jhana—is very close to the first shamatha jhana, just as aspects of the stages of the Arising and Passing Away, Dissolution, and Equanimity are close to their respective shamatha jhanas. Reality can seem just a bit more brilliant the first time we chance into Mind and Body. We may feel more alive and connected to the world. For some it may hit with unusual force, filling them with a great sense of unity or universal consciousness. For others, it may not seem particularly profound or noticeable except that now they suddenly feel they are practicing better than before, assuming they were practicing in the first place, as the first three stages in particular commonly arise during daily life, as plenty of activities in daily life cultivate factors such as precise attention and concentration that are sufficient to generate these insights.

With the sensate experience of both mental and physical phenomena being clearly observable and distinguished, the relationships and interactions between the two start to become obvious, and what is meant by “the dualistic split” is more easily comprehended here.

Just before or just after the first stage, there may arise odd jaw pains on one side, throat tensions, and similar unpleasant physical occurrences. Multiple other unusual experiences can arise early at the start of the first vipassana jhana, such as feelings related to what is called the “homunculus”, in which our lips and mouth, as well as hands, feel very large, and our bodily shape feels like it corresponds closely to the size distribution of the way parts of the brain map onto parts of the body. The sense of other similar body distortions can occur, such as feeling very large or small, long or compacted, or feeling like we are sinking slowly into the floor or rising into the air.

Also, it is not uncommon for people on retreats who are doing walking meditation around first vipassana jhana territory to notice things like faces in the wallpaper or marks on the floor, much in the way that we might see faces in clouds and, in fact, I have often speculated that seeing shapes in clouds correlates with extremely light first vipassana jhana territory, which is why it is nice to do that. Regardless, it soon becomes easy to see that each sensation is followed by the crude mental impression of it, and that intentions precede actions and thoughts (see the discussion of impermanence in Part One, “The Three Characteristics”), meaning we see what causes what. Thus, we come to …

2. Cause and Effect

In the stage of Cause and Effect, the relationships between mental and physical phenomena become very clear and sometimes ratchet-like. There is a cause, such as intention, and then an effect, such as movement. There is a cause, such as a sensation, and there is an effect, namely a mental impression. The joy and wonder of Mind and Body have left, and now the interactions between the mind and body start to seem somewhat mechanical. Motions such as walking or breathing may begin to get jerky, as there is the intention and the motion, the sensation and the mental impression of it, the cause and the effect, all occurring in a way that can seem sort of tight and robot-like. You note, the breath moves just a bit. You stop noting, the breath stops. You note quickly, the breath jerks quickly. You note slowly, the breath follows. You note smoothly, the breath is smooth. The same thing can happen with our feet during walking meditation if we are noting our steps.

Some will stop noting quickly or stop noting completely, thinking that they are “messing up the breath”. The advice here is as before—note quickly, and don’t worry about what the breath does. It may do crazy things—keep practicing regardless, as this is just one phase, and in later phases attention won’t modify the breath in this way, so just keep going. Avoid having some idealized notion of how meditative breathing must be, as it will just confuse, frustrate, and slow you down at this stage. Do not pathologize this stage and the fact that attention, intention, and movement interact in unusual ways, as this is a sign of progress, not problems.

Remember how I recommended trying to experience one to ten sensations per second, noting which were mental and which were physical? At this stage, the technical meditator is finally able to do this with a fair degree of skill, confidence, and consistency. Even meditators who are not particularly technical will generally notice that they are able to observe many more sensations than they could before.

Those with stronger concentration tendencies or a bent towards more visionary aspects of life and practice may notice thoughts and perhaps even visions of insight into Cause and Effect on a macroscopic scale, where past action or circumstances led to various consequences, some event led to some rebirth, some previous life led to something today, and in general may get a sense that they are able to intuit aspects of the workings of karma in a way they did not before. As the meditator becomes clearer about the beginnings and endings of mental and physical sensations, of the irritation caused by this jerkiness, and notices the fact that all of this seems to be happening on its own, they come to directly perceive for themselves …

3. The Three Characteristics

The three characteristics of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self become predominant, which is good, as these are the basis for insight, except this stage is one of the hard ones and can really throw people. It becomes more obvious that all the constituents of our experience are quickly arising and passing, somewhat jarring, and not particularly in our control or to be identified with as “me”. Further, as these sensations are all observed, including the crude mental impression that follows them (“consciousness”), it becomes clear the whole of the mind and body process is not a separate self; it is merely a part of the interdependent world.

These characteristics become clearer and clearer, as well as faster and faster, as the meditator diligently pays careful attention to exactly what is happening at each moment. For those doing noting practice, at this stage your speed and precision may get so fast that you cannot note every sensation you experience. Move to more general noting, monosyllabic noting (such as “bip” for each sensation experienced regardless of what it was), or drop the noting entirely and stay with noticing bare sensation come and go. If one is noting, then dropping noting during this stage will allow some to get much faster, but others will get sloppy, so watch for this, particularly around unpleasant sensations, and start noting again if you start to stagnate or regress.

At this stage, practice really begins to take off even though this stage tends to be physically unpleasant, with what is called “hard pain” being a classic hallmark of this stage. This stage can also cause many dark emotions and a sense of wanting to renounce the world and do only more practice. Others on retreat or practicing in daily life will hit the pain of this stage and completely bail out, because they find the hard pain frightening or too difficult to handle. Occasionally, the early part of this stage can cause people to feel vulnerable, raw, and irritable to the degree and in ways that a migraine headache or a bad case of PMS can. I have occasionally been laid out on a couch for hours by this aspect of this stage, holding my head, massaging my neck, and just wishing that these early stages didn’t sometimes involve so much pain, tension, and even anguish.

There may be odd bodily contortions, movements, obsession with posture, and painful tensions or other bizarre sensations, particularly in the back, neck, jaw, and shoulders, which typically go by the name kriyas in the Indian traditions. These tensions may persist when not meditating and be quite irritating and even debilitating. The rhomboid and trapezius muscles are the standard offenders. It is common to try to sit with good posture and then find our body twisting into some odd and painful position. Bizarre and even violent movements can occur. You straighten out, and soon enough the contortion happens again, often referred to as “swaying” in the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition, though it may be more rigid than that implies. This is a very Three Characteristics stage sort of pattern. People sometimes describe these feelings as some powerful energy that is blocked and wants to get out or move through.

Feelings of heat and sensations like those of a fever may sometimes accompany this stage. The neck and back may become very stiff, either on one side or both, specifically manifesting as spasmodic torticollis aka “wry neck” and/or TMJ pain. One day, the medical, developmental, psychological, and scientific disciplines will learn to recognize this insight stage with those being possible criteria. The right and left sides of the body may at times feel quite different from each other, like they are pulling in different directions, are somehow different sizes or shapes, or even have totally different feeling tones. The easiest way to get these unpleasant physical manifestations to stop is to keep investigating the three characteristics with high-resolution precision, of either the unpleasant sensations or of whatever primary object you have chosen.

These are common early retreat experiences, particularly in the first few days. A successful journey through this stage typically requires meditators to up their games in terms of the fine resolution of their minds. Our minds can perceive these tensions and unpleasant sensations with surprising degrees of speed and subtlety, if we can find the balance of positive meditation factors that facilitates this. A review of the seven factors of awakening may be helpful here.

Fighting the kriyas or trying other methods of alleviation (massages, painkillers, etc.) seems to help only a little, not at all, only temporarily, or sometimes makes the problem even worse, though sometimes hatha yoga, tai chi, and related practices done with a high degree of precise awareness can help. It is a common time for people on retreat to spend a lot of time suddenly stretching and reworking their sitting apparatus and posture to try to mitigate these effects, usually manifesting a few days into the retreat. This is a common time for people in daily life to go to health practitioners of various kinds, from orthopedists and dentists to chiropractors and body workers.

For example, I had a wisdom tooth removed during one pass through this stage because I thought it was throwing my jaw out of alignment. Perhaps it was, but this perception of the tooth’s position being pathological was clearly exacerbated by this stage of practice. I dream that one day chiropractors, physiatrists, physicians, mid-level practitioners, and physical, occupational, and massage therapists will all be taught these stages in school so that they can recognize them and help people cultivate some of the internal techniques that can help.

Even if these unpleasant physical manifestations do slack off for a bit, they are likely to recur until insight is sufficient to progress beyond this part of the stage of the Three Characteristics. Thus, should we find these meditation side effects interfering with our lives, I recommend continued precise and accepting investigative practice. This is a phase of practice in which strong effort and very quick investigation pay off.

Certain traditions may look at such physical manifestations as “energy imbalances” or in some other negative light, and I can see where they are coming from, but I find those perspectives limiting. Rather, I see this stage in its broader context as just one more phase of practice. Others may spin very strange tales to explain these experiences. A friend of mine ran into this stage on retreat, found it very unpleasant, stopped practicing, and began to create all sorts of fantastic stories in her head about how the poor fellow sitting next to her was very angry and how it was making her tense. This didn’t help whatsoever, and she got stuck there, her practice derailed by obsession with a story she had just made up. I have learned to welcome these odd manifestations as clearly recognizable markers of progress on the path. They are clear objects for practice and reassure me that I am on the right track. Unfortunately, this lesson is hard to teach others.

True, these manifestations are difficult, but being able to truly appreciate what is happening in the face of the difficult stages is important, and becomes much more important later. This stage can look like some similarly unpleasant later stages (the Dark Night stages, described shortly), and it is easy to confuse this stage with those later stages. This stage tends to be more physically painful and involve more muscular pathology, but sorting out which is which is often more a question of timing, sequence, and context, as some of the emotional tones can be very similar.

Bodily pains and tensions on one side more than the other naturally draw attention to that side. This is normal and understandable, but it can also cause problems. I highly recommend that you try to keep part of your attention focused on the other side of the body even when one side hurts a lot more and the other side seems to disappear into the background in contrast, to be boring, or to have nothing going on at all. Focusing too much meditative attention on one side of the body can cause all sorts of weird postural distortions and other odd meditative issues. Also, if one area hurts, it might be something on the other side, or just above or below it that is causing the trouble. For example, plenty of TMJ problems (jaw pain typically on one side) can be caused by the muscles on the other side of the head being too tight and throwing that joint off, but if you just focus on where the pain is most strongly sensed, you might easily miss what is causing it, as the side with the tense muscles often doesn’t hurt.

The back and neck are similar—you can have tension on one side that causes the other side to hurt. In short, whenever you have what seems to be isolated pain, check the other side and the surrounding areas to see if maybe there isn’t something subtler but related going on, as that can help. This lesson took me a long time to learn, so hopefully passing it on will save some time for you. Noticing anything subtly fluxing, vibrating, or changing about the pain and the surrounding areas can also help to loosen it up and move it.

As the mind gains speed at seeing each of the sensations of the mind and body come and go, the jerkiness from Cause and Effect can become very quick and pronounced. These physical movements and spasms seem to help break up the physical tension that may sometimes accompany this stage, and are a sign of progress and should be allowed if possible. If you are on retreat and start shaking, talk with the teacher and see if there is a place where you can sit and shake as much as you need to. Dealing with this stage’s sometimes strange physical effects can be troubling enough, without having to deal with the reactions of everyone around you.

I recommend neither cultivating the shaking nor restraining it (unless you need to keep from hurting yourself, as some of the movements can get pretty weird). Kriyas can be fascinating for some people for a while, like some odd spasmodic badge of accomplishment, but they are just low-level, early-stage, beginner stuff most of the time (though they can occasionally happen to more advanced meditators) and so shouldn’t be any source of pride. As you will see, there is much to perceive beyond them. Being all excited and proud about having body spasms is sort of like being all excited and proud about being in second grade. Chapter nine in A Path with Heart, by Jack Kornfield, is worth reading about the various odd effects that can occur, and for skillful advice on how to deal with them. There is a great set of techniques explained in Robert Harry Hover’s classic How to Direct the Life Force to Dispel Mild Aches and Pains that I recommend for this stage in particular, though the knowledge contained therein has many other applications. As that older book is hard to find, you can check out his memorably titled newer book, Internal Moving Healing Manual of Instruction: Stopping Your Pain & Other Unpleasant Things.

Regardless, as meditation begins to take on a life of its own, we enter the second vipassana jhana …

4. The Arising and Passing Away

This fourth insight stage, called the Arising and Passing Away, is also the beginning of the second vipassana jhana. As in the second shamatha jhana, the applied and sustained effort of attention begin to drop away, and meditation seems to take on a life of its own. As this is the second jhana, which has the basic attentional phase quality of having maximum clarity at the center of attention, this stage is noted for perceiving things clearly wherever the attention is directed. In fact, this is the stage where clarity of what is going on in the center of attention is greatest.

This focused way of working, in which you direct attention and perceive whatever is there very easily is understandably compelling and forms the basis of the stage. It also reinforces this way of relating to the meditation object, which is okay to a point, and in fact amazing to a point, but it can limit practitioners if they continue to try to apply this same attentional strategy and paradigm at later stages, as will be discussed when I get to the third vipassana jhana. Keep that in mind so you can compare this stage and attentional mode to later ones.

An overall general point about this stage is that it tends to be very impressive. When people say to me, “I had this big experience …”, ninety-nine percent of the time it is almost certainly related to the A&P. The descriptions I give of it may not line up exactly with how it happens or has happened for you, but pay attention to the general aspects of the pattern, as you will notice many elements described here that you won’t see described elsewhere. I tend to describe the A&P as it happens on retreat and with strong practice, but it can happen off-retreat in daily life, spontaneously, without warning, in people who don’t think of themselves as meditators, and even in dreams and to young children. Why some people seemingly spontaneously get into this territory early in life with no meditative training and some people who have done decades of meditation practice never get to this stage, I have no idea.

There can be an extremely broad range of variability in the A&P, and so it is not possible to match perfectly anyone else’s description of it to what happens or happened to you. For example, timing can vary widely; it can go on for seconds or months. Intensity can vary widely; it can occasionally be subtle, but the general trend is for it to be very intense, high definition, and dramatic. The A&P works the same way functionally in terms of insight and of moving practice along, regardless of intensity and duration, so don’t worry about those factors.

Just to make this point clear, I will give two brief examples from my own practice. One time my entire body and world seemed to explode like a fireworks display in a powerful lucid dream with my whole sensate world zipping around like fragmented sparks through space for a while until things settled down. Another time I had a small, second-long zap of lightning-fast energy through the back of my head while lying down on a couch in daily life, which was the whole of that A&P. My longest A&P phase was about three days of powerful shaking, sniffing, and energy craziness during a retreat, but I know people whose A&P stages lasted at the longest for a month or two.

For those who are practicing meditation (as opposed to experiencing an occurrence in daily life), in the early part of this stage, the meditator’s mind accelerates more and more, and reality begins to be perceived as particles or fine vibrations of mind and matter, each arising and vanishing utterly at tremendous speed. The traditional texts call this stage the beginning of insight practice, as from this point on there is a much more direct and non-conceptual understanding of the three characteristics. This can be confounding with respect to the numbering schemes, as some (such as the Visuddhimagga) will label this stage as insight stage one, whereas I number it insight stage four. As long as you know which numbering scheme is being used in a given context, this should cause no problems.

This stage is marked by dramatically increased perceptual abilities when compared with the previous stages. For example, we might be able to hone our awareness to laser-like precision on the tip of our little finger and seemingly be able to perceive the beginning and ending of every single sensation that made up that finger. Remember the exercise of the two fingers? Those in this stage can rock that practice like nobody else, even beyond those at higher stages of meditation.

Spontaneous physical movements and strange jerky breathing patterns that showed up in Cause and Effect and became more pronounced in Three Characteristics may speed up significantly. This stage explains where many practices such as Tibetan inner heat practices (tummo) come from, as a lot of heat and energy can be generated. Sweating is common for those who are having a lot of heat arise. This stage can also reveal the source material that inspired teaching systems involving the chakras, energy channels, and auras. Many—nay—nearly all descriptions of “Kundalini awakening” are talking about this stage.

Reality may be perceived directly with great clarity; great bliss, rapture, equanimity, mindfulness, concentration, and other positive qualities arise. Practice is extremely profound and sustainable, and there may be no pain even after hours of sitting. Unfortunately, the positive qualities that have arisen can easily become what are called the “Ten Corruptions of Insight” if the true natures of the individual sensations by which they are known are not realized as well, and until this happens a meditator can easily get stuck in the immature part of this stage. The trap is that these are all positive qualities, and in this stage, they may show up with surprising intensity, much to most meditators’ delight. It is understandable that people would not investigate those positive qualities too clearly and instead back off the investigation to bask in them, regardless of how conscious this backing off is. However, lack of investigation can convert positive meditation factors into more golden chains.

The ten corruptions of insight are:

• illumination

• knowledge

• rapturous happiness

• tranquility

• bliss

• resolute confidence

• exertion

• assurance

• equanimity

• attachment

To quote the great meditation master Sayadaw U Pandita’s excellent book, On the Path to Freedom, “As for the practicing yogi, he will at once recognize the above as imperfections of insight not representing dhamma breakthrough and are only to be noted off, remembering the teacher’s advice as to what is path and not path. Being disabled by the ten imperfections, he would not be capable of observing the triple characteristics in their true nature; but once freed from imperfections, he is able to do so.” [16]

In short, we might feel we are a very mighty meditator and that we should try to hold on to these qualities of experience forever; that is, we stop doing insight practices and instead solidify these pleasant qualities as concentration practice objects. Thus, the advice given about deconstructing and investigating the positive factors of the shamatha jhanas, particularly the second one, is also very helpful when trying to stay on the narrow path of the progress of insight, though in truth, and as noted before, basically everyone alternates to some degree from insight territory to concentration territory and back even if they are trying to stay to one side or the other; this is normal.

Visions, unusual sensory abilities (such as seeing nearby things through closed eyelids), and out-of-body experiences are common. Bright lights tend to arise for the meditator, sometimes first as jewel-tone sparkles and then as a bright white light (“I have seen the light!”). Some people will have the light persist and grow very bright and steady; just note it or notice every moment of its apparent steadiness and it will eventually break up and go away.

Experiences of other powers are also common here, with the list being too long to go into, and this is the most spontaneous-powers-prone stage of them all. I discuss the powers later and give plenty of advice about them, but just keep in mind that this stage is one source of many of those experiences. At points I personally could tell that I was about to enter A&P territory in daily life as I would suddenly find myself reviewing my old magickal references or buying new ones.

Meditation in dreams and lucid dreaming is common in this territory. The need for sleep may be greatly reduced. People often don’t recognize the A&P when it happens in dreams, because lots of weird stuff happens in dreams. This stage is a common time for first-time hyper-lucid dreaming, and out-of-body experiences (what I generally refer to as “traveling”) or, for those who have done that before, this stage makes it much more likely to occur. [17] As with a sudden interest in magick, it is also a common time for people to become highly interested in lucid dreaming and out-of-body traveling, a topic I cover in Part Six.

Skilled technical meditators (which make up only a small proportion of those who cross this) may sit easily for hours dissecting their reality into fine and fast sensations and vibrations, perhaps even up to forty per second or more, with an extremely high level of precision and consistency. (Where the absurd and disheartening rumors of billions of mind-moments per second come from is beyond me.) Fine vibrations, chills, and tingles may spread over the body, revealing interference patterns between experiences in the style of moiré patterns, enabling us to know directly that when one sensation is experienced, in that instant, something else is not.

It is very easy to confuse this stage with descriptions of stage eleven, Equanimity, especially since the stage before it, Re-observation, has some distinct similarities to stage three, Three Characteristics. A brief discussion of the fractal nature of insight stages and concentration states will follow in the chapter called “The Vipassana Jhanas”. The big difference between the A&P and Equanimity is that this stage is generally ruled by quick cycles, quickly changing frequencies of vibrations, odd physical movements, strange breathing patterns, heady raptures, a decreased need for sleep, strong bliss, and a general sense of riding on a spiritual roller coaster with no brakes. The higher stages (ten and eleven) do not have those qualities.

As to the cycles, they tend to proceed as follows, with this description assuming you are using the breath as object. The mind kicks in, follows faster and faster vibrations, attention engages and speeds up, perhaps accompanied by more pronounced shaking or strange breathing patterns increasing in speed. Finally, halfway down an out-breath there is a shift, our mind may drop down slowly with the breath. It takes work to stay with sensations as they slow down, and then the breath and attention bottom out. The breath may stop entirely for a while. Then the mind may come back up with the breath, attention tends to flag, things relax, and then the cycle begins again with investigation speeding up. These breathing cycles may happen on their own and may even be difficult to stop when we are deeply into this stage. Those using visualizations as objects may notice that the objects begin to spin with the phase of the breath, or move in ways that suggest they have a life of their own, albeit a largely two-dimensional one, as compared to the more strongly three-dimensional visions that may arise in later stages, though three-dimensional visions can occasionally also arise here, just to make things confusing.

As this stage deepens and matures, meditators let go of even the high levels of clarity and the other strong factors of meditation, perceiving even these to arise and pass as just fluxing sensations and/or vibrations, to not satisfy, and not to be self. Some will notice the slow variant of the A&P and may plunge down into the very depths of the mind as though plunging deeply underwater to where they can perceive individual frames of reality arise and pass with breathtaking clarity, as though in slow motion. It can even feel as if we have been partially sedated with a strong, opiate-like drug and submerged in thick syrup.

At the bottom of these depths, however they present themselves, individual moments may sometimes have a frozen quality to them, like garish snapshots of the bottom of a well, as if sensations were stopping completely in the middle of their manifestation for just an instant, and this way of experiencing reality is unique to this stage. Somewhere in here is the entrance to the third vipassana jhana in U Pandita’s model, though there is some controversy about exactly which insights line up with which vipassana jhanas from here on out.

I prefer to think of the Arising and Passing Away as being purely second vipassana jhana. Since the A&P is known for its speed of sensate perception, its slow variant way of manifesting may confuse some into not realizing it was the A&P, but functionally it works the same way and leads to the same results, which raises the interesting question: are all variants of the A&P functionally the same? I would say yes, in that they all lead to the next stages. However, some variants will obviously also lead to other real-world effects owing to the specifics of the possibly dramatic presentations and people’s reactions to them.

Wild “kundalini” phenomena are very common at this point, including powerful physical shaking and releases, explosions of consciousness like a fireworks display or a tornado, visions, and especially vortices of powerful fine “electrical” vibrations blasting up or down the spinal column and/or between the ears. These vortices can be very loud. Anything that might be described as a “vortex” is nearly perfectly diagnostic of this stage. If someone is describing some sort of fast, buzzy energy that seems to want to burst out or be darting around, the vast majority of the time they are referring to this stage.

While people generally think kundalini phenomena and energy will be great fun, not everyone finds them so. The energetics that can occur in the A&P can be disconcerting, painful, even occasionally excruciating, like we are being electrocuted. Sometimes energetic openings can feel like we are being ripped open and our nervous system fried. People can imagine that something is horribly wrong with them and some reasonable number will seek spiritual, medical, and/or psychiatric care. I dream that one day basic kundalini awakening phenomena will be taught in medical schools and other therapeutic institutions, but we are likely a long way from that level of sophistication on that front, unfortunately, being the primitive, materialist culture that we are. I have no idea why the A&P is extremely blissful for many and painful for others but, if you are looking for a PhD dissertation research topic, that might be a fun one!

In some of my more painful and jarring early A&P phases (which a map geek might correlate with the late aspect of the stage Three Characteristics), I have preferred reclining practice, as it not only helps with some of the pain, it also allows my mind to really get to the level of subtlety and fine buzzing investigation of the harder aspects of the pain and tensions to allow them to finally buzz through. Thus, if something feels really blocked, stuck, tight, you might try this type of practice. Really feel into the fine-grained nature of the sensations that make up those tensions, blockages, chakras, or however you think of them, open to them, relax around them, and gently and patiently allow them to do their thing, as this may help.

As mentioned earlier, the A&P can occur quite unexpectedly and even off the cushion, such as in daily life and lucid dreams. I know a woman who had a dream in which she was in a shop with brightly glowing jewel-tone crystals in display cases. She touched them and they had this powerfully blissful buzz to them that went up into her arms, and then she started twirling round and round, faster and faster, in a maelstrom-like vortex. This is about as classic A&P as it gets, and yet we might never know what it was if we didn’t know the theory and weren’t on the lookout for it. Why it is so important to identify the A&P when it happens will become obvious shortly.

None of these manifestations are a problem unless their true nature is not understood; unless they lack appropriate conceptual context and cause people to react poorly to them; or unless they happen when we are doing something like driving a car down an interstate at seventy-five miles per hour (a story for another time). A&P phenomena may be followed by various mixtures of wonder, excitement, bliss, elation, and sometimes disorientation. Occasionally they will also really freak people out, as most people who enter this stage have no idea what it is and are not in a context where those around them are likely to clearly identify it.

It is not uncommon for those in the height of the rapture of the A&P to associate some of these occurrences with those of an extended orgasm, and sexualized descriptions of this stage are very common. Hypersexual ways of looking at the world and people are common in this territory. It is the stage most prone to creating vipassana romances (VRs), in which people fixate on someone else on retreat (or in the office, class, gym, or whatever) as being extremely desirable in that all-consuming crushy-love sort of way. Portlandia, the TV show, has a funny episode about VRs. Similar VR phenomena can happen at a later stage in Equanimity (ñ11.ñ4, meaning the part of Equanimity that looks a bit like the A&P). Heightened libido and increases in sexual ability may be noticed during this stage. Affairs with other meditators, teachers, and other types of people become more likely. I am not making excuses for anyone, just giving a warning about what can happen in this territory. Those few who notice the ability to see and manipulate emotions and/or energy channels in themselves and others who combine this ability with lovemaking during this stage may temporarily be able to achieve some truly remarkable effects, however short-lived.

Strong sensual or sexual dreams are also common at this stage. These and their while-awake counterpart feelings may sometimes be non-discriminating gender-wise. Those that are attached to the notion of themselves as being something other than at least partially bisexual or just generically sexual may find these dreams and feelings disturbing. Further, if you have unresolved issues around sexuality, which we basically all have, you may encounter aspects of them during this stage. This stage can be particularly disconcerting for monastics and others who have repressed significant aspects of their sexuality.

The A&P, its afterglow, and the almost withdrawal-like crash that can follow it seem to increase the temptation to indulge in all manner of hedonistic delights, particularly substances and sex. As the bliss wears off, we may find ourselves trying to fill that chemical void, feeling very hungry or lustful, craving chocolate, wanting to go out and party, etc., as if we were suddenly in drug withdrawal. If we have addictions that we have been fighting, some extra vigilance near the end of this stage might be very helpful. There are some paradoxical and notable exceptions to this trend, specifically that some practitioners who cross the A&P will suddenly find substances far less appealing, as well as addictions lessened or even simply gone. Unfortunately, these effects are unpredictable and there is substantial variability among practitioners.

This stage also tends to give people more of an extroverted, zealous, or visionary quality, and they may have all manner of energy to pour into idealistic, grandiose, or ambitious projects and schemes. It is one of the most evangelism-prone of the stages. Ever talked to a hyper-excited Christian who just had their conversion experience, saw the light, and is now passing out pamphlets for Jesus and telling everyone to get saved? Very likely they are in this stage or just crossed it recently. At the far extreme of what can happen, this stage can imbue us with the powerful charisma of the radical and magnetic religious leader.

Finally, at nearly the peak of the possible resolution of the mind, at the peak of the A&P, some (but not all) meditators cross something called the “Arising and Passing Event” (A&P event) or “Deep Insight into the Arising and Passing Away”, sometimes just called “Deep Insight”, a term that may often generically be applied to this whole stage. For those who do have a specific event, it, or this stage in general, marks a profound shift in the practice, and from then on they will be somewhat changed by what they have seen, with this being the point of no return that I mentioned in the Foreword and Warning. The intensity of this A&P event can vary, though it tends to be quite clear and memorable, particularly the first time we cross it during that cycle. However, for some, there will simply be something that seems to have the general characteristics of the A&P territory that then fades without an obvious peak event. If you get into A&P territory and keep practicing and it fades out to something else, that still “counts” as it were, with the implications of “counts” hopefully becoming clearer in the next section on the Dark Night.

Some people will have a big and obvious buildup to the stage of the A&P. For others, this stage will suddenly just show up spontaneously and sometimes even without formal meditation training, as happened to me at around age fifteen. I have many friends, family members, and acquaintances who ran into these stages without formal training and in daily life. I know others who ran into them when doing hallucinogens, including mushrooms, mescaline, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, bufotenine, salvia divinorum, and LSD; others had them happen during yoga or tai chi practice; others while in the presence of powerful spiritual figures, including one who had it happen while hanging out with a Christian faith healer; and a few who were hanging out with various gurus. My mention of drugs here as contexts in which people can cross the A&P is simply a description of things that can and sometimes do occur, not any specific endorsement of drugs, as plenty of people do drugs all the time and don’t get to the stage of the A&P on them.

In whatever context the first A&P event occurs, that context will tend to hold a special place in that person’s heart from then on. For me it happened on my own, by my own meditation efforts and without a tradition, and so I have always associated my own practice and exploration with progress. My friend who had it happen with the Christian faith healer became the most hardcore Christian you will find. Many people who have had “born again” experiences have simply crossed the A&P. Another friend who had it happen while on mescaline has since held a special place in her heart for shamanism. Those who had it happen with gurus tended to follow those gurus for some period, associating it with the guru’s presence.

Some others who had it happen in an apparently random context usually had no idea what it was or what it had done to them, but most have realized that something was different and most, though not all, remember it with uncanny clarity as standing out from ordinary experiences. One friend who had never meditated had it happen at age eighteen just after she walked onto the stage during a theatrical performance, and it was extremely disorienting. Another friend who was in her late sixties had it happen for the first time during a yoga class and she was so wound up after it that she crashed her car into a telephone pole on the drive home, though luckily wasn’t seriously injured. In the autobiographical section I talk about some of my own experiences with it, which have varied widely in intensity and other qualities, but all were fundamentally the same from an insight map point of view.

Once we have attained this event or crossed the stage of the A&P without a clear and defining event, it is likely that we will be able to attain the first stage of awakening sooner or later if we can navigate the Dark Night skillfully, meaning, if we simply keep practicing, which is easier said than done if we are Dark Nighting. Thus, a good first goal in insight meditation is to cross the A&P event at our earliest possible convenience, with some very important caveats given later in the section on the Dark Night. That said, if you are reading this book, you very well may have crossed the A&P event already even if you don’t know you have, as reading long and esoteric tomes on meditation while searching for something is the sort of thing that people who have crossed the A&P are much more likely to do, though this is not diagnostic, just highly suggestive.

When we do have a distinct A&P event, it can happen in three basic ways corresponding to some combination of the three characteristics, just as can happen at the entrance to insight stage fifteen, Fruition. The A&P and Fruition are easily confused for this and other reasons. There is great variation in the specifics of what we are seeing and feeling when we cross this profound and often intense event, but certain aspects of A&P events will be common to all practitioners. A&P events tend to manifest in a way that can mimic the three doors (described in a few chapters) at about the middle of the out-breath, leading to an “unknowing event”, which consists of moments about which we know little. During unknowing events, the sensory information available to us is very sparse or vague. This first unknowing event or state shift halfway down the out-breath is followed by a few much clearer and more distinct moments imparting some deep understanding of the three characteristics before a second unknowing event occurs at the end of the out-breath. This is what I call a “double-dip”, since we dip into something very deep twice as we travel down the out-breath. This will be important later when I talk about Equanimity.

In these profound and clear moments, most, but not all, of our sensate universe is perceived to strobe in and out of experience, arise and pass. The subtle background and sense of an observer still seem to remain stable. In contrast, the entrance to stage fifteen, or Fruition, is through one of the three doors, which involves the complete sensate universe (background, time, space and all), and happens at the end of the out-breath, and does not involve two closely related unknowing events. The relevance and usefulness of this information may become apparent later. During these potentially extreme experiences we may not be focused on the breath but on some other sequence of phenomena, the sense of the breath may not be particularly clear, such that the fact of these happening at the end of the out-breath may not be obvious or even discerned, but this is in fact how things happen.

Those who have crossed the A&P event have stood on the ragged edge of reality and the mind for just an instant, and some will feel certain that awakening is possible. The whole of the A&P stage can produce that feeling in some practitioners. Those in this stage and those who have recently left it typically have great faith, may want to tell everyone to practice, and are generally evangelical or uber enthusiastic about spirituality, religion, and/or philosophy for a while. This zealous or evangelical quality can latch onto all sorts of other approaches, like yoga, veganism, and whatever other cause, practice, setting, or movement they might associate with their experience. They will have an increased ability to understand dharma teachings due to their direct and non-conceptual experience of the three characteristics.

Philosophy that deals with the fundamental paradoxes of duality will be less difficult than it might once have been, and they may find this fascinating for a time. Those with a strong philosophical bent will find that they can now philosophize rings around those who have not attained to this stage of insight. Further, if you read about the lives of the great philosophers, many report episodes that are clearly the A&P at the start of their illustrious careers. René Descartes and many others come to mind.

Some who cross the A&P may also be incorrectly convinced that they are awakened, as what they have seen was completely spectacular and profound. In fact, this is strangely common, and those who are doing some meditative practice or other practice that got them into this stage may stop practicing, not understanding that they have only begun. I wish to create no false duality, no false split between our experience and awakening. Yet, if we aren’t yet awakened and yet think we are, there are reasons to heed warnings so that we can increase our investigation of what is going on right now to advance our practice, as mentioned previously in “A Clear Goal”.

The stage of the A&P is a common time for people to write inspired dharma books, poetry, spiritual songs, etc. If you are on retreat and suddenly creativity is pouring out of you, that song or screenplay or whatever is suddenly seemingly writing itself, then having a way to write the ideas down or a phone to record them on so you can remember them later can be helpful if it doesn’t take too much time away from the retreat. The level of creativity that the A&P can produce is astounding. A bit of journaling here and there can be helpful in the more dramatic stages of insight, as it helps get the ideas out of our heads and it can help to process them. When we see something on a written page, we think about it differently than when it is in our brains. If you are on a retreat and find yourself journaling a lot, perhaps discuss this with a meditation teacher so they also know what is going on.

This is also the stage when people are more likely to join monasteries or go on great spiritual quests. It is also worth noting that this stage can look an awful lot like a manic episode, and for those who are bipolar, can trigger manic episodes, albeit manic episodes that also have real insight mixed in with the real mania. Just because we have insight doesn’t mean we might not also be functionally nuts, to use the vernacular. Decisions about stabilization and intervention for those who get way out into Crazyland in the A&P need to be made based on issues of promoting safety for the practitioner and those around them and based on the degree of impairment of basic function. I talk more about that in Part Six.

However this stage manifests, the A&P is a major milestone on the path of insight. It is also a point of no return, since soon the meditator will learn what is meant by the phrase, “Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish!” as they are now too far into this to ever really go back. Until they complete this progress of insight, they are “on the ride”, and may begin to feel that the dharma is now doing them rather than the other way around. They will progress inevitably and relatively quickly, usually within days, into stages five through ten, which as you will shortly see, are not always pretty. The rapture and all the bells and whistles die down quickly, and the meditator may even be left raw as if hungover after a night of wild partying. The clarity fades significantly, and the endings of objects become predominant as they progress to knowledge of Dissolution.

5. Dissolution, Entrance to the Dark Night

So begins what is called the “Knowledges of Suffering” or “The Dark Night of the Soul” (to use St. John of the Cross’ terminology, which has such a nice ring to it). I consider this the entrance to the third vipassana jhana, though U Pandita considers this the entrance to the fourth vipassana jhana. I’ll give my arguments for why I think this later in chapter thirty-four, “The Vipassana Jhanas”. The Dark Night spans stages five through ten in this map, namely:

5. Dissolution

6. Fear

7.Misery

8.Disgust

9.Desire for Deliverance, and

10. Re-observation.

Stages five through nine tend to come as a package, with one stage leading fairly quickly and naturally to the next. Stage ten, Re-observation, tends to stand out as its own distinct and often formidable entity, like the icing on a very creepy cake.

It should be noted that some pass through the Dark Night quickly and some slowly. Some barely notice it, and for some it is a huge deal, regardless of the speed at which they move through these stages. Some may get run over by it on one retreat, fall back, and then pass through it with no great difficulties some time later. Others may struggle for years to learn the lessons of these stages.

I am going to describe the Dark Night largely in extreme terms, but please understand that this is just to give a heads-up about what is possible, not what is necessary, required, expected, or guaranteed. This is in response to and to counterbalance the culture that has tried to ignore, minimize, or otherwise cover-up these stages, and it may be, admittedly, an overreaction. Sometimes it is by overreacting that some synthesis, understanding, and integration can occur, so I like to believe this description will facilitate that process. As before, on retreat these experiences are likely to be more intense and clear, though those on retreat who can keep practicing are likely to make much faster progress as well. On the other hand, practice in “daily life” can be powerful and sometimes very speedy. These things are strangely unpredictable. Enough disclaimers!

Once we have crossed the Arising and Passing Away (and if we don’t suddenly die or get severe brain damage due to some unfortunate life circumstances), we shall enter insight stages five through ten regardless of whether we want to. It doesn’t matter if we practice from this point on; once we cross the A&P, we are in the Dark Night to some degree and become what is sometimes called a “Dark Night yogi”, or simply “darknighter”, until we figure out how to get through it. If we do get through it without getting to the first stage of enlightenment, we will have to go through it again and again until we do. I mean this in the most absolute terms. It appears to be a hardwired part of human physiology as far as I can tell. I have a very large and growing body of case studies and a wealth of shared experiences among meditation friends and acquaintances to back this up, and I am not alone. Tens of thousands of meditators have noticed these stages in their own practice and countless teachers have noticed them also.

As the meditation teacher Sean Pritchard says, some skillful teachers will at least give meditators a heads-up after the A&P that what might be coming next can be challenging, and that on the other side of it is good stuff, namely Equanimity. Even if they don’t explicitly use these maps or specific stage labels, I will assert the odds are that most practitioners will do much better if warned ahead of time about what is about to happen after they cross the A&P.

You see, the Dark Night typically begins with just about all the profound clarity, mindfulness, concentration, focus, equanimity, and bliss of the A&P dropping away. This is one of the hallmarks of Dissolution. So also ends the cause-and-effect-like phenomena of the breath or walking, the shaking or jerking up and down in a way related to attention and noting, as well as all the fine vibrations and vortex-like raptures. People who are all into the kundalini stuff are often left wondering why it just vanished. In contrast to the A&P, early on in the Dark Night stages, the frequency of vibrations disconnects from the cycle of the breath, remaining largely stable at whatever frequency is going on at that stage once they can be perceived again (in late Dissolution or Fear).

Whereas we might have felt that our attention had finally attained the one-pointed focus that is so highly prized in most ideals of meditation during the Arising and Passing Away, during the Dark Night we will have to deal with the fact that our attention is quite diffuse and its contents unstable. Further, the center of our attention becomes the least clear area of experience, and the periphery now predominates. This is normal and even expected by those who know this territory. However, most meditators are not expecting this at all and so get completely blindsided and wage a futile battle to force their attention to do something that, at this part of the path, it won’t do well at all. It is simply a third vipassana jhana thing, so you’d better get used to it. Those who try to go all first jhana with strong effort and narrow concentration will often find that the third vipassana jhana kicks their ass. Those who try to figure out how to work with the third vipassana jhana on its own terms are likely to do vastly better.

If we have ever been meditating in a place with lots of mosquitoes buzzing in our ears in a way that made it very hard to concentrate on the primary object, we can get a sense of what our attention will be like in the Dark Night, particularly in its later stages. As the Dark Night progresses, it tends to get broader and more irritatingly buzzy. Rather than fighting this and ignoring the metaphorical mosquitoes, we should try to understand what it feels like to allow our attention to be however it is. Just as listening to discordant, chromatic jazz with lots of jarring harmonies and instruments playing more at odds with each other than in synchrony takes some getting used to, the quality of attention in the Dark Night is an acquired taste. The sensations that arise tend to be very rich, complex, broad, and unsettling.

Those who obsess over staying tightly one-pointed will suffer more than those who learn to stay with what is going on regardless of whether it feels like “good meditation”, and those who idealize “good meditation” as being very focused, stable, and pleasant will need to revise their expectations, as mature concentration is much more broad and inclusive, and it takes mature concentration to do well in these stages. Remember how I mentioned in the section on the A&P that the linear, center-of-attention-is-really-clear second jhana attention-mode won’t work well later? This is that later.

In that same vein, those who are using some other object as a focus will notice the same phenomenon of the attention being broader and the basic sense that attention seems to be out of phase with phenomena. Those doing visualizations may notice that they see a very dark spot in the center of their attention with some sort of patterns or visions around the edge of it spreading out farther and farther into the periphery. They may also find visualization suddenly much more frustrating than when they saw nice clear things like bright dots. Remember my descriptions of the murk in the kasina section? The murk is the immature phase of the third jhana.

Those using a mantra may feel that the mantra is out of phase with attention, wide and complex and yet hard to stay with, and may acquire more complex harmonics and harmonies if it is in any way musical, like listening to a large, ghost chorus that is in an orchestra pit off to the sides, whereas before the mantra may have felt centered in the stereo field of attention. There will be individual variation in some aspects of these features, depending on object, focus, ability, and each person’s proclivities, but some basic aspects will be universal, and I will talk more about these in chapter thirty-four, “The Vipassana Jhanas”.

There are two basic patterns of vibrations in the Dark Night, and they are the Dark Night’s defining characteristics, though again, plenty of people are not that good at perceiving the patterns or pulses of sensations, and few are good at counting frequencies. These are learnable skills, like anything else, but, if you don’t acquire them, fear not, as most people who go through this stuff will do so without those analytical abilities and do just fine. We may get overwhelmed by the descriptions of emotional difficulties, but keep these patterns in mind and try to stay on that level. The first re-emergence of vibrations is somewhat regular and chunky, at perhaps five to eight Hz, without much else going on. It’s an early Dark Night phenomenon that happens mostly in Fear, and it tends to feel like a shamanic drum beat.

The later pattern is faster, perhaps ten to eighteen or more Hz, more irregular and chaotic, with faster and slower harmonics in the background and at the periphery of our attention. It tends to make us feel very buzzy and edgy in a scattered, diffuse, ungrounded, restless, irritated way. The fact that the background is beginning to shake is a good sign of progress, as this needs to happen for the cycle to be complete. Remember when I said the goal was to see the three characteristics of the whole field? This is a truly essential, if often painful and confusing, step towards that happening. On the other hand, it is exactly the fact that the background has begun to shake, crumble, and dissolve that can cause people to freak out.

Things were all fun and games when the primary object was shaking, but when the sense of the observer, subjectivity itself, starts to fall apart, that can be creepy all the way to utterly terrifying. Simply pay careful attention to exactly what is happening, staying with each pulse of each vibration as clearly as you can, trying to see each from its beginning to its end. Chances are you will be just fine.

There are two basic challenges that occur during the Dark Night: one emotional, the other perceptual. The emotional challenge is that our most disturbing and difficult psychological issues tend to come bubbling up to the surface with an intensity that we may never have known before. Remembering what is good about ourselves or our lives can be extremely difficult if not seemingly impossible in the face of this. Our reactivity in the face of our dark stuff can cause us and those who must deal with us staggering amounts of needless suffering.

The perceptual challenge is that we also begin to experience directly the fundamental suffering of duality, a suffering that has always been with us but which we have never recognized with this level of intensity, never mind ever clearly comprehending its deeper existential implications. We face a profound and fundamental crisis of identity as our insight into the three characteristics begins to demolish part of the basic illusion of there being a separate or permanent “me”. This is a kind of suffering that has nothing to do with the circumstances of our life and everything to do with a basic misunderstanding of all of it. It occurs when we are in this strange in-between territory where everything is having a wrecking ball brought to it, but something better to resort to hasn’t yet surfaced.

In short, some of the Dark Night stages can feel like we are up serious shit creek without a paddle and headed immediately over the waterfall. My apologies for the swear words that appear in this section, but they convey a gritty emotional honesty that I feel more polite language can’t capture.

Dealing with either of these two issues, that is, our dark stuff and our fundamental identity crisis, would be a difficult undertaking, but trying to deal with both at once is at least twice as difficult and can sometimes be so overwhelming as to preclude normal functioning. It goes without saying that we tend not to be at our best when we are overwhelmed in this way.

The frequent knee-jerk response is to try to make our minds and our world change to try to stop the suffering we are experiencing. But, when we are deeply into the Dark Night, we could be living in what others might consider paradise and not be able to appreciate this at all, and so this solution is guaranteed to fail. How many emails have I received from miserable Dark Nighting meditators who are now recovering from their retreat on a beach in Thailand and still having a wretched time in that gorgeous, peaceful place? Way more than makes any sense if you don’t know meditation map theory. Thus, my strong advice is to work on finishing up this cycle of insight and then work on your stuff from a place of insight, clarity, and physical and emotional balance, rather than trying to do so in the reactive and disorienting stages of the Dark Night. I cannot make this point strongly enough.

As Kenneth, who has a gift for precise language and teaching, so aptly put it, “The Dark Night can really fuck up your life.” This stage is what curse words were designed to honestly illuminate. Allow me to give you two hard-won pieces of advice that I have found make all the difference in the face of these stages. First, make the time to do basic insight practices. Do your very best to get enough insight into the three characteristics to understand these stages well enough so that they move on to what comes next. Make time for retreats or solitude and don’t get stuck in the Dark Night. You and everyone around you will be happy that you did.

The second piece of advice is to have a “no-bleedthrough” policy when you suspect you are in the Dark Night. This is how strong skills in training in morality can save your ass. It might best be expressed by two simple mantras, “Do no harm,” and “Keep your shit together.” This is obviously great advice for life in general and it applies doubly here. One might reasonably add, “Fucking get over yourself!” People can get insufferably and narcissistically wrapped up in their pain during this stage, thus severely reducing their capacity for empathy toward others. Intentional service given to those less fortunate than ourselves can help lessen these effects and allow some more realistic perspective to develop in some, but not all.

Simply refuse to let your negativity bleed out onto everyone and everything around you. Keep your life functioning. Failure to do so can be disastrous, as your profound lack of perspective, fixation on negativity, and the suffering from your fundamental identity crisis can easily get projected onto things and people that simply did not cause that suffering. No one appreciates being blamed for your subjective misery at all, and so you will just generate more animosity and suffering. While simple in theory, it is often hard in practice, but there is advice to help make this easier, which is why this section is a long one.

Combining these two pieces of important advice,

Resolve Thus:

I have recently crossed the A&P and I know this by the many directly experienced signs of that stage.

Now I am feeling highly reactive and negative about things that I ordinarily can handle with more balance and clarity. I know that much of this is due to the inevitable stages that tend to highlight and exaggerate suffering that follow the A&P.

I realize that I am in a less than ideal position to deal skillfully with the personal issues that are driving me crazy, since I am likely to project the suffering from the illusion of duality and the odd side effects of the Dark Night onto people and issues.

I have been warned by master meditators who have successfully navigated this territory that projecting my stuff out onto phenomena is an extremely bad idea (and an even worse experience), and I have faith that those meditators know what they are talking about.

Even if these issues seem very real and valid, I am likely to blow them way out of proportion and not be able to bring balance, compassion, or kindness to resolving them.

By contracting into my own reactive misery and confusion, I could easily and unnecessarily hurt others and myself.

Thus, I resolve to keep my darkness to myself, tell only those who are skilled in navigating Dark Night territory, or otherwise share it in a way that protects others and does not project it out onto my world and them.

This way, I will spare those around me needless suffering which they do not deserve.

In short, I will use the meditation map theory to keep the reins on my dark stuff and deal with it in ways that are known to help rather than harm.

I will make time for insight practices and retreats during which I will simply see the true nature of the sensations of whatever arises, however difficult, painful, extreme, or compelling, and not indulge in the spin cycle of ruminating on content for one skinny minute.

I affirm that doing this is within the scope of my strength, capacity, and power.

In this way, I will be able to navigate this territory skillfully and not damage the fragile and therefore precious relationships and routines of my daily life.

Should I fail, I will actively seek counsel or help from those who are skilled in guiding others to maintain a healthy perspective in the face of Dark Night issues until I can traverse the insight stages of the Dark Night as recommended by clear sensate investigation of my immediate experience.

When I have attained to the first stage of awakening (or the next stage of awakening), that will be a great time to see how much of my negativity was valid and how much was due to my own lack of clarity and the side effects of the stages associated with the Dark Night.

From that place of clarity, I will be much more likely to address those aspects of my life and character that really do need addressing and attending to and be able to dismiss those paper tigers that I have created for myself.

By not trying to take on all of this at once, that is, by gaining deep insights before tackling the personal issues, I am more likely to lead the happy and wise life I wish for myself and others.

I will attain to both liberating insights and insights into my issues, and this will be of great benefit to myself and all beings.

One of the primary reasons that I wrote this book was to provide this important resolution. I myself and those I love have suffered needlessly and sometimes profoundly from failure to follow this resolution. Were you hearing me say these things to you in person, you would see tears in my eyes right now and hear me choking up with sorrow as I recall those past events and reflect on what is happening around me as I write this. I beg you, for the sake of all that is good in this world, please make every effort to heed this advice.

Unfortunately, not everyone seems to be able to do so. In fact, not everyone is even willing to attempt to follow this advice, particularly those who buy into the dangerous paradigm that “whatever I feel right now is real”, in the sense that their feelings at that moment must be the only possible valid perspective on their current situation, and thus those feelings are completely justified, along with the reactions to those feelings, and actions issuing from those glorified feelings. There are those who simply don’t believe that such a wondrous and holy thing as insight practices could produce such profound difficulties. There are also those who do not believe in the maps or that the maps could possibly apply to their own very special and unique life. Lastly, there are a few whose pride and insecurity will not allow them to admit that they might be affected by the Dark Night in this way.

I would therefore warn such people to stay the fuck out of the Dark Night until they come to a place where they are able to adopt at least some aspects of the above-mentioned resolution or apply the basics of the theory behind it. If you are not willing to at least try to make or live by some version of my recommended resolution, you should not attempt insight practices and should not cross the A&P, as doing so could promptly deliver you more harm than good, particularly if you have a nonexistent to flimsy foundation in the first training of morality. I write about these stages much more as a lifeline to those readers who are currently in them than as some temptation to those who are not and who are not ready for them yet. I take this as a calculated risk, realizing that some will not realize they are not ready for these practices and will do them anyway.

I am a big fan of fast sports cars, but I wouldn’t give one to a six-year-old. Just so, as you may have guessed, I am a big fan of insight practices, but I have concluded that those who do not use them responsibly, ethically, and intelligently should not use them at all, as doing so is too dangerous for themselves and others, causing too much trouble in the world to be of any significant benefit. This is not likely to be a popular view, particularly for those who want to sell meditation to a mass market, but I have experienced too much of what can go wrong when people refuse to try to live up to such a resolution.

One problem is that some people cross the A&P and enter the Dark Night without doing formal insight practices. I did so when I was a teenager and had no idea what was going on. How to reach these people I have no idea, but they tend to come wandering into spiritual communities soon enough. I hope they find people there who can help them sort out what has happened to them and provide appropriate contextualization and guidance.

In my naive dreams, I imagine that one day there will be training on the maps and basic generic, non-sectarian attentional, contemplative, and meditative development in elementary school, just as we learn about biology and math, such that it would be just another ordinary, accepted, standard part of human educational curricula. Then, everyone would know these stages for the ordinary, natural, human things they are. We are clearly a long way from that now, but hopefully a few who run into this spiritual technology will help spread it and help people who have crossed the A&P to recognize it and handle it properly.

Here’s an analogy that arose in conversation with Dr. Willoughby Britton: imagine if we didn’t tell preadolescent females about menstrual periods, because somehow society in general had totally missed a pattern in which, somewhere around their teenage years, females started having approximately monthly episodes of vaginal bleeding, cramping, and mood instability. In this dystopian world, all these women would be wandering around dealing with this on their own, having no idea that this was totally normal and that billions of others were experiencing the same thing.

A very similar analogy can be constructed relating to pregnancy. Imagine if women didn’t know about pregnancy and labor pains, so they start having sex, it feels good, and then they start to gain some weight, then feel these strange movements in their enlarging abdomen, and, all of a sudden, they start having these horrific pains that feel like pooping out a bowling ball that’s going to split their pelvis in half. That’s stressful enough, without having no idea what the hell is going on or that you are having a baby. The Dark Night is like that for most people who go through it. They started meditation to gain relief (or just paid enough attention to their ordinary daily life to cross the A&P), hit the Dark Night, and are now like a pregnant woman who doesn’t know what pregnancy is or what caused it.

That same exact situation is what is happening globally with the A&P to Dark Night cycle, which is a strangely common part of human attentional development. How many people have crossed the A&P and entered Dark Night territory? I have no idea, but I do know that the number is vastly higher than what most people would think, as most people have never even heard of this basic, human progression of cultivated attention and its accompanying side effects. In the circles in which I run, the percentage is high. If you are reading this book, then it is likely to have happened for you, as reading a book like this and getting this far into it is the sort of thing that people above the A&P are much more prone to do.

I rarely pull out the physician card in this meditation business, but I am pulling it now and throwing it down hard on the table. As a physician and trained scientist, I know as undeniable fact that the cycles of insight are an innate part of human development, occur on a broad scale, and cause profound physiological and psychological effects in significant numbers of people. I have seen it hundreds of times in others and experienced it many, many times myself. I also know for certain that meditative practices and map theory can help those in these stages. One day it will be part of standard psychological and medical curricula. Until then, needless, blind, un-contextualized suffering and chaos continue. How many people have been diagnosed with having bipolar II rapid cycling when they are just going through the A&P to Dark Night cycle I have no idea, but it has happened to a few friends of mine who, later, suddenly were fine when they got further along in their practice.

The resolution presented here and the spirit conveyed by it are an aspect of training in morality, and this sort of morality is one of our best friends in the Dark Night. When we adopt the spirit of this resolution, we do our conscious best to craft our way of being so we’re kind and compassionate and, if that’s not possible, non-harming to any being or object. Many people have commented that insight training is a “monastic practice”. If we can build our own virtual monastery through skillful speech and skillful action, then we do not need a monastery to protect us and the world from the potential side effects of our practice. We can live skillfully in the ordinary world and still make progress in insight.

There are those who, while willing to conceptually buy the theory and spirit conveyed by the above resolution, are so completely overwhelmed by their personal issues and circumstances that they simply cannot follow through on the above advice after they get into the Dark Night despite their kind and skillful intention to do so. My advice to them is to diligently and quickly seek qualified support and/or professional help in the form of psychotherapists and their ilk until they can follow something like the above-mentioned resolution. Good friends and family can be helpful also.

Realize that this is not an optimal way to go, as a lack of perspective and understanding of the Dark Night makes aspects of the therapeutic process more difficult, but for some there will be no other option and this solution is better than simply floundering. Further, only a small number of psychological professionals are currently aware of these very straightforward and predictable stages, something that I hope changes immediately. On the other hand, at least such people have tons of stuff bubbling loudly up for them to deal with, making some aspects of the therapeutic process easier, as it does break down some defenses against our deeper stuff. However, I would try to do just enough healing so that you can push on to the first stage of awakening with minimal bleed-through and then finish whatever therapeutic process you began in the Dark Night only after you are out of it, as it is a heck of a lot easier for most.

A related question is the role of pharmaceuticals in meditation, such as SSRIs, SNRIs, other antidepressants, mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, and the like. Reports from the field so far have been mixed. Unfortunately, we have nothing like enough data at this point for definitive recommendations. Hopefully, someone soon will do that science and try to sort out what optimal blend of meditation and medication helps various populations best in the Dark Night. Unfortunately, you and your prescriber will have to do your own personal experiment and hope for the best. I have a general prejudice, based on not much information, that people should continue their medications and stay in close contact with their mental health practitioners, meditation teachers, and dharma friends. I wish I could say more, but this science is still in its infancy. Also, exercise, a good diet, and just trying to maintain a sense of humor can go a long way sometimes.

There is another seemingly positive way of looking at the Dark Night, or the Knowledges of Suffering, and it is one that doesn’t really fit well with our mainstream ideals of how life should be. It is the view of the renunciate, which basically says, “Ah, now I see the pain of my superficial and materialistic life, of my cravings that will never bring me happiness, of my worldly attachments, and that faulty house of cards I called a life. Far better to give it all up and take up the way of the dharma.” In fact, if you read the Buddhist texts, particularly the Pali canon, you will come across this point of view again and again.

While I have generally advised doing otherwise, I can completely understand why someone would renounce their ordinary householder life and go forth to follow the dharma. The problem comes when we have things like debt, children, spouses, sick or aging parents, and the like, and sorting out the ethics of these conflicts is complex. Regardless, the Dark Night does teach important lessons, and learning them is essential for moving to what comes next. These lessons do not require specific lifestyle choices for mastery, though the Dark Night does tend to call like a siren to people to make radical, renunciate lifestyle choices. Instead, it is a question of clear perception of—you guessed it—the three characteristics of the sensations that occur during those stages regardless of where you find yourself and how complex and overcommitted your life is. As I mentioned in Part One, in anticipation of this section, each training has a specific kind of renunciation associated with it, and they could not be more different.

Speaking of Part One, now is a good time to go back and read the section on morality, as morality really helps in these stages, as at all other times. Behave well. Speak well. Earn a livelihood well if you can. Be polite, helpful, patient, proactive, skillful, generous, compassionate, and honest as much as possible. Avoid unskillful coping mechanisms, such as escaping into alcohol and drugs or just a needless sullen blue funk. Face your life proudly with poise and panache. Laugh. Play. Be brave, like a spiritual warrior, like a ninja. You can even wear those cute little black tabi toe socks if this helps you. Be impeccable. Give to and help others. You will be happy you did so. Morality, morality, morality, meaning skillful living in all its everyday aspects: this is the key before, during, and after. This is the “during” part. Learning to be functional in the face of the Dark Night is learning something of extreme value: practice this way to make this knowledge your own.

It is time to get back to describing Dissolution specifically. As the stage of the Arising and Passing Away ends, meditators may be left feeling raw and incompetent even though they are continuing to make valuable progress into deeper and deeper levels of profound insight. This feeling that something is very wrong when practice is getting better and better can cause all sorts of problems during the Dark Night, especially to those not familiar with the standard maps.

On the other hand, for those who found A&P territory disconcerting, such as those who endured unpleasant kundalini experiences, having come through to Dissolution can seem a welcome relief. Some will stop practicing here, as they feel they have “released the kundalini”, and so are done for the time being. Their body is no longer tense. The weird energetic experiences are gone. The strange movements have stopped. No lights or images are arising. Motivation may fall away. The fireworks have finished. Dissolution feels like a very natural place to stop practicing, the only problem being that the later stages (Fear, and the rest) follow it soon enough even if we stop, though less intense practice leads to a less intense, perhaps more diluted, if often prolonged, Dark Night.

However, those who wish to keep doing formal practice may find Dissolution frustrating. Whereas just one stage ago they could sit for hours and perceive the finest vibrations of reality in exquisite detail, now reality appears to be slipping away, out of focus, vague, and hard to get a handle on. Whereas we may have had stellar posture in the A&P, now we go back to being run-of-the-mill mortals. Images of the body may become vague or even seem to disappear completely, similar to that which happens in formless realms but without the clarity.

Practice is likely to be more difficult, and we may experience pain from sitting that was basically completely absent during the previous stage. This can be extremely frustrating for those who don’t know that this is normal, and the desire to recover a fading past can greatly interfere with being present. In the face of these difficulties, I highly recommend noting practice. It may seem like backsliding to those of us who abandoned noting during the glory of the A&P when our minds were way too fast to formally note all we could perceive, but the spiritual path is not a linear one. In the face of Dissolution and the stages that follow, noting practice can be very useful and powerful. Additional notes to add at this point include things such as, “vague”, “dissolving”, “vanishing”, or Shinzen Young’s famous “gone” for when things disappear again and again in Dissolution. Speaking of Shinzen, definitely check out his The Science of Enlightenment, as well as his videos and other resources, such as Five Ways to Know Yourself.

In short, if we can keep practicing (familiar theme yet?) and adjust to having to work in some more subtle way to perceive things clearly, we will begin to make further progress. This time the effort will have to be with a lighter and broader touch. Further, there are remarkable opportunities to notice that there can be a high degree of clarity in Dissolution concerning very vague phenomena and mental wandering. I recall one meditator who was frustrated by his practice and talked to Christopher Titmuss about this during a “Sit and Enquiry” session on retreat.

The meditator explained, “Christopher, I am so confused. I have no idea what is going on in my practice.”

Christopher responded, “You are quite certain?”

“Absolutely!” the practitioner went on. “I am totally lost, floundering, like I have no idea what I am doing.”

“You are quite sure?” Christopher again asked, pointing directly to the clarity in this man’s mind as he properly identified key, if frustrating, elements of his experience.

“Oh, yes!” said the frustrated man who didn’t yet get what Christopher was pointing to, even while people around him began to see the funny aspects of this exchange and gently laughed knowingly and with sympathy for his plight. “I am utterly lost, like I can’t figure anything out at all …” and so it went.

That we can be very clear about vagueness is something that takes time to learn for most of us, but Dissolution is one great opportunity to notice this more fundamental clarity that has little to do with how clear things are in a relative sense. Still, despite this often hidden opportunity, Dissolution can be very frustrating, causing people to suddenly lose interest in meditation.

Note well, if they give up in the stages of the Dark Night (or any time after the A&P), the qualities of the Dark Night will almost certainly continue to haunt them in their daily life, sapping their energy and motivation, and perhaps even causing feelings of unease, depression, paranoia, and even suicidal thoughts. Thus, the wise meditator is very, very highly encouraged to try to maintain practice despite potential difficulties, to avoid getting stuck in these stages.

I think of Dissolution as “the couch potato stage”, though it can also have a sense of sensual languor to it. A hallmark of Dissolution is that it is suddenly hard to avoid getting lost in thought and fantasy when meditating. We may feel somehow dissociated or disconnected from our life, as if we were ghosts.

Another effect that can be very noticeable at this stage is that actions just don’t happen easily. For instance, you might be going to lift your hand to turn off your alarm clock, but your hand just doesn’t move. You could move your hand, but somehow things just tend to stop with the intention and get nowhere. Eventually you move your hand, but it might have been just a bit tiring to do so. You know you should get up for work (or for that first early morning sit if on retreat), but somehow you just continue to lie there like a stone anyway: that’s what Dissolution can feel like. Meditation can be the same way, and until we break out of this, things can get a bit mired down in the overstuffed cushions of Dissolution. However, when the perception of sensations ending becomes clearer again, there arises …

6. Fear

The clarity and intensity begin to return, but now the stage of Fear can involve all sorts of frightening distortions of perception when sitting, accompanied by intense feelings of unease, paranoia, terror, dread, and/or “the willies”. It can even sometimes seem that our body is falling in tatters through the floor or that we are rotting away. If we have strong concentration tendencies, we may see horrifying or gruesome visions. Vibrations from here on out should no longer change frequency with the phase of the breath as they did in the A&P and, for the next few stages, vibrations tend to be slower than those in the A&P. Nightmares are substantially more common in this stage.

The degree of fear that people experience in Fear can vary quite widely. Some people can suddenly experience extremely powerful feelings of abject terror for no obvious reason at all, but the mind has this odd tendency to create stories to explain how we are feeling, to fabricate things to be suddenly afraid of, even if those explanations and rationalizations are not the cause at all and arose after the fact of the terror setting in. Just feeling terror without an object can be very disorienting. As an example, I had a friend that hit this stage on a retreat in Asia at a center that was not very accommodating of his vegetarianism. He began to imagine that he would suddenly die of starvation and so left the retreat. That is a very classic Fear stage behavior.

Strangely, Fear can also be exhilarating in the ways that a horror movie or riding a roller coaster at night can be. I am a bit of an oddity, I think, in that I enjoy this stage, but then I also practice emergency medicine, a job that basically involves some real love of adrenaline and grisly things, and the stage of Fear can provide those in abundance at times. For most people, however, the thrilling or exciting side of this stage tends to be greatly overshadowed by the dark side, and most people don’t appreciate Fear in that way.

The duration of Fear, like the other stages, varies widely. I know people who have barely noticed it and gone through it in minutes. I know a few others who had it kick their butt for years, flooding them with dysfunctional panic that totally derailed their lives, though all these were people who didn’t know what the stage of Fear was and didn’t have good instruction about what to do with it or how to relate skillfully to it. Both are extremes and atypical. For most, it lasts hours to days when learning to go through it, and many get through it moderately well. Still, some people who are otherwise smart, previously well-adjusted, and capable people will find it deeply taxing, and I do not know exactly why some people have such a hard time in it while others don’t. Traditionalists will generally say “karma”, as if they understood that very thoroughly, but we must admit at this point that the exact science of the stages of insight, their biochemistry, and other exacerbating and moderating factors is a mystery.

Reality testing, noticing that we are generally in a safe place (assuming we are, and not in a war zone, running for our lives), have access to food, water, and shelter, and that we are okay: these can help a lot. Grounding attention in trying to gently synchronize with the sensations of things vanishing, falling away, and shifting can help. It is very important to recognize that Fear is not dangerous unless we make it so. The classic quote, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” is of relevance. If we fear the fact of fear, indulging in telling ourselves stories about it, we can amplify this stage. If we ride it, flow with it, welcome it, dive down into it, play with it, revel in it, dance with it, and dissolve with it, letting it tear down the illusion of permanence and control as it begins to do so, we can appreciate that this is the third vipassana jhana, which can be a fascinating meditation adventure given the right attitude.

Regardless, Fear is part of the Whole Person Tour that these stages take us through, in which we are being given the opportunity to accept the full range of our lives here as they are and recognize the awakeness of every type of experience. Acceptance, honesty, and clear, precise awareness of the true nature of the actual sensations that make up all of this are the key in all the Dark Night stages, as before. The six sense doors and the three characteristics are the basis of great insight practice in this stage and all the rest. On the mild side, this stage might manifest as just a slightly heightened sense of nonspecific panic or anxiety. As Fear passes and our reality continues to strobe in and out and fall away, we are left feeling …

7. Misery

The stage of Misery is characterized by intense feelings of sadness, grief, and loss. Again, for some who can appreciate what such emotions teach, there is a redeeming quality to the heartfelt depth of grief and melancholy, but this tends to be greatly overshadowed by their dark and engulfing aspects. Energy, which may have increased a bit in Fear, may flag again during this stage. In Misery, we are having our whole concept of self and the world as being permanent, able to satisfy, and even being “me” or “mine” torn up from the roots, and eroded by the now undeniable truth of the three characteristics. There can be enormous grieving in this process. Those with a broader or more archetypal point of view may feel they have tapped into the suffering of the world, like having tapped into the vast universal ocean of sorrow. Those with a tendency to the powers end of practice may see images and/or whole scenes of suffering, death, devastation, and destruction flash before them.

The feelings that Misery can bring up are hard to accept for many, and our resistance to this process causes us further misery. Just as with Fear, it is common to come up with fabricated reasons to be miserable after the misery has already set in, a tail wagging the dog type of thing. We may feel like failures and frauds, as if we can’t do anything right. We may relive memories of those actions and words we regret the most in life, undergoing a tour of those times when we most disappointed ourselves and others. Be gentle, loving, and forgiving of yourself if this happens. Wise remorse, as mentioned earlier in Part One, is key, and will help a lot more than self-pummeling guilt. We may feel that our meditation and path is all just some sad and dead-end trip. The hard, unfair, and cruel aspects of life may affect us more deeply in this stage.

This stage, though often unpleasant, can be very healing and heart-opening. However, becoming lost in and overwhelmed by the content of these sensations and being unable to see their true nature is a somewhat common cause of failure to progress and thrive. On the mild side, we may just feel a bit like we do after we come out of a crying spell. Misery is the transition point between the drum-like five to eight Hz part of the Dark Night and the very complex, irritating frequencies that follow, though Misery itself is generally not that buzzy, and frequencies of vibrations are not that noticeable for most practitioners, which is just fine. It tends to have a heavy, slow thickness to it. Attention continues to broaden and the center to become more absent. As things continue to fall apart, clearly demonstrating their unsatisfactoriness, and their selflessness, this can cause …

8. Disgust

We become disgusted with the whole thing. This is where the buzzy ten to eighteen-plus Hz chaotic vibrations around the periphery really begin to get strong for those who are attending to the impermanence aspect of sensations, which I highly recommend. Through this section of the Dark Night, our ability to clearly perceive objects in the center of our attention is poor, and it may feel like our minds are being stretched wide and yet contracting at the same time. We begin to feel completely tormented by our noisy and repetitious minds (a classic sign of this stage), by a body that is full of suffering and unpleasant sensations, and by a world that is falling apart, as well as an image of ourselves, that, while seemingly growing tighter and tighter in terms of how it feels, is also paradoxically becoming more volatile, fragmented, and unstable. Perceiving thoughts as thoughts becomes harder and harder, and thus getting caught by our stuff gets increasingly more likely. Gone is the freedom that the insights of Mind and Body allowed us, though they tend to return later in Equanimity. However, we can intentionally remember to see thoughts as thoughts, and it can be very helpful in this stage to note “thinking” when we have harsh thoughts.

It is a stage at which it is very easy to be very critical of basically anything, another case of the tail wagging the dog, in that the mind state of Disgust comes first and we then apply it to our outside world not realizing that we just did that, judging things and people harshly due to being at this stage. It is easy to suddenly become critical of our path, our tradition, those practicing around us, our workplace, our partner, our friends, and our family. In short, for basically anything we see, we are likely to see the downside more strongly than we ordinarily would. Some of the odd exceptions to this generalized disgust with the mundane and ordinary can be with books, conversations, teachings, videos, diets, practices, clothes, and lifestyles that are felt by that person to be purer, truer, more profound, and/or more holy. Many in Disgust will find that basically anything but the “highest and best” will annoy the crap out of them.

On the mild side, we might just feel subtly revolted and disappointed with reality in general, with the simple fact of experience, or perhaps have the slightly creepy feeling of crawling skin. The number of things we can become disgusted with as we try to find some reason and set of objects to fit our feelings is basically limitless. On the strong side, we see nothing to cling to, no self to be found, and we begin to wish the whole edgy, disillusioning reality we had placed our trust in would just end, and now we find ourselves with a strong …

9. Desire for Deliverance

At the stage of Desire for Deliverance, we are fed up with basically everything, often including dharma practice, but at a level that transcends mere suicidal thoughts, though definitely it may include such thoughts for an unfortunate few. If you find yourself among those few, tell someone and seek help immediately. It will likely pass soon enough; you need to stay alive so you can get to the good stuff, and Desire for Deliverance is very close to the good stuff. However, by some weird trick of this stage, it can be very hard to imagine that we are close to great stages of practice from this vantage point.

We can feel that, if we just go far enough out or in, we can get to something better, and the pull towards that nebulous but powerful, imagined “better” can be very strong at this stage. Often this pulling feeling has a stronger component to it of running away, meaning that it can feel more like we are fleeing unpleasant things rather than being called to salvation. Yet, that flavor of inspired stepping out of our ordinary comfort zones and into a compelling unknown can be powerful in this stage. I took a whole college course dedicated to spiritual practitioners from across the ages who felt “called out” of their ordinary lives—including St. Augustine and Joan of Arc. In this stage, it is easy to identify with their stories and the feeling that we are similarly “called out” of our comfort zones and to something greater, farther, higher, or at least less bad. When you know meditation map theory, it is fascinating to read the stories of some of history’s great spiritual figures, as you will see these insight stages and their classic manifestations in their reports of their tribulations and transformative experiences.

Desire for Deliverance is beneficial in some deeper sense, though it nearly always seems otherwise. It can cause serious problems that can appear as insurmountable. Those who know dharma map theory will no longer wish for anything but the complete ending of all sensations, that is, the first taste of Fruition (described in a bit). We just wish the noise in our minds would stop cold, but are unable to will this to happen. We wish the vibrations, which can be quite intense, harsh, and jarring by this stage, would all go away forever. We wish the unpleasant feelings that are flooding in would all just stop. If we fail to associate the ending of pain with progress in insight and instead falsely associate that pain with merely changing something in our ordinary life (such as suicide, sedation with substances, divorce, or whatever), we are likely to wander far and wide or do something stupid or irreversible until we come to realize the limits of ordinary solutions. If you find yourself working on your escape plan, try to re-channel that into your inscape plan, such that you can turn attention within at the actual root of the problem in your own heart, mind, and body.

Here’s the “One Weird Trick” to this stage for those who are not going through it at the level of vibrations or kasina-induced visuals, but instead going through it at the level of emotions: honestly feel that crash, that utter devastation, that agony, that bottoming out, that despair, that longing for release, in all its down-to-earth, real, gritty humanity, allowing that plunge to happen inside you deep down, down, down. Then, investigate that, just as it is, because it is a crucial part of the trip, part of the journey, part of the remarkable opportunity to bring the clear light of wisdom to every aspect of our full emotional range, including the bottom of it. So, fall. Notice it. Allow it to be. Notice it is made of sensations: feel them honestly, as well as all the reactions to those sensations. This is the key.

The technique of noting can be very helpful, as can keeping our attention at a very spatially grounded sensate level, meaning that you keep some awareness of the shifting volume in which all this is going on. Open-eyed meditation may be a bit easier at times than eyes-closed. If you do go through it eyes-closed on the cushion, those unafraid to plunge and dive into the chaos and take up the dance with it will do better. Meanwhile, when off the cushion, do not do anything stupid, which is to say destructive of yourself or anything else. It won’t help, and on the contrary, could cause protracted misery. As Kenneth likes to say, “Be sure to heed the ancient admonition: ‘Don’t fuck up!’”

This is the stage at which people are most likely to quit their relationships, jobs, or school and go on a long retreat or spiritual quest. Fascination with celibacy as somehow being “a higher spiritual path” can arise. I am not making a judgment call here on the value of celibacy versus non-celibacy, just stating that it is more common for practitioners in this phase to find celibacy compelling. Our renunciation trip can be very disorienting to partners, particularly if we were going to the opposite extreme of intense sexuality during the stage of the Arising and Passing Away, which probably occurred not long before, so try to be empathic and sensitive to their needs if you can. If you can talk with them about meditation stage theory, even in generic or non-technical terms, it can be helpful to keep them in the loop in some way so that the contrast is not so disorienting or surprising.

An awareness of the maps can help normalize and contextualize what can otherwise be a confusing and distressing process. Somewhere in here, there can arise the tendency to try to get our lives and finances in order so that we can leave the world behind for a time and have something to come back to without having to worry about such things for a while. A profound resolution to push onward can arise at this stage, driven by our powerful frustration and the powerful compassion in it. Then, we make the last push for freedom, the push against the seemingly impenetrable wall of …

10. Re-observation

Re-observation may not sound like much of a problem, as it has such a sanitized and boring name. However, friends have suggested renaming it with various four-letter Anglo-Saxon vernacular terms, usually in some grammatically problematic but emotionally cathartic string. This stage is often, though not always, like a brick wall, particularly the first few times we collide with it. It can be as if all the worst aspects of the Dark Night stages converge for one last important lesson, that of Re-observation.

We must perceive the true nature of the sensations that make up our ideas of perfection, all the ideals we cling to, all images of how the world should and should not be, all desire for anything to be other than exactly the way it is, as well as all desire for awakening to be anything other than this. It may seem impossible to sit for even a minute, as the levels of restlessness and aversion to meditation and all experience can get high. The sudden complete inability to sit on the cushion for even a few minutes is a classic mark of this stage. As a physician, I speculate that at some point they will find some physiologic commonality between this stage and the pathways of restless leg syndrome, but the whole-body version.

This stage, and part of the stage of Three Characteristics share some features. In other words, be warned, particularly those of you who are prone to being overly certain about “where you are” on these maps. I get a reasonable number of emails and calls from people who claim they are certain they are in Re-observation, and shortly thereafter they are describing A&P territory, meaning that they had just been in Three Characteristics territory, not Re-observation. Continuing to investigate the true nature of these sorts of sensations and our map theories is often difficult, and this is a common cause of failure to progress.

Now, I am about to describe all sorts of emotional or psychological manifestations that can sometimes happen in Re-observation. The more extreme the description of a possible side effect of this stage, the rarer that side effect is likely to be, particularly those that sound like descriptions of severe mental illness. For someone who is staying at the level of bare sensate experience, as I strongly recommend, the only difficult manifestations that seem to be quite common at this stage are a strong sense of aversion and resistance to formal meditation and experience, and a deep sense of primal frustration, though these tend to fade quickly in the face of good practice. If our concentration is strong enough and our other factors are in balance, we may move through this stage with no problem at all at the level of vibrations or even pure, abstract patterns of light and/or sound, bypassing all the potential complexity I am about to describe.

For those using more ordinary objects, aversion to meditation and experience can arise as we react to the vibrations in this stage, which can be fast, chaotic, and harsh. The noise in our repetitive minds can be quite irritating. By repetitive, I mean that this stage can involve repeating thoughts, songs, and stories, like we have a horrible case of the evil earworms (in the metaphorical sense of annoying songs that get stuck playing in our heads). Ever had a fever and had some irritating thought circling again and again in your head? This stage can produce similar experiences.

Some of my own descriptions of this stage while on retreat have included such phrases as “the mind-storm” and “a bracing work in D minor for six sense doors, hailstorm, and stuttering banshee”. If we are very powerful meditators who yet lack enough equanimity and tranquility (remember the seven factors?), it can literally feel as if we will be torn apart by harsh vibrations. At some illusory level of the sense of continuity and stability, this is exactly what we are trying to accomplish.

However, even if very difficult manifestations arise, if we are practicing well, they should not last long at all, at best minutes, at worst, hours or days. Once I began to get what this stage was about and what it was useful for, a perspective that had a hard learning curve, I would intentionally amplify the sense of being torn apart, directing this stage’s sharp and cutting ability to shred reality at anything that appeared even the slightest bit stable or continuous anywhere in the body, mind, or experience in general. That is a skillful use of the perspective that this stage allows us.

In a similar vein, and as mentioned before, those few who are crossing this territory with world-class concentration abilities and using a very rarefied object, such as a complex visualization on sacred geometry, may, if they are very good at it, pass through this stage with little or no difficulty. It can be fascinating and subtly rapturous, as this is the peak of the third vipassana jhana. Strong practitioners fusing insight and concentration practices may notice that the proportion of the visualized field that is organized into clear images gets broader and broader. The patterns may become more complex. The phase problems get more and more bizarre. The visual field may take on more spherical dimensions, with curving images beginning to encircle (or “ensphere”) you. The images may appear to have manifold symmetries and repetitions, and these generated images and sounds may come around to encompass basically the whole field of experience.

This can be like watching an IMAX movie of a moving technicolor spirograph in the front row. As mentioned earlier, I have also seen gigantic fields of hyper-detailed, repeating, shifting patterns of things like spiders, mushrooms, snakes, skulls, fingers with claws, and other creepy and disconcerting things but, on careful inspection, they were beautiful, vibrant, and amazing in their intricacy. I use this example partly due to my own experiments and partly to illustrate general points.

Different objects and practitioners will most definitely produce different specifics, such as colors, images, etc., while some aspects of what happens at this stage will remain the same, and are therefore universal. It goes to illustrate a basic point: Re-observation need not be a problem if you have very solid meditation skills. Even if you don’t, it still need not be a big deal if you know what to look for, what to expect, how to handle it, and that it too shall pass. Dry insight workers get through this stage all the time just fine with good practice. Further, if you are reading this book, you probably already crossed the A&P as mentioned already, and so you have probably already handled it at least once and may not have even known it, and even if you haven’t yet, you still may do just fine. We’ve all been through hard times, and this is just one more phase that might be potentially challenging.

You see, Re-observation is all fluff and no substance but, if you confuse fluff for substance, the effect will be the same as if it actually had substance. Bodily sensations of creepy revulsion, disgust, or profound existential angst may arise, and yet, those with wisdom will notice they are like confetti, like sparkles of light, like raindrops, albeit seemingly acid raindrops. Still, they are not harmful. In fact, they apparently do something great to the mind, since Re-observation leads to the next stage, Equanimity. This normalizing knowledge is power.

Re-observation is like a toothless dog with a ferocious bark. If you run screaming or faint from fear when the dog barks, then it needed no teeth to prevent your progress. It is like a hologram of a snarling demon that you can just walk right through and it can’t touch or harm you at all. There is a curious freedom when you deeply realize that you are safe in Re-observation, that you can go deep into the pit, and the pit is just fine. In Review stages, a period when it can be easy to call up specific stages and stay in them to get a better sense of them, I have again and again called up Re-observation just to check it out and learn its secrets.

On a somewhat different note, however bad Re-observation is, we can’t always blame it for everything. The primary sign that the negative side effects that may occur in the Dark Night are not associated with insight stages (but instead are due to other, ordinary, real-world processes) is that they do not change much in the face of strong and accepting investigation or when we stop practice entirely. Remember, you have two sets of effects going on: insight-related, and other circumstances and psychological aspects of your life. If good insight practice, done well and bravely, with strong investigation and good technique, is not fixing your life situation, then you may instead have standard, ordinary problems to be dealt with by ordinary, real-world methods.

As you can likely already tell, the Dark Night tends to get practitioners strategizing, trying to figure out the best way to crack it and get to Equanimity. This has led to various teachers and practitioners developing their own distinct schools of thought that may deem some techniques and approaches the most optimal, typically the techniques that have worked best for them. However, those who have gone through the Dark Night enough times and with a range of approaches, techniques, attitudes, and practice conditions will eventually realize that there are many, many ways to skin this cat, to use an un-Buddhist metaphor. Exercise often helps. Loving-kindness practices get recommended often for good reason. Strict vipassana and ultra-rapid noting work well for those with a high tolerance for pain. Slower noting might work for those with a bit more time and less interest in shattering themselves.

Some teachers highly recommend physical practices, such as yoga with a high degree of bodily awareness, as that can ground people in something other than their psychological stuff. Others might highly recommend plunging hard into their psychological issues and healing, with a high degree of sensate mindfulness of that process to ensure it keeps producing insights. Others with mighty concentration skills might go for more abstract objects, such as sacred geometry, as mentioned above. The “concentrate your ass off” strategy in the Dark Night has much to recommend it. Loving-kindness practices and other brahma viharas (covered in Part Six) are commonly reported to be helpful. Yet others might recommend more shamanic and psychonautic techniques to cause the sort of radical unsticking that can happen with those methods, and reality testing shows that those do sometimes work for some people but cause problems for others, and predicting which will result is not easy. Each of these strategies has risks and benefits to be considered.

In contrast to what most people might expect me to advocate here, it is true that much more gentle approaches can also work in Re-observation and the Dark Night in general. Some find that softening, opening, and accepting generate much better results than more aggressive approaches such as rapid noting or surfing fine vibrations. Sometimes just carefully investigating and gently relaxing what is often called “body armor”, those physical tensions that correspond to psychological blocks and tensions, can be quite effective in this territory.

Others among us will notice that just carefully investigating other aspects of our lives, like physical tensions related to roles and identities, will help facilitate progress here. Some do well with intellectual reflection coupled with some sensate investigation, and repeated questions such as, “Where am I contracted?” or, “What am I clinging to?”, asked well and often enough, will actually yield good results. Some with more spacious tendencies may notice that just feeling into the subtle moving warps in our sense of attention or space that are the hallmarks of the third vipassana jhana will be all they need, and doing this with the eyes open rather than closed can help us keep from getting lost. Many of these methods just require doing them well enough for long enough to get them to cause progress.

Even stranger measures can be oddly facilitating here although they may superficially seem to have little to nothing to do with insight practice. Some practitioners may just need to change locations, resolve a single conflict with one person, cry about one issue they need to grieve over properly, make some other simple change, or go through some other simple process, and then suddenly everything opens. Just giving yourself permission to care for yourself might make a difference. I recommend When Things Fall Apart and Start Where You Are, by Ani Pema Chödrön, as the yin energy of these books will help counterbalance the energy of this book, which can be too yang sometimes. Nurturing strategies often help a lot in the Dark Night.

I remember one cycle through this territory where what cracked it was just dancing wildly for hours until I was totally exhausted. A few will do oddly well by stopping practice entirely, forgetting entirely about progress and the maps and all of that, and just surrendering, but this last one generally only works when the meditator is in the correct place and has done enough work and growth already for that strategy to make sense.

This is a small subset of the various strategies that might work and that teachers advocate. You will have to assess your own capabilities, inclinations, intuition, resources, and what you have available to find what works best for you. Experimentation and a willingness to regroup and retry if you fail with one approach are key, as failure and frustration are common experiences the first few times we try to crack the nut of the Dark Night. If you are on retreat, it typically only takes about ten days to two weeks of struggling in the Dark Night to fall back to earlier stages and have another shot at it, so you can try a new strategy on the next pass if the first pass strategy didn’t work. I still generally feel that very simple practice: six sense doors, three characteristics, is the best practice for all insight stages. One day, I hope that scientific methods and controlled experiments are applied to find how best to navigate this territory. Until then, take your best guess and, if it doesn’t work, try again.

Due to the sorts of frustrations and failures that are common in this territory, this stage is sometimes called the “rolling up the mat stage”, when many who joined monasteries in the stage of the Arising and Passing Away now give up and disrobe. People on retreats tend to need much reassurance but often leave right then even with good support, guidance, and encouragement. Are you suddenly needing to leave a retreat that you had planned to stay in much longer? You are likely in this stage.

There can be the distinct feeling that there is no way to go forward, and it is useless to go back, which is exactly the lesson we should learn. Acceptance of exactly this, right here and right now, is required, even if it seems that this mind and this body are completely unacceptable and unworthy objects of investigation. Remember: no sensations are unworthy of investigation!

One of the hallmarks of the early part of this stage is that we may begin to clearly see exactly what our minds do all day long, see with great clarity how the illusion of a dualistic split is created in the first place, sensation by sensation, moment to moment, but there is not yet enough of a meta-perspective and equanimity to make good use of this information. This can be very frustrating, as we wonder how many times we must learn these lessons before they stick. The interesting thing is that this stage, when gone through at the level of emotions and vibrations, rather than in the realms of light produced by strong concentration, will nearly always come with a sense that it lasted just a bit longer than we could take it, and yet somehow, we can take it, and it does end.

Intense feelings of frustration and disenchantment with life, relationships, sex, jobs, moral codes, the world, and worldly responsibilities may emerge at this stage in ways that can cause enormous disorientation, disruption, and angst. Re-observation can take whatever issues and reactions arose in the earlier stages of Fear, Misery, Disgust, and Desire for Deliverance, combine them in fiendish ways, and then crank that intensity to the next level, a level that can seem overwhelming. These aspects of our life can temporarily seem bland and pointless at this stage, though it may seem that this will always be the way we feel about them.

This stage can mimic or perhaps manifest as some degree of clinical depression. Beware of making radical life changes that cannot be easily undone, such as a divorce or firing off angry emails to your boss, based upon the temporary feelings that may arise during this stage. For those who recognize that they are in this stage, some form of active mental compensation for these potential effects can be helpful to facilitate maintaining our relationships, jobs, studies, etc., at a functional level. This can be very skillful if it is also combined with practice that allows the experiences of this stage to be acknowledged and understood as well.

I should be careful here in that, while I generally advocate for maintaining jobs, relationships, studies and the like, if possible, in the face of Dark Night stuff, there is obviously no way for me to know for certain that this is the right course of action for you or anyone else, as the future is unknown and unpredictable. This is obviously not helpful, as we might wish for concrete, reliable guidelines as to how to proceed, and yet, unfortunately, there are none. Maybe shaving your head and joining a monastery really is the best thing you could possibly do. On the other hand, maybe preserving your marriage and job is.

There are obviously many other options that might suddenly seem like good ideas in this stage, and whether, in retrospect, they will have been as good an idea as they seemed at the time is anyone’s guess. I wish I could definitively tell you what to do, but I can’t. Still, there is something to be said for optionality, even if, in the Dark Night, all options can seem like bad options. Not trashing possibly valuable relationships helps preserve optionality and generally lessens later regrets. There are ways to gain some space in which to let this disorienting and often disruptive process mature that are more skillful and less damaging than others, and I wish you well finding those.

Layers of unhelpful and previously hidden expectation, pressure, and anxiety can reveal their true uselessness, though this beneficial process can feel very confusing and difficult. We may get the sense that we have never had such a strong emotional life, and until we get used to this new awareness of our previously subtle or unacknowledged feelings, this stage can seem overwhelming.

Occasionally, people at this stage can also have what appears to be a full psychotic break, or what is often called a nervous breakdown, though if these are truly a side effect of insight practices, they should pass quickly. The main key here is to continue to acknowledge and accept the content but also to see the true nature of the sensations that make up these natural phenomena. This can be extremely hard to do, especially if people have chanced upon this stage without the benefit of the support and guidance of a well-developed insight tradition and qualified teachers who can easily recognize and navigate this territory.

Even for those who do get into this in a well-developed tradition, unrealistic spiritual ideals can really screw up practice. In your idealized spiritual world, you imagine you aren’t supposed to be insanely frustrated, on edge, shuddering from some strange wrongness you can’t figure out, because you are a meditator, you are practicing something good, and so you shouldn’t feel this way, or at least so the traditions might seem to tell us. However, this is exactly where your practice led you at some point, where it took you, what is really going on, because you have entered aspects of the human psyche you wished would just go away and you wouldn’t have to deal with. Go into them, but with wisdom, with clear morality, with some sense that you can go there and be okay, with some control of what you think, say, and do.

The classic arc of the hero’s journey, where at some point they must enter the underworld, mirrors this part of the path. Part of the flip side of the next stage involves going there, being honest, dealing with an utterly “un-spiritual” way of being that might not fit your ideals at all. Keep a lid on the bleed-through, but internally be willing to be emotionally honest, and keep investigating. This is an acquired taste and getting comfortable doing this is not easy for most people. Still, it is a great skill to learn.

Those who do not know what to do with this stage or who are overwhelmed by the mind states can get so swept away in the content that they begin to lose it. This is the far extreme of what can happen in this stage. Fear is frightening, Misery is miserable, and seemingly psychotic episodes are confusing and destabilizing. In the face of such miserable experiences, we may swing to the opposite extreme, clinging desperately to grandiose or narcissistic images of ourselves. These reactions can easily perpetuate themselves, and this can become a blatantly destructive mental habit if people persist in wallowing in these dark emotions and their deep and unresolved issues for too long. It can be like cognitive restructuring from hell. Do not do this to yourself.

I should mention the problem with developing concentration, which you must have succeeded at to at least some degree at some point to get into this territory. Strong concentration is a generic force that may be used for good or ill. If you use strong concentration to write positive qualities on the mind, they will be written more strongly than if you didn’t have strong concentration. Likewise, if you have strong concentration and end up writing negative qualities on the mind, those will also be written more strongly than if you lacked strong concentration. That is the danger in this stage. Thus, the essential point is, if you ever develop strong concentration, you must be extremely careful with what you do with it. Part Six, specifically chapters fifty-eight to sixty-one, will go into more about this, but the basic lesson is straightforward.

Specifically, if you continue to be strongly identified with content, without perceiving its true nature, and your strongly concentrated mind dives down that pathway of focusing entirely on the story, particularly negative interpretations of the story without seeing those thoughts as thoughts, then the mind can spiral down and down into madness and despair, and more madness and despair can lead to a horrid feedback loop. I call this “dark jhana”: like the exact reverse of jhana. In skillful jhana, we skillfully use positive qualities to attract and stabilize attention, which then reinforces those positive qualities in a positive feedback loop. In dark jhana, we unskillfully reinforce horrible mind states by obsessing about horrible mind states from within horrible mind states while being freaked out by horrible mind states.

If you recognize dark jhana is happening, put the brakes on it right then with everything you have. Seize control. Refuse to lose that control. Find a way to get a grip on yourself. Splash cold water on your face. Eat grounding food. Exercise or take a walk in nature. Take a warm bath. Listen to soothing music. Sing. Dance. Play a video game. Watch a funny movie or funny cat videos on YouTube. Read the section in Part One where the Buddha talked about the removal of distracting thoughts and apply those instructions with full force: this is when they really come in handy. Stand with your legs planted firmly on the ground, your hands gripping something like a sink, countertop, or the back of a chair, and figure out where the actual problem is in your body and the space in which you stand. Note physical sensations of restlessness and irritation with precision and bravery.

Dark jhana sucks and should be avoided at all costs. Wire your brain in a positive way, not a negative way, and you will do much better. Go into that territory at a bare sensate level that remembers there is space and you will do much better. Go into it divorced from the senses and lost in the content, and badness will likely result.

When people mention “touching their own madness” on the spiritual path, they are often talking about this stage. This stage can make people feel claustrophobic and tight. If they push to make progress, they can feel that they are just getting more and more tightly wound and are about to snap. If they do nothing, they continue to suffer anyway.

The advice here: stick with the process but don’t force it. Pay attention to balancing effort and gentle acceptance. Remember that discretion is the better part of valor. Practicing in moderation as well as maintaining a long-term view can be helpful. Think of practice as a lifelong endeavor, but do just what you can each day. Stay present-oriented. Walks in nature or places with open, expansive views can help, as can exercise. Re-observation has the power to profoundly purify us, given sufficient commitment to just being willing to sit with it. Be clear, precise and accept all this despite the pain and anguish, both physical and mental, that it can bring.

If you are on retreat, let the teachers know what is going on immediately. Sit and walk according to the schedule. Apply the technique as prescribed every second, if humanly possible, and do not leave the retreat early! Remember: applying the technique means seeing everything arise naturally, without anything having to happen at all. This can really take the pressure off, a pressure that really doesn’t help in this stage. There is a way to keep practicing well that nevertheless drops the unskillful aspects of striving which are pulling you away from each moment. Other than just sticking to the schedule, not a lot needs to happen beyond what is already happening. Thus, and very critically, you can’t power this stage, but you can try to accept and synchronize with what is going on at a direct experiential level.

Again, if on retreat, try walking outside as opposed to inside if logistically possible. Reclining sometimes rather than sitting might help, but some will find the restless energy too much, in which case walking may help. It can seem counterintuitive to keep practicing when things feel so unproductive, unspiritual, unpleasant, and unbearable, but keeping at it in skillful ways builds the wiring that leads to the good stuff that comes in the next stage even if it feels like it is doing nothing good at all.

This stage is a profound opportunity to see clearly the pain of the dualistic aspect of our attachments, aversions, desires, hopes, fears, and ideals, as our awareness of all this has been amplified to an unprecedented level. At its best, it is very humanizing and very emotionally honest. This is the stage that makes possible the path of heroic effort, the diligent investigation of this moment based upon the powerful wish for awakening, because at this stage all the unskillful aspects of this wish are beaten out of the meditator with a force equal to the suffering caused by them. You can get very far on highly imbalanced and goal-oriented practice, and it can provide sufficient momentum and meditation skills so that, should you get your ass kicked at this stage, you continue making quick progress anyway, even when you drop off the imbalanced striving power and let the insight machine you have built coast somewhat on its own momentum.

Again, if meditators stop practicing entirely at this stage, they can get stuck and haunted for the rest of their lives until they complete this first progress of insight. Not moving forward with practice at this stage will deprive meditators of its primary benefits, such as the increased perceptual abilities that allowed them to get this much insight in the first place. They teeter on the brink of meditative greatness. Remembering this will help increase faith, and it can take a lot of that to get through this stage. Good teachers will help students develop faith in their own abilities to handle these stages, and to balance this with backing off if it truly gets to be too much.

To get through the Dark Night on your own power and to get to Equanimity is true meditative greatness. The next stage is fantastic and what comes after it is even more so. Thus, those who quit in these stages reduce their chances of ever getting beyond this stage, and the whole range of consequences, both physical and emotional, can remain long after the meditation skills have faded. Finding that balance, knowing what you can take and what you can’t, is as much art as science, with no perfectly clear guidelines that can be given. However, we strongly need to consider that quitting in these difficult stages increases the chances of doing it again the next time it happens, as the way we practice creates pathways in the brain that will be stronger next time. This pattern of bailing on practice in the tough stages can create “chronic Dark Nighters”, meditators who just don’t figure out how to move through this stage for a long time.

You would be surprised how many of these people are out there. Their failure to unstick themselves may be due to their own psychological makeup, poor instruction, belief that the spiritual life is all about bliss and wonderful emotions, belief in unrealistic and absurd models of spirituality that do not allow for the full range of the emotional and mental life, or chancing upon this stage outside the context of a well-developed insight tradition.

I was a chronic Dark Nighter for over ten years without having any idea what the hell was happening to me, so I can speak on this topic with some authority. Further, I have gone through numerous other Dark Nights at the higher stages of awakening and have come across the same issues again and again. Being stuck in the Dark Night can manifest as anything from chronic mild depression and free-floating anxiety to serious delusional paranoia and other classic mental illnesses, such as narcissism and delusions of grandeur (which I am sure you recognize at points in this book, parts that were likely written in this phase). Dark Nighters may act with a disarming mixture of dedicated spirituality, social conscience, compassion, and reactive darkness.

I mentioned that the A&P could impart a bit of the inspirational, radical religious leader quality to those with such tendencies. For these same individuals, Re-observation can sometimes lend a bit of a paranoid, apocalyptic cult leader quality to them, a confused whirlwind of powerful inspiration and frantic desperation. Just because someone has borderline or antisocial personality disorder doesn’t mean they can’t make progress in insight, and when they hit these stages it can get wild. In fact, this basic pattern of the A&P happening to a psychopath leading to a cult-following and then mass-suicidal crash when they inevitably hit Re-observation is seen again and again in history and is perfectly explanatory of this otherwise perplexing phenomenon. Same goes for suicide bombers and militant recent converts in general.

We may all have our own neurotic tendencies that come out when we are under stress, but if you feel that you are really losing it, get help, particularly from those who know this territory firsthand and are willing to talk honestly about it. Don’t be a macho meditator, go it alone, or get stuck; and don’t imagine that spiritual practice can’t cause some wild and sometimes extremely unpleasant side effects. One of the best things about working with thoroughly qualified and realized insight meditation teachers before we get into trouble is that they will have some idea of our baseline level of sanity and balance and thus know what our capacity is and what we can manage.

That said, I suspect that both the mushroom factor and the dharma culture of jet-set teachers popping in and out of our lives with little chance for students to have meaningful contact with them off-retreat contributes to the significant number of Dark Nighters out there. I suspect that there are fewer problems with chronic Dark Nighters in traditions in which the maps outlining what can happen are well-known and in which there are teachers who are accessible and honest about their humanity and the varied landscapes of the spiritual terrain. Naming and normalizing these stages can be profoundly empowering to those going through them in order to find and master their own meditative power.

On the other hand, genuine mental illness or unrelated emotional or psychological difficulties can show up in people’s lives. Blaming it all on the Dark Night may not always be accurate or helpful, though if you have recently crossed the A&P but have not completed an insight cycle or gotten into the next stage (Equanimity), there is going to be some Dark Night component mixed in with whatever else is going on.

Meditation traditions tend to attract what can seem like more than their fair share of the spiritual, emotional, and psychological equivalents of the walking wounded. Sorting out what’s what can sometimes get murky and may require the help of both those who know this insight territory and those who deal with ordinary mental illness and the emotional and psychological difficulties unique to the culture in which practitioners were raised. The best guide would be familiar with both realms. I have an awakened friend who has found it very useful to take medication to treat his very real bipolar disorder. There is something very down-to-earth and realistic about that. These practices won’t save us from our biology. They merely reveal something in the relationship to it.

On the other hand, there are those of us who are so deeply indoctrinated by the models of “working through” our “dark stuff” that whenever it comes up we turn to psychotherapy or a whole host of other ways of getting our issues to “resolve” or go away. This view implies false solidity and an exaggerated importance being given to these things, making it very hard to see the true nature of the sensations that make them up. The trap here is that we turn a basic crisis of fundamental identity into a witch hunt for the specific parts of our lives we imagine are to blame for our feeling such dissatisfaction with our basic experience. If someone has gotten to this level of practice, no amount of tinkering with the circumstances or issues in their life will ever solve the core perceptual issue.

That doesn’t mean that some of the dissatisfaction with specific aspects of our lives are not valid—quite often it is. However, these relative issues get conflated with a far deeper issue, that of what we really are and are not, and until this cycle of insight has been completed, this conflation tends to cause us to greatly exaggerate our criticisms of those things in our lives that could actually stand improvement and work. Learning this lesson can be very hard for some people, and the dark irony is that we may wreck our relationships, careers, and finances, as well as emotional and physical health, trying to get away from our own high level of insight into the true nature of reality.

It can also make us have strong reactions to our meditation teachers and dharma friends, either being very dissatisfied with them, or demanding that they somehow save us, or more likely, both. Until we are willing to work on a more direct, sensate level, there is no limit to the amount of angst and negativity we can project onto our world. I have seen this play out again and again in myself and in the lives of my dharma companions—the strange volatility that can be created by Dark Night–amplified reactive attachment disorders. It can be a very ugly business.

My advice: if careful analysis of your insight practice leads you to the conclusion that you are in Re-observation, resolve that you will not wreck your life through excessive negativity. Resolve this repeatedly and intensely. Follow your heart as best you can, but try to spare yourself and the world from as much needless pain as possible. Through sheer force of will, and with the assistance of whatever skillful supports you can connect with, keep it together until you are willing to face your sensate world directly and without anesthesia or armor. I have seen what happens when people do otherwise, and have concluded that, in general, things go badly when people do not follow this advice, though some unexpected good, in the form of learning the hard way, can and does come from such situations.

The framework of the three trainings and the three types of suffering that are found within each of their scopes can be helpful here as well. Since most of us are generally not used to facing fundamental identity crises, which is the basic issue in Re-observation, we are not familiar with the misery of fundamental suffering. Being unfamiliar with that misery, we are likely to conclude that it is produced by the specifics of our ordinary world and personal circumstances. However, if we have gotten to Re-observation, that is, if we have found these techniques to be effective, we need to have faith that the remaining advice may be of value to fulfill this part of the experiment. If we are in Re-observation, the task that confronts us is to tease out the fundamental suffering we now know all too well from the specific problems of our lives in an ordinary sense. Remember the five spiritual faculties? Remember balancing faith and wisdom? This is one phase of practice when you get to see what that truly means, as it will test both.

This advice to at least partially decouple our felt sense of suffering from our ordinary circumstances may sound dangerous, heartless, or bizarre to some people. It is a valid criticism. In an ideal world, we would not have to go around second-guessing ourselves and the sources of our misery in the specific way that I advocate here. In an ideal world, we would really have our psychological trip together, be able to stay with the practice during these stages, and thus cross quickly through the Dark Night and finish this practice cycle. It can be done.

We are not always ideal practitioners, and thus the Dark Night often causes the problems mentioned previously that need to be addressed. My solutions to what happens when we cannot or will not do insight practices in the face of the Dark Night are also not ideal. However, the outcomes are likely to be much healthier in the short and long term than those that come from simply allowing unrestrained Dark Night bleed-through, which often occurs in the absence of solid and sufficient training in morality. Strangely, I have concluded that simply practicing is often much easier than trying to stop Dark Night bleed-through if we are willing to just try it, though it can often seem otherwise. The old kindergarten evaluation, “Follows instructions, plays well with others,” is still a valuable standard in the Dark Night.

While in the Dark Night, not restraining negativity and reactivity that issue from our thoughts, speech, and physical actions is a bit like getting stinking drunk and then driving in heavy traffic rather than just sitting down and waiting to sober up. Not continuing to do insight practices in this stage is like going into surgery, getting an incision, getting the surgery, and then having the surgeon leave you with a large, open incision. Until you get that wound closed you are basically screwed, no matter how anyone might try to comfort you. In this case, you are both the surgeon and the patient. Face the wound and close it up! You have the necessary skills, as you have gotten this far. Use them. The procedure is almost done.

There are also those who try to investigate the true nature of their psychological demons and life issues but get so fixated on using insight to make them go away that they fail to hold these things in perspective. This subtle but common corruption of insight practices turns practice into another form of aversion, escape, or denial rather than a path to awakening. Drawing from the agendas of mostly psychology and confused morality, in which there is concern for the specific thoughts and feelings that make up our experience, we fail to make progress in insight, whose agenda is simply to see the true nature of all sensations as they are. Both are important, but it is a question of timing.

I have concluded that, with very rare and fleeting exceptions, ninety-five percent of the sensations that make up our experience are really no problem at all, even in the difficult stages, but seeing this clearly is not always easy. When we fixate on very painful or very pleasant sensations, we can easily miss the fact that most of our reality is likely made up of sensations that are no big deal, and thus we miss many great opportunities for easy insights. Further, the Dark Night can bring up all sorts of unfamiliar feelings that we have experienced rarely if ever with such clarity or intensity. This has the effect of busting attempts at spiritual bypassing, as the Dark Night is basically the exact opposite of spiritual bypassing. We are in it, deep into it, facing our darkest and most challenging stuff. However, until we get used to these feelings, they can frighten us and make us reactive because of our lack of familiarity with them, even if they are not actually that strongly unpleasant at a sensate level.

What compounds our misery is the mental content we tend to kick up in response to sensations. Often the stories we make up and then tell ourselves, about why these difficulties are happening and what it all means, exacerbate the problem they were intended to solve. There are multiple ways to reframe the meaning of these occurrences that might make them more bearable and point to solutions that are more likely to work, particularly learning to reframe them in terms of these insight maps (and the three characteristics), which is why they can be so valuable. It is not that the insight maps are the be-all and end-all of meaning, as they obviously aren’t. However, focusing entirely on the psychological end of our work without also focusing on the underlying insight process is a common trap that typically doesn’t go as well as the dual approach that keeps making progress on the insight front also. [18]

I highly recommend using physical sensations as the objects of inquiry during the Dark Night whenever possible, such as those of the breath, with particular attention to the fact that these sensations occur in space. Diving into emotional content, even with the intention of investigating it, can sometimes be a very hard way to go. Remember, whether we gain insight through investigating physical or mental objects is completely irrelevant. Insight is insight. Whenever possible choose objects for investigation by which you won’t easily get caught. The best thing about reality, particularly in the Dark Night, is that you only have to deal with one little flickering sensation in space at a time. Staying on that level when doing insight practices is an unusually good idea. Pay attention to what is right in front of you, but keep your attention open.

Using physical object allows you to investigate how much physical pain you are actually in. Does reality seem totally horrible? Notice how much of it is actually excruciatingly painful. If it is not that painful, why do you think it’s horrible? Investigate that carefully in your body, so as to notice exactly where the pain is and also exactly where it is not. Open your eyes and notice the space you are sitting in. Are you in a safe place? No gunfire nearby? Have enough to eat? Decent water? Immediate threat to life or limb? If not, is that much fussiness, reactivity, and drama really necessary? Probably not. Sink into that down-to-earth, common-sense understanding, and basic, practical wisdom. Do some solid reality testing. Notice exactly what volume of space is really a problem and exactly how much of it is not. You will very likely find that the majority is not, and somehow your mind had forgotten that much if not most of it is okay and perhaps even pretty good or interesting. Then get back to a detailed but open, wide, all-embracing, moment-to-moment sensate investigation.

Scary stuff said, there are people who breeze straight from the Arising and Passing Away through the whole of the Dark Night in as little as a few easy minutes or hours and hardly notice it at all, so don’t let my descriptions of what can happen script you into imagining that the Dark Night has to be a major suffering event. It absolutely does not. These descriptions of what can occur are merely there to help those who do encounter these sorts of problems to realize that these things do occur, and can be skillfully addressed. There is no medal awarded for having a tough time in the Dark Night or for staying in it for longer than necessary, much to my dismay.

At my best and on retreat, I have gotten through Dark Night territory in as little as about a day and a half. Bill Hamilton said one Dark Night took him about seven minutes, which is really fast, but it means it can be done. I have had Dark Night phases that were no worse than the general stress I encounter in daily life in ordinary situations. That said, off-retreat I have had Dark Night phases hit hard for months, those being before I knew anything about what they were or how to deal with them. Contextualization, explanation, normalization, and the empowerment that comes with knowledge and well-applied time-tested techniques make a huge difference, as I have noticed by doing the experiment myself many, many times, and as many others have reported.

One of the more bizarre potholes we can fall into in the Dark Night is to become fascinated by and identified with the role of The Great Spiritual Basket Case. “I am so spiritual that my life is a nonstop catastrophe of uncontrollable insights, disabling and freakish raptures, and constant emotional crises of the most histrionic nature. My spiritual abilities are proven and verified by what a consummate mess I am making of my life. How brave and dedicated I must be to screw up my life in this way. Oh, what a glorious, holy, special, and saintly wreck I am!” Both my sympathy and intolerance for those caught in this trap are directly related to the amount of time I have spent in that trap being just like them. While we should not try to pretend that the Dark Night hasn’t made us a basket case, if it has done so, neither should we revel in or wallow in being a basket case, nor use the Dark Night as an excuse for not being as kind and optimally functional members of society as we can possibly be.

Try to navigate the Dark Night with panache, dignity, self-respect, decency, gentleness, poise, and if possible, a sense of humor, which often seems to be the first thing to be sacrificed at its bloody altar. Even a cutting, cynical, and dark sense of humor about your current experience would be better than none at all, but avoid hurting people with it. Feel free to use humor on yourself as much as you wish. Remember to balance all that with some honest humanity. It is actually possible to have fun with the Dark Night, just like it can be fun to go on a scary roller coaster or see a scary movie, like the alleviating feeling of a really good cry, like the weird thrill that comes from primal scream therapy. Remember that.

Additionally, the practice of remembering the good, true, and beautiful aspects of the world, and the myriad kindnesses shown you and others by you and others—to literally stop and smell the roses—can help a lot to regain perspective. My roses are actually blooming nicely as I write this, with their beautiful fragrance wafting through the open window. This advice is likely to ring cheesy to one in the Dark Night, but remember this and you will do better.

Speaking of doing better, and getting away from the crazy and back to the vipassana, I should mention something about the micro-phenomenology that I really care about, that makes insight practice more than just psychology. The patterns happening from a sensate point of view in Re-observation are the pinnacle of the third vipassana jhana and, because of this, have the following qualities: first, they are very broad—very around the “back”, very on the periphery of attention. That is where attention is naturally very strong in this phase, so go with that first, as it is easier. Allowing attention to be its natural fluxing shape will make this work a lot better than trying to go narrow and forcing things—that would be using a first vipassana jhana coping strategy at a stage in which it isn’t likely to work well.

Second, the frequencies of pulses are chaotic and fast. We are getting into more sophisticated forms of more inclusive attention that are starting to broaden enough to include many diverse, irregular, erratic, intricate aspects of reality. Go for that attention-wise, meaning go into frequencies of the oscillation of the sensations that appear to be subject and object that are really fast and harmonically irritating, instead of regular and predictable. We are talking at least ten to eighteen pulses of sensations per second, if not a lot more. While noting can help if we are getting run over in this stage, if we can get it together to go into the broad vibrational complexity directly, we can learn to draw on the remarkable discerning power of our minds. We can notice how fast reality is arising, and, as reality and comprehension are the same thing in their essence, we can notice that comprehension, and thus contemplation, can go this fast. It takes an elegant letting go of control and an embracing of that to get what Re-observation is trying to teach you.

Do not try to power through this: that’s first vipassana jhana. Do not try to go for really tight, narrow, fine, tingly frequencies that are all about a center of attention and not about background: that is second vipassana jhana. Re-observation comes at the peak of the third vipassana jhana: it is broad, rich, chaotic, and about the “background” and issues of synchrony and asychrony. “Background” here means those things we typically think of as on “this side”, as well as those sensations that tend to frame objects in the center of attention, as well as just those sensations that are more in the direction of “us”.

The fourth jhana will put it all together later, so here, you just need to learn the third jhana piece well. The first jhana’s linear, controlling, effortful attention paradigm can’t go that fast, but reality can, and reality is attention itself, so just embrace that. You need to let reality start learning to recognize that it is already recognizing itself. That’s the only way the mind can realize the massive processing power it already actually has and embrace a vast and complex world of sensate experience that the limited, linear mind cannot possibly track in all its richness and intricacy.

This is vipassana. Notice that every little background sensation already is its own comprehension, where it is, as it arose and vanished, and that trying to pretend to be a little point in space observing and controlling all that sensate complexity is absurd and just causes suffering: that is the lesson here. That is the three characteristics, and the three characteristics are the key in this stage, as with all the others. Do not get all caught up in my psychological descriptions, they are there to help only if you get thrown totally off your vipassana game. As soon as you get back on your game even a little bit, get back to noticing all this come and go on its own, naturally, effortlessly, at a basic, fast, sensate level. This is the most important paragraph of this whole section.

One way or another, when we finally give up and rest in what is happening without trying to alter it or stabilize it, when we can accept our actual humanity as well as be clear about the three characteristics of naturally flowing mental and physical phenomena, there arises …

11. Equanimity

Finally, we really begin to understand and surrender to the truth of things. We begin to accept, at a deep level, the truth of our actual human lives as they are. All the “stuff” that the Dark Night may have brought up may still be going on, but somehow it has lost its ability to cause real trouble. Equanimity is much more about something in the relationship to and among phenomena than anything specific about the phenomena themselves. It involves a real, down-to-earth, honest humanity, a real acceptance of ourselves just as we are. Figuring out how to manage the transition from Re-observation to Equanimity is one of the big keys to practice. Another key is to be real with yourself and keep up a gentle investigation of the three characteristics while you are being that honest in a broad and inclusive way that remembers something called “space”. Remember that space is just fine.

When in Re-observation you may think, “This totally sucks! Dang, I really want to get to Equanimity!” Feeling into that yearning, being very clear and honest about how you are feeling and thinking, as well as just continuing to practice, makes it all happen. Those sorts of thoughts and feelings are totally normal: when perceived clearly as they are, they become the foundation of progress. If they are not investigated gently at least somewhat at a basic sensate level, you are likely to stay stuck for longer than you need to be, as stated in “The Seven Factors of Awakening” when I mentioned being stuck in hell: this is what that section was referring to. If your practice stays future-oriented, goal-oriented, rather than just being with what is right now, what you wish for will not happen easily.

In Equanimity, there is a settling in, a rediscovery of what we seemingly always knew but temporarily forgot. Equanimity can have a rough start, strangely enough, as well as some mildly painful and irritating sensations, but the meditator feels that some barrier has finally broken, a weight has lifted, and practice can continue.

Equanimity can be such a relief after Re-observation that it is very tempting to solidify it into the fourth shamatha jhana, either because doing so is very nice or because of fear of falling back to Re-observation, which can easily occur. In this, many will shift to modes of attention that are much more in the realm of concentration practice, being more about the positive qualities than the three characteristics, meaning that they stop investigating those and rest in the equanimity. However, as I continue to mention, not gently investigating the qualities of this stage, such as peace, ease, and a panoramic perspective, prevents progress and makes falling back to Re-observation more likely. In fact, falling back to Re-observation is quite common, since important learning takes place in Re-observation, as much as we may not like it.

Strangely, some may find the openness, ease, and spaciousness of Equanimity disconcerting, disorienting, or ungrounding, particularly if they have spent a lot of time being in significantly more contracted modes of being. This may cause some to then retreat into those more contracted modes, such as the Dark Night, as that sort of familiar discomfort may actually be more comfortable to them in some strange way than the ease and openness of Equanimity until they get used to it. Milan Kundera’s book title The Unbearable Lightness of Being sums up well this surprising but understandable phenomenon.

What I call “the standard pattern” involves people crossing the A&P, learning (if reluctantly) many deep and essential lessons in Re-observation, getting to Equanimity, but then falling back to Re-observation, learning more lessons of a similar nature, getting back up to Equanimity, and so on until the lessons hit deeply and finally Equanimity really predominates in its unobtrusive way. So, if this happens to you, be as grateful as you can be to go back and learn something that you clearly needed to learn more fully or deeply, such that when you get back to Equanimity, that lesson will endure and be better rounded.

The first vipassana jhana (Mind and Body, Cause and Effect, Three Characteristics) is about building up the basic skills of identifying what a physical sensation is, what a mental sensation is, how they are related, and what the three characteristics feel like in practice. The Arising and Passing Away (second vipassana jhana) is about seeing these very clearly and profoundly for the object of meditation and its naturalness of presentation. The Dark Night (third vipassana jhana) is about these insights coming around to the background and seeing more complex emotional and psychological constructs of mental and physical sensations as they are. The fourth vipassana jhana, meaning this stage, is about seeing the true nature of even more integrated, inclusive, subtle, and fundamental things such as space, awareness, investigation, wonder, expectation, analysis, knowing, wanting, anticipation, peace, ease, questioning, subtle fear, subtle doubt, etc., in honest, complete ways that cut through the center and include the background and foreground as well. It is also about gently teasing out these strands into the field of awareness, delicately, as though we were trying to coax out something fragile and shy.

I think of “core processes” as those aspects of experience that most deeply form the basis of the illusory sense of a “me” or “this” side of an investigator, a meditator, a continuous being, something that could be there to make progress, acquire, or attain something. Seeing those at a sensate level is the opportunity presented in Equanimity, and a remarkable opportunity it is for those who know what to do with it. In Equanimity, we can see the three characteristics in a way that applies to the whole field of experience: everything happens on its own, everything is shifting and ephemeral, everything that involves a “this” that seems to be watching “that” has this strange tension in it. Allowing that wisdom to come through and show itself naturally is key.

The early parts of Equanimity (ñ11.j1) can feel very familiar and “normal”, like we have remembered something simple and good from our childhood. If we felt weary of the world in the Dark Night, we may suddenly find that the world is just fine and we may even become more engaged with and excited about it than before. Again, these potentially radical mood swings can be very disorienting to those with whom we have close relationships. Try to be sensitive to this and their feelings. Confidence returns, but whereas there may have been a Rambo-like quality to it during the Arising and Passing Away, now there is more of the cool, easy confidence and competence of James Bond or Lara Croft.

At this stage, there can arise a tendency to see the world and those in it in very strange and unusual ways. Tremendous variation is possible here. One example from my experience, intended to convey a general concept: I remember looking around me at all the people on retreat and even at all the chickens, birds, and puppies in the monastery, and seeing them all simultaneously as little mush demons (little squat greenish creatures with big, sad mouths and eyes) [19] but also as fully awakened Buddhas. They were both. In fact, we were both. We were deluded and small, yet interconnected and luminous.

I could see in some very strange way exactly how each of them, including me, was caught in the world of form and confusion, trying to find happiness and doing so from such a small and frightened place, and yet all of this was vast Buddha nature, all of this was the natural, luminous, and compassionate divine dance. Such strange perspectives that try to resolve paradoxical insights do not always occur, but this is included here in case they occur for you and perhaps to prompt knowing laughter from those with their own unique stories from this part of the path. More sexual and stylized versions of these experiences can also explain where some of the more exotic tantric teachings come from, though a sexual component is generally more characteristic of the A&P.

Sometimes the early part of stage eleven can produce a real sense of freedom in the conventional sense, freedom from cares, worries, even responsibilities and social conventions. We may sometimes feel that we are simply beyond everything, and this is a wonderful feeling (ñ11.j2). It tends to fade quickly enough on its own, but it’s possible to get caught by it if we stop practicing entirely, which is a common occurrence in Equanimity: the charge is gone, the quest seems preposterous, we are okay, just this seems to be enough. Those who became spiritual fanatics, fundamentalists, or freaks after the A&P and during the Dark Night may now begin to behave more like their old selves, with their spiritual practice being much less of a big holy deal. About damn time …

Visions of bright lights may arise once more, but these are more typically associated with the A&P. If white lights arise in Equanimity, they tend to be much more broad, amorphous and/or diffuse than the pointed, train headlight of the A&P. Any images that form in this stage are much more likely to have more three-dimensional elements than those in the A&P. Again, as with that earlier stage, the meditator is able to sit for longer and longer periods and begins to perceive clearly the three characteristics with spaciousness and breadth. The big difference is that the A&P is more about the object of meditation and Equanimity is more about the whole sensate universe, though sorting this out at the time is not always straightforward, as the A&P can be so powerful, and manifests in many different ways. There is less rapture and more equanimity than in the stage of the A&P. There are rarely if ever the spontaneous physical motions and odd breathing patterns that come with that earlier stage.

Unfortunately, just to make things confusing, there is often a single double-dip state shift into some deeper version of early Equanimity in the manner of A&P territory, with one state-shift that may involve an eye-blink and shift in consciousness halfway down the breath and the other at the end of that same breath, very soon after the shift from Re-observation to Equanimity. [20]

I should also note that occasionally at the stage of Equanimity I am prone to having an unusually strong memory of something that seems unrelated to what I am doing, such as a strong vision of some part of my past. It tends to last just a few seconds for me. I began noticing the recurrence of this during this phase of cycles much later in my practice, but I suspect it was happening all along, and you might watch for it to see if something similar happens to you. I notice this most in daily life when cycling through these stages, as the intensity of the memories is so striking, as though I am momentarily transported to that place and time for just a moment for no apparent reason. This may just be idiosyncratic, and if you don’t notice this, don’t worry about it. That same advice is true of much of this map stuff, as I describe a wide range of variants, only a few of which might apply to any one person in each cycle. If you are paying attention, after things repeat often enough, you will likely notice all the little quirky phenomena that manifest for you in each stage, like familiar little markers along a forest trail, a mossy stump here, a funny-looking stone there, etc.

In the early part of Equanimity, reality may appear a bit “chunky” for a while, like some half-way point between the irritation of the late part of the Dark Night and the flowing, open phase that happens as Equanimity more fully develops. Practice in this early phase may seem quite possible but may seem to require steady but sustainable work. If we are tired, we may begin having dropouts and head-drops that are like what occurred in Dissolution but more extreme, sort of like when we start to have our head nod while driving when extremely tired (something I have done way too many times and strongly advise against). [21] These head drops are among the things that people can mistake for Fruitions (described later), but Fruitions almost never involve the head dropping as these Equanimity head-drops do.

In this third subjhana phase of Equanimity (ñ11.j3), the broad, out-of-phase phase, it may be hard to read and pay attention, hard to hear people and listen, hard to notice where we are and what we are doing. It can have some resemblance to Dissolution but is less slothful and more diffuse and spacious and makes people more prone to “spacing out”. The arising of fear of madness and death is not uncommon in this phase of Equanimity, but usually does not cause too much trouble and may even seem comical or welcome. [22] For others, this mini Dark Night of Equanimity can make things complicated, and in the face of that seeming complexity some will either try to power the thing (unlikely to work well in Equanimity), or try to solidify the pleasantness they may have experienced right before it and turn something open, flowing, and accepting into a more stable and safe-feeling fourth shamatha jhana, which is equanimous but still more frozen and static than works well for reaching stream entry. In this way, people can stagnate in Equanimity.

We may get a sense that something strange and perhaps scary (namely, “reality” vanishing) is about to happen. A related and common feeling in the early part of this stage is the general sense that something big and exciting is about to happen, like kids on Christmas morning before they’ve opened their presents, like young couples on their first date, though this feeling is also common before an A&P Event. These feelings are worthy of sensate investigation in a broad and inclusive way, just as with other sensations. It is common at these times to apply familiar practice tactics that worked in previous stages, such as going for very fine details about small phenomena as we did building up to the A&P, powering investigation, or noting fast as we may have tried to do in Re-observation, or some other gamey strategy that we borrowed from an earlier part of the path. Few of these are likely to help and most will hinder, but many people will try them again and again until they learn this, and there is something to be said for learning for ourselves by trial and error. As Mahasi Sayadaw says in Practical Insight Meditation, we may feel that the noticing and the objects are not close enough. We are not yet recognizing that the “objects” know themselves where they are and on their own naturally.

Allow me at this point to introduce “The Analogy of the Kazoo Player”. Hopefully it will be as big a hit as “The Analogy of Shootin’ Aliens”. In “The Analogy of the Kazoo Player”, imagine there is a great symphony orchestra in a great concert hall and in front of it, like an absurd comedy act, sits a clearly nervous kazoo player with no music score in front of him. The orchestral introduction begins, and the poor kazoo player, who has no idea what piece will be played, tries to give his best rendition of the orchestra’s chosen symphony. He is about a half a second behind them, playing the notes just after he hears them. As he is a kazoo player, he can only play one note at a time, so his impression of the orchestra is a very crude one, hitting on selected highlights of the melody, making for a very small and very simple version of the rich and intricate multipart score of the symphony that this orchestra is playing beautifully in all its glory.

Now, imagine that certain audience members have been cursed to believe that they can only hear the symphony after the kazoo player plays his rendition of it. Beginning meditators are nearly all thusly cursed. Noting is like the kazoo player, and eventually we get good at noting (or noticing), and we hang on to the notes of the kazoo player, delighting in his performance, as crude, linear, and simple as it is. Remember that I am a noting technique fan, and a bit of a kazoo fan as well. However, at some point, some of us notice that we can also hear the symphony just as it is, just on its own, that the weave of sounds is coming in from the symphony also, and this is known without the kazoo player having to make a limited, absurd, out-of-time, delayed facsimile of it.

Soon, some of us concert-goers are going to begin to find the kazoo player silly, like some sort of joke that ruins the majesty of the symphony as it is. Finally, imagine that someone suddenly puts the music in front of the kazoo player, such that he joins the symphony, becomes just one more part of the grand sweep of the melody, largely lost amidst the grandeur of the hundreds of other players all giving it their all. Equanimity is like that, in that we finally are just caught up in the performance, without having to feel like we need some poor kazoo player to interpret and imitate the symphony for us, and definitely without having to feel like we have to be up on stage being the kazoo player ourselves.

One danger of this analogy is that it might cause beginning practitioners to try to jump up to the broad directness of the later stages without doing the work of the early phase that creates Equanimity. Specifically, if you are doing a technique like noting, which clearly is very kazoo-player-esque, don’t let this analogy dissuade you from noting in the stages of practice when it can be so very helpful. Noting is a great way to get to Equanimity, as most practitioners can’t notice just the symphony completely without going through some sort of kazoo-player-like stages.

You will notice that I don’t mention anything about the frequency of vibrations in this section, as it is not about that, but much more about flow, fluxing, synchronization, and inclusion. There might be pulses, shifts, arisings, and vanishings, but this is not about the specific frequency or counting beats or anything of the sort. That is all kindergarten stuff compared to what this stage is about, so don’t be tempted to apply that first vipassana jhana mentality and technique of linearly noticing individual pieces; doing this would be backpedaling, as this stage is far beyond that, even though it may seem so ordinary that it hardly seems as advanced as it is. It would be like trying to count the number of notes coming from the violins instead of getting fully into the beauty of the symphony in all its rich, full, textured, effortless, grandeur as it reverberates within the concert hall.

Speaking of pedaling, an analogy from the world of cycling comes to mind. In the early stages we exert effort, like pedaling up a hill. The A&P is what it is like to be flying along at top speed, totally rocking it, feeling the power of your legs effortlessly cruising along as you are now on a high plateau. The Dark Night is what it is like to suddenly have come to a steep, down-sloping, treacherous, and dangerous part of the road that is poorly maintained, with lots of crazy traffic, potholes, and other obstacles. We try to brake but we can only slow down so much before our brakes heat up too much and we must somehow hang on and navigate the craziness.

However, Equanimity is like now coasting along on an easy, open, flat, straight road in a beautifully scenic area with no finish line to cross, no specific goal in mind, just effortlessly coasting and enjoying the scenery. If we employ a biking style from any earlier stage, such as totally powering it, as in the early stages, or if we are braking hard and swerving around imaginary obstacles, as in the Dark Night, we will likely miss the simple, easy, open beauty of the scenic area we have managed to get to after our long, hard ride, and instead just exhaust or frustrate ourselves instead of noticing what Equanimity is all about.

As practice matures, reality can be perceived with great breadth, precision, and clarity, and soon with no special effort. This is called “High Equanimity” (ñ11.j4 or ñ11.ñ11). It is the loss of any sense of the isolated, individual, effortful kazoo player, and there is just the symphony of ordinary reality happening on its own, as it is. The odd thing about High Equanimity is that most of the time you don’t notice you are in it. In fact, not noticing that you are in it is part of its hallmark. It can feel so normal that it might feel like terrible practice, if we were even thinking about such things, which is not nearly as likely in actual High Equanimity. Obviously, the problem with this is that some will think, “I don’t at all feel like I am in Equanimity, so I must be in Equanimity!” when, in fact, they are not. So, such advice must be taken in context.

In Equanimity, our practice may feel that it lacks the speed and precision of the A&P, the drama of the Dark Night, the delightfully free wonder of the earlier phase of Equanimity, and as if it isn’t enough. When High Equanimity happens, it seems so ordinary that we may try to make it into something extraordinary. If we are attached to ideals about how amazing, blazing, bright, dramatic, powerful, sensational, and thrilling practice is supposed to be, we may keep seeking those qualities and prevent ourselves from being with the very ordinary-feeling but clearly extraordinary stage of High Equanimity.

High Equanimity can happen in many unexpected situations, such as walking to the bathroom after a sit, or just doing ordinary things like watching TV, as you lie down for a nap, daydreaming, brushing teeth, or during formal practice, though at that point practice is unlikely to feel much like practice or anything special or unusual. It can feel pretty boring, like we no longer care at all if we awaken, practice, or anything like that. Attempts to fake it are common if people know the map theory, but the real deal just shows up and pervades quietly on its own.

It is quite common to experience High Equanimity during walking practice, as most people mistakenly believe that walking practice is not as important as sitting, so they let the pressure off, which in this case is good. This phase may be very quick, just a few minutes or even a few seconds, but if we have set up our practice well, that is all it may need. If we have conditioned our minds to perceive the broad, interconnected, integrated world of phenomena however it manifests in the light of the three characteristics, then in this final natural letting go of everything, the mind does what we have trained it to do. By taking our whole world in, it takes our whole world out.

In MCTB1, this section caused considerable confusion and needless complexity: hopefully this version will clarify things. Vibrations in the higher part of Equanimity tend to be very different from how they were in earlier phases. In the A&P they tended to be fine, fast, of one clean frequency that tended to modulate its rate by the phase of the breath, and either localized in one small area or spread out across our skin and the like. In the Dark Night stages, vibrations start slower (the shamanic drum-like beat of Fear) and then later speed up, but in an edgy, irregular, irritating, complex way that is around the edges of attention.

However, in Equanimity, particularly as it develops out past the “chunky” phase, vibrations tend to be slower, more flowing, more volumetric, more about waves of moving attention-space-phenomena all together. Equanimity is more inclusive, almost like the graceful interpretative dance of attention and space creation itself. Many people don’t really notice much about the vibrations or flow and that is also okay. It is much more a question of flow, a shifting back and forth of attention like gentle waves on a beach, like tracking a falling leaf, like the easy settling of attention and phenomena into themselves on their own.

Here, to illustrate the point about how vibrations often manifest in this phase, I introduce a little quirky practice of my own. I call it “The Exercise of the Spinning Swords”. In it, I imagine two swords in two imagined arms twirling gently around and through my body and head, gently and easily sweeping through everything that I think of as myself, looping, dancing, and swirling around, being just a natural part of space and attention as those imagined swords are, almost like a lazy and whimsical baton twirler. I let the swords swing anywhere they want in a playful way that gently tries to move through everything I think of as “me”. This gently integrates the perception of everywhere that I think I am. They don’t hurt anything, and instead they are just attention realizing that it is simply all phenomena, with attention represented by the swords and everything else represented by itself.

After doing this for a while, the imagined swords may start to swing around on their own, sweeping up space with them, until the whole thing synchronizes naturally on its own and, just like that, it all vanishes and reappears. I think of it as a fun, stylized, fantasy-inspired personal variant of that already-mentioned good advice that Sharda Rogell gave me: “Just watch the motion of attraction and aversion.” They are basically the same exercise in some fundamental way, and if you prefer the one she proposed, it can be very helpful, particularly if you include everything you think of as “you” in that natural motion. If you don’t like swords, try lightsabers, batons, staves, rays of light, or whatever else has that basic shape.

I also add an analogy by Achaan Chah, perhaps one of his most famous, found in a compilation of his teachings by Jack Kornfield and Paul Breiter called A Still Forest Pool. While that book might seem to contradict much of what you find in this one, I like it a lot and highly recommend that you check it out as a valuable counterbalance to my style, which is not necessarily a sufficiently balanced style for everyone, including myself, that being one reason I found that book (and many others) helpful to my practice. In Achaan Chah’s analogy, practice is like sitting by a still forest pool in a jungle at twilight. If you sit quietly, all sorts of animals show up and drink from the pool and vanish back into the shadows on their own without you having to do anything. Equanimity is like that for the whole field of experience all the way through, including the pond, the forest, and yourself. Experience phenomena arise and vanish on their own, where they are, as they are, with no effort at all required to perceive them, as they contain the perception as a part of their being sensations: that is good practice advice in Equanimity.

The world in Equanimity is a very flexible place, and all sorts of odd things can happen, particularly for those with strong concentration abilities, though some will suddenly jump up to a whole other stratum of concentration in this stage, attaining to levels of concentration and their commensurate weird effects they had no idea they could ever do or see: 3D visions of fully-formed, intelligent beings, 3D shapes or other odd things, such as sacred geometry or vast landscapes and basically anything else you can imagine. It is also a time when some people will have other spontaneous powers and experiences. I detail those and my advice for relating to them later in Part Six, but they are truly not important, just more stuff that can happen.

Certainly, not everyone experiences these more unusual and often interesting types of experiences. If you do have them, the most important thing is how you relate to and interpret them, and the more you can see them just as sensate experiences and not buy into their story or a fixed way of interpreting them, the better things are likely to go. If you find yourself buying into their content and story, serious trouble can result, so just keeping a gentle rein on any impulse towards losing touch with ordinary points of view is helpful. If you do find yourself in strikingly unusual territory with odd ways of viewing the world, let some good, mature, and experienced dharma friends or a meditation teacher know what is going on, because, while Equanimity is generally benign, there are rare exceptions.

As Equanimity progresses, it may feel like reality is trying to synchronize with itself, or that subject and object are trying to synchronize with themselves, catch up with each other, and align, or that this side is trying to synchronize with all of space—and that feeling is basically correct. Gently investigate this feeling and any subtle, fluxing tensions in it as lightly as possible, leaving plenty of space for it to do its wide, flowing, easy, natural thing. Trying to force it is natural: feel this forcing, if it arises. You could note “forcing” if that helps identify it. Realize that you can’t do it, but, left alone, it may do itself. Basically, the less you mess with it and the more you just let it be and roll with it, the better.

For those with more refined concentration, phenomena may even begin to lose the sense that they are of a specific sense door, and mental and physical phenomena may appear nearly indistinguishably as just vibrations of barely differentiated suchness. Vibrating formless realms may even arise, with no discernible image of the body being present at all. [23] Again, these are not necessary, just very interesting consequences of having strong concentration skills. Most gain stream entry or the next path without ever having experienced these more refined Equanimity variants, but if you do, they are pretty darn cool and the lessons they teach may be useful later on.

One of the other hallmarks of Equanimity is that the way reality presents is not made up of lots of little sensations occurring in some stable space, not broken up into lots of little, individual sense doors, but instead complete phenomena begin to be perceived as consolidated in a more integrated way, meaning that they are formed together, with space, awareness, and all the different types of sense qualities happening all together to make up the objects in the sensate world, and even all of those objects in the world arise in these integrated wholes, consolidated swaths of moving space that contain all those things within them. It is as though flowing space has textures, colors, sounds, tastes, smells all integrated into it, as part of it, and gradually attention and anything that really seems to be “us” finally gets integrated in the same way also, though we might not notice this at all. The thing about this integrated way of perceiving reality is that, at this stage, it just seems so normal that most people won’t have any idea that this is what is happening unless they are curious about the basics of the way attention and sensate information present themselves, or have been given a heads-up that this is what occurs at this stage. It sounds dramatic, but it is very undramatic. Many will get through this stage and have no idea that something was different, and that’s okay.

These put-together sense impressions, these formed things, are formally (pun intended) called “formations”, and they are the phenomena regarding which we come to Equanimity in this phase. The full formal name of this stage is Knowledge of Equanimity Concerning Formations. I put off writing about formations for a long time, since although the experience of them is very straightforward and natural, they are for some a conceptually difficult topic. Furthermore, the classical definition of “formation” is perhaps not so clear-cut, so I was concerned about imposing on the term my own functional and experiential definitions. Lastly, it seems that plenty of people will just get confused by this set of descriptions, and even plenty of talented meditators won’t be able to notice that these integrated formations are what is going on, and they clearly don’t have to for progress. However, as the topic comes up repeatedly, here we go …

Formations contain all the six sense doors, including thought, in a way that does not split them up sequentially in time or positionally in space. If you could take a 3D moving photograph that also captured smell, taste, touch, sound, and thought, all woven into each other seamlessly and containing a sense of flux, this would approximate the experience of one formation. From a fourth vipassana jhana perspective and from a very high dharma point of view, formations are always what occur, and when they are not clearly perceived, then we experience reality the way we ordinarily do. They contain not only a complete set of aspects of all six sense doors within them, but also include the perception of space (volume) and even of time, movement, and the sensate qualities that make up “duration”. This distinction between ordinary perception of formation and perceiving formations in the way that people do in Equanimity is a very subtle one, and so descriptions like those here can cause confusion if misinterpreted to imply some dramatic perceptual shift, as evidenced by the endless questions I received about this section after writing MCTB1.

When the fourth vipassana jhana is first attained, subtle mental sensations might again “split off” from “this side”, in much the same way as in Knowledge of Mind and Body, [24] but with the three characteristics of phenomena and the space they are a part of being breathtakingly clear. Until mental and physical sensations fully synchronize on “that side”, there can be a bit of a “tri-ality”, in which there are three things going on:

1. the sense of the observer on “this” side;

2. most of the sensations of the body; and

3. most of the sensations of the mind, with the latter two fluxing “over there”.

As mental and physical phenomena gradually integrate with the sense of luminous space, this experientially begs the question, “What is observing formations?” at a level that is far beyond the intellectual contemplation of it. [25]

Formations are so inclusive that they viscerally demonstrate what is pointed to by the concept of “no-self” in a way that no other mode of experiencing reality can. As formations become predominant, we are faced first with the questions of which side of the dualistic split we are on and then of what is watching what earlier appeared to be both sides. Just keep investigating in a natural and matter-of-fact way. Let this profound dance unfold. If you have gotten to this point, you are extraordinarily close and need to do very little but relax and be gently curious about your experience.

When experienced at very high levels of concentration, formations lose the sense that they were even formed of experiences from distinguishable sense doors. This is hard to describe, but we might try such nebulous phrases as “waves of suchness”, or “primal, undifferentiated experience”. This is largely an artifact of experiencing formations high up in the byproducts of the fourth vipassana jhana, the first three formless realms, as discussed earlier. This aspect of how formations may be experienced is not necessary for the discussions below nor is it necessary for stream entry. It is actually somewhat uncommon.

It is the highly inclusive quality of formations that is the most interesting, and leads to the most practical application of discussing formations. It is because they are so inclusive that they are the gateway to the three doors, stage fifteen, Fruition (see the chapter called “The Three Doors”). They reveal a way out of the paradox of duality, the maddening sense that “this” is observing, controlling, subject to, separated from, etc., “that”. By containing all or nearly all the sensations comprising one moment in a very integrated way, they contain the necessary clarity to see through the three fundamental illusions.

One of the primary ways that the illusion of duality is maintained is that the mind partially “blinks out” perception of a part of each formation that it wants to section off to appear separate, in control, or observing everything else. In this way, there is not enough clarity to see the interconnectedness and true nature of that part partially blinked out of reality, and a sense of a separate or autonomous self is maintained. The problem is not the arising of those sensations and patterns that the mind is partially blinking out to, it is that these sensations are not clearly perceived. It is almost as if the mind is placing some sensations in its map of space and what is in it, and then only partially doing that for other sensations that it wishes to turn into a sense of something stable and continuous. When the experience of formations occurs, it comes out of a level of clarity that is so complete that “blinking out” can no longer easily happen, as everything is mapped equally and completely to the same volume of our perceived sensate space and so, finally, the clear perception we have developed threatens the core illusion of a stable, perceiving, separate self. Yay!

Thus, when the clear, integrated perception of formations becomes the dominant experience, even for short periods of time, and even if we don’t notice that this is what is going on at the level of metacognitive conceptual analysis, very profound and liberating insight is close at hand. That is why there are systematic practices that train us to be very skilled in being aware of our whole mental and physical existence. The more we practice being aware of what happens, the fewer opportunities there are for blinking out. In practice, we gently work to integrate those subtle remaining processes that seem to be a “this” side, a practitioner, a practice, a self, and so on, into the rest of the clearly perceived sense field, basically just by being gently aware of the patterns of sensations that make up those qualities of space until they realize they are naturally aware of themselves and the thing flips over.

During the first three insight stages, we gained the ability to notice that mental and physical sensations made up our world, how they interacted, and then began to see the truth about them. We applied these skills to an object (perhaps not of our choice, but an object nonetheless), and saw it as it actually is with a high degree of clarity in the A&P. By this point, these skills in perceiving clearly have become so much a part of who we are that they began to apply themselves to the background, space, and everything that seems to be a reference point or a separate, permanent self as we entered the Dark Night. However, our objects may have been quite vague or too disconcerting to have been perceived clearly. Finally, we get to Equanimity and put it all together: we can see the truth of objects and of the whole background naturally and are okay with this, and the result is the perception of formations.

Formations contain within them the seeming gap between “this” and “that”, as well as sensations of effort, intimacy, resistance, acceptance, and all other such aspects of sensations from which a sense of self is more easily inferred. Thus, these aspects begin to be seen in their proper place, their proper context; that is, as an interdependent part of reality, and not split off or a self. These sorts of things are the core processes, those things that most feel like a “self”, “me”, or “mine”. Equanimity gives us a natural ability to see these core sensate patterns well if we turn attention to them. Questioning, analysis, expectation, practicing, remembering, subtle fear, subtle desire, real longing for release, excitement about success, wondering, mapping, comparing, knowing: these are all just sensate qualities. Notice them.

Inhabit them honestly, realistically, gently, feeling into them, accepting them, all through the head, face, neck, chest, back, and abdomen, noticing the shifting of attention and how the sensations are part of that flowing movement of effortless direct comprehension, with the comprehension being the manifestation itself and not something overlaid onto that or split off from it in a way that is at once intricate and integrated. This may sound like fru-fru, New Age bullshit advice, but is a very good idea in this phase and hopefully will make enough sense to be useful. Any last little subtle experience patterns that still seem to be self, me, or mine: notice them as being normal, ordinary, just fine parts of what is happening. Accept that they occur and notice gently where they occur and how they fit into the larger, flowing space. You could gently note these qualities that seem to be yourself, if that helps, and it just might, particularly if we spatially include the notes in our practice.

Remember, it is not that we are trying to get rid of these subtle patterns that seemed to be the most “us”—they are just fine and they never were a self, never are, and never will be. The point is to just perceive those sensations clearly, and the thing will flip over to another way of perceiving them in which they are just a part of all of this natural transience. Like so many categories of experience we gradually got used to in order to get to this point, these core processes learn to be seen automatically as they are by the simple repetition of gently bringing attention to the sensations that make them up, and finally nothing is left that doesn’t automatically know the truth of itself, including all the parts that were masquerading as a practitioner and a practice. These can be subtle, but in Equanimity we have the chops to do this, and they need not be blazingly strong or ultra-clear. No need to dissect them ruthlessly or catch every tiny detail of them: that sort of stuff worked well in the early stages, but Equanimity sacrifices a bit of that for the bigger prize: wide-open, total, all-the-way-through understanding. Just an ordinary, simple clarity, with the natural curiosity of a fascinated child, will do just fine at this phase of practice—a child who is willing to become wakefully absorbed in the daydream that is whatever the mind does and wherever it goes.

The level of clarity out of which formations arise also allows us to see formations from the time they arise until the time they disappear, thus illuminating clearly those transient, empty sensations that make up a sense of a self or of a sensate universe continuing coherently in time. In the first part of the path the beginning of objects was predominant. In the A&P we got a great sense of the middle of objects but missed subtle aspects of the beginning and end. In the Dark Night the endings are about all we could really perceive clearly. Formations once again put together all of this work we have done in a very natural and complete way that finally includes everything in experience.

Formations also explain some of the odd teachings that you might hear about “stopping thought”. There are three basic ways we might think about this dangerous ideal. We might imagine a world in which its ordinary aspects, which we call “thought”, simply do not arise, a world of experience without those aspects of manifestation. You can get very close to this in very strong concentration states, particularly the eighth shamatha jhana, but so what? You actually don’t need to do that at all. We might also think of stopping experience entirely, as happens in Fruition (when reality totally vanishes, a topic that will be covered shortly), and this obviously includes thought.

Formations point to yet another possible interpretation of the common wish to “stop thought”, as do very high levels of realization. The seeming duality of mental and physical sensations is gone by the time we are perceiving formations. Thoughts appear as a luminous aspect of the phenomenal world. I should mention that the word “luminosity” can cause lots of problems and angst if you erroneously believe that somehow the word means that sensations will be glowing more than their typical and ordinary sensate presentation entails. However sensations present is the luminosity, that is to say, for practical purposes (and ignoring questions of ontology), that “luminosity” refers to the fact that the knowledge of sensations is in the sensations of the things themselves and is the sensations themselves: there will be much more on this later. In fact, I challenge anyone to describe the bare experience of thinking or mental sensations in terms beyond those of the five “physical” sense doors. Thus, in the face of experiencing formations, it seems crude to consider thoughts as separate from visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory qualities, or even to speak in terms of these being discrete entities. Many will not notice that this is how they are experiencing reality, and that is just fine.

When perceived clearly, what we usually call “thoughts” are seen to be just aspects of the manifesting sensate world that we artificially select out and label as “thought”. Just as it would be odd to imagine that an ocean with many shades of blue is really many little bits of ocean, in times of high clarity it is obvious that there is manifesting reality, and it is absolutely inclusive. Look at the space between you and these words. We don’t go around selecting out little bits of space and labeling them as separate. In the face of formations, the same applies to experience, and experience includes the sensations we call “thought”.

Separating the early stages of Equanimity from its mature stage, there tends to be a “near miss” moment when we get very close to the fruit of the path, which serves to really chill us out, as it were. [26] From this point, awakening is likely to occur quickly as long as the meditator continues to simply practice and very gently fine-tune awareness and precision, paying gentle attention to things like thoughts of progress and satisfaction with equanimity. At some point even this becomes boring, and a certain cool apathy and even forgetfulness arise. Most won’t notice much about this phase.

Around this very mature part of Equanimity the feeling that we are not really here can arise, or that somehow we are completely out of phase with reality. Conducting our ordinary business may be difficult in this phase if we are out in the world rather than on the cushion, but it tends to last only tens of minutes at most, though rare reports involve it going on for somewhat longer. The sense that we are practicing or trying to get anywhere just vanishes, and yet this may hardly be noticeable at all. We sort of come back, with clarity again becoming more predominant. Then we get truly lost in something, some strangely clear reverie, vision, object, or flight of fancy. By really buying in, we get set up to check out. When understanding is completely in conformity with the way things are, this is called …

12. Conformity

Conformity means that we suddenly flash onto a way of perceiving the whole of our experiential reality completely, directly, and perfectly clearly. This stage lasts only one moment and never recurs until we attain the next stage of enlightenment. The same is true of the following two stages. Stages twelve through fourteen (Conformity, Change of Lineage, and Path) are the three moments of the first entrance to transcendent ultimate reality (stage fifteen or Fruition) through one of the three doors (there is a whole section on those shortly). In subsequent attainments of Fruition at the same “path” (or level of enlightenment), during the stage of Review, the three moments before Fruition are no longer called Conformity, Change of Lineage, and Path. We will return to this in the more extensive treatment of these three stages in the chapter “The Three Doors”.

In the first edition of MCTB, this section on Conformity was very short. However, I realized that this would be a great place to add something I call “The Hierarchy of Vipassana Practice”, as this culminates in Conformity Knowledge. Here is a practical guide on how to adjust our practice depending on what is going on and what we are capable of, as well as urging us to keep working to reach the next rung of the ladder of practice, skill, and understanding.

At our best, we attain to Conformity Knowledge, in which we effortlessly, naturally, simultaneously, and totally comprehend two of the three characteristics of our entire sense field including space, consciousness, and everything else in that volume as an integrated whole. Bill Hamilton used to describe Conformity as the moment when all of the centers of attention in the brain suddenly synchronize and converge perfectly on one complete moment, and his description holds up in practice.

However, I will go back to the bottom, which is where most start and often return, and work back up from there, hopefully to illustrate that wherever you are, all you have to do is just get up one level and then work from there. This will hopefully make it more workable. Going from least developed to most developed:

1. Not trying to practice, lost in our stuff, spacing out, mindfulness weak.

2. Mindfulness weak, lost in our stuff, but at least attempting some technique or just basic attention to what is happening at times, even if we can’t actually do it for long. People spend whole retreats at this level, unfortunately.

3. Better able to practice, albeit with frequent interruptions, and to follow basic instructions such as noting, body scanning, or whatever you are trying to do. I’ll go non-technique-specific here, as this is a guide to the essence of the thing: basically any technique, object, or posture that moves you up this hierarchy and keeps you there is what matters, and nothing about the specifics of your object of attention or how you are attending to it is important as long as it serves that fundamental goal.

4. Able to do a specific vipassana technique or set of techniques that allows you to stay with aspects of your sensate reality as it presents with few interruptions.

5. Able to apply those techniques or practices uninterruptedly.

6. Able to perceive directly the three characteristics of objects in the center of attention consistently and directly regardless of whether we are using a more specific technique. In short, if you can do this, for that time, however long that lasts, whether you use a more formal technique is irrelevant.

7. Able to perceive directly and continuously the sensations that make up the coarse background components also in that same light of strong, direct vipassana awareness, meaning direct comprehension of the three characteristics of not only the foreground objects, but also those in the background or periphery, such as rapture, equanimity, fear, doubt, frustration, analysis, expectation, and other sensations, as well as other objects as they arise, such as thoughts and the component sensations of feelings, as well as the primary object or objects (assuming we at this point are still using primary objects, which is not necessary).

8. Able to do #7 very well and then add core processes, such as the sensations that seem to make up attention itself, intention itself, memory itself, questioning, effort, surrender, subtle fear, space, consciousness, and everything that seems to be subject or observer or self all the way through the skull, neck, chest, abdomen, and all of space such that nothing is excluded from this comprehensive, cutting, piercing, instantly comprehending clarity that is synchronized with all phenomena (or is just about to be).

9. Able to do #8 naturally, effortlessly, and clearly due to diligent efforts to write that wiring on the mind as our new baseline default mode of perception.

10. We are back to where we started with Conformity Knowledge: we comprehend simultaneously two of the three characteristics of our entire sense field, including space, consciousness, and everything else in that volume as an integrated whole, and so attain Conformity, and then Change of Lineage, Path, and Fruition (to be detailed shortly). That’s what we are shooting for if we are at least going for stream entry, and it even works well for the sort of complete mindfulness that effects higher paths.

Keeping this hierarchy in mind, many questions are answered either directly or with small amounts of additional information:

Q: Does it matter what object I use?

A: Only if that object at that moment in time helps you at least stay at the higher of the lower few levels of the hierarchy and hopefully progress up them. You don’t want to switch objects and techniques too often, as this will usually lead to a lack of depth, particularly if you are a beginner and have mastered no techniques or objects. You do want to have the metacognitive awareness to be able to frequently adjust how you are using your mind and to recognize where you are along this hierarchy, such that you are able to continually improve your game.

Q: Does it matter if my concentration is narrowly focused or broad?

A: Conformity Knowledge can take any object and work with it, but it must take the complete sensate reality of that moment. If your whole moment is very exclusively focused or refined, it can work with that. If your whole moment is widely focused and broadly inclusive of the sense doors, it can work with that. Since all you have to do is comprehend the three characteristics of our sum total reality for three moments, Conformity could take as object a refined object if you haven’t become automatically fluent enough with other objects to attain to Conformity Knowledge using them. For example, if you can get your attention focused exclusively on the breath such that the breath becomes your whole reality, and comprehend the sensations that compose it along with the attention-focusing apparatus, as that is all there is, that’s all you need to understand. If you can’t get attention that focused or refined but have attained through diligent work a natural fluency in a wider array of other sensations, then broader attention will do just fine.

Q: Does it matter what technique I use?

A: I would give different advice to beginning, intermediate, and advanced meditators. Beginners can benefit from more structure and technique. Once you have some solid skills, I would say scramble up the hierarchy however you can, using any object you can, and whatever dose it takes to get there, changing objects, focuses, techniques, postures, or whatever other factors need to be changed if those help you move higher and stay there. This is the pragmatist’s approach rather than the dogmatic traditionalist’s approach to vipassana. If a dogmatic and traditional approach moves you up the hierarchy, there is no conflict at all. If your dogmatic and traditional approach is not working at that moment, meditation period, hour, month, or year, try switching things around, preferably with the help of good guidance if available, to see what does move you up a rung.

Q: When should I stop noting and just pay attention?

A: You can definitely stop when at that particular time you are at stage six or higher, but you could also continue as long as it doesn’t slow you down or restrict your ability to comprehend whatever arises in its rich and comprehensive entirety. See Mahasi’s Practical Insight Meditation for more good advice on this point. Read it very carefully.

Q: Which technique is better: noting, body scanning, Zen koan training, or what?

A: Whatever helps you progress or at least stabilize beyond the lower levels of that hierarchy at that time. Techniques take time to learn well, so continuously abandoning one poorly-learned and poorly-applied technique for another poorly-learned and poorly-applied technique will not do any good, but if you have learned a few techniques well, then anything that works goes. Realize that this is for most people a very dynamic and nonlinear progression, with many ascents and descents along the ranks of the hierarchy, and learning how to shift focus or approach at the right time is a learned skill that requires constant vigilance and practice, but having the basic goals in mind should help guide you.

For instance, say we decided to use noting practice, and had gotten to insight stage two, Cause and Effect, with steady, slow noting, but then bad back pain began to derail our attempts at noting in stage three, Three Characteristics, during which time we fell back to lousy practice. We might reflect: “Ah, I am no longer able to do slow noting, at least I should try to do slow noting, and perhaps mindfully adopt a different posture for the time being that isn’t so painful.”

Or, we might have been doing noting up through Three Characteristics, but then began to notice energetic phenomena, such as heat and kundalini stuff, that were fluctuating too quickly to note well, at which point we might think, “Ah, I was really good at blasting through the A&P using more Goenka-style body scanning on a previous retreat and know how to do that, maybe I will give that a try, as it worked well before.”

Or, we might have been rockin’ it in the A&P by rapidly and directly perceiving fast vibrations and tingling interference patterns, but when we got to Dissolution we noticed that our practice was completely derailed and we were just spacing out. We might reflect, “Ah, whereas before I was rockin’ it in the A&P, now my practice has fallen to the bottom of the barrel, and perhaps attempting to do slow noting to build back up to more direct methods when I can would be better than floundering.” Good plan!

Or, we might be high up in Equanimity and yet not be able to land a Fruition. We might ask ourselves, “What core process, subtle background or foreground sensations, or other patterns of core experience that really seem to be ‘me’ have not yet been brought into the clear light of direct comprehension in the way I have done for so many objects?” In this way, we see what we are missing and, having learned to see those objects naturally and without any effort at all, we land it.

Working thus, we get a sense of how we can adjust our practice to accommodate what is happening and keep us riding the waves of change that vipassana in all its forms can throw at us.

13. Change of Lineage

Having understood things just as they are, this next stage, Change of Lineage, which also lasts for just a moment, permanently changes a meditator’s mind in ways that I will discuss in just a bit. Such meditators join the ranks of the awakened. While the social designation of formal lineage transmission is a very useful thing to have received, the results of this stage are in fact what that symbolic act is all about. They have done it, and thus attain …

14. Path

This stage, called Path (magga in Pali) also lasts just a moment, and after the first completed progress of insight it marks the first moment of the newly awakened being’s awakened life. It marks a permanent shift in baseline perception and brain function. It is as if you have flipped a huge switch that you can’t unflip, and new circuitry hums to life, circuitry it seems we build piece by piece during the stages of insight. The first time around, this is called “stream entry” or “first path” in the Theravada, the “fourth stage of the second path of five” [27] or “the first bhumi” in the Tibetan tradition, and many names in Zen that are purposefully ambiguous, but “kensho” is the most common. I will go into a long discussion of the uses and perils of path terminology shortly. Regardless, after a subsequent new progress of insight it marks the attainment of the next level of awakening, whatever you call it. It is directly followed by …

15. Fruition

Fruition (phala in Pali) is the fruit of all the meditator’s hard work, the first attainment of ultimate reality, emptiness, nirvana, nibbana, ultimate potential, or whatever extrapolative and relatively inaccurate name you wish to call something utterly non-sensate. In this non-state, there is absolutely no time, no space, no reference point, no experience, no mind, no consciousness, no awareness, no background, no foreground, no nothingness, no somethingness, no body, no this, no that, no unity, no duality, and no anything else. “Reality” stops cold and then reappears.

Thus, this is impossible to comprehend, as it goes completely and utterly beyond the rational mind and the universe. In “external time” (if we were observing the meditator) this stage typically lasts only an instant (though the question of “duration” will be addressed below). It is like an utter discontinuity of the space-time continuum with nothing in the unfindable gap, exactly like what happens when someone edits out a frame or sequence of frames of a movie. It is not that you see a blank screen for a while where they edited the frames out, instead that part of the movie is just not there.

The initial aftershocks following the first time this happens at stream entry (or the first time it happens at the beginning of a higher level of awakening), however, can go on for days, and may be mild or spectacular, fun or unsettling, or some mixture of these. There are times when it is fun to show off, and this is one of those times. (Particularly mature? No. Honest? Yes.) Aftershocks I have noticed after paths include but are not limited to:

• the brief visceral feeling that sensory reality is so intense that the nerves in the forehead and upper neck may not be able to handle the strain;

• the feeling that new brain pathways are now being infused with vibrant life they lacked before, as if new nerve channels are tingling into life;

• the feeling that we have become diffused into the atmosphere without a center, purpose, function, sense of direction, or even will;

• a feeling of joy and gratitude bursting through our being beyond our usual sense of appreciation;

• the sense of having at long last discovered what we most needed;

• the profound sense of coming home, a quiet awe like the stillness after a great storm;

• rapturous transcendent highs that make anything that happened after the A&P seem like dry toast;

• the profound feeling that something pressed a reset button on reality, causing it to reboot as new, clean, clear, bright, pristine, and fresh.

All that said, there are those who won’t recognize it, particularly those who chance upon it outside of a meditative tradition that can recognize it. There will also be those for whom it happens within the context of their practice tradition, who can recognize it, but who fail to identify it as being what it is. Sometimes the afterglow is not so spectacular, though for most the series of insights, connections, syntheses, and the like that burgeon forth is impressive. Others will just go on practicing, not realizing what has just happened.

Just after the attainment of a path, particularly the first path, is a time when formal resolutions have an outrageous amount of power. The Buddha said that the greatest of all powers is to understand and then teach the dharma, meaning to attain full realization, however you define it, and then to help others do the same. I had been advised to use this unique period in my practice well, and I resolved to attain this awakening for the benefit of all beings as quickly as was reasonably possible. Despite all the complex consequences of having done so, I do not regret my decision in the least and highly recommend that you do the same.

On subsequent passes through Fruition of that path, the mind tends to be refreshed, bright, quiet, and clear for a while, and milder forms of the above-listed phenomena may occur. The afterglow can seem to clear out all the junk for a little while. There is a nice bliss wave that tends to follow and may take a few seconds to develop. You can take that bliss wave as a shamatha object if you wish and intensify it, as a possible option. If you have not learned the concentration states yet, doing so in the afterglow of a Fruition can make them much easier to attain and master. The breath may change on the reappearance of “reality”, being a bit deeper, slower, easier, and more fluid. The total synchrony of the sense sphere that leads to a Fruition shows a fun physiological fact: Fruitions always occur at the end of the out-breath, and reality always reappears at the beginning of the in-breath, which is one of the cool reasons that finding the end of the out-breath can be powerful practice.

For those who really want to get to know something interesting, notice exactly how reality reappears or re-manifests, and how the mental processes resume at an extremely fine level. This is best done by intending to notice it some time before the Fruition happens. Most people who have a Fruition are so relieved by it that the relief is most of what they notice, but those who can pay attention to more detail than that and do this well are afforded a rare treat—getting to see the processes that make up the functioning of our brains as they come online and orient to the surroundings, as well as to see the restarting of the sense of the illusion of duality, and exactly what makes that up in that powerfully clear attentional mode. It is fascinating stuff, and can lead to some serious clues about essential parts of the puzzle that help later. I recommend doing this again and again, as it generally takes going through it a good number of times to see what is really happening clearly and notice the assumptions we make about those processes and how they relate to things like “me”, “time”, “space”, and the like.

Please note that there are at least two uses for the term nibbana, one of which is Fruition. The reference for this comes from the Abhidhamma or higher (abhi) dhamma (“teachings”, in this context), accessible in English as A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, by Narada Maha Thera, available free online and in print form. This is the standard Theravada literature on Buddhist mind-moment (Pali javana [28] ) theory and many other technical points, and it details that there will be three or four pulses of phenomena (typically called javanas, or “mind-moments”, “impulsions”, or dhammas) which, when they occur the first time, are Conformity, Path, and Change of Lineage, and then the mind will turn to nibbana and then the stream of ordinary sensate awareness will resume.

For those who actually do check out the Abhidhamma, which is a very good idea if you want to give more context, background, and support to your practice, you will notice that some of the biology seems pretty archaic, so don’t get derailed by that. The meditation theory remains quite helpful. Those who sometimes mention online and in person to me that they think that Mahasi Sayadaw or I made up this stuff about the ñanas, jhanas, stages, or other Buddhist theory, should read the Abhidhamma, or get your practice to the point where you yourself can perceive directly what these early followers of the Buddha perceived, and you will be satisfied by direct knowledge. At that point, the texts those followers wrote might make a lot more sense to you, and you may gain even more benefits by appreciating them based on your own practice instead of dismissing them based on ignorance.

Footnotes

[15]

The Abhidhamma is available in English in several translations and explanatory summaries, one of the best of which is A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi.

[16]

For a great, thorough treatment of the ten corruptions of insight, as well as lots more about vipassana, see www.vipassanadhura.com/sixteen.html#two (accessed October, 2017).

[17]

My favorite book on the subject is Alan Guiden’s *Traveling: An Accidental Expert’s How to Leave Your Body Handbook*, Aeon Books, 2009. I thought about adding some tips for traveling here, but you should just check out his book, as it does a much better job than I could.

[18]

Man’s Search for Meaning*, by Viktor E. Frankl,* may shed light on some of the skillful and therapeutic uses of meaning as we confront these challenging insight stages.

[19]

I have no idea where I got the image or name “mush demon”, it just showed up.

[20]

ñ11.ñ4 in ñana.subñana (insight stage.insight stage) terminology, the part of Equanimity that has a bit of the A&P phase in it. For those who really get annoyed or turned off by this sort of notation or fine-grained dharma theory, just ignore it, as you don’t need to understand that system of notation to be a great meditator, and that way of thinking about experiences is largely used by a relatively small group of us, influenced by Bill Hamilton.

[21]

ñ11.ñ5 in ñana.subñana notation, or could be ñ11.j3.j1 in ñana.subjhana.subsubjhana terminology.

[22]

ñ11.ñ6–ñ11.ñ10 in ñana.subñana notation.

[23]

I term vibrating formless realms ñ11.j6–ñ11.j8, now using ñana.subjhana (insight.concentration) terminology, meaning the Boundless Space through Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception sub-aspects of Equanimity.

[24]

ñ11.ñ1 in my notation scheme, meaning the Mind and Body phase of Equanimity.

[25]

For you Kabbalah fans, these insights correspond to the three points of Binah, the two points of Chokhmah (when mind and body integrate on “that side” but there is still a “this side”), and finally the single point of Kether.

[26]

I tend to call that a brief dip into ñ11.j4.j8 (equanimity.fourth vippassana jhana.eighth jhana), ñ11.ñ11.j8 (the eighth jhana phase of the high equanimity phase of high equanimity), or ñ11.j8 (equanimity. eighth jhana, the truly formless version of ñ11.j4.j8).

[27]

See Dharma Paths, by Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, Snow Lion, 1992, p. 223.

[28]

See A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, III §8 (12), p. 124, for more.