Enlightenment

For the first nine years of my practice, I gathered the idea that enlightenment was nearly impossible for the likes of me, and that it was taboo to talk about the possibility of becoming enlightened. It wasn't until I edited the book Wisdom Wide and Deep for my friend Shaila that I learned some details about enlightenment. First, there are various stages of enlightenment. It's not like there's just one big bang and you're done! Second, it's entirely possible for a Western layperson to attain at least the earlier of these stages. Zounds!

After that, I found the book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram. Ingram claims to have gotten through all four stages of enlightenment, meaning that he's seen completely through the illusions of permanence, satisfactoriness, and self. And Ingram describes what he did to accomplish this, and there is a web forum full of people who are following his teachings and making their way through the stages. This is very enticing! He recommends focusing on practices that let you power your way through the stages so you don't waste your time on practices that don't move you forward.

Since my 2-month retreat, my meditation has been very strong, and lately I've been following some of Ingram's advice. Why not get through the stages of enlightenment sooner rather than later?

I can think of a possible answer, though. I've seen hints in several people's writings that it's not enough to attain a stage of enlightenment. One must integrate the experience properly, else one's ego will seize the experience, build itself up around it, and make it way less beneficial than it otherwise could be. Perhaps by practicing in a more well-rounded, less driven, manner, one ultimately benefits more from the attainment of each stage.

There is a big clue in Ingram's own writing. The folklore is that, after attaining the third stage, one has completely eliminated greed, hatred, and delusion. And that after the fourth, one has eliminated all suffering. Ingram has not eliminated any of those. Either he hasn't attained the fourth stage, the Buddhist texts are wrong about the kinds of freedom that come with the attainments, or else one doesn't get the freedom unless one practices properly along the way.

Wanting to be special

I've been quite aware lately of the drive to be "special". Whenever I accomplish something, meditatively or otherwise, the thought comes, "Aren't I special! Now I'm winning the game!" And this thought triggers pleasure and anxiety, and shame. And that combination causes me to try to avoid achieving. Anything. What a tense situation!

I'd like to look at the drive to be special, and notice how much suffering is there. Even now, as I write about it, I feel something loosen up inside. I feel some sadness come to the foreground. I have two guesses what the sadness might be about. Sadness from childhood, when my actual specialness--my uniqueness, my lovability, my good intentions--was not recognized. And sadness about being shunned for excelling (being special) in school.

I see that the word special has at least two meanings in this context: unique and different (and in this sense, every being is special), and more deserving than others (in this sense, nobody is special). It's good to acknowledge my own specialness with regard to the first meaning. And it's good to accept and forgive my desire to be more deserving, given that I, like everyone else, has been trained to be competitive.

Happy birthday

Spent the long weekend orienteering in the Anza Borrego desert. Thursday and Friday nights I slept through without meditating. Saturday night, awoke around 1 with distinct bodily anatta. Thought it was cool and special; wanted to cling. It would recur, then disappear, seemingly from fear. Often I'd sense it at the start of the in-breath. Got frustrated; switched to watching tension in right side of torso, tension that seemed connected to the struggle between wanting to retain the sense of self and wanting to shed it. This tension felt uncomfortable and did not become spacious with attention, and I wondered if it was the"solid pain" mentioned by Dan Ingram as being associated with one of the earlier stages of insight.

The next day, Sunday, was my 52nd birthday, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, ending with a party at our rental house in Borrego Springs.

Sunday night, awoke again with anatta--that stuck, persisted. Thought it was so cool, then found it freaky. Watching my breathing happen without feeling that I was doing it made me afraid I'd stop breathing. My eyes stung, and I feared I'd ruined them by removing my contacts roughly and without washing my hands. And I also knew that this fear was really about losing a sense of control and entering a new territory of experience. For the first time I really saw each thought enter my awareness and dissolve without my identifying with it. Just like clouds floating by, just like they say. The content was, so this is how it is. Saying good bye. My eyes opened and I was shocked to find the experience continuing in full wakefulness. I donned my down jacket, sat upright in bed, and continued. I asked Eric, asleep, to put his hand on my knee. After an hour or two, I lay down and fell back asleep. It seemed that this disidentification with the mind and body was a permanent change, but when I awoke in the morning, I felt about the same as I had the day before, with perhaps an incremental increase in disidentification.

It was a happy birthday, bookended as it was by amazing meditation adventures.

Investigating pleasure and longing

One unusual bodily sensation I've had in recent months (since retreat) has been a deliciously interesting tension in my right jaw. It doesn't quite feel like pain. Often it feels like pleasure, but a distracting kind of pleasure. Distracting in a way that similar to the way sexual pleasure is distracting. If I give the right jaw attention, especially if I touch it lightly but awarely* with the tip of my finger, it becomes quite intense and seems to trigger associated pleasurable feelings in the back of my right throat and in my right abdomen. The pleasure has an element of longing to it, engendering some mental activity that wants the pleasure to go somewhere and reach some resolution.

The first few weeks I experienced this, I would periodically focus on the sensation, either at my desk at work, or while sitting in the quiet room at work (where I meditate most days). But I found this an unsatisfying experience--I'd enjoy the sensations, but at the same time I disliked the desire for resolution. That desire is never fulfilled.

Today I've been taking a different approach -- instead of experiencing the pleasure and longing at face value, I've been investigating it in fine detail, the way I'd investigate any other sensation in meditation. It takes a lot of discipline, because the pleasure is so intense that one wants to just enjoy it. I haven't had the quiet to really pursue this -- I've just done it at my desk and in the lunch room -- but I'm curious to see where it goes.

*When I talk about touching awarely, I mean allowing the pressure and angle of my touch to respond to the sensations in such a way that the sensations increase. Kind of a dance between fingertip and jaw.

Meditating in the midst of sleep; bodily sense of anatta

Last couple of weeks, I've been waking around 1 am and watching mental states come and go for hours with greater clarity than during daytime meditation, perhaps because I'm in a very relaxed, quasi-asleep state such that thought processes do not interfere. This is a very enjoyable, engrossing activity, more attractive than sleep. When clarity is great, I seem to have a new small insight every minute or so. I can't think of a more satisfying way to spend my time. Sometimes clarity is low and I wonder whether I'm wasting my time, neither sleeping nor meditating.

Since the anatta insight of last week, I feel different in my body. The experience of moving my body without feeling that "I" am doing it has not repeated with the same distinctiveness; however, during these nighttime meditations in the midst of sleep, the motions of my body often have a lot of anatta character to them, and I wonder if the difference I feel in daytime is also due to anatta. It's hard to describe the manner in which I feel different in my body during the daytime. The difference is pleasant, and pleasing in the sense that it suggests to me that I am progressing and that I am special. (I well understand that being special is SO not the point, but my psyche continues to wish for me to be special.) I can feel the difference this moment in my hands as I keyboard. I'm also quite aware of it when I am gesticulating. It seems part of the difference is a heightened awareness of my body moving through space. It's quite lovely.

Deepest intention

Last night at the weekly meeting of our local sangha, to mark the new year, we took the refuges and the precepts. Then, we tied red strings around each other's wrists. Rodney, our guiding teacher, said to reflect upon our deepest intention as our string was tied.

Over the past ten years I've frequently struggled to formulate what my deepest intention is. Initially, it was "to suffer less". That was why I was meditating. I tried to think of a more noble intention, but if I was honest with myself, that was my intention. As the years passed and my daily suffering decreased (yes, it did), this intention faded, but another did not arise. I experimented with "to become a more compassionate person". To me, to be compassionate is to resonate with other beings and to feel less separate from them. I love it when I can be compassionate; it is one of the best experiences in life, if not the best.

A couple of times over the last year I have reflected on the goals I had when I was a child. "To know God" was always among them. It was perhaps my highest goal, yet I didn't know how to pursue it. Eventually I abandoned it as I came to the conclusion that there was no evidence for the existence of God.

Yet the urge to merge with the divine has persisted. I have longed to lose what I think of as my self, to drop the burden of personhood, to push aside the veil that separates me from the rest of the universe. I can articulate this urge without reference to God, yet "to merge with the divine" did not seem like a worthy highest intention. It seemed selfish and dangerous.

Last night we were only given a minute or two to formulate our deepest intention. I stepped out into thin air and decided upon -- "to know God".

Sleepiness

I wish someone would write a book about the role of sleepiness in a meditation practice. Sleepiness is usually explained as an extreme manifestation of the hindrance, "sloth and torpor". Commonly recommended strategies for dealing with sleepiness include "raising one's energy" (how the heck does one do that?), exercising before meditating, opening the eyes slightly for a while, standing for a while, redoubling efforts to observe the meditation object, abandoning the desire to sleep, and investigating the experience of sleepiness. Sometimes a nap is recommended, but usually the advice is that if one has had enough nighttime sleep, a nap is not called for.

I have tried all these strategies to little avail. Standing does help make it easier to stay awake, but it's usually pretty unpleasant and the meditation done in this state doesn't seem to be of good quality (though I could well be wrong about this). I use standing as a strategy for toughing out the remainder of the sitting period when I am meditating in a group. I have taken lots of naps, guiltily, because I usually have had enough nighttime sleep. I've found that a 20-30 minute nap will usually allow me to stay awake for another few hours, but waking myself up after that short a period can be painful. If I let myself nap as long as I wish, the nap will commonly last for 1.5 to 3.5 hours, and I've done that as well on many an occasion.

After my retreat at Forest Refuge, a fellow retreatant shared that the first time he entered the very deep first jhana taught by Pa Auk Sayadaw, it was during the transition from sleep to wakefulness. He posited (and I hope I'm recalling this correctly) that it was the relaxation of this state that allowed jhana.

Indeed, this reminded me of some experiences I'd had on that same retreat, when I chose not to fight sleepiness in the meditation hall, but just to allow myself to slip in and out of sleep while sitting. I found that sometimes, when I did this, I seemed to rotate among three mental states: sleep, jhana, and access concentration. In my case, what I called "jhana" was not the full absorption taught by the Sayadaw, but some lesser state of absorption.

Over the two months since I emerged from this retreat, my ability to use sleepiness, rather than fight it, has developed. I'm not sure whether this is a result of a conscious change of attitude, or whether it's some other change that's happened on its own. But over the past few weeks, sleepiness just has not been a problem for me in meditation. First, I have not gotten sleepy during my early morning meditations at all since I emerged from retreat, whereas during the last half of the retreat, I'd usually get sleepy if I did the 4:30 a.m. sitting. Second, when I do get sleepy during meditation, usually in the afternoon or evening, I actually welcome it, because somehow I don't feel the need to struggle with it anymore, and it does allow my analytic mind to settle down easily. I am then more able to observe the ever-changing nature of things, presumably because my conscious mind isn't constantly grasping at them.

One of my fellow retreatants used to spend most of the day in an easy chair in the library. She appeard to be dozing. I pitied her, figuring that she was not able to get anything out of the retreat and was just trying to pass the time. I considered writing a note to our teachers alerting them to her plight and urging them to talk to her about whether she might be better off going home. But I figured that possibly her home life was even worse and that she was staying on retreat to escape. Better not to interfere, I thought. One day during the last week I gave her a chocolate bar to help her feel less alone.

To my surprise, at retreat's end I learned that this woman was actually meditating very effectively in that easy chair, and that she had apparently made steady progress under Sayadaw's direction!

So much for the importance of sitting in an alert posture. Perhaps an alert posture is important for beginners, but perhaps once one has developed a certain level of concentration, it can be fine, or even better, to adopt a relaxed posture, and perhaps to allow in some sleepiness.

Anatta!

Last night I slept lightly, and shortly before 4:00, in a state between sleep and wakefulness, I observed my left arm reach to my face to rub or scratch an itch ... and it didn't feel like "I" was doing it! I don't recall having an experience quite like this before. It was surreal and a little freaky, but I also recognized it immediately as something very positive, and tried to embrace it rather than panic. I then sat up and meditated for 2 hours, a kind of dreamy, wandering observation of my experience. Usually "dreaminess" and "wandering" is discouraged in meditation, but in this case it seemed like the right way to go; this approach seemed to help quiet my analytic mind (though there certainly was a lot of chatter nevertheless). The not-self experience didn't repeat, but for a lot of the session I perceived sensations to be very fluid and changing, at times very beautiful.

Anatta is a Pali word which means something like "not-self", or the notion that the self is insubstantial, that there is no material thing or mental formation which could be said to be "mine". Don't quote me, I'm a total beginner on this stuff.