Subtle ripplings

I am noticing a somewhat painful physical/emotional reaction to small physical movements, such as moving my mouse wheel or keyboarding. It's initially felt as a tingling in the fingers. With mindfulness, a fraction of a second later I feel a kind of longing rippling through the right torso.

Anicca

Anicca is the Pali term for "impermanence" or "inconstancy".

In recent days I've noticed an increasing sense of bodily inertia, especially during meditation. During meditation, I just don't want to move my body at all -- don't want to move my arm to check the time on my phone, don't want to lift my head to improve my posture. A couple of nights ago I realized the reason: each bodily movement is now accompanied by pain. The pain is not located in the part being moved, but in the torso, and it is akin to sadness.

Describing this to Eric after dinner last night, it occurred to me that this might be the sadness of loss -- of realizing, with each tiny movement, the impermanence of things. The sadness of saying good-bye to one bodily position as I move onto the next. The sadness appears at the tiniest movement, even at the moment I tense my muscle in preparation for movement. In other words, the inertia might be an insight into anicca.

Last night I awoke around 3 and sat up to meditate for 90 minutes. I chose to experiment with this phenomenon. When I noticed my posture was slumped, I very very slowly exerted myself to sit up straight, paying close attention to the sensations of sadness in the chest. Following Daniel Ingram's suggestion on the Dharma Overground website in response to my description of my practice, I paid special attention to the vibrational quality of the sadness. Although the sadness was uncomfortable, it was also a relief to look directly at it.

As I became more and more aware of the sadness, I wanted to let go of it. At one point, amidst this desire to let go, I felt heat gather in the chest, and over a period of perhaps 20 seconds, I felt some of this sadness drop away. This was accompanied by a letting go of my monitoring, journaling mind.

I moved into a state that felt like nothingness but which I imagined was not actually nothingness but just the unfamiliar absence of my usual monitoring, journaling mind. I had been feeling this monitoring mind (which seems about the same as "the chattering mind" and "the mind that wants to be special") as a burden that I've increasingly wanted to drop, and I've been seeing it intellectually as something that must be keeping me from being fully present. The monitoring mind kept wanting to re-activate, so I shifted my attention to the urge to re-activate. This was interesting and satisfying. The state that I describe as nothingness only appeared intermittently and for very brief (1-2 seconds) periods of time.

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.