Watching thoughts

30 min sit after asana practice

No motivation for striving this morning. Maybe I could drop the effort for a moment?

Feeling of relief

The attention expanded somewhat from the corners of my eyes towards the ears. I felt a continuous flux of sensations coming at me through all the sense doors and the mind door. The flow of sensations seemed to be going out of my head by my ears and turning back to my body. This created a feeling of constant grounding in the body. The stream just carried with it everything the mind created and dumped it into the body, so it was not possible for the mind to start dwelling on any of it’s creations.

I experimented with this mind state a bit and threw some stones into the stream. Thinking about future obligations at work: gone. Fantasizing about future: gone. No stickiness in this state of no-thought.

After sitting I could re-create that state by using a visual image of a flowing stream of sensations. The sense of time was gone. When I was brushing my teeth, there was no ”me” doing the brushing. The brushing just happened. Time and agent emerged again when planning thoughts and self referencing thoughts were back in operation.

Proto Thoughts

Lying on the sofa paying attention,

lone proto-thoughts looking for a cover

Feet vibrating,

central channel flowing like a hose

Five times in a row

Trembling, shuddering, smiling

Mind clean, just taken out of a washing machine

”If one thought  clings,

then  successive  thoughts  cling;  this  is  known  as being

fettered.”

 

”If in all things successive

thoughts do not cling, then you are unfettered.”

 

”If one instant of thought is cut off, the Dharma

body separates from the physical body, and in the

midst of successive thoughts there will be no place

for attachment to anything.”

– The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch

see: Jan Yun-Hua: A Comparative study of ’no-thought’ (wu-nien) in some Indian and Chinese Buddhist texts

http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-JOCP/jan2.htm

Experimenting with eye focus

Heaviness and unpleasant sensations in the body seem to have passed for now. I am also seeing more often spontaneous reactions of letting go of emerging thoughts. When this happens, the thought is objectified automatically and dropped as awareness prefers to return back to observing body sensations. I still sometimes get lost in thoughts, but not that often.

This morning when doing asana practice I paid special attention to the gazing points or drsthis (see http://www.befityoga.com/yfocus_may05.shtml) of each asana. There was a huge difference between just pointing the eyes to an expended arm or tip of the nose and really looking at those points. Doing the latter would just stop dead all the mind activity. The appearance of emerging thoughts caused the eye focus soften at the same time. If I paid attention to this and did not let the attention widen, thoughts failed to emerge.

I experimented with this handle throughout the day and my initial discovery was confirmed. Every time a thought is about to be born, the attention gets somewhat wider and eyes start to relax. It is as if the external and internal vision cannot function at the same time and they cancel each other. Using this knowledge I could be aware of the mind activity just by monitoring closely the area around my eyeballs and the quality of the attention.

Watching a floor tile

How does watching a tile on the floor feel like? Actually pretty good. Light is hitting the retina and there is a feeling of seeing something, a sense of watching. I cannot detect anyone doing the watching, nor is it possible to say that there is a separate object that is being watched. Being awake in the moment is an action.

I used this sense of watching as a template as I sat and watched the floor tile moment by moment. I compared all other phenomena to this feeling of watching and everything else that I detected was labelled as noise. During the past two weeks the mental activity has become increasingly subtle and harder to detect. If I am not very careful, I will not be able to see proto thoughts appearing, just seeing them disappear or turn into fully grown thoughts.

At first glance there was no thought activity present at all, but as the mindfulness deepened I started to see some proto thoughts trying to run for cover. When I was more in sync with the rate the mind was fluctuating, I was getting emerging proto thoughts in real time. The noting started to be cumbersome at this speed, so I switched to noticing instead, keeping in mind how just watching the tile feels like.

Experience of Being Alive

Reply to RevElev

I am not sure I know what you mean by “experience of being alive” so feel free to ask follow-up questions if I am rambling beside the point 🙂

The shift from 3^rd to 4^th path was not a huge thing at all for me. The most notable feature was that before that there were time periods when I saw through the illusion of self, seeing myself from the outside from time to time. After 4^th path this became a permanent feature of my experience. The sense of self did not disappear though, but it became almost like a shadow. Like watching a movie you may be so immersed in the story that you may forget it is just a show, in the same way it was possible to continue to get caught up by the phantom when the mindfulness was low. If I paid any attention to it, it was obvious to me that there was nothing solid to it.

There were still negative mind states arising, but not so much as before. What made the difference was that whatever negativity arose, it was not stacking and disembedding from it was fast and easy. Still episodes of dark nights and cycling bugged me from time to time.

Direct mode practice fixed all this and when it became a permanent feature (sixth stage in Kenneth’s map as he counts A&P as the first stage and 4^th path as fifth stage) and it made a huge difference to me. At this point everything became a lot easier: no cycling, no dukkha nanas and most importantly: no more negative mind states. The feelings of compassion and metta started to flow spontaneously and without effort. If I thought that I was being mistreated, I might still get a negative reaction in the body, but no resentment or aversion was happening. Irritation or worry was still felt in the body from time to time, but their power was decreased considerably.

At the next major shift in my practice, the sense of self was lost completely (seventh stage in Kenneth’s map). Explaining this stage is a bit difficult for me, because it soon became clear to me that there were a lot of situations in which I continued to react like the self still was present, even though direct investigation revealed to me that there nobody home. Old habits die hard, I guess

Anyway this development brought a new quality of clarity to my experience, so that I started to see how the silence is present in every moment. This state of peace was easily accessible at any moment if I just inclined my mind towards it. Only at this point I started to get what being present really is, even though I could still not do it continuously. It is kind of interesting that it took so long for me to recognise it, but even pre-path we are having these moments of clarity all the time. They are just surrounded by so much noise and our unrealistic expectations about enlightenment make it hard to see something so obvious and simple.

Recently I have some short but continuous experiences of being alive in this body with (seemingly) nothing between the experience and the one experiencing phenomena. Or maybe more accurately things are just happening without even the need to know if there is someone experiencing it. There is a huge relief as all unnecessary mental activity drops away. This is the cutting edge of my practice at the moment and I have no idea where it leads…

To summarise I would say that 4^th path is a good start for some real discoveries ahead. I am not saying this to belittle the attainment of 4^th path, just that it is not the end of path by no means, but really the new beginning.

Anyway don’t take my word for it, see it for yourself 🙂

On Uneasiness

Reply to Andymr

Thank you Andy for taking the time to read my journal, I try to be clearer about this.

To be honest, I am pretty excited about the latest development, even though it is physically mostly unpleasant. I usually get strong tension in the throat and head area as soon as I start noting. The tension builds up until at some point there is a feeling of release and a violent surge of vibration goes up my spine to the head. Some of these surges feel very weird indeed and there is a part of me that seems to be a bit uneasy about it. Sometimes it may feel like some part that I took to be solid is cracking and crumbling under me.

I have a complete trust in the process with Kenneth guiding me and the physical symptoms are not a problem, since aversion is not arising for me at this point. I am not even sure if this could be called suffering, since who would be suffering anyway ;-). So come whatever may, in theory I am accepting it all.

Still the uneasiness that I am experiencing shows me that somewhere in this pile of habitual tendencies there must be a part that is scared about emptiness and the possibility that everything turns out to meaningless.

Silence is always present

It is not still but vibrating continuously.

At any given moment a wave may break the surface and a proto thought is formed. If in that instant it is recognised for what it is:

Noise

The surface is calmed again.

Some waves have more momentum than others and may develop into fully grown thoughts. When recognised they shrink back to mere ripples on the surface.

For the first time I am directly experiencing what Patanjali wrote in his classic sutra:

yogaś-citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ

Yoga is the restraint of fluctuations of the mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Sutras_of_Patanjali

On Silence and Selfing

Hi Eric

I have recently been investigating a lot this very activity of the mind when it is not occupied. Practising though the paths, sometimes the sense of self disappeared for a moment. Then at 4^th path it was seen through and everything changed forever. The subsequent stages removed the self completely, so that it could no longer be felt even if I wanted. Mysteriously something still remained.

Now it has become completely clear to me by direct experience that it is this seemingly harmless and automatic narrative activity of the mind that is creating the phantom self over and over again. By this I mean a sense self that cannot be seen of felt in any way, yet it must exist judging from my automatic reactions to certain sensations. This has been a mystery to me.

My recent experiences have shown me that it is possible to stop the noise and happily exist in silence.

At least this moment

And this.

Selfing Thoughts

My current practice is helping me to see different kinds of background chatter that are supporting my long held mental fixations. This is what I found:

• Self congratulation thought
• “What others think of me” thought
• Pride thought
• Commenting thought
• Remembering thought
• Nostalgic thought
• Want to attract others’ attention
• Future planning thought
• Anticipation
• Wanting to appear competent
• Arrogant thought
• Self confidence thought
• Wants to show off
• Want others’ acceptance
• Wants to be funny
• Self conscious thought
• Wants to be respected
• Fantasising thought
• Self criticising thought
• Fear of death (in a dream)
• Wanting others’ approval
• Feeling foolish
• Regretting thought
• Feeling of superiority
• Pretending to be skilful
• Wanting to give good impression
• Judging thought
• Wanting to be the centre of the attention (and being afraid of it at the same time)
• Wanting to be admired by others
• Feeling inadequate
• Free association thoughts
• Indignation thought
• Righteousness thought

Lying on the hotel bed doing binary noting. 

“I don’t have to go on creating myself all the time again and again. I can drop it.”

Rising current

Connecting both ends of the sushumna

Restful silence

Sensations flowing steadily

Unstuck mind

The baseline of my practice has moved to a new level thanks to binary noting Silence/Noise. I have learned to see in real time how thoughts are forming even when the conditions are not ideal. Noting the thought as “Noise” instantly returns the mind to silence and being present.

I was doing binary noting in the train. There was unpleasant pressure in the face and throat, like some nasty burrowing animal was moving underneath the skin. It felt like my head was slowly transforming into something ugly and weird. I had a feeling that my face was being pulled into a hideous grimace and I hoped that it was just my imagination.

I could no longer take it. My whole body felt sick and I was on the verge of vomiting. I surrendered to whatever was happening. It felt like the very bedrock of my being was shaking, strange raptures that I have never felt before shook my body.

Then it passed and I had a chance of watching interesting phenomenon for a couple of minutes: every time the mind was being pulled into something interesting that it saw, a proto thought formed and then disappeared immediately. Then again just body sensations and direct perception. I was walking through the crowd at the train station. Continuous stream of body sensations and some mental images flickered by without sticking or creating the usual tidal wave of comments and stories.

Super Real

The morning sun on the cobblestone streets and weathered plastered walls of the old part of Lisbon make me feel all the sensations very acutely. The thoughts cease to arise and the skin all over my body is tingling. The reality seems super real.