http://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3940082
Daniel:
I myself have never used the term technical 4th, and I am not sure
where it originated.
Lots of people, even those in this community, use the terms
discussed here in many different ways, and they tend to get loosely
applied a lot of the time.
I am currently thinking about the models very differently from the
general way presented in MCTB, in case anyone is asking, with an
increased appreciation of the basic concept, expressed in MCTB,
that there are many axes of development, and the assumption that
they will all occur simultaneously in a very specified sequence
often not reflecting what actually happens in the wild.
That said, the language is still in use, and I use it sometimes
also these days, for better or for worse, though I am trying to get
away from it more and more, as it causes a lot of trouble, and
there seem to be many layers to the thing that often surprise
people when they show up unexpectedly when they thought they had
something totally nailed, as happened to me many, many times over
many years, as noted in MCTB.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand...
Some people use Technical or MCTB 4th to mean the general feeling
that they are done, with that feeling of doneness being the primary
criteria. Kenneth Folk, the primary proponent of this particular
meaning, was just here at Hurricane Ranch working on his book, and
we had long discussions about this, with me advocating for this not
to be the primary thrust of the term, and him thinking that the
feeling of doneness was of primary importance. I argued for the
following as being more along the lines of what I considered
relevant: an undifferentiated field of selfless causality doing its
natural thing with no sense of center-point, doer, controller,
perceiver, or agent of any kind. Anyway, experts clearly disagree,
and so long as people qualify how they are using the term, I am not
sure it matters, or does it? Actually, it probably does, so back to
the drawing board...
As posted in an earlier thread, I think a more nuanced model that
allows for flexibility and many areas of development and evolution
of the practitioner in time is going to be what we end up with,
following something like a more medical model of all of this.
For instance, when I am admitting a patient from the emergency
department and speak on the phone with my consulting/admitting
hospitalist, I don't just say, "Mrs. Jones has pneumonia, admit
her."
Instead, I might say, "Mrs. Jones is a 75 year-old female with
pneumonia who needs admission. She has mild emphysema,
diet-controlled diabetes, hypertension and a previous case of
pneumonia 3 years ago. She was just admitted to the hospital 3
weeks ago for a right hip replacement by Dr. Smith. Her primary
care doctor is Dr. Brown, for whom you admit. She had been
recovering well at home for 3 days after 2 weeks in a rehab
facility who presented with shortness of breath, fever to 102.1, a
blood pressure of 102/45, a heart rate of 120, and an pulse ox of
89% on room air. She was found to have bilateral patchy infiltrates
on chest x-ray, a white count of 17.5 with 92% neuts and 3% bands,
platelets are a bit elevated 580, has mild anemia, a glucose of
216, a normal urinalysis, a sodium that was just a bit low at 131,
normal potassium, mild dehydration with a BUN of 25 and a Cr of
1.2. She improved after 1L of normal saline IV fluids, with her
blood pressure coming up to 110/58, and we gave her levaquin 750mg
IV, doripenem 500mg IV, and vancomycin 1g IV, given her low blood
pressure, concern for sepsis, and recent extensive health-care
exposure raising concern for resistant organisms. Her hip wound is
healing well without erythema. Her breathing responded well to one
hour of albuterol and atrovent nebulized, and she should probably
go to the RCU."
In the same way, of some practitioner I might say, "Mrs. Jones is a
35 year-old female with about 9 months of retreat time total,
mostly Goenka, Mahasi, but also a bit of Soto Zen and Dzogchen, who
has been practicing for 16 years total with a good daily practice.
She also practiced in a mixed Wiccan/Golden Dawn-influenced
magickal tradition in the past and still does on occasion. She has
4 jhanas most of the time in daily life and can get real formless
jhanas on retreat up to the 8th reliably after a week of practice
to warm up and occasionally in the height of Equanimity during new
cycles. She has attained to what she thinks is Nirodha Samapatti 4
times with heavy afterglow and proper set up, again on retreat. Her
current practice focuses on meditation at all times in daily life,
and integrating what she thinks of as ultimate and relative
perspectives. By her report she is now walking around mostly in a
field that appears mostly without boundaries, but still at points
catches glimpses of formed patterns that clearly have some tinge of
a sense of identification and separateness to them sometimes, and
debunking these are what she considers her cutting edge of
practice. She easily attains to Fruitions up to a few per day in
daily life when in Review phases, and has gone through what feels
like an insight cycle every 2-3 months for the last 3 or so years.
When in the A&P phase she has a high degree of talent for out
of body travel, something she started practicing as a teenager. She
also feels she can at times see auras and subtly manipulate her own
and others energetic fields. She has had a few prognosticative
dreams of uncanny accuracy, none in the last two years. She just
crossed the A&P last about 6 days ago, and is currently
struggling a bit in Re-Observation, but bleed-through is minimal,
her having easily identified this phase from long familiarity with
it, and her job as a physical therapist is going well despite a
relatively large amount of daily practice, about 2-3 hours/day of
sitting at this point, which at this time is making her feel a bit
edgy, though nothing nearly as bad as it used to during this phase,
and she is confident she will hit Equanimity any time now. She is
planning a retreat of 2 weeks duration at the Forest Refuge in 4
months, with her goal being total field integration. She also
practices Bikram yoga in a hot studio 3 times/week and finds it
very helpful, something she has done on and off for 5 years. She
has noticed a marked increase in her emotional balance and ease
after a major shift about 5 months ago that she has no good name
for, as it doesn't seem to correlate that well with any standard
map. The benefits of that shift have held up well in the face of
some recent family stressors, with clear and automatic improvement
in the way she processed old triggers by her parents. She does
occasionally suffer from insomnia, but uses the time to meditate.
She also volunteers occasionally at the local art museum front desk
and occasionally paints water colors, and she was actually painting
when her last major breakthrough occurred and considers it part of
her practice. She has a small local sangha, mostly of mixed
practitioners, many of whom are also members of her yoga studio.
She teaches informally through Skype on occasion."
Here is a repost of the thread content, as somehow I can't find the
original thread:
"A large number of recent conversations with relatively talented
practitioners revolved around various things that practice had done
to everyone, and what the similarities and differences were. These
conversations mercifully weren't along the lines of, "Yeah, I'm an
MCTB Arahat," or whatever, and instead focused on the
phenomenology, which is always more fun and straightforward anyway,
and is often less politically charged, it seems.
Basically, the attempts of the conversations were either
consciously less so (but the effect was the same) to put the member
of the groups discussing this on a virtual grid something like
this.
On one axis you have those discussing what they can do and what
they have attained.
On the other axis, you have something like this, in no particular
order:
Agency: completely gone, even more completely gone, sometimes
completely gone, at times has been completely gone, is somewhat
attenuated, is occasionally attenuated, is still quite
present.
Panoramic Perspective: how well does the concept of panoramic
perspectives describe your practice and how has this changed?
Dreams: did you dream before and do you dream now and how are they
the same or different? Have you lucid dreamed and how has this
changed with practice?
Traveling: have you ever and can you still travel out of body, with
what degree of regularity and control, duration, etc? Can you do it
from waking or do you have to start in a lucid dream? Can you come
back to body being fully awake or do you have to come back to a
dream? etc.
Sleep: do you need more, less, or what, if anything, is
different.
Visualization ability: same, different, there, not there, or
what?
Cycling: do you cycle through the insight stages or something like
them, and did you cycle before, and what it is it like now and how
has it changed?
Fruitions: have you ever attained them, can you attain them now,
did you ever have the notion that they had duration of any kind
(either experienced or not experienced), how many could you at your
best attain/day and how rapidly from inclination to them happening,
can you get multiple back to back, etc.?
Subject/Observer: seems to be localized, seems diffuse, seems gone
some of the time, seems utterly and completely gone, or what?
Affect: do you still have the internal feeling of feelings, and if
so is anything different about the way you experience them?
Similarly: Affect triggers: is there anything different about how
stimuli that would have at some point in the past (and perhaps now)
have triggered feelings are reacted to and if so, what is
different, if anything, and how has this changed?
External Affect: do people still perceive you to have feeling and,
if so, how has this changed as a result of practice, if at
all?
Formed Jhanas: did you ever have and do you still have jhanas, and
if so, which ones and how developed (stability, duration, rapidity
of access, various objects, etc.)?
Formless Realms: did you ever have they and do you still have them,
and if so, how developed were/are they (with formed/bodily
phenomena somewhat present, very present, subtle or gone or what,
stability, access, duration, etc.)?
Brahma Viharas: have you practiced them, and could you stay with
the phrases, feel the actual feelings, take them to their ultimate
jhanas (3rd or 4th, depending) and how has this changed with
time?
Powers: did you ever have any, do you still have them or can you
access them, and if so how often, how easily, what conditions
required, etc.? How has your interpretation of those experiences
varied with time?
Energetics: have you ever perceived energetic stuff (vibrations,
chakras, energy channels, etc.) and could you ever manipulate them,
and can you now and what conditions would be required to do
that?
Nirodha Samapatti: do you think you have ever attained it, which
version did you attain (NS Lite: sense of duration/experience still
somehow present, or NS Deluxe: experience and everything else
utterly gone), can you still attain it, do you have any notion of
how long the attainment has been able to last (either by external
or internal reference) and what conditions would be required for
you to do that?
Suffering: what is suffering like for you now on any level and how
do you describe it? What causes the mind to be disturbed, if
anything?
Memory: has practice changed your memory of events in any way and
if so how?
Visual Field: anything different about it, or any other sense door,
for that matter?
Relationships with others: has practice changed the way you related
to others and if so how, assuming the ability to generalize this
very complex topic?
Compassion: do you feel compassion, and, if so, how has practice
changed it if at all or your understanding of what compassion
is?
Peace: is your mind more or less peaceful or what and how has this
changed with time?
Ethics: has your practice changed your concept of morality and
ethics, and if so, how and how has this evolved with time?
Task Fatigue: has meditation practice changed your ability to stay
on tasks with less fatigue in any way?
Silence: do you perceive your mind as silent and if so when/how
often?
Thoughts: how has meditation practice changed what thoughts do and
how often you perceive them to occur?
Time: anything interesting about it?
There are probably a bunch more things that could be placed on this
grid, but those are some of the more common ones that have been
bandied about recently, and these sorts of conversations turn out
to be so much more fun than trying to shoehorn people into very
narrow concepts such as single path names and the like, as it turns
out that there is all sorts of variability in how people respond to
those questions even among people who claim the same crudely
labeled attainments.
While these could end up looking a bit like a character sheet from
D&D (for those old enough to remember what that was), the
effect is a much more nuanced and productive discussion of exactly
what people are experiencing and it also leads nicely to all sorts
of fascinating practice discussions, I have found.
This is actually a setup for a more sophisticated discussion of the
goal and promises of practice and what is possible and how
developments may occur in a non-parallel fashion sometimes, as well
as terms such as "enlightenment", which, given that the level of
discussion is now at this much more nuanced level, seem paltry by
comparison."
See the difference?
Daniel
.....
Thanks.
Here is a fragment from MCTB2 in its rough form that I was just
working on recently.
"The Problems with Most Current and Former Models
There are large numbers of problems with many of the models of
meditative development that we have inherited from the past as well
as those we are creating today. I will get right to the point and
list the major problems and then spend some time flushing them
out:
1. Some models assume predictable linear development, such that if
you attain this, next you will attain that, and so on, with this
and that being very specifically defined. I call this the Linear
Fallacy. It is not that there aren’t some truths in these models,
but there are generally problems as well.
2. Some models assume that if you attain or understand one thing,
you will automatically attain or understand something else which
might be entirely unrelated, something I call the Package Fallacy.
It is not that packages of abilities and understandings don’t
occur, as they definitely do, but most Package Models presume it
will always happen that way.
3. Some models assume that if you can perceive or do something now
that you will always be able to (at least until you die, that is in
most models that don’t assume that realizations carry on into the
“next life”.) I call this the Permanence Fallacy. It is not that
there aren’t some very long-lasting and resilient transformations
that can occur, but some of these models have problems that I will
touch on in a bit.
4. Some models assume that if you attain to something you will
automatically describe it in certain ways. I call this the
Descriptive Fallacy.
5. Some models assume that if you attain to something you will
automatically know you have attained it, what it is, what it does,
and what it means. I call this the Diagnostic Fallacy. It is in
many ways related to the Descriptive Fallacy.
6. Some models assume that there is only one endpoint that is a
valid or final or ultimate endpoint and that it will look a certain
way. I call this the Final Fallacy, or, as my friend Kenneth Folk
calls it, Pernicious Convergence, meaning that all roads lead to
some specific final point if you take them all far enough, and this
is not referring to that obvious endpoint, namely death, as least
not in some models...
It is worth noting that I have fallen victim to believing all of
these fallacies to some degree at some point, though now don’t
totally believe any of them. Exactly how these Fallacies do and
don’t apply is complicated. The problem is that many of them are
getting at something that can happen sometimes or something that is
at least partly true with some qualifiers at points. I will
illustrate this by way of specific examples now.
The Linear Fallacy is probably the most pernicious of them all.
Most models that are not single shot models (meaning models that
are not Total Package Models, in which everything that you could
every know and do is gained all at once in one big “Zap!”) involve
some aspect of the Linear Fallacy. The Four Path Model, the Tibetan
Five Path Model, the Bhumi Model, and many others all involve this
one to some degree. The problem is not that they are not getting at
something that may have some value as a model, as many of them have
some specific merits at times with many qualifiers..."
Anyway, much more work to do on that.