Welcome to my first, and possibly only (time will tell), Dharma
publication. The material I present here is drawn from my own
experience and from inferences made on its basis. It is written for
a readership already clued-in to the basic mental exercises that
constitute insight meditation, the maps and models designed
to describe its progress (particularly the four-path model derived from Theravadan
Buddhism, to which this text will refer), as well as some of the
vocabulary that is commonly used to describe those things, and its
meaning and significance may elude readers outside this group. For
example, if you don't know what stream-entry (or first awakening) is, or why you would want it, this
text may only serve to pique your curiosity, or it may be a boring
or confusing read. On the other hand, if you're part of an
orthodoxy that holds, in one way or another, that nirvana is beyond a practitioner's realistic
reach and may as well be mythical, given its practical
unattainability, this text may annoy you and you probably wouldn't
believe me anyway so, whatever, it doesn't matter.
This text is meant to be read as a companion volume to Daniel M. Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha,
to which it will frequently refer, for while this essay may be
insightful as stand-alone writing, and may indeed prove to be key
reading for those whose temperaments and styles of practise (and
habits of shortcoming) are similar enough to my own, it does not
offer a thorough enough treatment of either the insight meditation theory or practical
instruction that a novice (or anyone sufficiently doubting their
skill) will need. What this text does offer is an exposition on the
way to hit a retreat properly and the right attitude to have
in order to attain a path. Its primary functions are
As best I've been able to determine, most people who have
completed at least one path of insight have done so while on intensive
retreat, particularly that first path. First path, otherwise known as stream-entry, is reputed to be particularly
tricky in that it requires the mind's entire field of experience to
do something it's never done before: completely disappear. To arise, and then pass
totally, without remainder. What this takes in order to happen for
the first time is not entirely clear to me; perhaps it's focus,
perhaps concentration, perhaps timing; and in support of all those
things, perhaps a kind of sheer willingness at a deep, deep level.
These are my guesses. Regardless, whatever it is mostly tends to
occur on retreat, so I've heard, and that's been my
personal experience as well. Therefore, this book will be about
going on retreat.
You can either retreat at a meditation centre or you can retreat on your
own. If doing the former, there will be rules to follow and a
schedule to keep up. If doing the latter, make your own timetable
and stick to it. If retreat at a centre, the basic needs are taken care of.
Someone cooks you food, there is a place you can sleep when it's
time to rest, and a bunch of people are all doing the same thing at
the same time around you to remind you to stay disciplined. If
doing a solo retreat, you will have the benefit of stark
isolation, which can turn into very powerful focus, but you may
have to prepare your own food and be your own motivation, in which
case it will greatly pay to keep food and other routines simple.
Both centre retreats and solo retreats have advantages and
drawbacks, but either way, you should have the same attitude, which
is to say a hard-working and independent one. Don't drift through
your retreat! Pay attention to each and every bit of
it. Practise even when there doesn't seem to be any point.
I should probably mention, for those unfamiliar with
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha,
that my expectations of retreats and retreatants are heavily influenced
by the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition. That means non-stop,
second-by-second attention to, and utmost engagement with, the
insight practice from the moment you wake up to
the moment you're out for the night... and then some. Seriously, we
aren't fooling around here. If you're not sometimes buzzy and
occasionally neurotic that you're not putting in enough
moment-to-moment effort, you probably really aren't. While
insight practice requires a balance of effort and tranquillity, an arahant friend of mine is convinced that 99% of
meditators err on the side of laxity. If you're convinced that
you're in the other 1%, this probably isn't the guide for you. And
while there are traditions that retreat in a more laid-back way,
perhaps by not utilising all the minutes in a day for insight practice, or by alternating between
periods of formal, heavily focused insight practice and gently mindful 'rest
periods' or 'activity periods', this book is about what I know, and
what I know is that working my ass off in a non-stop way, as
recommended, worked. Overkill? Perhaps, but see how good you feel
coming out of retreat, still unenlightened, and wondering if
maybe you simply didn't try hard enough.
So, enough lead up. What is this all about, what is needed? Down
to the heart of the matter.
If you would like a successful retreat, you should probably:
This part is crucial. However you do it, make sure you know that
your goal is possible.
Sceptical that it's possible? Why? People have
done it, people do it. Talk to people who have done it, there's
enough of them around. Don't know them in person? Can't find some
who will talk openly? Not meeting them at your favourite health
food store? Come online, there's a bunch of people who get it on
the Internet. A wiki-based web community called The Dharma
Overground has a decent collection of practitioners from a
variety of mystical traditions, Buddhist as well as
otherwise, who are attained, insight and otherwise, and open about it.. a
collection which is growing as more of the current members tune in
and get it done, and more people who've already done
it, and so get it, find their way to the group. Anyway, wherever
you can find people willing to talk about it, take advantage of it.
Make sure it sinks in that enlightenment, where it occurs, is an everyday
reality.. not divorced from the realm of ordinary experience in
which you are living right now.
It's important to know it's actually, seriously, possible so
that you don't compartmentalise your expectation of enlightenment away from your direct experience
of being alive here and now. Don't pigeonhole enlightenment into an 'it will magically drop
out of the sky' mental category. You'd think that simply because
you've been dogging it, retreat for retreat, you wouldn't be treating the
possibility of actually seriously getting enlightened like
fantasyland stuff, wouldn't you? Believe me, this is a habit that's
hard to not form and once formed, hard to break. 9 years steady on
the trail, with even some time in the monkhood, and I was still
doing it to no end. Are you assuming this yourself? Do you find
yourself thinking of enlightenment in the form of an unattached
daydream, similar to winning the lottery? Investigate yourself
seriously and if you find that you are, take a good look at what
you're doing. It is solidly disempowering for your mind to assume enlightenment can only exist in the stories you
tell about your future at best, your maybe-future at worst. Start
looking for it right here and now, right around you and right
through you. What does it mean to look for it? It means to:
Following retreat instructions means doing the
exercises they tell you to. This should mean doing insight practices that cause you to pay
attention to things as they are.
In the Mahasi tradition, and in much of the Theravadan
Buddhist world, insight insight practice means paying attention to any
or all of the Three Characteristics that can be found in any
instance of sense experience; they are the characteristics of
impermanence (momentariness), suffering (fundamental tension, displacement and
discomfort), and no-self (hardest to explain, it has to do with
an illusion that never clearly existed anyway, so perhaps best it's
understood for now as the spontaneous and out-of-anyone's-control
aspect of how sensations just happen on their own). Ingram makes much fuss about this subject, which
is a perspective I have benefitted from to no end and heartily
endorse but will also proceed to contradict later on. For now,
however, if you're going to take on noting practice, assume that seeing some aspect
of the Three Characteristics at this very moment is the
only way you're going to get anywhere. Keep at it! Remember, in
general, you should:
It can feel unnatural to work so hard, but the progession of insight can feel pretty unnatural
too. Will you overshoot it by working too hard? Theoretically I
guess that's possible. Heck, it took me almost 9 days on retreat to do it.. maybe if I had mellowed out a
bit, it wouldn't have taken so long! Haha, unlikely. Stream-entry is essentially a shot in the dark..
it's your destiny to miss over and over again until your mind
finally lands its rhythm and figures out how to rhyme on time (and
disappear on time with the rhyme). This is a
trial and error process and a classic example of procedural
learning. While you're not going to be able to force it to happen,
you can pretty much take away all the other options. This is a
gradual process, and every moment of contribution helps
tremendously. Therefore:
Not for a moment, not for a second, don't slack, don't allow
yourself to do things you think will cause you to unintentionally
slack in the next moment. The whole world in a grain of sand. The
whole world in this one moment. If you work like this, with this
kind of intensity, whether you land a path or not you will gain insight like nothing else, which will heavily
contribute to your life being better. Work with the kind of
immediacy that is focused on what is right here, right now, and
that highlights the relationship and engagement you have with it.
And at times you slip from it, and can't seem to find your way back
to the cutting edge:
Artificial dualities, nonsensical problems. Should I do
this, or should I try that? Will this work, or will it only get in
the way of that working? The subject/object out-of-focus makes
things that don't actually contradict each other look like they do,
and as you pay increasing attention to the out-of-focus, you may
become kind of loopy and start seeing problems that wouldn't exist
if you didn't think they did. The 3rd stage of insight (Comprehension of the Three Characteristics) and
the late Dark Night stages can magnify this tendency a
great deal. The way to deal with it is to keep practising as best
you can. Sometimes, absolutely nothing works. So note the suffering, note the anxiety, note the confusion,
note the discontent, note the restlessness, etc. Get acquainted
with the way your mind flinches around to try and avoid suffering, and get comfortable with it.
Suffering is a part of your world and it does
not have to be a hindrance, so pay attention to it. What is the
experience of suffering? This is a very real question, and the
answer is something like 'the whole world in this moment'. Nothing
outside of this moment is going to deliver this particular answer
for you, because you are looking to understand something about this
moment itself. Suffering is often a clear indicator about where
to look in order to see this, and as such, the hard times are some
of the best opportunities to internalise this very necessary
understanding. So embrace them when they arise and make best use of
them. The more comfortable you are in your own suffering, the more clearly you will see what
you've got to work with, and there is no better position you can be
in, in order to:
If you're halfway up a mountain and the way you think you're
supposed to be taking is blocked, it's up to you to figure out how
to get up the rest of it. At this point, it's purely between you
and reality.. and this isn't a point you can locate on a map, this is a point that happens whenever you
realise that it's got to be this way. This is the sense that
reality isn't something that's happening in a story somewhere else,
it's happening right here, right now. You don't need an
intermediary in order to perceive it, it's something no technique,
no teaching, no teacher, no matter how useful, can do for you. The
relevance of all those things waxes and wanes; what remains
relevant is the part you're experiencing it with. So get
comfortable with going it on your own! I can't stress enough how
important this is, and I conjecture that some lack in this spirit
of the solo adventurer may be what keeps many people from attaining
the greatness for which they have already cultivated the faculties
required. Don't be a lacker in this spirit, don't slack on
adventure. Therefore:
I know this may sound out-of-place given that the above
instructions are about working hard non-stop and through all
difficulties, but yeah, it's like that. Don't forget to have fun.
Things change, roll with the punches, especially since in a sense
what you're working with is all you've got at that moment. Make
sure to have a good time doing what you're doing.. since you're
doing this for you! Going on retreat is about coming out of needless
suffering and making a better life for yourself,
so if there isn't a part of you that's having a good time doing it,
or at least that understands it as good somehow, you might be
missing something. Admittedly, there can be times where it's no fun
and you have no clue how anyone, least of all yourself, could be
benefitting from this process in any way. Those times are good
opportunities to just stay with the visceral experience of things
as they are. They don't tend to last forever though, so you can get
back to having fun in no time if you so incline yourself... and I
strongly recommend that you do.
It is a wide, rich and varied territory you are navigating and you may lose
your purpose or direction often. Getting it right and taking that
next step forward will, in some ways, always involve a trial and
error process on the most primitive and most basic levels. Your
mind may do funny, seemingly unrelated and useless stuff. This is a
natural side effect of being alive and learning new things. Stay
engaged with reality, and learn to see the lighter side of these
things. Be comfortable with mood swings. Get used to conflicting urges. And
start feeling at home in the bevy of mapping, theorising, predicting, wondering,
wanting, etc, and all the other neurotic intellectual activity that's gonna happen anyway
whether or not you think it's useful. These things are not signs of
regress so don't be disheartened and take them as signals that you
lack focus or control, or whatever seems to be the bad guy this
time. Expectations or attempts to predict the next
step, or whatever else shows up, are just part of the process your
mind needs to go through, are part of this same reality you are
attempting to investigate, and are not at all hindrances when you have insight into how they're being experienced. Just
like any other sensations, they are all causal, empty, happening on
their own, and sufficient material for penetrative insight to develop in. Keeping a sense of humour to face the surprises that turn
up along the way, and staying inquisitive when the going gets dull
and you've exhausted all known options, will take you far.
On that front, here's something bizarre that, while it is not
necessary to see – indeed, some people may simply never see it this
way – I think may help some: understand that you can't imagine a
fruition, but don't exclude the parts of your
experience you think of as 'imaginary' from practice. Indeed, there
is something imaginary about all this. I have strong reservations
saying this sort of stuff because it can be so easily misconstrued,
but if you haven't gotten path yet, a fruition is what you're looking for, the
entrance to a fruition arises out of the 4th vipassana jhana (equanimity regarding
formations), and 4th jhana is hella imaginary. I personally thought
I must be crazy thinking things like this until I noticed that a
quite-realised Dharma friend of mine's email address contains the
phrase 'imaginationrealization'. It sanks into place that very
moment. I'm at a loss for a better way to explain what I mean and
have considered removing this section entirely, but opted to
include it for people who might benefit from having it addressed,
however many or few there are. If this paragraph seems strange or
irrelevant to you, just skip it over. Then again, if it strangely
was just what you needed to hear.. there you are.
Ok, so, remember how earlier I said that if you're doing this
Mahasi-style you should cling to seeing the
Three Characteristics like it's the only thing
that's going to get you anywhere? Well, here's where I change my
tune a bit. A time comes, deep enough into equanimity territory, perhaps after having come
up to it and fallen back countless times, when it doesn't matter
how you're practising, or labelling your practice.. you are just
seeing things as they are. This means you might not be seeing
things as characteristics, or vibrations, or whatever else has indicated to
you up to this point that you're on the right track. You might not
even be paying attention to anything in particular about what
you're seeing. Should such a time come, and you realise that you're
here, just keep staying with whatever you're staying with, doing
whatever it is you're doing. It won't really matter at this point.
No instruction is necessary here really.. anything can happen,
taking any length of time, or nothing could happen at all. From
here on, you're really on your own.. I mean, you've actually been
on your own all along, but this might be the part where you finally
really notice it. And on that note, the end. Practice well and good
luck.
As a short appendix, I've attached some practical material that
may be useful to have for referring to and helpful for getting
started.
A good example schedule to follow:
And an example set of reminders to have stuck on the wall: