PROGRESS OF INSIGHT Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

THE PROGRESS OF INSIGHT

The progress of insight is a set of stages that diligent meditators pass
through on the path of insight. Some of the “content based” or
psychological insights into ourselves can be interesting and helpful, but
when I say “insight,” these stages are what I am talking about. Just so
that you have seen the whole list of the names of these stages, the formal
names of stages of insight in order are:

1. Mind and Body
2. Cause and Effect The pre-vipassana stages 1
3. The Three Characteristics
4. The Arising and Passing Away 2
5. Dissolution
6. Fear
7. Misery  
8. Disgust (dukkha ñanas)
9. Desire for Deliverance
10. Re-observation
11. Equanimity 4
12. Conformity
13. Change of Lineage
14. Path
15. Fruition Nirvana (one of two meanings)
16. Review

I will give detailed descriptions of them shortly.
I will refer to these stages by their shortened titles, their numbers
and occasionally short-hand slang. These are formally known as
“Knowledge of” and then the stage, e.g. “Knowledge of Mind and
Body,” but I will just use the part after the “of.” They are also called
“ñanas,” which means “knowledges”, usually with a number, as in “the
First Ñana.” Notice that I use the word stage rather than state. These are
stages of heightened perception into the truth of things, opportunities to
see directly how things actually are, but they are not seemingly stable
states as with concentration practice. The jhanaic groupings refer to
vipassana jhanas, which will be covered in more depth later, but they
borrow their perspectives and certain fundamental aspects from their


samatha jhana equivalents. In other ways they may diverge widely from
the experience of pure samatha jhanas.
One of the most profound things about these stages is that they are
strangely predictable regardless of the practitioner or the insight
tradition. Texts two thousand years old describe the stages just the way
people go through them today, though there will be some individual
variation on some of the particulars today as then. The Christian maps,
the Sufi maps, the Buddhist maps of the Tibetans and the Theravada,
and the maps of the Khabbalists and Hindus are all remarkably
consistent in their fundamentals. I chanced into these classic
experiences before I had any training in meditation, and I have met a
large number of people who have done likewise. These maps, Buddhist
or otherwise, are talking about something inherent in how our minds
progress in fundamental wisdom that has little to do with any tradition
and lots to do with the mysteries of the human mind and body. These
stages are not Buddhist but universal, and Buddhism is merely one of
the traditions that describes them, albeit unusually well.
The progress of insight is discussed in a number of good books,
such as Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart in the section called
Dissolving the Self, which I highly recomment. A very extensive,
thorough, accessible and highly recommended treatment of it is given in
Mahasi Sayadaw’s works The Progress of Insight and Practical Insight
Meditation (on BPS out of Sri Lanka), a partially castrated version of
which appears in Jack Kornfield’s Living Dharma. It should be noted
here that Practical Insight Meditation is my favorite dharma book of all
time with no close competitors. If you can ever lay your hands on a
copy, do so! Even the section of it that appears in Living Dharma is
much better than having access to none of it at all.
Sayadaw U Pandita’s In This Very Life also covers this territory, and
is a bit of a must have for those who like lists and straight-up Theravada,
but he leaves out a lot of juicy details. The Visuddhimagga, a 5th
Century text by Buddhaghosa, also does a nice treatment of these stages,
and contains some interesting and hard to find information. It focuses
largely on the emotional side-effects and thus misses many useful points.
Another good but brief map appears in Ven. Khenpo Karthar
Rinpoche’s Dharma Paths. You could also check out Bhante


Gunaratana’s The Path of Serenity and Insight if you would like to
know the dogma well. It is a thorough and scholarly work.
Matthew Flickstein’s Swallowing the River Ganges is a light
treatment of basic Buddhist concepts and contains a very superficial
treatment of the stages of insight. It is kind of like what would happen if
you condensed a medical school textbook down to a 5
th
 grade science
text. It focuses almost entirely on the emotional side effects and thus
misses a huge amount that is worthy of discussion, but it comes from a
good place and is harmless enough. It doesn’t add anything to the above
sources but is easy to read.
There are many less accessible maps of insight as well. The Tibetan
Book of the Dead, Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo requires
some prior familiarity with this territory to sort out the wild symbolic
imagery. A 12th Century Sufi map is given in Journey to the Lord of
Power by Ibn 'Arabi, but again the medieval symbolism is somewhat
hard to untangle unless you are already personally familiar with these
stages. It also provides a very interesting if quite cryptic description of
the higher stages of realization. St. John of the Cross’ The Dark Night of
The Soul does a good job of dealing with the most difficult of the insight
stages. His map is called The Ladder of Love. Unfortunately, the
translation of the medieval Spanish and thickness of complex Catholic
dogma make it a fairly inaccessible.
I strongly recommend that you consult some of these other sources,
particularly the first five mentioned. While I consider the treatment of
the stages of insight that follows shortly to be by far the most
comprehensive and practical explanation of the stages of insight ever
written, and I mean that honestly, there are still lots of great points made
in those books, and you should check them out. There is a huge
amount of valuable information left out in all of these sources, perhaps
due to the Mushroom Factor, but perhaps due to some of the
difficulties in describing all the little nuances of the subject in all its
possible variations. Thus, working with a teacher who has personal
mastery of these stages (regardless of what they call them) is an
extremely good idea most of the time.
The model terminology I am using is from the ancient
commentaries on the Pali Canon of the Theravada tradition. This


model is used mostly in Burma but is also used to some degree in the
other Theravada traditions. Zen is quite aware of these stages, as all Zen
Masters had to go through them and continue to do so, but they tend
not to name them or talk about them, as is their typical style. This can
be helpful, as people can get all obsessed with these maps, turning them
into a new form of useless content and a source of imprisoning
identification and competition. This is the ugly shadow side of goaloriented or map-based practice, but it often (though not always) may be
overcome with honest awareness of this fact.
Luckily, if the meditator really is into insight territory, continued
correct practice has a way of unsticking them given time. Also, when the
proverbial stuff is hitting the fan, having a map around can really help
the meditator not make too many of the common and tempting
mistakes of that stage, as well as provide the meditator with faith that
that they are on the right track when they hit the hard or weird stages.
These stages can significantly color or skew a meditator’s view of their
life until they master them, and it can be very helpful to remember this
when trying to navigate this territory and keep one’s job and
relationships functioning. Those who do not have the benefit of the
maps in these situations or who choose to ignore them are much more
easily blindsided by the psychological extremes and challenges which
may sometimes accompany stages such as The Arising and Passing
Away and those of The Dark Night.
While many people don’t want to know the maps for various
reasons (such as their own unexamined insecurities), I suspect that
many more people could get a lot farther in their practice if they did
know them. At their very least, the maps clearly demonstrate that there
is vastly more to all this than just philosophy or psychology. They also
clearly and unambiguously point to how the game is played step by step
and stage by stage, what one is looking for and more importantly why,
and give guidelines for how to avoid screwing up along the way. Why
people wouldn’t want to know these things is completely beyond me.
They fill in the juicy details of the seemingly vast gap from doing
some seemingly boring and simple practice to getting enlightened.
Further, providing all of this extremely precise information on exactly
what to do puts the responsibility for progress or a lack thereof clearly


on the meditator (e.g. you), which is exactly where it should be. If after
reading this book you don’t put this extremely powerful information
into practice, the fault is your own.
There is considerable evidence that the lack of this information in
insight traditions that don’t use the maps has been one of the primary
obstacles to progress. On the other hand, the maps can sometimes
cause furious competition and arrogance in the traditions that do use
them, as well as harmful fixation on purely future-oriented goals. Please,
do your very best to avoid these sorts of problems.
The more intense, consistent and precise the practice, the easier it is
to see how the maps apply. The more energy, focus and consistency is
put into practice, the more dramatic and even outrageous these stages
can be. If these stages unfold over long periods of time and gently, it can
be more difficult to see the progression through them, though it does
happen regardless. Certain emphases in practice, such as Mahasi
Sayadaw style “noting” practice, particularly on intensive retreats, seem
to produce a clearer appreciation of the maps, and some individuals will
have an easier time seeing how these maps apply than others will.
Each stage is marked by very specific increases in our perceptual
abilities. The basic areas we can improve in are clarity, precision, speed,
consistency, inclusiveness and acceptance. It is these improvements in
our perceptual abilities that are the hallmarks of each stage and the gold
standard by which they are defined and known. Each stage also tends to
bring up mental and physical raptures (unusual manifestations). These
are fairly predictable at each stage and sometimes very unique to each
stage. They are secondary to the increase in perceptual thresholds of
ways by which we may judge whether or not we are in a particular stage.
Each stage also tends to bring up specific aspects of our emotional
and psychological makeup. These are also strangely predictable, but
these are not as reliable for determining which stage is occurring. They
are suggestible, ordinary, and will show more variation from person to
person. However, when used in conjunction with the changes in
perceptual threshold and the raptures, they can help us get a clearer
sense of which stage has been attained. Further, these stages occur in a
very predictable order, and so looking for a pattern of stages leading one
to the next can help us get a sense of what is going on. Thus, when


reading my descriptions of these stages, pay attention to these separate
aspects: the shift in perceptual threshold, the physical and mental
raptures, the emotional and psychological tendencies, and the overall
pattern of how that stage fits with the rest.
So, the meditator sits down (or lies down, stands, etc.) and begins to
try to experience each and every sensation clearly as it is. When the
meditator gains enough concentration to steady the mind on the object
of meditation, something called “access concentration,” they may enter
the first jhana, now called the “first vipassana jhana,” which is in some
ways the same for both concentration practice and insight practice at the
beginning. However, as they have been practicing insight meditation,
they are not trying to solidify this state, but are trying to penetrate the
three illusions by understanding the Three Characteristics.
They have been trying to sort out with mindfulness what is body and
what is mind and when each is and isn’t there. They have been trying to
be clear about the actual sensations that make up their world just as they
are. They have been trying to directly understand the Three
Characteristics moment to moment in whatever sensations arise, be it in
a restricted area of space, such as the area of the sensations of breathing,
a moving area of space (e.g. body-scanning practices), in the whole of
their world as is done in choiceless awareness practices, using some
other technique or object, or just by being alive and paying attention.
Thus, this first stage has a different quality to it from that of
concentration practice, and they attain to direct and clear perception of
the first knowledge of...

1. MIND AND BODY

There is this sudden shift, and mental phenomena shift out away
from the illusory sense of “the watcher” and are just out there in the
world with the sensations of the other five sense doors. This is an
important insight, as it shows us clearly and directly that we are not
“our” mind or “our” body. It is also a really nice, clear and unitivefeeling state (it really is still more state-like than stage-like), and people
can try to hold on to it just as with the first jhana and get stuck. Reality
can seem just a bit more brilliant the first time one chances into Mind
and Body. We may feel more alive and connected to the world


With the sensate experience of both mental and physical
phenomena being clearly observable, the relationships and interactions
between the two begin to become obvious. What is meant by “the
dualistic split” is very obvious during this first stage.
Somewhere around the first stage, either just before it or shortly
after it, there may arise odd jaw pains on one side, throat tensions, and
some other such unpleasant physical occurrences. Regardless, it soon
becomes easy to see that each sensation is followed by the crude mental
impression of it, and that intentions precede actions and thoughts (see
the discussion of impermanence in Part I, The Three Characteristics).
Thus, we come to...

2. CAUSE AND EFFECT

In this stage, the relationships between mental and physical
phenomena become very clear and sometimes ratchet-like. The joy and
wonder of Mind and Body have left, and now the interactions between
the mind and body become somewhat mechanical seeming. Motions
such as walking or the breath may begin to get jerky, as there is the
intention and the motion, the sensation and the mental impression of it,
the cause and the effect, all occurring in a way which can seem sort of
tight and robot-like. You note, the breath moves just a bit. You stop
noting, the breath stops. You note quickly, the breath jerks quickly. You
note slowly, the breath follows. Some will stop noting quickly or stop
noting at all, thinking that they are messing up the breath. The advice
here is as before: note quickly, and don’t worry about what the breath
does.
Remember how I recommended trying to experience one to ten
sensations per second consistently, noting which were mental and which
were physical? At this stage, the meditator is finally able to do this with a
fair degree of skill, confidence and consistency. Those with stronger
concentration tendencies or a bent towards such things may notice
thoughts and perhaps even visions of insight into cause and effect on a
macroscopic scale, where past action or circumstances lead to various
consequences, some event lead to some rebirth, some previous life lead
to something today, and in general may get a sense that they are able to
intuit aspects of the workings of karma in a way they did not before. As
the meditator becomes more clear about the beginnings and endings of


each of these, about the irritation caused by this jerkiness and about the
fact that all of this seems to be happening fairly on its own, they come to
directly perceive for themselves...

3. THE THREE CHARACTERISTICS

The Three Characteristics of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and
egolessness or no-self become predominant, which is good, as these are
the fundamental basis for insight. Here it begins to become quite clear
that these intentions and actions, sensations and the knowledge of them,
and all of the constituents of this experience are quickly arising and
passing, somewhat jarring, and not particularly in our control or us.
Further, as these sensations are all observed, including the crude mental
impression that follows them (“consciousness”), the whole of the mind
and body process is not a separate self. It is merely a part of the
interdependent world.
These characteristics become clearer and clearer, as well as faster
and faster, as the meditator diligently pays careful attention to exactly
what is happening at each moment. For those doing noting practice,
somewhere around here your speed and precision may begin to get so
fast that you cannot note every sensation you experience. Move to more
general noting, mono-syllabic noting (such as “beep” for each sensation
experienced regardless of what it was), or drop the noting entirely and
stay with noticing bare sensation come and go. At this stage, practice
begins to really take off despite the fact that this stage tends to be fairly
unpleasant.
This unpleasantness tends to be mostly physical, though this stage
can also cause numerous dark feelings and a sense of wanting to
renounce the world and practice. Occasionally, the early part of this
stage can cause people to feel vulnerable, raw, and irritable to a small or
large degree in the ways that a migraine headache or a bad case of PMS
can. I have occasionally been laid out on a couch for hours by this
aspect of this stage, holding my head and just wishing that these early
stages didn’t sometimes involve so much pain and anguish.
There may be odd bodily twistings, obsession with posture, and
painful tensions or strange other sensations, particularly in the back,
neck, jaw and shoulders. These tensions may persist when not
meditating and be quite irritating and even debilitating. The rhomboid


and trapezius muscles are the most common offenders. It is common to
try to sit with good posture and then find one’s body twisting into some
odd and painful position. You straighten out, and soon enough it does it
again. That’s a very Three Characteristics sort of pattern. People
sometimes describe these feelings as some powerful energy that is
blocked and seems wants to get out or move through.
Feelings of heat and sensations like those of a fever may sometimes
accompany this stage. One’s neck and back may become very stiff,
either on one side or both sides. The right and left sides of one’s body
may feel quite different from each other sometimes. The easiest way to
get these unpleasant physical manifestations to go away is to keep
investigating the Three Characteristics, either of them or of whatever
primary object you have chosen. These are common early retreat
experiences, particularly in the first few days.
Fighting them or trying other methods (backrubs, etc.) seems to
either help only a little, work only temporarily, or sometimes make
them even worse, though sometimes hatha yoga and related practices
done with a high degree of awareness can be helpful. This is a common
time for people to go to health practitioners of various kinds, from
orthopedists and dentists to chiropractors and body workers. For
example, I had a wisdom tooth removed during one pass through this
stage because I thought it was throwing my jaw out of alignment, and
perhaps it was, but this was clearly exacerbated by this stage of practice.
Even if these unpleasant physical manifestations do slack off for a
bit, they are likely to keep coming back until one’s insight is sufficient to
progress beyond this part of this stage. Thus, should one find such
things interfering with one’s life, I recommend continued precise and
accepting practice. This is a phase of practice when strong effort and
very quick investigation really pay off.
Certain traditions may look at such physical manifestations as
“energy imbalances” or in some other negative light, and I can see
where they are coming from, but I find those perspectives limiting.
Rather, I see this stage in its broader context as just one more phase of
practice. Others may invent very strange stories to explain these
experiences. A friend of mine ran into this ñana on retreat, found it very
unpleasant, stopped practicing and began to spin out all sorts of fantastic


stories in her head about how the poor fellow sitting next to her was very
angry and how it was making her tense. This didn’t help whatsoever,
and she got stuck there. I have learned to welcome these odd
manifestations as clearly recognizable markers of progress on the path.
They are clear objects for practice and reassure me that I am on the
right track. Unfortunately, this is a hard lesson to teach others. True,
these manifestations can suck, but being able to appreciate what is
happening in the face of the difficult stages is important, and becomes
much more important later on.
As the mind gains speed at really seeing each of the sensations of the
mind and body come and go, and the jerkiness from cause and effect
can get quite rapid and pronounced. These physical movements and
spasms seem to help break up the physical tension that may sometimes
accompany this stage, and are a sign of progress.

4. THE ARISING AND PASSING AWAY

This is also the beginning of the second vipassana jhana. As in the
second samatha jhana, the applied and sustained effort or attention
begin to drop away, and meditation can seem to take on a life of its own.
In the early part of this stage, the meditator's mind speeds up more and
more quickly, and reality begins to be perceived as particles or fine
vibrations of mind and matter, each arising and vanishing utterly at
tremendous speed. The traditional texts actually call this stage the
beginning of insight practices, as from this point on there is a much
more direct and non-conceptual understanding of the Three
Characteristics.
This stage is marked by dramatically increased perceptual abilities
when compared with the previous stages. For example, one might be
able to hone one’s awareness to laser-like precision on the tip of one’s
little finger and seemingly be able to perceive the beginning and ending
of every single sensation that made up that finger. Spontaneous physical
movements and strange jerky breathing patterns that showed up in
Cause and Effect and became more pronounced in the Three
Characteristics may speed up significantly. This stage explains where
many practices such as Tibetan inner fire practices of the Yogic breath
of fire come from. It can also reveal the source material that inspired


teachings such as those about chakras and energy channels. Many
descriptions of Kundalini awakening are talking about this stage.
Reality is perceived directly with great clarity, and great bliss,
rapture, equanimity, mindfulness, concentration, and other positive
qualities arise. Practice is extremely profound and sustainable, and there
may be no pain even after hours of sitting. Unfortunately, the positive
qualities that have arisen can easily become what are called the “Ten
Corruptions of Insight” if the true nature of the individual sensations by
which they are known are not understood as well, and until this happens
a meditator can easily get stuck in the immature part of this stage.
The Ten Corruptions of Insight are: illumination, knowledge,
rapturous happiness, tranquility, bliss, resolute confidence, exertion,
assurance, equanimity and attachment. To quote the great meditation
master Sayadaw U Pandita, from his great but very hard-to-find book,
On the Path to Freedom, “As for the practicing yogi, he will at once
recognize the above as imperfections of insight not representing
dhamma breakthrough and are only to be noted off, remembering the
teacher’s advice as to what is path and not path. Being disabled by the
ten imperfections, he would not be capable of observing the triple
characteristics in their true nature; but once freed from imperfections,
he is able to do so.” In short, they may feel that they are now a very
mighty meditator and that they should try to hold on to this forever, i.e.
they stop actually doing insight practices and instead solidify these
qualities as concentration practice objects. Thus, the advice given about
deconstructing and investigating the positive factors of the samatha
jhanas, particularly the second one, is also very helpful when trying to
stay on the narrow path of the progress of insight.
Visions, unusual sensory abilities (such as seeing nearby things
through one’s closed eyelids), out of body experiences, and especially
bright lights tend to arise to the meditator, sometimes first as jewel-tone
sparkles and then as a bright white light (“I have seen the light!”). The
technical meditator may easily sit for hours dissecting their reality into
extremely fine and fast sensations and vibrations, perhaps even up to 40
per second or even more, with an extremely high level of precision and
consistency. (Where the absurd and disheartening rumors of billions of
mind moments per second come from is beyond me). Fine vibrations


may spread over the body, revealing interference patterns between
experiences, enabling one to know directly that when one thing is
experienced, in that instant, something else is not.
It is very easy to confuse this stage with descriptions of stage 11.
Equanimity, especially as the stage before it, 10. Re-observation, has
some distinct similarities to stage 3. The Three Characteristics. A brief
discussion of the fractal nature of things that describes this will follow in
the chapter called The Vipassana Jhanas. The big difference is that this
stage is ruled by quick cycles, rapidly changing frequencies of vibrations,
odd physical movements, strange breathing patterns, heady raptures, a
decreased need for sleep, strong bliss, and a general sense of riding on a
spiritual roller coaster with no breaks. The higher stages (10 and 11) do
not have those qualities.
As to the cycles, they tend to proceed as follows, with this
description assuming that you are using the breath as object. The mind
kicks in, follows faster and faster vibrations, things really engage and
speed up, perhaps accompanied by more pronounced shaking or
strange breathing patterns increasing in speed, and then finally half way
down an out-breath there is a shift, things drop down slowly, it takes
work to stay with things as they slow down, and then things bottom out.
The breath may stop entirely for a while. Then things come back up
with the breath, attention tends to flag, things relax, and then the cycle
begins again with things speeding up, etc. These breathing cycles may
happen quite on their own and may even be difficult to stop when we
are deeply into this stage. Those using visualizations as object, may
notice that the objects begin to spin with the phase of the breath, or
move in ways that they seem to have a life of their own, albeit a two
dimensional one, as compared to the three dimensional visions that may
arise later.
As this stage deepens and matures, meditators let go of even the
high levels of clarity and the other strong factors of meditation, perceive
even these to arise and pass as just vibrations, not satisfy, and not be self.
They may plunge down into the very depths of the mind as though
plunging deep underwater to where they can perceive individual frames
of reality arise and pass with breathtaking clarity as though in slow


motion. It can even feel as if we have been submerged in thick syrup
and partially sedated with some strong, opiate-like drug.
At the bottom of these depths, however they present themselves,
individual moments may sometimes have a frozen quality to them, as if
sensations were stopping completely in the middle of their manifestation
for just an instant, and this way of experiencing reality is unique to this
stage. Somewhere in here is the entrance to the third vipassana jhana in
U Pandita's model, though there is some controversy about exactly
which insights line up with which vipassana jhanas from here on out. I
prefer to think of the Arising and Passing Away being purely second
vipassana jhana. I will discuss these controversies in the following
chapter.
They may be able to meditate with profound clarity even when
asleep, and the need for sleep may be greatly reduced. Wild “kundalini”
phenomena are very common at this point, including powerful physical
shaking and releases, explosions of consciousness like a fireworks
display or a tornado, visions, and especially vortexes of powerful fine
“electrical” vibrations blasting down one's spinal column and/or between
one's ears. These vortexes can be very loud. These sorts of experiences
can occur quite unexpectedly and even off the cushion, such as in lucid
dreams. They may be followed by various mixtures of wonder,
excitement, bliss, extraordinary joy, and sometimes disorientation. It is
not uncommon for those in the height of the rapture of this stage to
associate some of these occurrences with those of an extended orgasm.
None of these things are a problem unless their true nature is not
understood or unless they happen when one is doing something like
driving a car down an interstate at 75 miles per hour (a story for another
time).
Strong sensual or sexual feelings and dreams are common at this
stage, and these may have a non-discriminating quality that those
attached to their notion of themselves as being something other than
partially bisexual may find disturbing. Further, if you have unresolved
issues around sexuality, which we basically all have, you may encounter
aspects of them during this stage. This stage, its afterglow, and the
almost withdrawal-like crash that can follow seem to increase the
temptation to indulge in all manner of hedonistic delights, particularly


substances and sex. As the bliss wears off, we may find ourselves feeling
very hungry or lustful, craving chocolate, wanting to go out and party, or
something like that. If we have addictions that we have been fighting,
some extra vigilance near the end of this stage might be helpful.
This stage also tends to give people more of an extroverted, zealous
or visionary quality, and they may have all sorts of energy to pour into
somewhat idealistic or grand projects and schemes. At the far extreme
of what can happen, this stage can imbue one with the powerful
charisma of the radical religious leader.
Finally, at nearly the peak of the possible resolution of the mind,
they cross something called “The Arising and Passing Event” (A&P
Event) or “Deep Insight into the Arising and Passing Away.” This event
marks a profound shift in the meditator’s practice, and from then on
they will be somewhat changed by what they have seen, with this being
the Point of No Return that I mentioned in the Foreword and Warning.
The intensity of this event can vary, though it tends to be quite clear and
memorable, particularly the first time one crosses it during that cycle.
It should also be noted that some people will have a big and
obvious buildup to such experiences and for others they will suddenly
just show up completely without warning, sometimes spontaneously and
even without formal meditation training, as happened to me at around
age 15. I have a number of friends who ran into these things without
formal training and in daily life, others who ran into them when doing
hallucinogens including mescaline and LSD, others during yoga
practice, others while around powerful spiritual figures, including one
who had it happen while hanging out with a Christian faith healer and a
few who were hanging out with various gurus.
Whatever context the first A&P Event happens in, that context will
tend to hold a special place in that person's heart from then on. For me
it happened on my own, by my own meditation efforts and without a
tradition, and so I have always associated my own practice with progress.
My friend who had it happen with the Christian faith healer became the
most hardcore Christian you could find. Another friend who had it
happen while on mescaline has since held a special place in her heart
for shamanism. Those who had it happen with gurus tended to follow
those gurus for some period of time, associating it with the gurus


presence. Some others who had it happen in an apparently random
context usually had no idea what it was or what it had done to them, but
most have realized that something was different and nearly all
remember it with an uncanny clarity as somehow standing out from
ordinary experiences.
Once one has attained this event, it is fairly likely that one will be
able to attain the first stage of awakening sooner or later if one can
navigate the Dark Night skillfully (read: simply keep practicing). Thus, a
good first goal in insight meditation is to cross the A&P Event at one’s
earliest possible convenience, with caveats given later in the section on
the Dark Night.
The A&P Event can happen in three basic ways corresponding to
the Three Characteristics, just as can the entrance to insight stage 15.
Fruition, and the two are easily confused for this and other reasons.
There is great variation in the specifics of what we are seeing and feeling
when we cross this profound and intense event, but certain aspects of
these events will be common to all practitioners. This event tends to
manifest in a way that can mirror the Three Doors (described in a few
chapters) at about the middle of the out breath, leading to an
unknowing event, followed by a few exceedingly clearer and more
distinct moments imparting some deep understanding of the Three
Characteristics before a second unknowing event at the end of the
breath. It is not uncommon for the A&P event to occur during a
particularly lucid dream or at least in the middle of the night.
Now, it should be noted here that it is unlikely in these extreme
moments for the sense of the breath to be particularly clear, but this is
how things happen regardless. In these moments, most, but not all, of
their sensate universe strobes in and out of reality, arises and passes.
The subtle background and sense of an observer still seems to stay
stable. In contrast to this, the entrance to stage 15. Fruition is through
one of the Three Doors, involves the complete sensate universe
(background, time, space and all), happens at the end of the out breath,
and does not involve two closely related unknowing events. (The
usefulness of this information may become apparent later on.)
Those who have crossed the A&P Event have stood on the ragged
edge of reality and the mind for just an instant, and they know that


awakening is possible. They will have great faith, may want to tell
everyone to practice, and are generally evangelical for a while. They will
have an increased ability to understand the teachings due to their direct
and non-conceptual experience of the Three Characteristics.
Philosophy that deals with the fundamental paradoxes of duality will be
less problematic for them in some way, and they may find this
fascinating for a time. Those with a strong philosophical bent will find
that they can now philosophize rings around those who have not
attained to this stage of insight.
They may also incorrectly think that they are enlightened, as what
they have seen was completely spectacular and profound. In fact, this is
strangely common for some period of time, and thus may stop
practicing when they have actually only really begun.
This is a common time for people to write inspired dharma books,
poetry, spiritual songs, and that sort of thing. This is also the stage when
people are more likely to join monasteries or go on great spiritual
quests. It is also worth noting that this stage can look an awful lot like a
manic episode as defined in the DSM-IV (the current diagnostic manual
of psychiatry). The rapture and intensity of this stage can be basically off
the scale, the absolute peak on the path of insight, but it doesn’t last.
Soon the meditator will learn what is meant by the phrase, “Better
not to begin. Once begin, better to finish!” as they are now too far into
this to ever really go back. Until they complete this progress of insight,
they are “on the ride” and may begin to feel that the dharma is now
doing them rather than the other way around, as they will progress
inevitably and relatively quickly, usually within days, into stages 5-10,
which as you will shortly see, are not always a party. The rapture and all
the bells and whistles die down quickly, and the meditator may even be
left raw as if hung over after a night of wild partying. The clarity fades
somewhat, and the endings of objects becomes predominant as they
progress to knowledge of...

5. DISSOLUTION,

 ENTRANCE TO THE DARK NIGHT
Thus begins what are called the “Knowledges of Suffering” or “The
Dark Night of the Soul” (to use St. John of the Cross’ terminology). I
consider this the entrance to the third vipassana jhana, though U
Pandita considers this the entrance to the fourth vipassana jhana. I'll give


my arguments for this later in the chapter that deals more directly with
the vipassana jhanas.
The Dark Night spans stages 5 through 10 in this map, namely
Dissolution, Fear, Misery, Disgust, Desire for Deliverance, and Reobservation. Stages 5 through 9 tend to “come as a package,” with one
leading fairly quickly and naturally to the others. Stage 10, Reobservation, tends to stand out as its own distinct and often formidable
entity. It should be noted that some pass through the Dark Night
quickly and some slowly. Some barely notice it, and for some it is a
huge deal, regardless of the speed at which one moves through these
stages. Some may get run over by it on one retreat, fall back, and then
pass through it with no great difficulties some time later. Others may
struggle for years to learn its lessons.
I am going to describe the Dark Night largely in extreme terms, but
realize that this is just to give a heads up to what is possible, not what is
necessary or guaranteed. As before, on retreat these things are likely to
be more intense and clear, though those on retreat who are able to keep
practicing are likely to make much faster progress as well. On the other
hand, practice in “daily life” can be powerful and sometimes very
speedy. These things are strangely unpredictable. Enough disclaimers!
Once someone has crossed the Arising and Passing Event, one will
enter the Dark Night regardless of whether one wants to or not. It
doesn’t matter if you practice from this point on; once you cross the
A&P you are in the Dark Night to some degree (i.e. are a Dark Night
Yogi) until you figure out how to get through it, and if you do get
through it without getting to the first stage of enlightenment, you will
have to go through it again and again until you do. I mean this in the
most absolute terms.
The Dark Night typically begins with just about all of the profound
clarity, mindfulness, concentration, focus, equanimity and bliss of the
previous stage dropping away. So also ends the cause-and-effect-like
phenomena of the breath or walking shaking or jerking up and down in
a way related to attention and noting, as well as all of the fine vibrations
and vortex-like raptures. Early on, the frequency of vibrations
disconnects from the cycle of the breath, remaining largely stable at


whatever frequency is going on at that stage once they can be perceived
again (in late Dissolution or Fear).
Whereas one might have felt that one’s attention had finally attained
the one-pointed focus that is so highly valued in most ideals of
meditation during the Arising and Passing Away, during the Dark Night
one will have to deal with the fact that one’s attention is actually quite
wide and its contents unstable. Further, the center of one’s attention
becomes the very least clear area of experience, and the periphery
becomes predominant. This is normal and even expected by those who
know this territory. However, most meditators are not expecting this at
all and so get blindsided and wage a futile battle to make their attention
do something that, in this part of the path, it simply won’t do.
If one has ever been meditating in a place with lots of mosquitoes
buzzing in one’s ears in a way that made it very hard to concentrate on
the primary object, one can get a sense of what one’s attention will be
like in the Dark Night. Rather than fighting against this and ignoring the
metaphorical mosquitoes, one should try to understand what it feels like
to have one’s attention be however it is. Just like listening to discordant,
chromatic jazz with lots of jarring harmonies and instruments playing
more at odds with each other than together takes some getting used to,
the quality of attention in the Dark Night is an acquired taste, and the
sensations that arise tend to be very rich, complex, broad and unsettling.
Those that fixate on staying one-pointed will suffer more than those who
learn to stay with what is going on regardless of whether or not it feels
like “good meditation.”
In that same vein, those who are using some other object as a focus
will notice the same phenomena of the width of attention being wider
and the basic sense that attention seems to sort of be out of phase with
phenomena. Those doing visualizations may notice that they see a black
spot in the center of their attention with some sort of patterns or visions
around the edge of it spreading wider and wider out into the periphery.
Those using a mantra may feel that the mantra is out of phase with
attention, wide and complex and yet hard to stay with, and may acquire
more complex harmonics and harmonies if it is in any way musical, like
listening to a large, ghost chorus that is off to the sides of you, whereas
before the mantra may have felt centered in the stereo field of attention.


There will be individual variation in some aspects of these things,
depending on object, focus, ability, and each person's particular
proclivities, but some basic aspects will be universal, and I will talk more
about these aspects in the later chapter on the Vipassana Jhanas.
There are two basic patterns of vibrations in the Dark Night, and
they are actually the Dark Night’s defining characteristics. One may get
overwhelmed by the descriptions of emotional difficulties, but keep
these patterns in mind and try to stay on that level. One is fairly slow,
somewhat regular and chunky, at perhaps 5-7 Hz, with not much else
going on. It’s an early Dark Night thing and it tends to feel like a
shamanic drum beat. The later pattern is fairly fast, perhaps 10-18+ Hz,
a bit more irregular, and has faster and slower harmonics in the
background and around the periphery of our attention. It tends to make
us feel very buzzy and edgy. The fact that the background is beginning
to shake is a good sign of progress, as this needs to happen for the cycle
to be completed. On the other hand, it is exactly the fact that the
background has begun to shake and crumble that can cause people to
freak out.
Things were all fun and games when the primary object was shaking,
but when the sense of the observer starts to shake, that can be creepy.
Simply pay careful attention to exactly what is happening, staying with
each pulse of each vibration as clearly as you can, trying to see each
from its beginning to its end. Chances are you will be just fine.
There are two basic things that happen during the Dark Night, one
emotional, the other perceptual. Our dark stuff tends to come bubbling
up to the surface with a volume and intensity that we may never have
known before. Remembering what is good in our life can be difficult in
the face of this, and our reactivity in the face of our dark stuff can cause
us staggering amounts of needless suffering. On top of this, we also
begin to directly experience the fundamental suffering of duality, a
suffering that has always been with us but which we have never known
with this level of intensity or ever clearly understood. We face a
profound and fundamental crisis of identity as our insight into the
Three Characteristics begins to demolish part of the basic illusion of
there being a separate or permanent us. This suffering is a kind of


suffering that has nothing to do with what happens in our life and
everything to do with a basic misunderstanding of all of it.
Dealing with either of these two issues, i.e. our dark stuff and our
fundamental crisis of identity, would be a difficult undertaking, but
trying to deal with them both at the same time is at least twice as difficult
and can sometimes be overwhelming. It goes without saying that we tend
not to be at our best when we are overwhelmed in this way.
The knee-jerk response often is to try to make our minds and our
world change so as to try to stop the suffering we experience. However,
when we are deeply into the Dark Night, we could be living in paradise
and not be able to appreciate this at all, and so this solution is
guaranteed to fail. Thus, my strong advice is to work on finishing up this
cycle of insight and then work on your stuff from a place of insight and
balance, rather than trying to do it in the reactive and disorienting stages
of the Dark Night! I cannot make this point strongly enough.
As a close friend of mine with a ton of experience in insight
practices and a gift for precise language and teaching so aptly put it,
“The Dark Night can really fuck up your life.” However, I will give you
two hard-won pieces of advice that I have found have made the
difference in the face of these stages. First, make the time to do basic
insight practices. Do your very best to get sufficient insight into the
Three Characteristics so as to get past this stage! Make time for retreats
or alone time and don’t get stuck in the Dark Night. You and everyone
around you will be happy that you did so.
The second piece of advice is to have a “no-bleedthrough” policy
when you suspect you are in the Dark Night. Simply refuse to let your
negativity bleed out onto everyone and everything around you. Failure
to do so can be disastrous, as your profound lack of perspective, fixation
on negativity and the suffering from your fundamental crisis of identity
can easily get projected out onto things and people that simply did not
cause that suffering! No one appreciates this at all and it does no good
whatsoever.
Combining these two pieces of important advice, resolve thus, “I
have recently crossed the A&P Event and I know this by the many
obvious signs of that stage. Now I am feeling strangely reactive and
negative about things that I ordinarily am able to handle with more


balance and clarity, and I know that a good part of this is due to the
inevitable Dark Night that follows the A&P. I realize that I am in a less
than ideal position to skillfully deal with the personal issues that are
driving me crazy, as I am likely to project the suffering from the illusion
of duality and the odd side effects of the Dark Night onto these issues.
“I have been warned that this is an extremely bad idea from those
who have successfully navigated in this territory, and I have faith that
they know what they are talking about. Even if these issues are real and
valid, I am likely to blow them way out of proportion and not be able to
bring balance and kindness to them. By contracting into my own
reactive darkness and confusion, I could easily hurt others and myself.
Thus, I resolve to keep my darkness to myself, tell only those who are
skilled in navigating in dark territory, or at least share it with others in a
way that does not project it out on my world and them, and so will spare
those around me needless suffering which they do not deserve. In short,
I will use the meditation map theory to keep the reins on my dark stuff
and to deal with it in ways that are known to help rather than harm.
“I will make time for insight practices and retreats during which time
I will simply see the true nature of the sensations of whatever arises,
however horrible or compelling, and not indulge in the content of my
stuff for one skinny instant if this is within the limits of my strength and
power. In this way, I will be able to navigate this territory skillfully and
not damage my daily life. Should I fail, I will actively seek help from
those who are skilled in helping people keep a healthy perspective in
the face of dark issues until such time as I can face the Dark Night as
recommended.
“When I have attained to the first stage of awakening, that will be a
great time to see how much of my negativity was really valid and how
much was just due to my own lack of clarity and the side effects of the
Dark Night. From that place of clarity, I will be much more likely to fix
those things in my life that really need fixing and attention and be able
to dismiss easily those paper tigers that I have created for myself. By not
trying to take on all of this at once, that is, by gaining deep insights
before tackling the personal issues, I am more likely to lead the happy
and wise life I wish for myself. I will attain to both liberating insights and


insights into my issues, and this will be of great benefit to myself and all
beings.”
One of the primary reasons that I wrote this book was to write this
important resolution. I have suffered needlessly and sometimes
profoundly from the failure of myself and those I love to follow this
resolution. They have also. Were you hearing me say these things to
you rather than simply reading them, you would see tears in my eyes
and hear my voice cracking with sorrow as I recall those past events and
even reflect on what is happening around me as I write this. I beg you,
for the sake of all that is good in this world, do not fail to heed this
advice.
Unfortunately, not everyone seems to be able to do this. In fact, not
everyone is even willing to attempt to follow this advice, particularly
those who buy into the dangerous paradigm that “whatever I feel right
now is real” in the sense that their feelings at that moment must be the
only possible valid perspective on their current situation and are thus
completely justified along with their reactions to those feelings. There
are those who simply don’t believe that such a wondrous and holy thing
as insight practices could produce such profound difficulties. There are
also those who do not believe in the maps or that the maps could
possibly apply to their own very special and unique life. Lastly, there are
a few whose pride and insecurity issues will not allow them to admit that
they might be affected by the Dark Night in this way.
I would warn such people to STAY THE FUCK OUT OF THE
DARK NIGHT until they come to a place where they might be able to
approximate at least some aspects of the above-mentioned resolution or
apply the basics of the theory behind it. That means that if you are not
willing to at least try to make and live by some version of my
recommended resolution, you should not do insight practices and
should not cross the A&P Event. Yes, I am a little bitter. Bitterness
comes and goes.
I am a big fan of fast sports cars, but I wouldn’t give one to a sixyear-old kid. Just so, I am a big fan of insight practices, obviously, but I
have come to the conclusion that those who are not willing to use them
responsibly and intelligently should not use them, as it is too dangerous.
They cause too much trouble in the world to be of little if any benefit.

This is not likely to be a popular view, but I have experienced too much
of what can go wrong when people fail to try to live up to such a
resolution to come to any other conclusion.
The problem is that some people cross into the Dark Night without
doing formal insight practices. I did when I was about 15 and had no
idea what was going on. How to reach these people I have no idea, but
they tend to come wandering into spiritual communities soon enough. I
hope they find people there who help them sort out what has happened
to them can tell them the above advice. I my naïve dreams I imagine
that one day there would be training on the maps and basic spiritual
development in some generic, non-sectarian way in elementary school,
just as we learn about biology and mathematics, and so would be just
another ordinary, accepted, standard part of human education, and so
everyone would know about these things as if they were the ordinary,
natural things they were, but we are a long way from that now, and so
hopefully a few who run into this technology will help spread it around
and help people who have crossed the A&P Event to recognize it and
handle it properly.
This resolution and the spirit implied by it are an aspect of training
in morality, and this sort of morality is one of our best friends in the
Dark Night. When we adopt the spirit of this resolution, we do our
conscious best to craft our way of being so as to be kind and
compassionate. Many people have commented that insight training is a
“monastic practice.” If we are able to build our own virtual monastery
through skillful speech and skillful action, then we do not need a
monastery to protect us and the world from the potential side effects of
our practices. We can live skillfully in the ordinary world and still make
progress in insight.
However, there are those who are willing to buy the theory and
spirit inherent in the above resolution but are so swamped by their
personal issues that they simply cannot follow the above advice after
they get into the Dark Night despite their kind and skillful intention to
do so. My advice to them is to diligently and quickly seek professional
help in the form of psychotherapists and their ilk until such time as they
are able to follow something like the above-mentioned resolution.


Realize that this is not an optimal way to go, as the inherent lack of
perspective of the Dark Night makes aspects of the therapeutic process
more difficult, but for some there will be no other option and this
solution is better than simply floundering. On the other hand, at least
such people have tons of stuff bubbling loudly up for them to deal with,
making some aspects of the therapeutic process easier. However, I
would try to do just enough healing so that you can push on to the first
stage of awakening with minimal bleed through and then finish whatever
therapeutic process you began in the Dark Night after you are out of it.
There another seemingly positive way of looking at the Dark Night,
or the Knowledges of Suffering, one that doesn't really fit well with our
mainstream ideals of how life should be. It is the view of the renunciate,
which basically says, “Ah, now you see the pain of your materialistic life,
of your cravings  that will never bring you happiness, of your worldly
attachments, and that house of cards you call a life. Far better to give it
all up and take up the way of the dharma.” While I have generally
advised doing completely otherwise, I can completely understand why
one would do this. However, the problem comes when we have things
like debt, children, aging parents and the like, and sorting out the ethics
of these conflicts is complex. Regardless, the Dark Night does teach
important lessons, and learning them is essential to moving to what
comes next. These lessons do not require specific lifestyle choices for
mastery. Instead, it is a question of clear perception of, you guessed it,
the Three Characteristics of the sensations that occur during those
stages. As I mentioned in Part I, each training has a specific kind of
renunciation associated with it, and they couldn't be more different.
It is time to get back to describing Dissolution. As the stage of the
Arising and Passing Away ends, the meditator may be left feeling raw
and incompetent despite the fact that they are continuing to make
valuable progress into deeper and deeper levels of profound insight.
This feeling that something is wrong when things are actually getting
better and better can cause all sorts of problems during the Dark Night,
especially to those not familiar with the standard maps.
On the other hand, having come through the A&P territory can be
quite a relief, and so sometimes Dissolution can seem quite welcome.
Some will stop practicing here, as they feel they have “released th


Kundalini” and so are done for the time being. Dissolution feels like a
very natural place to stop practicing, the only problem being that the
later stages (Fear and the rest) tend to follow it soon enough even if one
stops, though less intense practice leads to a less intense, if often
prolonged, Dark Night.
However, those who wish to keep doing formal practice may find
Dissolution frustrating. Whereas just one stage ago they could sit for
hours and perceive the finest vibrations of reality in exquisite detail, now
reality appears to be slipping away, vague, and hard to get a handle on.
Whereas we may have had stellar posture in the previous stage, now we
go back to being ordinary mortals. Images of the body may even seem
to completely disappear, similar to that which happens in formless
realms but without the clarity.
Practice is likely to be more difficult, and we may experience pain
from sitting that was basically completely absent during the previous
stage. This can be extremely frustrating for those who don’t know that
this is normal, and the desire to re-attain a fading past can greatly
interfere with being present. In the face of these difficulties, I highly
recommend noting practice. It may seem like a step back to some who
abandoned it during the glory of the A&P, but the spiritual path is not a
linear one. In the face of Dissolution and the stages that follow, noting
practice can be very useful and powerful.
In short, if they are able to keep practicing (familiar theme yet?) and
adjust to having to actually work to perceive things clearly again, they will
begin to make further progress. This time the effort will have to be with
a lighter and wider touch. Note well, if they give up in the stages of the
Dark Night (or any time after the A&P Event), the qualities of the Dark
Night will almost certainly continue to haunt them in their daily life,
sapping their energy and motivation, and perhaps even causing feelings
of unease, perhaps depression and even paranoia. Thus, the wise
meditator is very, very highly encouraged to try to maintain their
practice despite the potential difficulties so as to avoid getting stuck in
these stages!
I think of Dissolution as the couch potato stage, though it can also
have a sense of sensual languor to it. A hallmark of Dissolution is that it
is suddenly hard to avoid getting lost in thought and fantasy when


meditating. We may feel somehow disconnected from our life. Another
effect that can be very noticeable at this stage is that actions just don’t
happen easily. For instance, you might be going to lift your hand to turn
off your alarm clock, but your hand just doesn’t move. You could move
your hand, but somehow things just tend to stop with the intention and
get nowhere. Eventually you move your hand, but it might have been
just a bit tiring to do so. That’s what Dissolution can feel like.
Meditation can be the same way, and until one breaks out of this, things
can get a bit mired down in the overstuffed cushions of Dissolution.
However, when the perception of things ending becomes clearer again,
there arises...

6. FEAR

The clarity and intensity begin to return, but now this stage can
involve all sorts of frightening distortions of perception when sitting,
accompanied by great feelings of unease, paranoia, fearfulness, and/or
“the willies.” It can even sometimes seem that our body is falling in
tatters through the floor or that we are rotting away. If we have strong
concentration tendencies, we may see horrifying or disconcerting
visions. Vibrations from here on out should no longer change frequency
with the phase of the breath as they did in stage 4 and for the next few
stages tend to be slower than those in that previous stage.
Strangely, Fear can also be a just a bit rapturous in the ways that a
horror movie can be or in the way that riding a roller coaster at night
can be simultaneously scary and exciting. However, the nice side of this
stage tends to be greatly overshadowed by the dark side. We are being
asked to accept the full range of life here as it is. Acceptance and clear,
precise awareness of the true nature of the actual sensations that make
up all of this are the key in all of the Dark Night stages as before. On
the mild side, this stage might manifest as just a slightly heightened sense
of non-specific anxiety. As fear passes and our reality continues to
strobe in and out and fall away, we are left feeling...

7. MISERY

This stage can be characterized by great feelings of sadness and loss.
Again, there can almost be something nice about the heartfelt depth of
these feelings, but this tends to be greatly overshadowed by the dark side


of them. We are having our whole concept of self and the world as
being permanent, able to satisfy, and even being us or separate from us
being torn down and violated by the now undeniable truth of the Three
Characteristics. There can be a lot of grieving in this process.
This is hard to accept, and our resistance to this process causes us
misery. Becoming lost in the content of these sensations and being
unable to see their true nature is a somewhat common cause of failure
to progress and failure to live healthily. On the mild side, we may just
feel a bit like after we do after we have been crying. Misery is the
transition point between the Drum-like 5-8Hz part of the Dark Night
and the very complex, irritating frequencies that follow. Attention
continues to get wider and the center more blind. As things continue to
fall apart, clearly demonstrate their unsatisfactoriness and their
selflessness, this can cause...

8. DISGUST

We become disgusted with the whole thing. This is where the buzzy
10-18+ Hz chaotic vibrations around the periphery really begin to get
strong. Through this section of the Dark Night, our ability to see objects
in the center of our attention is poor, and it may feel like our minds are
being stretched wide and yet contracting at the same time. We begin to
feel completely tormented by our noisy and repetitious minds (a classic
sign of this stage), by a body that is full of suffering and unpleasant
sensations, and by a world that is falling apart. Perceiving thoughts as
thoughts gets harder and harder, and thus getting caught by our stuff gets
increasingly easier. On the mild side, one might just feel subtly revolted
and disappointed with reality in general, or perhaps have the slightly
creepy feeling of crawling skin. On the strong side, we see nothing to
cling to, no self to be found, and we begin to wish the whole edgy thing
would just end, also called...

9. DESIRE FOR DELIVERANCE

At this stage, we are fed up with the whole thing, but at a level that
transcends mere suicidal thoughts. Thus, it is actually beneficial though
it seems otherwise. No longer do we look forward to anything but the
complete ending of all sensations, i.e. the first taste of Nirvana. We just
wish the noise in our minds would stop cold, but are unable to will this


to happen. We wish the vibrations, which can be quite intense, harsh
and irritating by this stage, would all go away forever. If we fail to
associate the pain ending with deep insights but instead falsely associate
it with changing something in our ordinary life, we are likely to wander
far and wide until we come to realize the limitations of ordinary
solutions.
This is the stage when people are most likely to quit their jobs or
schooling out of frustration and go on a long retreat or spiritual quest.
Fascination with celibacy as somehow being “a higher spiritual path” can
arise. Our renunciation trip can be very disorienting to partners,
particularly if we were going to the opposite extreme of intense sexuality
during the stage of the Arising and Passing Away which probably
occurred relatively recently, so try to be sensitive to their needs if you
can. Somewhere in here, there can arise the tendency to try to get one’s
life and finances in order so that one can leave the world behind for a
time and have something to come back to without having to worry about
such things for a while. A profound resolution to push onward can arise
at this stage driven by our powerful frustration and the powerful
compassion in it. We make the last push for freedom, the push against
the seemingly impenetrable wall of...

10. RE-OBSERVATION

This stage may not sound like much of a problem, as it has such a
boring-sounding name, but this stage is often, though not always, like a
brick wall, particularly the first few times we run into it. It can be as if all
of the stages of the Dark Night converge again for one last important
lesson, the lesson of Re-observation. We must perceive the true nature
of the sensations that make up all of our ideas of perfection, all of the
ideals we cling to, all images of how the world should be and shouldn’t
be, all desire for anything to be other than the way that it is as well as all
desire for enlightenment that is anything other than this. It may seem
impossible to sit for even a minute, as the levels of restlessness and
aversion to meditation and all experience can get quite high. This stage
and part of stage 3 (The Three Characteristics) can share some
common features. This should be seen as a strong warning to those who
are prone to being overly certain about “where they are.” I get a
reasonable number of emails from people who claim they are sure they


are in re-observation, and shortly thereafter they are describing A&P
territory, meaning that they had just been in The Three Characteristics
territory, not Re-observation. Continuing to investigate the true nature of
these sorts of sensations and our map theories is often difficult, and this
is a common cause of failure to progress.
Now, I am about to describe all sorts of emotional or psychological
manifestations that can sometimes happen at this stage. The more
extreme the description of a possible side-effect of this stage, the rarer
that side-effect is likely to be, particularly those that sound like
descriptions of mental illness. For someone who is staying at the level of
bare sensate experience, as I strongly recommend, the only difficult
manifestations that seem to be quite common are a strong sense of
aversion to formal meditation and experience, and a deep sense of
primal frustration, though these tend to fall quickly in the face of good
practice, and if our concentration is strong enough and our other factors
are in balance, we may move through this stage with no problem at all.
The aversion to meditation and experience are due to the fact that
the vibrations by this point can be quite fast and harsh and the noise in
our repetitive minds quite irritating. Some of my own descriptions of
this stage while on retreat have included such phrases as “the
mindstorm” and “a bracing work in D minor for six sense doors,
hailstorm and stuttering banshee.” If we are very powerful meditators, it
can literally feel as if we will be torn apart by these vibrations, and this is
exactly what we are trying to accomplish. Even if the other odd
manifestations do arise, if we are practicing well they should not last very
long at all, at best minutes, at worst hours or days.
All of that said, and before I go on, those who are crossing this
territory with strong concentration abilities and using some very rarefied
object, such as a complex visualization on sacred geometry as one of
many possible examples, may, if they are very good, pass through this
stage with little or no difficulty at all, and all they may notice is that the
thing gets wider and wider, the patterns get more complex and attain to
wider, more spherical dimensions and perhaps many-fold symmetries,
and that it comes around to encompass basically the whole field of
experience, kind of like watching an IMAX movie of a moving
technicolor spirograph in the front row, or some similar thing. I use this


example partly due to my own experiments and partly to illustrate
general points. Different objects will produce different specifics, such as
colors, images, etc.,  while some universal aspects of what happens
during this stage will remain basically the same.
You see, Re-observation is actually all fluff and no substance, but if
you confuse fluff for substance, the effect will be the same as if it
actually had substance. It is like a toothless dog with a ferocious bark. If
you run screaming or faint from fear when the dog barks, then it needed
no teeth to prevent your progress. The corollary is that the primary sign
that the negative side effects that may occur in the Dark Night are
actually not associated with insight stages but instead are due to other
processes is that they do not change much in the face of strong and
accepting investigation or stopping practice entirely. That said…
This stage is sometimes called the “rolling up the mat stage” and is
when many who joined monasteries in the stage of the Arising and
Passing Away now give up and disrobe. People on retreats tend to need
lots of reassurance and often leave right then even with good guidance
and encouragement. There can be the distinct feeling that it is
impossible to go forward and useless to go back, which is exactly the
lesson they should learn. Acceptance of right here and right now is
required, even if it seems that this mind and this body are quite
unacceptable and unworthy of investigation. No sensations are unworthy
of investigation!
One of the hallmarks of the early part of this stage is that we may
begin to clearly see exactly what our minds do all day long, see with
great clarity how the illusion of a dualistic split is even created in the first
place sensation by sensation, moment to moment, but somehow there is
not yet enough spaciousness of perspective and equanimity to make
good use of this information. This can be very frustrating, as we wonder
how many times we have to learn these lessons before they stick.
Great feelings of frustration and disenchantment with life,
relationships, sex, jobs, moral codes and “worldly” responsibilities may
sometimes emerge at this stage in ways that can cause all sorts of
disruption and angst. These aspects of one’s life can temporarily seem
bland and pointless at this stage, though it may seem that this will always
be the way one feels about them. This stage can mimic or perhaps


manifest as some degree of clinical depression. Beware of making
radical life changes that cannot easily be undone (such as a divorce), or
firing off  angry emails to your boss based upon the temporary feelings
that may arise during this stage. For those that recognize that they are in
this stage, some sort of active mental compensation for these potential
effects can be helpful so as to keep one’s life functioning. It can help
one appear more “together” than one feels, and thus maintain
relationships, jobs, studies, etc. at some sort of functional level. This can
be very skillful if it is also combined with practice that allows the
experiences of this stage to be acknowledged and understood as well.
Layers of unhelpful and previously hidden expectation, pressure
and anxiety can show their true uselessness, though this beneficial
process can be very confusing and difficult. We may get the sense that
we have never had such a strong feeling life, and until we get used to this
new awareness of our previously subtle emotions, this stage can be quite
overwhelming. Occasionally, people can also have what can seem like
full psychotic breaks during this stage, though if these are truly a side
effect of insight practices they should pass quickly. The big trick here is
to continue to acknowledge and accept the content but also continue to
see the true nature of the sensations that make up these natural
phenomena. This can be extremely hard to do, especially if people have
chanced upon this stage without the benefit of the guidance of a welldeveloped insight tradition and teachers who can recognize this
territory.
Those who do not know what to do with this stage or who get
overwhelmed by the mind states can get so lost in the content that they
begin to lose it. This is the far extreme of what can happen in this stage.
Fear is frightening, misery is miserable, and seemingly psychotic
episodes are very confusing and destabilizing. In the face of such
experiences, we may swing to the opposite extreme, clinging desperately
to grandiose images of ourselves. These things can easily perpetuate
themselves, and this can become a blatantly destructive mental habit if
people persist in wallowing in these dark emotions and their deep and
unresolved issues for too long. It can be like cognitive restructuring
from Hell.


If the content continues to be bought without the ability to see its
true nature, then the mind can spiral down and down into madness and
despair. When people mention “touching their own madness” on the
spiritual path, they are often talking about this stage. This stage can
make people feel claustrophobic and tight. If they push to make
progress, they can feel that they are just getting wound up tighter and
tighter. If they do nothing then they are still suffering anyway.
The advice here is: stick with it but don’t try to force it. Pay attention
to balancing effort and acceptance. Remember that discretion is the
better part of valor. Practice in moderation as well as maintaining a longterm view can be helpful. Think of practice as a life-long endeavor, but
do just what you can each day. Stay present-oriented. Walks in nature or
places with large, expansive views can help, as can exercise. This stage
has the power to profoundly purify us, given sufficient commitment to
just trying to sit with it, be clear, precise and accept all this despite the
pain and anguish, both physical and mental, that it can bring. If on
retreat: sit and walk according to the schedule, apply the technique as
prescribed every second if humanly possible, and do not leave early!
This stage is actually a profound opportunity to see clearly the pain
of the dualistic aspect of our attachments, aversions, desires, hopes,
fears and ideals, as all this has been amplified to an unprecedented
level. It is this stage that makes possible the path of heroic effort,
diligent investigation of this moment based upon the powerful desire for
enlightenment, as at this stage all of the unskillful aspects of this desire
are beaten out of the meditator with a force equivalent to the suffering
caused by them. You can actually get very far on highly imbalanced and
goal-oriented practice, and it can give sufficient momentum and
meditation skills so that, should you get your ass kicked in this stage,
one continues making progress quickly anyway.
Again, if the meditator stops practicing here, they can get stuck and
haunted by this stage in the whole of their life until they complete this
first progress of insight. Their lack of practice will deprive them of the
primary benefits of this stage (i.e., the increased perceptual abilities that
allowed them to get this much insight in the first place) and reduce their
chances of getting beyond it, and yet the emotional consequences can
remain long after the skills in meditation have faded


They can become “Chronic Dark Night Yogis,” meditators that
somehow just don’t figure out how to get past this stage for very long
periods of time. You would be surprised by how many of these people
there are out there. Their failure to unstick themselves may be due to
their own psychological makeup, poor instruction, imagining that the
spiritual life is all about bliss and wonderful emotions, believing in
absurd models of spirituality that do not allow for the full range of the
emotional and mental life, or chancing upon this stage outside of a welldeveloped insight tradition, which is what happened to me at about age
15. I was a Chronic Dark Night Yogi for 10 years without having any
idea what the hell was happening to me, so I can speak on this topic
with some authority. Further, I have gone through numerous other
Dark Nights at the higher stages of awakening and come across the
same issues again and again. Being stuck in the Dark Night can manifest
as anywhere from chronic mild depression and free-floating anxiety to
serious delusional paranoia and other classic mental illnesses, e.g.
narcissism and delusions of grandeur (my personal favorites). Dark
Night Yogis may act with a strange mixture of dedicated spirituality and
darkness.
I mentioned that the A&P Event could impart a bit of the
inspirational, radical religious leader quality to those prone to such
things. For these same individuals, Stage 10 can sometimes have a bit of
the paranoid, apocalyptic cult leader quality to it, a confused whirlwind
of powerful inspiration and despair. Just because someone has
borderline or antisocial personality disorder doesn't mean they can't
make progress in insight, and when they hit these stages it can be pretty
wild.
We may all have our own particular neurotic tendencies that come
out when we are under stress, but if you feel that you are really losing it:
get help, particularly from those who know this territory firsthand and
are willing to talk honestly about it! Don’t be a macho meditator and get
stuck, and don’t imagine that spiritual practice can’t cause some wild
and sometimes unpleasant side effects. One of the best things about
working with a thoroughly qualified and realized insight meditation
teacher before we get into this sort of trouble is that they will have some


idea of our baseline level of sanity and balance and thus know what we
are capable of.
That said, I suspect that both the Mushroom Factor and the dharma
jet set culture of teachers popping in and out with little chance for
students to have meaningful contact with them off retreat contributes to
the non-trivial number of Dark Night Yogis out there. I suspect that
there are fewer problems with Chronic Dark Night Yogis in traditions
where the maps of what can happen in this territory are well known and
in which there are teachers who are very accessible and honest about
their humanity and the possible range of the spiritual terrain.
On the other hand, sometimes genuine mental illness or unrelated
emotional or psychological difficulties can show up in people’s lives.
Blaming it all on the Dark Night may not always be accurate or helpful,
though if you have recently crossed the A&P Event and not completed
an insight cycle or gotten into the next stage (Equanimity), there is going
to be some Dark Night component mixed in with whatever else is going
on.
Meditation traditions tend to attract what can seem like more than
their fair share of the spiritual, emotional and mental equivalents of the
walking wounded. Sorting out what is what can sometimes get murky
and may require the help of both those who know this insight territory
and those who deal with routine mental illness and emotional and
psychological difficulties. The best combination would be someone who
knows both. I have a highly enlightened friend who has found it very
useful to take medication to treat his bipolar disorder. There is
something very down-to-earth and realistic about that. These practices
won’t save us from our biology. They merely reveal something in the
relationship to it.
On the other hand, there are those that are so deeply indoctrinated
by the models of “working through” our “dark stuff” that whenever it
comes up they turn to psychotherapy or a whole host of other ways of
getting their issues to “resolve” or go away. This view implies false
solidity and an exaggerated importance to these things that can make it
very hard to see the true nature of the sensations that make them up.
The trap here is that we turn a basic crisis of fundamental identity into a
witch-hunt for the specific things in our life that we imagine are making


us this dissatisfied with our basic experience. If someone has gotten to
this level of practice, no amount of tinkering with the specifics of our life
will ever solve the fundamental issue.
That doesn’t mean that some of the dissatisfactions with specific
aspects of our life may not be valid, and in fact they often are quite
valid. However, these relative issues get mixed in with a far deeper issue,
that of who we really are and aren’t, and until this progress of insight has
been completed, this mixture tends to greatly exaggerate our specific
criticisms of those things in our life that could actually stand
improvement and work. Learning this lesson can be very hard for some
people, and the dark irony is that they may wreck their relationships,
careers and finances, as well as emotional and physical health, trying to
get away from their own high level of insight into the true nature of
reality. Until they are willing to work on a more direct, sensate level,
there is no limit to the amount of angst and negativity they can project
onto their world. I have seen this play out again and again in myself and
in the lives of my dharma companions. It can be a very ugly business.
My advice for such situations is this: if, after careful analysis of your
insight practice leads you to the conclusion that you are in Reobservation, resolve that you will not wreck your life through excessive
negativity! Resolve this strongly and often. Follow your heart as best you
can, but try to spare yourself and the world from as much needless pain
as is possible. Through sheer force of will, keep it together until such
time as you are willing to face your sensate world directly and without
anesthesia or armor. I have seen what happens when people do
otherwise, and have come to the conclusion that, in general, things go
badly if people do not follow this advice, though some unexpected good
can always come from such situations.
The framework of the Three Trainings and the three types of
suffering that is found within each of their scope can be helpful here as
well. Since people are generally not used to facing fundamental crises of
identity, i.e. the basic issue in Re-observation, they are not familiar with
the pain of fundamental suffering. Being unfamiliar with the pain of
fundamental suffering, they are likely to imagine that it is actually
suffering produced by the specifics of their ordinary world. However, if
you have gotten to Re-observation, in short, if you have found these


techniques to be effective, have faith that the remaining advice may be
of value and try to fulfill this part of the experiment. That is, if you are
in Re-observation, the task that confronts you is to dissociate the
fundamental suffering you now know all too well from the specifics of
your life in an ordinary sense.
Following this advice may sound dangerous, heartless or bizarre to
some people. It is a valid criticism. In an ideal world, we would not have
to go around second-guessing ourselves and the sources of our suffering
in the specific way that I advocate here. In an ideal world, we would
really have our psychological trip together, be able to stay with the
practice during these stages, and thus cross quickly through the Dark
Night and finish this practice cycle. It definitely can be done.
However, we are not always ideal practitioners, and thus the Dark
Night often causes the problems mentioned above that need to be dealt
with somehow. My solutions to what happens when we cannot or will
not do insight practices in the face of the Dark Night are also not ideal.
However, the outcomes are likely to be much healthier in the short and
long term than those that come from simply allowing unrestrained Dark
Night bleed-through. Strangely, I have come to the conclusion that
simply practicing is often much easier than trying to stop Dark Night
bleed-through if we are willing to just try it, though it can easily seem
otherwise. The old kindergarden evaluation, “Follows instructions, plays
well with others,” is still a valuable standard in the Dark Night.
Not restraining one’s negativity and reactivity in the Dark Night is a
bit like getting stinking drunk and then driving in heavy traffic rather
than just sitting down and waiting to sober up. Not continuing to do
insight practices in this stage is like going into surgery, opening up an
incision, making some repairs, and then freaking out because the patient
now has a big, bleeding incision and running away from the operating
table, leaving them there to suffer. You could think of many ways to
make the patient happy and try them all, but until you close up that
wound they are gonna’ be pissed! Unfortunately, in this case you are
both the surgeon and the patient. Face the wound and close it up! You
obviously have the necessary skills, as you have gotten this far. Use
them. The operation is nearly over.


There are also those who try to investigate the true nature of their
psychological demons and life issues but get so fixated on using insight
to make them go away that they fail to hold these things in a wider,
more realistic and appropriate perspective. This subtle corruption of
insight practices turns them into another form of denial rather than a
path to awakening. Drawing from the agendas of training in morality, in
which there is concern for the specific thoughts and feelings that make
up our experience, they fail to make progress in insight, whose agenda is
simply to see the true nature of all sensations as they are. Both are
important, but it is a question of timing.
I have come to the conclusion that, with very rare and fleeting
exceptions, 95% of the sensations that make up our experience are
really no problem at all, even in the hard stages, but seeing this clearly is
not always easy. We tend to fixate on strong sensations when they arise,
those that are very painful or very pleasant, and in these times we can
miss the fact that most of our reality is likely made of sensations that are
no big deal, thus missing many great opportunities for easy insights.
Further, the Dark Night can bring up all sorts of unfamiliar feelings that
we rarely if ever have experienced with such clarity or intensity. Until we
get used to these feelings, they can frighten us and make us reactive
because of our unfamiliarity with them even if they are not actually that
strongly unpleasant.
I highly recommend using physical sensations, such as those of the
breath, as the objects of inquiry during the Dark Night whenever
possible, as plunging into emotional content, even with the intention of
investigating it, can sometimes be a very hard way to go. Remember,
whether we gain insight through investigating physical or mental objects
is completely irrelevant! Insight is insight. Choose objects for
investigation by which you don’t get caught whenever possible. The best
thing about reality, particularly in the Dark Night, is that you only have
to deal with one little flickering sensation at a time. Staying on that level
when doing insight practices is an unusually good idea. Pay attention to
what is right in front of you, but keep your attention open.
All of that scary stuff said, there are people who breeze straight from
the Arising and Passing Away on through the whole of the Dark Night
in as little as a few easy minutes or hours and hardly notice it at all, so


don’t let my descriptions of what can sometimes happen script you into
imagining that the Dark Night has to be a gigantic problem. It absolutely
doesn’t. These descriptions of what can sometimes happen are merely
there to help those who do encounter these sorts of problems to realize
that these things can happen and so be more able to deal with them
skillfully. There is no medal awarded for having a tough time in the
Dark Night or for staying in it for longer than necessary, much to my
dismay.
One of the more bizarre potholes we can fall into in the Dark Night
is to become identified and fascinated with the role of The Great
Spiritual Basket Case. “I am so spiritual that my life is a non-stop
catastrophe of uncontrollable insights, disabling and freakish raptures,
and constant emotional crises of the most profound nature. My spiritual
abilities are proven and verified by what a mess I am making of my life.
How brave I am to screw up my life in this way! Oh, what a glorious and
holy wreck I am.” Both my sympathy and intolerance for those caught
in this trap is directly related to the amount of time I have spent in that
trap being just like them. Whereas we should not try to pretend that the
Dark Night hasn’t made us a basket case if it has done so, we should
neither revel in being a basket case nor use the Dark Night as an excuse
for not being as kind and functional as we can possibly be.
One way or the other, when we finally give up and rest in things as
they are without trying to change them or be them, i.e. are very
accepting of our actual humanity as well as clear about the Three
Characteristics of mental and physical phenomena, there arises...

11. EQUANIMITY

Finally, we really begin to understand and surrender to the truth of
things. We accept the truth of our actual human lives as they are at a
deep level. All of the “stuff” that the Dark Night may have brought up
may still be going on, but somehow it has lost its ability to cause real
trouble. Equanimity is much more about something in the relationship
to phenomena than anything specific about the phenomena themselves.
Equanimity can have sort of a rough start, strangely enough, as well as
some mildly painful and irritating sensations, but the meditator feels that
some barrier has finally broken, a weight has lifted and practice can
continue.


However, this stage can be such a relief after Re-observation that it is
very tempting to solidify it into the fourth samatha jhana either because
doing so is so nice or because of fear of falling back to Re-observation,
which can easily occur. However, as I continue to mention, not
investigating the qualities of this stage, such as peace, ease, and a
panoramic perspective, causes failure to progress and makes falling back
to Re-observation more likely.
The first vipassana jhana is about building up the basic skills of what
is a physical sensations, what is a mental sensation, how they relate, and
what the Three Characteristics feel like in practice. The Arising and
Passing away is about seeing this very clearly and profoundly for the
object of meditation. The Dark Night is about these insights then
coming around to the background and seeing more complex emotional
and psychological constructs of mental and physical sensations as they
are. The fourth vipassana jhana, meaning this stage, is about seeing the
true nature of even more complex, inclusive, subtle and fundamental
things, like space, awareness, investigation, wonder, expectation,
anticipation, peace, ease, questioning, and those sorts of things in ways
that cut through the center and include the whole background and
foreground as well.
This early stage can feel very familiar and “normal,” like we have
remembered something simple and good from our childhood. If we felt
weary of the world in the Dark Night, we may suddenly find that the
world is just fine and may even be more engaged with it and excited
about it than before. Again, these potentially radical mood swings can be
very disorienting to those with whom we have close relationships. Try to
be sensitive to this and their feelings. Confidence returns, but whereas
there may have been a Rambo-like quality to it during stage 4. The
Arising and Passing Away, now there is more of the cool, charming
confidence of James Bond (sorry about the purely masculine images
here).
Somewhere in here there can arise a tendency to see the world and
those in it in very strange and unusual ways. I will give one example
from my own experience, but realize that tremendous variation is
possible here, so don’t take this too seriously. It is meant to try to
convey a very general concept. I remember looking around me at all the


people on retreat and even all the chickens, birds and puppies in the
monastery, and seeing them all simultaneously as “little mush demons”
(little squat greenish creatures with big, sad mouths and eyes) and fully
enlightened buddhas at the same time. They were both. In fact, we were
both.
We were deluded and small, yet transcendent and luminous. I
could see in some very strange way exactly how each of them, including
me, was caught in the world of form and confusion, trying to find
happiness and yet doing so from such a small and frightened place, and
yet all of this was vast buddha nature, all of this was the natural,
luminous and compassionate dance of God. Such strange perspectives
that try to resolve paradoxical insights do not always occur, but this is
included here in case they do and perhaps to provoke knowing laughter
from those with their own unique stories from this part of the path.
More sexual and stylized versions of these experiences can also explain
where some of the more exotic tantric teachings come from.
Sometimes the early part of stage 11 can produce a real sense of
freedom in the conventional sense, freedom from cares, worries, and
even responsibilities and social conventions. One may sometimes feel
that one is simply beyond everything, and it must be admitted that this is
a wonderful feeling. It tends to fade quickly enough on its own, but it
might be possible to get caught by it if one stopped practicing entirely.
Those who became spiritual fanatics or freaks after the A&P and during
the Dark Night may now begin to act much more like their old selves,
with their spiritual path being much less of a Big Holy Deal. About
damn time…
Visions of bright lights may arise once more, but they are really
more associated with stage 4, The Arising and Passing Away. Again, as
with that earlier stage, the meditator is able to sit for longer and longer
periods of time and begins to clearly perceive the Three Characteristics
with spaciousness and breadth. The big difference is that the A&P is
more about the object of meditation and Equanimity is much more
about the whole sensate universe. There is less rapture and more
equanimity than in the stage of the Arising and Passing Away. There are
rarely if ever the spontaneous physical motions and odd breathing
patterns that come with that earlier stage. Unfortunately, just to make


people on retreat and even all the chickens, birds and puppies in the
monastery, and seeing them all simultaneously as “little mush demons”
(little squat greenish creatures with big, sad mouths and eyes) and fully
enlightened buddhas at the same time. They were both. In fact, we were
both.
We were deluded and small, yet transcendent and luminous. I
could see in some very strange way exactly how each of them, including
me, was caught in the world of form and confusion, trying to find
happiness and yet doing so from such a small and frightened place, and
yet all of this was vast buddha nature, all of this was the natural,
luminous and compassionate dance of God. Such strange perspectives
that try to resolve paradoxical insights do not always occur, but this is
included here in case they do and perhaps to provoke knowing laughter
from those with their own unique stories from this part of the path.
More sexual and stylized versions of these experiences can also explain
where some of the more exotic tantric teachings come from.
Sometimes the early part of stage 11 can produce a real sense of
freedom in the conventional sense, freedom from cares, worries, and
even responsibilities and social conventions. One may sometimes feel
that one is simply beyond everything, and it must be admitted that this is
a wonderful feeling. It tends to fade quickly enough on its own, but it
might be possible to get caught by it if one stopped practicing entirely.
Those who became spiritual fanatics or freaks after the A&P and during
the Dark Night may now begin to act much more like their old selves,
with their spiritual path being much less of a Big Holy Deal. About
damn time…
Visions of bright lights may arise once more, but they are really
more associated with stage 4, The Arising and Passing Away. Again, as
with that earlier stage, the meditator is able to sit for longer and longer
periods of time and begins to clearly perceive the Three Characteristics
with spaciousness and breadth. The big difference is that the A&P is
more about the object of meditation and Equanimity is much more
about the whole sensate universe. There is less rapture and more
equanimity than in the stage of the Arising and Passing Away. There are
rarely if ever the spontaneous physical motions and odd breathing
patterns that come with that earlier stage. Unfortunately, just to make


things confusing, there is often a single double-dip unknowing event,
with one being halfway down the breath and the other at the end of that
breath, very soon after the shift from Re-observation to Equanimity.
In the early part of this stage, reality may appear a bit “chunky” for a
while, and practice may seem quite possible but may seem to require
steady but sustainable work. If one is tired, one may begin having
dropouts that are similar to what occurred in Dissolution but more
extreme. It may be hard to read and pay attention, hard to listen to
people and hear, hard to notice where one is and what one is doing.
The arising of some sort of fear of madness and death is not
uncommon at this stage, but usually does not cause too much trouble
and may even seem comical or welcome. A related and common feeling
in the early part of this stage is the general sense that something big is
about to happen, though this feeling is also common before the A&P
Event. These feelings are worthy of sensate investigation in a wide and
inclusive way.
Reality can now be perceived with great breadth, precision, and
clarity, and soon with no special effort. This is called “High
Equanimity.” Vibrations may become predominant, and reality may
become nothing but vibrations. Vibrating formless realms may even
arise, with no discernable image of the body being present at all. It may
feel like reality is trying to synchronize with itself, and that is exactly
correct. Investigate this feeling. Phenomena may even begin to lose the
sense that they are of a particular sense door, and mental and physical
phenomena may appear nearly indistinguishably as just vibrations of
suchness, sometimes referred to as “formations.”
I put off writing about formations for a long time, as they are a
conceptually difficult topic. Further, the classical definition of
formations is perhaps not so clear-cut, so I wondered about imposing
my own functional and experiential definitions on the term. However,
as the topic of formations has arisen in so many conversations recently,
I thought that it would be worth taking on despite the difficulties.
I am going to define formations as the primary experience of insight
meditation when one is solidly in the fourth vipassana jhana, the 11
th
ñana, High Equanimity, whose formal title is actually Knowledge of
Equanimity Concerning Formations. For those of you who find this


circular definition completely unhelpful, formations have the following
qualities when clearly experienced:
• They contain all the six sense doors in them, including thought, in a
way that does not split them up sequentially in time or positionally
in space. If you could take a 3D moving photograph that also
captured smell, taste, touch, sound, and thought, all woven into each
other seamlessly and containing a sense of flux, this would
approximate the experience of one formation. From a fourth
vipassana jhana point of view and from a very high dharma point of
view, formations are always what occur, and if they are not clearly
perceived then we experience reality the way we normally do.
• They contain not only a complete set of aspects of all six sense
doors within them, but include the perception of space (volume)
and even of time/movement within them.

• When the fourth vipassana jhana is first attained, subtle mental
sensations might again “split off” from “this side,” much as in the
way of the Knowledge of Mind and Body, but with the Three
Characteristics of phenomena and the space they are a part of being
breathtakingly clear. Until mental and physical sensations fully
synchronize on “that side,” there can be a bit of a “tri-ality,” in which
there is the sense of the observer “on this side,” and nearly the
whole of body and mind as two fluxing entities “over there.” As
mental phenomena and physical phenomena gradually integrate
with the sense of luminous space, this experientially begs the
question, “What is observing formations?” at a level that is way
beyond just talking about it. For you Khabbala correspondance fans,
these insights correspond to the the three points of Binah, the two
points of Chockmah, and finally the single point of Kether.

• Formations are so inclusive that they viscerally demonstrate what is
pointed to by the concept of “no-self” in a way that no other mode
of experiencing reality can. As formations become predominant, we
are faced first with the question of which side of the dualistic split we
are on and then with the question of what is watching what earlier
appeared to be both sides. Just keep investigating in a natural and
matter-of-fact way. Let this profound dance unfold. If you have


gotten to this point, you are extraordinarily close and need to do
very little but relax and be gently curious about your experience.
• When experienced at very high levels of concentration, formations
lose the sense that they were even formed of experiences from
distinguishable sense doors. This is hard to describe, but one might
try such nebulous phrases as, “waves of suchness,” or “primal,
undifferentiated experience.” This is largely an artifact of
experiencing formations high up in the byproducts of the fourth
vipassana jhana, i.e. the first three formless realms. This aspect of
how formations may be experienced is not necessary for the
discussions below.
It is the highly inclusive quality of formations that is the most
interesting, and leads to the most practical application of discussing
formations. It is because they are so inclusive that they are the gateway
to the Three Doors to stage 15. Fruition (see the chapter called The
Three Doors). They reveal a way out of the paradox of duality, the
maddening sense that “this” is observing/controlling/subject to/separated
from/etc. a “that.” By containing all or nearly all of the sensations
comprising one moment in a very integrated way, they contain the
necessary clarity to see through the fundamental illusions.
One of the primary ways that the illusion of duality is maintained is
that the mind partially “blinks out” for a part of each formation, the part
it wants to section off to appear separate. In this way, there is insufficient
clarity to see the interconnectedness and true nature of that part of
reality, and a sense of a self is maintained. When the experience of
formations arises, it comes out of a level of clarity that is so complete
that this “blinking” can no longer easily occur. Thus, when formations
become the dominant experience, even for short periods of time, very
profound and liberating insight is close at hand. That is why there are
systematic practices that train us to be very skilled in being aware of our
whole mental and physical existence. The more we practice being aware
of what happens, the less opportunities there are for blinking.
During the first three insight stages, we gained the ability to notice
that mental and physical sensations made up our world, how they
interacted, and then began to see the truth of them. We applied these
skills to an object (perhaps not of our choice, but an object


nonetheless), and saw it as it actually was with a high degree of clarity in
the A&P. By this point, these skills in perceiving clearly have become so
much of a part of who we are that they began to apply themselves to the
background, space and everything that seemed to be a reference point
or separate, permanent self as we entered the Dark Night. However,
our objects may have been quite vague or too disconcerting to have
been perceived clearly. Finally, we get to equanimity and put it all
together: we can see the truth of our objects and of the whole
background and are OK with this, and the result is the perception of
formations.
Formations contain within them the seeming gap between this and
that, as well as sensations of effort, intimacy, resistance, acceptance, and
all other such aspects of sensations from which a sense of self is more
easily inferred. Thus, these aspects begin to be seen in their proper
place, their proper context, i.e. as an interdependent part of reality, and
not split off or a self.
Further, the level of clarity out of which formations arise also allows
one to see formations from the time they arise to the time they
disappear, thus hitting directly at a sense of a self or sensate universe
continuing coherently in time. In the first part of the path the beginning
of objects was predominant. In the A&P we got a great sense of the
middle of objects but missed subtle aspects of the beginning and end. In
the Dark Night the endings are about all we could really perceive
clearly. Formations once again put all of this work we have done
together in a very natural and complete way.
Formations also explain some of the odd teachings that you might
hear about “stopping thought.” There are three basic ways we might
think about this dangerous ideal. We might imagine a world in which
the ordinary aspects of our world which we call “thought” simply do not
arise, a world of experience without those aspects of manifestation. You
can get very close to this in very strong concentration states, particularly
the 8
th
 samatha jhana. We might also think of stopping experience
entirely (as happens in Fruition), and this obviously includes thought.
Formations point to yet another possible interpretation of the
common wish to “stop thought,” as do very high levels of realization.
The seeming duality of mental and physical sensations is gone by the


time we are perceiving formations well. Thoughts appear as one
luminous aspect of the phenomenal world. In fact, I challenge anyone
to describe the bare experience of thinking or mental sensations in
terms beyond those of the five “physical” sense doors. Thus, in the face
of experiencing formations, it seems crude to speak in terms of thought
as separate from those of visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory
qualities, or even to speak in terms of these being separate entities.
When perceived clearly, what we usually call “thoughts” are seen to
be just aspects of the manifesting sensate world that we artificially select
out and label as thought. Just as it would be odd to imagine that an
ocean with many shades of blue is really many little bits of ocean, in
times of high clarity it is obvious that there is manifesting reality, and it is
absolutely inclusive. Look at the space between you and this book. We
don’t go around selecting out little bits of space and labeling them as
separate. In the face of formations, the same applies to experience, and
experience obviously includes the sensations we call thought.
Separating the early stages of Equanimity from its mature stage,
there tends to be a “near miss,” moment when we get very close to the
fruit of the path, which serves to really chill one out, as it were. From
this point enlightenment is likely to be attained quickly as long as the
meditator continues to simply practice and gently fine tune their
awareness and precision, paying gentle attention to things like thoughts
of progress and satisfaction with equanimity. At some point even this
becomes boring, and a certain cool apathy and even forgetfulness arises.
Around this part of Equanimity there can arise the feeling that we are
not really there, or that somehow we are completely out of phase with
reality. Conducting our ordinary business may be difficult in this phase
if we are out in the world rather than on the cushion, but it tends to last
only tens of minutes at most. The sense that one is practicing or trying
to get anywhere just vanishes, and yet this may hardly be noticeable at
all. We sort of come back, with luminosity again growing predominant.
Then we get lost in thoughts about something, some strangely clear
reverie, vision, object, or flight of fancy. By really buying in, we get set
up to check out. When understanding is completely in conformity with
the way things are, this is called...


12. CONFORMITY

This is why understanding things just as they are is so important.
This stage lasts only one moment and never arises again until one attains
the next stage of enlightenment. The same is true of the next two stages.
Stages 12-14 (Conformity, Change of Lineage, and Path) also share the
fact that they represent the three moments of the first entrance to
transcendent ultimate reality (stage 15. Fruition) through one of the
Three Doors. In subsequent attainments of Fruition at that path (during
the stage of Review), the three moments before Fruition are not called
Conformity, Change of Lineage and Path. These three stages will get
extensive treatment in the chapter on The Three Doors.

13. CHANGE OF LINEAGE

Having understood things just as they are, this next stage, which also
lasts for just a moment, “does the damage” as a friend of mine joyfully
put it. It permanently changes the minds of the meditators in ways that I
will discuss in just a bit. They leave the ranks of the unenlightened and
join the ranks of those that are. While the social designation of formal
lineage transmission is a very useful thing to have received, the results of
this stage are in fact what that symbolic act is all about. They have done
it, and thus attain...

14. PATH

This stage also lasts just a moment, and after the first completed
progress of insight it marks the first moment of the newly awakened
being’s awakened life. The first time around, this is called “stream
entry” or “first path” in the Theravada, the “fourth stage of the second
path” or “the first bhumi” in the Tibetan tradition, and many names in
Zen that are purposefully ambiguous. After a subsequent, new progress
of insight it marks the attainment of the next level of awakening, and
there are lots of names for those that will be discussed shortly. It is
directly followed by...

15. FRUITION

This is the fruit of all the meditator's hard work, the first attainment
of ultimate reality, emptiness, Nirvana, God or whatever you wish to call
it. In this non-state, there is absolutely no time, no space, no reference


point, no experience, no mind, no consciousness, no nothingness, no
somethingness, no body, no this, no that, no unity, no duality, and no
anything else. Reality stops cold and then reappears. Thus, this is
impossible to comprehend, as it goes completely and utterly beyond the
rational mind and the universe. To “external time” (if someone were
observing the meditator from the outside) this lasts only an instant. It is
like an utter discontinuity of the space-time continuum with nothing in
the unfindable gap.
The initial aftershocks, however, can go on for days, and may be
mild or spectacular, fun or unsettling or some mixture of these. There
are times when it is fun to show off, and this is one of those times.
Aftershocks I have noticed after paths include but are not limited to: the
visceral feeling that sensory reality is so intense that the nerves in one’s
forehead and upper neck may not be able to handle the strain, the
feeling that one has become diffused into the atmosphere without a
center, purpose, function, sense of direction or even of will, a feeling of
joy and gratitude beyond what is normally possible welling through
one’s being, the sense of discovery of that which one has most needed,
the profound sense of coming home, a quiet awe like the stillness after a
great storm, and rapturous transcendent highs that make anything that
happened after the A&P seem like dry toast.
Remember how I said in the section on the psychic powers that
strong concentration and intent make magickal things happen? Just after
the attainment of a path, particularly the first path, is a time when formal
resolutions have an outrageous amount of power. The Buddha said that
the greatest of all powers is to understand and then teach the dharma,
meaning to attain to full realization, however you define it, and to then
help others do the same. I had been advised to use this unique period
in my practice well, and I resolved to attain to full enlightenment for the
benefit of all beings as quickly as was reasonably possible. Despite all
the complex consequences of having done so, I do not regret my
decision in the least and highly recommend that you do the same.
On subsequent passes through Fruition of that path the mind tends
to be refreshed, bright, quiet and clear for a while, and milder forms of
the above listed phenomena may occur. It is as though someone hit the
reset button and cleared out all the junk for a little while. There is a nice


bliss wave that tends to follow and may take a few seconds to develop. If
you have not learned the concentration states yet, doing so in the
afterglow of a Fruition can make them much easier to attain and master.

16. REVIEW

In this stage, the meditator just keeps practicing largely as before. In
this way, they will learn to master the stages of insight, as they must pass
through them again each time they wish to re-attain Fruition. The first
few times through the cycle after the path has been obtained can
sometimes be quite intense and even very disturbing, as the mind tends
to be exceedingly powerful for a few days after a path has been gained
and yet is navigating in territory that is not yet mastered. One is advised
to be somewhat careful and perhaps very restrained in what one says
and does during the few days and perhaps weeks after attaining a path
or something that one thinks may be a path. However, it also sometimes
happens that realizations are hardly noticed at all, or if they are noticed,
there is simply the sense, “Well, I guess that’s done.” Powerful cycles
and the sense that things have been completed are not sure signs that a
progress of insight has been completed.
That said, when a progress of insight is completed, one may notice
the mind simply not doing lots of useless things it used to do, and it may
seem impossible that it even was able to do them. However, it may take
some time to figure out what the permanent implications of the path are
and what is just a product of its lingering and transient afterglow. It is
likely to take quite a while to really integrate the understandings that
come from a path into one's way of being in the world.
Mixed in with the sense of what is different is also a growing sense of
what hasn’t been changed at all, what aspects of reality are still basically
unenlightened and poorly perceived. After attaining the early paths,
what has remained untouched by that level of understanding is usually
fairly obvious. However, one of the difficulties with attaining higher
levels of enlightenment is that the sense of what is left to do can become
more and more vague and subtle. Again, give things time. Be patient. It
can sometimes take a while, perhaps weeks, months or even years, to
clearly see which understandings hold up under the pressures of the
world and which fade. You might not get a clear sense of the limits of
this path until you are well on your way to the next one.


Speaking of the world, Review is a great time to re-engage with the
specifics of our life. It is an unfortunate but true fact that one of the
possible side effects of the relentless focus on the Three Characteristics
that produces these spectacular insights is the habit of not paying much
attention to the specifics of our life. The specifics of our life are
obviously very, very important, and so now is a great time to pay a lot of
attention to them. Those around us may have noticed the side effects of
the Dark Night or some of the other stages and be worried about us or
even mad at us for how we behaved if we allowed too much to bleed
through. It is not always possible to make up for that sort of damage, but
now is a good time to try. Take the time to heal the old wounds you
discovered in yourself or created in your life while you were in the Dark
Night.
Also, go out and have some fun! Enjoy the richness of friendship,
exercise, leisure, work, entertainment, service, and life in general. In
short, do your best to make your life a great one in the conventional
sense. You should have been trying to do that all along, but try to forgive
yourself and learn from your mistakes if you were not able to do so.
Remember, the kind of renunciation that brings insights is seeing the
true nature of things. If you can see the true nature of the sensations
that make up a fun and healthy life, there is no need for any other type
of renunciation! In fact, buying into a strong renunciation trip is well
known for making people quite neurotic, and then the challenge is to
see the true nature of the sensations that make up renunciation-induced
neuroses. I’m not convinced that this is an easier way to go.
After attaining a path, particularly the early ones, the feeling that one
is particularly special is common, and from a certain point of view it is
true and understandable. However, what is truer is that something in the
understanding of the relationship to ordinary things is now “special,” or
at least somewhat unusual. The attainment of stream entry or a new
stage of awakening should be a cause for joy and celebration.
Unfortunately, people who have never attained these things tend to react
oddly or even poorly to such disclosures and sentiments. Strangely,
many people are very excited about the idea of people getting
enlightened but not the idea of you getting enlightened.


Those with higher levels of understanding than yours will know
where you are coming from, but will also know how much more there is
to go from their own experience, and their tendency to focus on that can
be frustrating. One’s teachers and more advanced companions may find
it amusing to be reminded of what it was like to be caught up in the
fascination with low levels of realization, but they know that eventually
even that has to be seen in some other way. One of my favorite
Chogyam Trungpa lines is, “You will never be decorated by your guru.”
Even if you are, I doubt if it will be of any great benefit to you.
Thus, two ironies of the spiritual life that one can encounter here
are that success can cause feelings of isolation and that the spiritual path
can be a very lonely one indeed. Sometimes writing can help, as can
finding those few people who seem to simultaneously be interested in
hearing the details of what you are going through without reinforcing
your fascination with these in ways that make it harder to see successes
in their proper proportion.
It is also not uncommon to feel that what one has experienced is just
so staggeringly profound that no one is likely to have ever really seen
such amazing things, perhaps including one’s teachers. However, if they
are the real deal and qualified to teach you, they are very likely to have
their own extensive list of spectacular and profound experiences and
realizations. However, as such things are so rarely discussed openly, one
may have a hard time believing this. As I have had to learn the hard
way, those who are particularly prone to extroversion and immoderate
speech in the face of recent insights can easily get themselves into
somewhat embarrassing and humbling situations. On the other hand,
eventually you may begin to outgrow or surpass your current teachers in
understanding and ability. This in and of itself can be confusing and
frustrating, causing role reversals that not everyone handles well. You
might be astounded at how easy it is to bruise the egos in the
conventional psychological sense of those who have seen through the
illusion of the ego in the high dharma sense.
As review continues, one gets very familiar with the territory of one’s
current path and its stages, and they may pass by more and more
quickly and easily. It can begin to seem that the only way to move
through the Review stages of insight is to not investigate reality too

closely. At some point, Fruition will no longer be as attractive and one
will feel that one really could be practicing more clearly and precisely.
This is a strong sign that the next set of stages is ready to arise.
That said, there may be times when one simply doesn’t want to
make progress as one can’t afford to be risking another Dark Night at
that point in their life. Strong resolutions to stay in Review, a lack of
really precise investigation and lots of indulgence in concentration states
can help one stay in a Review phase until one is ready to move onward.
However, progress of some kind can only be postponed for so long, and
the dharma has a relentless way of pushing us onward.
Bud Karas