Daniel Ingram - Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book
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 190
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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 191
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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 192
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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 193
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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 194
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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 195
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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 well-developed insight tradition and teachers who can recognize this territory.
Those who do not know what to do with this stage or who get
