Daniel Ingram - Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book
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.
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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 long-term 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.
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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 well-developed 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 198
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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 199
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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 Re-observation, 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 200
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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.
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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 202
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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.
