Related: A Meditation: Climbing Jacob's Ladder

If you realized I AMness, it is important to progress in terms of the Four Aspects of I AM, the two stanzas of anatta in 2) On Anatta (No-Self), Emptiness, Maha and Ordinariness, and Spontaneous Perfection. and the Two Types of Nondual Contemplation after I AM
Four Aspects of I AM

Many people get stuck in the initial I AM realization without much progress for decades. Fortunately I was able to progress relatively quickly (8 months from I AM realization to non-dual and anatta) compared to Thusness and many others that I know, who got stuck for decades due to a lack of good pointers and directions for progress from experienced teachers.

For progress after I AM realization, Thusness taught me about the deepening of the "I AM" in 4 aspects: 1) the aspect of impersonality, 2) the aspect of the degree of luminosity, 3) the aspect of dissolving the need to re-confirm and abide in I AMness and understanding why such a need is irrelevant, 4) the aspect of experiencing effortlessness (Thusness: any form of clinging, be it Self/self or Presence, will prevent a practitioner from correctly experiencing 'effortlessness')

By focusing on these four aspects of I AM, then later going deeper into the two types of nondual contemplations, I was able to make swift progress into non-dual and anatta realization.

"4 aspects are simply pathing you towards non-dual when you are in the phase of ultimate presence." – John Tan, 2020

"You must also understand that the four aspects are conveyed to you so that in the event you get lost in "I Amness", they can lead you back to the deeper insight of anatta and DO [Dependent Origination]." - John Tan, 2011

2007:

(12:39 PM) Thusness:    when impersonality steps in, the bond of the background, the perceiver is substantially reduced. Yeah, that is why he is willing to give up [Soh: give up grasping and reifying] the "I AM" now...

• 01 The Aspect of Impersonality;

This is the case when practitioners experience that everything is an expression of a universal cosmic intelligence. There is therefore no sense of a personal doer... rather, it feels like I and everything is being lived by a higher power, being expressed by a higher cosmic intelligence. But this is still dualistic – there is still this sense of separation between a 'cosmic intelligence' and the 'world of experience', so it is still dualistic.

Soh experienced impersonality after the I AM realization, however some people experience it before I AM realization. Some of the Theistic Christians may not have I AM realization (it depends - although many Christian mystics including Jesus Christ (https://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2018/12/jesus-christ-cosmic-consciousness-alan.html) himself have pointed out the I AM realization), however through their surrendering to Christ, they can drop their sense of personal doership and experience the sense of 'being lived by Christ', as in Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.". This is an experience of impersonality that may or may not come with the realization of I AM. And as Sailor Bob Adamson said, "That separate entity, the belief in that entity or person, has never done a damn thing! It never can and never will. You must realize that you have been lived. That body-mind that you call 'you' is being lived, and it is being lived quite effortlessly. As Christ said, 'Which of you, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature?' That separate entity can’t do a bloody thing."

It should be noted that impersonality is not just an experience of non-doership. It is the dissolving of the construct of 'personal self' that led to a purging of ego effect to a state of clean, pure, not-mine sort of "perception shift", accompanied with a sense that everything and everyone is being expressions of the same aliveness/intelligence/consciousness. This can then be easily extrapolated into a sense of a 'universal source' (but this is merely an extrapolation and at a later phase is deconstructed) and one will also experience 'being lived' by this greater Life and Intelligence.

“Of course, make no mistake, from the point of view of the total Understanding this teaching about whether you are the doer is in fact redundant; the question does not even arise. With the Understanding comes the natural and spontaneous apperception that there is no one here no individual to either be the doer or not be the doer. So the question is moot. What you think of as yourself; the whole package of body, mind, personality, ego, sense of individuality, personal history; none of that even exists as such, as anything other than an idea, a story, a concept in Consciousness. The discussion of whether or not 'you' can be a doer or not is, as Wei Wu Wei writes, like discussing whether the bird in the empty cage is captive. The cage is empty! There is nobody home!

At the morning talks recently there has been a musician who plays traditional Indian flute for the group after the talks. The flute does not know music: it does not know 'G'from 'B flat;' it does not know tempo or emphasis, and cannot make music come out of itself: it's just a hollow bamboo stick with holes in it! It is the musician who has the knowledge and the skill and the intention and the dexterity, and whose breath blows through the instru-ment and whose fingers manipulate the openings so that beautiful music flows out. When the music is ended, no one congratulates the wooden stick on the music it made:  it is the musician who is applauded and thanked for this beautiful gift of music.

It is precisely so with what we think of as our 'selves.'

We are instruments, hollow sticks, through which the Breath, the Spirit, the Energy which is Presence, All That Is, Consciousness, flows. Just as it is not the flute making the note, but the Musician making the note through the instrument, so it is the breath which is Presence which animates this mind and body and comes out through this mouth to make it seem that this mouth is speaking words. The basic misunderstanding, the basic ignorance, is this unwitting usurpation of the role of Musician by the instru-ment. This inversion of the truth is spontaneously realized when the Understanding occurs. It becomes obvious that there is no individual, that there is 'nobody home,'no entity’ here to be the doer or not. Because awakening is simply the Understanding that there is no one here to awaken.” – David Carse, Perfect Brilliant Stillness https://www.perfectbrilliantstillness.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Book-from-PerfectBrilliantStillness.org_.pdf

Impersonality will help dissolve the sense of self but it has the danger of making one attached to a metaphysical essence or to personify, reify and extrapolate a universal consciousness. It makes a practitioner feel "God". At this phase it is good to focus on this impersonal and universal aspect of consciousness, but beware of the tendency to extrapolate.

“...Next — and remarkably there is a next — we become aware of the other side of I Am, of the source from which it arises, within a stillness of surpassing quality. We see our I as a knot that blocks off the depths, a knot that makes itself the source of our will, intentions, choices, and decisions, including the intention to meditate in this moment. Gradually we loosen the knot until it gives way, until I let go entirely of being myself, of being my own source.

Until this point, our ascent has been into the depths within us. But always we have remained at the core of the experience, with the experience outside of us, of our core. Now we must empty that very core and open to what is deeper than our innermost center. We ourselves become the outside to the Sacred Will of the World, Who is our Source, and let that Will come through us, as us.

We inwardly prostrate ourselves, begging for reconnection, begging to become a part of that Greatness. Silently and wholeheartedly calling out to the Ultimate, completely and utterly opening the very kernel of who we are, we reach beyond the world of sacred light, into the unbounded emptiness, which is also an overflowing fullness, an intimacy with all, with the All.

This is the Sacred Will of the World,
Of Whom I am now a particle,
Who lends me the will to be myself,
Who lends me my I,
Who is my very Self,
Whom I hope to become able to serve by emptying myself unconditionally,
In Whom we are all united,
And Who continuously creates and sustains this universe in love.

This ultimate stage of the meditation comes only as an act of grace from Above. It lies well beyond our ability to make happen, although our emptiness, our surrender, and our love are necessary. Attempting to enter      here, prayer may help. If you are so inclined, silently repeat one of God’s names, one close to your heart, one that both expresses your yearning and brings you peace.

In closing the meditation, we climb back down Jacob’s Ladder to return to our daily life, though somewhat changed inwardly. We come, in turn, back to the sacred light, back to the cognizant stillness of consciousness and the presence of I Am, back to sensation and relaxation, and thus back to the base of the ladder. We rest in awareness as the meditation settles in us.” - Joseph Naft, A Meditation: Climbing Jacob's Ladder, https://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-for-different-phasesaspects-of-i.html

“I AM the Tree of Life within you. My Life will and must push forth, but It will do it by gradual and steady growth. You cannot come into your fruitage before you have grown to it. Remember, My Life is all the time building you up into the perfection of health and strength and beauty, that must express outwardly as It is even now expressing within. You who have begun to realize I AM within, but have not yet learned to commune with Me, listen and learn now…

...Yes, this cell consciousness is common to every cell of every body, no matter what its kind, because it is an Impersonal consciousness, having no purpose other than doing the work allotted it. It lives only to work wherever needed. When through with building one form, it takes up the work of building another, under whatever consciousness I desire it to serve.

Thus it is likewise with you. You, as one of the cells of My Body, have a consciousness that is My Consciousness, an intelligence that is My Intelligence, even a will that is My Will. You have none of these for yourself or of yourself. They are all Mine and for My use only.

Now, My consciousness and My Intelligence and My Will are wholly Impersonal, and therefore are common with you and with all the cells of My Body, even as they are common with all the cells of your body.

I AM the directing Intelligence of All, the animating Spirit, the Life, the Consciousness of all matter, of all Substance. If you can see it, You, the Real you, the Impersonal you, are in all and are one with all, are in Me and are one with Me; just as I AM in you and in all, and thereby am expressing My Reality through you and through all.

This will, which you call your will, is likewise no more yours personally than is this consciousness and this intelligence of your mind and of the cells of your body yours. It is but that small portion of My Will which I permit the personal you to use. Just as fast as you awaken to recognition of a certain power or faculty within you and begin consciously to use it, do I allow you that much more of My Infinite Power.

All power and its use is but so much recognition and understanding of the use of My Will. Your will and all your powers are only phases of My Will, which I supply to suit your capacity to use it. Were I to entrust you with the full power of My Will, before you know how consciously to use it, it would annihilate your body utterly.

To test your strength and more often to show you what the misuse of My Power does to you, I at times allow you to commit a sin, so-called, or to make a mistake. I even permit you to become inflated with the sense of My Presence within you, when It manifests as a consciousness of My Power, My Intelligence, My Love; and I let you take these and use them for your own personal purposes. But not for long -- for, not being strong enough to control them, they soon take the bit in their teeth, run away with you, throw you down in the mire, and disappear from your consciousness for the time being.

Always I AM there to pick you up, after the fall, although you do not know it at the time; first straightening you out and then starting you onward again, by pointing out the reason for your fall; and finally, when you are sufficiently humbled, causing you to see that these powers accruing to you by the conscious use of My Will, My Intelligence and My Love, are allowed you only for use in My Service, and not at all for your own personal ends.

Do the cells of your body, the muscles of your arm, think to set themselves up as having a separate will from your will, or a separate intelligence from your intelligence? No, they know no intelligence but yours, no will but yours. After a while it will be that you will realize you are only one of the cells of My Body; and that your will is not your will, but Mine; that what consciousness and what intelligence you have are Mine wholly; and that there is no such person as you, you personally being only a physical form containing a human brain, which I created for the purpose of expressing in matter and Idea, a certain phase of which I could express best only in that particular form.

All this may be difficult for you now to accept, and you may protest very strenuously that it cannot be, that every instinct of your nature rebels against such yielding and subordinating yourself to an unseen and unknown power, however Impersonal or Divine.

Fear not, it is only your personality that thus rebels. If you continue to follow and study My Words, all will soon be made clear, and I will surely open up to your inner understanding many wonderful Truths that now are impossible for you to comprehend. Your Soul will rejoice sing glad praises, and you will bless these words for the message they bring…

...The proof of this is, man does not and cannot breathe of himself. Something far greater than his conscious, natural self lives in his body and breathes through his lungs. A mighty power within his body thus uses the lungs, even as it uses the heart to force the blood containing the life it drew through the lungs to every cell of the body; as it uses the stomach and other organs to digest and assimilate food to make blood, tissue, hair and bone; as it uses the brain, the tongue, the hands and feet, to think and say and do everything that man does.”

- The Impersonal Life by Joseph Benner


“When we move from "I AMness" and mature the deconstruction of personality, we experience God-Like qualities. Seeing everything as one manifestation of 'One Life' and Presence being the same for everyone.

...just the isness without the individuality.  Once this individuality is gone (Whether permanently or temporary), you will intuit that all as sharing the Source or as Manifestation of this Source.  But that is not non-duality.  That is impersonality. :)  That is why you need to experience that too.” - John Tan, 2009

“(6:06 PM) AEN:    Eckhart Tolle: "Ultimately nothing is yours. you are giving energy because that energy whatever form comes from the source of all energies. all energies derives from one's source. so you allow yourself to be a vehicle in which this energy flows out into the world, and then the sense of me, the doer, isn't there,
and the sense that there is a poor person that i am helping isn't there either. so there is simply the process that happens through you. and that is the non egoic way, and to be of service is a beautiful practice because the ego is out of the way, and through
(6:06 PM) AEN:     that you realize you don't own anything ultimately, and the energy is not yours, it's universal energy that comes through."
(10:14 PM) Thusness:    In layman term yes
but what is this energy
(10:15 PM) Thusness:    anyway, where you get this quote from?
(10:15 PM) AEN:    i just watched a video by eckhart tolle just now, quoted from there
recent talk
(10:16 PM) AEN:    the energy is simply life?
(10:16 PM) Thusness:    icic... seems like he has moved from "I AM" to the "impersonality"
(10:16 PM) Thusness:    there is always only life expressing, no you.” - June 2010

“Session Start: Saturday, 5 June, 2010

(11:27 PM) Thusness:    certainty of being when you focus on the 4 aspects till the peak and with right understanding, you will also have the same experience as anatta and emptiness. when you felt that the will of the source becomes your will, you become life itself, that is the same experience. actually all is the same experience except that buddhism provides the right understanding. in the experience of "I AM" and the article you posted about the divine, what is the peak of experience phase?
(11:48 PM) AEN:    which article about divine?
Hmm im not sure
(11:49 PM) Thusness:    the article about the source after "I AM"
(11:50 PM) AEN:    is it like the 'sacred will of the world'
i mean the peak of experience
(11:51 PM) Thusness:    after glimpses and realization of the source, when the divine will becomes your will. you must be able to experience every manifestation as the grace of divine will. so must understand this in terms of direct experience and right view. :) i will talk to you when we meet. do you know why there is the sensation of a 'divine will'?
(11:57 PM) AEN:    bcos the sense of self is being let go... and its seen that everything is spontaneously arising from the source
(11:58 PM) Thusness:    and what is this 'source' that seems to be doing the work?
(11:59 PM) AEN:    consciousness, life?
(11:59 PM) Thusness:    isn't "I AM" the consciousness?
(12:00 AM) AEN:    ya but at the beginning it still feels like an individuated sense of presence... but then later its seen as more impersonal, like everything is merely the expression of the source
(12:00 AM) Thusness:    first you must understand the separation is due to dualistic thought, thought separates. do you know what is the 'divine' will? the sensation due to "the sense of self is being let go... and its seen that everything is spontaneously arising from the source" causes the 'divine will'
(12:02 AM) AEN:    oic..
(12:03 AM) Thusness:    what is the divine will?
(12:03 AM) AEN:    it means its happening due to the divine source, nothing is happening due to an individual will/agent/doer
(12:04 AM) Thusness:    when someone hit the bell, anything due to divine will?
(12:05 AM) AEN:    its also divine will bcos there is ultimately no separate person who acts, and no separate person who experience.. everything is manifested by the divine will... including every action that is spontaneously arising
(12:05 AM) Thusness:    when someone hit the bell, anything so divine?
(12:05 AM) AEN:    it’s a manifestation of consciousness
(12:05 AM) Thusness:    no good no good. because of the lack of understanding of your nature. your nature is empty. what is this divine will? it is just DO [dependent origination]. because we think in terms of entity and the 'weight of this dualistic and inherent' tendencies makes us feel separate and inherent. instead of seeing 'DO', we see it as divine will. not knowing empty nature, we mistaken DO for divine will. not knowing no-self nature, we thought we are independent. when no-self is fully experienced and insight of anatta rises, you do not feel source as separated from 'you'
there is merely manifestation, empty luminosity. empty as in DO and therefore does not require 'divine will', yet all manifests due to empty nature, effortless and spontaneous. there is conditions that are required for manifestations. a 'divine will' is not necessary
(12:11 AM) AEN:    icic..
(12:12 AM) Thusness:    when a practitioner realizes no-self and anatta insight arises, he clearly sees conditions. there is no divine will to listen to, but whenever condition is, manifestation is. slowly understand this.  do not see DO as something dead. see it as direct manifestation of your breathe just like you experience everything as the grace of this divine will. feel this grace of life everywhere. letting go of yourself completely and feel this life
(12:18 AM) AEN:    oic.. i am writing my experience to lzls lol
(5:36 PM) Thusness:    Lol.  In Chinese

(6:12 PM) Thusness:    the second experience is more of 天地同根，万物同体. (tian di tong gen, wan wu tong ti: heaven and earth have one root, ten thousand phenomena have the same substance)
(6:12 PM) Thusness:    clouded by '我相' (wo xiang, self image, egoity)
(6:12 PM) AEN:    what do you mean
(6:13 PM) Thusness:    means the second experience is more of a realization on the same source.
much like ?
(6:13 PM) AEN:    oic..
why you said clouded by wo xiang
(6:15 PM) Thusness:    ?  (xiang, image) is simply a construct.  That is from a dualistic point of view, being 'connected' must always be the case.  When you de-contruct personality, you merely discover. a practitioner must also be aware of the 'weight' of these constructs. from an empty point of view, when the tendency is there, it is also not right to say that the interconnected state is always there, always the case.  Obviously 'you' are not 'connected'. when the 'construct' is strong, there is no such experience or when the 'personality' is there, there is no experience of '万物同体' (everything has the same substance/source).  Or 'personality' is that very experience of individuality and therefore cannot have any experience of same 'source'. get it?
(6:19 PM) AEN:    ic.. ya
(6:19 PM) Thusness:    the former does not realize the causes and conditions for any arising. when we say it is always 'there' we are having 'absolute view'.  If we cling to that, then that will prevent clear seeing.  So what is the experience of 'individuality' like?  it is the very experience of what practitioner before the 'connection' feel and understand. that is a state of reality, cannot be said to be determined or not.
(6:21 PM) AEN:    oic.. what you mean by that is a state of reality cannot be said to be determined or not
(6:22 PM) AEN:    hmm i think i get what you mean. so one must deconstruct the individuality otherwise there is no feeling of connection
(6:22 PM) Thusness:    yes. for personality is the very state of individuality. what i want you to understand is not to have a pre-determined state.
(6:26 PM) AEN:    ic... that means according to conditions we experience the connection, but its not always there?
(6:27 PM) Thusness:    yes it is better to understand that way

(6:28 PM) Thusness:    now when you experience certainty of being, you only experience the undeniability of your existence. doubtless, certain and present. but being connected to the source is different. it will also determine your later phase of practice. if you are attached to the Presence, what happened?
(6:31 PM) AEN:    hmm. you mean when you are attached to Presence you will have difficulty seeing the connection?
(6:31 PM) Thusness:    you wanted the state of Presence to transcend to the 3 states (waking, dreaming and sleeping) for you are only interested in that Certainty of Being. whereas when you realized the source, you don't do that. you are surrendering much like the christian. you are devoting. nothing is important besides serving the divine. sustaining the state of presence and devoting to a divine source is different. you sleep when it is time to sleep. whatever thy will is. in Presence, you still think of control, in surrendering, you realized you are being lived. Awareness is being done. it is almost the opposite, but then there is also the integration
(6:35 PM) AEN:    oic.. Actually i think if we let go of control completely the presence is also naturally there, there is no need to try to control presence
(6:36 PM) Thusness:    if you think that, that becomes a hindrance
(6:36 PM) AEN:    oic how come
(6:36 PM) Thusness:    coz you are torn in between. you are serving 2 masters. :P Presence and source. but then there is also the integration where divine will becomes your will. then in jacob ladder meditation, after realization and experience of the grace, it must be found everywhere. therefore you return to phase 1 of the ladder with new understanding. you are directly and intuitively experiencing all manifestations as the expression of life. where you and the divine become one, where phenomena and the divine becomes indistinguishable, as transient, as inner and outer world
(6:40 PM) AEN:    oic..
(6:40 PM) Thusness:    however that is because we are trying to express and understand this in an inherent and dualistic way. we speak in such a way because we are using a dualistic paradigm.  and the experience seems difficult to reconcile and become seamless. so you must arise insight. you realized, what you call Self/self is just a label. this is very difficult to understand. then you are not trapped in 'reconnection' or surrendering.

You realized there is no-self (Soh: Thusness Stage 4 and 5). whatever experienced is vividly present and aliveness everywhere because what that 'blocks' is no more there through the arising insight. now how clear are you in directly experiencing sensation? in experiencing sound, color, sight, taste? the mind at present is more interested in the behind reality. so anatta transform the experience of individuality through insight, clear seeing. there is a difference in saying what you call Awareness has always been sight, sound, the scent of fragrance… and there is Awareness and there is sound, sight, taste… when you see and mature your insight of anatta, it is realized that wrong view is what that is causing the problem. however after that, you must practice directly
(6:48 PM) AEN:    what do you mean practice directly
(6:48 PM) Thusness:    means you don't think theoretically too much after the arising insight of anatta, there is a difference between thinking that a Weather truly exist and the changing clouds, the rain exist inside weather. get it? so when you took that to be real, it creates the problem of reification and intensifying the inherent existence of Self. if there is no-weight to the constructs, then there would be no problem. unfortunately, constructs are like spells. :)
(6:51 PM) AEN:    oic..
(6:52 PM) Thusness:    do you get what i meant? just experience first. feel this aliveness everywhere. in other words, what you realized is beyond ? (xiang4: form), but you do not understand the impact of ? (xiang4: form). anyway you can send your article to your lzls for comments. :)” - June, 2010 

“There is a vast impersonal natural intelligence which is living you, or rather, it IS this life, this breathing, this walking, this drinking... this life of the universe, of the earth spinning, .... all an interconnected play of Dharma, of total life, intelligence, and awareness. The only blockage is simply this sense of an 'I', someone who controls will and dictates actions in life.

If you think that I am sounding like an advocate of 'God', I have to reiterate that this so called 'God' or intelligent Mind is empty of its own existence apart from Dharma, is not something changeless and independent, and is not some sort of source acting behind the scenes or pulling the strings. Because this vast impersonal intelligence is so magnificent, powerful and impersonal, it can give the impression that we are all just the dream or expression of a Universal Mind of God, and if we follow this 'personification' and 'reification' we may start to think whether we are living in a matrix, a dream of Shiva for no other reason than his own enjoyment. But we are not the play or lila of a Brahman, there is no need to personify or reify this at all. This intelligence IS the miracle of manifestation. The divine has no face of its own, and yet every face is the face of divinity. There is no I, no perceiver, or a controller of this spontaneous intelligent happening. Living this is living in complete ecstasy and joy born of this total intelligence, life and clarity.” - Soh, 2015, Vast Impersonal Intelligence (Note that I wrote this post-anatta insight, therefore there is no more reification of this impersonal intelligence into universal consciousness)

“When we move from "I AMness" and mature the deconstruction of personality, we experience God-Like qualities. Seeing everything as one manifestation of 'One Life' and Presence being the same for everyone.

...just the isness without the individuality.  Once this individuality is gone (Whether permanently or temporary), you will intuit that all as sharing the Source or as Manifestation of this Source.  But that is not non-duality.  That is impersonality. :)  That is why you need to experience that too.” - John Tan, 2009

• 02 The Intensity of Luminosity

The degree of luminosity refers to feeling with entire being, feel wholly and directly without thoughts. Feeling 'realness' of whatever one encounters, the tree bark, the sand, etc. As with Impersonality, one may experience this even before the I AM realization. I (Soh) did. However one should practice to experience this aspect further after the I AM realization. This will also serve as one of the conditions for further non-dual insight. (You will also need to engage in nondual contemplation - https://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2018/12/two-types-of-nondual-contemplation.html  - see below)

This aspect will come by practicing Vipassana, see John's Vipassana - https://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2018/12/thusnesss-vipassana.html  and Vipassana - https://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2018/09/vipassana.html

“It will be advisable to take a step back to re-visit and re-experience each of the 6 sense doors. To cultivate a little on the aspect of being 'bare' for all the senses. Experience as much vividness as possible and have clarity on the luminous aspect of awareness first. Touch, taste, smell and sound… are all equally vivid as compared to seeing. Experience the texture and fabric of awareness. The rest of the conditions that give rise to no-self will come later. :) There is no ‘willful’ entrance into non-duality, create enough conditions, that’s all. :)” - John Tan, 2007

“When we experience Awareness directly without using our thoughts, everything is experienced as having a magical, alive, shimmery, fresh, amazing and blissful quality to it. Life is not the 'boring and ordinary' as the mind interprets it, even the most ordinary things (such as eating, walking, etc) just feels awesome. You will be naturally attracted, pulled towards the pristine awareness than to stressful thoughts. The ego will melt in the wonder and majesty of awareness.” - Soh, 2009

“I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.

That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born into this world.

For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss. After that, it diminished somewhat in intensity, or perhaps it just seemed to because it became my natural state. I could still function in the world, although I realized that nothing I ever did could possibly add anything to what I already had.

…

In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence. There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you felt within.” - Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

“I was walking through the park on my way home when something happened. Something holy arose from within and took over. I was standing there looking out at the trees and the grass like it was the first time I was seeing them. I was looking at my hands and feeling my body as it moved and I was marvelling at being alive and being in this body. I was acutely aware of being in the world, that I was a separate being in the world. I was enjoying all this as a child would enjoy a new and novel experience. I went over to a tree and grabbed a branch, I touched it softly and then grabbed it firmly, I really wanted to feel the tree, I really wanted to be there with it, to be present, to feel and see and take it all in. I bent down and touched the trunk near the roots, it was very real, very solid to my touch, it felt very alive. I noticed some bare earth around the tree trunk and picked up a chunk and broke it in my hand and watched and felt it crumble and stream through my fingers as it fell down to the earth. I was feeling so primal, so alive, I went around to the other side of the tree where the branches were a little higher off the ground and squatted under the branches near the tree trunk and put my hand on the trunk and left it there. I was feeling the roots and feeling extremely rooted myself in being. I stayed there for a few minutes, the feelings arising were so intense and overwhelming that tears were streaming down my face. Finally I left the tree and moved closer to the bench and sat and watched the crescent moon in the clear blue sky, there was a very bright star right beside it, so bright that I thought it might be the headlight of a plane heading towards me. I sat there and watched this scene and marvelled at life and being alive.

I finally got up and was going to go inside but I had to walk by the sandbox and I was immediately attracted to the sand. I bent down and started letting the sand run through my fingers, feeling the texture of the grains on the skin of my hand. I dug deeply into the sand and noticed that the sand was very damp when you dug down 3 or 4 inches. And then I found a flat stone. I don't know why this was so fascinating but I was like a little child, I would pick up the stone with a handful of sand and squeeze the sand so it would run through my fingers and then I would feel the hard stone pressing against the flesh of my palm and fingers. It was like finding a treasure, I did this over and over again.

I left the sandbox and moved over to a very large pine tree and grabbed on the branches really hard. I gave a really good pull on it and ripped that piece of branch clean off and allowed the needles to run through my fingers as they fell through the ground. I grabbed two branches, and held on really tight like I was holding hands with the pine tree, I looked up at it and was just present with it for a little while. But things were beginning to feel really intense inside of me so I went inside.

I went in the bedroom to change and got undressed, but when I was completely undressed I was drawn down to my knees and I bent very low with my forehead against the carpet. The energy was flowing like crazy inside, it felt like it was all emanating from the gut area. My head was on the carpet and my gut was much higher since I was still on my knees, this felt right as it had so many times before. Energy was flowing from my gut down through my head and out. But the energy also radiated outwards in all directions at the same time, like a sacred sun was shining in my gut. It was extremely intense and overwhelming and continued for at least 15 minutes.

I have no idea what is going on and I don't care. It feels very right and it makes everything sacred, my own body, and everything else in the world. It's almost a mystical experience at times to be alive.

I'm completely filled by this experience, it's overflowing.

I love you.” - Din Robinson

Soh, 2020:

“Someone (Olivier Sandilands) sent me this description and asked me to 'diagnose' it for him. I told him this is what I call intensity of luminosity, check out AtR guide on it. However he has not experienced or realised anatta, so it remains a glimpse. The peak of its intensity is when the sense of self completely dissolves into a state of no mind (no sense of subjectivity), but even then it remains an experience until realisation.

After dissolution of self/Self through realisation of anatman, this intensity of luminosity is experienced all moments at its peak, it is my everyday effortless natural state.

“At noon, after getting up and waiting for the bell to call us up for lunch, I kept an extremely relax and extremely sharp investigation of objects of perception going while sitting on a bench. Opening my eyes, I looked at one of my fellow retreatants walking back to her room. This was astounding. I don't really know how to explain it, but I believe I was experiencing emptiness in real time. It was absolutely clear that there was no past and future in that immediate experience : though she was obviously changing position, her movement was not of time. It was utter immanence, eternity : she was moving, and everything around her was moving ; yet nothing was moving. In fact, she didn't exist, and yet existed more than ever. Something angelic.

I got up, went to get my food. As I looked upon the face of some of my fellow meditators, I was struck by two profound things : first, I was perceiving them in such detail and in such a light, that they appeared like universes, like infinite things which had nothing to do with anything else ; each one of them was a miracle, right here in front of me, indistinct from me, of the same fabric. This brought about deep compassion and love, which moves me to tears now as I write about it. As I was eating, in silence, my visual perception was deepening. It was already quite astounding, in detail and brightness.

But now, looking at my fork, it was starting to really bloom in a crazy way. My forkful of dahl was the most beautiful and rich thing I had ever seen. In fact, as I was letting that develop itself, myself just trying to relax into it, it felt as if visual perception started to open, that I started to dissolve into it ; it felt like something untangled in the back, and that everything got bigger. It felt like a free fall into a world of unexpected richness, of a transfigured nature, timeless, the same as ever, yet totally different, raw, vivid, inescapably rich. In fact, this started to get freaky. I stopped the process. I felt some fear, but it was confined to a tiny perception of my heart beating in the chest. I decided to chill out. But something had flipped. It was this : reality, become REAL. I now understand what realization must mean. Just that : reality become completely real.

For about two hours I explored the premices, walking around the pond, into the forest, etc. It was completely surreal, psychedelic. Visual perception was totally illuminated : every object that had some kind of brightness or movement was emitting intense light in the whole of my visual field. It was like the experience I described earlier, x10, with an added depth to spatial perception that was astounding. Furthermore, I could "freeze" perception on command by stilling it on a particular object, which would start to acquire the same "transfigured" quality I described. The same, yet totally different, totally new, totally immanent : direct perception, pure unfolding of shapes and colors bound by nothing, flux.

Emotionnally, I felt a mix of elation, incredulity, great amusement and mild background panic. What the hell was that ?? I skipped meditation to go lie down. Was this a side effect of my ear infection ? Was it the first phases of a visual migraine ? Have I gone nuts ? None of these... I talked with another meditator in the hallway of one of the buldings. The best way I can describe it is : it was like a conversation on mdma. The kind where one is both profoundly calm, at ease in a supernatural way (nothing can touch me), yet extremely sharp, loving and energetic. Visual perception was so sharp, in particular, any reflecion in the field of vision, particularly the periphery, was perceived as a glowing neonish light. The face of that man was beautiful to look at : shimmering with light, detailed, with a background sense of eternity infusing the whole of perception... Man. Powerful."” (Note by Soh: it is important to understand the the terms ‘Emptiness’ and ‘Realization’ used here is very different from how AtR uses these terms. This person’s experience has more to do with the intensity of luminosity aspect, it has nothing to do with realizing the empty nature)

 

"I have already told you that in non-dual, especially anatta, the same sacredness you find in the background is also found in the transience. Identification is getting lost in the story or content. Not to deny urself the clarity of the essence and nature of the phenomena and aggregates. You do not resort to a background from disidentification. But from disidentification, realize the essence and nature of the aggregates in its primordial and pure state. When you do that, you are dis-associating. When you dis-identify from your body, you free urself from the 'inherent aspect of the body construct' but is having a full vivid experience of the sensations." - John Tan, early 2010 after my I AM realization

"(10:33 PM) Thusness: Self inquiry is a form of meditation like koan. The purpose is to have a direct experience of our inner most essence called 'Self'. The next step is to bring this 'Self' into the foreground. That requires vipassana meditation. It is the key towards non-dual. Even after non-dual, we have to practice vipassana but the focus is in being 'bare'. By being 'bare', it becomes mirror like, pristine, clear and luminous.

(10:45 PM) Thusness: the next step is to bring this [Presence] into the foreground by practicing bare attention of our body sensations.

(12:38 AM) Thusness:  When we first experience the Eternal Witness, it is non-dual, presence, very real, it is the Reality. at that moment the experience is non-dual. When we come to understand it, it becomes dual. We understood it wrongly but we think that it is right. Therefore it appears to be 'there', still, unchanging, wherever is. In actual fact, we are abstracting the characteristics of 'pristine clarity' from a moment of arising and call it Presence. It is the mind doing the abstraction.

(12:40 AM) Thusness:  this is a tendency that is dividing. That is why vipassana is taught. Observing all arising sensation.

(12:40 AM) Thusness:  that sensation is already Awareness itself. otherwise, self enquiry instead of vipassana would be taught and there is no point observing sensation. To be bare is to understand sensation in its pristineness, its luminosity that when it is bare. yet it is impermanent." - John Tan, 2009

See John's Vipassana - https://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2018/12/thusnesss-vipassana.html  and Vipassana - https://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2018/09/vipassana.html and read this book Gesture of Awareness

Eckhart Tolle describing the intensity of luminosity in the body in The Power of Now: “Connecting With The Inner Body

Please try it now. You may find it helpful to close your eyes for this practice. Later on, when "being in the body' has become natural and easy, this will no longer be necessary. Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it alive? Is there life in your hands, arms, legs, and feet - in your abdomen, your chest? Can you feel the subtle energy field that pervades the entire body and gives vibrant life to every organ and every cell? Can you feel it simultaneously in all parts of the body as a single field of energy? Keep focusing on the feeling of your inner body for a few moments. Do not start to think about it. Feel it. The more attention you give it, the clearer and stronger this feeling will become. It will feel as if every cell is becoming more alive, and if you have a strong visual sense, you may get an image of your body becoming luminous. Although such an image can help you temporarily, pay more attention to the feeling than to any image that may arise. An image, no matter how beautiful or powerful, is already defined in form, so there is less scope for penetrating more deeply.

The feeling of your inner body is formless, limitless, and unfathomable. You can always go into it more deeply. If you cannot feel very much at this stage, pay attention to whatever you can feel. Perhaps there is just a slight tingling in your hands or feet. That's good enough for the moment. Just focus on the feeling. Your body is coming alive. Later, we will practice some more. Please open your eyes now, but keep some attention in the inner energy field of the body even as you look around the room. The inner body lies at the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.”

John Tan replied in 2006, “The experience comes when the 'self' subsides and awareness is experienced as a vibrantly luminous bright clarity.  The radiance of pure awareness creates a powerful sense of Presence that is experienced in the form of aliveness and clarity in all parts of the body.   If you were to visualize it, it is like a very powerful inner light radiating out from nowhere to everywhere making everything that comes into contact alive.”

John Tan, early August 2010:

(12:49 AM) Thusness:  do you feel like a luminous light?

(12:50 AM) AEN:          yes, awareness is radiant and present

(12:50 AM) Thusness:  u need to lose that sense of self first. you will not feel like radiance light with your current realization [Soh: that was spoken during my I AM phase of realization], only when you mature impersonality and non-dual. how did dharma dan describe pce?

(1:32 AM) AEN:            i think he said something like pure delight in the senses, the physical, etc. i think he also talked about no sense of movement or fluxing?

(1:33 AM) Thusness:    he said radiance, brilliance and luminous. the senses and physical. when the background and foreground are both experienced as so. there will be radiance throughout, then it is possible to talk about luminous radiance. otherwise what you experience is still far from it. there must be total transparency, and there be the experience of purity, primordial, radiance in whatever arises. you may also visualize radiance light vitalizing all your cells like what eckhart tolle said.

(1:37 AM) AEN:            oic.. what eckhart tolle said is like non dual?

(1:37 AM) Thusness:    yes. but he isn't clear about that, though the experience is there

[Comments by Soh: Eckhart Tolle's insight is more into I AM, Thusness Stage 1 and 2]

John TanThursday, May 30, 2013 at 10:21pm UTC+10

do you have the experience of a transparent inner emanation?

Soh Wei YuThursday, May 30, 2013 at 10:21pm UTC+10

do you mean outwards emanation? or something else

John TanThursday, May 30, 2013 at 10:22pm UTC+10

yeah, like a transparent energetic glowing light emanating outward?

Soh Wei YuThursday, May 30, 2013 at 10:29pm UTC+10

transparent luminosity yeah

John TanThursday, May 30, 2013 at 10:29pm UTC+10

actually you don't need to meditate...just mature your insights and experience in daily activities [Soh: important - this comment was made 2+ years after my anatta realization, so do note that the I AM realization is insufficient to experience nondual luminosity in all manifestations in an effortless manner]

if it becomes stable...visualize light and experience that taste as a skillful practice

Soh Wei YuThursday, May 30, 2013 at 10:30pm UTC+10

how to visualize light

John TanThursday, May 30, 2013 at 10:31pm UTC+10

not how...you must have that taste...like inner light emanating out... like a form of radiance...then visualize that as if it is healing your entire being and body, into boundlessness as a skillful way of practice

 “Soh Wei Yu

021haS0h7cnsorfe9  ·

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This is one of the four aspects of I AM, that John and I call 'intensity of luminosity'...

"One of the ways Brilliancy is useful for the Work of essential realization relates to intensity, or amplitude. When essential presence has the aspect of Brilliancy, you experience that the voltage is suddenly raised in all the processes going on inside you. Brilliancy gives a radiance to all manifestations, including your mind and body. Your processes become more radiant, more brilliant, which means that they become purer and more themselves. When Brilliancy is experienced and realized, one’s process accelerates. It has a magnifying effect, an empowering effect, on everything within your field. It is as if your essence were getting a shot in the arm. It makes everything more alive, more luminous, and in a sense, more itself. Everything functions better, more efficiently, more accurately, more to the point. Brilliancy exists on its own—it independently functions as intelligence —but it also magnifies the functioning of everything else. And yet what characterizes the actual nature of Brilliancy is its direct presence in the soul, which then manifests in the thoughts and actions of that person in the world." - A H Almaas, Brilliancy: the Essence of Intelligence (I was reading a sample of this book - the first two chapters today and I particularly copied out this excerpt, and then later I found out this same exact excerpt can be found here https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/brilliancy)

This book is still more of the I AM and one mind sort of understanding, unlike his most recent books which talks about anatta and total exertion also.
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Soh Wei Yu

Luminous Intelligence

The true essential quality of Brilliancy is a living quality to the consciousness that is aware and present. It has a sense of a luminous kind of intelligence that will affect our capacities in terms of seeing, perceiving, and also understanding and apprehending. The effect on the aesthetic sense—the elegance and the purity—is just beautiful. It makes us, our sense of presence, our life, and the environment, have a quality that is spiritual. It is actually more real than just calling it divine or spiritual. It attains an immaculate quality. Everything becomes more itself in a very pure, radiant way.

Brilliancy, pg. 183

      

o   Reply

o   2h”

• 03 Dissolving the Need to Return or Abide in I AM

There are two tendencies after I AM realization which are pitfalls that prevent effortless and total Presence, although the second is more helpful than the first:

Attempting to re-confirm the ever-presence of Awareness through reasoning
Attempting to abide in Presence

Dissolving the need to re-confirm is important as whatever is done is an attempt to distance itself from itself, if there is no way one can distant from the "I AM", furthermore the attempt to abide in it is itself an illusion.

However, abiding in presence is a form of meditative practice, like chanting, and leads to absorption. It can result in the oceanic experience. So although it is a pitfall that prevents effortless and non-dual experience of Presence (this requires deeper insights) and is a form of efforting, abiding in Presence through samadhi is a form of development after I AM realization. But once one focuses on the 4 aspects discussed here, one will have that experience of oceanic Presence too.

“How still, how silent, how oceanic and immense is that moment of authentication of I AM is crucial.”

- John Tan, 2020

On the other hand, attempting to re-confirm the ever-presence of Awareness through reasoning (reasoning to oneself that Presence-Awareness is always here regardless of what experiences arise) is a retrogression from the I AM realization (which is direct certainty without inference), instead of any kind of development. The following conversation explains why.

Conversation with John Tan while Soh was in his I AM phase:

“John Tan: what is the difference before and after the realization of "I AM"?
Soh: a non conceptual certainty that does not come from inference, words, concepts
*certainty of being
John Tan: This certainty is unshakeable at that moment of realization.
Complete, Done, Still, Perfect, Pure, non-dual , Non-conceptual, primordial
Soh:    yea
John Tan: Yet it doesn't seem 'there' anymore. Though intuitively it can't be lost, but this clarity despite the realization does not stay.
Soh: yeah..
John Tan: why so?
Soh: Because of conceptual thoughts... the I AM experience is a non conceptual direct authentication, just abiding as that
John Tan: why does conceptual thought arise?
Soh: By habit mostly
John Tan: now... have you seen through the illusion and power of 'thoughts'?
Soh: I can see that thoughts are illusory... yet when I get lost in thoughts it still seems real and powerful. That’s why suffering still arise
John Tan: I remember reading something you said you read somewhere.. that the only problem is 'thought'. Because it becomes a 'reality' to the mind. Suggestion is very real to the mind to consciousness, so how does problem arise? This is important… if you can't understand this, it is difficult for you to progress and understand deeper. You cannot have 'problems' if you do not react to the content of 'thoughts'...
Soh: yeah.. we invest meaning and invest identity to our thoughts. I wrote about 'What's wrong with right now unless you think about it?'. It’s when we label and give meaning to things that there are problems, otherwise there are just wordless vibrations, even thoughts are wordless
John Tan: yes, and problems includes confusions. Now in the direct mode, is there confusion?
Soh: no
John Tan: Is any explanation needed?
Soh: no
John Tan: Is any re-confirmation needed?
Soh: no
John Tan: Now if I were to ask you about source, is there any differentiation in that mode? You do not differentiate between source or you. There is no such differentiation… but when you are out of that mode, you  seek explanation. You attempt to re-confirm, and your way is by explaining to yourself. This very act itself already distant itself from the direct and immediate mode. Get it? You made the mistake after the realization of "I AM". So does Mr. T. There is no why, no because,...no matter how logical it sounds, how much sense it makes, it is irrelevant, and from that [Soh: i.e. when comparing the logical reasoning process to direct realization] quality of experience in your realization, it is completely off the mark…
...actually ramana maharshi only tell you to abide in the Self. There is no explanation, just the abiding. However, that is not the way though it is better than explanation… hahaha.
Is surrendering a form of 'explanation'?
Soh:    no
John Tan: It is just a quality of non-dual experience... a direct, immediate, non-dual, pure and non-conceptual experience that is still, complete and entire. Nothing matters in that mode. It is not about reading or no reading. If I don't explain to you, how are you to know? It is about getting into that mode and not falling into the trap. If you want to re-live the experience, you cannot approach that way. Read my article on anatta ( http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-anatta-emptiness-and-spontaneous.html ), I have already said it must be a more direct mode. In hearing, just sound, this is an experiential fact. You may describe the experience, you do not ask why in hearing, just sound. Or in hearing there is just sound because..... this and that… get it?”

As John Tan also wrote in 2009, “...Awakening to the ‘Watcher’ will at the same time ‘open’ the ‘eye of immediacy’; that is, it is the capacity to immediately penetrate discursive thoughts and sense, feel, perceive without intermediary the perceived. It is a kind of direct knowing. You must be deeply aware of this “direct without intermediary” sort of perception -- too direct to have subject-object gap, too short to have time, too simple to have thoughts. It is the ‘eye’ that can see the whole of ‘sound’ by being ‘sound’. It is the same ‘eye’ that is required when doing vipassana, that is, being ‘bare’. Be it non-dual or vipassana, both require the opening of this 'eye of immediacy'”.

Aditya Prasad
If it makes you feel any better, I've been stuck in "I AM" for over three decades . After reading (parts of) AtR, I recognized another major trap I fell into: trying to continually reconfirm awareness. It's deeply habitual now, and triggers itself when I'm trying to fall asleep, preventing me from getting restful sleep. Really grateful for this group, because even though it's taking a long time to work through this stuff, I don't know of any other resource that explains it.

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Tony Taylor
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Aditya Prasad Yea I’m 44 so 3 decades for me as well

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Aditya Prasad Due to lack of insight into the nature of awareness, the mind always has the sense that awareness is behind, an unexamined belief that "awareness is not thought, is not sleep, is not this and that experience" and that "awareness is what is BEHIND them", so it always attempts to jump out of that moment of experience to find this 'familiar background' which is a mind made illusion. It is really just a line, a definition, a mind made map that attempts to locate awareness as 'not that but this', 'not there but here', etc.
When insight into nature of awareness arise, then one is able to overcome the tendency of locating awareness anywhere besides manifestation. Then you will love to just sleep when you sleep, in hearing just sound, in sleeping just sleep, because that's always what's already the case -- never a seer or a seeing besides.
After that 'confirmation' is always auto confirmation by the ten thousand things and auto release (self liberation) upon arising, in fact non arising in its arising. There is absolutely no effort to reconfirm anything necessary what has no who, no where, no when, non local but ever brilliant and spontaneous, without center, division, location or boundaries, all vivid manifestations as spontaneous presence.
Joel Agee, 2013:
http://www.awakeningtoreality.com/.../joel-agee...
Here are two sentences from one of the oldest Dzogchen texts, The All-Creating Monarch (Kunjed Gyalpo) quoted in Longchenpa's Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding (Richard Barron's translation):
“Seek the location of the heart essence through phenomena that derive from it
and come to appreciate it through the skillful means of not conceptualizing in any way whatsoever.
Since the heart essence occurs naturally, dharmakaya is not elsewhere.”
Coming across these lines had a vividly awakening effect on me.
Like · · Unfollow Post · September 2, 2012 at 1:29pm
Dannon Flynn, Steven Monaco, Neony Karby and 6 others like this.
Joel Agee Simple but profound and ongoing: a deconstruction of an unconscious habit of locating awareness anywhere else than in the moment-to-moment transient phenomena. Whoosh! No observer, no witness. No location!
David Vardy No location but 'here' in the heart....
September 2, 2012 at 1:46pm via mobile · Like · 2
Chris Collins You're finding a deepening clarity in transcient phenomena ? Can you explain any more ?
September 2, 2012 at 1:48pm via mobile · Like
Joel Agee David: Yes, definitely. And your putting "here" in quotes feels accurate, because that too is unfindable.
September 2, 2012 at 1:50pm · Like · 2
Joel Agee Chris, I'm not sure I can explain exactly. There's a frequent and delightful experience of being "confirmed" by sounds and sights, especially sounds. Greater appreciation of what shows up from moment to moment, a kind of energy of being available for anything. More spontaneous ease in action and speech and thought. But in a way this is all secondary. The recognition of awareness is unobstructed. Sometimes it seems to be obscured by thoughts and feelings, and then it's obvious that those too are the clarity and the emptiness. RIght now there's joy in seeing and saying this.

AWAKENINGTOREALITY.COM
Joel Agee: Appearances are Self-Illuminating
Joel Agee: Appearances are Self-Illuminating

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Tony Taylor
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Soh Wei Yu Soh I have been trying to get under this but using a contemplation based on a conversation you and John had. I contemplate
Is there actually awareness of sound or are there just sounds?
Is there awareness of thinking or is there just one thought , then another , then another etc…
Does that sound like a good contemplation related to awareness ?

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Tony Taylor
That I would say is related to the two stanzas of anatta.
“Geovani Geo wrote:
We hear a sound. The immediate deeply inbuilt conditioning says, "hearing ". But there is a fallacy there. There is only sound. Ultimately, no hearer and no hearing. The same with all other senses. A centralized, or expanded, or zero-dimensional inherent perceiver or aware-er is an illusion.
Thusness/John Tan:
Very good.
Means both stanza is clear.
In hearing, no hearer.
In hearing, only sound. No hearing.”

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Soh Wei Yu
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As John Tan said before, what we call anatta realization is also realising emptiness of awareness, and many people misunderstand anatta yet continue to reify awareness (that would be more on impersonality and at most nondual but not anatta).
But even after emptiness of awareness it does not mean non existence as you probably have read here https://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/.../no-awareness...

AWAKENINGTOREALITY.COM
No Awareness Does Not Mean Non-Existence of Awareness
No Awareness Does Not Mean Non-Existence of Awareness

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Tony Taylor
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Soh Wei Yu Ok great , thanks. I have read this but the reminder doesn't hurt

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Tony Taylor You might also be interested to read this: https://www.facebook.com/cyberlogy/posts/10166373379195226?__cft__[0]=AZVqKCx85pGup4QX6E2ldhQeVmU9f3Zzy0OvcJthr0vV_YLIXUcIN70YsMaTuFyJsjclMCP-TW4301F8M4qOc-_bnfq7iOx95I_pFG0_dcyj1HXhryV-zA5wKVrV1kWZTFA&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R

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Tony Taylor
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Soh Wei Yu Yes this is excellent. I’ll have to re read it a few times. Thank you
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J.P. Hamilton
Soh Wei Yu "a deconstruction of an unconscious habit of locating awareness anywhere else than in the moment-to-moment transient phenomena. Whoosh! No observer, no witness. No location!"
This is very good. Immediate non-dual view. I am starting to see how "locating awareness" creates "awareness as background".
"Far away car sound" is not far away. Right here is "far away car sound". Moving awareness out to "far away car sound" seems to create "container" view.

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J.P. Hamilton
Yes the distanceless and nonreferentiality is one of the things i commented right after anatta http://www.awakeningtoreality.com/.../my-commentary-on...

AWAKENINGTOREALITY.COM
My commentary on Bahiya Sutta
My commentary on Bahiya Sutta

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• 04 Effortlessness.

Any effort to sustain a state of Presence is contrary to the self-shining and spontaneous nature of Presence. But this aspect will require further insights (into non-dual, anatta and empty nature - http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2007/03/thusnesss-six-stages-of-experience.html) to unfold and mature much further.

Third and fourth point is especially clear after realization of anatta (No-Self, as elucidated in the latter part of this document):

“There is no one who has ever known the essence of awareness. There is no one has ever rested in the presence of awareness.  Such is only concept and concept can not cross the threshold of wisdom.

Expanse and eveness are their ownmost and admit no one, no realizer, no Buddha, no being ........  no one can enter therein and yet not only is no one excluded but no thing no time no presence has ever strayed or wavered from ……..

Identity does not rest within but resolves….. and the absence of all conceptuality 'about' is known as absence of identity of beings of Buddhas. Devoid of reification, within this eveness, all appearances, all bodies, all thought abides non-other than ownmostness’ uncompounded and uncontrived essence.

What is talked about when we speak of the essence of awareness is not mere intellectualization, abstract philosophizing but is directly realized in the unutterableness of contemplative practice's deep and concept free eveness.

One does not come to abide in this realization. The fact that there is no such one at all is realized long before the eveness of essence is known. One does not come to abide in this state but instead realizes that in fact no-thing has ever strayed from it.

When this is realized then body and mind are informed by, and animate the truth of  ………” - Traktung Rinpoche (from recent talks on ineffability)

“Hi AEN,

I do not usually reply people about spiritual stuff but I sense the confusion in Mikael's mail to you.

It is advisable to correctly point out to him that there is no short cut to direct path.

In the most direct path, Awareness is already and always at rest.  In the most direct path, whatever manifests is Awareness; there is no "in Awareness" and there is no such thing as going deeper in Awareness or resting in Awareness.  Anything "going deeper" or "resting" is nothing direct.  Nothing more than the illusionary appearances of 'hierarchy' caused by the inherent and dualistic tendency of understanding things. 

It is more 'gradual' than 'direct'.  Therefore have the right view first before we talk too much about the direct path so that we do not fall into such views.   Next clearly understand the cause that blinds us then have direct authentication of our pristine nature so that we will not be misled.

By the way, non-discrimination does not deny us from clear discernment.  An enlightenment person is not one that cannot differentiate 'left' from 'right'. :)” - John Tan, 2009

“The 4 aspects are simply guiding and allowing the mind to get prepared for anatta. Look into the four aspects (Soh: and compare it to Anatta) and you will understand.” - John Tan, 2019

“Aditya Prasad: I've never understood the distinction between aspects 3 and 4. Shouldn't effortlessness (4) just be the result of dissolving the need to return (3)? 

Soh Wei Yu: (3) is about uncontrivance.

(4) is about effortlessness, spontaneous emergence of presence.

One is telling you to stop creating karma. The other is telling you the effortless spontaneity of presence.

But all these are difficult without the correct insights... but still, we have to practice in this way as a means of imitating what life is like in anatta. Means anatta has all the four aspects in maturity, but if you have not reached anatta realization, you consciously and knowingly imitate all those aspects and then with the right pointers and contemplation a breakthrough occurs.

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Mr. A.P.: Thank you. Let me see if I understood. 3 is about not needing to return to presence. 4 is noticing that it's there even if you don't.

Soh Wei Yu: Yes but not even a “noticer” remains

In I AM just I AM, in seeing just scenery, both are nondual actualization and not the usual noticing or noting. Not as a subject object knowledge

Although.. Even after anatta “in the seen just the seen...” initially it may be concentrative before it turns into totally effortless spontaneous presence

2009:

(3:05 PM) Thusness: did JK [Soh: see J Krishnamurti and Anatta] said that: When this is a fact not an idea, then dualism and division between observer and observed comes to an end. The observer is the observed - they are not separate states. The observer and the observed are a joint phenomenon and when you experience that directly then you will find that the thing which you have dreaded as emptiness which makes you seek escape into various forms ...?

(3:07 PM) AEN: i think so why?

(3:08 PM) Thusness: quite good...it never really occur to me he has put it so clear, though he is very persistent about no-self. 🙂

(3:08 PM) AEN: icic..

(3:09 PM) Thusness: His teaching though talk about no separate agent is still very much concentrative. Not so much of spontaneous perfection.

(3:10 PM) AEN: oic.. UGK leh? more on spontaneous?

(3:10 PM) Thusness: same

(3:10 PM) AEN: icic..

(3:17 PM) Thusness: sometimes you should rejoice how fortunate it is for you to have right understanding of this teaching of anatta at this age.

In initial anatta, one has the realisation there is no one purest state to abide in or return to, no I to abide in.

Just in the seen just the seen.

Initial anatta should resolve the need to return and abide. (3)

But effortlessness (4) reaches full maturity in later phase of spontaneous presence. Thats how it is for me. Then concentrative mode is not necessary.

The (2) aspect of intensity of luminosity also varies even after anatta.

Because JK is stuck at concentrative mode of anatta instead of maturing it into spontaneous presence, his over exertion in PCE mode caused life long energy imbalances and pain. Kundalini issues.”

…

Its interesting that John Tan said sleeplessness [faced by some people like Mr. A. P. and John Tan back in his I AM days] will be solved at stage 5.5. I think 5 to 5.5 is the phase where anatta turns from subtly concentrative to effortless and spontaneous presence. Energy and tension in overfocusing on the details release, all effort releases into selfless spontaneity.”

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Besides contemplating on the Four Aspects of I AM and the two stanzas of anatta in 2) On Anatta (No-Self), Emptiness, Maha and Ordinariness, and Spontaneous Perfection. and the Two Types of Nondual Contemplation after I AM

It is also good to go through the following links consisting of early days conversation between John Tan and other forummers like Sim Pern Chong. John Tan has said before that these posts are suitable for guiding a person from I AM to non dual and anatta.


Early Forum Posts by Thusness
Part 2 of Early Forum Posts by Thusness
Part 3 of Early Forum Posts by Thusness
Early Conversations Part 4
Early Conversations Part 5
Early Conversations Part 6
Thusness's Conversation Between 2004 to 2012


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Someone asked, "I often hear people saying that more than a decade has passed between the I AM realization and the subsequent ones. It's very often between 10 and 20 years. Does that mean that there's a sort of maturation process happening very slowly after the first realization? I just wonder if I'm stuck or whether I will make progress"


I said,



The same person realized I AM but was facing this issue,

"Though I sort of do feel stuck right now, I have difficulty finding interest in anything, including spiritual matters. I find that everything is hollow and without meaning, and for some reason I keep settling into a sort of zombie mode where I just do things automatically without really caring. It doesn't feel right, but I don't have the willpower or energy needed to get myself out of it.
I don't know if this sounds familiar, is this also just a stage, or have I gone wrong somewhere along the way?"


I said,

"In my blog the latest post on book recommendations there is a link to the Four Aspects of I Am and in it one of it is the intensity of luminosity. And I put an article there describing the intensity of luminosity. You should practice that and the joy will come. You will marvel at the aliveness of simple things like the blueness of the sky, the colours of flowers and having a simple meal, the tastes. Everything becomes imbued with a sense of magnificence and significance and awe, rather than dullness and meaninglessness. If you realized The I Am then you should practice all four aspects and do the Two Types of Nondual Contemplation. That is the way to progress.


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After the maturity of anatta insight and twofold emptiness, eventually there is effortless, ongoing and intense experience of "everything as Self", "As in that experience of I AM powerfully present at this moment", "As if like Awareness clear and open like space, without meditation yet powerfully present and non-dual. Where the 4 Aspects of I AM are fully experienced in this moment. This experience will become more and more powerful later yet effortless and uncontrieved. How so? If it is not correct insights and practice, how is it possible for such complete and total experience of effortless and uncontrieved Presence be possible?". "Indeed and this is being authenticated by the immediate moment of experience.  How could there be doubt abt it.  The last trace of Presence must be released with seeing through the emptiness nature of whatever arises. After maturing and integrating ur insights into practice, there must be no effort and action.... The entire whole is doing the work and arises as this vivid moment of shimmering appearance, this has always been what we always called Presence." "Yes and u should in all moment of 6 entries and exits experience all coming together for this moment to arise....this will dissolve all senses of holdings and will lead u effortless and maha experience of suchness effortlessly", "interpenetration, open, boundless, effortless and uncontrieved." (Thusness, 2012)


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Here's a good post on 'the degree of luminosity' by a friend 'JonLS'/'Din Robinson' or 'Amadeus':

I was walking through the park on my way home when something happened. Something holy arose from within and took over. I was standing there looking out at the trees and the grass like it was the first time I was seeing them. I was looking at my hands and feeling my body as it moved and I was marvelling at being alive and being in this body. I was acutely aware of being in the world, that I was a separate being in the world. I was enjoying all this as a child would enjoy a new and novel experience. I went over to a tree and grabbed a branch, I touched it softly and then grabbed it firmly, I really wanted to feel the tree, I really wanted to be there with it, to be present, to feel and see and take it all in. I bent down and touched the trunk near the roots, it was very real, very solid to my touch, it felt very alive. I noticed some bare earth around the tree trunk and picked up a chunk and broke it in my hand and watched and felt it crumble and stream through my fingers as it fell down to the earth. I was feeling so primal, so alive, I went around to the other side of the tree where the branches were a little higher off the ground and sqatted under the branches near the tree trunk and put my hand on the trunk and left it there. I was feeling the roots and feeling extremely rooted myself in being. I stayed there for a few minutes, the feelings arising were so intense and overwhelming that tears were streaming down my face. Finally I left the tree and moved closer to the bench and sat and watched the crescent moon in the clear blue sky, there was a very bright star right beside it, so bright that I thought it might be the headlight of a plane heading towards me. I sat there and watched this scene and marvelled at life and being alive.

I finally got up and was going to go inside but I had to walk by the sandbox and I was immediately attracted to the sand. I bent down and started letting the sand run through my fingers, feeling the texture of the grains on the skin of my hand. I dug deeply into the sand and noticed that the sand was very damp when you dug down 3 or 4 inches. And then I found a flat stone. I don't know why this was so fascinating but I was like a little child, I would pick up the stone with a handful of sand and squeeze the sand so it would run through my fingers and then I would feel the hard stone pressing against the flesh of my palm and fingers. It was like finding a treasure, I did this over and over again.

I left the sandbox and moved over to a very large pine tree and grabbed on the branches really hard. I gave a really good pull on it and ripped that piece of branch clean off and allowed the needles to run through my fingers as they fell through the ground. I grabbed two branches, and held on really tight like I was holding hands with the pine tree, I looked up at it and was just present with it for a little while. But things were beginning to feel really intense inside of me so I went inside.

I went in the bedroom to change and got undressed, but when I was completely undressed I was drawn down to my knees and I bent very low with my forehead against the carpet. The energy was flowing like crazy inside, it felt like it was all emanating from the gut area. My head was on the carpet and my gut was much higher since I was still on my knees, this felt right as it had so many times before. Energy was flowing from my gut down through my head and out. But the energy also radiated outwards in all directions at the same time, like a sacred sun was shining in my gut. It was extremely intense and overwhelming and continued for at least 15 minutes.

I have no idea what is going on and I don't care. It feels very right and it makes everything sacred, my own body, and everything else in the world. It's almost a mystical experience at times to be alive.

I'm completely filled by this experience, it's overflowing.

I love you.



...............

Entry in my E-Book:

20th December 2011
All views of self lead to suffering (clinging, effort, seeking, desire, craving, and other forms of suffering). If you were to achieve mastery of samadhi and abide as the I AM 24/7, which can have profound life transforming effects, nonetheless you cannot overcome the subtle clinging and achieve liberation. Even if you sit in samadhi bliss all day, this is not the same as liberation - as Buddha left his previous teachers who were masters at samadhi and had their own insights. When you achieve higher insights, your clinging lessens and disappears, your effortlessness increase. You also see how deeper insights are a natural progression of your original experience - the I AM is not denied, but now experienced in all manifestations in all conditions, effortless and spontaneous, without any attempts to re-confirm or any effort needed to sustain any experience. As I told Thusness: I just realized that the four aspects of I am are not just four aspects of I am They are also four aspects of non dual
442
Four aspects of anatta Four aspects of shunyata Etc Those four aspects are refined in every phase as an example: seeing through the need to abide in non dual and dropping it - notice the tendency to reconfirm nondual by giving rise to thoughts like "the sound is as much you as the thought", seeing how ridiculous it is when always already in seeing just sound, in thinking just thought, all thoughts to reconfirm nondual arise due to falsely perceiving there to be a self to be nondual with "that" which turns into one mind and worse still it presumes there to be a subtle split that needs to be resolved when that notion of separation is entirely illusory. The entire movement to become nondual is illusory when anatta is fully seen and all self notions are dropped Intensity of luminosity in non dual - peak is in "no cold no heat", no mind, pure transparency, luminosity as textures and shapes and forms and all details of manifestation Effortlessness - when all latent views are replaced with right views then there's effortlessness of nondual Impersonality - even in nondual and anatta, impersonality must be matured Etc... Thusness replied me, This I have told u. I have told you that later you will understand. (though I didn't remember him telling me - not that he didn't as I'm sure he has, but when I heard it then, I probably didn't understand it at all) He also said, U must also understand that the four aspects are conveyed to you so that in the event you got lost In "I Amness", they can lead you back to the deeper insight of anatta n DO. So as you can see, each arising insight leads to greater freedom and liberation, greater effortlessness, greater bliss.
…..
443
I believe the Buddhahood is the ultimatum of spirituality. Why do I believe? Because I have no direct knowledge of Buddhahood. I have not experienced Buddhahood. But I have faith in Buddha, partly due to confidence from my direct experience - how it completely lines up with what the Buddha taught, how deep and profound was Buddha's insights... that by inferrence surely, what the other stuff I've not seen but have been said by Buddha, must be true too. However what I do know from experience (without any need of inference) is this: as my insights progressed, there is deeper freedom experienced, deeper liberation experienced, greater effortlessness, greater clarity, lesser clinging, lesser afflictions, etc etc... greater insight into the nature of reality. Therefore this is of course a very obvious progress in my path. And I say - without anatta, emptiness, etc, you cannot achieve maximum effortlessness, maximum clarity, trueliberation, etc. Even in I AM due to belief in purest identity of I AM it is clung to tightly and practice aims at achieving 24/7 abidance in a purest state of presence - a form of contrivance and effort. In non-dual, though lesser effort and greater seamlessness with the manifold manifestation, still there can be subtle habit to reconfirm a source, an attempt to be nondual, etc, which are again subtler but still present effort, clinging, ignorance. And so on... so as I said, greater freedom, lesser effort, greater clarity, greater bliss, lesser clinging, lesser suffering, lesser afflictions (in their various forms)... greater results with the deepening of insight into the way things are. Which is why this is worthwhile for me. This is why while there is no strict one-for-all linear hierarchy of things, it does not mean there is no observable progress. Ultimately, all Buddhist paths that aims at liberation, i.e. the total ending of suffering, clinging, craving, etc must lead to twofold emptiness, to the qualities mentioned above. Believe me - or not, I am only stating my experience, just see for yourself.

How Busyness Can Be Laziness (Think: Buddhist Ideology v Speed)

by Reginald A. Ray

It’s better to take your time and slow down than trade a good job well done for hasty speed or effectiveness. Here’s where Buddhism and busyness collide.

Busy can be good! “Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news!,” as Trungpa Rinpoche used to remind us (and our egos). But busy-ness…not so much–and our speediness and quest for efficiency doesn’t even produce results, often. Mindfulness anchored to busy? Hai!
Life emerges out of the silence of our inner being.
The life that we have in our mind, the life that is a reflection of our planning, the life that has been constructed out of bits and pieces in our environment—external conditioning, things we have observed in other people, things that influential people have told us—is actually not who we are.
That pre-planned life is rigid. It’s artificial. It’s unresponsive. It doesn’t reflect the life that we were born to live.
As a student of mine observed, obstacles—which are always with us—are not really obstacles when you work with them in the right way. And we have to work with them.
Many, many people tell me “I’m having a lot of problems doing this [meditation] practice because I am so busy. I’m really busy. I have a full life. It’s busy and I run from morning ‘til night.” People actually say that.
Now think about that for a minute. What kind of life is that? Is that a life worth living? Some people feel it is. America is probably the most extreme example of a speed-driven culture—and this is not my particular personal discovery, but something that has been said to me by many people from other traditional cultures. The first time this was said to me was when I was 19 and I went to Japan. Western people are running from themselves and they use the busy-ness of their lives as an excuse to avoid having to actually live their own life. We are terrified of who we actually are, terrified of the inner space that is the basis of the human experience.
We are actually incapable of being alone—of any work that requires genuine solitude, without entertainment, that requires making a connection with the silence of the inner being. The American family engineers a life in which there is never any time alone, where we never have to actually talk to each other. Even dinnertime is around the TV, at best—or we’re just grabbing something at McDonald’s.
But it’s not the larger culture. It’s actually us. It’s me and it’s you. We load our life up to the point where it’s about to snap. And when you ask someone to sit down and be with themselves they go, “I can’t. I don’t have time for that.” Now you and I may realize that there actually is a problem. Most people don’t think there is a problem.
We run our kids in the same way—and it’s destroying them. The soccer practice and the music lesson and three hours of TV and homework—it goes on from the minute they get up until they go to sleep. They never have an opportunity to experience silence. Psychological development requires periods of solitude. Anthropological psychology—studying other cultures, as well as our own—shows that when children do not have completely unstructured time, when there are no parental expectations looming over them, they actually can’t develop normally.
We see this at higher levels of education, too. Even the unusual and gifted students at Naropa [University]. These people are disabled, in many cases, because they have lived a busy life, fulfilling all expectations that middle and upper-middle class parents lay on their children because of their fear. The underlying thing is fear of space.
We all have it. I have it in a major way. I am busy. I have all these things that I like to do. When one thing ends, the next thing starts. It’s all important and I have to do it and I don’t sleep enough. So we all have to take another look.
The problem with being busy is that it is based on ignorance—not realizing that by keeping your mind occupied constantly you are actually not giving yourself a chance. We even put an activity in our life, called meditation, where you practice not being busy. Think about it. It’s actually genius. You have added another thing on top of everything else you do, but you are pulling the plug for a period of time every day—so it actually has a reverse effect of opening up and creating space. So you are just going to be more busy now! But this is good, especially in Western culture. People put meditation on their To Do lists. This is something I tell my students: “If you don’t put meditation on the top of your To Do list, it will be at the bottom, and it won’t happen.” I find that if meditation is not the first priority of my day it won’t happen. You know if I am
foolish enough to say, “Well, I have to make this phone call, check my email…,” then it’s over. Finished. “I’ll do it later.” It never happens. Look at your life and ask, “Am I being honest with myself? Is it really true that I don’t have time?”
When I was in graduate school I worked with a Jungian analyst, June Singer. She used to say, “Work expands to fill all of the available space.” The problem is not the amount of things you have in your life, it’s the attitude. It’s your fear of space. Busy-ness in the Tibetan tradition is considered the most extreme form of laziness. Because when you are busy you can turn your brain off. You’re on the treadmill. The only  intelligence comes in the morning when you make your To Do list and you get rid of all the possible space that could happen in your day. There is intelligence in that: I fill up all the space so I don’t have to actually relate to myself!
Once you have made that list, it’s over. There is no more fundamental intelligence operating. So the basic ignorance is not realizing what we are doing by being busy. What we are doing to ourselves, what we are doing to our families, what we are doing to our friends.
When my daughter Catherine, who is now 24, was a newborn baby my wife Lee and I went home to my mother’s house. My father had already died. I grew up in Darien, Connecticut—the ultimate suburbia. Everyone works in New York and they are all busy. My best friend from high school came over with his wife, who was also a close friend of mine, and my godfather came over. This succession of people all came in…and Lee picked up on it right away, because she is from Alberta and out there, there is a lot of space!
These people…we loved each other. We were so close. But it was always the same: after 10 minutes they said, “Well, we got to run!” Every single one did the same thing. And Lee said to me, “What are they so afraid of?” Not one of them was actually present. It made me realize why I left the East Coast and went to India. “How far away can I get?” But these patterns are deeply ingrained in us, and running away is not going to solve the problem. It’s in us.
People on campus always say to me, “Gee, you must be really busy.” I could be standing there looking at an autumn tree. I say “No, I’m not busy, I have all the time in the world.” Now, I may not really feel that way—but somehow we have to stop this mentality. It’s sick. Literally. So I never say to my wife, “I’m busy.” Ever. I used to do it, but it didn’t evoke a good reaction. [Laughter]
“I’m too busy.” I am sorry. I don’t buy it. It’s self-deception: “I am too busy to relate to myself.” I don’t care if you have four children and three jobs—we have one human life. And if you can’t make the time, 15 minutes to relate to yourself, everyone else in your life is going to suffer. You have to realize that you are harming other people by making up excuses and not working on yourself. This is serious.
I do understand that things happen in life, and in the course of a week there are going to be times when you can’t practice if you have a job, a family. But to say that over a period of three months I can’t practice because I am too busy? That is the very problem that you came here to solve. I implore you.
My wife has developed some techniques to help with this problem. I am going to give them to you, and then I’ll ask her permission when I go home for lunch. [Laughter]
Being busy is tricky. We set up our life so we are busy. I do this to myself; this is one of my biggest obstacles. I get excited about things and agree to do things three months from now. But when the time comes I realize it is not a good idea because I can’t do it properly, because I have so much else going on. But I have no choice. I have to go through with it. “God, you idiot, how could you do that!” But getting angry doesn’t help, because there I am and I’ve got a 16-hour day I have to get through.
Unless you viciously carve out time to work on yourself it’s not going to happen. You have to be brutal about it, actually. If your mind is always busy then you have no sense of the world you live in. Because there is no communication, there is no space within which to see what we are doing. We will end up destroying our lives, and you may not realize what you have given up until you are on your deathbed. By being busy you are basically giving away your human existence.
One of the things about being busy is that it is a un-examined behavior. It’s habitual.

3 Thinks to Ask Yourself to Evaluate if You’re too Busy

What’s the Point?
So when something comes up and you think “I need to do this,” the first question to ask is, “Why do I need to do this? What am I expecting to get out of this particular activity? What is the benefit going to be?”
A lot of times we actually don’t even think what we are going to get out of it, or what it’s going to accomplish. Amazing. Say I need to call so-and-so right away. Okay: “Why?” You’d be surprised. You think “Well, it’s obvious.”
It isn’t. We have not thought through most of the things that we do at all. We haven’t looked at what the desired consequence is.
What are the Odds?
I may think I am likely to get something, and sometimes I do. But what is the likelihood that something is not going to happen? How sure am I that what I think I am going to get, will happen? What is the percentage of possibility?
Is Other Stuff Likely to Come Up?
This is the big one for me. Does this action have unforeseen karmic consequences? For example: I want to call up somebody and check on something. A lot of times they start telling me some terrible thing that has just happened. I’d allowed five minutes for this conversation, and 45 minutes later I am still on the phone. We do this all the time. We don’t look at the consequences of a particular action.
It’s like somebody who goes into a café, and there is this huge cheesecake right there. You could buy a slice, but you get a cappuccino and sit down with the entire cheesecake and start eating. Now, from a certain point of view this sounds like bliss. And maybe for a short period of time you are going to forget all the pain of the human condition. I mean, that is the great thing about cheesecake. [Laughter] It boosts your endorphins for 5 or 10 minutes. You feel great! But then, having eaten the entire cheesecake, you feel sick for the next three days.
Strangely enough, this is how we live our lives. We jump on things. Someone asks me, “Why don’t you come to Switzerland, teach for a few days and then hang out in the wonderful Alps?” By the time I get off the phone I am ready to pack. Then I talk to my wife. [Laughter] And she asks me, “Have you considered what a 17-hour trip is going to do to your bad back? Have you thought about that?” And then I get back on the phone. [Laughter]
But, because of our ambitions of all kinds, we are ready to fill our life up to the point where, even if I’m in Switzerland, nothing is different. This is one of the great discoveries: wherever I go it’s still lousy. [Laughter] It’s just me and my mind and I don’t feel good and I have got this work to do and I don’t have the energy. It’s the same story, no matter where I go or what I’m doing.
Except when I sit down and meditate. Then, I feel like I am creating an inner space so I can actually relate to the fact of what my life is, rather than just being in an out-of-control mode. So sit down and ask yourself, “What is important in my life, and what’s less important?” Almost on a daily basis, we have to look closely at the things that remain on our To Do list to see whether they are actually realistic.
Ten years ago, after I’d taught a Dathün—a month long meditation—some of the students said to me, “We feel bonded to each other and to you. We’d really like to keep going” And I said, “Well, we could start a meditation group.” And 10 years later I am trapped with a community of 200 people, called Dhyana Sangha. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful. But I got into it in a blind way. And there are many other things that I do not love in the same way that I get into blindly. We all do that all the time—and we wind up with a life that doesn’t work and isn’t helpful to others.
My ambition to accomplish things is going to be one of the last things to go. I can’t help it; it’s just the way that I am. I see a pile of leaves that need to be raked up and I start salivating. I love to do things. I love to be active. And you can say, “Well, that’s great.” But there’s neurosis in that. It’s a way of shutting out space. This is another thing my wife has taught me: when there’s no space nothing really happens.
I had a wonderful quotation by Chögyam Trungpa up on my wall during my [meditation] retreat. It goes something like, “If there isn’t a complete sense of openness and space, then communication between two people can not happen. Period. It’s that simple.” The communication we have with each other is often based on agendas: negotiating with other people to get what we want. That’s not communication.
My wife taught me that. Insistently. It’s to the point where that busy mind is just not acceptable in our house anymore. It doesn’t matter what’s going on my life. If she comes into my study, I have to be completely there. And that’s fabulous, because I’m never able to get invested in that neurosis. If I do, she’ll let me have it.
Giving up this state of busy-ness doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to be active, creative people. We’re giving up the mentality where you can’t actually relate to what’s in front of you because you have this mental speed going on. Let it go. I’m saying it to you. This is an issue that we are going to have to address if we want to be any good to anyone.
You’ll notice when you work in this way over a period of years—and this is something that I have discovered accidentally—the more you practice, the more you get done. If you sit for 2 hours in the morning, which is a lot for people, you will find that your day is 30 hours long. When you establish sitting, somehow, in your life—when you sit in the morning—your day takes care of itself. Things happen as they need to. There is a sense of auspicious coincidence throughout the day.
And when you don’t sit, things go to hell. [Laughter] Everything runs into everything. You say, “I don’t have time to sit ‘cause I have to do this email.” You run to your computer, turn it on and spend the next 4 hours trying to get your computer to work. This is just how things work.
Magic is actually very down to earth. It’s a part of our lives. It’s going on all the time, we just don’t see it. But when you actually take care of yourself, work with yourself and create openness in your life, life will respond by cooperating. And when you are unwilling to relate with yourself at the beginning of your day, your life is going to give you a hard time.
I got stuck on my first book, Buddhist Saints In India. If I wrote another book like that it would kill me. It was an unbelievable labor. I got stuck in the middle. So I started practicing more, I started doing long retreats. And the book started flowing. The more I practiced, the more the book happened. In a sense, when I meditated I was getting something good done.
I realized that the way you accomplish things in life—whether with family or going to work—is through practice. One hour of work with the practice behind you is worth two days when the practice isn’t there. Things just don’t work well—there’s too much neurosis in it. When I don’t feel busy, things I have to do fall into place. Going through my day with a sense of relaxation, I connect with people. I appreciate the outdoors when I walk to my car. I see the sky.
I encourage you to take a chance: put practice at the top of the list. Don’t make that call if it isn’t something that actually needs to happen—so many of the things we do is to make people like us. “I have to make this call or so-and-so is going to be upset.” I have a pretty good idea that if you do that you will find that there is plenty of time to practice, no matter how busy you are. Busy people will look at your life and go, “I don’t see how you can do it!”
Here’s a teaching that Chögyam Trungpa gave that has changed the way a lot of people look at their work lives: learn how to invite space into your worklife. The space itself will actually accomplish most of what you need to do. In the form of helpful people turning up, auspicious coincidences… And in so doing, you are not only opening up your self, you are opening up the world. It becomes a dance. It’s no longer your job to sit there for 10 hours doing your thing, it’s to respond to the way the world wants things to happen. It’s de-centralized.
In Buddhism, this is one of the paramitas: exertion. Exertion is tuning into the natural energy of the world. And when you tune in, you don’t get tired. You become joyful. That you are part of a huge cosmic dance that is unfolding, moment by moment. And you have to change your ideas of what you thought should happen. It requires flexibility on our part!
Busy-ness. It’s the most commonly mentioned obstacle that everyone faces, and I know for me it’s #1. So I thought it would be worthwhile spending a little time with it. I invite you to take a fresh look at your life. Relate to the fear that comes up when we are not busy. Am I still worthy? It’s that Calvinist thing, underlying our culture. But try letting go and lo and behold it’s a better human life, and much more beneficial for other people.
I hope I didn’t upset anybody by saying these things, but I can’t beat around the bush with you. I need to just lay things out as they come up.

The above is adapted from a talk Dr. Reggie Ray gave as part of his Meditating with the Body retreat.

Instructions on Self Enquiry and Self-Realization by Ramana Maharshi:

https://app.box.com/s/v8r7i8ng17cxr1aoiz9ca1jychct6v84

Also see: The Simple Model


https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-v-awakening/37-models-of-the-stages-of-awakening/the-non-duality-models/
Here is my revised version of the four-path model. It is the primary model I use when describing awakening, talking about my practice, and helping others practice. I think that using the original terminology and revising its definitions allows a lot of the most universally applicable and least culturally conditioned information from the Pali canon to be used today, thus maintaining a link to that previous great work. However, I realize that using terminology that already has such deep cultural and dogmatic resonance may be a problem. For those who want something new, I will shortly present a rephrasing of this model that I call “the simple model”.
In the revised four-path model, stream enterers have discovered the complete discontinuity that is called Fruition and sometimes called nirvana (Sanskrit) or nibbana (Pali), as in texts such as the Abhidhamma. This is the first of two meanings of nirvana (with the other being the waking, walking-around, day-to-day experience of fourth path). Stream enterers cycle through the ñanas, know that awakening or some different understanding from the norm is possible, and yet they do not have such a different experience of most sensations from those who are not yet stream enterers. They may correctly extrapolate a lot of good dharma insights from momentary experiences, particularly far along in High Equanimity and the three moments before Fruition, but this is not the same as living there all the time. In fact, most stream enterers have a very hard time describing how their minds have changed in terms of their everyday perception except that they cycle and can understand the dharma in ways they never could before.
Those of second path have now completed a new insight cycle. If they attained this within a tradition that maps this process in something like this way, they will understand the process by which awakened beings make further progress and equate progress with further cycles of insight, which is partially true. Strangely, psychological issues tend to be a bigger deal during this particular path, and psychological development often more becomes interesting and important to those of second path in some way. More model-obsessed, intellectual, or analytical practitioners at second path may get very into fractal models, consciousness models, enlightenment models, various integrative theories, etc.
By this point, many people—though certainly not all—have at least some understanding of the basics of the shamatha jhanas (assuming they are training in a tradition that can point those out), and these can be very fascinating. What they may be most bothered by is that, despite cycle after cycle of practice, duality remains the predominant experience most of the time.
Their capacity to appreciate finer points of dharma phenomenology, such as sub-cycles, subjhanas, sub-ñanas, and the like, will be generally superior to stream enterers, but there is a range and wide individual variation in phenomenological and analytical ability, both of which can be significantly improved by training.
Third path individuals have shifted their understanding of progress beyond those of second path, and begin to see that they can perceive the emptiness, selflessness, impermanence, luminosity, etc. of many sensations in daily life. Perception tends to get broader, more spacious, more expansive, more through and through, with awakening being now more of a waking, walking-around experience. This can be a long, developmental process from the first time they notice it to when it becomes a nearly complete experience. Thus, third path tends to be a long path, though it doesn’t have to be, with individual variation being significant and affected both by natural ability and formal training.
At the beginning of third path, most practitioners think: “I’ll just complete more cycles of insight, as I did before, and this will do the trick.” They don’t understand yet what it is they have attained, or its deeper implications. By the mature stage of third path, which for most can take months or years to show up, the practitioner is more and more able to see the selfless, centerlessness, luminosity, etc. of phenomena in real-time, so much so that it can be very difficult to notice what artificial perceptual dualities remain. 
“Rigpa” is a nuanced and subtle term from Dzogchen meaning something along the lines of the “clear light” of the natural, awakened mind, the ultimate nature of reality, and is meant to help point to something essential about the nature of consciousness. I don’t want to go into an in-depth discussion of rigpa, but I do wish to point out the oft-noticed phenomenon that fascination with terms like rigpa, and feeling that they now seem very important to one’s practice and what one is experiencing, is common in this territory. Fascination with the concept of  “rigpa” as well as related concepts such as “luminosity”, “ground of being”, and the like, is not diagnostic of this territory, as unawakened scholars may have similar fascinations, but, if you are up into the path of awakening and are noticing that those terms seem to have a lot more experiential relevance, then the advice in this section may be helpful.
I get a moderate number of questions from people in the general territory of the first two paths about how to attain the next two paths, as they can begin to recognize rightly that they are missing something more fundamental that must apply to everything. Thus, I include here some advice that people have said was helpful to them for attaining third path.
1) Continue to practice directly perceiving sensations arise and vanish on their own everywhere in experience, however you can do that. Direct observation of all the complexity is better, though using noting to ease into unpleasant or disconcerting patterns of sensations can sometimes still be useful. Try to notice that all experiences occur in this moving space of experience. This may sound so simple that its profundity may be missed, but it is a key to awakening.
2) Going broad and through: what you are looking for is more spaciousness, more about dissolving a significant chunk of what seems to be observing, doing, controlling, analyzing, and the like. Take on more of the sensations that seem to make up “you” and those core processes. “Who am I?” practices may be of value here: pay attention to both who is asking the question, the answers that result, and where in space they occur. Mindfully explore with natural curiosity how to dissolve the artificial boundaries that seem to delineate whatever seems to be “you” from everything else, meaning the rest of what happens in what seems to be space. Play around with investigating that moving line: how do you know what the edge is between what seems to be you and not you, viscerally, perceptually, vibrationally, texturally, geographically, volumetrically? Identify and become familiar with any qualities of experience or pattern of sensations that seem to really feel like “you”, then notice the three characteristics of those patterns again and again, more times than you think you should have to.
3) Regard your cherished ideals and the patterns of sensations that make up those ideals about what you think meditation practice will get you as more sensations to observe. If you can do this at the level of fluxing, shifting patterns of suchness, it is easier. Whatever level you find yourself at is the level that you can work with, as it is all the same from that point of view that includes whatever is going on as both practice and the foundation of realization, and knowing that simple fact can help a lot. This is a good time to check out Dōgen and his practice-enlightenment emphasis. Traditions that emphasize dangerous concepts such as “ground of being” might be more helpful now than they might have been earlier, if you can take them with an appropriately huge grain of salt and eventually see beyond them. [Pepper!]
4) Really allow experience to show itself. Really allow luminosity to show itself. Really allow things just to happen as they do. Less control, more direct understanding of that natural unfolding, more noticing of how the sense of control occurs at all, what it feels like, how that set of textures and intentions sets up a sense that there is a “you” that is doing anything and how obviously wrong that is. Feel into what seems to be looking, asking, wanting, and expecting, and investigate all of that. Do not do this forcefully. Instead, skillfully and subtly coax those patterns into the light of awareness that sees through their clever tricks. There are only so many trick patterns: learn them and see them for what they are. The right feel for this is the same as the way you must look just slightly to one side of the Pleiades to see them clearly. It is almost as if you must sneak up on core processes so gently that they don’t notice and can be caught unawares, except that the sneaking up process is what you are also trying to sneak up on. Thus, the slower you move attention, the more likely you will be able to catch up with yourself. Skillful rapid vibration junkies will shift to become flow-fluxing, panoramic, gentle synchro junkies instead. Remember “The Exercise of the Spinning Swords”.
5) Notice that you can’t do anything other than what happens. Try. See how those patterns occur. Try to do something other than what happens. It is preposterous, but when you try it, there are patterns that arise, patterns of illusion, patterns of pretending, patterns that if you start to look at them you will see are ludicrous, laughable, like a kid’s fantasies. Yet, that is how you believe you are controlling things, so try again and again to do something other than what occurs and watch those patterns of confusion and of pretending to be in control which arise, and you will learn something. This is an unusually profound point. I spent many hours exploring exactly what happens during attempts to do something other than what happens and found it high-yield.
6) Keep the six sense doors and the three characteristics in all their profundity as the gold standards for whether you are perceiving things clearly. In each moment that you aren’t clear about these, notice why and debunk it right there, and then do it again and again and again. It always takes more repetitions of this process than people think it should, and so many get psyched out, when it might have been but a few more iterations of the process to have succeeded in locking in that way of perceiving things.
7) Feel the going out into new territory with its confusion, tedium, frustration, and creepiness as the prize itself. That which wants it to be known, mapped, predictable, certain, safe, and familiar, is part of what you need to see as it is. Perceive those patterns in the head, chest, stomach, throat, etc., as more shifting, fresh patterns. That freshness keeps you honest, keeps you really paying attention in that slightly violating, slightly personally taboo way that really helps in the end.
8) If you are familiar with the vipassana jhanas as living, familiar, felt perceptual modes, then realize that third path, due to the fractal strangeness of the mind, has elements of the third vipassana jhana to it. Third path is broad but there is something creepy about it, as it violates the center in a more intimate way than do the earlier paths. The more you have a tolerance for something in that letting go through-to-the-bone creepiness and can see the good side in that, the breadth, the spaciousness, the naturalness, the directness, the completeness, the fullness, the now-ness of it, the better you will do. It is a more sophisticated way of perceiving things, more beyond control, more decentralized, more spacious, braver, more free, requiring more trust, more openness, more acceptance, being more down-to-earth, and at the same time also more diffuse, which is an odd juxtaposition of feelings to get used to, but it is worth it. Said another way: third path is an acquired taste.
9) If you have Boundless Space, or even j4.j5, meaning the spacious aspect of the fourth jhana that is not truly formless but still quite open and wide, this is a really good pointer, just also allow it to go through anything you think is you, working on that seeming boundary line, as above, but allowing it to breathe, to flux, volumetrically, like moving blobs of space with texture all together, all of them just the natural world doing its rich and empty thing.
10) In that same way, if you have access to Boundless Consciousness, or even j4.j6, meaning the Boundless Consciousness aspect of the fourth formed jhana, the aspect where you see the luminosity of consciousness pervading the space of the jhana and its formed elements, cultivate that. There is also some element of this that is useful to realizing what third path is all about. It is not that the jhana is third path, or that third path is perfectly like these jhanas. It is that these jhanas do fill in some piece of the puzzle, which, when combined with insight, helps third path arise.
11) If you have the last two formless realms, Nothingness and Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception, enter them and leave them again and again and again. What remains of you when you are in these rarified states? What falls away when you enter them? What seems the same? What perceives them? You can’t answer these questions for the eighth jhana, but it is very instructive to try. Further, that glorious post-eighth jhana junction point (P8JP) has some interesting power to it, and, after leaving the eighth jhana, asking deep, direct, perceptual questions about perception itself can be quite powerful. What rearises when you leave them? What do they tell you about your typical impression that you must be a body, a mind, or even something perceived? Set intentions to answer these questions before you get into that territory and watch what happens!
12) There is something very immediate about third path. Thus, look for how a sense of time is formed in your experience. What does your mind do when you think a thought of past or future? How do those feel different? What is the difference in the qualities of sensations, in the way the head and eyes hold themselves, in where thoughts occur, in how they feel? Formally experiment with how a sense of time is created here and now, consciously, clearly, in this space, in this immediacy. This begins to create some of the frameworks of insight that will be very useful later. Read that sentence again and see how you immediately perceive the concept of “later”!
As those on third path cycle, they will enter new territory, possibly causing some uncertainty or instability, and with each Review phase they tend to feel that they truly have done it until they notice the limits of their practice. There can be this nagging sense in the background that things aren’t finished, and yet figuring out exactly what the problem is can be very slippery. It is a bit like being in the stages just before stream entry, trying to figure out what exactly needs to be done. They need to notice something that has nothing to do with the cycles to untangle the knot of perception at its core, but doing this can be a real trick. It is a very strange place, as we seem to know the insight practice–related aspects of the dharma all the way to the end and yet somehow it still isn’t quite enough. In that vein, it is interesting to note that I wrote most of this book while I was an anagami and, years later, I still appreciate much of what I wrote then. My emphases are slightly different now, but the basics are the same.
As practice deepens, anagamis begin to tire of the cycles to a small or large degree and begin to look to something outside of or unrelated to them for the answer to the final question. Golden dreams, meaning golden chains, such as a luminous transcendent superspace or ground of being, can at once become more compellingly attractive and more repulsive. Finally, the cycles of insight and, if meditators have them, the shamatha jhanas, the powers, and all the other perks and prerogatives of their stages of awakening, as well as any concentration abilities (again, if they developed them), hold no appeal and only lead to more unsatisfying cycles. In fact, these cycles may strangely begin to become a source of deep, existential disgust, and this can come as quite a surprise to those who previously felt enraptured by them.
I completed around twenty-seven full, complete insight cycles with powerful A&P Events, challenging Dark Nights, equanimity phases, and what seemed to be brand new, fresh Fruitions and Review phases between third and fourth paths. There is nothing special about that number, both because it is just a rough guess and because of the reasons I stated when describing the phenomena of what Bill Hamilton referred to as “Twelfth Path”. The later cycles got faster and faster, so that by the end it seemed I was whipping one out every few weeks or even every few days, but they still seemed to be leading nowhere.
It was only when I had gotten so sick of the cycles and realized that they were leading nowhere that I was able to see what has nothing to do with the cycles, which also wasn’t anything except a strange untangling of the knot of perceiving them. The cycles, for better or worse, have continued just the same. Thus, there is not much point in counting cycles or paths, as they don’t necessarily correlate well with anything beyond the first two or three, and issues of backsliding can really make things complex, as I explained earlier.
Finishing up my revised four-path model, arahants have finally untangled the knot of perception, dissolved the sense of the centerpoint as being “The Center Point”, and no longer experientially make a separate self out of the patterns of sensations that used to produce that sense, even though those same patterns of sensations continue. This is a different understanding from those of third path, and makes this path about something that is beyond the paths. This is also poetically called “the opening of the wisdom eye” (which, as mentioned, is not talking about any sort of additional eye or psychic eye or whatever, as some people seemed to extrapolate from my mentioning it without this qualifier in MCTB1). What is interesting is that I could write about this stage reasonably well when I was an anagami, but that is a whole different world from knowing it as an arahant. As an anagami, it seemed like about ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of the field of experience knew itself where and as it was. The last little remaining ignorant percentage was maddeningly difficult to track down, with the tracking down paradigm obviously being part of the problem. That subtle few percent of the field of perception that was still poorly perceived caused a surprising amount of discomfort that got worse rather than better as practice progressed.
To use strictly metaphorical language, the wisdom eye may seem to blink initially, which is a way of saying that this untangling of the final knot of perception may re-tangle itself, though having ever seen perception truly untangled, that insight, even if transient, really points to the essence of realization, and even remembering what it was like can call the mind back to that far-superior way of perceiving. We may go through cycles of suddenly untangling just after Fruition and then having that insight slowly fade over a few hours (at least on retreat) as each round of physical sensations, then mental sensations, then complex emotional formations, then lastly fundamental formations such as inquiry itself, move through and become integrated into this new, correct, and direct perception of reality as it is.
Review cycles may recur many times during each period when perception is untangled, and during those periods, the cycles may seem rather irrelevant in comparison to keeping the level of clarity and acceptance high enough to keep the “eye” open. When the direct and untangled perceptual mode fades and the knot of perception seems to retie itself, the familiar insight cycles may seem like pure drudgery, as the focus drifts back to getting lost in the cycles and then gradually shifting again to getting clear enough to get the “eye” to “open” again. The themes that occupy center stage go through a cycle that is very much like a progress cycle.
Finally, the various cycles all converge, and the wisdom eye stays open from then on, the knot remains untied. Said another way, we cease to be able to perceive reality in a tangled state, and even everything that seemed tangled is now clearly perceived as intrinsically untangled without any other perceptual option. That being seen, nothing can erode or disturb the centerlessness of perspective. Done is what had to be done, and life goes on. That there are arahants who have flipped reality around to the centerless mode of perception but had it re-tangle, and that there are those who have opened it and had it stay open is rarely mentioned but worth knowing.
For the arahant who has kept the knot untangled, there is nothing more to be gained on the ultimate front from insight practices, as that axis of development has been taken as far as it goes. That said, insight practices can continue to be of great benefit to them for a whole host of reasons. There is much they can learn just like everyone else about everything there is to learn. They can grow, develop, change, evolve, mature, and participate in this strange, beautiful, comic, tragic human drama just like everyone else. They can integrate these understandings and their unfolding implications into their general way of being. Practicing being mindful and the rest still helps, since the mind is an organic thing like a muscle, and how we condition it affects it profoundly. These practitioners also cycle through the stages of insight, as with everyone beyond stream entry, so doing insight practices can move those cycles along. 
I commonly get questions about the fact that arahants still cycle, and thus must go through the Dark Night stages. The Dark Night stages are not the problem that they were before, as they relied on the knot at the center of perception for much of their disturbing power. With the knot of perception gone, the stages’ unfortunate aspects vanish, and the skillful aspects that engender growth, keep us real, and promote fascinating spiritual adventures, remain. It is amazing to call up the stages of insight and go deeply into them while in this untangled perceptual mode and watch how they just don’t stick as they did, don’t catch us in the same way, and yet still take us on a rich tour of ourselves in so many different, human facets. This sort of formal Review practice can yield rich treasures of development and amusement. Enjoy!
On less fun topics, in the circles I run in, MCTB1 inspired some folks to create a spin-off term, “technical fourth path”, which continues to be loosely defined in a strangely large number of ways by various definers, but generally was pointing to this disconnect between the standard Theravada models that implied eliminating all negative emotions and the perceptual models that involved seeing all things as naturally empty, centerless phenomena. Please note that various schools of thought on exactly what the criteria are for “technical fourth path” do not agree on those criteria, and claiming that someone has “technical fourth path” has become relatively common, for better or for worse. If you run into someone claiming this attainment, it might be worth asking exactly what they mean and what their criteria are, to avoid confusion and needless projection.
One criterion that gets thrown around as primary for this “technical fourth path” is the sense that a person is simply “done”. Over the years, I have had that feeling myself many times and I have come to the measured conclusion that we have to be very careful with what we do with that feeling of being “done”, as it can very easily become a subtle (or gross) and intractable delusion, something we cling to that prevents us from carefully seeing what is happening now—like a refusal not to progress, grow, and improve—and it can keep us from knowing what the limits of our practice might be and how much more progress could occur if we had more of what Carol Dweck calls a growth-versus-fixed mindset.
Thus, should you find yourself feeling “done”, just watch how that unfolds over time and varies by the moment, as well as how that feeling responds to the challenges that life can bring. Keep an open mind, as I think that this attitude will likely help you more than being certain that the feeling of doneness will last forever or be something you can ride on. I also advocate that whenever that feeling of being “done” arises, you recognize it and make a conscious resolution to open to anything beyond it, just in case, as such resolutions have real power in this territory. I was blessed enough to be sitting at a lunch table with some of the grandmothers and grandfathers of the modern Western meditation teacher world one day, a truly accomplished and seasoned group of wisdom beings, and they all agreed that, whatever you think you have achieved, you should always keep practicing. There are so many axes of development that further practice can benefit. Further, if you are really “done” in the insight sense, no amount of inquiry can violate that, so inquire your ass off, just to be on the safe side, as it can do no harm and can do much good.
Since the term “technical fourth path” is out there, were I to define “technical fourth path”, I would define it as having all the following attributes:
1) the total and final elimination of any sense that there is anything called “attention” or “awareness” that is different from, separate from, or unrelated to bare phenomena;
2) the perfect direct comprehension of all sensations in the entire field where and as they are by themselves, as perception and the sensations are the same thing, so the parity between perception and reality is perfectly one to one at all times, meaning that the question of parity is actually completely eliminated perceptually, as there are just sensations;
3) the total naturalness of the field, such that everything is obviously happening completely on its own in a perfectly causal way;
4) the total integration of all sense doors into one unified and all-pervading “sense door” as mentioned in the Time and Space models section (meaning that all sensations appear to be just qualities of this perfectly integrated, boundaryless, fluxing, created-on-the-fly volume), which also specifically means that all thoughts are perceived naturally as part of this same integrated, fluxing volume;
5) the direct and immediate perception that time and space are created out of sensations that arise and vanish now, such that the sense of time and space as existing real entities is entirely seen through;
6) all sensate phenomena without exception self-liberate automatically, meaning that the experience of such questions as, “Is this field awake?” yields a wonderfully direct and satisfying experience of centerlessness and directness of the whole interdependent moment of that same question;
7) any sense of a this-and-that is fundamentally completely uprooted at the perceptual level (not that ordinary discrimination doesn’t function as before), and that this holds up over the long-haul, meaning off-retreat and for years in the face of the strongest vicissitudes of life, across insight cycles, across jhanas and other shifts, and is the only and default perceptual mode at all times when there are any sensations of any kind occurring.
By having this sort of take on what awakening is about (which I think is a pretty high standard), I have been accused of having very low standards. I think this standard is a very reasonable one, and if you think it is a low bar, then I would recommend attaining it and seeing how you find it, and wish you well on your journey beyond it to whatever else calls to you at that point. If you have already attained it, and it has held up for a while, drop me a line if you feel inclined, as it would be fun to talk about it.
So, now that we have talked about the Theravada path models, we should give some time to the related Indian Mahayana models.