http://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3940082
Daniel:
I myself have never used the term technical 4th, and I am not sure where it originated.
Lots
of people, even those in this community, use the terms discussed here
in many different ways, and they tend to get loosely applied a lot of
the time.
I am currently thinking about the models very
differently from the general way presented in MCTB, in case anyone is
asking, with an increased appreciation of the basic concept, expressed
in MCTB, that there are many axes of development, and the assumption
that they will all occur simultaneously in a very specified sequence
often not reflecting what actually happens in the wild.
That
said, the language is still in use, and I use it sometimes also these
days, for better or for worse, though I am trying to get away from it
more and more, as it causes a lot of trouble, and there seem to be many
layers to the thing that often surprise people when they show up
unexpectedly when they thought they had something totally nailed, as
happened to me many, many times over many years, as noted in MCTB.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand...
Some
people use Technical or MCTB 4th to mean the general feeling that they
are done, with that feeling of doneness being the primary criteria.
Kenneth Folk, the primary proponent of this particular meaning, was just
here at Hurricane Ranch working on his book, and we had long
discussions about this, with me advocating for this not to be the
primary thrust of the term, and him thinking that the feeling of
doneness was of primary importance. I argued for the following as being
more along the lines of what I considered relevant: an undifferentiated
field of selfless causality doing its natural thing with no sense of
center-point, doer, controller, perceiver, or agent of any kind. Anyway,
experts clearly disagree, and so long as people qualify how they are
using the term, I am not sure it matters, or does it? Actually, it
probably does, so back to the drawing board...
As posted in an
earlier thread, I think a more nuanced model that allows for flexibility
and many areas of development and evolution of the practitioner in time
is going to be what we end up with, following something like a more
medical model of all of this.
For instance, when I am admitting a
patient from the emergency department and speak on the phone with my
consulting/admitting hospitalist, I don't just say, "Mrs. Jones has
pneumonia, admit her."
Instead, I might say, "Mrs. Jones is a 75
year-old female with pneumonia who needs admission. She has mild
emphysema, diet-controlled diabetes, hypertension and a previous case of
pneumonia 3 years ago. She was just admitted to the hospital 3 weeks
ago for a right hip replacement by Dr. Smith. Her primary care doctor is
Dr. Brown, for whom you admit. She had been recovering well at home for
3 days after 2 weeks in a rehab facility who presented with shortness
of breath, fever to 102.1, a blood pressure of 102/45, a heart rate of
120, and an pulse ox of 89% on room air. She was found to have bilateral
patchy infiltrates on chest x-ray, a white count of 17.5 with 92% neuts
and 3% bands, platelets are a bit elevated 580, has mild anemia, a
glucose of 216, a normal urinalysis, a sodium that was just a bit low at
131, normal potassium, mild dehydration with a BUN of 25 and a Cr of
1.2. She improved after 1L of normal saline IV fluids, with her blood
pressure coming up to 110/58, and we gave her levaquin 750mg IV,
doripenem 500mg IV, and vancomycin 1g IV, given her low blood pressure,
concern for sepsis, and recent extensive health-care exposure raising
concern for resistant organisms. Her hip wound is healing well without
erythema. Her breathing responded well to one hour of albuterol and
atrovent nebulized, and she should probably go to the RCU."
In
the same way, of some practitioner I might say, "Mrs. Jones is a 35
year-old female with about 9 months of retreat time total, mostly
Goenka, Mahasi, but also a bit of Soto Zen and Dzogchen, who has been
practicing for 16 years total with a good daily practice. She also
practiced in a mixed Wiccan/Golden Dawn-influenced magickal tradition in
the past and still does on occasion. She has 4 jhanas most of the time
in daily life and can get real formless jhanas on retreat up to the 8th
reliably after a week of practice to warm up and occasionally in the
height of Equanimity during new cycles. She has attained to what she
thinks is Nirodha Samapatti 4 times with heavy afterglow and proper set
up, again on retreat. Her current practice focuses on meditation at all
times in daily life, and integrating what she thinks of as ultimate and
relative perspectives. By her report she is now walking around mostly in
a field that appears mostly without boundaries, but still at points
catches glimpses of formed patterns that clearly have some tinge of a
sense of identification and separateness to them sometimes, and
debunking these are what she considers her cutting edge of practice. She
easily attains to Fruitions up to a few per day in daily life when in
Review phases, and has gone through what feels like an insight cycle
every 2-3 months for the last 3 or so years. When in the A&P phase
she has a high degree of talent for out of body travel, something she
started practicing as a teenager. She also feels she can at times see
auras and subtly manipulate her own and others energetic fields. She has
had a few prognosticative dreams of uncanny accuracy, none in the last
two years. She just crossed the A&P last about 6 days ago, and is
currently struggling a bit in Re-Observation, but bleed-through is
minimal, her having easily identified this phase from long familiarity
with it, and her job as a physical therapist is going well despite a
relatively large amount of daily practice, about 2-3 hours/day of
sitting at this point, which at this time is making her feel a bit edgy,
though nothing nearly as bad as it used to during this phase, and she
is confident she will hit Equanimity any time now. She is planning a
retreat of 2 weeks duration at the Forest Refuge in 4 months, with her
goal being total field integration. She also practices Bikram yoga in a
hot studio 3 times/week and finds it very helpful, something she has
done on and off for 5 years. She has noticed a marked increase in her
emotional balance and ease after a major shift about 5 months ago that
she has no good name for, as it doesn't seem to correlate that well with
any standard map. The benefits of that shift have held up well in the
face of some recent family stressors, with clear and automatic
improvement in the way she processed old triggers by her parents. She
does occasionally suffer from insomnia, but uses the time to meditate.
She also volunteers occasionally at the local art museum front desk and
occasionally paints water colors, and she was actually painting when her
last major breakthrough occurred and considers it part of her practice.
She has a small local sangha, mostly of mixed practitioners, many of
whom are also members of her yoga studio. She teaches informally through
Skype on occasion."
Here is a repost of the thread content, as somehow I can't find the original thread:
"A
large number of recent conversations with relatively talented
practitioners revolved around various things that practice had done to
everyone, and what the similarities and differences were. These
conversations mercifully weren't along the lines of, "Yeah, I'm an MCTB
Arahat," or whatever, and instead focused on the phenomenology, which is
always more fun and straightforward anyway, and is often less
politically charged, it seems.
Basically, the attempts of the
conversations were either consciously less so (but the effect was the
same) to put the member of the groups discussing this on a virtual grid
something like this.
On one axis you have those discussing what they can do and what they have attained.
On the other axis, you have something like this, in no particular order:
Agency:
completely gone, even more completely gone, sometimes completely gone,
at times has been completely gone, is somewhat attenuated, is
occasionally attenuated, is still quite present.
Panoramic Perspective: how well does the concept of panoramic perspectives describe your practice and how has this changed?
Dreams:
did you dream before and do you dream now and how are they the same or
different? Have you lucid dreamed and how has this changed with
practice?
Traveling: have you ever and can you still travel out
of body, with what degree of regularity and control, duration, etc? Can
you do it from waking or do you have to start in a lucid dream? Can you
come back to body being fully awake or do you have to come back to a
dream? etc.
Sleep: do you need more, less, or what, if anything, is different.
Visualization ability: same, different, there, not there, or what?
Cycling:
do you cycle through the insight stages or something like them, and did
you cycle before, and what it is it like now and how has it changed?
Fruitions:
have you ever attained them, can you attain them now, did you ever have
the notion that they had duration of any kind (either experienced or
not experienced), how many could you at your best attain/day and how
rapidly from inclination to them happening, can you get multiple back to
back, etc.?
Subject/Observer: seems to be localized, seems diffuse, seems gone some of the time, seems utterly and completely gone, or what?
Affect: do you still have the internal feeling of feelings, and if so is anything different about the way you experience them?
Similarly:
Affect triggers: is there anything different about how stimuli that
would have at some point in the past (and perhaps now) have triggered
feelings are reacted to and if so, what is different, if anything, and
how has this changed?
External Affect: do people still perceive
you to have feeling and, if so, how has this changed as a result of
practice, if at all?
Formed Jhanas: did you ever have and do you
still have jhanas, and if so, which ones and how developed (stability,
duration, rapidity of access, various objects, etc.)?
Formless
Realms: did you ever have they and do you still have them, and if so,
how developed were/are they (with formed/bodily phenomena somewhat
present, very present, subtle or gone or what, stability, access,
duration, etc.)?
Brahma Viharas: have you practiced them, and
could you stay with the phrases, feel the actual feelings, take them to
their ultimate jhanas (3rd or 4th, depending) and how has this changed
with time?
Powers: did you ever have any, do you still have them
or can you access them, and if so how often, how easily, what conditions
required, etc.? How has your interpretation of those experiences varied
with time?
Energetics: have you ever perceived energetic stuff
(vibrations, chakras, energy channels, etc.) and could you ever
manipulate them, and can you now and what conditions would be required
to do that?
Nirodha Samapatti: do you think you have ever
attained it, which version did you attain (NS Lite: sense of
duration/experience still somehow present, or NS Deluxe: experience and
everything else utterly gone), can you still attain it, do you have any
notion of how long the attainment has been able to last (either by
external or internal reference) and what conditions would be required
for you to do that?
Suffering: what is suffering like for you now
on any level and how do you describe it? What causes the mind to be
disturbed, if anything?
Memory: has practice changed your memory of events in any way and if so how?
Visual Field: anything different about it, or any other sense door, for that matter?
Relationships
with others: has practice changed the way you related to others and if
so how, assuming the ability to generalize this very complex topic?
Compassion:
do you feel compassion, and, if so, how has practice changed it if at
all or your understanding of what compassion is?
Peace: is your mind more or less peaceful or what and how has this changed with time?
Ethics: has your practice changed your concept of morality and ethics, and if so, how and how has this evolved with time?
Task Fatigue: has meditation practice changed your ability to stay on tasks with less fatigue in any way?
Silence: do you perceive your mind as silent and if so when/how often?
Thoughts: how has meditation practice changed what thoughts do and how often you perceive them to occur?
Time: anything interesting about it?
There
are probably a bunch more things that could be placed on this grid, but
those are some of the more common ones that have been bandied about
recently, and these sorts of conversations turn out to be so much more
fun than trying to shoehorn people into very narrow concepts such as
single path names and the like, as it turns out that there is all sorts
of variability in how people respond to those questions even among
people who claim the same crudely labeled attainments.
While
these could end up looking a bit like a character sheet from D&D
(for those old enough to remember what that was), the effect is a much
more nuanced and productive discussion of exactly what people are
experiencing and it also leads nicely to all sorts of fascinating
practice discussions, I have found.
This is actually a setup for a
more sophisticated discussion of the goal and promises of practice and
what is possible and how developments may occur in a non-parallel
fashion sometimes, as well as terms such as "enlightenment", which,
given that the level of discussion is now at this much more nuanced
level, seem paltry by comparison."
See the difference?
Daniel
.....
Thanks.
Here is a fragment from MCTB2 in its rough form that I was just working on recently.
"The Problems with Most Current and Former Models
There are large numbers of problems with many of the models of
meditative development that we have inherited from the past as well as
those we are creating today. I will get right to the point and list the
major problems and then spend some time flushing them out:
1.
Some models assume predictable linear development, such that if you
attain this, next you will attain that, and so on, with this and that
being very specifically defined. I call this the Linear Fallacy. It is
not that there aren’t some truths in these models, but there are
generally problems as well.
2. Some models assume that if you
attain or understand one thing, you will automatically attain or
understand something else which might be entirely unrelated, something I
call the Package Fallacy. It is not that packages of abilities and
understandings don’t occur, as they definitely do, but most Package
Models presume it will always happen that way.
3. Some models
assume that if you can perceive or do something now that you will always
be able to (at least until you die, that is in most models that don’t
assume that realizations carry on into the “next life”.) I call this the
Permanence Fallacy. It is not that there aren’t some very long-lasting
and resilient transformations that can occur, but some of these models
have problems that I will touch on in a bit.
4. Some models
assume that if you attain to something you will automatically describe
it in certain ways. I call this the Descriptive Fallacy.
5. Some
models assume that if you attain to something you will automatically
know you have attained it, what it is, what it does, and what it means. I
call this the Diagnostic Fallacy. It is in many ways related to the
Descriptive Fallacy.
6. Some models assume that there is only
one endpoint that is a valid or final or ultimate endpoint and that it
will look a certain way. I call this the Final Fallacy, or, as my friend
Kenneth Folk calls it, Pernicious Convergence, meaning that all roads
lead to some specific final point if you take them all far enough, and
this is not referring to that obvious endpoint, namely death, as least
not in some models...
It is worth noting that I have fallen
victim to believing all of these fallacies to some degree at some point,
though now don’t totally believe any of them. Exactly how these
Fallacies do and don’t apply is complicated. The problem is that many of
them are getting at something that can happen sometimes or something
that is at least partly true with some qualifiers at points. I will
illustrate this by way of specific examples now.
The Linear
Fallacy is probably the most pernicious of them all. Most models that
are not single shot models (meaning models that are not Total Package
Models, in which everything that you could every know and do is gained
all at once in one big “Zap!”) involve some aspect of the Linear
Fallacy. The Four Path Model, the Tibetan Five Path Model, the Bhumi
Model, and many others all involve this one to some degree. The problem
is not that they are not getting at something that may have some value
as a model, as many of them have some specific merits at times with many
qualifiers..."
Anyway, much more work to do on that.
Nice, really like this kind of a more descriptive, "everyone's unique" approach.