April 2018

My gut told me a new season of insight practice was coming.  I started to investigate time, after encouragement from a friend.  This led to some new perceptions, which I shared with my spiritual friend, who in turn assigned me some new insight practices that I have been waiting for a long period to receive.  My spiritual friend remarked that I have been very patient & I felt like a new set of possibilities had opened up.

I began to practice these intensively off-cushion, as I tend to do.  First exploring a type of vipassana for several days, then moving into the space or ground of each sense door, then noticing that the sense doors are actually all fused together in one.  These are all deepenings of things I already have & the last one felt poignant.  I spent hours just “mushing” panoramic-vision & support-of-earth together, or body-as-whole & silence-between-sounds together.  There were several “micro shifts” as these things clicked into place.  What was weird about doing this overall set of instructions is that it launched me into a heavy insight cycle.  I went through the POI twice between 4.16 & 4.30, with insightful C&E’s, hypomanic A&P’s, miserable dark nights & crystalline EQ’s.  Haven’t had that for awhile. 

After the sequence described above, I began to feel into this vast, hollow room beyond anything I had known before.  I was compelled to investigate memories of dreaming, as well as the sensation of falling asleep, to understand that all states of consciousness take place in this room.  The “hollowness” of everything was much more in my face, even than space or vastness beyond space.  Within that cold hollowness, the display of reality (including myself) seemed like a kind of puppet show (weird detachment effects).  

I also played with a lens of infinite inner world, infinite outer.

Then I had a sense of this work cutting through a sense of caring about my life.  I investigated different avoidance mechanisms (death, pain, etc).  Then I had a newfound type of renunciation where I decided I was just going to meditate & not do morality anymore.

I thought a lot: about drinking, dating, right speech & finance.  I drank too much a couple times, suffered hangovers & reflected on how stupid it is that I continue to do this occasionally.  My habit of making stream-of-consciousness public posts with potentially unskillful material caught up with me: I had 2 interactions of people reaching out to critique my emphasis on maps.  I also decided to just focus on meditation for awhile & stop doing all the morality stuff I’ve been working on.