Also, I think that terminology can lead to specific induced states as it primes your mind for certain things.
One of the annoying things with meditation is of course that there’s n=1 primary experience that makes it hard to talk about yet from my perspective it seems a bit like insight cycling, dark night of the soul and the hell realms are something that can be related to a hyperstition or a specific way of practicing?
If you for example follow thai-forest tradition, mahamudra or dzogchen (potentially advaita though less certain) it seems that insights along those lines are more a consequence of not having established a strong enough 1 to 1 correspondence with loving awareness before doing intense concentration meditation? (Experience has always been happening, yet the basis for that experience might be different.)
It is a bit like the difference between dissolving into a warm open bath or a warm embrace or hug of the world versus seeing through the world to an abyss where there is no ground. That groundlessness seems to be shaped by what is there to meet it and so I’m a bit worried about the temporal cycling language as it seems to predicate a path on what has no ground?
I don’t really have a good solution here as people seem to be going through those sort of experiences that you’re talking about and it isn’t like I’ve not gotten depressive episodes after longer meditation epxperiences either. Yet I don’t know if I would call it a dark night of the soul for it implies a necessity of personation with the suffering and that is not what is primary? Language is a prior for experience and so I would just use different language myself but whatever.
Man I’m noticing this is hard to put into words, hopefully some of it made sense and I appreciate the effort for a more standardised cybernetic basis to talk about these things through.
Also, I think that terminology can lead to specific induced states as it primes your mind for certain things.
Yep. For this reason, my favorite teachers often don’t talk about specific insights until a student encounters it him/herself.
I don’t think that insight cycles aren’t limited to a certain way of practicing. I read about them from a Daniel Ingram’s Therevada book, but my Zen teacher talks about them too—he just uses different words and emphasizes different aspects.
I have heard that the hard parts of insight cycles like dark nights are much easier if you do lots of morality work before getting deep into insight. In this way, different traditions can make certain parts of the path easier and harder.
As for a path that has no ground, there is a ground: it’s compassion. The challenge is that a lot of norative intermediary priors are fundamentally groundless. This is a difficulty of the territory, and not an error in the map.
It is true that dark nights are predicated on having some degree of chronic suffering. That’s true in two ways: ① without an encapsulation layer to penetrate there is nothing to see through with which to get access into a dark night and ② encapsulating world models cause chronic suffering.
Also, I think that terminology can lead to specific induced states as it primes your mind for certain things.
One of the annoying things with meditation is of course that there’s n=1 primary experience that makes it hard to talk about yet from my perspective it seems a bit like insight cycling, dark night of the soul and the hell realms are something that can be related to a hyperstition or a specific way of practicing?
If you for example follow thai-forest tradition, mahamudra or dzogchen (potentially advaita though less certain) it seems that insights along those lines are more a consequence of not having established a strong enough 1 to 1 correspondence with loving awareness before doing intense concentration meditation? (Experience has always been happening, yet the basis for that experience might be different.)
It is a bit like the difference between dissolving into a warm open bath or a warm embrace or hug of the world versus seeing through the world to an abyss where there is no ground. That groundlessness seems to be shaped by what is there to meet it and so I’m a bit worried about the temporal cycling language as it seems to predicate a path on what has no ground?
I don’t really have a good solution here as people seem to be going through those sort of experiences that you’re talking about and it isn’t like I’ve not gotten depressive episodes after longer meditation epxperiences either. Yet I don’t know if I would call it a dark night of the soul for it implies a necessity of personation with the suffering and that is not what is primary? Language is a prior for experience and so I would just use different language myself but whatever.
Man I’m noticing this is hard to put into words, hopefully some of it made sense and I appreciate the effort for a more standardised cybernetic basis to talk about these things through.
Yep. For this reason, my favorite teachers often don’t talk about specific insights until a student encounters it him/herself.
I don’t think that insight cycles aren’t limited to a certain way of practicing. I read about them from a Daniel Ingram’s Therevada book, but my Zen teacher talks about them too—he just uses different words and emphasizes different aspects.
I have heard that the hard parts of insight cycles like dark nights are much easier if you do lots of morality work before getting deep into insight. In this way, different traditions can make certain parts of the path easier and harder.
As for a path that has no ground, there is a ground: it’s compassion. The challenge is that a lot of norative intermediary priors are fundamentally groundless. This is a difficulty of the territory, and not an error in the map.
It is true that dark nights are predicated on having some degree of chronic suffering. That’s true in two ways: ① without an encapsulation layer to penetrate there is nothing to see through with which to get access into a dark night and ② encapsulating world models cause chronic suffering.