Last night I had a dream, where I was in some sort of student-teacher situation with Daniel Ingram, and another fellow. I don’t remember the content of the dream that well, but when I woke up from the dream, around 5 in the morning, I had a profound recollection.
The recollection had to do with an experience I had while on the 6-week retreat, somewhere around the mid-way point of the retreat. Without going into the specifics, cause in the end I don’t think they matter that much, when I woke up I suddenly remembered an obscure detail in Daniel’s book, and realized that the experience I’d had correlated exactly what with he’d described. I’d had the intuition before that this was the case, and had it indirectly confirmed by another teacher, but this morning things suddenly “clicked into place” for me on another level.
The result was that I suddenly knew that given time & patience my path would unfold accordingly, and I would “enter the stream,” as they say in the Theravadin Buddhist tradition. I suddenly became confident beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I would know the fruit of my practice. I guess you could call it faith, although in the Theravadin lineage they call this particular kind of faith, “verified faith,” because its faith based on experience, not on belief.
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February 6th, 2006 at 11:22 am
[...] The stages of insight, which Pongsathorn is giving a subjective description of in the above quote and which I was referring to in the my previous post, have to do with the progressive unfolding of perception as one deepens insight into the true nature of phenomena, namely their impermanent, unsatisfactory, and selfless nature. As this “insight” deepens, more-or-less predictable stages of perceptions and side-effects occur, on the way to the first stage of enlightenment (and beyond). I have a personal interest in studying these different state-stages, or what Wilber calls meditative cartographies. They’re helpful maps that can potentially be sources of valuable information and inspiration. But like any other maps, they can be used in harmful ways, and can ironically become obstacles to progress. As an integral therevadin practioner (or neo-therevadin), I’m interested in using these frameworks to inform my practice in helpful ways. Recognizing that disregarding the rich history of what practioners before me have discovered, would be foolish. Instead, I’m interested in using the conceptual knowledge when it’s helpful, and abandoning it when it isn’t. [...]
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