Over at the Dharma Overground, Daniel Ingram dropped some good practical advice for those practitioners who are trying to make progress in their practice. If you are confused with the terms, you might want to check out his book, but rest assured, this dude knows what he’s talking about:
If you are one of the chronic Dark Nighters here: get stream entry. It really helps. Go on long retreats, meaning 2-4 months, if you can possibly find the time without doing things like ruining your ordinary life, credit, career and important commitments. Just investigate the Three Characteristics of every single thing, space, subject, object, whatever, second after second with sufficient consistency and then inclusiveness to get it full 360 in all spacial axes and through the center. Practicing long enough in that sort of territory tends to do it.
If you are past stream entry but not yet an anagami: keep cycling and begin to feel the apparent tension between the fact that Fruitions occur and yet during the experience of most sensations things are largely the same as pre-stream entry. Thus, look at their luminosity, their own manifestation/awareness where they are, on its own, the centerlessness of perception, and do this again and again until you get anagamihood. The Three Characteristics are still key.
For those anagamis, meaning those for whom emptiness/luminosity/centerless means something tangible and obvious in real-time as a baseline of perception who yet have not finished the thing up: keep looking at the subtle sensations that make up the center, emptiness, luminosity, space, perception, awareness, investigation, with particular attention to not avoiding pain and the tension that subtly lurks in the last false knot-process of dualistic illusion-making. Do this again and again until you are so sick of the cycles that your mind sees something just after a Fruition that untangles the knot and the last apparent duality of emptiness and form. The Three Characteristics are still key, but pay attention to how reality re-assembles itself after each Fruition, as there is something important to be learned from what happens and noticing that each of these processes are themselves empty, transient, etc.
