Numinous Nonsense

In a recent comment on my post on The Spiritual Map of the Elders I got some very good follow-up questions. I’d like to answer them in this post, one at a time.
And thanks to Bob for bringing these questions up.

How many hours of meditation would you guess you logged until you initially encountered ‘The Three Characteristics’?

The first time I remember clearly getting into The Three Characteristics was on my first retreat, somewhere in the middle of the retreat. Including the time I spent practicing daily prior to that and the retreat time itself I’d say I stumbled into that territory after around 100-200 hours of practice. From what I can tell it’s not all that difficult to get into this initial territory, and you’ll almost certain run into it on a week or longer meditation retreat if you’re practicing well.

Not to belabor the obvious, but your approach seems to strongly emphasize mindfulness of mind and to some degree bodily sensations. I wonder, though, if The Four Immeasurables of Loving-Kindness, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity have played a role in your practice?

Yes, my approach has been to put a considerable amount of energy into the four foundations of mindfulness as a vehicle for insight. But I have also practiced with the Brahma Viharas (or Four Immeasurables) and found these practices to be quite helpful. In particular my first solid experience of the 1st and 2nd jhana came during a 3-day metta retreat. I found metta to be a great concentration practice, and it really helped quiet the mind. I’ve also found metta practice an extremely helpful aid while on long-retreats, particularly when I’m going through “difficult” insight territory. It really helps open the heart, despite an acute awareness of suffering, and in many ways I think is greatly supportive to my more “dry insight” approach.

I also think that as a life-long intention to cultivate states of love, kindness, etc. that these practices are great for that. Most long-time meditators that I’ve met see a tremendous value in cultivating these states, as a support both for insight and concentration, but also for living a good and meaningful life (i.e. ethics).

Also, to what degree have you focused purely on honing concentration, or “shamatha”, and if you have – was there a specific “sign” that allowed you to move more into insight meditation?

Initially I focused primarily on shamatha via the mindfulness of the breath. On my first retreat, which I mentioned earlier, then I started doing the Mahasi Sayadaw method of vipassana. The sign which one looks for is “access concentration,” which for me was just being stabilized enough so that I could do the vipassana practice fairly consistently. I found on retreat to be able to do that fairly quickly, so I figured that I had cultivated access concentration, though to be honest I didn’t really think that much about it. Now, I find it a non-issue as I can very reliably begin practicing in a relatively uninterrupted way.

I have, off and on, since that time devoted time to developing shamatha, though I haven’t mastered the 8 jhanas. I have periodic experience with deeper concentration states, but have in large part decided to follow the path of “dry insight” of going straight for Arhantship w/o a whole lot of interest in developing firm mastery of the concentration states. That being said, lately I’ve found myself becoming interested in shamatha again, and have considered doing a 2-3 week shamatha retreat or perhaps one day even going to sit an extended retreat with B. Alan Wallace. We’ll see…

Again, thanks for the questions. I hope that by sharing some of my personal answers to these questions that I can encourage people to be openly pragmatic about their dharma practice.

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