ardacigin

The reality of the situation is that meditation requires discipline, consistency and proper technique according to the student. And a lot of time is needed. If you are taking a 3-month retreat meditating 10 + hours a day and REALLY applying the techniques properly, experiencing the growth systematically and still think you got more consciousness from a few psychedelic trips, you are doing it wrong. The techniques are not working. I'm talking about the baseline increase in consciousness. Not the peak experience of insight. Also, if you think 1 hour a day is anything serious, you need to realize that people do retreats for a reason. Crank up the intensity. You need tangible skills to do get anywhere and from what I'm observing with people, they do practices without diligence. Doing self enquiry for a 15 mins changing it to breath meditation for 10 mins and doing some labeling and ending it with do-noting. You miss the point. The momentum of all these practices are interrupted by the next technique. That is what we call dabbling. Stable attention and concentration development is the name of the game in the beginning stages. The multi-perspectival approach which is great is turning into a way to just spice up the boredom and restlessness of stable attention as a dabbler. The hard work is maintaining that stable attention. Then you add the awareness. Then you learn how to maintain them together. Distracting thoughts start to fall away. Sleepiness starts to go away. The mind is energized. Then you get to effortlessness. Then joy and happiness arises. Then contentment arises. Then equanimity and insights starts to arise. Try to get more serious about meditation. Using psychedelics must be done responsibly. Also yoga and meditation are not distinct practices. One is not more powerful than the other just because yoga introduces body movements and postures. They are both extremely powerful. In a yoga posture, you are not thinking about stuff. If you are, then you are not ready to maintain attention in yogıc posture and body movements. Again, learn to stabilize attention first. Then do the yoga postures. You can do kriya yoga like that for 10 years and just like meditation, not get anywhere. Kriya yoga is not a magic pill. It requires as much diligence as mindfulness meditation. If kriya yoga is 100 times easier to practice than sitting meditation, then you are doing kriya yoga without mindfulness like a physical exercise. And that won't get you anywhere.

@Buba Hi! That contentment and happiness you are looking for don't even require full-blown hardcore deep awakening. Once you become a skilled Samatha meditator, the contentment, joy and happiness will slowly develop and get to legit drug levels. I'm not saying this is easy but at least it is systematic. You develop tangible skills at your own rate. Insight recognition, mastery and embodiment is messier. Once you get to TMI stages 8-9-10, you'll have this contentment and happiness with equanimity. There is no doubt about it. If you don't have the happiness, joy and contentment, then you are not TMI stage 8-9-10. Simple as that. If that is the case, you need to work on stages 4-5-6. And if you can't even do that go all the way back to stages 1-2-3 and start from scratch on a solid foundation. Regardless, once you develop the necessary skills, you'll get there. How fast you'll get there depends on your motivation, talent, nervous system inclination and hard work. It took me about 3-4 years with exclusive practice with TMI. Start reading the book 'The Mınd Illuminated' and see if the practice helps. So enlightened people do feel content and complete. Even skilled Samatha skills will get you there without awakening. So stay diligent and start practicing daily. Motivate yourself and do intense sessions. Try to enjoy your practice as much as you can. Do the jhana practice taught by Leigh Brasington.

Also, let me add my own experiences with behavioral change. I'm not awake from a traditional Theravadan standpoint, however as a skilled samatha meditator, I've reduced suffering and increased life satisfaction, present moment awareness and happiness so radically than before that I'm TOTALLY fine eating chocolate here and there. I'm also TOTALLY fine watching porn and playing video games. I understand that some of you would view these activities to produce attachments and perturb the mind, however that is actually an illusion. All of this work (for the spiritual dimension) occurs internally. Suffering is reduced internally. So once you actually start to do that, you can't point to external activities and say: 'Watching porn is bad and wrong!' So you can sit on a couch and just act like a 'potato' all day, watching porn, TV shows, playing games, and relaxing and that would be a blissful spiritual experience. None of this produces suffering inducing thoughts like: 'Man! I gotta do something with my life. I gotta take action and achieve goals. I feel like something is missing sitting at my mom's basement.' It also doesn't produce negative emotions like sadness, anger, hatred, anxiety etc. See, the entire thought pattern arises out of dissatisfaction and suffering. Someone who has reduced suffering sufficiently would be content living in his mom's basement. However, once you become even more awake, you also start to develop love for sentient beings and compassion for your imagined sense of self and other. Once you are on that level of mastery for both mindfulness and behavioural change, you consciously choose to get out of your mom's basement and decide to help reduce the suffering of the world. So your actions stop being facilitated by the experience of suffering. This might sound simple but even after legit awakening, this is a HUGE challenge. This is why even zen and vipassana masters struggle with behavior change. You need to truly become a master to act from a place of love without a regard for sensate suffering and pain. Don't forget the powerful force of suffering that taints your everyday momentary experience right now as you are reading this. But provided that you get to that level, you'll choose to work on your behavior issues and act on the world rather than being a couch potato. But again! There is nothing wrong with being a couch potato from a spiritual point of view. And you'll come to love and enjoy your shortcomings until you become even more radically awake. At that point, you will still love all of your personal shortcomings but also will do your best to help others reduce their suffering You are filled with joy and contentment. You haven't eliminated all suffering however, you are conscious enough that what is being referred to as 'bad and undesirable' in self-development circles like laziness, video games, entertainment industry, porn (no-fap challeneges etc.), eating junk foods have no longer the ability to produce aversion and unhappiness in the psyche. Therefore your entire view of these activities changes radically. You realize that intrinsically speaking there is no undesirable activities or sensations provided that you can work with these skillfully in the present moment. They become bad and undesirable once you fail in mindfulness or when they contradict with the sense of self's imagined goals, values and moral paradigms. Not only are these values a mental construction but so is the sense of self that resides at the center of your world.

Many of us who are interested in spirituality knows about Shinzen Young and his skill in meditation. He has gone through some horrific intensities in Japan and done 100 days in isolation type of practices very early on in his meditation career. I've talked to Leo about him and he definitely acknowledges his meditation expertise. But Leo also told me that his insights in sensory experience, perception and materialism is still not fully matured. He also said that all spiritual masters have certain shortcomings and lack of insight into certain facets of awakening. I definitely agree with Leo on this. I think it is a wise claim about the nature of spiritual attainments. But if there is one thing you can learn from Shinzen is that his earlier experiences as a child is certainly a case study for people who think that spiritual talent is a big deal in this work. Especially that this idea that spiritual talent severely limits your rate, capacity and potential to grow spiritually regardless of how much you practice. This is not true. Here is Shinzen's early experiences as a child prior to meditation taken directly from his own article: https://www.shinzen.org/meet-my-mom/ 'I have very little natural ability or natural inclination towards meditation. In early life I was unusually wimpy, whiny, and fussy. Also, I was perennially impatient. On top of that, I had a proclivity to be destructive, including towards myself (when I’d get frustrated, I’d bang my head on the sidewalk). I was also pretty mean (just ask my brother). I actually like for people to know what a poor meditation candidate I am based on the tendencies of my early life. I take it as a positive. If a person like me can be successful, anyone can be successful.' Now, anyone who has this sort of childhood can peg themselves spiritually untalented. Shinzen could have thrown in the towel and say: 'Fuck this Japanese meditation torcher. I'll go back to America and focus on my Buddhist studies. I guess I'm untalented spiritually. I won't get anywhere even if I practice hard. Stream entry is way above my pay grade.' Imagine where he'd end up now if he made that decision back then. This work is more about practice, diligence and effort than spiritual talent. Spiritual talent decides where you'll start initially. It also decides how joyful the process might be at first. But it can't decide where you'll end up as long as you apply effort and diligence. Spiritual talent is one's degree of ability to attain both samadhi and spiritual insights (no-self, emptiness etc.) with relative ease. Some people's personalities, brain types and intentions are more in tune with spiritual attainments and high states of concentration. These people start at a higher baseline than other meditators. Again, don't get me wrong here. I don't posit that spiritual talent doesn't exist. It is just not a show stopper considering the vast importance of diligence and effort. For instance lack of spiritual talent won't get in the way of stream entry - first stage of permanent awakening and God realization. But talent might play a larger role when we are talking about 'God-Head' insight attainments. ( as Leo talks about) Since we all have finite time and energy, we can only practice spirituality so much. In these extreme circumstances, DNA can also get into the picture. So one's lifetime may not be enough for some of the extra deep insights Leo talks about with 5 Meo DMT. To experience these insights naturally, talent can be the deciding factor since it changes at what baseline do you start the path. But I think before we worry about these sort of things, we should take steps one at a time. First, develop the fundamental skills of meditation. Then get to your first permanent stage of awakening. You don't need spiritual talent for none of these. Diligence and practice will get you there. Don't limit yourself.

Yeah. And many enlightened people fix these issues once they become aware of them to a sufficient degree. But they need to focus on them and be aware of them. Also, these are only publicized flaws of teachers. There are many more issues an awakened person might have besides procrastination etc. So when Shinzen cured his procrastination, that doesn't mean he turned into a perfect Buddha. That was only one big issue he faced. There still are micro issues he might be dealing with and we'll never know because they are not publicized. The point I've tried to make was that awakening doesn't equate to moral excellence or behavioral saintliness. Awakening is little bit of a double-edged sword here. It makes it easier to work on these issues if the person wants to get rid of them but it can also make them totally fine to have these issues and therefore eliminate all motivation to change those behaviors and thought patterns. That is why all awakened people have all sorts of behavioral issues. Whether big or small. Some do have much less so than others, but they still have them.

@Nak KhidYes. He said that even after deep awakenings, he had to work with a psychologist for 6 months to overcome procrastination. Mindfulness itself was not enough for him and he said that this tendency to procrastinate was so strong that it destroyed his productivity over the years. He needed some sort of an accountability structure for this particular issue. Again, this is an example of a deep behavioral issue that requires the integration of mindfulness, emotional work, and psychotherapy. Look at another spiritual teacher and he might have zero problems with procrastination. Everyone has different quirks.

@Nak Khid Hi! Yes. I'm aware of the allegations. I've talked to Culadasa about it. Let me address that. He definitely made a mistake and is ready to purify that shadow aspect of himself. He is also open to working with a therapist if the need arises. He also said that he is doing shamanic breathing practices to work on deep emotional work. This is basically Shinzen's procrastination issue all over again in a different context. The person is awake spiritually but there are still subtler and subtler layers of craving and suffering that results in immoral action. All of us have these issue including myself. I still watch porn and play video games. But these actions become bad, wrong and immoral from the moral excellence paradigm. There is actually no such thing as wrong actions. That is why mindfulness when you are awake sometimes allows for these sorts of 'cracks' in the armor. Morality is a human construct and is relative. These sort of 'negative' behaviours constitute your uniqueness in this infinite-ness of consciousness. And what is interesting is that even if suffering is fully eliminated, these 'immoral' actions can still occur automatically just due to sheer habit force in times when the mindfulness is less powerful. This is also similar to Joshua Sasaki Roshi's sexual allegations with students. The person is deeply awake but gaps in contextual understanding, lack of emotional work, childhood traumas, powerful negative habits all create these cracks in the mindfulness and results in less than moral actions. Behaviors are very important. But one's depth of spiritual realization is not a direct cause of their quality of behaviors due to the existence of egoic habit forces, emotional trauma and shadow aspects. So the teachings do work. Culadasa is deeply awake. But just like everyone he has behavioral issues, a shadow aspect and hasn't embodied a Buddha-like ideal of moral excellence. Such a thing actually doesn't exist. These are different lines of development and should not be confused with the validity of actual spiritual insight or methods. Look at Peter Ralston, Leo, Shinzen, Culadasa, Martin Ball...etc. they all have behavioral issues to a degree and are not morally excellent. You can easily cherry-pick all sorts of behavioral issues by observing them if your standards are moral excellence. For instance, Peter Ralston has a masculine and arrogant personality style. This can be seen as a lack of embodiment and a strong habit force when it comes to morality, personality and love aspects of consciousness. But it also can be a personal choice. Culadasa's style is much more loving and less-arrogant but his cracks in mindfulness are in different areas. This is one of them. Shinzen's style is precise but his mindfulness has cracks in procrastination (which is a behavioral problem) which is a deep unconscious habit force. Martin ball and Leo have insight mastery to varying degrees but are working on both embodiment and behavioral change. And so do everyone else including Eckhart Tolle, Sahdguru etc. All awakened people are in a continuum that has different behavioral strengths and weaknesses. And also all awakened people are conscious of specific spiritual insights and have embodied them to varying degrees. So there is no such thing as a binary awakening. Awakening is a process of spiritual growth. Especially when it comes to behavioral change. Hope this clarified the issue

Stable attention is the first step. Before developing the 4 elements described here with internal happiness, joy, tranquility and equanimity, you need to develop the ability stay with a pre-defined object in the present moment. Dullness and distracting thoughts are not important to deal with at this initial stage of concentration development. There is only 1 key advice. Thoughts intrude, you become aware that you don't focus on the breath and then you come back to the breath with a smile on your face. gently. Without getting frustrated. This creates a feedback loop of positivity that will induce these 4 states in the future. Again, I recommend TMI technique taught by Culadasa. Read his book. And always try to find the joy and happiness in meditation. Otherwise, boredom, frustration, dullness and sadness will pervade your sessions. It is cool to meditate with music etc. but your technique must be defined precisely. If it is noting gone at the end of every beat, then you should be able to do that consistently. You must also do that while being aware of the body, breath and mind in s state of metacognitive awareness. That requires intermediate levels of attentional and awareness skills. So try to do a silent formal sits in the beginning. Do these music and video meditations informally in your life. Still do them everyday but not as a formal sit. These are very important and will help you bring mindfulness in daily life once you go deeper with formal sits. Hope this helps

This is an important part of my spiritual training where my experiential understandings of these elements on this path are rapidly improving. All 4 of these elements - equanimity, tranquility, happiness and joy - are inter-related but highly distinct lines of development. A meditator eventually needs to develop these skills to a very high level and integrate all of them to their lives deeply before insights into different facets of awakening can arise. Especially love = consciousness will be 100 times easier if you develop these Samatha factors. To do that, you need to understand what skills you need to develop. Let's define these terms first. Happiness: This is a specific feeling of physical and mental pleasure in the mind-body. It can arise with zero meditation experience if 'things' are going your way. This is the usual dopamine high non-meditators experience. Happiness can also be trained to access all the time with stability in the higher stages of meditation. Happiness can also arise independently of joy. Joy: Joy is a comprehensive positive mental state. In the context of meditation, it usually arises with happiness in dependent of external circumstances in an internal manner due to unification of mind. It also can arise without any pleasurable feelings and happiness in the mind. Joy skews your awareness, emotional health and cognitive interpretations towards what is wholesome and loving effortlessly. In a joyful mind, the following will occur: Something that usually creates a lot of suffering and negative feelings in a non-meditator will only produce mild-unpleasantness. Something that produces mild-unpleasantness will only produce neutral feelings. Something that produces neutral feelings (like sitting down and breathing) will produce mildly pleasurable sensations. Something that produces a lot of pleasurable feelings will produce ECSTATIC levels of bliss. The combination of joy and happiness in meditation directly reduces craving and suffering in a significant manner. Tranquility: This is basically calm abiding contentment. Contentment is the keyword here. We tend to think that someone who is tranquil is dull and neutral. This has negative connotations. It is also inaccurate in the context of meditation. Tranquility induces a calm and serene state of mind. That is true but it does so with energy. So if you are dull, that is not true tranquility. Also, the feeling of neutrality is a misconception as well. Equanimity and neutrality are not the same things in the slightest. This is important because any lack of clarification here can result in a meditator wasting years of their lives getting deeper into sustained states of dullness thinking that they are developing tranquility. So watch out! You can have crazy levels of equanimity with joy and happiness. In fact, that is what you are developing with Samatha. The point is not to develop sustained dullness and emotional neutrality with equanimity. That means you've developed equanimity without happiness and joy. You still need to go back and develop these wholesome emotional states for optimal insight investigation. Back to tranquility! So tranquility means calmness and serenity. That is only 1 side of it. It actually means practicing contentment with calmness. Contentment is different from equanimity. It is extremely important in reducing craving. This one distinction helps you to develop and deepen meditative joy and happiness into daily life. Contentment will enable you to glean more satisfaction from the already existing joy and happiness. It will also reduce craving even more radically than just happiness and joy. If you've thought that high degrees of meditative joy and happiness you experience in meditation has already reduced a lot of craving already, think again! Contentment + meditative joy enables you to see how much suffering resides even in crazy high states of happiness and mental pleasure. This is 3rd jhana practice. But you deepen that practice further with Samatha factors and bring all of those qualities into daily life with TMI. This tranquility aspect of development naturally comes after fully developed meditative joy. Here is how it occurs in a nutshell: 1- Wow! I'm experiencing a lot of happiness and joy internally. This is fucking amazing. I can support this mental state with smiling as well. 2- Wow! This is extremely resilient. I can maintain this in stressful situations. 3- Hmmm...I sometimes experience a reduction in meditative joy when I get really tired and sleepy. Let me try to understand what leads to this experience. 4- I guess there is subliminal craving and suffering attached to meditative joy. I also fear that I might lose this in the future. The overall craving gets overwhelming when I get tired so happiness and joy go away. I don't really know how to combat this issue... 5- I also can't quite maintain joy and happiness in daily life when I'm moving around and doing stuff. It is still very stable but I don't momentarily taste the joy and happiness in evey microscopic movement of my body in movement. I think I need to work on this more. Because, meditative joy in movement results in craving and suffering. I guess I have developed a decades-long habit of urgency and movement with craving. I tend to move fast and speak fast. I lose a lot of mindfulness in these states. I need to add more contentment, tranquility and body awareness to every microscopic body movement, otherwise joy and and happiness can't be maintained on a momentary basis. I might get the illusion that it is stable but it actually isn't. And I'm still suffering quite a bit. 6- WOW! When I bring tranquility, joy and happiness are dominating my conscious experience with more stability in a state of contentment. I also experience more reduction in craving and therefore suffering less when I'm doing stuff in the world, talking to people and planning stuff. 7- This basically means that I can wake up in the morning - get the joy and happiness with tranquilty- pay EXTRA attention to maintaining this in movement with contentment and re-train the nervous system to stay in the present moment without craving. This is the next level after meditative joy development. Your entire life truly turns into high-quality meditation at this point. At this mastery, you are a stage 9 TMI meditator if you've also developed metacognitive awareness and stable attention sufficiently. The next step is adding the equanimity aspect of development. This is very challenging and is the final step in developing samatha. Equanimity: This is sublime non-reactivity to pleasure and pain. The nervous system shuts down its 'craving' operating system and activates equanimity. Your body and mind stop interfering with the present moment experience. This leads to the complete elimination of suffering at the HIGHEST level of mastery. But in its developing stages, it results in significant reductions in craving and suffering. As a stage 10 TMI meditator, you will have a highly developed equanimity. But it won't be high enough to result in full elimination of suffering permanently. That requires deeper and deeper awakenings, not just advanced Samatha development. So once you have meditative joy + tranquil contentment, you already have some degree of equanimity. But it is not enough to do advanced insight practices. You can probably get to profound equanimity occasionally in formal sits, the game plan is to get there every day. Then every sit. Then to get that equanimity in daily life. And then to start an adventure into insight development. At this point, you'll have the following skills applied both in formal sits and daily life: 1- Stable Attention & Momentary Attention (consistent upacara and kannika levels of samadhi) 2- Joy and Happiness (piti and sukha) 3- Powerful Metacognitive Awareness (satisampajanna ) 4- Tranquility and Contentment (passaddhi) 5- Profound Equanimity (upekkha) This is the end of stage 10 TMI practice. You can do many things at this point. Self-enquiry in no-mind? Go for it! You have the skills to do it. Dependent origination practice? Go for it! You have the skills to do it. Craving reduction? Go for it! You have the skills to do it. Mahamudra? Go for it! You have the skills to do it. Infinity and love? Go for it! You have the skills to do it. Compassion and Shadow work? Go for it! You have the skills to do it. Emptiness and Impermanence? Go for it! You have the skills to do it.

@Raptorsin7 Great! How did the 2-hour sit go? Anything you want to share or ask about?

@Raptorsin7Okay. I totally understand what you are experiencing. I've worked with TMI for 3-4 years and only recently joy and happiness started to arise. Back then I was thinking like this: 'My concentration and awareness is pretty good. I occasionally get to effortlessness. I've also had one or two deep mystical experiences. But where the hell is this joy and happiness Culadasa is talking about? Meditative joy? What is that? I've never experienced significant joy or happiness in meditation? In a formal sit, I tend to feel neutral calmness the first 20 mins and after that, I tend to usually feel some frustration and boredom building up in the mind and body. My concentration is good. But why is Culadasa emphasizing joy and happiness so much? Maybe I'll never experience that and go straight for some insights. I feel like I'm not following the instructions properly ' That was my thinking patterns for the majority of these last 3-4 years. After doing an intense 4 hour long extrospective awareness based TMI practice one day, that night, things have shifted radically. Joy and happiness started to pervade my life. So the key for me was doing a long session like that. I remember being super concentrated and being able to apply really solid awareness of external sounds. Due to that, I've had a legit psychedelic state (that lasted for 4-5 secs) somewhere in the 3 hour mark. This was the longest uninterrupted meditation sessions I've done with such high quality ever in my life. So maybe, try to build up some motivation and attempt something like that. You can move around with mindfulness since 4 hours is a really long time. You can walk in meditation. You can also lay down when you feel a lot of negative sensations. But the trick is to never lose that TMI mindfulness. I also was really sleepy in those 4 hours but somehow decided that I was not going to sleep and maintain mindfulness for 4 hours. I remember my resolve being very intense. Hope this gave you some motivation and inspiration. I've experienced almost the same thing you did. So keep going and crank up that intensity. That day, my technique was: Attention is on the Breath sensations and all awareness is extrospective attending to external sounds. My eyes were open the whole 4 hours. I really liked this technique and I've been practicing sound awareness with the breath for a while now. This may not be the most optimal for you but I felt really comfortable with extrospective sound awareness. Now I see the body awareness and introspective awareness is also super important and easier to practice. But then again, everything is easier to practice once you momentarily experience joy, satisfaction and happiness. In short, strengthen your resolve, find your 'go-to' TMI technique that you are good at, do a long 4 hour session sitting, moving and laying down and hopefully experience some nice spiritual gains after that. Also if it doesn't work, just try again next week. (or as soon as you can) The difference between 1 hour long sits 4 times a day and 4 hour straight uninterrupted session is HUGE! The former will most likely create some nice momentum but the latter will get you 100 times deeper and create a 10 times more intense momentum. Long sessions are amazing and this helps me to see why retreat intensity is so important on the spiritual path. Again, 4 hours is a really long time so learn to maintain TMI techniques while walking and laying down. Don't attempt 4 hour long SDS sits like Shinzen That requires stage 9-10 levels of TMI mastery. Move around or lay down whenever you feel like giving up but maintain the technique. Reduce the pressure and you'll get to 4 hours.

@Surfingthewave Hi! I recommend doing the practices described in 'The Mind Illuminated'. That is the technique I'm using. I meditate everyday formally for 1 hour on average and 3+ hours informally. That is a normal day. Depending on my goals, I can increase or decrease this schedule. I tend to meditate the moment waking up to going to bed these days. Because the quality of the informal sits are increasing due to 3rd jhana contentment. My current practice itself is 'Let's rewire my usual craving response in movement and bring that joy and contentment into every momentary experience'. To do that, I must continually maintain metacognitive introspective awareness of what my mind is doing, how it feels in the present moment, how much craving do I experience, how much happiness is present with stability, what my attention is doing etc. It sounds like a lot of work but it gets effortless after awhile and this guarantees solid mindfulness in daily life. Anyways, this is what I do currently. In formal sits, I try to get to profound equanimity for stage 9-10 work in TMI. It is actually challenging even with all this joy and contentment. It is hit or miss sometimes. I need to develop more physical and mental pliancy. That is currently my practice

@Jordan94 Hi Jordan Glad you've liked the post. The absence of dissatisfaction is quite different than happiness. A normal person actually experiences a lot of suffering when they feel happy. They just don't know it. Unless you bring the contentment and equanimity component, the amount of happiness will always lead to craving, therefore suffering. Even if there are heroin levels of pleasure. Also, the absence of dissatisfaction doesn't directly mean full satisfaction. That would lead to an awakening experience. We always, even as meditators, experience suffering and craving to a lesser degree. After a certain threshold point, happiness and joy arises. But that doesn't mean dissatisfaction is fully eradicated. There are degrees of satisfaction. Happiness, on the other hand, is a mental and physical feeling of pleasure. It may not lead to satisfaction without enough contentment. You can grasp after it even as a meditator. So the arising of joy and happiness is only the beginning. Your life gets 100 times better living there but you should still investigate the sense of dissatisfaction in states of pleasure and see what actually creates that suffering and dissatisfaction. It always leads to some sort of craving. Once you apply contentment + equanimity and maintain that, you experience a radical reduction in suffering. This, in turn, means experiencing more satisfaction from existing levels of pleasure. Hopefully this was useful

I've experienced a lot of growth from The Mind Illuminated. Buy the book. Start reading and practicing. Let me know if it helps

What matters is not the raw hours but how many of those hours were utilized in deliberate practice with the right techniques in uninterrupted hours. Deliberate practice. Right techniques tailored to the person. Uninterrupted continuity of practice. Hours and years only make sense in this context. Otherwise, raw hours and years don't mean anything. This path has a deep skill development component to it. I was a non-spiritually inclined person and I've re-trained my nervous system. I wasn't genetically gifted. Most of my 'Gains' in spirituality was due to effort and diligence. I agree with Shinzen. He went hard at this in a monastic setting. Don't think about talent too much. It is a dead end. Just focus on finding a method that works and practice with diligence. You may not grow as quickly as Buddha but you'll make steady progress because of systematic awareness, equanimity and attention training.

Here is a great interview on jhanas from Leigh Brasington on Deconstructing Yourself Podcast. In a scientific sense, it appears that deep meditative joy is basically stable and consistent opioid (sukha) and norepinephrine (piti) production in the nervous system. This is currently Leigh's theory on the science of jhanas. Subjectively, this is how I feel as well. Norepinephrine gives that bouncy energy and agitation in the physical body. It is more present in the 1st and 2nd jhana. Opioid gives you the happiness and joy with warmth and contentment. It is more present in 3rd jhana. Opioid is really where stuff gets super interesting. For instance, Heroin is a very addicting and powerful form of opioid so in a sense, you are getting a fraction of that naturally. This is brain's natural opioid endorphins. Obviously, I don't know what heroin feels like but if jhanas are a vastly less potent form of heroin then stabilizing just the 1% of a heroin high naturally with meditative joy is pretty damn sweet. It'd make holding on to negative states of mind almost impossible. It is that sweet. Jhana practice is basically teaching the brain to manipulate these neurotransmitters for the purposes of deep insight practice. But these states in and of themselves reduce craving so much that they can be directly insight practices themselves. (if you have enough mindfulness) In the deeper jhanas like the 3rd jhana, opioid and endorphin production increases a lot so that the element of contentment and equanimity with joy and happiness becomes really pronounced. Leigh says that mastering meditative joy and jhanas to a stable level so that your emotions in daily life is skewed to the positive and your baseline happiness is permanently increased takes about 5 years of work. It is a long term project. This time frame is for non-monastics. And overall, I do agree. It took me 3-4 years with TMI. But I have never intentionally practiced jhanas. I was learning deep access concentration with TMI and I was thrust into the world of stable joy and happiness. So maybe, if I were to cultivate joy and happiness and focus on that as a meditation object, I'd have experienced this shift in 1-2 years. Regardless, 5 years is a doable time frame IF you have a consistent jhana practice + access concentration. If you don't have a hardcore daily practice like that, then you may not even get any meditative joy in 10 years. You must make this work a priority. Anyways, here is the interview. Listen to it in a state of deep meditation, access concentration and hopefully in a state of joy and happiness. https://deconstructingyourself.com/dy-014-diving-deep-jhanas-guest-leigh-brasington.html

I can understand this. I've had a talk with my mother a few days ago and she said that I was 'unusually mellow' emotionally and said that it was unnatural. Especially after radical meditative joy development 2 months ago, my happiness levels just went 100 times higher than it originally was. And I was a relatively chill but neurotic person prior to meditative joy. All kinds of stressful events are going on and I'm smiling and cracking jokes. It definitely feels weird at first. But once you realize how neurotic the alternative is, you learn to downplay the happiness in certain social circumstances and just keep practicing with diligence. People get used to it and even start to get impressed by your emotional mastery. Also, this happiness facilitates care love and compassion towards other people. So you don't laugh at people when you see them struggling. You are in a state of joy combined with caring compassion. So, you go and help them out. But you don't suffer emotionally.

@Serotoninluv I thought 5 meo dmt was not addictive. It is interesting that other psychedelics don't produce this craving. Maybe Dilaudid created a form of attachment to this profound mental state and when 5 meo-dmt at low levels reduced craving to a similar level, the mind has reacted with addictive behaviour, as occured with dilaudid. Maybe this can be one of the reasons why 5 meo was addicting to you? I can definitely get a sense of what you are talking about. Serenity, blissful joy, equanimity in the present moment. I'm pretty sure this is 1000 times deeper and more intense with Dilaudid, but meditative joy gets you these elements as well. Even though they are not on full awakening and nirvana levels of ecstasy, once they dominate consciousness on mid-levels, all negative states of minds go away and craving is radically reduced. The bliss is not subtle and is present in consciousness effortlessly with stability on significant levels. This also enables you to interact with people and do demanding tasks. You constantly walk with a smile on your face effortlessly. But I'm only a meditator with a few years of experience. I'm pretty sure a meditator who has spent decades of time with meditative joy can run with it, deepen it and get it to legit morphine levels with profound equanimity consistently. But we are only talking about the emotional aspects of this path. 5 meo gives you many more insights besides ecstatic emotions and unconditional happiness. Thank you for the comparison though

@SerotoninluvI've never heard of that. How would you compare 5 meo dmt and dilaudid? Even though they are different substances, what sort of similarities and differences they have?

Exactly Mastering the Alchemy of Emotions. Intense exercise and healthy diet is said to increase natural opioid and endorphin production. However, these are very minor developments compared to mental states that can be achieved on jhanas and with meditative joy.

@integralI haven't used GABA supplements but still, I think a spiritual practitioner should be careful on this. This is not quite like psychedelics. These supplements are quite safe and in the short term usage , go for it. But we don't know its effects on the nervous system for long term usage. My concern is that if you use GABA supplements too consistently, the brain might stop producing GABA on its own since you are constantly outsourcing it. This is also not a chemical you can directly take from food. So you don't want to use supplements that can potentially reduce the brain's ability to produce GABA. In my experience, jhana and meditative joy increase both GABA and opioid production in the brain as a baseline in a stable way. This is the ideal solution. But I totally understand why one would like to try a GABA supplement. Since we don't know how GABA supplements would affect brain's natural GABA production and indirectly one's access to meditative joy and jhanas, don't use it consistently just in case. But someone who had experimented with GABA supplements for a few years can comment on its effects and how withdrawal feels like. I hope it doesn't make natural GABA production more difficult What do you guys think?

That is great. Exactly what I've should have done. I wish I've learned how to smile in meditation and also in daily life looking for the joy and equanimity. Recently, I've been experimenting more with meditative joy and the reason I've found it so profound was not the pleasure itself. I've gotten used to experiencing meditative joy with solid levels of equanimity. That equanimity component was making the whole experience profound and more stable. I've tried to drop equanimity and just focus on meditative joy and the mindfulness collapses much faster. The joy is challenging to access AND maintain at the same time. It is great that you are seeing some effects of smiling. Subtle is significant. Stage 6 is fairly frustrating. Subtle dullness is not a show stopper but Subtle distractions are pretty important. Don't be paranoid about it but try to relax into the present moment with diligence whenever you are aware that the mind goes back and forth between distractions. As I've mentioned before, my development towards stage 7-8 occured in a state of heavy dullness (not even subtle) but diligent TMI attentional training in a 4 hour session without interruptions. Subtle distractions were mostly overcome. I've gotten to the effortlessness of stage 7 with a lot of dullness and maintained that for the entirety of those 4 hours. Even if this is not ideal, it still did the trick. On that night, I've started accessing meditative joy on demand. So keep building the attention with the breath. I've used extrospective awareness of sounds mostly in stage 6. Let me know your practice goes

Hello everyone! As I've been meditating with diligence these days, I've developed a systematic process of transition that will enable the meditator to develop their mindfulness skills from stage 7-8 to stage 9 in TMI. Now, as some of you know, I've close to effortless access to meditative joy and stable happiness in my life from waking up to going to bed. To attempt practicing stage 9 level of TMI mastery, something close to 'fully developed' meditative joy is VERY helpful. This facilitates the 4rth jhana levels of equanimity we must develop in stage 9. You don't have to pervade the joy into your life as I've done. But you must develop and systematically cultivate subtle-low levels of joy and happiness here and there with some amount of stability. Meditative joy can be subtle but it can't be too unpredictable and too inconsistent. If it is, practice more the pleasure jhana described in TMI stage 7. Now, here are a few skills you already need to be pretty good at before attempting what I'm explaining here. - Stable Attention + Awareness: You need to have the skill to sustain attention to the breath sensations at the tip of the nose meanwhile the awareness includes the joy, body and mental reactions. In other words, the breath is primary and everything else is secondary. In reverse, you also need the skill to sustain attention on meditative joy, body or mental reactions meanwhile the awareness includes breath sensations. In other words, meditative joy, metacognitive awareness and body is primary and the breath is secondary. - Some level of experience in SDS sits: If you can do 60-90 mins long SDS sits with relative equanimity, you can attempt this provided your stable attention and awareness skills are at the level I'm talking about above. The equanimity can be below average and there can be A LOT of pain at the end of SDS sits. That is totally fine. In fact, that is why we are moving towards stage 9. The equanimity gets to extremely profound levels due to the physical and mental pacification of the senses. That is it. What I'm going to be explaining here can also be thought of as deep 3rd and 4rth jhana levels of joy and equanimity with powerful mindfulness + effortlessly stable attention and tranquility (all combined at the same time) as TMI advise. The end result will be physical pliancy and mental pliancy. This will further develop internal meditative joy but most importantly profound equanimity which will give rise to insights of suffering, emptiness, impermanence and no-self. After you have started to experience low-mid levels of meditative joy with stability, get familiar with this. Spend however days, weeks or months you need until the craving you have towards this intrinsic pleasure is reduced to a degree where you are fine letting go of this profound stable happiness and focusing back on narrow meditation objects like the breath at the tip of the nose. If you have been doing open awareness practices + meditative joy with open eyes, drop them temporarily. If you want to get to stage 9 equanimity, we are going to change our approach. We'll do our sits closed eyes as much as we can and our attention and awareness will alternate between the narrow sensations of the breath and the wide open sensations of the whole body + meditative joy in a 90-120 mins SDS sit. You'll also be doing all this cross-legged. So if you've been meditating on a chair to facilitate meditative joy, drop that. Again, don't start stage 8 practices towards stage 9 unless you are already familiar with the wonderful meditative joy. Technique Explanation: The Level of Meditative Joy: Do not expect mid-high levels of stable joy and happiness in these sorts of formal sessions. Be content with subtle-low levels of meditative joy because the energy of the mind will be focused more on the breath, equanimity development, and the whole body awareness. There simply isn't enough conscious bandwidth to sustain crazy levels of meditative joy you are used to experiencing in daily life in a relatively long 2 hour SDS sessions when the attention carefully examines the breath while awareness needs to include both the body and analyze the equanimity levels in real time. There are only 2 obligations regarding meditative joy: 1- Slight smile: You will slightly smile (without creating tension) because this will facilitate subtle levels of meditative joy and happiness when pain starts to arise in a 2 hours SDS. You have to always smile, however subtle. Depending on how stable the joy is, you can emphasize or de-emphasize the smile as needed. At this point, you need to get comfortable smiling and looking for the joy in meditation. 2- Subtle levels of meditative joy: You can't emotionally flatline and dive down into drowsiness, dullness, lack of sensory clarity and sleepiness. The antidote to all these is meditative joy and all you need is to maintain subtle levels of joy and happiness. So don't feel pressured to increase joy to high levels. But you must have enough skills to maintain in subtle but perceptible levels. SDS Movement Restriction: In a cross-legged posture, your only key restriction will be legs. You are allowed to slowly move the upper body occasionally (not always) depending on your level of pain. But you can almost never break the cross-legged posture. The reason is that, while developing physical pliancy, you are going to experience RADICAL reductions in pain sensations in an SDS sit. The most noticeable will be the elimination of leg pain. After sitting cross-legged without high physical pliancy for 90 mins, your legs will be full of unbearable physical pain. That will create a lot of aversion and you'll barely continue the sit while grinding your teeth. That is what a pre-stage 7-8 meditator feels before developing physical pliancy. So to get to stage 9 equanimity, you need to pacify the senses so that the actual pain sensations in the legs go WAY down and the equanimity towards existing pain sensations go WAY up. Attention and Awareness: You'll do the entire session closed eyes. At the first 30 mins, get to effortlessness in TMI stage 7 in the following manner: - Effortlessly Stable Attention is on the breath at the nose meanwhile, subtle meditative joy + body awareness is covered by awareness at the same time. Once you've stabilized the breath effortlessly with high levels of sensory, do the opposite - Effortlessly stabilize attention on meditative joy + body awareness meanwhile breath is covered by awareness in the background. Don't forget to adjust meditative joy accordingly with smiling. Be content with subtle levels of meditative joy. At this point, you'll be around 60 mins mark. Continue going back and forth between breath narrow attention and open body awareness. But this time add the contentment element going forward because at this point physical pain might usually get noticeable. Try to let go of the breath and put the attention more to the meditative joy and equanimity. But still, hold on to breath sensations in awareness with vividness. Then the next step is adding open body awareness more. Basically, let the awareness and attention experience 4 different elements in this sequence. The left side is attention and the right side is awareness. Attention /// Awareness 1- Breath + Meditative joy 2- Meditative Joy + Breath 3- Breath + Meditative Joy + Equanimity and Contentment 4- Breath + Meditative Joy + Equanimity and Contentment + Whole Body Awareness As long as you do this transition process with the tips I've recommended, you'll start to experience deeper physical pliancy and profound equanimity going towards stage 9 TMI mastery. Practice well

You are welcome! Keep going and be consistent. Emotional mastery is very important.