ardacigin

You wake up early to do the 2 hour SDS sit. And you continue the practice in daily life regardless of whether you have a job or not. You can do 5+ hours of practice in daily life if you are motivated enough. Time-wise, there are no problems. Even a 9-5 job can allow for this schedule. I personally have flexible hours because I have a business. But the issue is whether the skill and motivation is there to pull of such intensities of practice on a daily basis. Once you have the skills developed, managing time is easy. Meditation no longer occurs in life but life occurs in meditation in advanced stages. Also I suggest doing these SDS sits while watching videos and listening to audios at first. (The first 30-60 days) Otherwise, you might not have the motivation to go through so much pain everyday. First, go from 60 to 90 mins. Then go from 90 to 120 mins. If you can do more than 2 hours SDS in cross-legged posture, then all the power to you. Don't do longer SDS sits on a chair because the point is to observe pain with clarity and equanimity. Compared to cross-legged postures, doing a 2+hours of SDS sit on a chair is easier. I think someone can pull that off once or twice with A LOT OF suffering at the end of their first year. But reaching 2 hour SDS in cross-legged with little to no suffering CONSISTENTLY will require a lot of intense daily work for 2-5 years. (in my experience) And it will literally force you to have insight experiences at some point in the practice. Somewhere in that process, the insight into suffering/impermanence will be VERY pronounced. The transformation will occur fairly quickly afterwards if you keep up the practice.

I also think that stream entry is not to be taken lightly. It is definitely possible if you train systematically but this first awakening attainment means that suffering goes away radically AND permanently. So when you wake up in the morning at 6 a.m. and you have to go to work or school, if you think 'Oh I don't want to get up, it is so cold outside' and if you suffer as a result of that, then you are not a stream enterer. When you speak with your family and friends, if you default to relating with people with the self agenda in mind rather than seeing them as yourself, you are not a stream enterer. If sleepiness, pain and frustration breaks up your connection to your sense of no-boundry, then you are not a stream enterer. Awakening has high standards. But this radical change is possible with retreat level practice if you are consistent with it. Again, I'm not a stream enterer. But my experiences are heavily leaning towards this level of attainment. As a practice program, I've trained with Culadasa's breath work and Shinzen Young's noting and gone techniques in daily life. Also added self-enquiry once I've hit Stage 7 in Culadasa's model of samadhi stages. Do these systematically AND intensely. I don't personally see how anyone can get to stream entry with a beginner level practice like 60 mins formal sit with micro hits in daily life. (unless you have a spontaneous awakening out of nowhere without systematic training like Eckhart Tolle which has a very low probability in my opinion). At some point, I highly suggest going up to 90-120 mins SDS sits consistently. That is where my transformation had occurred. Also very deep relaxation and noting practice in daily life helped me continue the momentum of formal sessions. Hope these suggestions help

Thank you for your explanation. You definitely make good points about genetics and I tend to agree with you overall. It is important not to over-generalize everything. As to 5 Meo experience, I had it very similar to Leo's situation. Amazing insights that don't stick. When I get more serious about mindfulness to a point where my ordinary experience started to get low-level psychedelics for the most of the day, I've tried psychedelics again and I no longer had the craving of awakening in meditation. Trying psychedelics before solidifying in intermediate/advanced stages produced a lot of frustration, expectations and demotivation for me. Again, very similar to Leo's situation. Once I've started doing 2 hour SDS in cross legged posture with industry strength level mindfulness in daily life for 5+ hours every single day, my life basically started to reflect the full-on retreat intensity. First of all, physical pain of sitting cross legged has disappeared for the most part. My experiential understanding of pain has changed on a neurological level since pain is essentially subjectively experienced through the brain. This is an insight experience Shinzen talks about. Equanimity +Pain = Purification Then once I've learned how to observe pain with clarity, I've seen that it flickers on and off on a subliminal level. This is an insight experience into impermanence. This tends to happen 1 hour and 20 mins into a SDS sit where the pain solidifies and then starts to flicker and flow if you can exercise equanimity with concentration until 1 hour and 45 mins mark. (For me of course) At that point, you experience a radical reduction in suffering while maintaining the same level of pain which gives you the insight into suffering. As you constantly have these insight experiences, your psyche starts to embody them and turns them into actual insights where your daily life is perceived through these insights. They start to become permanent. Then more months have passed and I've started to experience how the sense of self is thought, image and feel activity. How it wells up and reduces in intensity depending on external situations. Once I've had strong introspective awareness of self-referential thought, image and feel activities, I've started to have insight experiences into no-self. I've also started doing self-inquiry at this point and it was VERY effective. I could go very deep with it. I've also started doing the 'gone' technique of Shinzen Young. At this point I've started to increase the SDS sits to 3 hour period and then everything started to break down. That's when I've had my first 'close to awakening experience'. It didn't stick as in stream entry but it definitely wasn't some samadhi state. I was getting close to penetrating the sense of being an individual self. This certainly wasn't 5 meo level intensity of insight, but I would say that it was a more diluted form of it both in intensity and insight clarity. Although my mind couldn't penetrate very much, probably this path goes 5 meo levels of clarity if I've practiced for 40+ years. Anyways, the more impermanence I've observed with clarity, the more my mind is transforming the rigid self to a flowing thought-image-feel activity. I've also started to integrate more compassion and understanding to my relationships with people. I'm still working on this and it is challenging for me on many levels. But mindfulness really helps in developing compassion in my observation. Even though my daily experience of life moment by moment is still permeated by some level of suffering (even in samadhi states) and even though I would not qualify my attainment as stream entry (because my experience of self-liberation is not permanent), the training I've been going through is heavily suggesting that things are moving in that direction. Hopefully, this helps some of you understand where I'm coming from and maybe become a motivation for deeper levels of practice. Let me know your thoughts and feel free to tell me about your own experiences in meditation.

Hi. Let me clarify some of your questions. I meant that since 5 meo dmt is a very powerful insight tool, it can demotivate people once they go back to the cushion. Since you no longer have access to these insights, subliminal levels of craving and aversion is produced in the psyche. Especially if you dont have consistent access to intermediate/advanced levels of concentration, jhanas or samadhi states, then it will be very challenging to detach from these mind made distractions. Cravings are one of THE fundamental obstacles which gets in the way of stream entry. And after a deep 5 meo insight, what is a left is a residue of thought-image activity of 5 meo assisted awakening which is not actual awakening in the present moment. And I think this can delude many beginner-intermediate practitioners. Thinking that they have attained these insights in any transformative and permanent way. This residue of awakening as a seperate experience is the potential problem which nags the meditator on the cushion preventing progress into deeper levels of insight without psychedelic assistance. As to genetics, industry strength level mindfulness changes not only the brain physically, but also DNA in fundamental ways. In my opinion, epigenetics are still in their infancy. Many scientists apart from people like Rupert Sheldrake and Deepak Chopra are severely underestimating epigenetic modifications. They are more powerful and effective than mainstream science makes it out to be. You can research this a little more online so let me address your other question. Of course, some people are genetically gifted meaning they start this path of meditation with relatively high levels of concentration, awareness, sensory clarity and equanimity. Or if not, these people can develop these skills a lot faster. But that doesnt mean people who doesn't have these can't develop them fast and exponentially. These are skills for a reason. They can be RADICALLY developed regardless of your starting point. The rate of growth can always be exponential if you practice systematically AND deliberately but how deep you'll go in the same amount of practice time compared everyone else will be naturally different because everyone starts out in different phases of life. I tend to think that combined with 5 meo dmt's intimidating insight clarity and subliminal limiting beliefs about genetics gets in the way of Leo's practice. This is my personal observation Let me know your thoughts and I'll clarify more if you want.