A Key Disadvantage of Samatha Meditation - My No Meditation Results

[ardacigin]

Samatha means calm abiding meditation. It is founded upon positive reinforcement, stable attention and strong mindfulness. As I keep practicing, I can clearly see its benefits. But recently, I've started to get too comfortable and slack off a little too much.

I've decided to stop meditating altogether for a while and see what remains. I wanted to stop this meditation business and see what happened to my consciousness and mindfulness. This also includes all the joy and happiness I experience most of the day. I was willing to not cultivate and pay attention to these for a while. 

I've stopped meditating in any shape or form for about a week or so. I did experience some serious drops in mindfulness and joy on a momentary basis at the end of the week. It felt like a 5-year-old computer trying to run Witcher 3 on high settings.  It still gets the job done in very low settings but the high performance I had was gone (temporarily).

In this one week period, I've experienced frantic energies, unconscious attentional movements and virtually zero cultivation of joy and happiness with little to no mindfulness of anything for a few consecutive days. If I had the urge to meditate and cultivate some joy, I've distracted myself with other stuff. Talking to people. Thinking about stuff. Reading books etc.

Now, my happy personality is still intact. I used to be pretty depressed and I'm glad to say that my 'happy' habitual reactions are still intact.

My social skills which have been improved DRAMATICALLY ever since meditative joy occurred 4 months ago are still intact. I make jokes. I enjoy hanging with my family and friends. I'm talkative. I do laugh very often even at silly things. 

I've realized that even if you don't have stellar mindfulness or joy in the mind, some people can still act this way because these are ingrained personality habits. My personality was shifted deeply in these past 4 months and even without joy and mindfulness (which facilitated the personality improvement in the beginning) was no longer necessary. 

This made me realize at a core level why taking anti-depressants can be beneficial for highly depressed people in short periods of time. The new interaction methods you learn while you have high dopamine levels tend to create habitual reactions and improve social behaviors on a deep level.

Now, mindfulness plays a deep role here and without it, the change may not be deep or lasting. And I don't really want to compare anti-depressants with meditative joy in this context but I can easily see how a depressed person can claim that anti-depressants improve one's personality and social skills. 

Now that being said, no mindfulness made me lose all internal witnessing of thoughts and emotions. I was doing outer hear, outer sound, unconscious internal thoughts and acting on the unconscious intentions. But I was not doing these in a meditative way. Complete unconsciousness as much as possible.

Now, this was a little beneficial in helping me to understand efforting and not efforting. Too much effort can still be a problem after fully developed meditative joy. That sense of creating joy entails some amount of effort and completely dropping it is a challenge. 

Finally, this experiment helped me to see the disadvantage of samatha. I have to say that a lot of things stuck with me. I can still access joy and powerful mindfulness on demand AS LONG AS I intend to experience joy and maintain mindfulness.

And this is the key word: intention. If I don't have that intention, things quickly drop into unconsciousness. It still took a few days but it is relatively quick considering I have been cultivating solid mindfuless and joy for about 4 months. And this is why awakening is different from advanced Samantha states. 

See, all this joy, reduced craving, reduction in selfhood, feeling of boundaries dissolving, compassion work are extremely important. And you must do this work because there is no better alternative.  Unconsciousness is just full of unnecessary suffering and drama. My life is 1000 times better thanks to Samatha work.

Once you have these profound states, the understanding can be seen as solid and complete. Awakening is a beast on its own. It is said to be a permanent intuitive understanding of self, reality and world. Samatha states do mimic that. And some amount of insight understanding DOES occur on some level. Samatha and insight practices are not that distinct as one might think.

 I'm not like who I was 4 years ago in that 1 week period. My personality is already deeply changed. My capacity to love is deeply increased. Fighting with someone or getting into an argument with another is not even slightly in my mind throughout the day. I can still access a lot of joy and happiness with mindfulness right now. I didn't REALLY lose these skills.

So I don't want to give the impression that samatha skills are super transient and it is a waste of time to build these skills. Samatha skills have already transformed my life so you have no better alternative than developing this skill.  

But realizing how these skills are not as permanent and deep as one might think is an important realization as well. There is this deep 'permanency' illusion once you get deep into samatha work. That is not fully wrong but most of your gains, the development of consciousness, is relying on your continuous mindfulness practice. If the intention to meditate goes away for a long time, so will be the gains.

Take a long break and the majority of the momentary mindfulness skills will go away temporarily. Then muscle memory kicks in and you are back on track.

So doing the insight practices are more important than ever in my current stage of development. To be more precise, samatha starts to bleed into insight territory. These are not just concentration practices anyways. But intention wise, I did get a little comfortable due to nice samatha states. I slacked off in mindfulness and joy cultivation as well.

As you see these elements dissolve away, you tend to focus more on the deeper levels of dissatisfaction that arises out of being a separate self,  this brings a clearer form of mindfulness and joy. I think that this experiment was healthy for me.

 So now, I'm starting to see even deeper forms of suffering I've experienced in these samatha states and some serious practice is in order for me to work on these aspects. I have an idea of what to do to progress in the near future and I plan to share the results with you when I experience some sort of a breakthrough.

I may not post too much for a while until I make some deeper progress.

I hope this was useful for some of you. I'm trying to share my journey as honestly and raw as I can. 

Let me know how you are doing and feel free to ask me your questions.

Much love,

 

Edited February 14, 2020 by ardacigin

[Mu_]

Really interesting read, thanks for sharing, I always appreciate your perspectives you've shared in the past. 

One thing that I'm not sure I've heard you share or talk about and am curious of your experience with, is the area of surrender, to just be with so called not-joy, not-happiness.  One could say the so called normal mundane experience and sometimes or often downer experiences, but seen and understood without the judgements of better or worse, more ideal or less ideal then the so called important cultivated states or desirable happy, joyish fulfilling states, and to not relate to these uncomfortable experiences in such a way to make them different or oneself different to then be able to handle them in a more desirable way then just as they seem...... And I say seem, because honestly what actually IS any particular so called experience......

 

 

[wens16]

I have read a few of your posts since I am on the vipassana path as well. I read your post about the continued state of samatha/joy and was wondering about that. Daniel Ingram writes about a friend of his who was practicing jhanas for like 30 years or something and was sort of stuck there. Dan Ingram also has a chapter on how to use unpleasant/ unwanted experiences to further the practice.

After I had experienced the first jhana on retreat, I felt I was always striving for this state during meditation and peace feeling off mat. But I think that one has to realize that joy, happiness, bliss are still experiences of sensations and mentality. I assume this is where equanimity arises. My last retreat was with a teacher from Pa Auk method and he always emphasized looking to who/ what is experiencing these sensations, shifting from experiencing to observing.

I think I'm rambling a bit but would like to say, I enjoy your posts and look forward to reading about your progress on the path. 

[ardacigin]

3 hours ago, wens16 said:

I have read a few of your posts since I am on the vipassana path as well. I read your post about the continued state of samatha/joy and was wondering about that. Daniel Ingram writes about a friend of his who was practicing jhanas for like 30 years or something and was sort of stuck there. Dan Ingram also has a chapter on how to use unpleasant/ unwanted experiences to further the practice.

After I had experienced the first jhana on retreat, I felt I was always striving for this state during meditation and peace feeling off mat. But I think that one has to realize that joy, happiness, bliss are still experiences of sensations and mentality. I assume this is where equanimity arises. My last retreat was with a teacher from Pa Auk method and he always emphasized looking to who/ what is experiencing these sensations, shifting from experiencing to observing.

I think I'm rambling a bit but would like to say, I enjoy your posts and look forward to reading about your progress on the path. 

I see what you mean. That is the insight component of the practice. Getting 'stuck' in jhanas is first of all not a 'danger' on the path. Daniel is overbowing the dangers of jhanas. As a meditator, you see deeper levels of dissatisfaction in jhanas and want to go deeper with insight attainment.  Jhanas, themselves are actually a form of insight practice (when done right) and they are healing in many ways. 

Is it possible to be stuck on jhanas forever? Maybe. But as long as you know about the fact that there can be permanent realizations, jhanas will always bug you here and there due to their impermanent nature (at their core). And that feeling will gently push towards insight.

Remember that this realization happens in states of profound joy and happiness. So this form of suffering is subtler than what people experience as depression or sadness. 

Seeing through both pleasant and unpleasant sensations as sensations in profound equanimity is more effective in insight practice. That is why 4rth jhana exists in the first place.

But I understand what you mean. Jhanas must be eventually combined with insight methods like self enquiry to increase their effectiveness. Some level of attachment to joy ALWAYS does occur prior to awakening. That sort of equanimity is attained post-awakening. 

So it is best to let the meditator's intuition kick in and help him guide the insight territory after some proficiency in jhanas. More you become adept in the Samatha path, the less challenging experiences you'll have in your insight journey. So it is never a complete waste of time. At the very least, it is emotional purification on a deep level when you sustain jhanic factors all day long. These are all important on the spiritual path.

Edited February 15, 2020 by ardacigin

[Pell]

What will you do in on the cushion now? I'm curious about how you're going to structure your sits now. Some people do the jhanas or some samatha for half the sit then switch to vipassana. Were your sits completely samatha focused before now? The TMI, and streamentry subreddits on Reddit seem to believe that samatha accelerates your progress substantially, that is, once one actually starts digging into vipassana. Apparently people have a lot of success with choiceless awareness practice with high levels of samatha. Of course self-inquiry is an amazingly direct method too. Whatever gets you to see the three characteristics ya know? I wish you well, I'm excited to see when you pierce into stream entry. 

Edited February 18, 2020 by Pell

[ardacigin]

21 hours ago, Pell said:

What will you do in on the cushion now? I'm curious about how you're going to structure your sits now. Some people do the jhanas or some samatha for half the sit then switch to vipassana. Were your sits completely samatha focused before now? The TMI, and streamentry subreddits on Reddit seem to believe that samatha accelerates your progress substantially, that is, once one actually starts digging into vipassana. Apparently people have a lot of success with choiceless awareness practice with high levels of samatha. Of course self-inquiry is an amazingly direct method too. Whatever gets you to see the three characteristics ya know? I wish you well, I'm excited to see when you pierce into stream entry. 

Hi @Pell Let me explain.

I have been doing insight practices but not being able to sit for a very long time in cross-legged postures for 3-4  hours due to lack of physical pliancy is creating a lot of unforeseen problems. Physical pliancy is important for a few reasons but mostly it enables consistent access to 4th jhana levels of equanimity. And that is incredibly important.

First of all, I can do 90 mins SDS without too much trouble and I can sometimes push it to 2 hours. But to do that, I need to really focus and strengthen my intentions. It doesn't happen effortlessly and there is a huge difference between pushing past 2 hours with ease and barely making through it. 

I'll be doing 2 hour+ SDS sits for my formal sits to develop physical pliancy. Since I needed to develop mental pliancy until now, I've taken a long break from long SDS sits. Now I'm coming back to it.

After this sort of daily training, things will dramatically change because it is already easier to sit for long hours due to mental pliancy. Once I'm able to sit for 3-4 hours with minimal physical pain and some level of piti + profound equanimity where body awareness is very light, I'll be solidly in stage 9 TMI territory.

I've basically realized that without enough samadhi development in TMI stages, insight practices are extremely ineffective.  In fact, deep Stage 9 is so mind blowing  that you don't even have to ask 'Who am ı?' etc. The self boundaries are already quite unstable and fuzzy in the first place.

Joy development in stage 8 on its own does not guarantee this level of physical pliancy. It does help a lot but I still need to sit for long hours just like everybody else to get used to long sessions.

Let's back up a little bit. When meditative joy has occurred around 4 months ago, in any given day, I could sit for an hour and at the end, I would feel quite a bit of mental joy and pleasant sensations (with instability), so that is good.

But there were some serious physical pain around my legs. Physical pliancy was fairly immature and mental pliancy has just started to develop.

4 months have passed, mental pliancy is fairly well developed. I can access piti on demand both in daily life and in formal sits. Physical pliancy is also improved but not so much in proportion to how much mental joy has progressed. Since I know how valuable it is to sit for long hours at this point, the first milestone is to develop physical pliancy to a point where I can do 3-4 hours long SDS sits with ease. That is not an easy thing.

I need to do these 3-4 hour sessions In a state where physical pain is almost absent from awareness akin to 4rth jhana. This is not possible to do unless you have some really solid mental pliancy. 

I did experience these states fleetingly in stages 7-8 but you can't maintain that stage 9 quality consistently without profound physical pliancy that enables the meditator to sit for 3-4 hours with ease. Physical pliancy is developed after fullly developed meditative joy.

And until you develop this, insight practices will always seriously suffer. Even with a lot of joy. That profound equanimity that breaks down self-boundaries, eliminates physical pain and invites that spaciousness is the most important state once can access in formal sits for insight attainment. So, that will be my first milestone.

As to insight practice, I'll just do self enquiry, TMI instructions on stages 7-10, joy cultivation as needed etc. Actually, the bulk of the work is to develop that level of physical pliancy. That is the bottleneck issue that severely limits my ability to access any sort of insight. I'm currently working on this aspect of the practice.

Once I experience stage 9 quality consistently, I'll post an update and share my experiences on this forum  Hope this was useful.

 

Edited February 19, 2020 by ardacigin

[Pell]

That's an interesting emphasis on physical pliancy. Have you done a sesh of just the jhanas? Like going to 1-4 and back down again? I'm not certain it takes a long sesh as you describe, although it's still beneficial. I think you'd appreciate this blog: https://www.meditator-x.com/

[fi1ghtclub]

This is amazing, man! This sounds like real work

Dropping all the intentions to be mindful or conscious. And being completely effortless and living daily life like that.

[ardacigin]

12 hours ago, Pell said:

That's an interesting emphasis on physical pliancy. Have you done a sesh of just the jhanas? Like going to 1-4 and back down again? I'm not certain it takes a long sesh as you describe, although it's still beneficial. I think you'd appreciate this blog: https://www.meditator-x.com/

@Pell Thanks for that blog  I'd like to comment on a few things.

First of all, going up and down between 1-4 jhanas is a good practice but ultimately one's ability to do that depends on the nature of jhanic factors.

Jhanas developed as a result of TMI is different from what Leigh Brasington teaches at its core. They arise due to different causes and they act in a different way when they do arise.

Since I've never done any jhanic practices prior to TMI, all of my jhanic abilities came from TMI. In my mind, jhanic factors are not so fleeting.

You don't go back and forth between jhanic states. Or to be more precise, that practice doesn't come naturally to me. You are telling me to go back to stage 6-7 from stage 8-9. Go back to effort from effortlessness.

 That can appear beneficial but it also suggests that each jhanic state is suggestable to dissoving without conscious intentions. So it is not exactly efffortless. Sustaining that in daily life would means a lot of conscious and effortful intentions.

That still occurs in my case but when effortlessness kicks in, so does stability. Each state goes above the other one and reduces craving more and more reliably.

I see 4 key milestones in jhanic development that can be experienced in one sit:

1- Arising of unstable meditative joy and happiness with energetic sensations

2-Arising of effortlessly stable meditative joy

3- Arising of effortlessly stable meditative joy with contentment (which reduces the bulk of the suffering)

4- Arising of equanimity that results in profound mental and physical pliancy.

In TMI, 4 jhanas are experienced a little more like this. And these are more stable states than what Leigh teaches. The first one with energetic sensations go away to be almost never experienced after a while. So I start with unstable 2nd jhana factors and go from there.

 So practically speaking, I experience the following:

- Stabilize and increase the existing amount of meditative joy to a 'sufficient' level (aka until it dominates consciousness). There is always some level of meditative joy in my mind.

- Try to maintain it while releasing effort - aka get to effortlessness. This puts you solidly in 2nd jhana.

- Add the contentment element - 3rd jhana (this builds a bridge between joy and equanimity)

- Get to Equanimity -  4rth jhana

Goin back from that equanimity is not a good idea because 4rth jhana is where you want to investigate reality. It already takes quite a bit of time to solidly access that level of equanimity.  So It would take an unnecessary effort to go back.

You should actually go forward even from the 4rth jhana by making it clearer, by adding the jhanic factors back in without losing that equanimity or with insight practices. 

I've read the blog and I wanted to comment on this particular passage:

'While these two goals are not mutually exclusive, they do compete for the meditator's time. In my case, I have the luck of being able to sit for 2 hours straight, which I do on a daily basis. You'd think that this is more than enough time to fully cultivate both samatha and insight.

But I actually don't think it is. In my case, I spend the first 20 minutes or so settling in, primarily doing "Do Nothing" practice. I then shift to 20-30 minutes of classic mindfulness of breath practice. With a more collected mind, I shift to Jhana, during which I go from first to fourth Jhana, then back down and back up.

This takes another good 30 minutes. Upon emerging from 4th Jhana, I'm left with about 40 minutes, which I then fully devote to some kind of insight practice (I rotate between still point, Do Nothing, Self-Inquiry and Shinzen style noting). This may seem to be enough to fully develop samatha and vipassana, but I've noticed that with this approach my concentration practice isn't getting developed as much as my insight practice'

Okay, so I think that underlying problem for this meditator is too much rotation of techniques especially in the samatha stage. 2 hours might appear like a long time but since he is playing around with techniques like do nothing, breath and jhana ascend + descend, he struggles getting to stage 8 effortlessness in TMI. Due t lack of effortless stability, he feels that his samatha stage was not as beneficial as it could be. 

It would be more efficient for him to get to jhanic elements faster, develop it and get to profound equanimity and stay there rather than descending back. Do nothing and breath are beneficial but you should stick with one progression path (like TMI breath or jhanas). Since he adds too much practices, his samatha practice ironically gets unstable. 

Starting with breath and changing to jhanas is also possible but you'll make that transition faster each time you practice and the breath will no longer be necessary after a while.

Changing techniques when it comes to insight within the boundaries of 4rth jhana elements are more effective in my opinion. Letting the mind explore consciousness without too much technique restraints is a good idea when it comes to insight. But that must ideally be done when you are solidly in 4rth jhana which is not a small thing. 

See, there are degrees within each jhana. 4rth jhana can be explored further.

 I wanted to comment on that practice path he was describing and I hope it was beneficial  

 

Edited February 22, 2020 by ardacigin

[Nahm]

@ardacigin I know it’s pigeonholed, no implication to reply. ♥️ Fantastic, intimate read. Delightful share, thank you, really. My advice, which might be heard because you don’t like how it sounds (maybe, idk)....  Drop spirituality entirely. Total 180. Every word, every practice, any plan, all the vernacular, all the teachers, practices, etc. Drop the whole thing, and inspect every thought about it right out of the mind. Imo, some things are going to surface and empty right on out, and ‘you’ll be’ ‘where’ the whole thing is about being. Or don’t of course, it’s just a suggestion. 

[ardacigin]

1 hour ago, Nahm said:

@ardacigin I know it’s pigeonholed, no implication to reply. ♥️ Fantastic, intimate read. Delightful share, thank you, really. My advice, which might be heard because you don’t like how it sounds (maybe, idk)....  Drop spirituality entirely. Total 180. Every word, every practice, any plan, all the vernacular, all the teachers, practices, etc. Drop the whole thing, and inspect every thought about it right out of the mind. Imo, some things are going to surface and empty right on out, and ‘you’ll be’ ‘where’ the whole thing is about being. Or don’t of course, it’s just a suggestion. 

Thank you for the advice  Do nothing techniques are good practices. Currently, I'm not doing them but whenever dropping effort becomes too challenging, I do those practices. I'll keep in mind. Thanks!

[Nahm]

@ardacigin I appreciate your response, thanks. I’m not sure if you’re hearing where I’m coming from on this though. I offered the consideration, that one way to go, could be to drop all of the practices & their instruction / concepts completely. In your reply, it seems you summarized that as a practice (do nothing). Is there a chance that, in your diligence of discipline, you might have to a small extent, contextualized that which is abundantly here now, into a result which can only come from one’s deservedness, via practices? 

[electroBeam]

29 minutes ago, ardacigin said:

Thank you for the advice  Do nothing techniques are good practices. Currently, I'm not doing them but whenever dropping effort becomes too challenging, I do those practices. I'll keep in mind. Thanks!

hahaahahahahahaha

I could be wrong, but the advice might have been "stop seeking enlightenment" and just BE. You've become waaaaay too attached to your techniques, methods and ideas about enlightenment, that you've forgotten what enlightenment was actually about. 

[Nahm]

@electroBeam Not sure that comment had your “highest & best” in it man. ?? The intention probably felt better than the sentiment. 

[electroBeam]

@Nahm Fair enough, being blunt doesn't work with everyone. It works with me though, so in the rare chance he's like me, the comment will be of good use. 

[Nahm]

@electroBeam I can’t argue with that. (I resonate with it too much  )

[ardacigin]

2 hours ago, Nahm said:

@ardacigin I appreciate your response, thanks. I’m not sure if you’re hearing where I’m coming from on this though. I offered the consideration, that one way to go, could be to drop all of the practices & their instruction / concepts completely. In your reply, it seems you summarized that as a practice (do nothing). Is there a chance that, in your diligence of discipline, you might have to a small extent, contextualized that which is abundantly here now, into a result which can only come from one’s deservedness, via practices? 

@NahmI understand what you mean  See, when you drop all concepts and ideas, strategies and techniques, you can call that 'just being conscious as directly as possible'. And that will feel like it is so effortless and easy and that is how dropping all effort feels like, right?

Well, yes and no. Regardless of how little effort is involved, you are still employing a technique by configuring consciousness in a certain way. That is why you feel a radical difference between the normal neurotic state of consciousness and this just be conscious, effortless state. Otherwise, no-meditation you are doing would be exactly the same as the unconsciousness of 99% of society. 

Just being in the present moment 'without the fluff' and without carefully defined meditation objects in spacious awareness etc. are advanced techniques by themselves. It is just that self-efforting is dramatically reduced, but that doesn't mean no technique, strategy or challenge is involved.

So 'do nothing' which is an umbrella term I use to describe all non-effort practices are actual techniques. When I say 'practices' or 'training', I don't always mean effort and hardwork. Effortlessness comes with its own share of challenges that are different than efforting styles of practice. You are still meditating but in a different way. 

I hope this clarified my usage. I should've explained some of the terms I use more carefully. Thank you for bringing this up

 

 

[Nahm]

@ardacigin I understand, thanks.

[karkaore]

@ardacigin Don't know if I am in any way to be considered as a perspective here, most of the stuff you talk about seems to be very much "fit-to-the-frame" kind of things. Very specific and "acknowledged". Your posts have a interesting way of looking at reality. What @Nahm tried pointing you towards, I think, is forgetting all that "knowledge" that you think you know. That includes everything, as well as the "dropping of the techniques" knowledge. I might be wrong, but I feel you rely on your intellect more than your feelings, intuition ect. If that is the case, it is holding you back from going deeper into yourself. And if I am wrong, my apologies and good luck brother. 

[Nahm]

@karkaore Ya, pretty much.

TL:DR

2g’s Shrooms. 

Not to imply the practices are not useful, or that discipline is not to be valued. A toothbrush & a bar of soap have value too, but you can also drive through the car wash.