Is there anyone here who has succeeded in eliminating these? (or is it just Tarin, Trent, Richard, Stefanie?) Can anyone give any tips/links? (Besides just HAIETMOBA?)
I have. Find my post on the early stages of advanced posturing for some ideas, or if simply interested in personal liberation of mind, maintain ordinary unfabricated consciousness and a steady pace of breath and be on guard for anything arising or forming in experience.
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"Look directly!
What is this?
Look in this manner
And you won't be fooled!"
-Bassui
"There are thousands upon thousands of students
who have practiced meditation and obtained its fruits.
Do not doubt its possibilities because of the simplicity of the method.
If you can not find the truth right where you are,
where else do you expect to find it?"
-Dogen
HAIETMOBA is just one recreation of many direct pointing partial insight practices. What is most efficient level of pointing depends on certain conditions related to the individual, faculty differences etc. HAIETMOBA, like other practices, uses sensory contact as a vector to be on guard for clinging, being, becoming. To prevent the 'demon' of subtle experiential conceptualization (distinct from that-which-whispers silent thoughts), that turns experience into something it isn't, from entering the fortress of the mind.
However, this process can be kept out until it perishes for good by simply watching the mind directly, being actively on guard for the aforementioned, that which automatically forms subtle experience, like causing imposed boundaries on the senses themselves between one another, having ratios and having their distinct place. Or automatically forming a sensation or feeling or perception of otherness or substance or things having a specific nature. Or redirecting the minds attention when placed on something else, or that which causes the mind to lose attention when falling asleep and wander incoherently in dream.
If you can't watch the mind directly and gradually take refuge in the primal substance, then consider placing the locus of concentration on the delineation of the senses themselves. Seeing the quality of sameness as in the ordinary unfabricated consciousness equally sustaining the senses like space. Break down and crumble this delineation of ratioed sense boundaries with penetrating observation. Now see and maintain the lightness, selflessness, boundlessness, open-endedness that results in the absence of that delineation. The space-like sameness of a single 'sense', almost a 'sensation' of experience itself. Actively non-fabricating the naturally present and ignoring fabrication if it does knock. Reduce and collapse everything in experience (inner and outer perceptions) to interpenetration itself and the quality of sameness thereof.
If not, consider viewing experience like a hot coal, the tighter you grip, the more it burns you, but when you get intimately close to it and simply let go of it, (experience), then it keeps you warm and secure.
If not, consider probing your perception and experience of the 'external element', that which is perceived as object opposed to subject and outside of 'oneself'. Upon finding this quality, see clearly the absolute sameness of that quality in the internal and what one habitually views as subject or self, fully encompass the back and the back of the spine in general and behind the vector of knowing that usually is the safe haven of delusion and subtle self.
Just as in the inverse, where one can effort and perceive some inanimate object with subjectness, eventually the brain takes it like a being; one simply is objectifying the disease of subjectivity. it is like one has magic elixir or fairy dust and is sprinkling all experiential instances or potential instances of subjectivity, internality, me-ness with the "external element" or 'the experiential quality of discerning and perceiving inanimate objectness, lack of subjectness. One must actively and assertively do this, then it eventually will be partially automatic; and then one closes the gaps until it is a perpetual system.
However with that achieved there is the subtle original being of regular mind, as when one simply alertly observes the mind for long periods of time there will be subtle changes in that vector of knowing (which is not the 'center point' that is often spoke of but persists after that) it is the subtle flux, charge, momentum, generally in the area of the back and back of the spine in general. One watches these charges and either maintains non-clinging and non-identifying ordinary unfabricated consciousness or asserts the anti-subjective 'external element'. The freeing non-subjective sameness of internal/external persisting unchanged for long periods.
There is a turning about and letting go completely and thus no longer forms experience into subtle energetic mental objects, then there is absolutely no delineating beings or non-beings etc. Once all subtle changing has ended a certainty dawns as to the persistence of attainment.
There are many types of methods in general however, so if you wish to have more methods or a different category of methods than let me know.
"[...] does your current, every day experience of 4th path exclude these (and all other affective) experiences entirely and continuously, such that they never even begin to arise?
disquiet, disquietude, inquietude, uneasiness, nervousness, nervous tension, apprehension, apprehensiveness, sheepishness, shyness, timidity, timidness, timorousness, butterflies in the stomach, embarrassment, anxiousness, fretfulness, funk, jitters, blue funk, quailing, quaking, quavering, heebie-jeebies, appalment, worry, worriment, insecurity, anxiety, angst, alarm, agitation, palpitation, perturbation, trepidation, fright, affright, being scared, being frightened, being afraid, being spooked, fearfulness, awe, foreboding, panic, terror, horror, horrification, petrifaction or dread."
This is an example of some of the issues that can arise from memetics and increasingly self-referential data-vectors etc. Any pranic/nervous-system charge as described by any of those above terms are due to persistent defilement knots amongst the pranic/energetic channels and a lack of the knowledge of non-arising.
To make clear for who require the most explicit, my direct experience of the "knowledge of destruction" bestows the destruction of above termed experiences at their root. Further, my direct knowledge and experience of the immediately following "knowledge of non-arising" bestows a certainty as to the future persistence of non-arising of the above termed experiences. Beyond merely ending I-making, as recently mentioned, there is no reification of property, sexual territory or social contracts or relationships and no false views or unpleasantness related to death of family etc.
The advanced practices have lead this mind to the special extinction via bliss and the resulting perpetual union of liberation and bliss. Further, increasing modification and domestication of bodily pain and fatigue, hot & cold, and even the subtle signs related to effort into bliss or cessation.
Moreover,
"As the Khemaka Sutta points out, those who have already attained one of the lower levels of enlightenment may not identify with anything in particular, but may still have the illusion of subjectivity; that is, there may not be anything for which they think "I am this", but they may still retain the tendency to feel "I am". "
First of all, generally the word suffering is not the best trans-literary choice to understand what the Buddha and all the liberated ones after him speak of. Unpleasantness and the complete liberation from such is a much more accurate description. The Buddha and others have made clear complete arhatship is a complete freedom from anything that could possibly make one tremble, experience dissatisfaction, unpleasantness, etc. Particularly death and other trauma.
They describe lasting non-changing happiness, while the above quote describes changing nonlasting 'happiness'. The quote directly describes what is opposite to liberation, describes what isn't liberation.
Beyond any anti-relevant and out of context definitions associated with any of the terms in the above quote, to iterate, I can say definitively from my experience that liberation is 100% completely devoid, moment by moment, of any of the terms mentioned. When certain bardo visions dawn, the slightest defilements, usually out sight, can reveal themselves. In this type of bardo "virtual space" we will say, anything possibly imaginable can happen there. Heaven and hell, everything beyond, and everything in-between.
However, arahant nibbana and the various types of 'knowledge of non-arising' liberations derived from the great many path-methods Buddhism discovered, allows one to be completely devoid of any unpleasantness in the face of anything that happens in the bardo space. Considered of the most extreme experiences possible, possibly besides death itself depending on your conception of death. Actual liberation perfectly maintains itself in such space. I have experienced the fully dawned bardo hundreds of times using a variety of means, and can speak of the static integrity of actual liberation in the bardo.
I have however experienced states that appear to resemble what the above quote is referring to in my early non-liberated lackadaisical years. Where one experiences unoccasional bursts of the aforementioned defilements etc. As an aside, a little background:
I was raised devoid of a particular religion or atheism. The siblings and I were told while growing up we could go to any religious group or any gathering related to a style of thought we wanted to explore, but nothing was going to be forced on us. I read a range of things from Nietzsche to manuals on developing psychic faculties (generally, even at a young age, could be considered a skeptical positivist of sorts).
Of the age of eleven or twelve (generally intensively curious and jumping fully into a topic in response to said sparks of curiosity), the psychic text I was reading distorted the degree of success that various prestigious universities were having in experiments related to quantifying such effects. The text later listed a few meditations, indicating meditation might be the best avenue to explore the psychic. For these reasons, I directed my curiosity towards trying them. Humorously, this was my very first exposure to meditation and any context of meditation.
Nothing related to unpleasantness, defilements, joy, liberation, enlightenment, equanimity etc (besides stating that being merely relaxed might help the psychic phenomena).
Even the connection between monks and meditation was completely non-existent (if pressed to assert what monks were about, I would of likely simply asserted from my limited knowledge that monks don't work and they pray all day).
The text advised choosing one of two basic methods, the first where one continues to focus away from thoughts as they arise, instead placing attention on the body; the other and the one I chose being where one simply watches the body & thoughts without getting involved. It explained to do one of those methods here and there for a week to several weeks until one gets a hang of it, then to move to the advanced technique. The technique consisted of expanding the body awareness, from whole body to rolling the attention around the body. When focusing on any specific point, that point of bodily awareness should be all one is experiencing. The second stage of the advanced technique was after one was well established in being able to place the attention completely on any point of the body, one visualized the body as being translucent and hollow. Then one visualized the whole body being filled with a color (whichever color represented power and energy to one; I used a few colors, but often a brightly rich & deep orange).
The idea was that the visualization facilitated the movement of actual energy, 'psi'. Thus one was informed to feel (generate) the bodily change and the energetic qualities as one is doing the visualization.
Continuing with the visualization of the energy having filled up the whole body, one then was supposed to slowly pool/drain all the energy into a small, dense, drop in the middle of the chest. One then was supposed to pool the dense energy into the palms of one or both of the hands. At this point projecting/visualizing spherical energy now emanating from the palms could be additionally extended to more advanced visualized shapes.
The basic meditations brought me various calm and joyful states that were interesting. Allowing a rationalization of context which fueled a growing desire to meditate more. This went on for several weeks with varying spurts of practicing, from in the nearby woods for several hours here and there to rituals of looking forward to practicing right upon getting home from school. I then began both stages of the advanced practice at the same time and would do the second stage after working on the first aspect for 45 minutes or so per routine iteration. I excelled very quickly at rolling my attention around my body and being able to focus nearly fully on whatever particular area. The fabrication/visualization stage was leading to more and more interesting, joyful, and exhilarating states as I stabilized the visualizations and the holding of the associated biofeedback for both the pooling to the chest and the pooling to the palms of the hands.
However, after a string of post-meditation experiences that were both energetic, intense, and unexpected, I was left seriously considering that I was messing with something I possibly shouldn't be, especially considering I didn't really understand it (even more so considering the contextual background that the meditation was being practiced amongst). I ceased all meditation after roughly six to eight months of a pretty consistent hobby-like practice (in terms of how many hours per day, almost always less than four, almost never less than a half hour a day).
It does appear to have influenced a bit, as I had my cake and ate it during my teenage years, they were great despite having many unforeseen circumstances thrown at the family (to the degree that we joked of a family curse; however, mother's resilience could be codified as "It is what it is.").
I 'did my own thing' rather devoid of all but pretty slight arisings (brief and very uncommon uneasiness, nervousness, anxiousness etc; a great much less than what could be observed of others) & felt nearly all social situations were in the palm of my hand (low self-grasping lead to extremely fluid social dynamics; 'people were easy').
To clarify, a 'young love' break up of a few years surely had the capacity to influence negatively, as I had rooted a pretty deep attachment and suffered a few weeks before moving on (including the standard sexual territory evolutionary programs males are 'blessed' with).
At that time I still had no conception of liberation at all, however if it was explained even misleadingly to me as the end of all 'suffering' (rather than properly as all 'unpleasantness'), I would of absolutely said no, that it is axiomatically self-evident that there is room for improvement. That labels of personal liberation would in actuality be lacking humility & 'self'-critical honesty.
Forward to my late teens - early twenties. I was using increasingly large doses (often up to max) of entheogens with others mostly of a similar intellectual grade (another becoming a physicist, a neuroscientist, a lawyer, a teacher at one of the finest music schools etc). On the same doses and 'same' environment, I consistently show a much deeper, more vivid, and much more controlled response with many analytic-intuitions on how to 'push it even deeper' (we conclude the difference is likely due to the prior meditation and the resulting higher order of biofeedback etc etc). I experienced several permanent changes within short periods of time, often due to the more radical experiences
<i.e. The open-eyed visions consumed more and more of 'objective' reality, distortions lead to geometric distortions, which lead to partial hallucinations, which lead to stable archetypical hallucinations intruding into all vision, blind-spots, peripheral, & all. As the visions consumed from thirty to seventy percent of reality, more and more of everything became monkeys, skulls & skeletons, and political figures.
The body's vitality seemed like it was leaking into and feeding the visions.
Then as the visions consumed further the next twenty percent, they merged into what I, for some time, could only refer to afterwards as a demon. A singular, seemingly trans-personal, and archetypal vision of a wrathful/forceful deity (I had a familiarity with the concept of Jungian archetypes, however no concept of wrathful deities and the differences in how Buddhism versus Jainism interpreted them).
It was very large, single-headed, and the upper third of it had consumed/become everything in experience save a faint echo of subjective "me-ness" that was bewilderment itself, the faint trace of 'body-ness' was outlined in bewilderment-only; as well as the faint perception of being 'pressed down' and held 'against something' (thus technically the bardo didn't fully 100% dawn, only about 90-95%). Paradoxically, a simultaneous experience of the most distinct "otherness" and yet the most vulnerable, honest, & primal "personalness". There was not much else to focus on, as it was almost all there was.
Occasionally, rather abstract & rapid intuitive 'knowing' (amygdala induced faux triggering or not) impressions flickered. Mostly concerning the deity/otherness and some understanding of or some relationship to symbolic stains pertaining to awareness itself.
Time seemed to grind to a complete halt at the peak of the experience, a static struggle, a suspended and imprinting struggle, searing itself into my experience.
This changed the mind in many ways, subtle and not, to which it took a few years to even partially quantify (even more so due to the interplay of several other change-triggering events).
However, these change-triggering events immediately set me on a fast track, as I succeeded through school with a natural ease of determination. >
I didn't meditate or have exposure to much of any new contemplative context (or any need or desire to) for roughly two years more, until hearing about the Buddhist clear-light and its supposed interrelation to the vision states. After, I went over descriptions in some detail and realized I had possibly glimpsed it or close to it, as well as other things that monks were reaching in meditation.
Then shortly afterwards came my first exposure to a painting of a wrathful/forceful deity, and that was enough to provoke much more serious study (as it was the only and first representation of the vision I had ever seen beyond the vision itself, and it called into question the remaining traces of a world view; I was forced to take Jung and his curious case of the schizophrenic, the sun's phallus, and the 2000 year old Persian text much more seriously etc).
At that point I was experiencing a consistent degree of low identification, higher unity & less-duality, higher equanimity, high mental energy and ease of concentration etc and only pretty rare spurts of the quoted defilement terms. Again however, of the little knowledge I had of Buddhism, I did not have any impression that I was arahant or liberated; though I would of admitted I was likely closer to some hypothetical 'enlightenment' than a hypothetical 'average person' who has had no combination of visionary experiences, meditative experience, or intuitive insight (Bohm's insights etc).
Over the course of finishing school, the lackadaisical 'meditation'/qigong (many stationary abiding bodily asanas used are common to what is now called Falun Dafa/Gong) what I was doing was more 'free-style exploration of the intro', to gain insight in general (not related directly to liberation at all; sometimes to meditate on the meanings of the texts; curious exploration, creating many meditations in response to various texts; etc etc).
I was studying texts of various tradition, both Buddhist and non, but primarily for the sake of understanding their claims (first independent of commentaries) and how said claims grew out of and how it interacts with the visionary accounts from varying religions & traditions etc.
Over time, more and more of my study and eventually practice became for the sake of transmitting the already existing useful knowledge coalescing with my growing knowledge from direct experience to others; becoming personally free-er and free-er despite it not being of my 'goals' (including the study/practice of many methods just to have degrees of knowledge from direct experience; a bit later to the degree of intentionally troubleshooting the consequences of some of the mistakes one can make along with the extreme practices; again, nearly all study/practice for the sake of transmission and ethical transmission at that). Of the many methods, directly pointing to that which moves attention to and fro and learning to suspend and cease it's spastic movement, and directly pointing beyond experientially/perceptually naming and forming.
Fast forward into my travels over the years to find pith-instructions, direct-transmissions, orations of uncommon or rare texts, and information on exotic attainments/traditions, I have had many detailed conversations with realized monks and yogis amongst many traditions (including post-tradition hermit yogis). Overall it has been made very clear by the advanced practitioners, that despite the somewhat common confusions of moderately skilled monks, those with an over all meta-knowledge of various traditions assert with absolute certainty that any dissatisfaction or unpleasantness is not liberation. Thus any who experience any terms in the quote are not liberated.
Meta-analysis leads to the conclusion that there are at least a few thousand methods and a great many of subtle types or grades of enlightenment (to the degree that the term itself can appear illusive, ambiguous etc to those not very well versed) some provide actual liberation, others are not really about personally-liberation much at all.
An example given to me more than once concerning nirvana: on the very first try and having not practiced it before, if someone can't hold their breath for several minutes without any uneasiness, unpleasantness, dissatisfaction at all, then the proper label of nibbana or liberation, or consciousness without surface of feature can't even be considered.
Contemplatives however that train beyond merely holding their own space and being free from unease, unpleasantness, dissatisfaction, can also experience various orders of the supreme all-encompassing primordial orgasm if wished.
Maybe the answer is yes, no, or yes but differently than before, and then "how differently?" begs an answer.