Starting to get a lot more serious about practice again now that second path insights are starting to show up in force, after deliberately holding off on making much progress for a while after landing stream entry in order to deal with daily life householder morality stuff.

After a long period of instability in my life (in the process of moving abroad to live with my partner) things look like they'll be a lot more stable for a while soon, so I'm finally looking into going on retreat for the first time - I'm one of those rare people that managed to hit first path without a retreat, I guess, though I also first crossed the A&P when I was probably around 5 or 6 years old, so it's not a path I would necessarily recommend, not like there is a choice.
I've been looking at Gaia House since I've heard good things about that retreat center and since they're within Europe (for some definition of Europe) it would help keep the cost down a lot. They offer a 70% discount rate for people up to 25 years old and I turn 26 this summer, so I might see if I can make use of that still since money is tight, but you have to call them for it and I have terrible phone anxiety :/. I'd have to find out which of their retreats would be most suitable too since not all are open to first time retreatants and I'd like to go for at least a week to really get some momentum going.

In terms of actual practice I've managed to stabilize on having high quality daily sits again. I feel like I stand to gain a lot from finally really powering the daily life practice a lot too, so I've been working on that, which has gotten much easier post-Stream Entry.
In formal sitting practice I'm trying to work up towards longer sits but not making very much progress, I've hit a wall pretty hard. I can do 30 minute sits without much trouble but that has been my sit duration for a while now and going much beyond it in a way that's useful practice and not just forcing myself to sit still is really difficult. I'd like to be able to reliably do 45 minute sits for the time being.

To help make my sits a bit longer I've started adding more steps to my sits and taking some more time with each, so my current routine now looks like this:
- Reflect on motivation; why am I doing this? What do I expect to happen, why is that beneficial, why do I expect these techniques to work?
- Reflect on gratitude; notice how fortunate I am to have access to these teachings and techniques, how much of a miracle it is that all this was discovered and preserved for thousands of years; reflect on how fortunate I am to have life circumstances that allow for serious practice.
- Make a formal resolution to practice using my intended techniques for the duration of the sit for the benefit of all beings.
- Cultivate metta, mostly directed either at myself or towards someone who I know is suffering. I use this to cultivate tranquility and access concentration too.
- (Optional) if I feel my concentration is too diffuse or sensations related to metta start to get vague I briefly redirect my attention to sensations of the breath at the nostrils since that helps to solidify concentration.
- Once sensations of piti start getting strong enough to be distracting I switch to focussing on them, trying to stabilize first jhana.
- Once sensations of piti start feeling tiresome and irritating I let it fade more towards the background and try and put sukha in the foreground instead, encouraging the mind to shift into second jhana, though that's very much still a work in progress.
- (Optional) Either before attempting the shift to second jhana or when coming out of jhana sometimes I send out wishes/intentions in a magickal kind of way, supported by the metta cultivated earlier.
- After coming out of jhana I switch to gentle noting for the duration of the sit.

I find that I really need the increased tranquility and concentration now to make progress; I need a mind that's pretty still to really be able to penetrate the deeper subtler layers of stuff. Metta has been really helpful in allowing me to relax into seclusion and feeling good, something which is still really tricky for me. I feel like the really fast, sharp, dissecting kind of concentration/investigation I used before would probably still work at this point but that's not where I want to go right now.

Mapping stuff feels much less useful right now as now there's just too many levels of "fractals" visible. I've gotten really good at making the first path cycles progress just by recalling what each nana feels like, but now both first path nanas and second path nanas are occuring at the same time, and inclining the mind too much towards mapping the second path nanas tends to just call up the first path nanas instead. I'm fairly confident I'm starting to run into early dark night stuff in second path though, but I don't really find it fruitful to map "what stage I am in" at any given specific moment.

I feel pretty silly over getting smug after landing first path for a while since I can see clearly now that not all that much was accomplished. For what it's worth I knew it was silly at the time too and didn't really let it impact my actions too much.

I think fruitions have gotten significantly less common, though I had a really satisfying one a couple days ago. Mind that I've never been able to "make fruitions happen" in any sense and they've always been things that catch me by surprise, most often just walking around mindfully or lying in bed and only occasionally when still on the cushion when I'm just daydreaming and not practicing anymore. If they stop occurring for a while I don't think I'll really miss them now that I've confirmed the last bits of phenomenology I wanted to confirm about them (the bit about "fruitions always happen at the end of the out breath" especially I really wanted to confirm), they're not "all that" though the rush and sense of refreshment is nice.

Welcome !!!

What a journey, welcome indeed!

Thank you, friends.

I took a pretty big dose of edibles (weed) earlier today as a belated celebration of 4/20.
Weed tends to work wonders on my concentration, it's rather psychedelic for me and something about the relaxation really works out.
I was discussing the difficulty of teaching the dhamma with my boyfriend and then I turned that towards magick, as the ability to teach well is very magickal.
I commented on magickal effects being something I really wanted to learn more about as I naturally get them in high enough doses that it feels like a significant issue in how I relate to other people, and also in making it very hard for me to relax into deeper states of concentration
This led me to contemplate how malleable my perception of the world and my mind are, which started giving my phenomenology very formless characteristics Which has happened before.

I remembered reading Daniel writing about how it's not true formless realms unless the body completely vanished, which I really wanted to see, so I sat down and inclined the mind towards spaciousness, thinking "it's so big, it's so big"
That definitely amplified the sense of spaciousness but I couldn't push it far enough on a pinch
I went back down to 4th jhana stuff but there was too much excitement now
I tried going back to 3th jhana but it was very chaotic there, then going down to 2nd I suddenly had an insight about the interaction of vippassana and samatha, seeing how 3th vippassana jhana was changing the experience of 2nd samatha jhana as they are very different and the effect is really silly
I went back to 1st jhana stuff and suddenly I noticed that the there was no "I" that was "shifting jhanas"
The jhanas were just coming up and the mind was shifting towards them automatically as was necessary
Then I realized the same thing was true for the meditation object too, the meditation object was shifting around more to the body for a while
I had been trying to stabilize concentration using metta which didn't really work, very briefly the breath but that seemed too much of a jump from the boundless formless things I'd been trying to do just before, then the body which is always really good and I was able to work through a lot of the weird body posture issues I'd been having
Anyhow then I realized that the body was just posturing itself as well and then I just felt like getting up, noticed that the getting up was also just happening by itself, and just let that happen and went to write this here
When I focus on it I can tune into it pretty well but it's a bit destabilizing if I do and makes it hard to think

This feels very clearly A&P to me while I also notice that dark night stuff is very nearby
I think I should focus on stabilizing this stuff more though, I can't afford to stop practicing now and that itself would be pointless, but I feel like I should really resolve to analyze this A&P territory for all it's worth since I haven't done it enough justice
For some definition of "I"... I feel pretty humbled now, I was definitely thinking myself a fair bit smarter than I was, though to my credit I was also aware of that issue and was giving it a fair bit of attention
it's just intertwined with self-esteem issues elsewhere, and I'm definitely better off overcorrecting towards "arrogant" for a while; the two are very linked

My relationship to this plant have grown pretty complicated, huh. I don't have much issues with other drugs anymore and am much happier with my relationship to them, but weed does so much for me. It's hard decisionmaking when the benefits and shadowsides are both big and very evenly matched. This was after a month-long break which has been really good.
Edibles feel a lot less toxic and more healing to me, and being a bigger commitment is good since it discourages impulsive use. Taking longer to kick in also just always helps a ton with anything potentially addictive, I feel. Something like today at a non-degenerate rate would not be bad for me at all. I understand that the vast majority of my gains today though are because I've gotten my daily life morality very well in order, getting more exercise and eating and living healthier than ever and few obligations, as well as deliberately training in concentration and cultivating metta and such. And just doing meditation in high enough doses.

In hindsight I don't know how to feel about what I did during stream entry review. I think I was definitely overly cautious, I'm towards the tail end of a complicated multi-year process of moving abroad to live with my partner so I just figured all my effort should be going into not rocking the boat on that and making it all go smoothly. I did succeed in making everything go very smoothly but I feel like with more mindfulness and concentration and such it would've been significantly easier. I did need to meditate pretty regularly, but overall it was maybe every other day or even less and at points of it it was absent most days. I did make tiem to attend some 4-hour online mini-retreats and I got quite a bit out of that in terms of technique, but I never really got my concentration up high enough nor did I power on the daily life practice pretty much at all.

I think I could've gotten it done using strong resolutions not to progress too far and review deeper instead, and that toning down the practice probably caused more problems than it solved
Then again I did also review quite well, but mostly on the cycles, I learned to go through them quickly when they come up and I did some practicing with calling them up in purpose, slowing them down, going out of order etcetera because I just couldn't help myself
But that felt like a bit too much magickal power at the time, being able to tune my mind to that extent felt like biting off a bit more than I trusted myself to chew even though it would've been fine, but it was a hard-learned caution.
I guess that ultimately is very related to the insights I had today, so going there probably would've actually progressed things to an extent I didn't want. It's amazing that the mind seems like it already knows what the insights are, otherwise how could it stop you from having them
I guess if you follow this train of thought enough it leads towards the weird intriguing "you are already enlightened" stuff, but I think I'll enjoy the rest of my drug trip with my partner rather than go down that rabbit hole ^_^)

I would apologize for the ramble but I guess it's my practice log

It is your practice log indeed : ) keep up the good work! I recently started a log as well and I'm finding it useful in developing momentum and also playing with effort and ease. Blessings to you

Thank you Louise.

Attention feels extremely out of phase at the moment. Sitting is quite possible as there's a lot of stillness, but trying to direct the mind towards anything is hardly possible now. It's weird to realize that I can be in a state where mindfulness and concentration are quite high and the mind is still, and yet everything is very vague and fleeting, leading to a clear experience of vagueness.

I wonder how I can best utilize this particular mindspace. For now I think I'll just relax into it and try my best to at least maintain the regular rhythm of my everyday life. I'm not particularly thrilled about what is likely to come in the practice in the forseeable future, since I don't really want my daily life to be disturbed too much, but it is how it is, I guess.

Occasionally I have interesting insights or interesting things to say, but I can't really muster the will and concentration to write them out, so they're just kind of stewing in the back of my mind somewhere, and that's pretty draining in its own right.

At least going through these experiences with a much higher level of clarity now makes them feel a lot more useful and meaningful. This definitely feels like new territory, but at least now I can see a point to what's happening, I still feel like I could really be getting a lot more practice in. In principle my life circumstances allow for it, but it's hard to really settle into it, living in this tiny run-down apartment with two people while we search for a new place. The lack of privacy is an issue as well since between work from home and the weekend, my partner is home most days.

The new meditation territory seems much more centered around craving and aversion. Craving especially feels more like a thorn every day; it's something I feel glad to let go of. I feel deeply for all beings that are tied up in this. I notice just how much time I spend ruminating on various desires and fantasies.

I definitely notice insight stages occurring, but there's many layers of it and they interact in strange and interesting ways. There's interactions between the new territory and the old territory, between stages and their substages, and between vippassanic and jhanic modes of attention.

Unfortunately I can't say I'm doing a very good job of controlling bleedthrough into my interactions with other people right now. I really try my best, but I'm bad at controlling my emotions.

I'm starting to think more about how I can gear my practice towards my personal inclinations. I generally learn best if I can learn something in a way that's very integrated with everything else in my life, getting very regular but small doses with lots of breaks over a long time, with a lot of theorizing and discursive thought. I also get a lot out of being able to utilize my creativity as well. I think it'll be good to let go of normative ideas of what good practice should be for a while and just do what I think will work, which I feel much more empowered to do post-Stream Entry.

Writing this practice log has been good. There's something super powerful about actually writing/speaking out ideas and sharing them with another person; it really helps drive them home.

A lot of emotional shadow stuff has been coming to the foreground. Proximally it manifests mostly as envy but there's also aspects regarding expectations, bits of vanity and obsession with the body -- I think my hair is definitely thinning, lol. It's all stuff that's very tied up in imagining there's a "self", and feelings of conceit and entitlement that come with that. A lot of it is triggered by becoming a lot more social again and facing tricky sexuality/gender related questions again. This mirrors what happened during my last major A&P-through-Dark-Night cycle before SE.

Karma really is a bitch, huh? Having naturally strong but very fickle and poorly controlled concentration abilities is a massive footgun. I still feel the effects daily of lots of very strong and dark ill will, resentment and general "dark jhana" stuff I fostered close to a decade ago, even though I now totally disavow that stuff. Likewise I'm very burdened by similar mental stuff I did riding very high A&P concentration into dark night stuff in the cycle I mentioned last paragraph -- an affair involving an ill-considered relationship and then a very painful breakup. I am immeasurably grateful I was able to find MCTB and through it the dharma around that time.

All of this has kind of left me in a bind, because years of having this stuff happen has made me very aware of how much of a double-edged sword strong concentration is and how many dumpster fires I have left in my wake because of it, which makes it very hard to actually allow strong concentration to arise and cultivate itself. The effect is very scattering and depressing. There's a lot to be said for training well in morality before training in strong concentration, as not only is strong concentration a potentially very dangerous power tool, it's also the case that strong concentration really has to be allowed to arise, and the system will try and prevent that from happening if it doesn't trust itself.

The flip side of that of course is that concentration is a skill like any other and has to be actively practiced to be mastered, and strong concentration can arise naturally without training. It's a similar story for insight, which is greatly helped by strong concentration, but insights significant enough to really mess your stuff up can also arise unintentionally quite easily.

I do strongly feel like I really, really need to get my concentration trip in order at this point, but it's hard to get a foothold on it. As I said, I naturally enter deep concentration states easily, but doing it on demand, sustaining it, sustaining or changing the object of concentration and growing or shrinking the breadth of the concentration object are much harder. It'll be a work in progress for a while.

On a higher level, I'm not sure what to prioritize; with the sense field being as erratic as it is with intrusive "stuff" coming up in high quantities and general energy levels, concentration levels and such fluctuating wildly it seems hard to practice the kind of consistency and finesse necessary to master concentration; I also don't want to amplify difficult stuff to beyond what I can handle. Right now morality stuff is still top priority. Concentration itself can act very stabilizing as well, and resolving strongly to focus on concentration and not investigate too hard might slow down the destabilizing phenomena. On the other hand, at this point I really don't think I can hold insights back anymore.

Working hard on insight and gunning for calmer waters is also an option. I definitely feel like I am a lot more on top of things now than I would've been in the past, and so far what's been going on has been a healthy level of challenge rather than the being way in over my head it was before. I'm also cautiously optimistic about what's the come, but it's hard to know. On the other hand, I feel like getting a handle on the concentration thing is 20 years overdue by now, and it might be irresponsible cranking the insight engine looking for the kind of stability that's very hard to come by in this inconstant world. I also just really don't want to bite off more than I can chew.

It's very liberating to realize that as long as I can control the bleed-through there's just really nothing bad about what's occuring. In fact, it's very healing, and I can tell it's necessary. That by itself helps a lot to muster the kind of equanimity and faith necessary to let it all happen. Getting my morality trip in order has also been a massive support; the benefits of a healthy diet, stable sleep schedule and regular exercise can hardly be overstated.

In terms of actual practice I think I will give up on extending my sits to 45 minutes for the time being, especially since I've stopped using a clock. I'll dedicate my usual 30 minute morning sit to morality and concentration, and pepper insight throughout my day. I'll focus more on the joyful appreciation and equanimity brahma viharas, as those are a very good antidote to the specific troublesome "stuff" I am encountering; currently I neglect these and focus on metta and compassion since those are much easier to generate for me.

I'm always impressed by how much more productive it is to do a short period of very high concentration, high commitment insight meditation compared to a longer period where my heart isn't in it as much. Cultivating skillful mindstates first really pays off, even if that's most of what I end up doing during a sit.

I'm getting better at not just recognizing unskillful states when they arise, but also bringing enough equanimity to them to actually work with them. Living skillfully takes a lot of mental agility, since mindstates can switch very rapidly and be very different from each other. I'm getting better at finding the right tools to apply at the right times. A related important insight that has started hitting home hard recently is the fact that there is no "self" on the medium term, either. I was aware that everything fluxes second-to-second, and also that there's no stable "self" that persists across years, but I somehow still imagined that at least on an hour-to-hour basis things were pretty stable, even though this is very much not the case.

My work on concentration has been very fruitful. I'm learning a lot from switching between shamatha and vipassana within a sit, and trying to balance higher levels of both at the same time. I think this suits me pretty well and I will keep going down that path, but I'm glad I prioritized vipassana in my early practice, as the rebound that can come from high levels of concentration is very real.

Actual consistency in daily sitting has been so-so. I definitely need a healthy dose of "nothing to do, nowhere to go" from time to time as I tend to skew rather ambitious and goal-oriented. Smoothly transitioning between that and high intensity bursts of practice is part of the mental agility I mentioned earlier, so it's a work in progress with good prospects.

I was rather sick for two days at the end of last week and that really helped drive home how nice it is to just be able to be here, to breathe freely and move around and have energy and just appreciate life itself, which really helped to chill out my frenetic and compulsive side a bit again, but it's very much a case of continuously picking the bean bags back up, so to speak. Increased levels of equanimity and keeping good humor have been a great help.

Patience seems to be a big theme right now, though progress itself is fast as long as I can muster patience, which has been getting a lot easier. This extends beyond the practice into daily life as well. My practice and daily life have supported each other very well recently. I've really caught the excercise bug now; my general energy levels have never been higher.

"Us versus them" goes so much deeper than just elementary "I am a dude, this is who I am" stuff
This is a really stupid way of perceiving anything, it's gutting and confusing. I am constantly fascinated by the question of why perception does stuff like this, and it's always really rewarding to wonder, even if at different times I come to very different-sounding answers that seem very grounded and obviously true and yet seem very orthogonal to each other. It's very intellectually satisfying. I wish I could get more of a handle on the neuroscience part of all this, but while there's very interesting stuff there it's all incredibly speculative. I'm very interested in the science of cognition and computation (having a computer science degree myself).

There's a very real hazard in asking the question of "why is it like this?" though, which is that now you're pressing some "this" for "it" to be onto the very thing you don't understand and are trying to study, so it's very important to balance any kind of reasoning with very dilligent direct observation. The question of "how are things?" is dangerously tied up in "who am I?" when really it shouldn't matter. This continues recursively into all the fine details.

Right, identifying these sorts of core dualities can be painful, sort of suck, be infuriating.  These worldviews are often rooted in trauma. You have to seperate things to make dualities. Seperation is a sort of escapism.

It's been a little while, but no time like the present to make another post here, I guess~

I've mostly finished moving house now, which is to say, my partner and I are now settled into the new apartment and renovations are done, but since it's ultimately a move abroad I will still have to return to my home country and settle affairs there, which I will do in October/November.

Very much trying to get everything stable on the road again, since you know... new place, new neighborhood, still in a foreign country where I still don't speak the language (eek! lots of aversion to be mined when it comes to the whole "learning French" thing...), still don't have a lot of my personal stuff here, not to mention I have bad ADHD as it is already... still, things are getting a lot calmer.

We both put an absolute ton of effort into this move and the new apartment is beyond comfy! A good chance to experience just... being a householder in the most literal sense, having (or renting) a house somewhere that you have to take care of, and how burdensome that is in its own way. Plus of course lots to think of in terms of family, career, "identity" in the conventional "I'm immigrating for love and now have to integrate into this society that I never gave much thought to" sense -- maybe something for another time.

I turned 26 last week, so that's a thing, I guess! I think... hope... I'm finally starting to leave the worst of the quarter-life crisis behind now. About damn time, lol.

Practice wise I really fell off the whole "formal practice" train again, but lately have been getting much much better at getting daily life practice in. The tone of my practice has shifted much more towards the "true self" lens of things as opposed to the "no self" lens, and that has been very fruitful I think. I read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a book that wasn't very easy to get through but ended up doing quite a bit of good in that impossible to pinpoint, somewhat trollishly frustrating way that Zen teachers specialize in.

I started reaching Loch Kelly's Shift Into Freedom and that kind of more direct pointing approach has been super helpful. Because of that my practice is now once again in much calmer, more spacious, more equanimous territory, after really struggling integrating an absolute storm of constantly shifting perspectives for a long time. I can imagine this kind of thing could be quite a footgun if you were to teach it to beginners though, because I can see how someone might read a book like this and think it's pointing at fourth shamatha jhana or formless jhana stuff, and sorting out the difference between that and genuine insight practice is subtle and tricky business.

Working from that kind of integrative, spacious, luminous perspective has reminded me of an exercise I taught myself to do at some point in the past before I knew about formal meditation practices, which is to pose the question "how would I feel if I had no name?". I've been picking that up again and it's been working well for me, it's very similar to a question Kelly teaches you to ask, which is "what would there be if there was no problem to solve?". Also similar in flavor to "what was your original face?" stuff.

I'm pretty interested to learn more about Zen and Tibetan practices and such since they do strike a chord with me in important ways that counterbalance some of the shadow sides of the more "pragmatic dharma" Mahasi-adjacent practices, but I know that Zen for instance is very heavy on the teacher-student relationship end, and that makes it seem very inaccesible to me.

I'm very eager to try and meet some good dharma friends and mentor figures soon. I'm just generally a very skittish, socially anxious person, so it's not easy. I'll post on DhO more to start. That's kind of daunting in its own right! It's an old forum with a lot of different subsections in various levels of disuse. I'm also quite young to be here and the forum software itself is, ahem, pretty fuckin' shit, though I understand that you can't just migrate an old establised community like this and there doesn't really seem to be anyone around to spearhead such a move.

Curious to see how many people actually read these so if you're reading this, feel free to chime in and say hello! I think there might also be an introductions section somewhere, maybe I should find that and make a post there...

Yo dude! Welcome to thee DhO man!  

I would suggest something Shargrol cooked up for me and it was called S-meditation where I would split the sit in three parts;

(btw, very Tibetan and Mahasi but not zen unless radical allowing is just sitting) 
1. Concentration 10 minutes ( I used White Tara mantra)
2. Active Noting 20 minutes ( I used noting aloud)
3. Radical Allowing (just let stuff do what it does)
( then gently return to the normal stuff and log the sit)

Please give us some juicy details instead of a rather general description. Ya know bra sensations and urges, and that sort of junk!  

Cheers Papa, I will try that some time.

Yeah I'd love to write some more phenomenological stuff some time, but I feel like I'd have to do it pretty quickly after a sit to keep it fresh, and I'm usually not really in a writing mood as I come out of a sit. I'll try, though.

Indeed, I would write immediately after the sit hence more details would be still fresh in memory. 

Here's a more phenomenological report:

I was working on my to-do list for today when I started feeling really distractible and my experience became very muddled and vague. I figured I might just be hungry since it was around dinner time so I started cooking dinner. While cooking I felt a lot of free-floating anxiety and impatience, constantly checking the oven and pacing around the kitchen. After dinner I decided to lie down a bit but I couldn't find any rest, so I got up to take a walk outside. As I was getting ready to step out I started feeling very dejected and mopey for no valid reason, though my mind kept trying to find reasons for it such as blaming it on not getting enough done today even though today was a very productive day for me.

As I started walking outside I made an effort to unhook from thoughts in my head and keep a broad, spacious awareness. My field of awareness became extremely panoramic, clearly being able to see almost a full 180 degree field of vision in front of me while also easily perceiving sounds all around. I walked like this for a while and some frustration set in, feeling like there was too much rumbling energy and discomfort to settle down, but it was all too vague and subdued to take it apart through aggressive observation while walking around, and I felt too wired to sit down. I acknowledged that this is just how it is, that sensations can always be accepted and worked with regardless of what form they take, and a sense of galvanisation set in, like steeling my heart and summoning bravery, and things briefly settled down a bit.

Around this time my mental talk, which had been very quiet when I'd just started walking and had the extremely panoramic experience, started up very fast and aggressively, thinking about how I should write this log entry afterwards and what I would write in this.
Reading Shift Into Freedom it recommended to try and experience both the wide panoramic view and the everyday "I am a guy with thoughts in my head" everyday view at the same time, something which I hadn't really tried before, so I tried that for a while, and it was challenging but doable. When I try that it feels like there's some subtle tension or barrier "between" the two perspectives, that has the same flavor as the separation that it feels like there is between the body and the rest of the world when taking just the panoramic view, and it feels "wrong" and like it wants to "resolve".

Anyhow, having now changed my technique things sped up, then calmed down for a while, then sped up again, feeling like perspectives and viewpoints were coming in far faster than they could be processed. Sensations like sounds, sights and the feeling of the wind started feeling very sharp and violating. Mental images and mental touch sensations got a lot stronger and took even more of the character of cutting into my bones, extreme cold, the body turning inside out, the sense field turning inside out, grinding gears, eyes popping out of my sockets and so on. I actually welcomed this, because at that point the sensations stopped being subtle and became very in-my-face, making it much easier to concentrate on them.

I decided to sit down on the sidewalk in a quiet place under a tree and fully surrender to the sensations and the uncontrollability of it all, until eventually there was a sense of being "done" and things being alright as they were. The sensations calmed down and I opened my eyes and started writing this report.

Right now there is a sense of instability, like things might easily fall back to unpleasant chaos, yet at the same time there is a sense that this is just fine and not a problem. I'm going home now and expect if I can sit or lie down quietly for a bit that things will stabilise more.

" I'm going home now and expect if I can sit or lie down quietly for a bit that things will stabilise more."

Why the need to "stabilize" anything? Which wants what to be stable?

Im still not seeing much of the phenomenological reporting ... but I might be off so ... don't mind me  

By stabilize I meant... There's some different "modes" of awareness there -- pretty obviously dancing around some map theory since I understand that's not what you want to hear for understandable reasons -- one of which tends to present sensations that are rapidly shifting, generally unpleasant, and attention tends to want to jerk around aggressively, trains of thoughts get repetitive and intrusive and run partially in parallel and go unfinished, there's more of a tendency of awareness to contract into a smaller regions of space. The other mode of awareness is more spacious, more equanimous, less forceful and seems less distorted, giving physical sensations and emotions more metered importance. When I say "stabilize" I am referring to the fact that these modes tend to occur in a linear progression -- first the first is prevalent, then the second -- and there can be a tendency to move in both directions along that line.

When I say stabilize I really mean "I, as a conventional person, would rather be in the second mode of perception than the first right now, because it is already past 8pm on a friday night and I still have some normal everyday things that need doing for normal everyday reasons, and one mode of perception makes that much easier than the other"

In terms of phenomenology, if I had to bring it back to the levels of sense doors -- though personally I describe these things not in terms of "six sense doors" but in terms of inner/outer sight, inner/outer sound and inner/outer "feel" (Shinzen Young system) -- I think there's a decent amount there? I can make certain parts of it explicitly sensorial:

- Talk about "vagueness": this is pretty tricky to explain, but mental images tend to look more blurred, space feels like it has more of a "thick soup with areas of varying density" character, physical sensations are more like... if you can picture "dull pain" versus "sharp pain", imagine that but for things that aren't pain. Mental talk tends to be quieter in terms of volume, what would otherwise be full sentences tends to devolve more into phrases or trail off towards the end.
- Talk about "restlessness" or "free-floating anxiety": in the body this is mostly felt around the chest, with a raised heartbeat and a feeling of being out of breath. Sensations seem like they follow up on each other faster, mental talk feels like it's speaking in a hurry.
- Talk about "spaciousness": It just kind of feels like there is more or less space. When I say things are spacious I mean that it feels like there is more space for sensations to be, like perhaps... imagine if you filled all of space with sensations distinguishable by nothing but their location, when I say things are more spacious, it feels like I would be able to identify more distinct sensations like that? I hope that is clear. When experienced visually it's like taking a photo with a wide-angle lens versus a more ordinary lens. The shape of space itself also changes, sometimes it feels like there is more "sensation" space in certain parts of "physical" space... like it might feel that there's more space to my left than to my right, for instance.

Other stuff I feel like I have already described, e.g. throughout the report mental talk got louder and quieter, faster and slower, took up more or less space. Other stuff like sensations of the wind cutting me or the body turning inside out or such which are physical sensations -- though obviously the kind you can distinguish from "real" physical sensations, in the way that imagining stubbing your toe actually feels like stubbing your toe (or at least it does for me, different people have different degrees of vivid imaginations), but I wouldn't confuse it for the "real thing".

Is that more clear/"phenomenological" for you, or were you thinking of something else? I'm never sure how to feel about these very "phenomenological" reports since I'm always writing them in hindsight, so the thing accessible to me is always a memory, and memories are pretty unreliable and tend to "fill in the details". Plus, if I know I'm gonna write that kind of detailed report, I easily get preoccupied with trying to "record" sensations.

If you have any good pointers on how to write better more phenomenological practice logs I can try to apply them next time I feel up for it.

Oh if you are indeed seeing/noticing/noting all this detailed stuff the Shinzen way, its all golden! Thats the important part, not the detailed reporting on the forum. Don't mind me! Keep up the good work! 

Did a 30 minute sit, timed with an app with a bell at the midway point for a bit of time keeping.

From the start of the sit there was a lot of mental talk; I knew I wanted to write a practice log entry about my sit, so that triggered a lot of analytic reflexive commentary -- if you're ever curious what my mental talk sounds like, it's basically exactly how I write, since my writings are typically mostly a transcription of reconstructed past mental talk; it's typically also about as fast as you might expect from my wordy writing style :-).

I felt myself very much pulled out of the "now" and into this story of writing this log entry -- hearing mental talk of what I would be writing, seeing mental images of this blue forum with the reply edit box and so on. I knew I had to unhook from that, but I also took care to remind myself that as long as I was clearly observing these sensations as sensations, there was no "problem".

Wanting to increase my concentration, I briefly generated feelings of metta in the body, repeating a mantra of "may I be well, may I be well..." in my head; I put a slight smile on my face too, which helped a lot, though I later forgot and dropped that. After that I switched to repeating "just this, just this..." as a mantra. I also opened my eyes and found a good visual object to concentrate on right in front of me (a white conch shell on a black TV stand) -- I usually meditate with my eyes open, actually. Finding a bit of concentration, I started concentrating on the sensation of concentration itself, starting by what I perceive as the "concentration muscle" kind of between the eyes and a little bit up, like furrowing your brow but as a mental rather than a physical motion, and then letting that sensation expand to fill the body and then all of space.

Having established a bit of concentration, I switched to Shinzen Young style "see, hear, feel" noting, which uses those three labels. This clarified sensations a lot and made me feel more grounded in direct sensate experience rather than stories. I started adding different labels too as they came to mind -- for instance, labeling a noise as "loud" rather than just "hear". I would return to the "sensation of concentration" as well quite regularly, in a manner that felt somewhere in between intentional and automatic.

Proceeding from that, now at about the half-way point of the sit, I very quickly automatically shifted into "just noticing" to keep up with the speed of sensations, using labels only occasionally. Body tension got a bit uncomfortable, so I briefly tensed every muscle at once and then relaxed, which helped. I dropped the mudra I was doing with my hands around the midway point of the sit in favor of just resting them in my lap, but other than that I kept unbroken posture throughout the entire sit rather easily.

After shifting to "just noticing", effort naturally dropped and more equanimity arose. Sensations themselves were rather mundane, with external sounds being the most common (city sounds, and my partner working at the desk in the same room), but also physical sensations of sitting, sights. Reflexive, analytical mental talk -- very much like what you are reading now -- stayed present throughout the entire sit, but by now had gotten less common, far less grippy, and wasn't perceived as distracting or problematic anymore.

There was a brief but distinct period of strong sensations of sadness, mostly felt in the body as relaxation and a feeling of being pulled downwards, but also including a certain sense of warmth and comfort and a dropping of energy levels -- all in all lasting maybe 30 seconds at most. At different times the body would generate more or less physical heat, but it never rose to the level of being distracting or hard to bear, something which occasionally makes it hard for me to sit. A bit later, there were brief strong sensations of fear, which felt like "freezing" (like a deer in headlights), being pulled upwards, and increased energy -- but this also passed quickly.

At some point I decided to check out "vibrations", something which I do perceive and that are talked about a lot in MCTB but that I really don't practice noticing because I find them edgy, and counted some 4-8 vibrations per second; I don't know where the range "4-8" comes from, since I really didn't count 1-2-3-4..., but that's the number that came to me. It's been a long time since I've paid attention to vibrations and I noticed that I can gauge the speed of them much more easily now.

For a while I felt like I was noticing most sensations, but only noticing the very end of them. Dropping effort somewhat had been good, but at this point it had turned into a certain kind of torpor and "ticking the boxes" and didn't feel like very good practice anymore, so I redoubled my efforts; I went back to some of the concentration exercises from earlier, then really powered on the investigation factor, becoming very curious to the exact texture, location, duration etcetera of sensations -- this was a really good idea, and felt like a workout in a good way.

Going into the final stretch I felt that I was "holding back" in some sense, and that this was the main cause of the torpor. I dropped that and suddenly sensations seemed to come in much faster and have much more of a "piercing" and "violating" quality; it also felt like a loss of control. Mental images, which had been quite present at the beginning of the sit but then quieted down a lot, became extremely present.

The mental images mostly took the form of horror, especially body horror as well as images of blades and saws and hooks and other things that look like torture implements, with a dash of insectoid things and various forms of "inversion" or "turning inside out", as in the body turning inside out, but also more abstract representations of that idea. Images were fast and fleeting enough that they couldn't be resolved in very much detail. The body horror and "turning inside out" sensations could also be felt as physical sensations, but not as vividly as such sensations sometimes are.

A strong sense of exhaustion, a sense of "I'm tired, I don't want this anymore, when will this end?" set in. Mental images and body sensations stopped being chaotic, and settled into a clear story, that looked as follows: I was lying on the floor (actually, it was on stone, so maybe "on the street"?), crying out, throwing a temper tantrum and beating my limbs against the floor. As I was doing this, I was smashing my body to bits; smashing through the flesh, exposing bone, grinding the bone into dust, splashing lots of blood everywhere.

This sequence looped a few times, and then I could very clearly see myself smashing my body into just blood. All the flesh, bone, and just the entire (image of) the body in general became just deep crimson blood; then, the image of the surrounding scene also turned into blood; what used to be the body joining into what used to be the environment to make just a single, giant sea of blood, which sloshed around for a moment.

There was a very distinct sensation of being "done", and I naturally got up with 1:40 left on the timer.

Lately I've been very fascinated with how the meditation syncs up with the timer like that. That seems like it has very interesting and deep implications somehow that I haven't quite worked out yet. The question of "how does that work?" might be worth giving special attention at some point.

Speaking reflectively I'm pretty happy with this sit; I definitely think I gave it a good dose of Right Effort and had enough mindfulness to use the right tools in the right situations, especially given that it's been a while since I've regularly really sat on the cushion like this. I'm happy with this as a practice log entry too.

EDIT: Interesting tidbit, useful to nobody -- writing up this log entry took me 45 minutes.

Having been adequately non-mappy for the practice log I'll let myself make a bit of a mappy comment: in my report I see what looks like the Misery ñana before the Fear ñana, even though the traditional maps have them the other way around. This is actually my experience most of the time, though I encounter them in the more traditional order as well, and a lot of the time I don't see anything that looks like "Misery" at all, even when all the others show up very distinctly.

What caused that "misery" feeling? What caused that "fear" feeling? Cause and Effect. It's beneficial to "see" this chain of "events." 

Im not asking you to answer Just to watch closely next time you sit ... what body sensations accompany these feeling states/stages? Mental images? etc ... 

Also ... DO NOT LOOK FOR THE MAP! Only note matter-of-fact arising and passing experience! Very simple! KISS 

I will link you to a play list showcasing my ex-teacher Kenneth Folk explaining all the stuff one can note. These are short but of great benefit, videos. One of them is by Shinzen as well! I used this list a lot and it led me all the way to SE. 
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLky8N7-NqOd95njMDZ3LD7-i24cqKmtQO&si=Ej5snU4Renv7ueQ3

One reason for me almost daily watching some or all of these videos was knowing that we can easily start abstracting about our meditation practice. Thinking myself into a certain state for example. These videos helped me get reminded about what the actual work to be done was! Noting matter of fact rising and falling away experience no matter if unpleasant, neutral or pleasant. 

I think brushing up on my noting in general would be a good idea. I started with MCTB and then read a bunch of the Mahasi and U. Pandita books referenced (Practical Insight Meditation and stuff). Worked using those kinds of instructions for quite a while, then did much more open, "Do Nothing" style stuff (like in A Still Forest Pool) and that combination got me through what were for a long time extremely disruptive effects on my. I also did a bunch of metta and more morality-centric stuff for a while (A Path with Heart) somewhere around this time overlapping with both I think.

Got to a point where I felt like I had gotten to a point where it was fine to ease up the effort on making fast progress a bit and focus on stability, concistency, playing around and experimenting more, mastering the toolbox and not leaving any major gaps in places. Very systematically worked through a lot of Shinzen's stuff which itself is very systematic and elegantly simplified. Worked with a teacher for a bit (not very long but a couple hours of calls and some email exchange), did regular ~4 hour group meditation sessions/lessons.

Then after that my daily life became really turbulent and unstable for a while and I got pretty skittish about doing much that would result in rapid progress since I didn't feel equipped to handle a lot of turbulence again. Worked on concentration for a while, which is pretty darn difficult for me so unfortunately I do chicken out of actually practicing that a lot. Worked a ton on morality in the normal daily life "get out of bed on time, eat good food, get regular exercise, be a good friend" etcetera sense.

Lately I've been working a lot more on carrying mindfulness and the techniques and skills I've learned in my practice throughout the whole day. Learning not to overanalyze is definitely one of the best things to do not just for my practice but for my life in general, I agree. That's part of why I've been kind of eyeing Zen stuff from a distance; they're very good at "don't think about it" and keeping some form of practice going every moment of their day -- the view of enlightenment not as a place but as an activity is very important I think.

On the other hand there's a place for theory too and a place for reading. It's always very motivating to me to see different viewpoints on the practice. Right now I'm thinking about picking the Vimuttimagga back up, which I put down with my life being chaotic and it not being light reading.

I think the way I'm working now is working out pretty well and I mostly just need to up the dose a bit, as well as adding noting back into it again.

"Thinking yourself into a state" is definitely a very real and interesting thing that can be very skillful or unskillful depending on how aware you are of it and how responsible you are about it. Might be good to work in that direction in a positive sense again, since that's a really good place to practice concentration and metta from and, if you know how to do it carefully and intentionally, you're less likely to do do it accidentally in harmful ways, I think.

I will say I am very impressed by the level of wisdom clearly on display by many of the regulars here. Posting on a forum like this is very challenging but very effective at revealing where a lot of pain points are. Very frustrating, I hate it, very good stuff. A healthy dose of masochism is a great asset on the path. A ton of suffering is tied up in word games.

Noting vagueness. Noting repetition. Noting loops. Noting pull. Noting obsession. Noting constriction. Noting frustration. Noting frustration. Noting remembering. Noting frustration. Noting sadness. Noting regret. Noting shape. Noting "blue". Noting "down". Noting tingling. Noting tiredness. Noting confusion. Noting vagueness. Noting storytelling. Noting structuring. Noting seeking. Noting seeking without object. Noting cycles. Noting attractor states. Noting analysis. Noting abstraction. Noting clinging. Noting exasperation. Noting "words". Noting confusion. Noting "no way forward, no way backward". Noting settling. Noting familiarity. Noting embarrassment. Noting desire for seclusion. Noting gratitude. Noting storytelling.

Noting "freedom". Noting relief.

I wouldn't particularly recommend severe sleep deprivation to anyone and in this case it's very much not intentional, but some of the more hindersome parts of the mind do tend to give the ghost first

They finally fixed a leak we've had in the new apartment since we got it months ago this morning. Further water damage restaurations still to be done but at least the bedroom should stop smelling like mold soon.

Word games are a symptom of ignorance. Noticing how our ups and downs throughout life are bound up in these word games is excellent practice. Noticing the word games as they happen. Noticing how they feel, how they start, how they end. Simply seeing them carry on. Over and over again, returning to relaxation, returning to presence, as we are bombarded by them. Becoming frustrated by it all, relaxing with that frustration, so on and so on. 
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It can be useful to find a little compassion. When we transition from noting to more just noticing there can at times be much more smoothness, chillness, awesommeness, etc. When in the midst of darker nanas one must transcend masochism, but I could entertain the argument that one must go through it. There's a capacity to lovingly relax with suffering that develops as one realizes the degree to which they refuse to just simply be with what is. There's interesting things to be explored in this regard, how does our refusal to suffer or face suffering feed into our experience of suffering. From where do the word games arise? How could they possibly be so compelling? These are not questions which have answers that can be arrived at intellectually but through the body, through sense experience, through deep exploration of meditation. 

I left "masochism" pretty vague, and the word doesn't seem to point at the same thing for you as it does for me. What you seem to be thinking of actually sounds more like sadism to me . Reflecting on how their can be distinct senses of sadism and masochism without either a giver or a receiver [of pain] is an interesting little koan in itself.

The masochism I mean is something you might feel in the latter half of a strenuous exercise. It's a humorous, giddy, silly kind of thing -- though it does have an edge to it, too. This is what there is, this is what you asked for, this is what you wanted, isn't it? Now bend over.

Maybe a bit crass But "this sucks but I love it, this is what I need" is a bridge to freedom that works really well for me. But obviously the confusion with "I want it to suck" is easy, yes.

Compassion is very good too, yes, but depending on how you're wired it's a lot harder. I have enough trauma history that being very compassionate to myself actually tends to get very disruptive really fast, so it's the kind of thing I prefer building up a foundation of stability for first and then doing it in small doses and really giving it time.

I'm a very energetic person, and a lot of that energy is bottled up. I live next to an Asian supermarket nowadays. They sell good cans of alcoholic drinks that remind me of being in Japan (a place I love dearly and have traveled to three times). Like Strong Zero if anyone knows, but a Chinese brand. I hardly drink alcohol but I do treat myself to one of these sometimes. But they're very fizzy, and they seemingly always come rather violently pre-shaken, so I have to be very careful to open them very slowly and methodically, and I don't always entirely remember . I work at it, but I'm also a 26 year old dude, in between uni and working, moving abroad to permanently move in with my fiance, aging grandparents, autistic, adhd, average shoe size, favorite dishes to cook recently are risotto and mapo tofu, etc etc etc, lots of busy emotional work, even if it's all very normal or very good news

Thanks for the reminders, I know all that damn well, but I keep forgetting, keep dropping those bean bags... It somehow always manages to be surprising, even though the number of ways in which it happens really isn't that large, and the fact that it happens and the moments on which it happens are in principle extremely predictable. It clearly smells like sabotage Unfortunately even though I am very quick-witted I am also very forgetful generally.

I'm not sure what kind of practice would help best with this... noting gives by far the fastest insight practice of anything I've tried, but it can turn pretty damn edgy if you do it all the time, and it's very easy to learn the bad habit of having it be a switch you throw on when you sit down and flip off when you get up. Doing more shamatha would be very good for me in a bunch of ways but I don't know if it would help with this constant baseline mindfulness stuff all that much; at least it doesn't feel like it directly targets it.

I think I mainly just want to power on the daily life practice a lot, really try to power on the mindfulness from waking up until going to sleep. I'll just have to get much, much, much gentler with myself about taking it in stride and picking those bean bags back up, again and again and again and again and... Yeah. What a pain, maybe I'll just wait for Daniel and his sciencey nerd shit to extract the mindfulness hormone and put it in a pill . One can dream.

Now that I have you here, sorry for being so reflexive on the other thread btw. I was very reactive to what Chris said, you hit uncomfortably hard as well but now I recognize that you were basically right. Very much appreciated and still do that you actually put in the effort respectfully explain. Considered going back there and making a quick edit but I think I'd rather just put the thing to rest after this.

Was thinking of writing maybe "not my clowns, not my circus" or some other catchphrase on some paper or something and putting it somewhere visible for a while. I wouldn't want it to be too much of a permanent fixture though because it reads very "live laugh love" aesthetically speaking, lol.

Random thought but thinking about Daniel and how busy he is versus how many emails he gets, I wonder if at some point he would benefit from setting up a system like:

- Some program keeps an email queue for him, and serves them to him one at a time;
- When it's somebody's turn in the queue, a bot sends them a confirmation email of the form "you've reached the front of the queue; here's your email, do you still want to send it? reply 'yes' if you do"

That way everyone who really wants to get in touch with him still will, in the order that they originally emailed in, but I strongly suspect that the majority of people's responses to the confirmation would be "fuck no, that'd be embarassing" or "I already solved it myself by now".

There'd have to be some auto email sorting stuff involved and some other safety valves to let really important stuff through easily and I imagine you wouldn't want to be restricted to a strictly serial pipeline of emails etc but there's a workable idea there. Could always just make a separate email address that specifically goes through this system and direct people there for a while and see.

Dunno to what kind of extent this kind of thing exists, I do know that there's a lot of tooling for managing email but no specifics since I don't handle much email myself. If it's a tool that doesn't exist it's definitely something I could build, might be a demand for that. Tons of space to apply all the major machine learning innovations in the email space too, I think some people are gonna make a lot of money there. This is not business advice Just a thought

I do always love just writing while thinking, it really helps organize my thoughts. I do write more long-form sometimes but don't really show people except my partner. I'd love to write more publicly but being an idiot in public is scary >_<"  At least on DhO you don't have to wonder whether people think you're an idiot because they'll tell you Though the discussion culture here is a kind that I usually avoid pretty hard, so it's a fair bit of culture shock.

I notice my reflexiveness and defensiveness is triggered moreso by me showing vulnerability than by stuff other people actually do. It's much more proactive than reactive in that sense. I feel offended first, and only take offense later.

My fiance is so cool. He's working really hard at a big creative project. I feel a lot of inspiration and admiration, though there's also a lot of "God I wish I was this cool".

Struggling with the difficult question of... my cap of social relationships I can comfortably actively maintain at any given time is not that big -- I'm pretty introverted -- and yet I want to befriend more inspiring people. Stuff like that is real tricky, the shifting and weaving of social relationships can be very exhausting. I'm very much still working on a higher stability/morality baseline. Lots of progress has been made but it's all not very tight yet, and at some point the dharma waits for no-one.

The practice is be aware, lose awareness, then be aware again. It's ok to suck at this. Simply notice the sucking. You can use noting to ease yourself into just being aware. Being aware becomes easier the more you catch the story as it carries on. A certain degree of shamatha simply occurs when ones mind can fall into just being aware. It is here that the classic insight vs concentration arguments tend to fall apart for me. Good insight practice will bring with it a certain quality of immersion in experience. It's not as perfect as a deep concentration but it is often quite refreshing in that one can surf their lived experience, get wiped out by a big wave, paddle out and do it again. It's useful, less edgy and more relaxing to let more mechanical noting fall away to achieve this. 

Sometimes we have the knowledge to be right and not the grace to pull our punches... Sometimes wisdom kinda stings.

Teaching is unfortunately a touchy subject for reasons that become clearer as you gain insight.

Noticing reaction is tremendous practice. Many would not notice. 
 

Really very excellent.

The classic "insight versus concentration" argument is... very unclear, because everyone is in many ways less in disagreement than they think they are, in disagreement over very different things, disagreeing on matters of priority that tie into lots of other aspects of their teachings and aesthetic, plus I'm not very convinced that anybody really nails perfectly what the suttas say on this. You can tell that jhana was super important to the Buddha, but it's also pretty clear that ideas about what "jhana" actually means diverged almost immediately.

I do think that the skill of being able to say "okay, I'm gonna concentrate, I'm not gonna be pulled all over the place like that" is very well-trainable through hard concentration exercises, and that's very useful for life in general. But I also absolutely agree that concentration skills will naturally kind of tend to follow what is asked of them by good insight practice and both insight and concentration practice have a very large element of "allowing" that causes them to co-occur.

Thank you for the kind words .

Just a quick one on my phone in the middle of the night since I won't be sleeping for a bit...

Practice has been good. Was doing 45 minute sits most days for a while, now doing 30 mins of good walking meditation followed by 30 mins of sitting. Very much back to basics noting.

For a while I was noting a lot of vagueness and unclarity. Now for the past week and a half to two weeks everything has been very clear. Constant body pains that had persisted despite finally getting a bed worthy of the name have disappeared. Lots of dreams going on, lots of energy, creativity, piti -- very classic by the books A&P.

Had a super powerful dream experience of looking outside the "membrane" and seeing that the outside is the same as the inside, leading to feeling the entire weight of reality also bearing down from "outside" looking "in", causing the "membrane" to feel like it's violently inverting in a way that is extremely scary and violating and wicked.

Very much like going into a fruition when the no-self door is primary and the suffering door is secondary, but clearly not "complete" and with a lot more fanfare. This is my first time going through an A&P event like this post-SE, so this is interesting to observe. I understand "torus" imagery from MCTB better now, though the actual "geometry" involved isn't really describable, since the point is more so that the geometry that is imagined to be there couldn't possibly exist.

I know it's all just fancy light shows but damn, that was wicked. I feel like my mind could cut steel right now. Also -- holy shit, no stiff neck.

Gonna stick with my practice as it is for now, play around with the enhanced concentration a fair bit too -- I think I managed to very briefly dip into some real "there's no body at all" formless stuff the other day.

Another 2 months or so I'll officially be done-done with my international move, so I made some strong formal resolutions to not proceed deeply into difficult territory until then. Seemed to land well, but I feel like I'll be fine either way.

Really pumping up the "faith" spiritual faculty has been really supercharging my practice. Cool! Very helpful for my daily life too, actually.

"You can tell that jhana was super important to the Buddha"

Yes it seems so, he, the Buddha, even tried to enter Jhana on his deathbed and failed to do so. He was in such pain it just overwhelmed the Jhanic fragile nature. I mean the guy was THE master of Jhana, better than his teachers they say. So if he failed at this Jhana during such bodily suffering we sure can conclude that its limiting, not in any way an end all of anything. If it happens sure, fine, let it do it's impermanent thing but cling not to it, or put it on a pedestal of importance, otherwise more Dukkha shall thread your way which is not a bad thing but ... well ... some of us don't mind Dukkha leading the way In any case, all is good! All this is fluff anyway and all this does itself in any shape or form anyway, so ... this we try to clearly see and then ... let go of the control we never had anyway. Anyway ... I used this word too much ... 

Mind not my words here my friend as Im under the influence of several beers and the Nirvana - Live in Amsterdam concert  

Papa,

"Yes it seems so, he, the Buddha, even tried to enter Jhana on his deathbed and failed to do so. He was in such pain it just overwhelmed the Jhanic fragile nature."

I have never heard that before. The  Mahāparinibbāna Sutta says the opposite. It say that he went through the eight jhanas without difficulty, then back down through them to first, then back up to fourth, and died in fourth.

Is the account you heard from the suttas?