Finally, we really begin to understand and surrender to the truth of things. We accept the truth of our actual human lives as they are at a deep level. All of the “stuff” that the Dark Night may have brought up may still be going on, but somehow it has lost its ability to cause real trouble. Equanimity is much more about something in the relationship to phenomena than anything specific about the phenomena themselves. Equanimity can have sort of a rough start, strangely enough, as well as some mildly painful and irritating sensations, but the meditator feels that some barrier has finally broken, a weight has lifted and practice can continue.

    However, this stage can be such a relief after Re-observation that it is very tempting to solidify it into the fourth samatha jhana either because doing so is so nice or because of fear of falling back to Re-observation, which can easily occur. However, as I continue to mention, not investigating the qualities of this stage, such as peace, ease, and a panoramic perspective, causes failure to progress and makes falling back to Re-observation more likely.

    The first vipassana jhana is about building up the basic skills of what is a physical sensations, what is a mental sensation, how they relate, and what the Three Characteristics feel like in practice. The Arising and Passing away is about seeing this very clearly and profoundly for the object of meditation. The Dark Night is about these insights then coming around to the background and seeing more complex emotional and psychological constructs of mental and physical sensations as they are. The fourth vipassana jhana, meaning this stage, is about seeing the true nature of even more complex, inclusive, subtle and fundamental things, like space, awareness, investigation, wonder, expectation, anticipation, peace, ease, questioning, and those sorts of things in ways that cut through the center and include the whole background and foreground as well.

    This early stage can feel very familiar and “normal,” like we have remembered something simple and good from our childhood. If we felt weary of the world in the Dark Night, we may suddenly find that the world is just fine and may even be more engaged with it and excited about it than before. Again, these potentially radical mood swings can be very disorienting to those with whom we have close relationships. Try to be sensitive to this and their feelings. Confidence returns, but whereas there may have been a Rambo-like quality to it during stage 4. The Arising and Passing Away, now there is more of the cool, charming confidence of James Bond (sorry about the purely masculine images here).

    Somewhere in here there can arise a tendency to see the world and those in it in very strange and unusual ways. I will give one example from my own experience, but realize that tremendous variation is possible here, so don’t take this too seriously. It is meant to try to convey a very general concept. I remember looking around me at all the people on retreat and even all the chickens, birds and puppies in the monastery, and seeing them all simultaneously as “little mush demons” (little squat greenish creatures with big, sad mouths and eyes) and fully enlightened buddhas at the same time. They were both. In fact, we were both.

    We were deluded and small, yet transcendent and luminous. I could see in some very strange way exactly how each of them, including me, was caught in the world of form and confusion, trying to find happiness and yet doing so from such a small and frightened place, and yet all of this was vast buddha nature, all of this was the natural, luminous and compassionate dance of God. Such strange perspectives that try to resolve paradoxical insights do not always occur, but this is included here in case they do and perhaps to provoke knowing laughter from those with their own unique stories from this part of the path. More sexual and stylized versions of these experiences can also explain where some of the more exotic tantric teachings come from.

    Sometimes the early part of stage 11 can produce a real sense of freedom in the conventional sense, freedom from cares, worries, and even responsibilities and social conventions. One may sometimes feel that one is simply beyond everything, and it must be admitted that this is a wonderful feeling. It tends to fade quickly enough on its own, but it might be possible to get caught by it if one stopped practicing entirely. Those who became spiritual fanatics or freaks after the A&P and during the Dark Night may now begin to act much more like their old selves, with their spiritual path being much less of a Big Holy Deal. About damn time…

    Visions of bright lights may arise once more, but they are really more associated with stage 4, The Arising and Passing Away. Again, as with that earlier stage, the meditator is able to sit for longer and longer periods of time and begins to clearly perceive the Three Characteristics with spaciousness and breadth. The big difference is that the A&P is more about the object of meditation and Equanimity is much more about the whole sensate universe. There is less rapture and more equanimity than in the stage of the Arising and Passing Away. There are rarely if ever the spontaneous physical motions and odd breathing patterns that come with that earlier stage. Unfortunately, just to make things confusing, there is often a single double-dip unknowing event, with one being halfway down the breath and the other at the end of that breath, very soon after the shift from Re-observation to Equanimity.

    In the early part of this stage, reality may appear a bit “chunky” for a while, and practice may seem quite possible but may seem to require steady but sustainable work. If one is tired, one may begin having dropouts that are similar to what occurred in Dissolution but more extreme. It may be hard to read and pay attention, hard to listen to people and hear, hard to notice where one is and what one is doing. The arising of some sort of fear of madness and death is not uncommon at this stage, but usually does not cause too much trouble and may even seem comical or welcome. A related and common feeling in the early part of this stage is the general sense that something big is about to happen, though this feeling is also common before the A&P Event. These feelings are worthy of sensate investigation in a wide and inclusive way.

    Reality can now be perceived with great breadth, precision, and clarity, and soon with no special effort. This is called “High Equanimity.” Vibrations may become predominant, and reality may become nothing but vibrations. Vibrating formless realms may even arise, with no discernable image of the body being present at all. It may feel like reality is trying to synchronize with itself, and that is exactly correct. Investigate this feeling. Phenomena may even begin to lose the sense that they are of a particular sense door, and mental and physical phenomena may appear nearly indistinguishably as just vibrations of suchness, sometimes referred to as “formations.”

    I put off writing about formations for a long time, as they are a conceptually difficult topic. Further, the classical definition of formations is perhaps not so clear-cut, so I wondered about imposing my own functional and experiential definitions on the term. However, as the topic of formations has arisen in so many conversations recently, I thought that it would be worth taking on despite the difficulties.

    I am going to define formations as the primary experience of insight meditation when one is solidly in the fourth vipassana jhana, the 11th ñana, High Equanimity, whose formal title is actually Knowledge of Equanimity Concerning Formations. For those of you who find this circular definition completely unhelpful, formations have the following qualities when clearly experienced:

•    They contain all the six sense doors in them, including thought, in a way that does not split them up sequentially in time or positionally in space. If you could take a 3D moving photograph that also captured smell, taste, touch, sound, and thought, all woven into each other seamlessly and containing a sense of flux, this would approximate the experience of one formation. From a fourth vipassana jhana point of view and from a very high dharma point of view, formations are always what occur, and if they are not clearly perceived then we experience reality the way we normally do.

•    They contain not only a complete set of aspects of all six sense doors within them, but include the perception of space (volume) and even of time/movement within them.

•    When the fourth vipassana jhana is first attained, subtle mental sensations might again “split off” from “this side,” much as in the way of the Knowledge of Mind and Body, but with the Three Characteristics of phenomena and the space they are a part of being breathtakingly clear. Until mental and physical sensations fully synchronize on “that side,” there can be a bit of a “tri-ality,” in which there is the sense of the observer “on this side,” and nearly the whole of body and mind as two fluxing entities “over there.” As mental phenomena and physical phenomena gradually integrate with the sense of luminous space, this experientially begs the question, “What is observing formations?” at a level that is way beyond just talking about it. For you Khabbala correspondance fans, these insights correspond to the the three points of Binah, the two points of Chockmah, and finally the single point of Kether.

•    Formations are so inclusive that they viscerally demonstrate what is pointed to by the concept of “no-self” in a way that no other mode of experiencing reality can. As formations become predominant, we are faced first with the question of which side of the dualistic split we are on and then with the question of what is watching what earlier appeared to be both sides. Just keep investigating in a natural and matter-of-fact way. Let this profound dance unfold. If you have gotten to this point, you are extraordinarily close and need to do very little but relax and be gently curious about your experience.

•    When experienced at very high levels of concentration, formations lose the sense that they were even formed of experiences from distinguishable sense doors. This is hard to describe, but one might try such nebulous phrases as, “waves of suchness,” or “primal, undifferentiated experience.” This is largely an artifact of experiencing formations high up in the byproducts of the fourth vipassana jhana, i.e. the first three formless realms. This aspect of how formations may be experienced is not necessary for the discussions below.

    It is the highly inclusive quality of formations that is the most interesting, and leads to the most practical application of discussing formations. It is because they are so inclusive that they are the gateway to the Three Doors to stage 15. Fruition (see the chapter called The Three Doors). They reveal a way out of the paradox of duality, the maddening sense that “this” is observing/controlling/subject to/separated from/etc. a “that.” By containing all or nearly all of the sensations comprising one moment in a very integrated way, they contain the necessary clarity to see through the fundamental illusions.

    One of the primary ways that the illusion of duality is maintained is that the mind partially “blinks out” for a part of each formation, the part it wants to section off to appear separate. In this way, there is insufficient clarity to see the interconnectedness and true nature of that part of reality, and a sense of a self is maintained. When the experience of formations arises, it comes out of a level of clarity that is so complete that this “blinking” can no longer easily occur. Thus, when formations become the dominant experience, even for short periods of time, very profound and liberating insight is close at hand. That is why there are systematic practices that train us to be very skilled in being aware of our whole mental and physical existence. The more we practice being aware of what happens, the less opportunities there are for blinking.

    During the first three insight stages, we gained the ability to notice that mental and physical sensations made up our world, how they interacted, and then began to see the truth of them. We applied these skills to an object (perhaps not of our choice, but an object nonetheless), and saw it as it actually was with a high degree of clarity in the A&P. By this point, these skills in perceiving clearly have become so much of a part of who we are that they began to apply themselves to the background, space and everything that seemed to be a reference point or separate, permanent self as we entered the Dark Night. However, our objects may have been quite vague or too disconcerting to have been perceived clearly. Finally, we get to equanimity and put it all together: we can see the truth of our objects and of the whole background and are OK with this, and the result is the perception of formations.

    Formations contain within them the seeming gap between this and that, as well as sensations of effort, intimacy, resistance, acceptance, and all other such aspects of sensations from which a sense of self is more easily inferred. Thus, these aspects begin to be seen in their proper place, their proper context, i.e. as an interdependent part of reality, and not split off or a self.

    Further, the level of clarity out of which formations arise also allows one to see formations from the time they arise to the time they disappear, thus hitting directly at a sense of a self or sensate universe continuing coherently in time. In the first part of the path the beginning of objects was predominant. In the A&P we got a great sense of the middle of objects but missed subtle aspects of the beginning and end. In the Dark Night the endings are about all we could really perceive clearly. Formations once again put all of this work we have done together in a very natural and complete way.

    Formations also explain some of the odd teachings that you might hear about “stopping thought.” There are three basic ways we might think about this dangerous ideal. We might imagine a world in which the ordinary aspects of our world which we call “thought” simply do not arise, a world of experience without those aspects of manifestation. You can get very close to this in very strong concentration states, particularly the 8th samatha jhana. We might also think of stopping experience entirely (as happens in Fruition), and this obviously includes thought.

    Formations point to yet another possible interpretation of the common wish to “stop thought,” as do very high levels of realization. The seeming duality of mental and physical sensations is gone by the time we are perceiving formations well. Thoughts appear as one luminous aspect of the phenomenal world. In fact, I challenge anyone to describe the bare experience of thinking or mental sensations in terms beyond those of the five “physical” sense doors. Thus, in the face of experiencing formations, it seems crude to speak in terms of thought as separate from those of visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory qualities, or even to speak in terms of these being separate entities.

    When perceived clearly, what we usually call “thoughts” are seen to be just aspects of the manifesting sensate world that we artificially select out and label as thought. Just as it would be odd to imagine that an ocean with many shades of blue is really many little bits of ocean, in times of high clarity it is obvious that there is manifesting reality, and it is absolutely inclusive. Look at the space between you and this book. We don’t go around selecting out little bits of space and labeling them as separate. In the face of formations, the same applies to experience, and experience obviously includes the sensations we call thought.

    Separating the early stages of Equanimity from its mature stage, there tends to be a “near miss,” moment when we get very close to the fruit of the path, which serves to really chill one out, as it were. From this point enlightenment is likely to be attained quickly as long as the meditator continues to simply practice and gently fine tune their awareness and precision, paying gentle attention to things like thoughts of progress and satisfaction with equanimity. At some point even this becomes boring, and a certain cool apathy and even forgetfulness arises. Around this part of Equanimity there can arise the feeling that we are not really there, or that somehow we are completely out of phase with reality. Conducting our ordinary business may be difficult in this phase if we are out in the world rather than on the cushion, but it tends to last only tens of minutes at most. The sense that one is practicing or trying to get anywhere just vanishes, and yet this may hardly be noticeable at all. We sort of come back, with luminosity again growing predominant. Then we get lost in thoughts about something, some strangely clear reverie or flight of fancy. By really buying in, we get set up to check out. When understanding is completely in accord with the way things are, this is called...

    This is why understanding things just as they are is so important. This stage lasts only one moment and never arises again until one attains the next stage of enlightenment. The same is true of the next two stages. Stages 12-14 (Conformity, Change of Lineage, and Path) also share the fact that they represent the three moments of the first entrance to transcendent ultimate reality (stage 15. Fruition) through one of the Three Doors. In subsequent attainments of Fruition at that path (during the stage of Review), the three moments before Fruition are not called Conformity, Change of Lineage and Path. These three stages will get extensive treatment in the chapter on The Three Doors.

    Having understood things just as they are, this next stage, which also lasts for just a moment, “does the damage” as a friend of mine joyfully put it. It permanently changes the minds of the meditators in ways that I will discuss in just a bit. They leave the ranks of the unenlightened and join the ranks of those that are. While formal lineage transmission is a very useful thing to have received, the results of this stage are in fact what that symbolic act is all about. They have done it, and thus attain...

    This stage also lasts just a moment, and after the first completed progress of insight it marks the first moment of the newly awakened being’s awakened life. The first time around, this is called “stream entry” or “first path” in the Theravada, the “fourth stage of the second path” or “the first bhumi” in the Tibetan tradition, and many names in Zen that are purposefully ambiguous. After a subsequent, new progress of insight it marks the attainment of the next level of awakening. It is directly followed by...

    This is the fruit of all the meditator's hard work, the first attainment of ultimate reality, emptiness, Nirvana, God or whatever you wish to call it. In this non-state, there is absolutely no time, no space, no reference point, no experience, no mind, no consciousness, no nothingness, no somethingness, no body, no this, no that, no unity, no duality, and no anything else. Reality stops cold and then reappears. Thus, this is impossible to comprehend, as it goes completely and utterly beyond the rational mind and the universe. To “external time” (if someone were observing the meditator from the outside) this lasts only an instant. It is like an utter discontinuity of the space-time continuum with nothing in the unfindable gap.

    The initial aftershocks, however, can go on for days, and may be mild or spectacular, fun or unsettling or some mixture of these. There are times when it is fun to show off, and this is one of those times. Aftershocks I have noticed after paths include but are not limited to: the visceral feeling that sensory reality is so intense that the nerves in one’s forehead and upper neck may not be able to handle the strain, the feeling that one has become diffused into the atmosphere without a center, purpose, function, sense of direction or even of will, a feeling of joy and gratitude beyond what is normally possible welling through one’s being, the sense of discovery of that which one has most needed, the profound sense of coming home, a quiet awe like the stillness after a great storm, and rapturous transcendent highs that make anything that happened after the A&P seem like dry toast.

    Remember how I said in the section on the psychic powers that strong concentration and intent make magickal things happen? Just after the attainment of a path, particularly the first path, is a time when formal resolutions have an outrageous amount of power. The Buddha said that the greatest of all powers is to understand and then teach the dharma, meaning to attain to full realization, however you define it, and to then help others do the same. I had been advised to use this unique period in my practice well, and I resolved to attain to full enlightenment for the benefit of all beings as quickly as was reasonably possible and despite all the complex consequences of having done so I do not regret my decision in the least and highly recommend that you do the same.

    On subsequent passes through Fruition the mind tends to be refreshed, bright, quiet and clear for a while, and milder forms of the above listed phenomena may occur. It is as though someone hit the reset button and cleared out all the junk for a little while. There is a nice bliss wave that tends to follow and may take a few seconds to develop. If you have not learned the concentration states yet, doing so in the afterglow of a Fruition can make them much easier to attain and master.

    In this stage, the meditator just keeps practicing largely as before. In this way, they will learn to master the stages of insight, as they must pass through them again each time they wish to re-attain Fruition. The first few times through the cycle after the path has been obtained can sometimes be quite intense and even very disturbing, as the mind tends to be exceedingly powerful for a few days after a path has been gained and yet is navigating in territory that is not yet mastered. One is advised to be somewhat careful and perhaps very restrained in what one says and does during the few days and perhaps weeks after attaining a path or something that one thinks may be a path. However, it also sometimes happens that realizations are hardly noticed at all, or if they are noticed, there is simply the sense, “Well, I guess that’s done.” Powerful cycles and the sense that things have been completed are not sure signs that a progress of insight has been completed.

    That said, when a progress of insight is completed, one may notice the mind simply not doing lots of useless things it used to do, and it may seem impossible that it even was able to do them. However, it may take some time to figure out what the permanent implications of the path are and what is just a product of its lingering and transient afterglow. It is likely to take quite a while to really integrate the understandings that come from a path into one's way of being in the world.

    Mixed in with the sense of what is different is also a growing sense of what hasn’t been changed at all, what aspects of reality are still basically unenlightened and poorly perceived. After attaining the early paths, what has remained untouched by that level of understanding is usually fairly obvious. However, one of the difficulties with attaining higher levels of enlightenment is that the sense of what is left to do can become more and more vague and subtle. Again, give things time. Be patient. It can sometimes take a while, perhaps weeks, months or even years, to clearly see which understandings hold up under the pressures of the world and which fade. You might not get a clear sense of the limits of this path until you are well on your way to the next one.

    Speaking of the world, Review is a great time to re-engage with the specifics of our life. It is an unfortunate but true fact that one of the possible side effects of the relentless focus on the Three Characteristics that produces these spectacular insights is the habit of not paying much attention to the specifics of our life. The specifics of our life are obviously very, very important, and so now is a great time to pay a lot of attention to them. Those around us may have noticed the side effects of the Dark Night or some of the other stages and be worried about us or even mad at us for how we behaved if we allowed too much to bleed through. It is not always possible to make up for that sort of damage, but now is a good time to try. Take the time to heal the old wounds you discovered in yourself or created in your life while you were in the Dark Night.

    Also, go out and have some fun! Enjoy the richness of friendship, exercise, leisure, work, entertainment, service, and life in general. In short, do your best to make your life a great one in the conventional sense. You should have been trying to do that all along, but try to forgive yourself and learn from your mistakes if you were not able to do so. Remember, the kind of renunciation that brings insights is seeing the true nature of things. If you can see the true nature of the sensations that make up a fun and healthy life, there is no need for any other type of renunciation! In fact, buying into a strong renunciation trip is well known for making people quite neurotic, and then the challenge is to see the true nature of the sensations that make up renunciation-induced neuroses. I’m not convinced that this is an easier way to go.

    After attaining a path, particularly the early ones, the feeling that one is particularly special is common, and from a certain point of view it is true and understandable. However, what is truer is that something in the understanding of the relationship to ordinary things is now “special,” or at least somewhat unusual. The attainment of stream entry or a new stage of awakening should be a cause for joy and celebration. Unfortunately, people who have never attained these things tend to react oddly or even poorly to such disclosures and sentiments. Strangely, many people are very excited about the idea of people getting enlightened but not the idea of you getting enlightened.

    Those with higher levels of understanding than yours will know where you are coming from, but will also know how much more there is to go from their own experience, and their tendency to focus on that can be frustrating. One’s teachers and more advanced companions may find it amusing to be reminded of what it was like to be caught up in the fascination with low levels of realization, but they know that eventually even that has to be seen in some other way. One of my favorite Chogyam Trungpa lines is, “You will never be decorated by your guru.” Even if you are, I doubt if it will be of any great benefit to you.

    Thus, two ironies of the spiritual life that one can encounter here are that success can cause feelings of isolation and that the spiritual path can be a very lonely one indeed. Sometimes writing can help, as can finding those few people who seem to simultaneously be interested in hearing the details of what you are going through without reinforcing your fascination with these in ways that make it harder to see successes in their proper proportion.

    It is also not uncommon to feel that what one has experienced is just so staggeringly profound that no one is likely to have ever really seen such amazing things, perhaps including one’s teachers. However, if they are the real deal and qualified to teach you, they are very likely to have their own extensive list of spectacular and profound experiences and realizations. However, as such things are so rarely discussed openly, one may have a hard time believing this. As I have had to learn the hard way, those who are particularly prone to extroversion and immoderate speech in the face of recent insights can easily get themselves into somewhat embarrassing and humbling situations. On the other hand, eventually you may begin to outgrow or surpass your current teachers in understanding and ability. This in and of itself can be confusing and frustrating, causing role reversals that not everyone handles well. You might be astounded at how easy it is to bruise the egos in the conventional psychological sense of those who have seen through the illusion of the ego in the high dharma sense.

    As review continues, one gets very familiar with the territory of one’s current path and its stages, and they may pass by more and more quickly and easily. At some point, Fruition will no longer be as attractive and one will feel that one really could be practicing more clearly and precisely. It can begin to seem that the only way to move through the Review stages of insight is to not investigate reality too closely. This is a strong sign that the next set of stages is ready to arise.

    That said, there may be times when one simply doesn’t want to make progress as one can’t afford to be risking another Dark Night at that point in their life. Strong resolutions to stay in Review, a lack of really precise investigation and lots of indulgence in concentration states can help one stay in a Review phase until one is ready to move onward. However, progress of some kind can only be postponed for so long, and the dharma has a relentless way of pushing us onward.