softlyblossoming

@Vincent S Thank you for reading! @BipolarGrowth Thanks

I loved reading this whole thread, you shared so many good pointers, that by the time I read this last post (quoted), I felt the exact same way. But it still feels like this is just a belief for me, an intellectual "getting it". While I no doubt consistently feel like I am everything, I still don't experience everything perceiving itself centrelessly and out from within itself like I hear Rupert Spira, Frank Yang and other nondual teachers talk about. What gives? Any advice/tip to convert it to the full 360 non located enlightenment? Lots of love, Rob

@Inliytened1 From the bottom of my long lost information overloaded heart, thanks for clearing this up.

@Nahm I struggle with ambition (thought attachment) near overwhelmingly. Could you give me any advice to overcome it? Any formal techniques or momentary if-then's? Thanks!

@ivankiss Have you heard of 'formations'? Here's the description in MCTB2 (bolded is the part that seemed most relevant to us): One of the other hallmarks of Equanimity is that the way reality presents is not made up of lots of little sensations occurring in some stable space, not broken up into lots of little, individual sense doors, but instead complete phenomena begin to be perceived as consolidated in a more integrated way, meaning that they are formed together, with space, awareness, and all the different types of sense qualities happening all together to make up the objects in the sensate world, and even all of those objects in the world arise in these integrated wholes, consolidated swaths of moving space that contain all those things within them. It is as though flowing space has textures, colors, sounds, tastes, smells all integrated into it, as part of it, and gradually attention and anything that really seems to be “us” finally gets integrated in the same way also, though we might not notice this at all. The thing about this integrated way of perceiving reality is that, at this stage, it just seems so normal that most people won’t have any idea that this is what is happening unless they are curious about the basics of the way attention and sensate information present themselves, or have been given a heads-up that this is what occurs at this stage. It sounds dramatic, but it is very undramatic. Many will get through this stage and have no idea that something was different, and that’s okay. These put-together sense impressions, these formed things, are formally (pun intended) called “formations”, and they are the phenomena regarding which we come to Equanimity in this phase. The full formal name of this stage is Knowledge of Equanimity Concerning Formations. I put off writing about formations for a long time, since although the experience of them is very straightforward and natural, they are for some a conceptually difficult topic. Furthermore, the classical definition of “formation” is perhaps not so clear-cut, so I was concerned about imposing on the term my own functional and experiential definitions. Lastly, it seems that plenty of people will just get confused by this set of descriptions, and even plenty of talented meditators won’t be able to notice that these integrated formations are what is going on, and they clearly don’t have to for progress. However, as the topic comes up repeatedly, here we go … Formations contain all the six sense doors, 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 perspective and from a very high dharma point of view, formations are always what occur, and when they are not clearly perceived, then we experience reality the way we ordinarily do. They contain not only a complete set of aspects of all six sense doors within them, but also include the perception of space (volume) and even of time, movement, and the sensate qualities that make up “duration”. This distinction between ordinary perception of formation and perceiving formations in the way that people do in Equanimity is a very subtle one, and so descriptions like those here can cause confusion if misinterpreted to imply some dramatic perceptual shift, as evidenced by the endless questions I received about this section after writing MCTB1.