My Recent 3 Key Insight Experiences Explained

[ardacigin]

For the past few weeks, I've experienced some cool insights due to my meditation practice so I wanted to share 3 of them and explain how they occurred.

To clarify, these are insight experiences. Insight is any direct experience realization that challenges your existing worldview of self and reality.  Insight experiences are moments where you become conscious of these insights to a degree. They can be temporary or permanent.

All these 3 were temporary in my case. But they are realizations I can contact in the present moment as long as my intention is strong. Everyone has insight experiences but being able to realize them and be conscious of them as they are occurring is not an easy task. Repeating them at will is even more challenging.

The more you repeat these consistently, the insights percolate deeper into the psyche and completely transform your existing belief systems and daily experience. Partial transformation has occurred in my case but the capacity of these insights to transform one's life (as far as I'm able to see) is massive and potentially infinite.

1- Life is a form of dream: This insight was realized through hypnagogic states one experiences while waking up or going to sleep. Eventually, mindfulness cracks through the sleep cycle and certain insights become available to the meditator. 

One of these was how the internal thought and images was active in the dream state. Basically the same monkey-mind you experience in daily waking life (both internal talk and memory images) are what constitutes your dreams. Your dreams are literally made up of mental talk and mental images you use in daily life.

I've realized this at the end of a dream where the waking life 'monkey mind' and dream life memories have clashed together in a hypnogogic state. The mechanism was realized to be the same due to metacognitive awareness one develops in meditation.

The insight challenges your exisiting worldview because you believe that you are relatively alert and awake in daily life but as long as there are mental commentary, images, thoughts that pertains to non-present moment experience, you are dreaming. You are not fully conscious.

Just as you create a story, body and a self in a dream, the same mechanism continues when you wake up in the morning. True 'waking up' arises out of greater mindfulness, silent mind and un-mediated contact with direct experience. So this insight experience makes you suspicious of what reality is on a deeper level and attunes the psyche to be more mindful automatically.

2- Literally Missing The Richness of Reality Without Mindfulness: This is seemingly a very obvious insight experience for many people. But the ramifications are quite deep. It is deceptively simple.

I was watching a TV show at the time and all of a sudden, I had a thought about a trivial thing. My metacognitive awareness was not that strong at the time so after a few minutes, I've realized that I've completely missed what happened in the tv show as my mind was in a subtle state of following a thought pattern. 

The reason why this insight experience was profound is that I've rewound the show and realized I was not even conscious of the subtle movement that guy made as he said this or that line. Or how a particular emotion was conveyed with a body language cue. These profound moments were completely missed due to unconscious movements of attention and thought activity. My metacognitive awareness was there at that moment with the importance of present moment realization.

The realization was that you are LITERALLY missing the richness of reality due to lack of mindfulness. This, again, re-programs the psyche to be more mindful in the following present moment experiences. Because there is no moment other than the present moment.

3- The Importance of Metacognitive Awareness + Joy + Body Awareness in Daily Life

I've already realized this before but as time goes on, you realize how much distortion occurs in consciousness when you start to move around, talk to people, write comments, and do stuff. Without metacognitive awareness, every single moment is tainted with craving and as a result, massive amounts of subliminal suffering arises.

You might bliss out in a meditative or psychedelic state. A lot of profound insights can occur from these experiences. But the tendency to compartmentalize your spiritual practice and 'end' meditation sessions as soon as you need to go to the bathroom is very great.

The key to radical reductions in suffering in daily life lies in the combination of metacognitive awareness + Joy + Body awareness. A quick explanation of these terms are:

Metacognitive Awareness:  This awareness is knowing the overall state of the mind, fixation/craving levels, the location of where attention is, what its doing, intentions, body awareness, emotions, thought activity of the mind.

So this is a very inclusive meta-skill of awareness. It is the pillar of mindfulness. And this one skill gets you to adept meditation stages. So the content (like the joy) loses its importance and things like the mind's mental reaction towards the joy/pain become central to your practice.

You monitor these elements in real time. It sounds really hard and a lot of work but it is fairly effortless once you are actually there. 

Joy is very alluring to the mind. So it becomes easier to develop metacognitive awareness. That is why many meditators rank jhana practice as a foundational technique in Samatha circles. 

In daily life, the demands of activities require metacognitive awareness. Otherwise, joy and body awareness goes away. and you get fixated on the activity. Walking meditation is the key to making this work. Once you get the joy there and maintain it, that is really good progress.

Then you need to do that while talking which is really hard. But it is possible with more practice. So in stage 8, you'll realize that daily life practice is just perfect for the development of metacognitive awareness.

Joy and Happiness: Both the pleasant sensations and being in a state of joy highly reduces suffering and invites equanimity to consciousness. Being able to maintain these qualities in daily life is a key skill in making your life sweet and strengthening metacognitive awareness further.

Body Awareness: To maintain this in daily life, an ability to slow your movements down and get in touch with the body as a whole in a state of comfort and relaxation is key. You already develop this skill in meditation but bringing it into daily life while you are walking etc. is a challenge. The tendency to rush towards activities is huge. 

To develop this skill in daily life, walk and move like an old man. Very slowly. Walk slowly.

This enables metacognitive awareness and joy to be maintained. As you get better at it, you can do it with speed as well. But quality matters here. Stop your general tendency to pick up the pan and cook stuff in a state of craving. That entire paradigm needs to go away. Just throw it out.

Commit to never move without mindfulness. The natural result will be slightly slower movement but greater joy, awareness, bodily comfort and mindfulness. Get used to living like this. Don't type out comments with speed. Feel into every click and button slowly and only increase the speed as far as mindfulness can keep up. 

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These were my recent insight experiences. Feel free to contact me and ask questions. I wish all of you well being and happiness

[fi1ghtclub]

Amazing stuff, man!

Thanks for posting.

Edited January 29, 2020 by fi1ghtclub
Spellcheck

[moon777light]

Lovely post as usual

I always try to remember over and over In TMI the importance of being mindful during the day and to do it from the start of your meditation journey. I like the bucket analogy. If you dont stay mindful when your not meditating, its like pouring water into a bucket that has holes on the bottom

[purerogue]

If there is one thing that I would suggest to anyone, then it is this, but I am already tired of taking about benefits of awareness, maybe I am just bad to explain, or people just do not care!  

Edited January 29, 2020 by purerogue

[ardacigin]

20 hours ago, moon777light said:

Lovely post as usual

I always try to remember over and over In TMI the importance of being mindful during the day and to do it from the start of your meditation journey. I like the bucket analogy. If you dont stay mindful when your not meditating, its like pouring water into a bucket that has holes on the bottom

@moon777light Mindfulness in daily life is admittedly radically easier once you are experiencing a lot of joy but that is not required. What is required is the metacognitive awareness. So using joy to develop this faculty in daily life is a powerful practice. But you should be able to just MAX metacognitive awareness with as little emotional content as possible. Similar to 4rth jhana work. I've realized that the former is emotional purification and the latter is insight practice. And they are both crucial. 

After you get that foundation, neither pleasure nor pain increases craving too much. But you also need to address emotional impurities like frustration, impatience etc. while you are developing this equanimity. Once you have an experiential understanding of how this awareness feels like, the process becomes clearer and easier. 

Just practice the skill of slowing your movements down, getting into the body holistically, knowing the general emotional tone of the mind and knowing what attention is doing in daily life with movement. Do all this very slowly. This is basically a taste of metacognitive awareness. The more you can hold these in consciousness at the same time, the more developed mindfulness will get.

 

[loub]

insightful and practical post, thanks @ardacigin .

I am currently reading Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and have started my Dharma-Practice on new years eve. So far I have been mainly doing concentration practice 1 h every day and have been getting results such as increased ease, effortlessness and relaxation in daily life and this subtle, tingling sense of joy and self-acceptance.

I intend to start doing insight practices soon and wanted to ask you for any advice you have for a beginner like me. What do you think is the most effective concentration to insight ratio?

Also I will have the chance to do a ten day retreat at home where I should be able to get in 12h hours of practice a day. I intend to have this kickstart or supercharge my meditation practice. Do you have any tips for doing that? Should I stick to a schedule. Do insight or concentration or both? Do kasina? Or stick to one of those the entire time? Does it make sense to get in some light exercise/runnning/gym session? Would love to hear your input.

Any additional tips will be greatly appreciated

I always enjoy reading your posts and want you to know that they have been both practically helpful and inspiring. Keep up the great work.

Much peace

Edited January 30, 2020 by loub

[ardacigin]

1 hour ago, loub said:

So far I have been mainly doing concentration practice 1 h every day and have been getting results such as increased ease, effortlessness and relaxation in daily life and this subtle, tingling sense of joy and self-acceptance.

Hi @loub. Hope you are well. Let me help you as much as I can.

Firstly, what exact technique are you using for concentration? 

Keep in mind that in a retreat-like setting, too much contracted attention on any object without broader awareness is eventually going to create frustration, agitation and negative emotional sensations. 

Use stable attention to develop awareness. The type of awareness can be anything. Outer sounds. Outer sight. Whole body awareness. Joy development. Equanimity development. 

From there you can drop the breath and ask 'Who am I' after stabilizing in high equanimity.

So don't spend all your time doing contracted concentration. Always stabilize attention with spacious awareness. If attention gets too restricting, dullness and negative emotions will arise. You want to constantly be aware of that tendency and revert back to equanimity and awareness.

12 hours a day is not easy. To deal with such a schedule, your formal sits must be top tier quality. So, I suggest relaxing both in the formal sit and schedule intensity. You don't want to burn yourself out if too much pressure builds up over time. Don't worry too much about finishing 12 hours.

Unbroken practice for 6 hours is more effective than 12 hours of broken and inconsistent practice. Add a lot of walking meditations between formal sits. Do walking meditation slowly whenever sleepiness or agitation gets overwhelming. Once you feel better, get back to the sit. What matters is not the posture but the unbroken practice. 

In one day, you need to do some amount of samatha and insight practice. I don't know how good you are in either practice but I personally do some samatha practice on joy and breath for a while. Then I do insight practice like self-enquiry until my psyche gets destabilized a little bit. Some deep experiences happen at this point. Then I balance those with jhanic qualities like happiness and joy by smiling. Relax a little bit with walking meditation. And then I continue the sit. All this time, you maintain a technique without interruptions.

I hope this helps. Good luck!