After speaking with my teacher yesterday and fully outlining my cessation and “mind f*” experiences that have occurred since January 1 2017, he concurred with Shinzen that I have likely…. at some point…. tripped into stream entry.  Apparently stream entry is typically followed by weeks of bliss.  For me, first path was indeed followed by bliss, but also by a total re-organization of how I saw the world that felt pretty scary.  Crazy visual hallucinations, feelings of not being in my body, weird energetic experiences etc.  My hypothesis on this is that I just haven’t been meditating for very long – seriously only for about a year and a half.  I just didn’t have the strong anchor of the dharma and sangha to root me into the experiences – so they were all frightening at first.

Now they are chill.  Which is good.  What I’m also realizing is that the insights that come with the practice instill a deep knowing of dharma experientially – and now that my more academic dharma studies are intensifying I find that doing much of this study is like ready things I already know on level I did not before.  It that makes sense, which it might or might not.

So after stream entry we go into 2nd path.  Yesterday we had a chat about how 2nd path is all about resolving craving and aversion.

I noticed since I returned from my last retreat that aversion in the form of resistance was (and is!) a major theme for me.  It isn’t like there is more aversion or resistance than before, it’s just that I’m so AWARE of all the things i’m resisting.  With awareness it’s easy to let it go.  Oddly those things that seemed so important to fight and find annoying on the day to day (the grown up version of being asked to clean your room) – those things just became easier.  Not that they are actually easier, more like my resistance to them drops.  I’m seeing a transformation in the mental story shifting from “I don’t want to do this, ugh this sucks, ugh I’ll procrastinate by doing this other thing” to “time to do the dishes – they need to be done”. It’s a subtle, but powerful shift – and dramatically changes my experience of life in general.

As Shinzen says:

Subtle is significant

The other side of the coin is CRAVING – which right now is hard for me to identify.  Noticing the aversion and resistance has been the aspect that’s come up pretty naturally for me, but noting craving is proving to be harder.

I think there’s certainly a relationship between craving and aversion, which might be making identifying craving more difficult.  Typically my cravings are desires to rid myself of the annoyance or aversion that’s manifesting.  So it’s possible that I’m not able to identify any clear cravings because they are primarily tied into dropping or avoiding the aversion that’s coming up in the moment.

Today while sitting I focused more on craving, and did find subtle cravings around advancing on the path, on having peak experiences, and around teaching and sharing the dharma and meditation practice.  So, there’s definitely something there – it just doesn’t seem to be manifesting clearly off cushion as much as aversion is.

Go figure.  🙂