Theravadin Stream Entry: The Lead-Up and Early Aftermath of 8 August 2014
T
he importance of the Progress of Insight (POI) maps [via Ingram] in making sense of my dharma practice, as well as of my life up to the time I began practicing, cannot be overstated. I’m grateful to the people who helped me, particularly through Knowledge of Equanimity, which my experience confirms can be quite the trickster, enforcing a trial-by-shifting-mirage.
Keeping a practice journal seems the way to marry these two benefits of map and personal support. Besides, I’m now back in the Knowledge of the Arising and Passing Away (A&P) stage and therefore feeling those A&P-characteristic rushes of zealous devotion to the dharma and my practice.
Something happened August 8, 2014, that I and others think was Theravadin Stream Entry. I’m not running over to claim it, because
I don’t feel any need to,
I take seriously Daniel’s caution that even people of much higher attainment are frequently fooled,
I’m confused about some of the ways my happening didn’t mesh with MCTB descriptions, and
If I’m “experiencing” the defining Review-stage cessation-fruitions, then I’m totally unaware of them.
So I’ll backtrack and lay out some basics:
What my practice was like before August 8
Recent cycle history leading up to the event
The happening of August 8
What I’ve noticed since August 8
Brief Past-Year Meditation Practice History
At the time of this journal entry, I have been meditating for 3 years, have never been on retreat, and rarely sit more than 30 minutes a night and several times a week. I experienced A&P phenomena during the second or third time I ever sat, back in 2010.
From April through July 2013 I was in a clearly identifiable A&P stage, with lucid dreaming many nights, culminating in the A&P Event during a dream in which I meditated. I had all the zealot post-A&P clarity that is classic, and from that point on had intense faith in my eventual awakening.
Exactly a week later, and almost a year to the day before this Stream Entry that I’ll describe, I entered the POI Dark Night (DN) stages and cycled around in that twice at the macro level of stage identification until the second week of June 2014, when the DN cycling broke and the Low Equanimity stage began.
By the way, I’ve always been much better able to see the cycling at the macro level than at any micro level—I don’t really notice cycling within a single sit—I’m just wherever I am at the macro level throughout the sit, so far as I’ve been able to tell. This makes sense because the “nested” or “fractal” stages within stages are a hallmark of the third path attainment, not the first path.
All that said, during the DN macro cycle from February to June, I did for the first time start clearly noticing a diurnal cycle within the meta-cycle, with the worst DN around 6 or 7 p.m. each evening. This past DN was so horrible that I entered into severe agitated depression for the first time in 15 years and went on SNRI antidepressants, which helped once they finally kicked in.
From the second week in June, when antidepressants began working, I steadily climbed to Mid-EQ, all the while seeing/hearing/feeling (but mainly seeing) MCTB’s meaning of “formations,” although without being able to clearly see distinct beginnings and endings . . . until August 8, when experiences changed and I could suddenly discern the beginnings and endings of formations with supreme clarity.
I saw formations at every single sit for 2 months straight and experienced all the other characteristics of EQ, but I assumed that I would fall back down the through the earlier stages again because, honestly, I’ve put little total time into my formal practice.
Meditation Practice Methods
I’m not a purist about methods. I’m not a “noter” at all: I find labeling sensations in “noting” to be a frustrating slog. What I try to do is “notice,” meaning that I observe the Three Characteristics of Conditioned Existence (3Cs), especially impermanence—but without the labeling step. Labeling runs over my next noticing, but I do understand why labeling when first beginning this method is helpful and probably necessary for most practitioners.
Upon sitting, I choose skin sensation, hearing, or seeing and just tune completely in. Impermanence will show itself right off the bat—at least it did for me—as flickers, vibrations, or nonsolidity. As I’ve discussed with Eric, I did experience Mind & Body (M&B), Cause & Effect (C&E), and Three Characteristics (3Cs) when I first started insight practices—but my experiences started with A&P (second or third sit ever). For all you POI nerds, the sequence was like so:
A&P –> DN –> LowEQ –> M&B –> C&E –> 3Cs –> A&P –> DN –> DN –> LowEQ –> MidEQ -> HiEQ –> Path
I never experienced M&B, C&E, or 3Cs again, only one cycle. Furthermore, After the second A&P (above), I never ever experienced any of those early insight stages for even a minute during any sit. My sits always began with A&P—always. The fact that my second or third meditation started right up with bright, dramatic lights and intense bliss, and the fact that apparently Stream Entry happened with fewer than 100 meditation hours in from practice, start to finish, makes me wonder how much of my prior nonpractice life I’ve spent cycling and not known it.
Can one be accruing insights and not be conscious of that fact? Or maybe there are past lives in some energetics sense, and I’m picking up where the last “host” left off?
During a sit, before I ever start “noticing,” I enter calm staying by following the meditation guidance of Thanissaro Bhikkhu. He translated one of his teacher’s brief meditation manuals, titled Keeping the Breath in Mind: Lessons in Samadhi. That’s basically my method: samadhi with “noticing” embedded within Thanissaro’s framework, which involves moving in and out of states, alternating with insight practice by pulling “out, up, and over” the jhana a bit.
Another good guide by Thanissaro is With Each and Every Breath. He emphasizes that a key component of the practice is to assemble one’s own practice methods logically and to continually interpret results. That is what a practice journal is for. Journaling is crucial.
So the main aids to my practice have been Thanissaro’s meditation method guides and Daniel’s MCTB, especially Daniel’s POI map and his painstakingly detailed phenomenological descriptions which I recognized in my current and retrospective experience during my very first reading.
The Night before Stream Entry
The night before the event I’ll try to describe, Stream Entry, I logged my sit with just the following phrase, in list form, to capture the sequence of what I had noticed:
1. Fast vibrations (seeing, feeling)
2. Intense multilayered hearing of “silence” as particles
3. Flows in the carpet arise, flows in the walls, flows wherever I look (formations)
4. Trying to locate sense of self watching all this, failing
5. Several felt beats of rapid, momentary dislocation
6. Intimacy with the flowing now arising
7. Fear arises
8. Remembering to investigate fear
9. Fear alternates with a strange rapture
10 Thought arises that I want and expect Stream Entry but am afraid of entering cessation
11. Mild nausea arises (physical)
12. Expansive feeling of love arises, nausea vanishes
13. Surprise, wonder blooms
14. Resolving formally to reach Stream Entry as soon as possible [the first and only time I’ve resolved]
15. Bell and stop
Friday, 8 August 2014, at a Group Sit
The event happened unexpectedly, right after the moment that an intensely clear realization arose about the now slowed-down, almost rhythmic formations [nimittas] I was watching arise and pass away clearly, from beginning to gone. What I call formations are like 3D “blooms.” And their passing away is like a concave, inverted bloom that is blank at center—even black, to tell the truth.
These formations are big and constantly fluxing and flowing. Normally they are moving so constantly that I cannot catch the instant of their arising, nor the instant of “gone.” Moreover, they overlap one another, so this fact makes seeing specific beginnings and endings hard (impossible till this day). What first happened in this event was that all the separate, overlapping arisings and passings of multiple formations “synched up” into one single formation.
The recognition that followed was preverbal, but the way I would put it now is this: The “gone” that I could suddenly watch is actually still a kind of arising, and the reason that it is so is that there is, or was, the frame of reference that was the “real” arising, the contrasted time point conceptually “backgrounding” the moment the formation was known as “gone.”
This crystal clear recognition ushered me into a collapse of perceiver-percept duality. The triggering event was my seeing that the “gone” of a formation wasn’t actually gone gone—then, absolute discontinuity of the entire universe and consciousness in a snap!
So I remember up to that instant, and I remember back to what it was like when reality was coming back “online.” And that was the most earth-shattering moment—the rebooting of the world: During those few moments, “I” was dislocated into everything around me, into every particle in the room, with nothing on “my” original “side,” no center, no sense of within-body or location-grounding. “I” was gone!
I knew something transformative was happening, or had happened. I remembered to try to keep seeing clearly. There was this hard-to-describe quality that was visual, I think (but I’m not absolutely sure I was physically seeing), and the closest I can come to describing it is to point to what happens in planetarium shows or movies when they are trying to convey warp speed through the stars and planets, and the stars turn into whiteness smeared out into bright white lines of perspective.
The difference in this case was that there was no contrasting darkness or outer space background or even linear direction, so I’m not even positive it was visual apprehension of actual white lines at all. If so, my sense was of white-on-white, or clear. I guess sometimes experiences are so unusual that all we can do is grasp onto metaphors for them. At any rate, there was a quality of zoom and radical dislocation, or diffusion, of center and ground—no “this” side, and no “that” side opposing.
Whatever there was of awareness was then in every particle of the room. Then there was a sense that the whole field was turning around to find me not there in my chair where I had been meditating. This experience was far more radical than an out-of-body experience, which I’ve had. With a normal out-of-body experience, a sufficient sense of location exists for directionality to also exist.
As soon as "I" was found to be not over there in my chair, I started being layered back into being Jenny, embodied and located. I distinctly remember the instant when form and name resolved. And several links of the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination followed. I now understand “In the seeing, only the seen.”
Immediately, and to my confusion, the meditation bell rang. And, oddly, I was almost paralyzed. I couldn’t stop meditating, even when I finally rose from my chair, stunned, and the whole group of us walked upstairs to the cafe and ate! I couldn’t speak. I could barely move. I could barely remember to eat.
The “door” to fruition was emptiness. I think it was this door of the three possibilities because, right before cessation, I was fixed on the passing-away moments of formations and seeing that the “nothing you can see” is not the “nothing you cannot see.” And I realized that positive formations and their apparent absence were not a polarity at all. They are not opposites, yet they are not identical.
So it was the emptiness-of-emptiness aspect that presented several clear beats in a row and then, bam, cessation.
The other reason that I think the door was emptiness/no-self is, well, look at what happened even during reboot–my self remained completely gone. Although—it seems in MCTB that all three doors to cessation involve some radical dislocation of self.
By the way, now that I have had this experience, I find the Three Doors chapter in MCTB just opening on questions, not answers, for me. I don’t recall anything like the specific descriptions Daniel gives of the three doors, except that there was a POW-POW-POW—cessation, the “POWs” being three distinct frame-like apprehensions of the endings of three successive formations.
Also, what the hell was that thing that happened after the cessation, and why is it not on any map?
Afterglow
Thereafter, I felt different—and not subtly different, but very different. Specifically, I feel noticeably less concentrated/localized within the boundaries of my body and immediate reach. I flow out further into the far off. Saturday I experienced cycling sensations of being diffused into all that surrounds me, feeling intense gratitude and weepy love for everyone (and telling them), and feeling a little bit scared/queasy at the sheer intensity of whatever has happened.
At the restaurant I ate in Saturday, I could distinctly hear all the voices and conversations at once, individually, hearing each so acutely that “I” was there in the sound, not where I usually am, in me. It is hard to describe, but something is very, very different now.
I had a migraine headache all Saturday and most of Sunday. I sat only about 25 minutes Sunday night and again Monday night—but was itching, restless, aching, and unable to see even vibrations that I always do, both times. So I started to feel doubt. I guess I assumed one stayed in Equanimity for a bit after Stream Entry.
Whatever the event was, after 2 days of afterglow, it kicked me out of Equanimity. However, the radically diffused sense of “me” remains. If this was not Stream Entry, then it was a stunningly convincing imitation—especially given that my “progress” through the stages to that point was “by the book” and I have zero doubt that I was in the insight stage High Equanimity.
Postscript
[Stream entry happened within a couple of days of my first talking with Daniel Ingram. I learned a few months later from him that the layering back into being that I experienced after the Stream Entry cessation had been experienced by him many times, including at his Stream Entry. In fact, I found in a draft he shared a new section he had written for the new MCTB edition. What he didn’t say there but that I coaxed out of him was that the layering sequence was that of the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination, just as I had suspected. This conversation confirmed for me that I had indeed attained Stream Entry. And so indeed I had.]
Welcome! I’m Jenny. Back in 1982, at the age of 19, I began studying Eastern philosophy and doctrine. In the late 1990s, I authored a 400-page doctoral dissertation comparing Zen koan aporias to the deconstructive rhetoric of silence in modern American texts—an East-West interface that still informs my teaching and writings today.
2010 marked the beginning of my formal Buddhist meditation practice. After engaging Theravadin practices in late 2013, Stream Entry quickly happened in August 2014. Mahamudra Fourth Yoga stabilized in July 2015. I then began practicing within the Bon Dzogchen tradition and began writing content now informing The Critical Path to Awakening (forthcoming). In 2017, I founded Axis Mundi Awakening to offer an intensive whole-path Buddhist awakening program to select, highly motivated students. Interested to learn more? See my teaching approach and curriculum overview.