So begins what is called the “Knowledges of Suffering” or “The Dark Night of the Soul”
(to use St. John of the Cross’ terminology, which has such a nice ring to it).
I consider this the entrance to the third vipassana jhana, though
U Pandita considers this the entrance to the fourth vipassana jhana.
The Dark Night spans stages five through ten in this map, namely:
5. Dissolution
6. Fear
7. Misery
8. Disgust
9. Desire for Deliverance, and
10. Re-observation.
Stages five through nine tend to come as a package,
with one stage leading fairly quickly and naturally to the next.
Stage ten, Re-observation, tends to stand out as its own distinct
and often formidable entity, like the icing on a very creepy cake.
It should be noted that some pass through the Dark Night quickly
and some slowly. Some barely notice it, and for some it is a huge deal,
regardless of the speed at which they move through these stages.
Some may get run over by it on one retreat, fall back,
and then pass through it with no great difficulties some time later.
Others may struggle for years to learn the lessons of these stages.
I am going to describe the Dark Night largely in extreme terms,
but please understand that this is
just to give a heads-up about what is possible,
not what is necessary, required, expected, or guaranteed.
This is in response to and to counterbalance the culture that has tried to ignore,
minimize, or otherwise cover-up these stages, and it may be, admittedly,
an overreaction.
Sometimes it is by overreacting that some synthesis, understanding, and integration can occur, so I like to believe
this description will facilitate that process.
~~~
On retreat these experiences are likely to be more intense and clear,
though those on retreat who can keep practicing
are likely to make much faster progress as well.
On the other hand,
practice in “daily life” can be powerful and sometimes very speedy.
These things are strangely unpredictable.
Once we have crossed the Arising and Passing Away
we shall enter insight stages five through ten
regardless of whether we want to.
It doesn’t matter if we practice from this point on; once we cross the A&P,
we are in the Dark Night to some degree and become what is sometimes called
a “Dark Night yogi”, or simply “darknighter”,
until we figure out how to get through it.
If we do get through it without getting to the first stage of enlightenment,
we will have to go through it again and again until we do.
I mean this in the most absolute terms.
It appears to be a hardwired part of human physiology
as far as I can tell.
I have a very large and growing body of case studies and
a wealth of shared experiences among meditation friends and acquaintances
to back this up, and I am not alone.
Tens of thousands of meditators have noticed these stages
in their own practice and countless teachers have noticed them also.
Most practitioners will do much better if warned ahead of time
about what is about to happen after they cross the A&P.
~~~
The Dark Night typically begins with just about all the profound clarity,
mindfulness, concentration, focus, equanimity, and bliss
of the A&P dropping away.
This is one of the hallmarks of Dissolution.
So also ends the cause-and-effect-like phenomena of the breath or walking,
the shaking or jerking up and down in a way related to attention and noting,
as well as all the fine vibrations and vortex-like raptures.
People who are all into the kundalini stuff
are often left wondering why it just vanished.
In contrast to the A&P, early on in the Dark Night stages,
the frequency of vibrations disconnects from the cycle of the breath,
remaining largely stable at whatever frequency is going on at that stage
once they can be perceived again (in late Dissolution or Fear).
Whereas we might have felt that our attention had finally attained
the one-pointed focus that is so highly prized in most ideals of meditation during
the Arising and Passing Away,
during the Dark Night we will have to deal with the fact that
our attention is quite diffuse and its contents unstable.
Further,
the center of our attention becomes the least clear area of experience,
and
the periphery now predominates.
This is normal
and even expected by those who know this territory.
However,
most meditators are not expecting this at all and so get completely blindsided
and wage a futile battle to force their attention to do something that,
at this part of the path, it won’t do well at all.
It is simply a third vipassana jhana thing, so you’d better get used to it.
Those who try to go all first jhana with strong effort and narrow concentration
will often find that the third vipassana jhana kicks their ass.
~~~
Those who try to figure out how to work with the third vipassana jhana
on its own terms are likely to do vastly better.
If we have ever been meditating in a place
with lots of mosquitoes buzzing in our ears
in a way that made it very hard to concentrate on the primary object,
we can get a sense of what our attention will be like in the Dark Night,
particularly in its later stages.
As the Dark Night progresses,
it tends to get broader and more irritatingly buzzy.
Rather than fighting this and ignoring the metaphorical mosquitoes,
we should try to understand what it feels like
to allow our attention to be however it is.
Just as listening to discordant, chromatic jazz with lots of jarring harmonies and instruments playing more at odds with each other than in synchrony
takes some getting used to,
the quality of attention in the Dark Night is an acquired taste.
The sensations that arise tend to be very rich, complex, broad, and unsettling.
~~~
Those who obsess over staying tightly one-pointed
will suffer more than those who learn to
stay with what is going on
regardless of whether it feels like “good meditation”,
and those who idealize “good meditation” as being very
focused, stable, and pleasant will need to revise their expectations,
as mature concentration is much more broad and inclusive,
and it takes mature concentration to do well in these stages.
In that same vein, those who are using some other object as a focus
will notice the same phenomenon of the attention being broader
and the basic sense that
attention seems to be out of phase with phenomena.
Those doing visualizations may notice that
they see a very dark spot in the center of their attention
with some sort of patterns or visions around the edge of it
spreading out farther and farther into the periphery.
They may also find visualization suddenly much more frustrating
than when they saw nice clear things like bright dots.
Remember my descriptions of the murk in the kasina section?
The murk is the immature phase of the third jhana.
(google search Daniel Ingram – Kasina practice)
Those using a mantra may feel that the mantra is out of phase with attention,
wide and complex and yet hard to stay with,
and may acquire more complex harmonics and harmonies
if it is in any way musical, like listening to a large, ghost chorus
that is in an orchestra pit off to the sides, whereas before
the mantra may have felt centered in the stereo field of attention.
There will be individual variation in some aspects of these features, depending on
object, focus, ability, and each person’s proclivities,
but some basic aspects will be universal.
There are two basic patterns of vibrations in the Dark Night, and they are
the Dark Night’s defining characteristics, though again,
plenty of people are not that good at perceiving the patterns or
pulses of sensations, and few are good at counting frequencies.
These are learnable skills, like anything else, but, if you don’t acquire them,
fear not,
as most people who go through this stuff will do so without those
analytical abilities and do just fine.
We may get overwhelmed by the descriptions of emotional difficulties,
but keep these patterns in mind and try to stay on that level.
The first re-emergence of vibrations is somewhat regular and chunky,
at perhaps five to eight Hz, without much else going on.
It’s an early Dark Night phenomenon that happens mostly in Fear,
and it tends to feel like a shamanic drum beat.
The later pattern is faster, perhaps ten to eighteen or more Hz,
more irregular and chaotic, with faster and slower harmonics in the background
and at the periphery of our attention.
It tends to make us feel very buzzy and edgy in a scattered, diffuse, ungrounded, restless, irritated way.
The fact that the background is beginning to shake is a good sign of progress,
as this needs to happen for the cycle to be complete.
The goal is to see the three characteristics of the whole field.
This is a truly essential, if often painful and confusing,
…step towards that happening.
On the other hand,
it is exactly the fact that the background has begun to
shake, crumble, and dissolve that can cause people to freak out.
Things were all fun and games when the primary object was shaking,
but
when the sense of the observer, subjectivity itself,
starts to fall apart,
that can be creepy all the way to utterly terrifying.
Simply pay careful attention to exactly what is happening,
staying with each pulse of each vibration as clearly as you can,
trying to see each from its beginning to its end.
Chances are you will be just fine. :-O
There are two basic challenges that occur during the Dark Night:
one emotional, the other perceptual.
The emotional challenge is
that our most disturbing and difficult psychological issues
tend to come bubbling up to the surface
with an intensity that we may never have known before.
Remembering what is good about ourselves or our lives can be
extremely difficult if not seemingly impossible in the face of this.
Our reactivity in the face of our dark stuff
can cause us and those who must deal with us
staggering amounts of needless suffering.
The perceptual challenge is that we also begin to
experience directly the fundamental suffering of duality,
a suffering that has always been with us
but which we have never recognized with this level of intensity,
never mind ever clearly comprehending its deeper existential implications.
We face a profound and fundamental crisis of identity as our
insight into the three characteristics begins to demolish part of
the basic illusion of there being a separate or permanent “me”.
This is a kind of suffering
that has nothing to do with the circumstances of our life
and everything to do with a basic misunderstanding of all of it.
It occurs when we are in this strange in-between territory
where everything is having a wrecking ball brought to it,
but something better to resort to hasn’t yet surfaced.
In short,
some of the Dark Night stages can feel like
we are up serious shit creek without a paddle
and headed immediately over the waterfall.
Dealing with either of these two issues, that is,
our dark stuff and our fundamental identity crisis,
would be a difficult undertaking, but trying to deal with both at once
is at least twice as difficult and can sometimes be so overwhelming
as to preclude normal functioning.
~~~
It goes without saying that we tend not to be at our best
when we are overwhelmed in this way.
The frequent knee-jerk response is to try to make our minds
and our world change to try to stop the suffering we are experiencing.
But,
when we are deeply into the Dark Night,
we could be living in what others might consider paradise
and not be able to appreciate this at all, and so
this solution is guaranteed to fail.
~~~
My strong advice is to work on finishing up this cycle of insight
and then work on your stuff from a place of
insight, clarity, and physical and emotional balance,
rather than trying to do so in the reactive and disorienting stages of
the Dark Night.
I cannot make this point strongly enough.
Morality really helps in these stages, as at all other times.
Behave well. Speak well. Earn a livelihood well if you can.
Be polite, helpful, patient, proactive, skillful, generous, compassionate,
and honest as much as possible.
Avoid unskillful coping mechanisms, such as
escaping into alcohol and drugs or just a needless sullen blue funk.
Face your life proudly with poise and panache. Laugh. Play.
Be brave, like a spiritual warrior, like a ninja.
Be impeccable. Give to and help others. You will be happy you did so.
Morality, morality, morality, meaning skillful living in all its everyday aspects:
this is the key before, during, and after.
This is the “during” part.
Learning to be functional in the face of the Dark Night
is learning something of extreme value:
practice this way to make this knowledge your own.
Describing Dissolution specifically.
As the stage of the Arising and Passing Away ends,
meditators may be left feeling raw and incompetent
even though they are continuing to make valuable progress into
deeper and deeper levels of profound insight.
This feeling that something is very wrong
when practice is getting better and better
can cause all sorts of problems during the Dark Night,
especially to those not familiar with the standard maps.
On the other hand, for those who found A&P territory disconcerting,
such as those who endured unpleasant kundalini experiences,
having come through to Dissolution can seem a welcome relief.
Some will stop practicing here,
as they feel they have “released the kundalini”,
and so are done for the time being.
Their body is no longer tense.
The weird energetic experiences are gone.
The strange movements have stopped.
No lights or images are arising. Motivation may fall away.
The fireworks have finished.
Dissolution feels like a very natural place to stop practicing,
the only problem being that the later stages (Fear, and the rest)
follow it soon enough even if we stop,
though less intense practice leads to a less intense,
perhaps more diluted, if often prolonged,
Dark Night.
The spiritual path is not a linear one.
In the face of Dissolution and the stages that follow,
noting practice can be very useful and powerful.
Additional notes to add at this point include things such as,
“vague”, “dissolving”, “vanishing”, or Shinzen Young’s famous “gone”
for when things disappear again and again in Dissolution.
Another effect that can be very noticeable at this stage is
that actions just don’t happen easily.
For instance,
you might be going to lift your hand to turn off your alarm clock,
but your hand just doesn’t move.
You could move your hand,
but somehow things just tend to stop with the intention and get nowhere.
Eventually you move your hand,
but it might have been just a bit tiring to do so.
You know you should get up for work
(or for that first early morning sit if on retreat),
but somehow you just continue to lie there like a stone anyway:
that’s what Dissolution can feel like.
Meditation can be the same way, and until we break out of this,
things can get a bit mired down in the overstuffed cushions of Dissolution. However,
when the perception of sensations ending becomes clearer again,
there arises… Fear…
This article was Inspired by
Buddha’s step by step instructions to obtain Enlightenment
as refined by The Arahant Daneil M. Ingram.
Buy this book for Full Immersion!
