The clarity and intensity begin to return, but now
the stage of Fear can involve all sorts of frightening distortions of perception
when sitting, accompanied by intense feelings of
unease, paranoia, terror, dread, and/or “the willies”.
It can even sometimes seem that our body is falling in tatters through the floor
or that we are rotting away.
Nightmares are substantially more common in this stage.
Some people can suddenly experience extremely powerful feelings of
abject terror for no obvious reason at all, but
the mind has this odd tendency to create stories to explain how we are feeling,
to fabricate things to be suddenly afraid of,
even if those explanations and rationalizations are not the cause at all
and arose after the fact of the terror setting in.
~~~
Just feeling terror without an object can be very disorienting.
If we ride it, flow with it, welcome it, dive down into it, play with it,
revel in it, dance with it, and dissolve with it,
letting it tear down the illusion of permanence and control as it begins to do so,
we can appreciate that this is the third vipassana jhana,
which can be a fascinating meditation adventure given the right attitude.
~~~
Acceptance, honesty, and clear, precise awareness of
the true nature of the actual sensations that make up all of this
are the key in all the Dark Night stages.
The six sense doors and the three characteristics are the basis of
great insight practice in this stage and all the rest.
On the mild side,
this stage might manifest as just a slightly heightened sense of
nonspecific panic or anxiety.
As Fear passes and our reality continues to strobe in and out and fall away,
we are left feeling… MISERY
~~~
FEAR – 6th Stage of Insights – Part 2 of THE DARK NIGHT
This song is performed in the ‘Hawaiian slack key of D Wahine.
View on YouTube with inspiring Hawaiian Sailing Photos
From my
SeaPasana
The Progress of Insight
Inspired by Daniel Ingram’s book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha,
With this section “The progress of Insight”
Inspired by Mahasi Sayadaw
