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Break Through
lobster
Crusty Veteran
Some of us through no merit to own, might become enlightened. Strange but true.
Most of us need to settle for a break through.
- Settled calm
- Enhanced being
- Improved attitude
- Less me-me-subtle-me(but still me)
Some are making the Break (mine above).
Are we still in the dark of the mine or seeing some Light?
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.001.than.html
3
Comments
I am starting to notice the benefit of a sustained focus on the five precepts.
personal breakthrough insight,half smart and half dumb.learn to choose smart.
Break throughs are useful, but not something to be attached to or looked forward to. Anticipation and searching for the next breakthrough are likely to confuse the effect of just sitting.
It puts me in mind of a person I know from another forum, who has the whole Buddhist path carefully mapped out, from which fetters are meant to be destroyed to stream entrance and on to arahantship. He is very knowledgeable in the sutra’s and is involved in the effort to translate accurately from the Pali, so one could say he has a scholarly bent. But i’ve said to him in the past that all this loading of expectations into the mind just gives the mind a chance to befuddle you.
The mind is useful only up to a point. It embodies a mixture of instincts, desires, learned conditioning and logic, which can make it a useful tool for navigating the world. The process of understanding is more interesting.
Most breakthroughs, in my experience, are a bit on the fuzzy side. What seems to be a breakthrough produces a rush of excitement for a couple of days, then fades. The ego reasserts itself, old habits return and the next couple of days are spent trying to figure out where you went wrong and how to get back to where you were 4 or 5 days ago. Then, after giving up the effort, there is another breakthrough and the process is repeated.
There is a cumulative positive effect of all this, but real progress is slow and not easy to pin down or define.
Then, on rare occasions, there may be a real breakthrough, something that produces a real, lasting effect and happens at a specific point in time so you can look back and say, wow, I'll be damned, something really happened there.
Last September, @Shoshin posted a thread on the subject of bliss. I avowed that I had no idea what that was, but that I would sure like to find out, and that I was nonetheless intimately familiar with what it was not.
I sat with this afterwards, and after 5 minutes - Jiggers! there it was! Bliss!
This triggered a rush that went on for months and a cascade of other effects that are still playing out. If that is not a breakthrough, it is the closest I've ever come to one. Gassho beaucoup, @Shoshin and the whole New Buddhist forum.
My latest breakthrough came on Sunday night, while I was in a hospital bed being examined for a suspected stroke (no thankfully it wasn't, it was however an extraordinary vascular migraine that mimicked a stroke - NOT FUN).
Even though I have a regular practise and have achieved some degree of control over my monkey mind, all I could think was "please don't let me die like this". As I lay having the CT Scanner do it's thing and suffering a blur of time thanks to being shot up with Fentanyl (which is the shiz btw when it comes to eradicating immense pain), I was struck with the realisation that excepting my husband, my parents and my daughter, no one would really suffer that much from my death. The world would keep turning, my workplace would replace me quickly and even my stepsons' lives wouldn't be too impacted by my death. So with that in mind - Why give a flying f@@k in a rolling donut about things that aren't immediately in my control or that important?
I continued to mull this over and try to discuss this with my husband - but all that came out was "hrmfopf fgoing asdoi itgjhng!!!!" I was kept in overnight for observation and discharged late Monday morning. Since then, I have been doing somewhat of a mental and spiritual reset. And lots of re-reading of Sutras, meditation and reviews of my practise.
What I've taken away from my experience is a new way to appreciate Buddhism and that it's ok to not match what others are practising/doing/feeling/reading/understanding. Also, really, a lot of what happens in life is just background noise and BS. It's totally a relief to understand that and frees me up to just focus on the 4NT and Eightfold Noble Path and just "be".
???
Sounds like a very excruciating and frightening experience but sounds like you came out on the other side having an insight. So much is out of our control. And even what's in our control I mean hey we have our shining moments and our mistakes. While we don't get to choose all of the stuff that happens I'm glad you sound like it refocused you somehow and glad you are through that experience.
Good to hear of increased focus from @Bunks ...
Bliss @Fosdick - nice.
Great stuff @Kundo - kind of humbling to be so near nothing ...
“Every sensation shares the same characteristic: it arises and passes away, arises and passes away. It is this arising and passing that we have to experience through practice, not just accept as truth because Buddha said so, not just accept because intellectually it seems logical enough to us. We must experience sensation’s nature, understand its flux, and learn not to react to it.”
S.N. Goenka
https://www.elephantjournal.com/2017/11/buddhist-insight-on-how-to-deal-with-our-emotions/
Onward and Upwards. Sideways and Inward. We kinda haz plan!
I have been thinking and saying this for some time. (Immediate brake, skid to halt) I am not saying that in a 'well someone hasn't been paying attention to me' way. I'm just totally agreeing with you, that sometimes it takes a sledgehammer event to the back of the head (in your case, literal!) to just drop the dishevelled heap of blocks back down and find they're perfectly placed, in harmony and structured. The pieces fit, but it's taken a 'boom' to make us see it.
In my case, three deaths, all from cancer, all really close to one another, and another 2 imminent.
I think it's a question of establishing priorities and realising that an awful lot - if not most - of what we experience, go through, encounter, doesn't really matter on the 'significant' Scale.
Richard Carlson was right, when he wrote "Don't sweat the small stuff - and it's ALL small stuff". And I'm really beginning to truly appreciate that now. I mean, really.
Oh sure, I have to go about my day, I have to do the small stuff... I mean, we all do.
But I am far, far more able to shrug things off and 'meh' the ride... Pick it up, deal with it, put it back down, move on.
I don't have either the stature nor the time to carry irrelevance, any more. The load is getting lighter.
As @Kundo says, the 4 the 8 and the 5.
That'll do for me.
That's not abdication.
That's completion.
It sounds like quite an experience, @kundo. Often the experience of something is different from what we think about it, and perhaps you may have contemplated death many a time, but when push comes to shove instinct still reasserts itself.
I’m having a slightly similar experience moving house, it’s the whole idea of giving up a personal space which I am finding is difficult. I am going to spend some time living with my mother, and it’s not easy going from living by myself in an apartment to a smaller space. I have in the past contemplated doing a monkish thing and living without possessions for a while, but I’m finding it loosens up a whole range of emotions to take this step.
But it is often in the doing of more difficult things that we encounter ourselves and get a real insight into our day-to-day practice.
??all of the above.
@kundo I’ve had that very same experience and it’s scary. I’m glad you’re ok and I’m glad it wasn’t what you feared. Sending love.
Yep, totally agree, re 4 NT and 8 NP. I lost myself a short while ago re all this ancient quotations / Sanskrit / Pali Canon stuff, to the point I lost sight of what all this is about. Simplicity. Focus. Ethical living.
Good on ya ?
?
Taken from a regular contributor's post on Fb...
Oy vey, ain't that the ams!
When the going gets tough....
Just a breath away. I like that. It is always like that.
We gently breath in. Relax. Breath away.
PS. Happy Vesak. Stay safe.
I had a break through in the form of an indication that I have NOT broken through.
I was having lunch with my mother and girlfriend and I realized I couldn't find my cell phone. I knew I had it at the gym I had just been at with my mom so I knew it wasn't gone so long. So after lunch and dropping my mom home I went to the gym and they hadn't found it and I looked in the parking lot.
My mom talked to my brother and he helped me use the 'find my phone' app and it was back at the restaurant we had lunch. I felt so relieved.
But the surprise was how that experience threw me off and made me super irritated. I was definitely not very chilled out at that time trying to find it. And I was irritable. Compared to a meditation master I was a wreck and definitely not laughing at the illusion of existence.
Sorry, my Aussie slang at its finest. Basically why give any effs about things I can't control.
(Only Aussies would roll a doughnut.... )
Not yet a meditation master? Tsk, tsk.
Attached to ones phone? Oh the humanity ...
It is OK ?? I get irritated by irritation and practically anything ....
Put the phone on your shrine and bend the knee. Your are in the Presence of the Mother of all Feta Dragons.
Cheesy? You bet.
My cheesy fetters are too long to list
But as a processed shrine I make an excellent case for flawed Bred and Bhatara Buddha’s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfinished_Buddha
Or a tyre....
I luv these bizarre dialects of Tibetan and their esoteric teachings ... eh wait ...
All roads lead to Roam, @lobster....