Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

I am going to describe the Dark Night largely in extreme terms, but realize that this is just to give a heads up to what is possible, not what is necessary or guaranteed. As before, on retreat these things are likely to be more intense and clear, though those on retreat who are able to 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. Enough disclaimers!

Once someone has crossed the Arising and Passing Event, one will enter the Dark Night regardless of whether one wants to or not. It doesn’t matter if you practice from this point on; once you cross the A&P you are in the Dark Night to some degree (i.e. are a Dark Night Yogi) until you figure out how to get through it, and if you do get through it without getting to the first stage of enlightenment, you will have to go through it again and again until you do. I mean this in the most absolute terms.

The Dark Night typically begins with just about all of the profound clarity, mindfulness, concentration, focus, equanimity and bliss of the previous stage dropping away. So also ends the cause-and-effect-like phenomena of the breath or walking shaking or jerking up and down in a way related to attention and noting, as well as all of the fine vibrations and vortex-like raptures. Early on, the frequency of vibrations disconnects from the cycle of the breath, remaining largely stable at 182

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whatever frequency is going on at that stage once they can be perceived again (in late Dissolution or Fear).

Whereas one might have felt that one’s attention had finally attained the one-pointed focus that is so highly valued in most ideals of meditation during the Arising and Passing Away, during the Dark Night one will have to deal with the fact that one’s attention is actually quite wide and its contents unstable. Further, the center of one’s attention becomes the very least clear area of experience, and the periphery becomes predominant. This is normal and even expected by those who know this territory. However, most meditators are not expecting this at all and so get blindsided and wage a futile battle to make their attention do something that, in this part of the path, it simply won’t do.

If one has ever been meditating in a place with lots of mosquitoes buzzing in one’s ears in a way that made it very hard to concentrate on the primary object, one can get a sense of what one’s attention will be like in the Dark Night. Rather than fighting against this and ignoring the metaphorical mosquitoes, one should try to understand what it feels like to have one’s attention be however it is. Just like listening to discordant, chromatic jazz with lots of jarring harmonies and instruments playing more at odds with each other than together takes some getting used to, the quality of attention in the Dark Night is an acquired taste, and the sensations that arise tend to be very rich, complex, broad and unsettling.

Those that fixate on staying one-pointed will suffer more than those who learn to stay with what is going on regardless of whether or not it feels like “good meditation.”

In that same vein, those who are using some other object as a focus will notice the same phenomena of the width of attention being wider and the basic sense that attention seems to sort of be out of phase with phenomena. Those doing visualizations may notice that they see a black spot in the center of their attention with some sort of patterns or visions around the edge of it spreading wider and wider out into the periphery.

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 off to the sides of you, whereas before the mantra may have felt centered in the stereo field of attention.

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There will be individual variation in some aspects of these things, depending on object, focus, ability, and each person's particular proclivities, but some basic aspects will be universal, and I will talk more about these aspects in the later chapter on the Vipassana Jhanas.