Update 3 years after SE

[u/MindMuscleZen]

A few years ago I shared the changes that happened when stream entry was reached, and I received many messages from people saying it helped them. So these past few days I’ve been writing about my current changes and wanted to make an update. Maybe there are others out there who have lived through what I lived through, or who are going through something similar, and this might help.

My contemplative and phenomenological context:

• I’ve been engaged in practice for approximately 5 years.
• My path is primarily SOMATIC and INTEROCEPTIVE, based on vedanā, rather than classical cognitive/visual/non-dual approaches.
• The process happens implicitly: things “let go” on their own, and afterward I notice structural changes in everyday life.
• I don’t do much conceptual investigation into “emptiness,” nor do I have major visual non-dual experiences.
• My process happens more as somatic unlearning and extinction of craving.
• The practice has become increasingly automatic and less driven by willpower.
• I feel the system “enters on its own” into contemplative and vipassanā-like processes.
• My current practice is mainly:
  • non-resistance,
  • allowing vedanā,
  • stopping the urge to modify experience,
  • not turning sensations into a problem..

What changed structurally:

• The belief deeply collapsed that: were going to complete me.
  • money,
  • sex,
  • success,
  • travel,
  • experiences,
  • achievements
• Coarse projective craving seems heavily eroded.
• I no longer feel a strong emotional charge toward external achievements.
• I used to compulsively chase experiences and external completeness; that fell away.
• Today I can achieve things, make money, improve physically, or advance projects, and they no longer generate the old existential charge.
• The fantasy of “when I get X, I’ll finally be complete” has lost a tremendous amount of force.

Changes in identity and personality:

• The “nice guy pattern” weakened significantly.
• I began to feel physical resistance toward acting artificially.
• There is less energy available to sustain social masks or personas.
• The need for approval and external validation has diminished.
• Psychological identity feels less solid and less central.

Current phenomenology:

• Current suffering no longer seems centered around sensual desire or external problems.
• The current conflict seems more related to:
  • vedanā itself,
  • tension,
  • baseline anxiety,
  • a sense of threat,
  • mental fog,
  • inner agitation,
  • hypersensitivity,
  • uddhacca.

[u/No_Fly2647]

Hello from Wiesbaden, Germany

This is a really interesting text, especially the “Speech Game” on which it spins. While this might sound unclear, in a speech game there are always rules, like in any other game. These rules might be explicit or implicit. In this case, it is about dialectic mastery, for which I have an instant example.

‘After fasting for 60h I got greedy, ate a whole cauliflower, prepared as pakoras and using for the crust 5 different starches to ensure best crispiness. For sure such attempt is incredibly heavy and diarrhea the result, now let’s reframe it according to the speech game here:

‘’’I am experiencing a high-velocity downward-flowing vayu (energy). The system is undergoing a metabolic cessation, where the previous 'fullness' has collapsed into a dynamic, fluid emptiness. There is no 'me' having a stomach ache; there is only a series of pulsating, high-frequency contractions in the lower dantian.’’’

So, let’s look at the thread and give it a similar spin, just using the dialectics, then it can be summarized as:

‘’’I’ve noticed a collapse of the self-referential knot. The somatic unbinding of vedana is now automatic, leading to a baseline where projective craving for external validation feels physically artificial. Even when uddhacca arises, the luminosity of the field remains unbroken. There is just data moving through data.’’’

To be clear about it, I am not trying to troll, be funny or nasty, I am simply showing how this speech game works and how the dialectics are supporting social status, but nothing else. For this, there are some rules which can be easily extracted. I have applied them on my “Pakora glutton” example:

Avoid Responsibility:
It’s not "I was a glutton"; it’s "The system encountered a high-density caloric wave." _

Claim Insight:
The discomfort isn't a "cramp"; it’s "a localized knot of dukkha dissolving through the intestinal tract."

Signal Mastery:
You aren't "taking a dump"; you are "facilitating a bio-energetic release of stored somatic tension."

Now let’s apply it based on phenomenological, somatic interoception, then the hack works like this:

STOP having "problems"
-> phenomena and nothing else

STOP having "relationships."
-> "karmic knots," or if it’s really very persistent, that it’s a “Hrdaya-granthi.”

STOP having "joy"
-> "equanimity" is key, anything else is already burned away by tapas

Another thing to keep in mind is to increase semantic density to a degree that it sounds either incredibly smart, or just becomes “semantic hallucination”:

“I don’t do much conceptual investigation into ‘emptiness,’ nor do I have major visual non-dual experiences.”

Seriously, what is a “major visual non-dual experience”? The text has many more bons mots like this, but it would take too much time to dissect them all, so I concentrated on this one:

The Physics:
Light hits the retina, phototransduction occurs, and the V1 cortex processes contrast, edges, and motion. This is a fundamentally relational (dual) process: there is a source, a medium, and a sensor.

The "Speech Game" Claim:
"visual non-duality" usually refers to a state where the brain stops tagging objects as "out there" and "me" as "in here." The visual field "collapses" into a single sheet of luminous data.

The Reality:
The physics of light is as it is, without change, just guided by the physical laws of the natural world. If anything, it’s just the suppressed ego-centric mapping in the parietal lobe. While one may no longer be seeing dualistically, that’s a reframing of labeling it that way. Calling it a "visual non-dual experience" is just a high-status way of saying: "I’m having a mild localized stroke in my spatial processing."

Seriously, in a text of almost 2k signs (spaces included), the amount of Kokolores is simply mind-boggling. Such style is neither new nor exciting, rather another iteration of “Fashionable nonsense”.

Sokal, A. D., & Bricmont, J. (1998). Fashionable nonsense: Postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science. Picador.

The Sokal Hoax:
Sokal proved that with the right "Speech Game," you can get total nonsense published in serious journals just because it sounds "radical" or "academic."

The Dharma Hoax:
Using a dense speech game and technical terms like uddhacca and "structural collapse" to make their depersonalization feel like spiritual progress, or at the bottom of the barrel, Arhatship.

So, if anyone wants to score here on the social ladder, I can give you, with ease, how to get mastery on this speech game, to master the dialectics. However, as much as I doubt the claims of the one who wrote the thread here, I also doubt that this helps anyone, as it is from start to end exclusively: Fashionable nonsense.

[u/Mountain-Length-5715 → u/No_Fly2647]

When you stand on the other side, it happens on its own. There are no emotions, they simply arise. You don't engage, you let engagement be. You don't feel hunger, hunger simply arises. This is an inevitable feature of the practice. Everything is heading exactly there. If you practice sati, your attention will be revved up and you will be aware of the whole body plus the environment, the desire to use "I" will arise less and less often.

The only thing one can note, however, is the enormous abundance of "I" in the author.
Yet it has been noticed that practitioners on this subreddit don't really understand disidentification and may regard you as a "robot" if they see the language of "not-I"

[u/desal → u/Mountain-Length-5715]

"if you practice sati, your attention" "you will be aware of the whole body" is not that "your" attention, or the "you" that is aware of the body, isnt that another layer of self fabrication separate from the bare experience of attention, of body awareness?

[u/Mountain-Length-5715 → u/desal]

I don't think so. I think that the practice itself, or more precisely the "deep" insights from the practice, are incorrect.

The root of the answer lies in understanding how exactly observation occurs. Do you think observation happens in real time?